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Caldecott Monday: Abraham Lincoln
Jun. 20th, 2016 10:57 amThe 1940 Caldecott winner, Ingri and Edgar d'Aulaire's Abraham Lincoln, is... well, it's not the d'Aulaire book I would have picked for a Caldecott winner. I would have gone with their beautiful illustrated book of Greek myths.
I don't have a lot of thoughts about this book itself, but fortuitously just yesterday![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rachelmanija sent me a link to an article about Lincoln's depression. One of the things the article mentions is that until the 1940s, historians routinely wrote about Lincoln's melancholy, which indeed the D'Aulaire book (published in 1939) does mention, although perhaps because it's a book for children it dwells far more on his puckish, prankish side.
But during and after the 1940s, historians wrote much less about Lincoln's melancholy - because, the article suggests, deep sadness no longer fit with their idea of a great leader. This was apparently not a problem in the nineteenth century, when it seems everyone looked at Lincoln brooding away in a corner, lines of sadness carved deeply in his face, and thought, "He's so sad, that's the mark of a great leader, we should totally elect him."
I'm having trouble imagining someone today enthusiastically endorsing a candidate not despite but because he's soooooo depressed.
Of course there were lots of other reasons to elect Lincoln, it's not like they were electing him on the basis of melancholia alone, but it's interesting that it was an asset. Not only was no one trying to hide it, but in fact everyone happily traded stories about Lincoln's dolefulness. It was part of his mystique, just like his folksy down-home stories.
I've noticed before a strain of fatalism in nineteenth-century American thought. It seems to me that a lot of people suspected deep down, even as they tried to reject their Calvinist upbringings, that the world is inevitably a vail of tears and human beings are indeed hopelessly cumbered in sin. Maybe some of the more ludicrous "and in the utopian future, the sea will taste like lemonade!" excesses of nineteenth-century optimism are a desperate attempt to escape the sense that reform is futile.
And Lincoln and his melancholy sort of square this circle: he sees the world arrayed in all the Calvinist darkness anyone could want, but he still promulgates the Emancipation Proclamation and in general tries to make the world a better place.
I don't have a lot of thoughts about this book itself, but fortuitously just yesterday
rachelmanija sent me a link to an article about Lincoln's depression. One of the things the article mentions is that until the 1940s, historians routinely wrote about Lincoln's melancholy, which indeed the D'Aulaire book (published in 1939) does mention, although perhaps because it's a book for children it dwells far more on his puckish, prankish side. But during and after the 1940s, historians wrote much less about Lincoln's melancholy - because, the article suggests, deep sadness no longer fit with their idea of a great leader. This was apparently not a problem in the nineteenth century, when it seems everyone looked at Lincoln brooding away in a corner, lines of sadness carved deeply in his face, and thought, "He's so sad, that's the mark of a great leader, we should totally elect him."
I'm having trouble imagining someone today enthusiastically endorsing a candidate not despite but because he's soooooo depressed.
Of course there were lots of other reasons to elect Lincoln, it's not like they were electing him on the basis of melancholia alone, but it's interesting that it was an asset. Not only was no one trying to hide it, but in fact everyone happily traded stories about Lincoln's dolefulness. It was part of his mystique, just like his folksy down-home stories.
I've noticed before a strain of fatalism in nineteenth-century American thought. It seems to me that a lot of people suspected deep down, even as they tried to reject their Calvinist upbringings, that the world is inevitably a vail of tears and human beings are indeed hopelessly cumbered in sin. Maybe some of the more ludicrous "and in the utopian future, the sea will taste like lemonade!" excesses of nineteenth-century optimism are a desperate attempt to escape the sense that reform is futile.
And Lincoln and his melancholy sort of square this circle: he sees the world arrayed in all the Calvinist darkness anyone could want, but he still promulgates the Emancipation Proclamation and in general tries to make the world a better place.
