Reminiscences about Abraham Lincoln . on to thatplace. Of the three, or four, AbrahamLincoln most nearly comes up* to therequirements. George Washington,it is to well-known, was an There has been too consciousan effort on the part Rooseveltsrelatives and friends to create a le-gend for him. And Wilson was toomuch of the intellectual to be gert-erally accepted by the popular Lincoln has, in popular belief,requirements lacked even by theheroes of other nations. He was ofhumble parentage, so we like to be-lieve. He rose from poverty andobscurity. He championed an altru-isti
Reminiscences about Abraham Lincoln . on to thatplace. Of the three, or four, AbrahamLincoln most nearly comes up* to therequirements. George Washington,it is to well-known, was an There has been too consciousan effort on the part Rooseveltsrelatives and friends to create a le-gend for him. And Wilson was toomuch of the intellectual to be gert-erally accepted by the popular Lincoln has, in popular belief,requirements lacked even by theheroes of other nations. He was ofhumble parentage, so we like to be-lieve. He rose from poverty andobscurity. He championed an altru-istic cause at great cost, includingdeath, tonimself. Of late years, dating particularlyin our mind from the production ofJohn DrinkVaters Abraham Lin-coln, the Lincoln legend has maderapid strides. Now a certain class of critics andresearch workers are trying to un-dermine one of the most vital partsof this tradition—the humble originof the man. They present a mass ofapparently indisputable evidence,which personally we believe. But we. HENRY B. RANKIN do not believe that they will be suc-cessful in convincing the public thatLincoln came not from poor whitetrash, but from an old and honor-able, if not wealthy, family. Miss Tarbell has allied herself withthe school that is devoting itself tothe facts and not the fancies re-garding Lincolns self and he was not the child of shift-less white trash without traceableforebears is a theory that she ex-plodes in her first chapter. In thesucceeding ones she proceeds to pul-verize the remaining fragments. She brings to bear upon Lincolnsancestors a sufficient degree of dis-illusion. But when she_ comes to theman himself her mind is too cloud-ed with sentimentality to arrive atthe core of the mans being. The chapters dealing with the ar-rival of the first member of thefamily, Samuel Lincoln, in Hingham,Mass., in 1637, from England and hisimmediate descendants are by farthe best. Her sentimentality regard-ing more recent years
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