Dusty Bookshelf: Review of Lincoln the Man by Edgar Lee Masters
Edgar Lee Masters. Lincoln The Man. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company 1931.
Edgar Lee Masters was a poet (and Illinois lawyer) most known today for his Spoon River Anthology (published in 1915).
Not nearly as popular as the Spoon River Anthology, but reflecting the same poetic intensity, Lincoln the Man gave Masters the chance to explain how, as he saw it, America had come to its current (as of 1931) condition of corporate power subjugating the country to its will. It was Lincoln who had allegedly brought about the transition of the U. S. to this condition of subjection by promoting centralizing, corporate principles and imposing these principles in the Civil War. Masters, with bitter sarcasm, calls this development “the triumph of God’s truth as divined by fanatics and abetted by money and power” (p. 344)
Masters declared that the historical data about Abraham Lincoln were known and that all that remained was interpretation. And it was time for someone to properly organize the date by showing the truth (as Masters saw it) about Lincoln’s career and its deplorable results.
Following through the course of Lincoln’s life, Masters uses biographical details to Lincoln as (the reader is expected to believe) a ruthless enemy of true freedom.
Lincoln supposedly embodied two forces which, in Masters’ telling, promoted pro-corporate centralization of power in the central government in Washington. The first force was, of course, the allies of corporate interests, seeking to stamp out states’ rights in order to suppress popular rights in favor of the big commercial and financial powers. Alexander Hamilton and the prewar Whigs were supporters of this kind of centralization, which would best flourish if self-government were suppressed at the local level and the central authority supported tariffs, central banking, and other corporate-friendly policies. Lincoln had been with the Whigs as long as there were Whigs to be with.
The second force, allied with the first, was Northern “Hebraic-Puritanism,” that is, a powerful movement for Christianizing society, a movement which Masters links in a special way with the Puritans of New England (though not only to them) and to the Christian faith itself. Masters doesn’t claim Lincoln as a Christian, but says Lincoln is still part of the fanatical current: “Lincoln, whether we call him an atheist, a deist, a free thinker, was in truth a Hebraic-Puritan product” (p. 444).
Masters doesn’t portray the Hebraic-Puritans of America as presenting a distortion of Christianity, but as embodying the fulfillment of Christianity. Just as it had overturned the supposedly beautiful paganism of the ancient Greeks, Christianity/Hebraic-Puritanism had overturned America’s freedom-protecting Constitutional arrangement of states’ rights. Being fanatics, the Hebraic-Puritans cared nothing about freedom, including the essential freedoms associated with the reserved rights of the states. This put the Hebraic-Puritans on the same side as those acting from pro-corporate motives; indeed, the same person (e. g., Lincoln) might be motivated simultaneously by Christian fanaticism (or its equivalent) and a lust for economic centralization.
Masters contrasts Lincoln with Stephen Douglas. Douglas, as Masters sees it, was a champion of American greatness, but wasn’t tainted with religious idealism or the wish for corporate dictatorship. Douglas is portrayed as a pragmatist who poured scorn on fanatics like Lincoln and the antislavery forces. Though others might see Douglas as a cynical racist, Masters sees the Little Giant as a champion of local self-government, that essential defense against pro-corporate centralism.
Though Douglas, who ended his life as the Civil War was beginning, spent his last days speaking against disunion and called it treason, Masters doesn’t unduly emphasize this aspect of Douglas’ worldview. Where the Union is concerned, Masters adopts the arguments of secessionist supporters, seeing secession as part of the states-rights philosophy which (to Masters) ought to have marked the application of the Constitution. Conversely, Masters sees Lincoln’s unionism as part of the sinister centralism which Lincoln bequeathed to the United States.
Masters, from his own point of view, isn’t defending slavery – even though he praises the Dred Scott decision as good, pro-freedom constitutional law. The relevant consideration for Masters is that, whether their opposition to slavery was sincere or not, the centralizers used the slavery issue to tear down states’ rights, a key bulwark of freedom, creating a pro-corporate, tyrannical central government.
Masters is taking on, not only Lincoln’s iconic status, but Christianity, too. It is hardly surprising that he wasn’t able to persuade readers, even though he used more popular themes such as opposition to corporate power, and the equivalency of Southern slaveholding ideology with the states-rights philosophy.
I read the Masters book far too long ago to be able to comment on it, but as ever I do find it astonishing the number of Lincoln biographies that exist – over 1,000? – and the fantastical inventions that have been made of his life, career and philosophies. It would take a large team of psychiatrists, psychologists, and sociologists to list and categorize all the projections of both fervid and fevered minds that have been lopped onto this lone individual. History that never happened, ideas and ideologies that he never possessed – many of which were not even invented until after his death – and a saintly canonization more powerful than the Vatican could bestow, it has come to the point where the corporeal man has not only all but ceased to exist, but must be eliminated, because his flaws – for all humans are flawed – are endangering the myth. Lincoln the Man is no longer wanted – in fact, Nicole Wallace will probably any day now, taking a break from her breathless National Socialist propaganda attacks on President Trump, denounce Lincoln the Man as a White Supremacist; Lincoln the Fantasy must reign henceforth. Why, Lincoln started the Black Lives Matter movement, didn’t you all know that? If Lincoln had fathered another son, he would have been Barack Obama’s great-grandfather!
So why so many biographies of this man whose reality has all but been ground to dust? They make money. Publishers love to handle a “safe” product, rather than break ground with a new one, a new vision, and, heaven forbid, newly uncovered facts – they are, after all, amongst the laziest of people on Earth – and most of all they love a product for which the marketing plan is already in place – the product has been pre-sold. Push the button to start the presses, then sit back and enjoy the profits, hand out awards to the authors, pat yourself on the back for being moral, rinse and repeat. They’ve done the same thing to Ernest Hemingway, the most widely-known and simultaneously misunderstood writer in history. Publishers have endlessly put out biographies of him; if you’ve read his works and then read whatever is the new book on him, you quickly see that the Ph.D. who authored the latest slop hasn’t even read Hemingway’s works – or worse, if they have, they are either so stupid or so biased that they do not deserve to be a Ph.D. But it doesn’t matter – the bios make money. There are something like 140 Hemingway biographies; of Joseph Conrad, a huge influence on Hemingway and a writer who stands shoulder to shoulder with him in vision and achievement, there are 2. Do the math. The Hemingway myth is far easier to sell. And poor Conrad – he even wrote a novel – an amazing one – with the word “Nigger” in the title. Of course, 95% of people missed the irony. All that matters is sales. I was the first person to ever – ever – conduct extensive interviews with veterans of the Viet Minh who fought against the French, and Viet Cong and People’s Army who fought against the Americans in Vietnam’s 1946-1975 war, and then the wars against the Khmer Rouge and China from 1977-1979, in order to write the first ever oral history of these wars. Even Vietnamese writers had never done this, though my friends amongst them, inspired by my example, eventually put out a brief book of interviews with veterans of the Battle of Dien Bien Phu. But American publishers refused to touch ‘For the Motherland,’ my book. One major publisher in New York summed up the general response I received: “We have spent thirty years fashioning an idea of the Vietnam War in the minds of the American people. If we publish your book, that idea would change. We’re never going to allow that to happen.”
And so we have 1,000+ biographies of Abraham Lincoln – and I’m sure another 1,000 are planned…while great writers, honest historians this very minute are working on 1,000 spectacular Civil War and era books…998 of which will never be published. And so history is lost or worse, distorted – and America suffers.
Times change, and interpretations of History adjust in an attempt to make sense of current events, good and bad.
While attending school in Rock Island County Illinois my class went on an obligatory field trip along a portion of the trail that tracks within spitting distance of Spoon River, the connecting thread of the “Spoon River Anthology.” We were tasked with “reflecting on the lives of early settlers of Illinois, and how Abraham Lincoln might have fit into their community. Edgar Lee Masters lived most of his life in Petersburg Illinois, and Ann Rutledge (an early love interest of Abraham Lincoln) is buried in Petersburg’s Oakland Cemetery… as is Edgar Lee Masters, who died in 1950. Petersburg is midway between Peoria, Springfield, and Havana (where the Spoon River empties into the Illinois River) and not far from Lincoln’s New Salem, and Galesburg (site of one of the seven Lincoln- Douglas Debates. Illinois being “The Land of Lincoln” – the licence plates say so – no mention was made of Master’s anti-Lincoln biography; and this researcher had no awareness of the existence of “Lincoln the Man” (1931) …until today. Worth a read just to see what evidence Masters presents in “blaming Abe Lincoln for the nation’s ills.”