What Would Abe Do?

Abraham Lincoln died 160 years ago, and the GOP died in 2016...where are we now?

The April 15, 1865 New York Times front page had this very small headline:

“AWFUL EVENT.”

Over at the New York Tribune, the news was placed under the headline “HIGHLY IMPORTANT!”

The Times story then went on to note that President Lincoln was very seriously wounded.

“President Lincoln Shot by an Assassin/THE ACT OF A DESPERATE REBEL/The President Still Alive at Last Accounts/No Hopes Entertained of His Recovery.”

1865 was not a more innocent time in America.

Frankly, it’s never been an innocent time in America. This country was founded on violence, expanded by violence, and continues to be riven by violence. This soiled, tired phrase, “The End of American Innocence”, should be filed away forever now. I had seen that one going around after 9/11 for a while.

Uh huh.

American Innocence has been replaced by American Cynicism, where a man like the 45th and 47th Carnival Barker of the United States can thrive in the new Scamerica.

Lots of Important Observers note we could be on the brink of some kind of a civil war. Maybe. But I doubt it, and, in order to stay sane and survive, I have to doubt it.

I think we’ve been in a cultural civil war for years, and Trumpism is really just the natural culmination of the John Birch Society and the 1964 Barry Goldwater campaign.

While Lincoln’s mythology has only grown in the past 160 years, he used to be a reliable touchstone for the Republican Party, which was only four years old when he became the 1860 GOP nominee, along with the now-forgotten Hannibal Hamlin of Maine as his vice presidential running mate. Now?

Jefferson Davis is the reliable touchstone for the Republican Party.

I am something of a Lincolnhead—not as much as some people, but I have read extensively about him, and even have a good friend in Oregon whose father raised him on Lincoln history.

He even named his sons Tad and Robert.

So it’s easy for me to conjure Lincoln most days, in the same way that I think about JFK, RFK, and FDR most days (and Herblock, Conrad, and Mauldin). I have a Lincoln bust on my mantel (or did, it recently fell and broke, and I need to get a replacement), as well as a bust of FDR. I don’t have seances with Abe, but he’s pleasantly in my head a lot, maybe in the same way that one of your favorite poets or writers will be in your thoughts most days.

When I was a kid, the history of Lincoln and the Civil War was quite front-of-mind for most Americans. The country observed the centennial of the Civil Way from 1961-65, and Time-Life Books and a lot of other publications were making money off the deal. My dad was deeply knowledgeable about the conflict, and I think the only thing he liked about living in the Washington, DC area was its accessibility to major battlefields.

We went to Manassas many times, as well as Antietam, Gettysburg, Petersburg, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, and I could sense Lincoln’s presence always. I had read quite a number of my dad’s books on Lincoln and the Civil War (he was a Bruce Catton reader).

In 1967, my family took me to Ford’s Theater, and I vividly recall the moment, but also remember mostly seeing a museum display of a burning boat there. I don’t know why it was there and how it related to Lincoln, but there it was, keeping me awake for days after. Maybe there was a little tourist trap museum across the street—it was a long time ago. Interestingly, the interior of the theater was completely gutted. Whatever you see now in the theater has been completely rebuilt, in the same way that anything you see in the White House had been completely rebuilt in the Truman years.

160 years is a longer time ago, and yet, I can still conjure what it must have been like then. You want to know what it was like? Walk around DC in certain neighborhoods, and, by God, the mustiness of the air in the spring after a thunderstorm will transport you to the Lincoln moment. It’s an olfactory memory, like smelling cut grass and lawnmower exhaust will bring you right back to your Little League team.

In fact, I worked with a wonderful man and cartoonist named Doc Goodwin. He was from Tennessee originally, and we spent a lot of time together in 1981 and 1982. Doc’s father was 69 when he was born in 1920, and Doc’s mother was 20 or so.

Doc told me his father was seven when the Civil War ended, so he was born in 1858 (Doc preferred the “War Between the States”, and even re-lettered a book spine on my shelf to reflect this nomenclature).

160 years doesn’t same like that long ago when your office mate tells you what his dad thought about Lincoln as a contemporary. Furthermore, I love that Lincoln’s son Robert, a former Secretary of War, was an avid golfer in Vermont. Makes him a little less of a statue, right?

Weird note: Robert Lincoln was present at three presidential assassination scenes. He was even saved by John Wilkes Booth’s brother, Edwin, from getting hit by a train. Calling Oliver Stone.

As I’ve gotten older, I no longer see Lincoln as some sort of ghostly oracular figure, as I did as a child. I see him as a man who had unusual gifts, a man who came out of rural Kentucky and Sangamon County, Illinois as a savant polymath/humorist/moral icon.

I know a guy in Kentucky, a lawyer, and I don’t wish to embarrass him—but he reminds me of what Lincoln must have actually been like in person, accent and all. He’s also has a vocal quality that is very much like Lincoln’s—his contemporaries said it wasn’t at all stentorian, but more on the higher tenor side. He’s tall, with a military bearing, and also very droll and amusing, a true raconteur, the way you would think Lincoln would be—not loud at all, but compelling. He’s also a former elected official and a natural leader—while being genuinely self-deprecating. This guy was born 100 years after Lincoln’s death, and yet he inadvertently evokes him.

And, no, I have never mentioned to this to him.

Yes, I would vote for him.

I have drawn Lincoln so many times, I can do a pretty good likeness from any angle—although I do have to check Abe’s mole location once in awhile. I have drawn many Lincoln cartoons in my career (how many? Insert four score and seven joke here), and I enjoy each one enormously, not in a self-congratulatory way, but the way you would feel having a coffee with an old friend.

Going to the Lincoln Memorial now doesn’t evoke Lincoln for me, nor does the Washington Monument evoke Washington. I go to JFK’s grave when I go to DC, and my feelings are always bleak, empty, sad, and the site doesn’t evoke Kennedy, either. It is a beautiful spot, and a beautiful grave, but I can’t visualize Kennedy there any more than I see Lincoln’s statue down the Capitol Mall.

What brings Lincoln alive to me is his stunningly realistic life mask and his hand casts

.

Every single time I see a photograph of them or see them at the Smithsonian (hope they leave that exhibit up—Lincoln is so DEI now), I can really sense who Lincoln was and ideally should be in our contemporary life: a man with solid judgment who ideally met that catastrophic moment of American fissure.

That’s not who we have now. If there’s a new Lincoln, they’re not in the Republican Party. which currently doesn’t encourage the better angels of our nature.

All we have now is malice toward all, and charity toward none.

That didn’t work 160 years ago, either.

As Lincoln lay in a too-short bed across the street from the theater, slowly fading, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton said as the 16th president passed, “Now he belongs to the ages”. And so he does. Carl Sandburg, Lincoln’s biographer, once remarked that “if we hadn’t had Lincoln, it would have been necessary to invent him”.

We don’t have him now, and we may need to invent him, and not in Silicon Valley AI labs.

Here’s Lincoln’s gift: you instinctively know what Lincoln would do, and with that knowledge, you also know what the right thing is.

Let’s hope, anyway.

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Hey, YBs!: More cartoons tomorrow. Good night!—J.

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