Goon, Warrior, Communitarian, and Mythos: The Lincoln Legend of Dramatic Literature and Live Performance

{ 49 } \ Goon, Warrior, Communitarian, and Mythos The Lincoln Legend of Dramatic Literature and Live Performance —SCOTT R. IREL AN Roy Basler offers a noteworthy if not comprehensive distinction between historicized Lincoln biographical narratives and the Lincoln Legend, postulating that the former “is a catalogue of detached facts, which have no other connection than time, place, circumstance, and cause, and effect,” while the latter is the “creation of actions according to the unchangeable forms of human nature , as existing in the mind of the creator, which is itself the image of all other minds.”1 To be sure, the image of Lincoln that resides in the hearts and minds of many today is not significantly influenced by biographers present or past, because “Abraham Lincoln” is largely a mythic construction that plays fast and loose with specific historicized lived experiences while ignoring others. To better illustrate how the Lincoln Legend reveals itself within dramatic literature and live performance, this survey delineates four points of reference: Lincoln the Yankee Goon, Lincoln the Warrior, Lincoln the Communitarian, and Lincoln the Mythos. Before continuing, I should note three conditions that frame my work. First, I limit my discussion to play texts appearing in print and/ or performance between 1861 and 1962 within the portion of North America known as the United States. I stop with 1962 because of the new directions politics, critical thought, and theatre take up in the form of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the CIA’s escalating involvement in Vietnam, Thomas Kuhn’s “paradigm shift,” and the budding underground movement in New York City.2 Second, Lincoln must appear in a scene at least once over the course of the play { 50 } SCOTT R. IREL AN text. Third, I freely borrow both language and concepts from existing Lincoln studies scholarship, tempering them with that of theatre and American studies so as to chart a course through an interdisciplinary landscape rarely traversed .3 Lincoln the Yankee Goon The Yankee Goon plays are derisive satires penned between 1861 and 1863 by either Southerners or Copperheads who are wary not only of Lincoln’s prairie ingenuity but also of his political motives. Similar to Royall Tyler’s Jonathan, a “true born Yankee American son of liberty,” the Yankee Goon possesses a simple wit and otherwise mirrors a rube-like frontier worldview as head of state.4 Distinct from the naively optimistic Jonathan, the Yankee Goon appears to be a dour dunce put in place by much savvier constituents of the Republican Party who set him up as their “fall man” for ineffectual policies. Sometimes he is prone to heavy drinking and womanizing, while at other times he is spineless and looking out only for the welfare of himself and his immediate family. Regardless, the Yankee Goon is out of his element as commander in chief. As the comically embellished core of “Northern values,” his homespun cunning is innately second-rate when put side by side with the affectations of those from the Confederate States of America. It is the manipulation of Lincoln by those around him that gives the Yankee Goon a piteous quality. This gangster of ghastly grandiosity delights Southerners and Copperheads alike, who find in his lesser traits that which will lead to the ultimate demise of Northern antagonism . Though it seems that the Yankee Goon first appears as a guilt-ridden, suicidal fool in Stephen Miller’s 1861 closet drama Ahab Lincoln: A Tragedy of the Potomac,5 it is not until John Hewitt’s 1863 King Linkum the First that a Yankee Goon play clearly meant for live theatrical performance emerges.6 Set in Washington , D.C., the burletta seeks not only to account for the rise of the Royal Linkums but also to project an imminent fall from grace. In usual burletta form, the piece has three acts, farcically deals with both legend and historicized details, and has (depending on your point of view, of course) the requisite happy ending. With Confederate victories at Secessionville (South Carolina ), Harper’s Ferry (Virginia), and Chickasaw Bayou (Mississippi) prior to the live performance event in Augusta, Georgia, Hewitt’s rendering is certainly not surprising. At rise King Linkum takes his morning coffee...