Abraham Lincoln’s sense of humor proved legendary during his own time and remains a celebrated facet of his personality to this day. Indeed, his love of jokes—hearing them, telling them, drawing morals from them—prompted critics to dub Lincoln “the National Joker.” The political cartoons and print satires that mocked Lincoln often trafficked in precisely the same images and terms Lincoln humorously used to characterize himself. In this intriguing study, Todd Nathan Thompson considers the politically productive relationship between Lincoln’s use of satire and the satiric treatments of him in political cartoons, humor periodicals, joke books, and campaign literature. By fashioning a folksy, fallible persona, Thompson shows, Lincoln was able to use satire as a weapon without being severely wounded by it.
In his speeches, writings, and public persona, Lincoln combined modesty and attack, engaging in strategic self-deprecation while denouncing his opponents, their policies, and their arguments, thus refiguring satiric discourse as political discourse and vice versa. At the same time, he astutely deflected his opponents’ criticisms of him by embracing and sometimes preemptively initiating those criticisms. Thompson traces Lincoln’s comic sources and explains how, in reapplying others’ jokes and stories to political circumstances, he transformed humor into satire. Time and time again, Thompson shows, Lincoln engaged in self-mockery, turning negative assumptions or depictions of him—as ugly, cowardly, jocular, inexperienced—into positive traits that identified him as an everyman while attacking his opponents’ claims to greatness, heroism, and experience as aristocratic or demagogic. Thompson also considers how Lincoln took advantage of political cartoons and other media to help proliferate the particular Lincoln image of the “self-made man”; underscores exceptions to Lincoln’s ability to mitigate negative, satiric depictions of him; and closely examines political cartoons from both the 1860 and 1864 elections. Throughout, Thompson’s deft analysis brings to life Lincoln’s popular humor.
TODD NATHAN THOMPSON, an associate professor of English at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, is the author of articles in Nineteenth-Century Prose; ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance; Early American Literature; Scholarly Editing; and journal of American Culture.
THE NATIONAL JOKER
Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire
TODD NATHAN THOMPSON
Southern Illinois University Press
Carbondale
Copyright © 2015 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
18 17 16 15 4 3 2 1
Jacket illustration: detail from “May the Best Man Win—Uncle Sam Reviewing the Army of Candidates for the Presidential Chair.” Thomas Nast, Phunny Phellow, April 1864, 8–9.
Courtesy of The Rare Book and Manuscript Library of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Thompson, Todd Nathan.
The national joker : Abraham Lincoln and the politics of satire / Todd Nathan Thompson.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8093-3422-3 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-8093-3422-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8093-3423-0 (ebook)
ISBN 0-8093-3423-2 (ebook)
1. Lincoln, Abraham, 1809–1865—Humor. 2. Political satire, American—History—19th century. 3. United States—Politics and government—1861–1865—Humor. 4. Political culture—United States—History—19th century. I. Title.
E457.15.T47 2015
973.7092—dc23
2014043670
Printed on recycled paper.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
To Sara Stewart, who loved me even though
I was broken and convinced me that I
still had some chapters left to write
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Abraham Lincoln and the American Satiric Tradition
CHAPTER 1
“This Reminds Me of a Little Joke”: From Humor to Satire
CHAPTER 2
“Little Big Man”: Modesty and Attack in Lincoln’s Writings and Speeches
CHAPTER 3
The Rail-Splitter President
CHAPTER 4
“Abraham Africanus the First”: The Limits of Preemptive Self-Satire
CHAPTER 5
“A Hoosier Michael Angelo”: The Politics of Lincoln’s Physical Appearance in Popular Media
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations
“By the Way This Puts Me in the Mind of a Little Story”
“Great and Astonishing Trick of Old Abe, the Western Juggler”
“The National Joker”
“Columbia Demands Her Children!”
“I Knew Him, Horatio”
“This Reminds Me of a Little Joke”
Lincolniana, or Humors of Uncle Abe, cover
Old Abe’s Joker, or Wit at the White House, cover
“The Tribune Offering the Chief Magistracy to the Western Cincinnatus”
“The Last Rail Split by ‘Honest Old Abe’”
“‘Uncle Sam’ Making New Arrangements”
“Lincoln’s Last Warning”
“Good Gracious, Abraham Lincoln!”
“The Rail Splitter at Work Repairing the Union”
“A Job for the New Cabinet Maker”
“Cooperation”
“Log Cabin Built by President Lincoln in Kentucky”
“President Lincoln’s Inaugural”
“Masks and Faces”
“Lincoln Signing the Emancipation Proclamation”
“Abduction of the Yankee Goddess of Liberty”
The Lincoln Catechism, title page
Abraham Africanus I, title page
“First Black Republican Made in Old Kaintuck”
Untitled drawing, Richmond, Virginia
“The Great ‘Cannon Game’”
“Pull Devil—Pull Baker”
“The Vampire”
“In for His Second Innings”
“Lincoln Out Walking”
“‘Boy’ Lost!”
“A Political Race”
“Lincoln, Douglas, and the Rail-Fence Handicap”
“May the Best Man Win”
“Presidential Cobblers and Wire-Pullers”
“The Good Uncle and the Naughty Boy”
“Long Abraham Lincoln a Little Longer”
“With All Thy Faults”
“Jeff Davis’s November Nightmare”
“The Tallest Ruler on the Globe”
“A Phenomenon of Portraiture”
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to many people for their help in making this book happen. At the University of Illinois at Chicago, Robin Sandra Grey pushed my initial thinking on Lincoln and satire and encouraged me to pursue it in depth; Terence Whalen offered invaluable feedback and support as well. UIC also supported the project and provided time and money to research through a Dean’s Scholar Award and Graduate College Provost’s Research Award. I am also thankful to the staffs of the various libraries at which I conducted my research: the Library Company of Philadelphia, which kindly provided an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship; the Lilly Library, which supported my research through an Everett Helm Visiting Fellowship; the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library; and the American Antiquarian Society, where As
hley Cataldo was invaluable in helping me to collect many of the images in this book.
Sylvia Frank Rodrigue at Southern Illinois University Press has been indefatigable in her enthusiasm for the project from proposal to final draft and over the course of two years has helped to make this book much better. Wayne Larsen cheerfully and skillfully shepherded this project in its later stages. I am thankful to SIU Press’s anonymous outside readers, whose comments and critiques were invaluable.
Megan O’Connor, Patricia O’Connor, Jessica Showalter, and Justin Tanaka also offered thoughtful and thorough readings of my work in its various stages. Mary Lou Kowaleski provided meticulous copyediting. My graduate assistants at Indiana University of Pennsylvania—Erin Guydish, Shana Kraynak, Andru Lugo, and Kaitlin Tonti—were tireless in their efforts. Guydish, in particular, deserves praise for her two-year dedication to this project and her cheerful eagerness to embark on quixotic research quests and endless fact-checking. My colleagues at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, especially David Downing, Tony Farrington, Tanya Heflin, Gian Pagnucci, and Mike Sell, have been consistently supportive of my research. My graduate students, too, keep me hungry and remind me that I love to work.
I am most grateful to all my friends and family for sustaining me during the writing of this book. My mother, Joan Middleton, father, George Thompson, and brother, Cory Thompson, have long indulged my writerly sensibilities. I appreciate the diversion mandated over the past couple years by my friends, especially B. W. B. (aka Simeon Novels and Nate Wygonik), Sarah Slack, and Henry Wong Doe. Special thanks go to Garrett Brown, Madeleine Monson-Rosen, and Sara Stewart for their intellectual (and sometimes necessarily nonintellectual) companionship, for picking me up when I was down, and for patiently abiding my Lincoln jokes.
Introduction: Abraham Lincoln and the American Satiric Tradition
That Abraham Lincoln liked jokes—hearing them, telling them, drawing morals from them—was a truism in his time and has been much discussed by Lincoln scholars in ours. He read aloud pieces by humorists, such as Artemus Ward and Orpheus C. Kerr, to cabinet members (to Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton’s disgust), and cartoonist Frank Bellew dubbed him “the National Joker.”1 But political cartoons and print satires that mock Lincoln often traffic in precisely the same images and terms that Lincoln humorously used to characterize himself. Such convergence between popular depictions of Lincoln and Lincoln’s own self-presentation is the subject of this book.
The National Joker: Abraham Lincoln and the Politics of Satire considers the politically productive dialectic between Abraham Lincoln’s use of satire and satiric treatments of him in political cartoons, humor periodicals, joke books, and campaign literature. In his speeches, writings, and public persona, Lincoln combined modesty and attack, consistently engaging in strategic self-deprecation to deprecate his opponents, their policies, and their arguments, thus refiguring satiric discourse as political discourse (and vice versa). At the same time, he astutely deflected his opponents’ criticisms of him by admitting, embracing, and, sometimes, preemptively initiating those criticisms. Lincoln also fostered an image ready-made for caricature—a fast-maturing political-cultural form when Lincoln first sought the presidency in 1860—and as such was able to mitigate partially the satiric content of cartoon portrayals as well as print portrayals of him. By self-fashioning himself as a folksy, fallible figure who lacked the prestige that caricature usually seeks to attack, Lincoln was able to use satire as a weapon without being severely wounded by it.2
Though much ink has been spilled in recounting Lincoln’s famous sense of humor, few have labeled him a satirist. The relative paucity of scholarly attention to Lincoln’s use of satire and of his treatments in the satires of his day may have something to do with the ways in which critics have categorized humor and satire over the past two centuries. A recent scholar of satire has convincingly shown that the nineteenth-century critical predilection to speak of American “humor” rather than “satire” was a result of lingering Anglophobia after the War of 1812. That is, Americans’ “postwar triumphalism” led to a derogation, beginning in the 1810s, of the term “satire”—which to Americans at the time “connoted the worst of British culture”—in favor of “humor.” Critics from the nineteenth century to today have, it seems, accepted this shift in terminology at face value and, thereby, characterized much American satire as humor.3
A brief survey of critical engagements with American humor and satire in popular nineteenth-century magazines underscores this point. For example, an 1867 essay on “Yankee Humor” in Every Saturday: A Journal of Choice Reading makes an odd distinction between humor and satire: the anonymous author praises James Russell Lowell’s collection of anti–U.S.-Mexico War poems The Biglow Papers as “the most characteristic and complete expression of American humor” but then generalizes to announce, “[h]itherto slavery and politics have been the chief subjects of the best American humor. The great social satirist has to come.”4 Here political satire is recast as political humor, and satire is deferred as a genre that Americans have yet to master. A quick perusal of the titles of other retrospective accounts of late nineteenth-century humor and satire in the U.S. press reveals a tendency to characterize American humor in opposition to British satire. Articles such as Ellen A. Vinton’s “Who Are Our American Humorists?” (1895), W. P. Trent’s “A Retrospect of American Humor” (1901), and Joel Chandler Harris’s “Humor in America” (1909) all concentrate on American works. On the other hand, articles with “satire” in the title tend to discuss British authors: examples include “English Satire” (1863), which mentions no Americans, and “Political Satire and Satirists” (1842), which only describes in passing a few Revolutionary-era satirists, such as Joel Barlow and Philip Freneau.5 That even a nationalist, Young America organ like The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (edited by John. L. O’Sullivan, who coined the term “manifest destiny”), which published “Political Satire and Satirists,” would slight Americans in its discussions of satire shows just how associated with Englishness the term had become by midcentury. Similarly, James Hannay’s Satire and Satirists (1855), a series of lectures collected in book form, begins with Horace and Juvenal, proceeds through early European and neoclassical British satire, and ends with mostly British writers (discussing, among others, Lord George Gordon Byron, Tom Moore, and Theodore Hook) and no Americans in his chapter on the “Present Aspect of Satirical Literature.”6
Such classifications spring from U.S. authors’ and critics’ desire to situate humor as a key element of “Americanness,” a penchant that Lincoln scholars have followed in describing Lincoln’s humor as the epitome of a particular national trait. Harris, for example, argues for a peculiarly American sense of humor that characterizes its political, social, and religious institutions: “It may be said of us, with some degree of truth, that we have a way of living humorously, and are conscious of the fact; that our view of life and its responsibilities is, to say the least, droll and comfortable; and there seems never to have been a day in our history when the American view of things generally was not charged or trimmed with humor.” Harris highlights the centrality (and efficacy) of the comic in American political campaigns and credits Lincoln’s droll sense of humor for his political success: “American diplomacy has achieved its greatest victories since the chair of state has been occupied by a gentleman who was noted for his humor long before his statesmanship had been put to the test.”7 In connecting Lincoln’s penchant for humor with “victories” of “diplomacy,” Harris by insinuation further undermines distinctions between humor and satire that his essay’s title purports to invoke.
Because Lincoln told nonpolitical jokes in political situations and shared private anecdotes that subsequently circulated widely in the public sphere, differentiating humor from satire and public from private can be somewhat dizzying if we define satire as an aesthetic attack mounted in a humorous or playful tone through literary indirection (e.g., metaphor or allegory or
hyperbole) against a public figure, policy, or idea.8 Lincoln deployed his apolitical stories allegorically to describe situations that were precisely political, shifting these jokes from the realm of humor to that of satire. In short, Lincoln, time and time again throughout his political career, repurposed jokes for political ends, in the process transmuting humor into satire.
Abraham Lincoln, Satirist-Statesman Satirized
Lincoln may be viewed as the culmination of an American tradition of “satirist-statesmen,” politically powerful figures who addressed pressing issues via two channels simultaneously: that of direct, political arguments or official diplomacy and that of indirect, aesthetic engagement through satire voiced by characters, personae, or self-presentations with ties to the people. Like satirist-statesmen before him, such as Benjamin Franklin, who as “Homespun” pilloried the Stamp Act in letters to the British press before testifying against the act before the House of Commons, or Hugh Henry Brackenridge, who satirized the western Pennsylvania Whiskey Rebellion after trying to mediate it, or fellow Whig congressman David Crockett, who leveraged his “half man, half alligator” image into national celebrity as a rustic foil against which to measure and mock Jacksonian Democrats, Lincoln used satire for political ends, simultaneously ingratiating himself with constituents as a common man and attacking or belittling his opponents and their policies as out of touch.9 As writers and speakers, all of these politicians donned satiric or self-satiric masks to launch attacks from selective positions of powerlessness, speaking in humbler, less official, and cruder voices meant to approximate those of political outsiders more than those of their political peers. In satires featuring homey characters, personae, or self-presentations, satirist-statesmen encouraged their readers to identify with them and against their defamiliarized targets, who were often portrayed as personifications of official, entrenched, or authoritarian power. This very awareness of and facility with satire helped Lincoln to deflect preemptively, or at least minimize, the sting of political satires levied against him. That the central figure in American history was also its ultimate satirist-statesman, whose satiric discourse was his political discourse, speaks to the heretofore unexamined prevalence and power of political satire in nineteenth-century America.
The National Joker Page 1
