Mencken
held that it is hopeless to look for the real man in his biographies as
they tend toward distortion and sentimentalism. Regarding the authors
he added: “Nearly all our professional historians are poor men holding
college posts, and they are ten times more cruelly beset by the ruling
politico-plutocratic-social oligarchy than ever the Prussian professors
were by the Hohenzollerns. Let them diverge in the slightest form from
what is the current official doctrine, and they are turned out of their
chairs with a ceremony suitable for the expulsion of a drunken valet.”
Bernhard Thuersam
Lincoln With a Few Gourds of Corn Aboard
“Even
Lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the covers of a book. The
Nicolay-Hay work is quite impossible; it is not a biography, but simply a
huge storehouse of biographical raw materials; whoever can read it can
also read the official Records of the Rebellion.
So
far as I can make out, no genuinely scientific study of the man has
ever been attempted. The amazing conflict of testimony about him remains
a conflict; the most elemental facts are yet to be established; he
grows vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year.
One
would think that, by this time, the question of his religious views (to
take one example) ought to be settled, but apparently it is not, for no
longer than a year ago there came a reverend author, Dr. William E.
Barton, with a whole volume on the subject, and I was as much in the
dark after reading it as I had been before I opened it. All previous
biographers, it appeared by this author’s evidence, had either dodged
the problem or lied.
The official doctrine, in this as in other departments, is obviously quite as unsound. One hears in the Sunday-schools
that Abe was an austere and pious fellow, constantly taking the name of
God in whispers . . . [and] that he was a shining idealist, holding all
his vast powers by the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue.
Imagine
a man getting on in American politics, interesting and enchanting the
boobery, sawing off the horns of other politicians, elbowing his way
through the primaries and conventions, by the magic of virtue!
Abe,
in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled at the great democratic
art of gum-shoeing. I like to think of him as one who defeated such
politicians as Stanton, Douglas and Sumner with their own weapons –
deftly leading them into ambuscades, boldly pulling their noses,
magnificently ham-stringing and hornswoggling them – in brief, as a
politician of extraordinary talents, who loved the game for its own
sake, and had the measure of the crowd.
His
official portraits, both in prose and daguerreotype, show him wearing
the mien of a man about to be hanged; one never sees him smiling.
Nevertheless, one hears that, until he emerged from Illinois, they
always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few
gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his
career in the State legislature was indistinguishable from that of a
Tammany [Hall] Nietzsche.
(Roosevelt: An Autopsy, Prejudices, A Selection, H.L. Mencken, Johns Hopkins Press, 1996, pp. 48-49)
