In both cases, and many others, the log cabin was cited as evidence for a humble, honest background, of all-American honor and valor. But more than that, the log cabin was increasingly presented as a proxy for a person’s character, especially after the 1840 election that saw wealthy William Henry Harrison run as the “log cabin candidate,” setting the stage for Abraham Lincoln’s rustic White House run two decades later. Daniel Drake’s 1834 speech lauding the cabin as a launching pad to tomorrow: “When an individual from the depths of a compressing population, builds his cabin in the West … speedily released from the requisitions of the society he left behind.” The log cabin was now portrayed as essential to America’s institution-breaking modus operandi. Where Franklin and others dissed the cabin, now American leaders were praising it, as in famed orator Dr. Once seen as miserable and bug-infested, the cabin was now portrayed as key to America’s westward expansion, thanks in large part to Romantic artists: Author James Fenimore Cooper made the cabin quite catalytic in his 1823 novel The Pioneers, and artists like Thomas Cole, Asher Durand, and Jasper Francis Cropsey did the same in oil paintings that depicted cheery frontier families living in optimistic cabins. Though independent for decades, Americans still compared themselves to sophisticated England, and it took a minute before Americans embraced what made them special: their rustic country sides, the people therein, and their cabins, too. It took the still-new nation a bit of time to find its post-colonial self. But that all changed around the late-1820s, when the United States started going through the national version of puberty. Benjamin Franklin spoke for an entire generation when he told his grandson that there are “two sorts of people”: “Those who are well dress’d and live comfortably in good houses … who are respected for their virtue.” And then, “The other sort … poor, and dirty, and ragged and ignorant, and vicious, and live in miserable cabins.” In other words, log cabin living was not enviable and the people within were even less so. Log cabins therefore spent most of their early existence here disdained and dismissed, described as “miserable” and “wretched.” And the people within said cabins weren’t beloved, either. Originally brought over in 1638 by settlers of short-lived New Sweden, not Pilgrims or Puritans, the log cabin was spread across the American colonies primarily by German and Scots-Irish immigrants, mostly dirt-poor folk looking for new lives in the New World. One thing to know right off: Log cabins weren’t always adored here in America. But that’s also part of its beauty, that’s what makes it the ultimate American icon. In fact, it has a very ugly, grotesque underbelly. The lionized log cabin is not as quaint as it appears. It’s the revered home of brave pioneers like Daniel Boone, a romantic retreat for harried urbanites, the quintessential escape for blocked writers and a rustic backdrop for fashion shoots featuring lumbersexuals and pioneer women living like yesteryear-this is all great, right? What, pray tell, could be “evil” about the log cabin? Well, (setting aside the moralistic undertones of the “e-word”), plenty. The log cabin, that beloved American icon, is above reproach, right? It’s the humble, honest abode of American greats like Abe Lincoln. That probably strikes some people as odd. “Americans want to hear no evil and see no evil so far as log cabins are concerned,” proclaimed historian C.A.
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