Lincolnoclast

Abraham Lincoln, having been reinterred 16 times, had reason last week to turn once more in his grave. Just before his 122nd birthday last week there was published his 112th biography, Lincoln: The Man-- by Poet Edgar Lee Masters. Unlike his Illinois neighbor Poet Carl Sandburg, whose Lincoln biography is a labor of love, morose Poet Masters pictures the Emancipator not as a warm-hearted prairie prophet but as a cold, lazy fanatic. Kansas-born, Poet Masters spent his boyhood at Petersburg, Ill,., went to Knox College (Galesburg), grew up swaddled in the Lincoln legend which he now repudiates. His grandfather hired Lincoln as a lawyer in 1847. His father was for eight years the law partner of William Henry Herndon who was Lincoln's law partner for 18 years. Poet Masters says that Lincoln never addressed Herndon, or any other man, by his first name. Lincoln: The Man (520 pp.) adds few new facts to Lincoln history, attempts instead a clinical character study, approaching the subject's "apotheosis . . . with the hand of rational analysis." Excerpts from the biography which will make many a Lincoln-lover wish Masters in the cold, cold ground:

". . . He went about grotesquely dressed, carrying a faded umbrella, wearing a ludicrous plug hat. He was mannerless, unkempt, and one wonders if he was not unwashed, in those days of the weekly bath in the foot tub, if a bath was taken at all. [As attorney, for the Illinois Central R. R. he was found] riding about on special trains furnished him and posing as 'Humble Abe Lincoln.' . . .

"He set out to marry Mary Owens, and when she would not have him he was enraged and proceeded to degrade her by a vulgarity of words which were as well untrue. ... No letter has been found that Lincoln wrote Anne Rutledge, and none that she wrote him. When she was dead she was buried in a lonely country graveyard, and Lincoln did not attend the funeral, nor ever visit her grave, nor ever give her a memorial stone. [He] was an undersexed man."*

Says Poet Masters: "Abraham Lincoln destroyed the American system. He was the ruin of its character and its primal hope. The Lincoln myth must cease."

*Dodd, Mead & Co.; $5

*Of the Rutledge-Lincoln romance, Poet Masters wrote in his Spoon River Anthology (1915) the epitaph subsequently carved on Anne Rutledge's tombstone:

Out of me, unworthy and unknown

The vibrations of deathless music;

"With malice toward none, with charity for all."

Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,

And the beneficent face of a nation

Shining with justice and truth.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleeps beneath these weeds,

Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,

Wedded to him, not through union,

But through separation.

Bloom forever, O, Republic.

From the dust of my bosom.!

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