Abraham Lincoln: "Big enough to be inconsistent."

[Rob Wick]

(12-25-2012 02:24 PM)Nancy Sparrow Wrote:  This may be a strange way to make my debut on this Forum, but I have one nit to pick with WEB DuBois, and that is that he called Lincoln "unusually ugly." I really think DuBois went way overboard with that description. In general, in the many things I've read about Lincoln, I've been puzzled by the harsh descriptions - almost always by men - of his physical appearance. The worst I can say about his physical appearance is that he was, perhaps, odd-looking. That doesn't have to be a negative, either. But I'd prefer to think of his looks as striking. He certainly stood out in a crowd, and that couldn't have been a bad thing in his line of work!

Welcome Elizabeth.

As inured as we are to photos of Lincoln, it's hard to fathom that when McClure's ran the earliest known photo of Lincoln for the very first time, it turned the Lincoln world upside down, because it showed a Lincoln, although not handsome by some standards, that resembled a "normal" person. As Ida Tarbell later wrote, the photo of Lincoln "was a Lincoln which shattered the widely accepted tradition of his early shabbiness, rudeness, ungainliness." She added that it took her "by storm."

I also think that's one reason why Robert Todd Lincoln severely disparaged George Grey Barnard's statue of Lincoln (which Tarbell liked and defended in print) because it showed him in a more homely light.

Best
Rob