A friend has just forwarded me this interesting retraction of a dismissive review 150 years ago of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address:  http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/15/us/gettysburg-address-editorial-retraction/index.html.
Clearly these editors don’t share the same sensibility as our dearly beloved friends at the Post and Courier in Charleston South Carolina–who saw fit to publish some really pretty obnoxious comments about the GA this Veterans Day–of all days. I won’t honor the piece by re-posting it, but you’re welcome to look it up if you want to see what I’m referring to. If anyone felt moved to write a sharp rejoinder to the editor of the Post and Courier, I would encourage you to do so. Here’s a version of what I sent them yesterday–which may or may not appear:

Dear Sir,

Kirkpatrick Sale may prefer to live in a nation whose watchwords are not freedom and democracy, but I don’t think he’d like it. He may prefer to live in a nation that does not guarantee equal treatment under the law, or aspire to provide equal opportunity for all its citizens, but why the Post and Courier would publish his cynical misreading of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address is beyond me. Why you should have done so on Veterans Day of all days, the day when we remember American men and women who died in the service of this nation “conceived in liberty” and dedicated constitutionally to the principle of republican government is unfathomable.  To those men and women who answered the call of the United States and went to war secure in the belief that they were risking their last full measure for principles of freedom and democracy nowhere so memorably and definitively expressed as in the Gettysburg Address, Mr Sale’s sophistry is nothing short of an insult.

Simon Lewis

Filed under: Jubilee Project

With a little help from our friends in the Bully Pulpit series on political communication, the Jubilee Project held its final public program of the year: a panel discussion of the historical meaning and contemporary significance of the Gettysburg Address.  Congressman James L. Clyburn, Professor Vernon Burton (Clemson University), and Professor Brian McGee (College of Charleston) gave brief presentations that assessed Lincoln’s celebrated remarks from a political, historical, and rhetorical standpoint, respectively, before the floor was opened for questions and answers. For me, one of the strongest points made was Professor Burton’s that in 1863 there was no guarantee that by the beginning of the 21st century, Lincoln’s faith in freedom and democracy might have become so ubiquitous. Lincoln’s reference to a “new birth of freedom” should not be understood just in a local context, alluding to the expansion of freedom to those who were unfree in the slave-holding states, but in a global context where the revolutionary 18th-century drive toward republican democracy was in danger of stalling out.  

Much was also made of Lincoln’s Biblical allusions. I would suggest that the Address has in fact become an article of faith in American politics, and stands as a kind of creed in America’s secular political religion.  As such the speech reminds us of the power of ideas, and the necessity for great leaders to find words sufficient not just to express those ideas, but to inspire others to put those ideas into practice.  Without the rhetorical skill of the Gettysburg’s Address, without the soaring oratory of Martin Luther King a hundred years later, who is to say whether the principles of freedom, democracy and equality of opportunity would have been put into practice and given the force of law.

The pictures below show President P George Benson of the College of Charleston with Congressman Clyburn,; College of Charleston theatre professor Joy Vandervort-Cobb reading the Gettysburg Address at the beginning of the event; and the three panelists–Congressman Clyburn, Professor Burton, and Professor McGee.

Filed under: Jubilee Project

Filed under: Jubilee Project