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"Letters from a Docent" by Dr. John W. Quinley. ENJOY!
Dr. John W. Quinley, a retired college administrator and faculty member, was raised in Maywood, Illinois, just a few blocks away from where Sandburg lived 30 years earlier. He served as a docent for Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site for several years, and is the author of Discovering Carl Sandburg: The Eclectic Life of an American Icon (2022). He and his wife, Melissa, live in Hendersonville, North Carolina, just a few miles from Sandburg's former home. _______________________________________________________
#3 12 February 2024
Carl Sandburg in his home in North Carolina
with a bust of Lincoln in 1960.
Why did Sandburg, the liberal social activist, study Lincoln, the first Republican President?
By John W. Quinley Dear Readers,
Carl Sandburg and Abraham
Lincoln had much in common. Their lives were shaped by the prairies and common
people of the American heartland. In Always
the Young Strangers, Sandburg recalls hearing
“the talk of men and women who had eaten with Lincoln, gave him a bed overnight,
heard his jokes and lingo, remembered his silences and his mobile face.” The
oldest citizens in Galesburg were among the Lincoln generation of rugged
pioneers in what was then the western frontier. These “men of failing sight and
hearing . . . told of seeing virgin prairie grass that rose standing six feet
high, which had roots so tough and tangles so deep they often broke the wooden
plowshare that tried to break them.” Sandburg and Lincoln both
derived strength from their humble beginnings and held enduring affection and
respect for the working people from which they came. In
Abraham Lincoln:
the Prairie Years, Sandburg writes, “In the
short and simple annals of the poor it seems there are people who breathe with
the earth and take into their lungs and blood some of the hard and dark strength
of its mystery.” Their respective fathers
questioned the value of an education. In Abe
Lincoln Grows Up, Sandburg imagined Lincoln’s
father saying: “I s’pose Abe is still fooling hisself with eddicatin. I tried to
stop it, but he has got that fool idea in his head, and it can’t be got out.”
Regardless, they both were hungry to understand the meaning of words, loved to
listen to their sounds, and enjoyed reading aloud where “words came more real if
picked from the silent page of the book. And pronounced on the tongues; new
balances and values of words stood out if spoken aloud.” Their adult lives were deeply influenced by a signature
adventure in their youth: Sandburg riding the rails as a hobo for two thousand
miles across the prairies and back to Illinois; and Lincoln navigating the
Mississippi River on a flatboat for one thousand miles down to New Orleans and
traveling another thousand miles back to Illinois. The poet and president
both believed that society moved forward by the work and innovation of working
people and argued that government should clear the way for the economic mobility
of those at the bottom. Hazel Durnell in The
America of Carl Sandburg
writes that “Sandburg was a common man with an
uncommon mind. He has the same ideas about America that Lincoln had.” And they both were multifaceted men: Lincoln as
frontiersman, lawyer, politician, orator, storyteller, humorist, and poet; and
Sandburg—except for frontiersman, lawyer, and politician—all of these, as well
as journalist, singer and folklorist, children’s author, historian, and
novelist. LINCOLN? He was a mystery in smoke and flags Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags, yes to the paradoxes of democracy, yes to the hope of government Of the people by the people for the people… “The whole people of this nation
will ever do well
if well done by.”
The People,
Yes These verses were written by Sandburg about Lincoln and
quoted from a Lincoln speech by Sandburg. Each author would be comfortable with
the words of the other. Thanks for reading,
John Quinley is the author of Discovering Carl
Sandburg: The Eclectic Life of an American Icon and is a former docent at
the Carl Sandburg Home National Historic Site in Flat Rock, North Carolina.
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