Quotulatiousness

July 15, 2024

Assassins

Filed under: History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Political assassination has been thankfully rare in recent decades (with a few exceptions), and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania is the first such attack on a US president or presidential candidate to make the news since Ronald Reagan survived John Hinckley’s attempt in 1981:

Donald Trump, surrounded by Secret Service agents, raises his fist after an attempt on his life during a campaign speech in Butler, PA on 13 July, 2024. One spectator was killed and two others were reported to be in critical condition. The shooter was killed by Pennsylvania State Troopers, according to reports in the succeeding hours.

The attempted assassination of Donald Trump is unfortunately far from the first against an American president. Four presidents have been assassinated (Abraham Lincoln in 1865, James A. Garfield in 1881, William McKinley in 1901, and John F. Kennedy in 1963), but our history has seen numerous other unsuccessful shootings targeting the nation’s chief executive: against Andrew Jackson, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford (twice), Ronald Reagan, and now Trump.

The first of these unsuccessful attempts came against Andrew Jackson in 1835. An unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence came at Jackson with a pistol while the president was in the U.S. Capitol attending the funeral of South Carolina representative Warren R. Davis. Lawrence pulled the trigger and attendees heard a crack, but the pistol misfired. Jackson turned on Joseph and swung his cane at the assailant, who took out another pistol, which also misfired. A melee ensued with Jackson screaming, “Let me alone! Let me alone! I know where this came from”, suggesting that Jackson’s Whig enemies had sent the assassin. Among those who tried to subdue Joseph was Davy Crockett, who later said of the incident, “I wanted to see the damndest villain in the world and now I have seen him”. Jackson was unharmed but became more paranoid as a result of the close call. It was a contentious period in American politics; the New York Evening Post deemed incident “a sign of the times.” Joseph spent the rest of his life in a mental institution.

The next three shootings of presidents were unfortunately successful ones; it’s remarkable to consider now that these three assassinations took place over just 36 years, from 1865 to 1901. (What must Americans have thought of “our democracy” then?) The next failed attempt did not come until Teddy Roosevelt’s ill-fated effort to reclaim the presidency in 1912 as a third party candidate. In October of that year, Roosevelt was campaigning in Milwaukee — the site of this year’s Republican convention — when a man named Joseph Schrank shot the former president in the chest. Roosevelt was fortunate that his folded 50-page speech was in his chest pocket and slowed the bullet. The bullet did pierce Roosevelt’s chest but did not penetrate too deeply. The crowd attacked Schrank, but Roosevelt asked that they not harm him, which probably saved Schrank’s life. Roosevelt then went ahead with his speech, famously saying, “it takes more than that to kill a bull moose”. This event has perhaps the most similarities to the Trump shooting, as both Trump and TR were ex-presidents looking to return to the White House, and both Trump and Roosevelt showed defiance after being bloodied.

TR’s cousin Franklin was president-elect in February 1933 when an anarchist named Giuseppe Zangara fired five shots at him and Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in Miami. The would-be assassin missed Roosevelt but hit Cermak and four other people. Roosevelt was likely saved by Miami housewife Lillian Cross, who pushed Zangara’s arm as he was firing. A gravely wounded Cermak told Roosevelt, “I’m glad it was me instead of you”. He died on March 6, two days after hearing Roosevelt’s inaugural address over the radio. Zangara was executed by electric chair two weeks later.

[…]

Before the Trump attack, the most recent shooting of a president was John Hinckley’s attack on Ronald Reagan in 1981. Reagan was early in his first term and was leaving a speech at the Washington Hilton (now referred to as the Hinckley Hilton by Washingtonians), when Hinckley opened fire, hitting Reagan press secretary Jim Brady, Secret Service agent Tim McCarthy, and DC police officer Thomas Delahanty. Reagan’s protective detail threw him to the floor of his limousine and, thinking he was unharmed, took off back for the White House. Like Ford, Reagan did not like being under a pile and thought the agents had broken his rib. When the president coughed up blood, agent Jerry Parr recognized that Reagan had been hit as well and immediately redirected the limo to George Washington Hospital. This decision saved the president’s life. Even so, it was a close call. A paramedic thought upon seeing a gray-colored Reagan, “My God, he’s code city”, ER lingo for someone who isn’t going to make it.

I have to admit to knowing a bit more than the average person about prior presidential assassination attempts thanks to Stephen Sondheim’s soundtrack to the musical Assassins, which I’ve enjoyed listening to many times over the years.

Niall Ferguson on the historical context of political assassinations (the rest of the article is behind the paywall:

“There was a reason why Rome of Julius Caesar and Florence of the Medici were such dangerous places. Assassination was a feature, not a bug, of republican political systems. However, modern American medicine and the overblown security provided to presidents and former presidents together make it quite likely that both candidates will make it to November 5.”

I wrote those words on July 2. Eleven days later, events proved me both right — assassination is part and parcel of republican political systems — and wrong: this has ceased to be true of the United States.

What happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July 13, is in equal measure shocking and baffling. An inch or two further to the left and the bullet that grazed Donald Trump’s ear would have penetrated his skull and very likely killed him. A slight gust of wind, a tremor of the assassin’s hand, an unexpected move by the former president — for whatever tiny reason, Trump lived to fight another day.

The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, a 20-year-old man from nearby Bethel Park, was a registered Republican but had made a $15 donation to the liberal ActBlue political action committee on the day of Joe Biden’s inauguration, when he was 17. Even more puzzling, this young man (who was barely a teenager when Trump was elected in 2016) was able to take several clear shots at the 45th president from the roof of a factory 130 yards away from the stage of Trump’s rally.

How did the Secret Service snipers stationed just 430 feet away not spot Crooks climbing into position on the roof, when at least one member of the public did see him and claimed that he had warned them? It is hard to think of a good explanation.

And what of the consequences? There are those who would have you believe that history is governed by vast impersonal cycles and that events such as this are mere epiphenomena, historical trivia. It is a claim as old as it is false.

The editors at The Line suspect the US Presidential election has now been decided months before any ballots are cast:

The prospect of someone deciding to take the rhetoric to its most extreme albeit logical conclusion — if Trump is a threat to life as we know it, the threat must be ended — cannot come as a surprise. At this time, we don’t know much about the 20-year-old shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, beyond his name, the fact that he was a registered Republican but, also, a one-time donor to a progressive political action committee. We await more information, and hope there aren’t many more like him waiting to try again, or retaliate against a Democratic politician.

For now, we at The Line are pondering what’s next. July 13, 2024 is going to be one of those days that future historians look back upon with a certain wistfulness. If the wind was a little harder, a bullet lands a few inches in another direction, and Donald Trump is dead. In this timeline, though, the shooter missed, and now America is going to witness first hand the problems with relying on violence to secure political outcomes. Namely, it very often backfires.

Because we’ve taken the other fork in the road. We now exist in the other timeline of history — the one in which Donald Trump is now the far-and-away favourite to win a second term.

We could be wrong about this. No one can predict the future, and there are lots of scenarios still unplayed out. Does Biden step down in favour of Kamala Harris? Does the shooting turn out to be a hoax perpetrated by Trump or his supporters? Does Trump suffer a heart attack between now and November? Does someone else get shot? Any of these possibilities is still available, and any one could further change the outcome.

However, at this moment in time, it was hard for us to look at the picture of Trump standing up once the bullets had struck, demanding to be seen by the crowd even as his Secret Service detail tries to get him off the stage, pumping his fist in the air, all framed by an American flag, and think anything but “Well, that’s the ballgame.”

The Line is no fan of Trump, but we are also political observers, and Trump’s handling of the assassination attempt, as political showmanship, was absolutely perfect. Trump displayed an incredible presence of mind in the midst of mortal peril. While the echoes of the gunshots were still ringing, he understood that he needed to forgo some small degree of further protection in order to show his supporters — and the world — that he was fine. No one has to like the guy, or ignore the real risks he poses both to American and Canada, but we do have to respect how he handled that moment, if nothing else. It demonstrated calm nerves and competency under literal fire.

The response shored up Trump’s strengths in a way that highlighted Joe Biden’s comparative frailty. The shooting will absolutely supercharge Trump’s supporters, his base, his cult. There’s no coming back from it.

We don’t know what more to say here, folks. For the record, we at The Line rule out nothing at this early juncture. But if the momentum of history holds on its current track, there’s a very good chance that the next American election is over weeks before anyone bothers to cast a ballot.

August 21, 2023

Cunk on America – Historian Reacts

Filed under: History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Vlogging Through History
Published 9 May 2023
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July 4, 2023

Shock! Horror! Apparently you can’t trust that Abraham Lincoln quote about not believing what you read on the internet!

Filed under: Books, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

As a long-time collector of quotations, I almost had to take to my fainting couch when it became clear that President Lincoln never said anything about the internet being a tissue of lies. My original quotations collection (webbed here, but no longer actively maintained) was not particularly well-policed in the sense of ensuring that the quotations were both accurate and properly attributed. This is because I began collecting them before the internet was a thing for most people. When I began the blog, I tried to ensure that anything I quoted could at least be traced back to the site I found it on (which isn’t a particularly rigorous chain of evidence, but at the least it ensured I couldn’t be accused of making shit up).

In James Delingpole’s article on this topic, I was sorry to find that the very first fake quote he listed is indeed one that I had included in my original collection:

Only the dead have seen the end of war – Plato

I became aware of this marvellous quotation – so wise, pithy and dark – on one of my frequent trips to the Imperial War Museum. It’s one of a series inscribed on the wall beside the ramp leading down to the World War I/trench section. Another of my favourites is attributed to Thucydides: “There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.”

The Plato quote is so good it has been used many times since, inter alia by General Douglas MacArthur in a speech at West Point in 1962, as an aphorism apparently oft-cited by grunts in the ‘Nam, and by Ridley Scott in Black Hawk Down. But the quote is fake. Or at least its attribution is.

In fact it derives not from the Classical Age but from the early 20th century. It was invented by the Madrid-born philosopher, poet and later Harvard professor George Santayana. He clearly had a gift for this sort of thing for he also coined another of those phrases which you’ve always thought was devised by someone much more famous: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Usually this is attributed, in various forms, to Edmund Burke or Winston Churchill. But the former didn’t say it and the latter – as I suspect he quite often did – plagiarised it.

Fake quotes, whether genuine sayings that have been misattributed or fabrications which have been lent authenticity by putting them in the mouths of someone famous, have been a bugbear of mine for a while. I can probably date this to the time someone called me out on my favourite George Orwell quote: “In times of universal deceit, truth-telling becomes a revolutionary act”.

Annoyingly, I had used it a good half dozen times in articles and in internet chats before I learned that Orwell had never said it. I felt cheated and also foolish: surely as an English literature graduate I ought to have known such a thing, in the way that film buffs know that Ingrid Bergman never said “Play it again, Sam”.

But these are easy mistakes to make now that fake quotes are everywhere. Probably, this has always been the case but they have definitely proliferated with the advent of the internet, the shortening of attention spans (which make us more susceptible to gnomic verities that appear to sum everything up and obviate the need for further thought) and the corresponding appetite for meme-friendly aphorisms.

Many of these fake quotes, I’ve noticed, are printed over photographs or images of the alleged author. It’s a cheap trick but an effective one. No one ever is going to be fooled by a joke quote like: “Don’t believe everything you read on the internet. Abraham Lincoln, 1865.” But shove it on top of a picture of the 16th president with those familiar features – the wart, the chin beard, the lined skin and sunken eyes – and for a fraction of a second, the subconscious is taken in.

He finishes off the article thusly:

I’m reminded here, somewhat, of the introductory talk that Mark Crispin Miller used to give his students when he was still allowed by New York University to conduct his course on Propaganda. I paraphrase – you really should listen to this podcast interview for the full account – but essentially Miller warned his audience: “Be prepared to be very upset. You may be shocked to discover how many of the ideas you imagined to be your own are in fact the result of propaganda.”

It would definitely have come as a shock to the younger me. When you’ve had what you consider to be a superb education, steeped in classical literature, you tend to kid yourself that you are just too damn clever, too well-read, to fall for the kind of cheap confidence tricks that fool the unwashed masses.

Which, when you think about it, is what makes the faking of those classical quotes so cunning. They deviously exploit one of one of the cultural assumptions most deeply embedded in both the “educated” and “uneducated” classes alike: this idea that if one of the Ancient Greeks or Romans said it, it must be true because there’s almost nothing about the world that they didn’t know. Another thing they exploit is that the “educated” are rarely as clever as we pretend to be. For example, presented with a vaguely plausible quote with a fancy classical name attached, passing few of us are going to go: “Hang on a second. Did he really say that? Let me check …” Instead, we’ll go “Ah. The great Thucydides. He was the Greek general who wrote Anabasis. The sea! The sea!” and congratulate ourselves on what marvellously well-informed people we are.

Did you catch that palmed card there? Thucydides didn’t write Anabasis because he was far too busy writing the Commentarii de Bello Gallico!

April 13, 2021

Was it REALLY the WAR of NORTHERN AGGRESSION?!?!?!

Filed under: History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 28 Apr 2020

Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the Lost Cause myths that Abraham Lincoln was a tyrant, that nobody in the North cared about slavery or abolitionism, and that the warmongering Union invaded the South without provocation or just cause during the Civil War. Featuring some special guest appearances from your favorite kooky historical characters!

[Update, 8 Feb, 2023: Here’s a Vlogging Through History reaction video that amplifies several of the points Atun-Shei makes – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTQzXG15QsU]
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November 24, 2020

Is the day of the orator over?

Filed under: Britain, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Nigel Jones considers some of the great orators of history:

Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941. Churchill was certainly one of the great orators of history … Mackenzie King, on the other hand, certainly was not.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.

On 19 November 1863, President Abraham Lincoln rose to speak at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the battlefield which four and a half months before had seen the decisive turning point of the American Civil War. Lincoln was not even the principal speaker at the ceremony to dedicate a cemetery for those who had fallen in the battle.

Before he spoke, the President had to sit through a two-hour address by a pompous official orator, a windbag called Edward Everett. But when he finally got to his feet Lincoln entered political immortality. He spoke for only two minutes, but the few words he uttered about “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people” have echoed down the years – even Mrs Thatcher made a recording of them – inspiring and rousing generations to value and defend democracy.

Winston Churchill’s iconic status as Britain’s greatest Prime Minister largely rests on the handful of radio speeches he growled out to the nation in the darkest days of World War Two: “… fight them on the beaches … so much owed by so many to so few … this was their finest hour …” and so on.

Ever since Roman statesmen such as Cato and Cicero delivered their speeches on the Capitol, oratory like that spoken by Lincoln and Churchill has been a mainstay of western civilisation and governance. A carefully constructed argument or a few ringing phrases having the power to change minds, stiffen sinews, and bring down leaders.

Churchill himself was brought to supreme political power in 1940 by the power of the spoken word. Those words were spoken by one politician – his friend and schoolmate Leo Amery – quoting another, when Amery repeated Oliver Cromwell’s words dismissing the Long Parliament in calling for the end of Neville Chamberlain’s feeble administration: “You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you: in the name of God, go!” Chamberlain, albeit reluctantly, went.

September 27, 2020

CHECKMATE, LINCOLNITES! Confederate DESTROYS Yankee with FACTS and LOGIC

Filed under: History, Humour, Military, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Atun-Shei Films
Published 23 May 2019

Checkmate, Lincolnites! Debunking the three or four arguments Neo-Confederates always make when they talk about the Civil War.

Support Atun-Shei Films on Patreon ► https://www.patreon.com/atunsheifilms

#CheckmateLincolnites #CivilWar #AmericanHistory

Watch our film ALIEN, BABY! free with Prime ► http://a.co/d/3QjqOWv
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September 3, 2018

Planes, Trains, and… Actually, just Trains

Filed under: History, Railways, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Knowing Better
Published on 18 Sep 2016

The railroad has affected your life more than you may have realized. From starting the mail order business to creating some of America’s greatest landmarks, see how this simple transportation system shaped the country we live in today.

Patreon ► http://patreon.com/knowingbetter
Twitter ► https://twitter.com/KnowingBetterYT
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—

Why Trains Suck in America – Wendover Productions – https://youtu.be/mbEfzuCLoAQ

Photo Credits –
American Waterways/Canals are edits of images I used to teach in 2011 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.
The Three Proposed Railroad Routes are edits of images I used to teach in 2013 – The originals were from Wikicommons and have long since been removed or updated. No Copyright Information can be found.

I don’t normally add comments about the daily 2:00am videos, but there are a couple of things in this video that I think needed to be addressed. First, he rather casually skips over the vast increase in American railway building even before the enabling legislation for the transcontinental lines, and misses a great opportunity to explain how important they were in determining the outcome of the American Civil War. Second, and rather more irritatingly, he blithely asserts the common myth about the “Big Oil” conspiracy to buy up and shut down municipal light rail (streetcars, interurban railways, and radials). The various streetcar systems had almost all been economically shaky since the Great Depression (many had to be taken over by the municipalities involved to keep them out of bankruptcy), and the huge increase in private car ownership after World War 2 was the coup de grâce that finished off most of the rest. During the same time, bus routes were encroaching on the streetcar’s territory and had the huge advantage of not being tied to rails (allowing relatively easy re-routing without huge construction costs).

I’ve posted about High Speed Railways a few times before.

July 24, 2018

The Amazing Life of Ulysses S. Grant

Filed under: History, Military, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

PragerU
Published on 2 Jul 2018

No American led a more eventful life than Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th President of the United States and the Union Army’s most celebrated general. Garry Adelman, director of history and education at the Civil War Trust, tells Grant’s amazing story in this inspiring video.
Donate today to PragerU! http://l.prageru.com/2eB2p0h

This video was made in partnership with the American Battlefield Trust. Learn more about the Civil War and America’s Battlefields at: https://goo.gl/mmJMPk

July 22, 2018

Debunking the “King Cotton” school of history

Filed under: Economics, History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the current issue of Reason, Dierdre McCloskey discusses the claim that America became rich only or primarily due to exploitation of slave labour in the south:

Map showing which areas of the United States did and did not allow slavery between January 1861 to February 4 1861. On February 4 1861, the Confederate States of America was created. Territories and states which had not specifically banned slavery are colored red/pink.
Map by Golbez, via Wikimedia Commons.

In his second inaugural, Abraham Lincoln declared that “if God wills that [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk…as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'”

It is a noble sentiment. Yet the economic idea implied — that exploitation made us rich — is mistaken. Slavery made a few Southerners rich; a few Northerners, too. But it was ingenuity and innovation that enriched Americans generally, including at last the descendants of the slaves.

It’s hard to dispel the idea embedded in Lincoln’s poetry. TeachUSHistory.org assumes “that northern finance made the Cotton Kingdom possible” because “northern factories required that cotton.” The idea underlies recent books of a new King Cotton school of history: Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams (Harvard University Press), Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton: A Global History (Knopf), and Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books).

The rise of capitalism depended, the King Cottoners claim, on the making of cotton cloth in Manchester, England, and Manchester, New Hampshire. The raw cotton, they say, could come only from the South. The growing of cotton, in turn, is said to have depended on slavery. The conclusion — just as our good friends on the left have been saying all these years — is that capitalism was conceived in sin, the sin of slavery.

Yet each step in the logic of the King Cotton historians is mistaken. The enrichment of the modern world did not depend on cotton textiles. Cotton mills, true, were pioneers of some industrial techniques, techniques applied to wool and linen as well. And many other techniques, in iron making and engineering and mining and farming, had nothing to do with cotton. Britain in 1790 and the U.S. in 1860 were not nation-sized cotton mills.

Nor is it true that if a supply chain is interrupted there are no possible substitutes. Such is the theory behind strategic bombing, as of the Ho Chi Minh trail. Yet only in the short run is it “necessary” for a good to come from a particular region by a particular route. A missing link can be replaced, as in fact it was during the blockade of raw cotton from the South during the war. British and other European manufacturers turned to Egypt to provide some of what the South could not.

March 26, 2015

QotD: Picking sides in historical struggles

Filed under: History, Liberty, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

All laws and regulations have unforeseen consequences. That usually means unintended damage, but there’s no law of history that says every unplanned outcome is pernicious.

If you’re an advocate of a free society — one in which all arrangements are voluntary and there is the least coercive interference from governments or other thugs — history will present you with an unending series of conundrums. Whom do you side with in the Protestant Reformation, for example? The Catholic Church banned books and tortured scholars, and their official structure is one of hierarchy and authority. Easy enemy, right? Clear-cut bad guy. But the Church had kept the State in check for centuries — and vice versa, permitting seeds of freedom to root and flourish in the gaps between power centers. Whereas the Protestant states tended to be more authoritarian than the Catholic ones, with Luther and Calvin (not to mention the Anglicans) advocating orthodoxy through force. There’s a reason all those Northern princes embraced the Reformation: they wanted a cozier partnership of church and state.

This is certainly not the history I was taught in my Protestant private schools.

Similarly, most of us were schooled to side with the Union in the Civil War, to see Lincoln as a savior and the Confederacy as pure evil. But as much as the war may have resulted, however accidentally, in emancipating slaves, it also obliterated civil liberties, centralized power, strengthened central banking and fiat currencies and — to borrow from Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s great book title — enslaved free men.

“Father Abraham,” as the pietists called him after his assassination, was a tyrant whose primary goal was always what he actually achieved: central power over an involuntary union. Recasting this guy as an abolitionist hero is one of the many perverse legacies of America’s official history. But it’s a mistake to simply reverse the Establishment’s verdict and claim that the Confederacy was heroic. Plenty of Johnny Rebs were fighting a righteous battle against what they rightly deemed to be foreign invaders, but even if you ignore the little problem of the South’s “peculiar institution,” the Confederate government was no more liberal than its Northern rival. “While the Civil War saw the triumph in the North of Republican neo-mercantilism,” writes Hummel, “it saw the emergence in the South of full-blown State socialism.”

Reading history without taking sides may fit some scholarly ideal (actually, it seems to be a journalistic ideal created by the Progressive Movement to masquerade their views as the only unbiased ones), but it is not a realistic option. We cannot do value-free history. If we try, we instead hide or repress our biases, which makes them a greater threat to intellectual integrity.

Neither can we say, “a plague on both their houses,” and retreat to the realm of pure theory, libertarian or otherwise. We have to live in the real world, and even if we are not activists or revolutionaries, the same intellectual integrity that must reject “neutrality” also requires that we occasionally explore the question of second-best or least-evil options.

BK Marcus, “When evil institutions do good things”, Libertarian Standard, 2014-06-12.

October 24, 2014

A new biography of Lincoln

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Myron Magnet is quite enthusiastic about Founders’ Son: A Life of Abraham Lincoln by Richard Brookhiser:

Unlike those mega-biographies that bury their subject’s chief accomplishments under 900 pages of undigested detail, Richard Brookhiser’s compact, profound, and utterly absorbing new life of Abraham Lincoln, Founders’ Son, leaps straight to the heart of the matter. With searchlight intensity, it dazzlingly illuminates the great president’s evolving views of slavery and the extraordinary speeches in which he unfolded that vision, molding the American mind on the central conflict in American history and resolving, at heroic and tragic cost to the nation and himself, the contradiction that the Founding Fathers themselves could not resolve.

[…]

Lincoln did not start out an abolitionist. As early as 1837, he showed ambivalence on the subject. When the Illinois legislature voted to condemn abolition societies as unnecessarily provocative that year, legislator Lincoln and a colleague voted yes but entered a protest, declaring for the record “that the institution of slavery is founded on both injustice and bad policy.” Even so, as a campaigner for Whig candidate William Henry Harrison in the election of 1840, Lincoln, in a debate with Martin Van Buren supporter Stephen Douglas, “was not above slyly trafficking in prejudice,” Brookhiser notes, attacking Van Buren for supporting voting rights for New York State’s free blacks. But as his congressional term drew to an end in 1849, he proposed (unsuccessfully) a plan for ending slavery in the District of Columbia, and the next year, when the three-decade-long era of trying to find a compromise on the issue of slavery came to a climax with the Compromise of 1850, Lincoln knew that the choice between slavery and abolition was inevitable for the nation—and he knew that he would stand against slavery. “When the time comes my mind is made up,” he told a friend, “for I believe the slavery question can never be successfully compromised.”

The time came soon enough, with the infamous Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854. In effect, the act repealed the 1820 Missouri Compromise, which, in admitting Missouri as a slave state, had barred slavery from the rest of the Louisiana Territory lying north of the 36° 30’ parallel. By the terms of the new act, however, settlers pouring into the vast, hitherto empty territories of Kansas and Nebraska, which mostly lay north of the 1820 line, could choose whether to admit or bar slavery by “popular sovereignty,” the term used by Democratic senate leader Stephen Douglas, who boasted of having “passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act myself. . . . I had the authority and power of a dictator throughout the whole controversy.”

Though what we call the Lincoln-Douglas debates occurred in their Illinois senatorial contest of 1858, the “six years from 1854 to 1860 were one long Lincoln-Douglas debate,” writes Brookhiser, as Douglas went around the state defending the act and an indignant Lincoln pursued him, rebutting his emollient arguments in a string of immortal speeches. In Peoria in October 1854, Lincoln condemned Douglas for reopening an already scabbed-over wound. “Every inch of territory we owned already had a definite settlement of the slavery question,” he observed; but thanks to Douglas, “here we are in the midst of a new slavery agitation.” Douglas wants the people of the territories to decide? Fine. But who the people are “depends on whether a Negro is not or is a man.” If he is, then isn’t it “a total destruction of self-government, to say that he too shall not govern himself?” When a white man “governs himself, and also governs another man, that is more than self-government — that is despotism.”

Lincoln appealed to the authority of his beloved Founding Fathers — a subject Brookhiser, biographer of several of them, knows better than most. These great men found slavery already existing in the colonies, and to forge a new nation that the slave states would agree to join, they had to accept the evil out of necessity, not principle. They clearly knew that it was wrong, as is evident in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, by which the Continental Congress strove to prevent slavery’s spread to unsettled territories; in the Declaration of Independence—“the sheet anchor of American republicanism,” said Lincoln, “that teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,’” including blacks, who are emphatically men; and in the Constitution itself, which accepted slavery so reluctantly that it wouldn’t even name it, Lincoln noted, “just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death.” So let’s not go beyond where the Founders felt themselves forced to go. Let’s not metastasize slavery further.

October 3, 2013

QotD: Biographies of Abraham Lincoln

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

… Lincoln is yet to be got vividly between the covers of a book. The Nicolay-Hay work is quite impossible; it is not a biography, but simply a huge storehouse of biographical raw materials; whoever can read it can also read the official Records of the Rebellion. All the other standard lives of old Abe — for instance, those of Lamon, Herndon and Weil, Stoddard, Morse and Miss Tarbell — fail still worse; when they are not grossly preachy and disingenuous they are trivial. So far as I can make out, no genuinely scientific study of the man has ever been attempted. The amazing conflict of testimony about him remains a conflict; the most elemental facts are yet to be established; he grows vaguer and more fabulous as year follows year. One would think that, by this time, the question of his religious views (to take one example) ought to be settled, but apparently it is not, for no longer than a year ago there came a reverend author Dr. William E. Barton, with a whole volume upon the subject, and I was as much in the dark after reading it as I had been before I opened it. All previous biographers, it appeared by this author’s evidence, had either dodged the problem, or lied. The official doctrine, in this as in other departments, is obviously quite unsound. One hears in the Sunday-schools that Abe was an austere and pious fellow, constantly taking the name of God in whispers, just as one reads in the school history-books that he was a shining idealist, holding all his vast powers by the magic of an inner and ineffable virtue. Imagine a man getting on in American politics, interesting and enchanting the boobery, sawing off the horns of other politicians, elbowing his way through primaries and conventions, by the magic of virtue! As well talk of fetching the mob by hawking exact and arctic justice! Abe, in fact, must have been a fellow highly skilled at the great democratic art of gum-shoeing. I like to think of him as one who defeated such politicians as Stanton, Douglas and Sumner with their own weapons — deftly leading them into ambuscades, boldly pulling their noses, magnificently ham-stringing and horn-swoggling them — in brief, as a politician of extraordinary talents, who loved the game for its own sake, and had the measure of the crowd. His official portraits, both in prose and in daguerreotype, show him wearing the mien of a man about to be hanged; one never sees him smiling. Nevertheless, one hears that, until he emerged from Illinois, they always put the women, children and clergy to bed when he got a few gourds of corn aboard, and it is a matter of unescapable record that his career in the State Legislature was indistinguishable from that of a Tammany Nietzsche.

But, as I say, it is hopeless to look for the real man in the biographies of him: they are all full of distortion, chiefly pious and sentimental. The defect runs through the whole of American political biography, and even through the whole of American history.

H.L. Mencken, “Roosevelt: An Autopsy”, Prejudices, part 2, 1920.

December 8, 2012

Jefferson, Lincoln, Churchill, and Yogi Berra

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:27

What do these four men have in common? They’re “flypaper figures“: people who frequently are quoted as saying things they never said:

“People will see a quote and it appeals to an opinion that they have and if it has Jefferson’s name attached to it that gives it more weight,” she says. “He’s constantly being invoked by people when they are making arguments about politics and actually all sorts of topics.”

A spokeswoman for the Guide‘s publisher said it was looking into the quote. Mr. Norris’s publicist didn’t respond to requests for comment.

To counter what she calls rampant misattribution, Ms. Berkes is fighting the Internet with the Internet. She has set up a “Spurious Quotations” page on the Monticello website listing bogus quotes attributed to the founding father, a prolific writer and rhetorician who was the principal author of the Declaration of Independence.

[. . .]

Jefferson is a “flypaper figure,” like Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Winston Churchill and baseball player and manager Yogi Berra — larger-than-life figures who have fake or misattributed quotes stick to them all the time, says Ralph Keyes, an author of books about quotes wrongly credited to famous or historical figures.

November 18, 2012

Having (in)famous ancestors

Filed under: History, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:40

John Scalzi is having mixed reactions to all the Twitter updates about Lincoln and theatres:

And he wrote about his infamous relative a few years ago:

Every family should have an interesting skeleton in the family closet. In my family, it’s John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, who, of course, was the President of the United States during the American Civil War. Booth assassinated Lincoln not long after the cessation of hostilities between the Union and the Confederacy, by sneaking into the President’s box at Ford’s Theater (the show: Our American Cousin) and shooting him in the back of the head with a pistol. Booth then leaped from the box to the stage, shouting “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus it is with tyrants”) and “The South is avenged.” He broke his leg but managed to escape nevertheless. However, eleven days later, he was discovered in a barn, burned out, and then shot (by himself or by a soldier, it’s unclear). He died shortly thereafter. Some maintain that Booth’s body was never positively identified, so it’s possible he actually escaped. Either way, he’s dead now.

For the record, I’m not a direct descendant — my line goes through one of his nine other siblings, making him something along the lines of a great-great-great-great-great-grand-uncle. Whenever I mention my relationship to him, though, people’s eyes get wide, their jaws go momentarily slack, and some people actually back up a step, as if a long dormant assassination gene might suddenly fire up, and they’d be the unlucky recipient. I get a kick out of that. Then I go for the extra point my mentioning that John Wilkes and I have the same birthday: May 10, 131 years apart. By the time I mention I get edgy handling pennies and five dollar bills, people begin to wend their way to the nearest door.

August 15, 2009

Would-be assassins

Filed under: History, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:42

In honour of this news item, I felt it appropriate to buy this (actually, I downloaded it from iTunes).

I always thought it’d have been more appropriate if she’d tried to do this at the Lincoln Centre, just for the symmetry . . .

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