The National Joker

by Thompson, Todd Nathan;

  Lincoln’s legendarily self-deprecating performances of modesty were key to his satire (and to other early and antebellum satirist-statesmen’s). Other scholars have limned a tradition of modest satire, which features humble, “plain, common-sense” characters who act as rustic “counsels of prudence” through “horse sense” and folk wisdom. But the “horse-sense character and the fool character, who were to be stand-bys for humorists for a long time,” often were embodied in the same persona.10 Lincoln, for one, following in this line of humorous rustics, situated himself as comically fallible but, nonetheless, wise.

  This inclusion of the satirist as among the targets of his or her own laughter is integral to the efficacy of modest satire in its expression of what one satire critic has labeled the “satirist-satirized,” which arises when “the satirist becomes self-conscious about his [or her] own activity.” That is, when the satirist realizes how problematic is his or her “own place as a judging and observing subject, he [or she] begins to reckon himself [or herself] into the universal condemnation which only awaited his [or her] own presence to be complete.”11 The satirist’s inclusion of him- or herself as a target is a necessary ingredient of any broader societal critique. Of course, the danger of “universal condemnation” is that assailing everything risks conservatism and inactivity, for there is no particular change that such a satire’s readership could undertake or even conceive; “universal condemnation,” thus, paradoxically treats political critiques as of merely literary concern.12 Lincoln was “self-conscious about his own activity” but aimed at more specific targets than “universal condemnation”; his satiric sallies were modest and self-conscious but precisely aimed.

  For literary critic Kenneth Burke, “true irony” does not claim superiority over the target it seeks to represent through reduction. Just as important, the satirist satirized’s self-awareness also allows for the “imagination” of alternatives or “some measure of development beyond folly” that counters the paralysis of totalizing critique.13 Such emphasis on the satirist’s intentionality in articulating self-satire runs counter to poststructuralist-inspired claims that satirists lose control of their irony and accidentally permit their attacks either to boomerang back upon them or to expand outward infinitely into “universal condemnation.” Rather, Lincoln—as nineteenth-century America’s consummate satirist-statesman satirized—engaged in self-satire strategically to sanction his critiques of other figures as well as to mitigate others’ denunciations of him.

  Elsewhere, Burke muses, “If I am to write a satire, when all the returns are in it mustn’t turn out that I am holier than thou. I must be among my victims.”14 This self-awareness of his own complicity in the situation he hopes to satirize grounds his satiric critique and defends him from charges of hypocrisy. Such inclusion of oneself in one’s satiric reproof disarms the audience and sanctions the critique as thorough and honest. For example, when in an 1848 speech Lincoln, serving his only term in the U.S. House of Representatives, mocked his own war record (as a captain in the Black Hawk War) and then attacked that of Senator Lewis Cass (Democratic presidential candidate and War of 1812 hero), Lincoln’s prefatory self-satire displayed to his audience his self-effacing good humor and preempted counterattacks on him, as he had already occupied that ground himself. Much of Lincoln’s satire of others begins in self-satire; if he is attacking anyone, it seems, it is himself. But these self-directed attacks almost always either sought larger game—secondary targets who were subsequently demeaned by comparison—or else inoculated Lincoln against similar criticisms by his opponents, thus defusing their attacks on him while presenting himself as genial. Lincoln’s good humor also derived, in part, from his consciously performed rusticity. In repurposing jokes or stories, most people will adapt their language and referents to fit the level of sophistication of their varying audiences, but Lincoln did not do this. In his Kentucky, Indiana, and early Illinois days, Lincoln swapped his stories with rugged western folk; when he turned politician and resorted to his humorous anecdotes in front of more sophisticated auditors in Springfield, Chicago, and Washington, he rarely changed his style, he kept his western accent, and he sometimes played to stereotypes that easterners had of him as a frontier rustic. Though the Democratic Chicago Times may have complained of the difficulty in rendering Lincoln’s speeches “in intelligible English” for print, P. M. Zall, who has collected myriad Lincoln jokes and witticisms, points out, “To many readers that was exactly the way he was supposed to talk. He sounded just like the westerners they knew from stories in their newspapers and magazines.” Such performance required not only a genuine common touch but also sophisticated media savvy. Like the southwestern humorists who were his contemporaries, he was able to stand both inside and outside of small-town western life, to laugh at it while being part of it. Lincoln was, thus, in one sense, akin to a “crackerbox philosopher,” a classic American comic figure who, according to one scholar, is “a symbol of a class-conscious people, a personification of the folk” and through “wise saws and rustic anecdotes and deliberately cruel innuendo . . . interprets the provincial eccentricities of American life and the petty corruptions of American political intrigue.”15 Lincoln consciously performed this tradition while co-opting its humor for political ends.

  Lincoln, thus, spoke satirically in multiple registers simultaneously. In satire, more than in any other mode or genre, the (sometimes multiple) masks that a satirist dons create a dialogue not only between different vocabularies and characters in the text but also between the satirist and his or her speaker(s), as well as between satiric representations and their real-world referents. Such layered dialogues collide “official” and “unofficial” languages in complicated interrelationships of ridicule and self-ridicule.16 Lincoln, for instance, famously told comic stories in the unpretentious idiom “of the farm and frontier,” but he could also, as one critic puts it, “speak and write in the most beautiful, clear, and direct prose ever known to American politics.” Helen Nicolay went so far as to say, “Lincoln knew no foreign tongue, yet he spoke two languages—the vernacular, and a strong, majestic prose, akin to poetry.” Such verbal dialogism allowed Lincoln to engage in satiric leveling, demeaning his opponents to his own, artificially diminished level. At the same time, attempts to use satiric leveling against Lincoln often fell flat simply because Lincoln had already modestly demeaned himself in terms not too different from those used by his attackers.17

  Hence, as The National Joker argues, Lincoln was adept not only at using satire but also at deflecting it. Lincoln time and time again turned negative assumptions or depictions of him—as ugly, cowardly, jocular, inexperienced—into positive traits of the “self-made man” while demeaning the traditionally positively charged political symbols of heroism, greatness, and prestige. He defined himself against such traits through his humorous manner, his tousled physical presentation, his self-deprecating modesty, and his (often sarcastic) deference. Mapping these qualities to the affective power of the American Dream, Lincoln in his political self-fashioning shifted his humor to a sign of shrewdness and compassion, his awkward lankiness to a metaphor for his stature as a leader, his modesty to greatness, and his laboring past to a symbol for his political pragmatism.

  As a politician, Lincoln used these same strategies of redefinition and deflection to shape a symbolic self presented to the populace; his “public image” was, thus, defined by his versions of others’ characterizations of him. In the American context, self-fashioning is inextricably linked to the reigning American myth of the self-made man. Lincoln used modest self-satire—and an embrace of others’ satires of him—to highlight the very fact of his self-making by foregrounding both his current position and his humble origins. Even southerners like Harris came to praise Lincoln’s humor as “essentially the humor of the common people, the people who have made the Republic what it is, and who will continue to mold its destiny,” demonstrating the power of Lincoln’s symbiotic performances of humor and of the self-
made man.18 Through performed modesty, folksy stories, and self-satirizing raillery of himself and his political opponents, Lincoln exerted some control over his own image while assailing those of his enemies. The symbiotic relationship of Lincoln’s satiric self-fashioning, his satiric attacks on other politicians, and satiric treatments of him is the subject of the chapters of The National Joker that follow.

  Of course, the sheer volume of scholarship on Lincoln is already intimidatingly immense, and in forwarding this new intervention into Lincoln studies, I stand atop many broad and prominent shoulders. Scholars like Benjamin P. Thomas, Robert Bray, and Zall have laid important groundwork for this study in their characterizations of Lincoln’s comic sensibility.19 Several biographies of Lincoln have also noted the centrality of the comic to Lincoln’s thinking and writing and his use of satire for political ends.20 Historians, such as Harold Holzer, Gary L. Bunker, Gabor S. Boritt, Mark E. Neely, and Robert S. Harper, have carefully studied representations of Lincoln in the popular press.21 But none of these scholars considers precisely how Lincoln took advantage of political cartoons and other media to help proliferate a particular Lincoln image—studiously built by self-fashioning and self-presentation—through, not in spite of, satires and caricatures of him. And none considers the reciprocal relationship between Lincoln’s use of satire to his treatment in satires. This is the project of The National Joker.

  CHAPTER 1

  “This Reminds Me of a Little Joke”: From Humor to Satire

  You speak of Lincoln stories. I don’t think that is a correct phrase. I don’t make the stories mine by telling them. I am only a retail dealer.

  —Abraham Lincoln to Noah Brooks

  An estimated 60 percent of the stories assigned to Lincoln in his lifetime can be traced to previously printed sources, such as humorists like Joseph Glover Baldwin, Artemus Ward, Petroleum V. Nasby, and Charles Halpine; old joke books like Joe Miller’s Jest Book; and tidbits from newspaper columns or periodicals like Harper’s Monthly.1 Contrary to his claim to Noah Brooks, though, Lincoln did in a sense “make the stories” his when he retold them, for in applying generalized jests to specific political situations, he transmuted these jokes, anecdotes, and fables from humor to satire. Throughout his career, Lincoln put his most common source materials—namely, Aesop’s fables, jokes circulating in the popular press, southwestern humorists, and, later, northern dialect humorists—to satirical use. In a reciprocal relationship with the popular press, Lincoln not only gleaned source material for his satire but also saw his stories—real and imagined—circulated widely, thereby recursively augmenting his reputation as the “National Joker.”

  Lincoln and his compatriots certainly viewed the stories and jokes he repurposed as political and satiric. In Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper in 1863, Secretary of State William H. Seward, for example, praised the practical usefulness of Lincoln’s stories: “Mr. Lincoln never tells a joke for a joke’s sake, they are like the parables of old—lessons of wisdom.” And after Lincoln’s death, eulogists came to appreciate Lincoln’s method of thinking and arguing through comic narratives, though many had disparaged the habit from the outset of his presidency. Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, celebrated Lincoln’s ability to utter thoughts “so disguised as pleasantries that it is certain they had no reputation at first but as jests; and only later, by the very acceptance and adoption they find in the mouths of millions, turn out to be the wisdom of the hour.” New York Times editor Henry J. Raymond, who wrote an 1865 biography of the president, Life and Public Services of Abraham Lincoln, concurred: “Much has been said of Mr. Lincoln’s habit of telling stories, and it could scarcely be exaggerated. He had a keen sense of the humorous and the ludicrous, and relished jokes and anecdotes for the amusement they afforded him. But story-telling was with him rather a mode of stating and illustrating facts and opinions, than anything else. . . . Mr. Lincoln often gave clearness and force to his ideas by pertinent anecdotes and illustrations drawn from daily life.” Even Lincoln himself pointed to the political advantages of his anecdotes. Silas W. Burt recalled Lincoln as saying, “It is not the story itself, but its purpose, or effect, that interests me.” Railroad president and New York Republican leader Chauncey M. Depew remembered Lincoln telling him, “in reference to some sharp criticisms which had been made upon his storytelling . . . ‘I have found in the course of a long experience that common people’—and repeating it ‘—common people, take them as they run, are more easily influenced and informed through the medium of a broad illustration than in any other way, and as to what the hypercritical few may think, I don’t care.’” A key word here is “informed,” revealing as it does Lincoln’s view of satiric stories as political education for nonspecialists. As Nathaniel Grigsby told Lincoln’s law partner William H. Herndon in an 1865 interview, “Mr Lincoln was figurative in his Speeches—talks & conversations. He argued much from Analogy and Explained things hard for us to understand by stories—maxims—tales and figures. He would almost always point his lesson or idea by some story that was plain and near as that we might instantly see the force & bearing of what he said.” In this way, Lincoln’s use of figurative language served as political education—or, as one Lincoln scholar describes it, “the gradual education of public opinion.”2 Lincoln’s justification for his storytelling and his contemporaries’ assessments of it highlight its political goals: to convince and instruct through indirect illustration or to gently reprove others’ actions, all while molding a homey public image.

  Formally, jokes, on the one hand, usually operate through delineations of general, recognizable types or stereotypes (e.g., the country minister, the rube, the racialized stereotype, the Yankee sharper, etc.). Satire, on the other hand, identifies and attacks a much more specific satiric referent, usually a particular public person or policy. Lincoln’s retelling of jokes, fables, and humorous anecdotes in political settings worked by replacing general types with specific referents, or he let his audience make these replacements, which allowed him to remain genial, seemingly above the fray of public attack by speaking indirectly and allegorically. Such indirection is key to satire, which “proceeds by methods which are manifestly not those of direct, literal communication (and thus involves what has been variously described as obliquity, indirection, irony, invention, distortion, etc., etc.).”3 At the same time, telling these anecdotes displayed the common touch that ingratiated him with constituents.

  Just as important, in using a story, joke, or parable to describe a specific situation or moment, Lincoln, in effect, redefined that situation or moment in his own terms, which gave him a distinct polemical advantage. All satires engage in a referential act, though “the degree and kind of referentiality” differ from one satire to the next. The historical particulars to which a satire refers are “neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction.” That is, in creating a satire, the satirist also constructs his or her own, alternate version of events, thus displacing or competing with another’s history. As one satire theorist explains, “To assume that a satirist or a historian is simply referring to ‘truth’ or ‘history,’” then, “is to be persuaded by that writer’s version of events.”4 When Lincoln used an illustrative joke or story to talk about politics, he changed not only the story through reapplication but also the situation it had been leveraged to describe. Or, to speak in terms of metaphor, he slyly shifted both vehicle and tenor. When Lincoln’s auditors acquiesced to the logic of his joke and when they recognized its metaphorical application, they were in a sense agreeing to his definitions of the situation under discussion. They, thus, came, usually unconsciously, to accept his version of history. This is how “Lincoln stories” moved out of the realm of recycled humor of folksy anecdotes and into the realm of polemical satire.

  “Aesop of the New World”: The Politics of Lincoln’s Jokes and Fables

  Biographers and historians who trace Lincoln’s early literary influences emphasize his love of Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Aesop’s fables. S
everal authors connect Lincoln’s facility as a communicator to the figurative language that permeates his favorite books (i.e., the King James Bible, fables, Shakespeare’s plays, and Pilgrim’s Progress). Lincoln drew from his favorite sources not just metaphorical indirectness but also comic language and timing. He loved Burns’s “satiric sharpness, his identification with the common man” and drew from Burns’s poem “Tam O’Shanter,” which Lincoln had memorized and often recited aloud in his storytelling.5 Among other things, Burns taught Lincoln to use dialect comically but without coming off as pandering or insulting to the common people he lovingly mimicked.

  If Burns greatly influenced the style of Lincoln’s storytelling, Aesop’s fables provided him with a wealth of source material. These fables were one of Lincoln’s “lifelong delights” and the likely reason for his penchant for “explication by anecdote.” Lincoln consistently applied the lessons of allegory and “moral analogy,” which he had learned and cherished from Aesop’s fables, for political purposes.6 The press recognized this connection, and in 1863 Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper dubbed the president “the Aesop of the new world.” Similarly, the 1863 illustrated pamphlet Ye Book of Copperheads features an image of Lincoln as a file, which a sympathizer to the Southern cause (pictured as a snake coiled around the file) attempts unsuccessfully to bite (fig. 1.1). Lincoln says, “By the way this puts me in mind of a little Story in Esop’s Fables.”7 The image itself refers to the Aesop fable “The Serpent and the File,” in which a serpent tries to sink its fangs into a file that pricks the snake’s skin, but, of course, the snake can do no harm to the insensible object. This image, thus, associates Lincoln’s love for stories with both wisdom and toughness.