OPINIONSrnGreatheart!rnby Mark Royden Winchellrn”The ‘Tycoon.'”rn—J.G. Nicolay and John Hayrn(Secretarial nickname for President A. Lincoln)rnLincoln, The Manrnby Edgar Lee MastersrnColumbia, South Carolina: Foundationrnfor American Education;rn498 pp., $29.95rnBooth: A Novelrnby David RobertsonrnNew York: Anchor Books;rn326 pp., $23.95rnIn the foreword to Brother to Dragons,rnRobert Penn Warren writes “historicalrnsense and poetic sense should not, in thernend, be contradictory, for if poetry is thernlittle myth we make, history is the bigrnmyth we live, and in our living, constantlyrnremake.” This statement seems particularlyrnrelevant to the persona of our 16thrnpresident. Whenever mainstream historiansrnrate our greatest chief execuhves,rnAbraham Lincoln is usually rankedrnfirst—because he saved the union andrnfreed the slaves. (Wliether those objectivesrncould have been accomplished byrnsome measure short of a war that costrn600,000 lives is a question rarely asked byrnLincoln hagiographers.) Often with littlernunderstanding of the historical figurernand what he really believed, political opportunistsrnfrom the far left to the neoconserrnative right claim the Lincoln legacy.rnWlien American Stalinists went to Spainrnto fight for its commrmist government inrnthe 1930’s, they formed the AbrahamrnLincoln Brigade. Wlien Newt GingrichrnMark Royden Winchell, who teachesrnEnglish at Clemson Universit}’, is thernauthor, most recently, of Cleanth Brooksrnand the Rise of Modern Criricismrn(University Press of Virginia).rnwanted to launder money for his partisanrnpurposes six decades later, he used arndummy foundation for underprivilegedrnblack children named after the GreatrnEmancipator. It can be said of Lincolnrnwhat Orwell said of Dickens: he is “wellrnworth stealing.”rnBut Lincoln is far more than the mostrnwidely coveted patron saint in Americanrnpolitics. He has come to embody our nationalrnidentity to the point that his legendrnis virtually synonymous with the bigrnmyth we live. Thanks to literary gushmeistersrnfrom Walt Whitman to JamesrnAgee, he is also an abiding presence inrnthe little myth we make. Wlien Americansrnof a certain age think of Lincoln,rnthey see Raymond Massey in the filmrnversion of Robert E. Sherwood’s reverentialrnAbe Lincoln in Illinois. (With littlernchange in characterization, Massey laterrnplayed John Brown in The Sante FernTrail.) Even Southern partisans such asrnThomas Dixon, Jr., and D.W. Griffithrnhave gotten in on the act by portrayingrnLincoln as “the Great Heart” who wouldrnliave welcomed the Gonfederate statesrnback into the union much as the forgivingrnfather celebrated his prodigal son’srnreturn to the old homestead.rnWhile George Washington had hisrnParson Weems, Lincoln was blessedrnwith an even more talented mj’th doctorrnin the prairie populist Carl Sandburg. Inrnhis six-volume beatification of Lincoln,rnSandburg assured us that humble beginningsrnand lifelong adversity could notrnsuppress true greatness in this mostrndemocratic of nations. The vision ofrnAmerica as a classless meritocracy is asrnold as Ben Franklin and as recent as Leernlacocca, but Lincoln’s passage from thernlog cabin to the Wliite House is its mostrnmemorable embodiment. In being bothrnextraordinary and representative, Sandburg’srnLincoln is the perfect Americanrnhero. But in between the appearance ofrnSandburg’s first two volumes (The PrairiernYears in 1926) and his last four {The WarrnYears in 1939), another prominentrnAmerican poet, Edgar Lee Masters, publishedrnLincoln, The Man. This book,rnfirst released in 1931, has been as vilifiedrnas Sandburg’s has been celebrated. Nowrnthat it is once again in print, thanks to thernFoundation for American Education, werncan see why.rnBorn in Garnett, Kansas, in 1868,rnMasters grew up in Petersburg andrnLewistown, Illinois. He was thus of arntime and place to hae known several individualsrnintimately acquainted withrnLincoln in his pre-Mount Rushmorerndays. The most important of these wasrnWilliam Herndon, who had been a lawrnSEPTEMBER 1998/27rnrnrn