The Whispering Gallery
ZONE 2
MAN 1:
What's that man doing as our country burns? He jokes! This disgusting fool is just like Nero or any of those other tyrants.
MAN 2:
The man's worse than Caesar himself!
WOMAN 1:
If you ask me, Mrs. Lincoln has brought shame upon the President's House because she is so selfish! She spends money on herself but is cheap with the help.
WOMAN 2:
I hear she haggled over the salary of the tutor hired to teach Willie and Tad but spent thousands on wallpaper!
MAN 3:
Lincoln is the weakest man ever elected.
MAN 4:
He's vain, weak, sterile, hypocritical, utterly without manners.
MAN 3:
He's beneath contempt.
MAN 1:
Lincoln's brought to the Presidency a heart reeking with malice and lips blistered with lies.
OLDER MAN:
Did you hear his Inaugural Address? What ignorant stupidity! What insolence! What brutality!
MAN 4:
His speeches are filled with lies, evasions and pathetic attempts at humor.
MAN 1:
Lincoln's speeches are nothing but condensed lumps of imbecility ...
MAN 2:
Buffoonery!
MAN 3:
Vulgar malignity! (LAUGHTER)
MAN 2:
Heard what Dictator Lincoln's done now? Seized all the arms, public and private in New York City! The last vestige of American liberty, gone, gone, gone.
WOMAN 1:
And Mrs. Lincoln!
WOMAN 2:
She's so dumpy!
WOMAN 2:
And have you seen her in those low-necked dresses?
WOMAN 1:
And those hats! It's like a flowerpot she wears on top of her head! (LAUGHTER)
OLDER MAN:
Lincoln's efforts to dodge responsibility are dishonest, cowardly, and reprehensible.
MAN 1:
Abraham Lincoln is putting forth all the powers of Government to crush out the spirit of American liberty ....
MAN 2:
His astonishing incompetence has no equal in the history of any people.
MAN 1:
The truth is that Lincoln is not acquainted with the commonest civilities of everyday life.
MAN 3:
Lincoln is so ugly! Thin, bony arms, long, scraggly neck ...
MAN 4:
A head like a coconut covered with rough, uncombed hair ...
MAN 3:
A furrowed, wrinkled face, bushy eyebrows ...
MAN 4:
And a nose and ears that somebody took by mistake from a head twice the size! (LAUGHTER)
OLDER MAN:
Lincoln's record is an ever-thickening file of revolting incompetence.
MAN 1:
Mr. Lincoln will go down in history as the man who plunged his country into a great war without a plan, who failed without excuse, and who fell without a friend.
MAN 1:
You pity Lincoln till he opens his mouth. Then hate becomes the dominant emotion.
MAN 2:
Lincoln, he's the craftiest and most dishonest politician who ever disgraced an office in America.
MAN 2:
Mr. Lincoln is indecent, insensitive, and blasphemous.
WOMAN 1:
One of her servants called Mrs. Lincoln 'downright cranky, bordering on ornery.’
MAN 1:
I hear Mr. Lincoln's own staff refer to Mrs. Lincoln as 'Her Satanic Majesty.'
MAN 3:
He's inadequate, naive, and unqualified.
MAN 4:
He's a dictator!
OLDER MAN:
His crimes against the free people of the South, including cold-blooded and deliberate murder, have no precedent in the annals of the world.