New book coming out exploring if Lincoln was gay.

[Rob Wick]

Quote:Well OK, as long as you're respectful

Only for you, Gene. After all, you and Joy introduced me to the only onion rings that I don't find disgusting.

Quote:Any thoughts on what Sandburg might have been by his comment then?

Bill,

Anything I could come up with would be pure speculation on my part. When I was going through Sandburg's papers, I tried to keep an eye open for any references to Lincoln and Speed, but the main thing I was looking for was in regards to Sandburg's friendship with James G. Randall. After all, there were 26 boxes of research material on Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years alone.

To me, Sandburg was a poet, and wrote like a poet. His poetry (and his prose) was sometimes overwrought when he was trying to make a point, especially compared to our standards today. It's possible that Sandburg was sending a coded message to his readers, although I would argue its just as likely he was suggesting that two men of the wild prairie were able to overcome their roughness and rude background and develop a friendship that was full of kindness and tenderness. Given the notion that Lincoln was very difficult to know fully (a point pregnant in Sandburg's oeuvre on Lincoln), that kind of friendship would have been extraordinary indeed.

Anyone who would want to do serious research on this would also need to look at Sandburg's poetry for references to lavender. Given his ties to the Chicago arts scene of the late teens and early 20s, there can be no doubt that Sandburg was familiar with homosexuality and knew several. Penelope Niven even makes a reference to Sandburg's encounter while riding the rails of being propositioned by a bum he referred to as the "Noo Yawkah." "Charlie stayed away from the Noo Yawkah after he made a homosexual advance, and quickly became astute in judging his compatriots in hobo jungles from Iowa to Colorado." (Penelope Niven, Carl Sandburg: A Biography, 35).

For it to be sustained that Sandburg was talking about Lincoln and Speed engaging in homosexual behavior, one would have to search through Sandburg's papers and correspondence to find evidence, something neither Tripp nor Gannett did. In looking through Tarbell's papers, I only found one reference to homosexuality when Tarbell referred to a professor at a woman's college who was accused of lesbianism as being accused of "deviance." Now, there is some suggestion that Tarbell and her sister, Sarah, destroyed many of her personal letters before Tarbell's death in 1944. I tend to believe this, given that most of the letters in Tarbell's extant papers deal with business and writing. The only personal letters of any merit that I've read don't exist in Tarbell's papers, but rather in the papers of Ada Pierce McCormick, who knew Tarbell in her later years. The letters are those written by Tarbell to her family while she was in Paris in the 1890s. Interestingly, none of the letters sent to Tarbell survive. Where McCormick got the letters isn't clear from the finding aid to her papers, but it is very clear that they do not exist in Tarbell's papers at Allegheny College. McCormick had planned to write a biography of Tarbell, which never materialized.

Best
Rob