Edgar Lee Masters enjoyed taking off everyone’s rose-colored glasses. His Spoon River Anthology wipes away the facade of pleasant, small-town American life. His 1935 biography of his friend Vachel Lindsay, while complimentary, broke the news behind Lindsay’s death–that he died by drinking liquid Lysol, not after suffering a heart attack, as was widely reported. He saved his most passionate criticism for Abraham Lincoln, whom he derided in his 1931 biography, Lincoln the Man. An excerpt from the book sums up his thoughts about the 16th president:
“There was a callousness and dumbness about some of the pioneer people of the Middle West, which persist to this day, and have become the nourishment of a sort of semi-barbarism, sometimes becoming cruel bigotry, at others a sort of savage indifference to the refined interests of life; and of this quality, in some particulars, was Abraham Lincoln.”
“Masters assails Lincoln and praises Lindsay without regard to truth or merit,” says Roland Cross, an attorney with Brown, Hay & Stephens, the law firm in which Lincoln once practiced. “His interpretations of both men are self-serving.”
Cross, who also has a Ph.D. in English from the University of Missouri, will offer his take on Masters’ “peculiar biographies” of Lincoln and Lindsay on Thursday, April 3, at 7 p.m. in the Carnegie Room of the Lincoln Library, Seventh and Capitol. Admission is free. It’s sponsored by the Vachel Lindsay Association. u
–Pete Sherman
This article appears in Apr 3-9, 2003.
