A perversely cruel press

Over at Salon, Joan Walsh has this to say about press coverage of Bill Clinton:

“The Clinton Tapes” makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media — from the New York Times’ lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free “opinion” journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn’t shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever. . .

Lately I’ve been reading in Catherine Clinton’s biography Mrs. Lincoln, A Life (HarperCollins, 2009), and I am struck by the similarities in the way the Lincolns and the Clintons were treated. Certainly, one can’t carry such a comparison too far, but I see it especially in the treatment of the two wives, Mary and Hillary.

Washington, D.D. was just as much an insider society in 1861 as in 1991. It was referred to as The Cave and The Cave found the Lincolns a bit uncouth, just as D.C. found the Clintons:

Harriet Lane [James Buchanan's niece and White House hostess] met with Mrs. Lincoln in advance and arranged a meal for the Lincolns following the inauguration. But she was not impressed and wrote cattily tht Lincoln resembled the Iris doorkeeper, Thomas Burns, and reported, “Mrs. Lincoln is awfully western, loud & unrefined.” [p. 124]

I don’t know whether Abraham Lincoln ate lunch at his desk, as did the Clinton White House staff, but Lincoln himself was prone to work through meals if his wife didn’t insist that he eat.

D.C. was also a southern city. Mary Todd Lincoln was also southern, of course, but the fact was no advantage to her. She was viewed as a traitor by the D.C. social elite with southern sympathies and accused of being a southern spy by those whose sympathies lay with the north.

The press was particularly vicious with Mary Lincoln. They accused her of extravagance, of buying expensive china to match the livery of the White House servants (the White House had no liveried servants but that was a mere detail), of having affairs with members of the White House staff, and, as I have said, of spying. When Mary insisted on a daily drive or entertaining friends, she was painted as demanding and self-centered. But it is also possible that she was trying to protect her husband from his own habit of overwork to the point of collapse. She was the one who could draw him out of his depressions.

She was unfortunate in her rivals for Lincoln’s ear and his time. She made enemies somehow of his secretaries (male) whom Clinton calls “the couriers nattering on the second floor of the Executive Mansion.” These courtiers referred to Mrs. Lincoln as the Hellcat. During the period when she was prostrated with grief over the death of her son Willie, John Hay wrote of her:

Madame has mounted me to pay her the Steward’s salary. I told her to kiss mine.

and

The Hellcat is getting more Hellcatical day by day.

Granted, Mrs. Lincoln was not stoical in her grief. Lincoln himself warned her that she might wind up institutionalized if she didn’t pull herself together.

Another unfortunate enemy was Kate Chase, daughter of the Secretary of the Treasury, Salmon P. Chase. Consider this anecdote:

One day, when an African-American teacher came to call on Mrs. Lincoln at the White House, having been invited to tea, she was escorted around to the kitchen entrance by the doorman [who may have been a lighter skinned African-American]. Mary was infuriated by this sight. The First Lady became especially solicitous during tea with her guest in the Red Room. Afterward, her black guest enjoyed the First Lady’s promise to bring the cause of African-American education to her husband’s attention. Then she was cordially escorted to the formal entrance, where Mary pointedly shok hands with her while bidding the woman good-bye. This gesture was observed by both the Chases, who just happened to be driving by the Executive Mansion at that very moment. Naturally, Chase’s daughter spread the story—willing to use it to her father’s political advantage by portraying Mrs. Lincoln as someone who was “making too much of the Negro.”

This jab at Mary Lincoln was particularly hypocritical coming from Kate Chase, whose father was a staunch abolitionist. Chase had long promoted emancipation as part of his political agenda, and criticized Lincoln for being weak on abolition. But when his wife made a gesture toward racial equality, the Chases made political hay by broadcasting Mary’s liberality among unsympathetic listeners.[p. 171]

The press seemed willing to believe anything of Mary Lincoln without bothering to think that some of the rumors contradicted others.

To this day, Lincoln biographers seem eager to heap calumny on Mary Todd. And unlike Hillary Clinton, Mary Lincoln was not in a position to hold high office herself, to make for herself a reputation o counter the slanders.

Possibly related posts:

The 19th century housewife

“First Lady of Controversy”

Abraham Lincoln

Slave state

The British press

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