For those not already familiar with it, archive.org’s Lincoln Financial Foundation collection, made up of scanned folders of Lincoln-related newspaper clippings, is a treasure trove. You can find a lot of interesting and rare stuff there, and it is pretty well organized and OCR-searchable. A fun place to browse—the ability to access it online is a major gift to today’s researchers.
One of the many clippings relates to Mary Harlan Lincoln, the rather mysterious wife of Robert Lincoln. Despite suffering from some sort of chronic health problem(s), she lived until 1937, dying at age 90.
The Harlan family had long been deeply interested in Wesleyan University, located in their hometown of Mt. Pleasant, Iowa. Mary Harlan Lincoln attended it herself, as did at least one of her daughter’s, and she made gifts to it throughout her life.
The one LFF folder devoted specifically to Mary Harlan Lincoln contains a page from a 1930 edition of the Wesleyan College Magazine (it was not yet a university). Here’s the heading—Dr. Coons was then the President of Wesleyan:
You’d assume that what followed was a reminder of the Lincoln-Harlan-Wesleyan connection, with some pleasant remarks from the elderly widow, and an expression of gratitude from Dr. Coons for her generosity to the college. And that is how it started:
You’d also assume a college president would demonstrate tact and discretion when talking about a prominent donor in an affiliated publication. Inexplicably, this is not a safe assumption to make about Dr. Coons:`
What? How on earth did this get published? No one flagged this as a breach of confidence (I have to assume it was meant to be off-the-record)? As gossip only suitable for a tabloid? As encouraging further blackmail attempts? As bad for donor relations and the college’s image? These are only a few of the many problems with article, which casually moves on from the revelation—I bet she wasn’t eager to return to Mt. Pleasant after she saw this! And that was all there was to the article, besides a few more lines about meetings Coons attended while in Washington.
Robert Lincoln had died in 1926. I don’t know if there is truth to the claim that he had an affair (if the love affair didn’t pre-date the marriage, which isn’t clearly ruled out in the article), although the way the story is relayed seems to suggest his widow believed it. The whole story is strange, but if it was a hoax, it’s hard to see her being so vehement about burning them.
Human nature being what it is, I never rule out the idea that someone might have had an affair. No evidence of infidelity has come to my attention, though the marriage was somewhat troubled and they lived apart at times. But Robert was no Dr. Coons—discretion was his forte. His wife’s, also, so I’m not sure why she would have spoken about this to Coons. Perhaps her judgment was fading a little due to her age and the stressful situation.
There’s a slim possibility that this was an atrociously garbled version of what happened with Myra Bradwell’s granddaughter, Myra Pritchard. Pritchard approached Mary Harlan Lincoln shortly after Robert’s death to announce she was publishing a book her grandparents’ interactions with Mary (Todd) Lincoln. This was to include sensitive letters written by the parties, including Robert, and she had therefore been waiting for his death to proceed. Mary Harlan Lincoln threatened to sue, and she ended up buying Pritchard’s manuscript for about $25,000. However, most of the letters, and Pritchard’s manuscript, were later found by Jason Emerson in the files of Mary Harlan Lincoln’s attorney. If she burned any of them, it was only a few, and it seems unlikely that Pritchard would have insisted upon including letters where Robert said such things, or that he would have written about this to his mother during the contentious period surrounding her commitment.
It would have made much more sense for Mary Harlan Lincoln to chat about the Pritchard saga, as it was less sensitive and he probably asked her about being part of the Lincoln family. Similarly, it would have been much more appropriate for Coons to chat about the drama surrounding the manuscript publication with a Wesley College Magazine journalist, possibly an inexperienced student who got mixed up in retelling it. But that’s quite a stretch—the simplest explanation is that the article was reasonably accurate, and that it demonstrated poor taste on the part of everyone involved.