CARL SANDBURG’S AMERICA A Study of His Works, His Politics, and His New Imagination First Edition By Evert Villarreal Bassim Hamadeh, CEO and Publisher Michael Simpson, Vice President of Acquisitions Jamie Giganti, Managing Editor Jess Busch, Senior Graphic Designer Marissa Applegate, Acquisitions Editor Brian Fahey, Licensing Specialist Sean Adams, Interior Design Copyright © 2015 by Cognella, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reprinted, repro- duced, transmitted, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information retrieval system without the written permission of Cognella, Inc. First published in the United States of America in 2015 by Cognella, Inc. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Cover image copyright © Al Ravenna / New York World-Telegram & Sun / Public Domain. Printed in the United States of America. ISBN: 978-1-63189-209-7 (pbk) / 978-1-63189-210-3 (br) Contents Introduction.................................................................................xi Chronology of Carl Sandburg, 1878–1967.......................xvii Chapter 1.......................................................................................1 “Two Men Speak in Mr. Sandburg, a Poet and a Propagandist: His Future Will Depend Upon Which Finally Dominates the Other” Chapter 2........................................................................................7 Carl Sandburg’s Early Works and Themes, and Critical Assessments of His Early Works (1916–1930) Chapter 3........................................................................................17 Critical Assessments of His Later Works (1930–Present) Chapter 4.....................................................................................29 Carl Sandburg’s New Imagination and Project of Nation-Building Chapter 5........................................................................................35 Sandburg’s New Imagination: The Children’s Books and Rootabaga Country Chapter 6.......................................................................................49 A Hero for America’s Children: Abe Lincoln Grows Up Chapter 7........................................................................................63 A New Type of American Biography: Resituating Lincoln’s Place in American History—Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years Chapter 8.......................................................................................79 The Archetypal Common Man—Abraham Lincoln: The War Years Chapter 9........................................................................................91 Transcontinental Poet: Carl Sandburg Celebrates the Common Man and America’s Story Chapter 10..........................................................................................99 Teaching America Its Songs: The American Songbag Chapter 11.......................................................................................107 Sandburg Celebrates America in His Later Poetry— Good Morning, America Chapter 12.......................................................................................113 The People, Yes: A Case Study of the Ongoing Labor Problem in the United States Chapter 13......................................................................................123 Remembrance Rock: Retelling American History Through Narrative Chapter 14......................................................................................135 Recovering Carl Sandburg Works Cited....................................................................................141 For Isabel, my beautiful, brilliant, and wonderful wife. She is my muse! For Matthew, Thomas, and Luke, our sons. They are the inspiration and motivation for everything I do in life. To my parents, Sabas and Betty Villarreal, who have taught me the value of hard work and have given me the gift of optimism. They have always insisted that my life reflect a continuous journey to excellence, with no excuses. They are also the very people Carl Sandburg championed all of his life. To my brother, Edgar Villarreal, who has always supported my professional career and is always there to lend a hand. Finally, to my students, who have taught me so much over the last twenty years of college instruction. No one will get at my verses who insists on viewing them as a literary performance. —Walt Whitman (from “A Backward Glance”) You ask me to belong to something. You wish me to join a movement or party or church and subscribe to a creed and a program. It would be easy to do this. It is the line of least resistance. If I have a fixed, unchangeable creed then I am saved the trouble every day of forming a new creed dictated by the events of the day. If I have a program and a philosophy and a doctrine, crystalyzed [sic] in an organized movement, then the movement is supposed to do for me what I ought to do for myself. —Letter from Carl Sandburg to Romain Rolland (October, 1919) reprinted in Herbert Mitgang’s The Letters of Carl Sandburg Introduction arl Sandburg was one of the most famous, beloved, and successful liter- C ary figures of the twentieth century. Between his birth in 1878 and his death in 1967, he lived out an extremely productive, dynamic, and experimental literary life. Significant highlights in Carl Sandburg’s career include winning the Helen Haire Levinson Prize for best poems of the year in 1914; sharing the Poetry Society of America Prize with Margaret Widdemer for Cornhuskers in 1919; sharing the Poetry Society of America Annual Book Award with Stephen Vincent Benét in 1921; reading as Phi Beta Kappa poet at Harvard in 1928; being awarded the Order of the North Star by the King of Sweden in 1938; winning the Pulitzer Prize in History in 1940 for Abraham Lincoln: The War Years; being elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1940; receiving the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1951 for Complete Poems; receiving the American Academy of Arts and Letters gold medal for history and biography in 1952; receiving the Poetry Society of America gold medal in 1953; receiving a citation from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce as Great Living American “for lasting contribution to American literature” (Mitgang xiv). In addition, his novel Remembrance Rock was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1949—the same year that Arthur Miller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Death of A Salesman. Another highlight in his career includes the address he delivered before a Joint Session of Congress on February 12, 1959—a date he fit into his busy schedule that year—to commemorate the sesquicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. xi xii | Carl Sandburg’s America Although this address may not seem significant to some readers, it is important to note that Carl Sandburg has been the only private citizen in American history to address a Joint Session of Congress along with George Bancroft, the historian, who spoke to Congress “following the assassination of Lincoln” (Callahan 222). Also, on March 4, 1961, he spoke to a group of over 20,000 people on the east front of the United States Capitol to deliver another speech on Lincoln, this one commemorating the one-hundred-year anniversary of Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. It is also important to note that many Lincoln scholars would concede that Carl Sandburg’s historical writings on Lincoln were extremely important in Abraham Lincoln’s continuing popularity in the twentieth century. If this list of accolades and accomplishments is not enough, Carl Sandburg was also asked to write the Foreword to John F. Kennedy’s 1962 book titled To Turn the Tide. Long before Carl Sandburg appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and on the Milton Berle Show, he had performed on almost every major college campus in the country, reading his poems, discussing current events, and talking about Abraham Lincoln. Also during his career he recorded many LPs of songs he loved and often performed as he traveled the country. In addition, he wrote hun- dreds of Forewards and Prefaces for the works of contemporaries he admired, and even wrote Prefaces for volumes of the collected works of Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, a poet whose work Carl Sandburg championed. To give readers an additional sense of the level of Carl Sandburg’s fame, on October 27, 1972—five years after Carl Sandburg’s death—his home in Flat Rock, North Carolina, called Connemara, was dedicated as a national park and the home was officially designated a national historic site. About the designation and honor, Lauren Goff said that Carl Sandburg “became the first writer in the history of our nation whose home was made a national historic site by the federal government. Only presidents’ homes were so designated before that. The second writer to be honored that way was Longfellow two years later, in 1974” (Swank 96). Carl Sandburg’s books often appeared on best seller lists. After Chicago Poems appeared in 1916, he published over thirty separate books. They consist of eight volumes of poetry; two separate multi-volume biographies of Abraham Lincoln (which, altogether total six volumes and more than 4,000 pages); a juvenile biography of Abraham Lincoln (the first of its kind); a biography of Edward Steichen (which was, at the time, the first biography of a photographer); a biography of Mary Todd