Word: lincolnisms
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Thus the Illinois State Register (Springfield), taking Lincoln to task for his "assumed clownishness," charged that his "buffoonery convinces the mind of no man, and is utterly lost on the majority of his audience." The Chicago Times, one of his angriest foes, sneered that "he cannot speak five grammatical sentences in succession." One of Lincoln's greatest speeches, the second inaugural ("with malice toward none") was dismissed by the Times as "slipshod" and "puerile...
...Lincoln bore not only the papers' contumely but their inaccuracy. From his entry into politics up to his nomination for President in 1860, newspapers in his own Illinois and across the country could -not seem to spell his first name right. They called him "Abram" Lincoln-and, in the very story of his nomination, so did the New York Times. (Soon afterward, papers began running instructions on how to pronounce "Lincoln.") The Chicago Times repeatedly misquoted him in its report of the Gettysburg address ("Four score and ten years ago . . ."). To its credit, the New York Times...
Judgment Day. But the press also gave Lincoln staunch supporters, e.g., the Chicago Tribune and the Cincinnati Daily Commercial, and some memorable reporting, such as the Commercial's description of the elation in Chicago at Lincoln's first nomination: "The city was wild with delight. The 'Old Abe' men formed processions and bore rails through the streets. Torrents of liquor were poured down the hoarse throats of the multitude. A hundred guns were fired from the top of Tremont House...
Despite all it said about him, Lincoln enjoyed a lifelong kinship with the press...
...state legislature for the same paper when he was a state representative. He carried his habit of writing letters-to-the-editor right into the White, House. For about a year before his inauguration he secretly owned a newspaper, the German-language Illinois Staats-Anzeiger at Springfield. The contract Lincoln drew up to buy the paper left it in the hands of Editor Theodore Canisius but entitled Lincoln to take over its type and press any time the paper failed to espouse the Republican line...