The lady in the neat gray hat sat all the way through the Lincoln Day speech with her feet crossed primly at the ankles, clucking her tongue as each new salacious detail of Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln’s lives was reviewed.
Then, in the question-and-answer session, came talk about whether Mrs. Lincoln had pilfered from the White House.
“This is just too much,” she whispered to her friend. She slipped out of the row of seats and left.
Others in the audience in Springfield greeted the recent controversial works discussed at this week’s Abraham Lincoln Symposium with similar distaste. Trashing Abe and Mary does not go over well in The City that Lincoln Loved.
This is the decade for it, though. In the past few years, new biographies and other writings have passed along speculation about the intimate lives of the 16th president and his controversial wife–that he was miserable in his marriage, that she abused him, that the two of them slept together before they were married.
What the disapproving Lincolnphiles of the nation must not have noticed is that the rumormongering over the past few years happens to correspond with a very favorable trend.
People are getting into Lincoln, in a big way. Visitors to Lincoln sites are on the rise. A new Lincoln exhibit is supposed to be Chicago’s pop culture hit this year. A book about Honest Abe has even made the best-seller lists.
The reason, more than one Lincoln expert concedes, has as much to do with Sally Jessy Raphael and the National Enquirer as with the Lincolns. We’re living in a tabloid culture, and, once we get wind of some tasty gossip on one of our national heroes, we’re apt to lean in and listen closely the next time the name comes up.
But instead of clucking in dismay, we ought to be giving thanks.
For one thing, it makes Lincoln seem more human, a little easier to understand. And confronting the evidence about a popular icon helps us put our heroes and ourselves in perspective.
Perhaps a sullied Lincoln offers even greater comfort to American society at large, as we delve into the personal lives of those who would lead us into the next century. Up to our elbows in the evidence, we find indications that they mismanage finances, cheat on their spouses, even serve divorce papers in hospital recovery rooms.
You know the ugly stories. Get ready to hear more of them between now and the November elections.
One politician, for example, is reported to have carried a torch for a 16-year-old girl when he was nearly 30, then rushed into marriage with a proper society lady because he was afraid she was pregnant.
He also is rumored to have visited a prostitute in a neighboring town and even brought home a sexually transmitted disease.
Sound like someone you would consider voting for? No?
Well, those were rumors of the day and of late about the Great Emancipator himself.
Or would you care for a candidate who carried on a well-known extramarital affair? If not, then on the basis of widely held belief you’d surely reject Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who led the country through the Great Depression and a world war.
There are plenty of others whose sexual proclivities or even unsubstantiated rumors thereof would qualify as the kind of character issue that hinders modern leaders or do them in altogether.
“I don’t think there’s a human being alive, Billy Graham included, who could completely stand up to today’s scrutiny,” said Kenneth Janda, a professor of political science at Northwestern University.
Nevertheless, these individuals still can perform great service to the public, he argues.
“You know, it’s possible for a person to have a highly charged libido and still be considerate, humane and thoughtful in making public policy,” Janda observed.
A prime modern example is former Sen. Bob Packwood of Oregon. He was known as a “womanizer” in his private life at the same time that he led fights for abortion rights and other feminist issues in the Senate. Even while women say he was sexually harassing them in the workplace, Packwood stood as one of two Republicans opposed to the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when he was accused of the very same thing.
Those who aren’t enamored of Packwood’s Senate career must admire at least one or two other leaders of American history caught in the swirl of personal impropriety–FDR, John F. Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower and Martin Luther King Jr., to name a few.
Given the magnitude of their public contributions, why pretend their private lives were pristine? And why demand so much more of modern leaders?
Perhaps the fear of confronting the sordid truth is really fear of losing the few moral heroes Americans have. This would explain what happened at a recent Springfield anniversary commemoration of the Lincolns’ marriage, celebrated at the national historic home site with a re-enactment by a pair of impersonators.
After the show, one spectator, curious about new postulations in a recent book by an Illinois author, asked the Abraham impersonator what he thought of speculation that the two Lincolns had sex before marriage.
Mr. Lincoln politely invited anyone in the audience who held such a belief to step outside with him so he could defend his wife’s honor.
“Mary Todd and Abraham Lincoln have always had a quasi-godlike status,” said Michael Burlingame, author of a controversial 1994 Lincoln psychobiography which posits, among other things, that Mary Lincoln physically abused her husband. “Any criticism of them is like criticism of your religion, even if you have tons of evidence to back it up.”
But Burlingame’s book has been received kindly by some scholars, who share his belief that new evidence deserves to be aired and that people can handle the news that their heroes are not perfect.
One such believer is a maverick Mary Todd Lincoln impersonator, a Springfield resident who avidly reads new books and writings on the Lincolns to keep her lectures and presentations up-to-date.
Karen Lee Lynn says people who come to her shows aren’t turned off by the latest speculations, but seem instead to express a warmer, more personal interest in the couple upon hearing about them.
“I know a lot of the other ladies who play Mary Todd would be upset with me for saying I think they probably did sleep together,” Lynn said. “But I’m as crazy about Mary Todd as any of them.”
