Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except Negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics." When it comes to this, I shall prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty -- to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.
-- Abraham Lincoln, letter to Joshua F. Speed, Aug. 24, 1855
I went to an Ivy League school. I'm very highly educated. I know words, I have the best words.
-- Donald Trump, campaign speech delivered at Hilton Head Island, S.C., Dec. 30, 2015
In the 1950s composer Aaron Copland went to Venezuela to conduct a performance of his Lincoln Portrait, an orchestral piece which features a narrator reading excerpts from some of the great man's most famous speeches and writings over a typically stirring Coplandic din.
"To everyone's surprise," Copland later told a newspaper reporter, "the reigning dictator, who had rarely dared to be seen in public, arrived at the last possible moment," and took a conspicuous seat among the 6,000 spectators in an outdoor stadium in Caracas. When the narrator--actress Juana Sojo--recited the final lines insisting that government "por el pueblo y para el pueblo [of the people, by the people] shall not perish from the earth," a small riot erupted, with people jumping to their feet and cheering so loudly that Copland was unable to hear the final strains of music.
"It was not long after that the dictator was deposed and fled from the country," Copland said. "I was later told by an American foreign service officer that the Lincoln Portrait was credited with having inspired the first public demonstration against him. That, in effect, it had started a revolution."
We have ceased to believe in the power of words; we no longer credit eloquence. Now we value straight talk, the method actor mumblings of angry people who aren't going to take it any more. (They will deliver us, trust them, and not the losers with the notepads and the FOIA requests.) We take to inarticulate sputterers, accepting their rawness as evidence of their authenticity. In this "too long, didn't read" age, where 140 characters strains the limits of our attention, it is impossible to imagine any American politician's words so thrilling a future crowd. Words and ideals are secondary to the semiotic accoutrements of the modern candidate.
Our world is different from Lincoln's; it's doubtful that a man of his talents would today be drawn into the ever more technological and show-bizzy arena of politics. The vulgar vocabulary of advertising has become our national literature. Glibness trumps reflection; there is no idea so clear and coherent that it can resist a hearty shouting-down. That Lincoln was one of the five best writers this nation has produced is remarkable; that he could deliver long, complex and compelling sentences was not. Nearly all politicians of Lincoln's day could write and speak well; the political culture of 19th-century America required its players to acquit themselves with pen and voice.
"Writing," Lincoln observed, "is the great invention of the world--very, very great in enabling us to converse with the dead, the absent, and the unborn, at all distances of time and of space."
The Lincoln I love is foremost a writer, working mainly in the plain style but, as Gore Vidal observed, slipping occasionally into iambic pentameter. I once wrote--without much reflection--that I would class Lincoln among the five best American writers ever. While that intemperate statement was based more on intuition than study, I believe it. Lincoln's rhythms--the hollows and dynamics of his words--ring fierce and solemn.
For though his law partner and biographer William Herndon thought Lincoln "read but little and that for an end," the great man's voice is undeniable. Lincoln was a thinker, and he had no doubt absorbed Shakespeare and the King James Bible into his very DNA, but he had neither time nor inclination to be an intellectual. He was a country lawyer, and he answered questions with lawyerly precision.
Few of us read much but for an end anymore, and our language is decimated. We snicker at "vocabulary words" and are impatient with nuance. Writing is a quaint and dying art. One imagines that homely Abraham--his face was, in Whitman's words, "so awfully ugly it becomes beautiful"--could probably resist the temptations of modern public life; he might well consider himself ill-equipped to compete in an anti-intellectual theater. Different sorts of people seek office these days.
But politics has never been the realm of saints. Things were rough in Lincoln's day as well, and he knew the limits of the possible as well as anyone. As polarized as we seem now, our present arguments are trifles compared to the questions Lincoln tussled with. Lincoln was a politician--imbued with the requisite ruthlessness and ambition--but he was a transcendent politician.
We occupy the country he saved for us.
Today there may be more enthusiasm for iconoclasm and debunking than hagiography; some of what Lincoln wrote can be turned against him by those unwilling to measure the dead by the standards that existed at their time. Some would deny Lincoln's greatness because he failed to anticipate the current vogue for "sensitivity" (which rushed in to fill the vacuum left by the evaporation of manners).
Others are simply lost in their own fractured times, disconnected from history and tradition, cocooned in a solipsistic web and fed by cables forcing light and sound. For them, Lincoln is just the man on the penny, another obsolete artifact. His cool fire is banked to embers; never dying, always available to those seeking to spark a torch.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 02/14/2017