Caldecott Monday: Abraham Lincoln

[osprey_archer]

The 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 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.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Aw. I like it. Something else the nineteenth century and I can agree on!

Depression's not actually more rational than relentless positive thinking, but I can see the appeal of a president who is just really sad about how messed up everything is right now, in 1859 or whenever. Because it is! It's a disaster! Deep sadness is an appropriate response sometimes!

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

The more I study history, the more I notice how weird and complicated the past is - and how impossible it usually is to draw a smooth line of progress from then to now. I don't think Americans today would enthusiastically embrace a confirmed melancholic as a presidential candidate, which clearly wasn't a problem in 1860, and that being the case, in what sense can we believe that we're more accepting of mental health problems today than they were then?

Or at least specifically of depression. Nineteenth-century Americans understood mental health problems so differently than we do that I don't think we can meaningfully discuss their attitude to everything we glom together under that label; we'd have to separate it out into specific problems.

This is also something that struck me when I was reading the biography of Emily Dickinson: not just her family but the whole town seems to have been accepting and protective of their resident eccentric. I think today there would be much more pressure for her to grapple with those anxiety issues already and stop hiding in the garret.

But, on the other hand, I think the nineteenth-century view of these things is predicated on the fact that depression and anxiety weren't treatable in the same way they are now, and because they're treatable (more or less), there's been a cultural shift to look at them as problems to be fixed rather than a fixed part of the personality: "Oh, Abe/Emily is just like that."

But the existence of treatment is hardly a bad thing. I guess the question is, is it possible to look at depression and anxiety as fixable problems, and also to accept that sometimes they may not be fixed and that's not necessarily the end of the world? Is that too many opposites to hold in the human mind at once?

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

This is a good comment, and I don't know. I try to avoid saying too much about mental health issues because I am very much not an expert, but. . .

is it possible to look at depression and anxiety as fixable problems, and also to accept that sometimes they may not be fixed and that's not necessarily the end of the world?

I think it's possible and important, and that these two ideas are not actually opposites. People are different from one another. I don't really know how not to be trite about this. :/

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Opposites might not be the right word. I suppose the two ideas are in tension with each other? Or are often seen as being in tension with each other; I guess maybe they don't have to be.

I've been thinking about this with regard to my two friends who are roommates who I posted about a week ago, but my thoughts aren't very clear and probably I shouldn't blather on about it in an unlocked entry anyway.

But yeah, people are different from one another. I don't think that's trite at all. Actually I'm a bit annoyed that our culture has turned "everyone is special" into one of those statements so overused that it's practically meaningless; everyone really is different and I think we all benefit when we try to truly imagine the implications of that fact.

[c-maxx.livejournal.com]

And life often was hard, and sad, in many ways back then.

We live in a pretty fortuitous, if far from perfect, world these days...

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that too. Looking at child mortality rates - and the not infrequent times that a disease would sweep through a family and carry off all the children at once - I'm sure that melancholic despair seemed like a pretty reasonable reaction to the world.