Word: lincoln
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Died. Ray Stannard Baker, 76, author, essayist and journalist, friend and official biographer of Woodrow Wilson and one of the last of the "muckrakers" (others: Lincoln Steffens, Ida M. Tarbell), who flourished on the late great McClure's magazine at the turn of the century; in Amherst, Mass. Under the pen name of David Grayson, Baker wrote nine popular volumes of philosophical essays about nature and people (Adventures in Contentment, The Countryman's Year); under his own name 27 volumes about political, social and economic problems and biography. His greatest and Pulitzer Prize work: Woodrow Wilson-Life...
...match the mountains and the sea" was no match for women. Historians have made great matter of Abraham Lincoln's unhappy marriage to Mary Todd; romantics have told and retold his tragic connection with Ann Rutledge; and now Novelist Carruthers has expanded the few known facts about Lincoln's other big (170 Ibs.) moment, Mary Owens...
...doing so, she has wound fact into such a mess of taffy prose that there is no tasting the original flavor of the personalities. Luckily for the reader who wants to know what really happened, Historian R. Gerald McMurtry, who is an instructor and director of Lincolniana at Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, Tenn., retells the unadorned facts in an "appendix" which is almost as long as and far better than Olive Carruthers' novel. It reprints a letter Lincoln wrote in 1838, which tells his version of the story...
Despite this light disclaimer (written on April Fool's Day), Lincoln appears to have begun the affair at a full, rolling boil-declaring that he would "catch, tie and marry" the lady. She was 30, he 29 and a member of the Illinois legislature. For about 18 months he continued at a simmer-traipsing over to see her at her sister's house, begging her to "say something that will please me, for really I have not been pleased since I left you." But he ended the affair tepidly with a negative proposal...
Mary sent this clerkly lover packing, married Jesse Vineyard, also a lawyer, and bore five children. It was not until after Lincoln's death, in pungent letters to W. H. Herndon, an early Lincoln biographer, that she told why she had refused Lincoln. Excerpts: "Really you catechise me in true lawyer style. . . . From his own showing, you perceive that his heart and hand were at my disposal; and I suppose that my feelings were not sufficiently enlisted to have the matter consummated. . . . I thought Mr. Lincoln was deficient in those little links which make up the chain of woman...