Word: herndon
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...William Herndon's life of Lincoln is one of the great neglected books of U. S. literature. It belongs with the best biographies by virtue of its accuracy, its almost unique tone that manages to combine veneration for a great man with shrewd understanding of a human being. But in addition to these qualities, Herndon's Lincoln is a document as essentially American as Whitman's poems, not only in its grasp of the tough frontier world in which Lincoln grew, but in its belief in U. S. democracy, its recognition of democracy's weaknesses...
...like Leaves of Grass, Herndon's Life of Lincoln has had a bitter literary history. Herndon, who had been Lincoln's law partner in Springfield for 22 years, began collecting his biographical material immediately after Lincoln's assassination. As monumental books on Lincoln appeared-Lamon & Black's outspoken Life, the ten-volume study of Nicolay & John Hay-Herndon read them eagerly but shook his head because the figures they presented were not the Lincoln he knew...
Lincoln was a man, Herndon wrote again & again, a great man, a noble man, but also a human being, ambitious, shrewd, successful, passionate, with a man's share of disappointments, of humiliations, of unhappy love affairs, and with more than most men's share of melancholy. He was a foolish father, a browbeaten husband, at once sentimental and hard; a secretive man with his human share of stupidities and perplexities, his career marked, like all men's, with its broken friendships and its grotesque blunders. The Lincoln Herndon knew was a thoughtful, dry man whose wife...
...Arkansas peonage charges, the Scottsboro trials, the Herndon case, the Tampa trials...
This week Mr. Justice Roberts became something of a communist hero too when, siding again with the Court's liberal wing in another 5-to-4 decision for social justice, he read an opinion setting aside Angelo Herndon's conviction. Finding no evidence that the young Negro had attempted to incite an insurrection, he declared Georgia's application of its musty law a flat violation of the "guarantees of liberty embodied in the 14th Amendment...