The National Joker

by Thompson, Todd Nathan;

  When the American humor periodical Frank Leslie’s Budget of Fun reprinted this poem in July 1865, the editors announced that they forgave the “PENITENT PUNCH”: “We admit the penitent jester, and in consideration of his confession give him plenary absolution.”43 Frank Leslie’s felt no need to offer its own apology, despite the fact that it had included countless caricatures of Lincoln—favorable, unfavorable, and merely fun—over the previous five years. This is because caricatures of Lincoln in the American North seem to have worked differently than did Punch cartoons. That is, the visual association of a leading figure, such as the president, with humility, labor, physical prowess, and humor was much less unseemly to American cartoonists and readers than to their British counterparts, who finally came to see the positive content of the symbolism of “long-laboring” limbs after four-plus years.

  CHAPTER 5

  “A Hoosier Michael Angelo”: The Politics of Lincoln’s Physical Appearance in Popular Media

  He has a face like a hoosier Michael Angelo, so awful ugly it becomes beautiful, with its strange mouth, its deep cut, criss-cross lines, and its doughnut complexion

  —Walt Whitman

  In one version of a widely circulated story, Lincoln recalled,

  In the days when I used to be “on the circuit,” I was once accosted in the cars by a stranger, who said, “Excuse me, sir, but I have an article in my possession which belongs to you.” “How is that?” I asked, considerably astonished. The stranger took a jack-knife from his pocket. “This knife,” said he “was placed in my hands some years ago, with the injunction that I was to keep it until I found a man uglier than myself. I have carried it from that time to this. Allow me now to say, sir, that I think you are fairly entitled to the property.”

  Though this anecdote, like most Lincoln stories, may well be apocryphal, P. M. Zall, who has collected and analyzed hundreds of such stories, surmises that Lincoln likely did tell this story or something similar. According to painter Francis Carpenter, who retold this story, Lincoln was “always ready to join in a laugh at the expense of his person, concerning which he was very indifferent.”1 Lincoln was not just “indifferent” to conceptions of his physical appearance; indeed, he made political capital of his homeliness by caricaturing himself. Similar self-mockery is at work in a joke attributed to Lincoln in 1858, in which he claimed that he swore he would shoot any man he could find who was uglier than he. When he came across such a man, explained his “sacred oath,” and told him he’d better make peace with his maker, the joke goes, the man replied to Lincoln, “Well sir: you are evidently a gentleman & not as I at first supposed some escaped lunatic & sir, you look as if you might put your threat into execution; but sir, all that I have got to say is, If I am any worse looking than you are, for God’s sake shoot me and git me out of the way!”2

  Many scholars who study Lincoln in caricature dismiss the bulk of it as particularly cruel to Lincoln, and almost none goes far enough in examining the positive possibilities of image amelioration resulting from Lincoln’s own visual and verbal uses of self-satire.3 As a closer look at popular circulating images of Lincoln shows, his consistent denigrations of his own appearance through modest self-presentation helped to shape satiric representations of him. By preemptively accentuating his physical irregularities, Lincoln to a certain extent guided satirists’ depictions, thus mitigating the damage they could do.

  Lincoln was unusually tall at six feet four and had limbs out of proportion with the rest of his body; long, bony fingers; huge feet; long ears; a sunken chest; and a gaunt, elongated face. One biographer describes him, “It was less his height that merited special comment . . . than the extraordinary proportions of his long legs, large feet, and, most remarkable of all, his arms. When he stood straight, with his arms at his sides, and his shoulders in their customary droop, the tips of his fingers reached nearly three inches lower than on the normal adult frame.”4 In short, Lincoln’s exaggerated physical features meant that his actual appearance was already in a sense a caricature.

  The 1864 burlesque campaign biography The Only Authentic Life of Abraham Lincoln, Alias “Old Abe” attempts to play on these irregularities. The pamphlet begins its narration of Lincoln’s life by announcing that he “was six feet two inches in height” at birth and that “Mr. Lincoln stands six feet twelve in his socks, which he changes once every ten days. His anatomy is composed mostly of bones, and when walking he resembles the offspring of a happy marriage between a derrick and a windmill. . . . His head is shaped something like a ruta-bago, and his complexion is that of a Saratoga trunk. . . . The glove-makers have not yet had time to construct gloves that will fit him.” The description is accompanied by the picture “Lincoln Out Walking,” which though whimsical in its exaggeration of Lincoln’s prodigious height—with trees at his waist and clouds at his shoulder to provide scale—is not particularly pejorative (fig. 5.1).5 The verbal description, of course, cruelly mocks the then-president’s physical appearance.

  This had been a common tactic during the 1860 campaign as well, as is evidenced by the lyrics of two campaign songs in The Democratic Campaign Songster. For example, “O! Poor Abraham!” features the chorus, “O! poor Abraham! your chances are too small, / You’ll never be a President—you’re too homely, and too tall.” The song assumes, incorrectly, that Lincoln’s “homely” physical appearance would turn off voters and that his looks made him somehow unfit for office. Another song, “Lincoln’s Picture,” features six verses cataloguing positive images of Lincoln then in circulation, introduced by the refrain “Tell us.” The song calls attention to the broader distribution of images of candidates, from photographs to drawings to caricatures, than had been seen in any previous campaign. (The Democratic Campaign Songster, for instance, features an illustration of Democratic nominee Stephen A. Douglas on its cover.) For the first time, voters who had never seen the candidates in person could look at a proliferation of their caricatured images in addition to the extant traditions of illustrated campaign newspapers and separately published prints.

  The sixth verse of “Lincoln’s Picture” proceeds,

  Tell us he resembles Jackson,

  Save he wears a larger boot,

  And is broader ’cross the shoulders,

  And is taller by a foot.

  Lincoln’s height here is not pilloried, and the rest of the song highlights public perceptions of Lincoln’s laboring past, “Seven cords or more per day”; his temperance, “Never drank a glass of whisky”; and his piety, “How each night he seeks his closet, / There, alone, to kneel and pray.” But all these ostensible compliments serve merely to set up the last verse, which operates as a sort of punch line to the song.

  Any lie you tell we’ll swallow,—

  Swallow any kind of mixture,

  But, O! don’t, we beg and pray you,—

  Don’t, for God’s sake, show his picture.6

  After identifying previous praise of Lincoln as a “lie” or “mixture,” the song feigns fear at being shown Lincoln’s likeness because of the singer’s horror at Lincoln’s homeliness. In the logic of the song, then, exaggerations of the Republican candidate’s personal virtues and “lie(s)” about his political acumen and policy are easier to “swallow” than his haggard visage. But, in caricature anyway, Lincoln’s picture becomes less hideous as it visually identifies him with working people and against more refined, or dandified, politicians. This could be what Walt Whitman meant when he described Lincoln’s face as “so awful ugly it becomes beautiful.”7 Ironically, the ditty’s mock fear, thus, may have been more appropriate than its author had imagined.

  Lincoln and his inner circle were as aware of the emerging power of portraiture as they were that he was not an attractive man. His campaign certainly was invested in the emergent power of images. Mary Todd Lincoln allegedly worried about a poor, pre-1860 convention image of Lincoln juxtaposed alongside the portraits of other candidates in a New York illustrated paper, complaining that the picture �
�couldn’t have been made more dismal. Half seriously I said to him: ‘A look at that face is enough to put an end to hope.’” Her concerns demonstrate the popular power of illustrated news in terms of electability. Lincoln’s backers flooded the nominating convention in Chicago with “hastily printed woodcuts,” and Norman B. Judd, a key member of Lincoln’s Illinois team, wrote Lincoln in June asking for a profile picture to send to a Philadelphia medal maker: “Every little [bit] helps, and I am coming to believe, that likenesses broad cast, are excellent means of electioneering.”8 Lincoln himself is said to have thanked famous photographer Mathew Brady for the portrait he took during his February 1860 visit to New York for the Cooper Union speech, saying later, “Brady and the Cooper Institute made me President.”9 This image proliferated throughout the campaign season and, along with caricatures, was the chief way in which voters came to visualize Lincoln.

  But not all circulating images of Lincoln were as careful or kind. Telegraph operator Albert B. Chandler told Harper’s that Lincoln told him the following story:

  [S]oon after I was nominated for President at Chicago, I went up one day, and one of the first really distinguished men who waited on me was a picture-man, who politely asked me to favor him with a sitting for my picture. Now at that time there were less photographs of my phiz than at present, and I went straightway with the artist, who detained me but a moment, and took one of the most really life-like pictures I have ever seen of myself. . . . But this stiff, ungovernable hair of mine was all sticking every way, very much as it is now, I suppose; and so the operation of his camera was but “holding the mirror up to nature.” I departed, and did not think of pictures again until that evening I was gratified and flattered at the cry of newsboys who had gone to vending the pictures: “Ere’s yer last picter of Old Abe! He’ll look better when he gets his hair combed!”10

  Lincoln’s retelling of a joke that mildly denigrates his unkempt hair—recalling his response to an 1857 bust portrait, which he said “presented me in all [my hair’s] fright”—reveals his cognizance of the proliferation of images during the presidential campaign and of the fact that negative images would serve as humorous fodder for his detractors. Lincoln sat for at least eight portrait artists during the 1860 campaign.11

  Lincoln found a way to parlay his bad looks into political capital through self-effacing mockery. For example, a two-page biography he wrote and sent to friend and political booster J. W. Fell in 1860 ended with a self-mocking physical description: “If any personal description of me is thought desirable, it may be said, I am, in height, six feet, four inches, nearly; lean in flesh, weighing, on an average, one hundred and eighty pounds; dark complexion, with coarse black hair, and grey eyes—no other marks or brands recollected.”12 In a personal sketch intended, undoubtedly, for political use, Lincoln closed with a joke in which he described himself as a farmer would cattle. Lincoln’s self-description—with his “dark complexion,” “coarse black hair,” and his reference to brands—also ironically echoes the rhetoric of want ads for fugitive slaves. In this sense, Lincoln had already sufficiently trod the territory embarked upon by campaign materials burlesquing his appearance and in doing so to a certain extent minimized their bite.

  In addition to Lincoln’s verbal mockery of his own appearance, he also often appeared unkempt in public—with ill-fitting clothes and hair askew. His pants were “invariably too short, sometimes verging on the ludicrous.” He always wore a faded brown hat, and during his debates with Douglas, he eschewed vest and waistcoat. Lincoln’s friend Russell H. Conwell recalled seeing Lincoln at the Cooper Union speech and described his “ill-fitting new suit . . . his old hat . . . his protruding wrists . . . the disheveled hair . . . his long legs, his bony face . . . the one-sided necktie.” Even after being elected president, he wore a dirty duster on his ambles around the streets of Washington.13 So, again, when the author of The Only Authentic Life claimed tongue-in-cheek of Lincoln, “In his habits he is by no means foppish, though he brushes his hair sometimes, and is said to wash,” the joke’s ironic rendering of a low standard of personal hygiene and appearance by which to judge Lincoln merely rehashed Lincoln’s own personal self-presentation.14

  Because Lincoln was an ambitious, self-aware politician long before garnering the 1860 Republican nomination, he must have given at least some thought to his image. It could be that politicians were simply not as “image-conscious” as modern politicians.15 But such an explanation does not account for the fact that so many contemporary observers—both friends and enemies—felt it necessary to comment on Lincoln’s pronounced uncouthness and disheveled appearance in public, or for the fact that as the Chicago newsboy joke shows, Lincoln was aware both of his public appearance and of others’ perceptions of it. Lincoln, thus, may have been more image-conscious than some historians imagine, as he seems to have played up his naturally awkward appearance. For example, when Lincoln wore his famous tall top hat—which in the mid-nineteenth century was a casual instead of a formal gesture—it further elongated his six-feet-four frame. Additionally, when he sought to make a point during a speech, he would reportedly “crouch down [on the lecture platform] and then jump off the ground for emphasis.” In the early age of visual media, when political caricature predominated over photographs, he may have acted this way as a “gimmick” or a public relations stunt. Noah Brooks recalled these odd public-speaking mannerisms similarly: “As he reasoned with his audience, he bent his bony form over the railing of the platform, stooping lower and lower as he pursued his argument, until, having reached his point, he clinched it . . . and then suddenly sprang upright, reminding one of the springing open of a jack-knife blade.”16 An 1860 description of Lincoln’s oratorical decorum certainly implied intentionality in such antics, suggesting that his experience had taught him well the art of altering his stage persona to achieve different effects: “His manner before a popular assembly is as he pleases to make it, being either superlatively ludicrous, or very impressive. He employs but little gesticulation, but when he desires to make a point, produces a shrug of his shoulders, an elevation of his eyebrows, a depression of his mouth, and a general malformation of countenance so comically awkward that it never fails to ‘bring down the house.’”17 According to this and other accounts, Lincoln scored personality as well as political points by making fun of himself. His strategic employment of “comically awkward” stances was consistent with Lincoln’s persistent use of self-satire for political ends.

  The political capital Lincoln manufactured out of his gangly stature came, at least in part, through the medium of political cartoons. A contemporary of Lincoln claimed, “The peculiar characteristics of Mr. Lincoln made him a splendid subject. . . . His long arms and legs, his leanness of flesh, his big nose and mouth, and his disheveled hair were distinguishing features for the exaggerations of the cartoonists,” who “labored to make him appear ridiculous.” Harold Holzer offers Lincoln’s homeliness as itself a reason for the plethora of caricatures of him: “We should acknowledge, just as Lincoln often did, that he possessed a face and a frame that seemed crafted for caricature; it hardly required exaggeration. . . . The homely, unusually tall Lincoln looked rather funny just as he was. How could the cartoonists have resisted such a figure? . . . Some cartoons may have attempted to make Lincoln look ridiculous, but he entered the national stage looking rather ridiculous to begin with.”18 If Lincoln “looked rather funny just as he was,” there was not much that caricaturists could do to further exaggerate those features. The word “caricature” is derived from the Latin root carricare, which means “loaded statement” or “exaggerate.” This is what caricature does: it distorts the normal proportions of the body, exaggerates facial expressions to telegraph emotion, and employs visual symbols as ideographical shorthand.19 This is not, of course, to imply that Lincoln somehow willed himself to be extremely tall, thin, and homely. Rather, since his physical appearance—both his natural attributes and his tousled self-presentation—was in a sense alread
y an exaggeration, in artists’ caricatures he may have actually looked less ridiculous because less physically altered by artists than the other subjects caricatured alongside him.

  Though there is little hard evidence detailing Lincoln’s reactions to or attitudes about political cartoons, we can engage in educated speculation about Lincoln’s cognizance of and relationship to caricature.20 To wit, Lincoln seemed to understand the satiric techniques of political cartoons, as he himself had used such methods, most notably in his 1852 speech mocking Franklin Pierce by drawing a cartoon with words. He began by recalling humorous, self-satirizing anecdotes of Illinois militia parades, including one with “our old friend Gordon Abrams, with a pine wood sword, about nine feet long, and a paste-board cocked hat, from front to rear about the length of an ox yoke, and very much the shape of one turned bottom upwards; and with spurs having rowels as large as the bottom of a teacup, and shanks a foot and a half long. . . . Among the rules and regulations, no man is to wear more than five pounds of cod-fish for epaulets, or more than thirty yards of bologna sausages for a sash.” Lincoln then applied a similar burlesque to Pierce that Lincoln could not help but introduce with mocking mimicry of Stephen A. Douglas.