What would Lincoln say? Hot tweets not cool -- Feb. 8, 2018 column

By MARSHA MERCER

If there’s a president Donald Trump admires more than himself, it must be “the late, great Abraham Lincoln.”

“With the exception of the late, great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that’s ever held this office,” Trump told a rally last summer.

“Great president,” Trump said of Lincoln last year at a dinner for House Republicans. “Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Right? Does anyone know? A lot of people don’t know that. We have to build that up a little more.”

For the record, Republicans call themselves the party of Lincoln, and polls show most Americans know Lincoln was a Republican. 

Lincoln’s 209^th birthday will be Monday, but you might miss it. It’s not a federal or even a state holiday most places.

Only Illinois, Connecticut, Missouri and New York still observe it in February, according to the National Constitution Center. Indiana, oddly, celebrates Lincoln’s birthday the Friday after Thanksgiving.

Tourists who happen by the Lincoln Memorial at noon Monday will find a free ceremony open to the public with music, speeches and wreaths. At the Lincoln Birthplace National Historical Park in Kentucky, park staff will lay a wreath.

The following Monday, the third Monday in February, is the federal holiday that commemorates George Washington’s birthday. Congress never officially changed the name, though the holiday became known as Presidents Day.  

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY Abraham Lincoln!!!” Trump shouted via Instagram last year with a picture of the Lincoln Memorial and what was supposed to be a quotation from Lincoln: “And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.”

But those were not Lincoln’s words. The quotation came from an advertisement for a self-help book on aging in 1947, fact checkers reported.

There is a way Trump can honor the 16^th president that has nothing to do with capital letters, exclamation points or fake quotes, however. He can learn from Lincoln the brilliance of the unsent letter.

It’s a lesson any of us can apply in our “Tweet First, Think Later” age. 

When he was angry, Lincoln’s ritual was to write a letter venting his feelings and put the hot letter aside until he cooled off, when he would decide not to send it.

A famous example is his letter to Gen. George Meade after the Battle of Gettysburg in 1863. Although the Union Army was victorious, Meade had let Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and his army get away.

“I do not believe you appreciate the magnitude of the misfortune involved in Lee’s escape. He was within your easy grasp, and to have closed upon him would . . . have ended the war,” the president wrote Meade.

“As it is the war will be prolonged indefinitely…Your golden opportunity is gone, and I am distressed immeasurably because of it,” said the anguished commander in chief.

Lincoln knew the power of his words and chose not to demoralize his general in the field. The letter was found decades later among other Lincoln papers, with a notation that it was never signed or sent.

“Now obviously the opposite of that is when President Trump gets angry with somebody, that tweet goes out immediately,” historian Doris Kearns Goodwin told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour Jan. 24 in an interview.

“I sometimes think if only he had a hot tweet and a cool tweet, maybe things would be a lot better,” said Goodwin, author of “Team of Rivals” about the political genius of Lincoln in choosing political rivals for his Cabinet.

Lincoln was a master of communication in his time; his Gettysburg Address is recited to this day. Trump is the first president to master social media. But neither Trump nor anyone else could remember the content of his impulsive tweets, as ephemeral as his moods.

On Lincoln’s birthday, we can all be glad Trump admires the president historians consistently rate the best in history.

But if he truly wishes to honor Honest Abe, he – and we -- should stop and think before we fire off that hot tweet.

©2018 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

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Grateful for this Thanksgiving -- Nov. 17, 2016 column

By MARSHA MERCER

A friend tells me she’s still very sad. The election was a “slap in the face of decency,” and she can’t forgive her sisters and their husbands for voting for Donald Trump.

Another friend has trouble sleeping. A third said she’s stuck in election denial.

“It cannot be as bad as we can imagine,” she wrote in an email, adding, “Yes it is.”

Nearly 62 million Hillary Clinton voters are as gloomy as the nearly 61 million Trump voters are jubilant. 

Into this maelstrom of emotions comes the holiday devoted to carbs, calories – and gratitude. What -- now?

Yes, bring on Thanksgiving. We have rarely needed it more. 

We can’t always agree about politics, and shouldn’t. But we can use the pause in our daily routines to gather together, give thanks for what we have and share love with family and friends.

   

We’ve been giving thanks since before we had a president or a country. Massachusetts and Virginia still squabble over where the first Thanksgiving occurred. The Pilgrims’ celebration of the harvest and survival with about 90 Wampanoag Indians was in 1621, two years after Virginia colonists marked their safe arrival with a day of prayerful thanksgiving.

 

In 1789, George Washington signed a proclamation declaring a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer” for the new government. Other presidents followed, with a few interruptions. Thomas Jefferson refused to issue a Thanksgiving proclamation because he saw it as a conflict of church and state.

It took a decades-long crusade by Sarah Josepha Hale, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, to bring the national holiday into being. She wrote her first editorial on the subject in 1837.

Thanksgiving “might, without inconvenience, be observed on the same day of November, say the last Thursday in the month, throughout all New England; and also in our sister states, who have grafted it upon their social system. It would then have a national character, which would, eventually, induce all the states to join in the commemoration of `Ingathering,’” she wrote. 

With foresight, she added: “It is a festival which will never become obsolete, for it cherishes the best affections of the heart – the social and domestic ties.”

After many more editorials and through Hale’s persistent appeals, more than 30 states and territories had Thanksgiving on their calendars by the 1850s.

Because Hale never gave up, our national Thanksgiving holiday was created at a time even more divisive than ours. She finally persuaded President Abraham Lincoln to issue a proclamation in October 1863, as the Civil War raged.

Lincoln put out a call to “fellow-citizens in every part of the United States, and also those who are at sea, and those who are sojourning in foreign lands to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.”

Secretary of State William H. Seward, not Lincoln, actually wrote the proclamation, although Lincoln signed it. Seward’s original manuscript was sold a year later to raise money for Union troops, according to Abraham Lincoln Online.

   

The holiday was celebrated on the last Thursday of November by tradition – until President Franklin D. Roosevelt thought he’d boost retail sales by moving Thanksgiving up a week in 1939, from Nov. 30 to Nov. 23. An uproar ensued, and some states celebrated two Thanksgivings. Two years later Congress set Thanksgiving in law as the fourth Thursday.

   

Today we know that practicing gratitude – and not just on Thanksgiving -- is good for us. Hundreds of academic studies have found physical, psychological and social benefits in gratitude – from lower blood pressure to less loneliness to more optimism.

Gratitude is “an affirmation of goodness. We affirm that there are good things in the world, gifts and benefits we’ve received,” Robert A. Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, wrote in an essay for Greater Good, a University of California, Berkeley, website.

Emmons, a leading authority in the study of gratitude, said by practicing gratitude, “we recognize that the sources of this goodness are outside of ourselves.”

Some things haven’t changed in 400 years. Happy Thanksgiving.

©2016 Marsha Mercer

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Gettysburg address still powerful at 150 -- Nov. 7, 2013 column

By MARSHA MERCER

Rarely has a president been so wrong.

“The world will little note nor long remember what we say here…” So Abraham Lincoln predicted in his brief, eloquent speech at the dedication of the cemetery in Gettysburg on Nov. 19, 1863.

The sesquicentennial of the Civil War mostly has commemorated bloody battles. Now we turn to the powerful words that shaped our views.

    

At Gettysburg National Battlefield Park, Dedication Day ceremonies are Nov. 19. A series of lectures, book-signings and other events Nov. 16 to 23 will commemorate the Gettysburg address.

 

The address is one of the most noted and quoted speeches in history, but Lincoln wasn’t the main speaker that day. The orator was Edward Everett, a former senator and secretary of state who delivered a two-hour address. We laugh about long-winded Everett, but, historian Garry Wills reminds us, in the 19^th century lengthy dramatic speeches were a kind of performance art.

Four months earlier, on July 3, 1863, the Union had won the three-day Battle of Gettysburg. More than 50,000 Confederate and Union troops were dead, captured, missing or wounded. Bodies that had been hastily buried in makeshift graves on the battlefield were still being interred in the new Soldiers’ National Cemetery.

Lincoln had been invited to make “a few appropriate remarks.” His 272-word speech changed forever the way Americans think about our country and the Civil War.

“Up to the Civil War `the United States’ was invariably a plural noun: `The United States are a free country.’ After Gettysburg it became a singular: `The United States is a free country,’” writes Wills, author of the 1992 book “Lincoln at Gettysburg.”

In his remarks, Lincoln reached back to the Declaration of Independence to reframe the war as a fight for liberty and freedom. The nation was “conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he said.

And, “we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation under God shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”

Lincoln did not mention the Emancipation Proclamation. In effect for less than a year, it had freed many, but not all, slaves. The war would grind on for two more years, but in two minutes, he assigned surviving Americans the task of renewing the promise of freedom for all. His critics were livid. Some complained that the president was deliberately misleading the public about American history. The country was founded on the Constitution, which had avoided any mention of equality.

A Chicago newspaper called the address “a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot regard it as otherwise than willful,” historian David Herbert Donald writes in his 1995 book, “Lincoln.”

Donald says Wilbur F. Storey also wrote that the soldiers who perished on the battlefield died “to uphold the Constitution and the Union created by it,” not to “dedicate the nation to `the proposition that all men are created equal.’”

It seems odd in our word-flooded society that a few simple words could have such lasting impact. Our politicians blab constantly, their every forgettable syllable and gesture recorded, tweeted and analyzed.

In contrast, there’s no definitive account of the Gettysburg ceremonies. We don’t know when Lincoln wrote his remarks. Historian Wills dismisses as a silly myth the familiar story that the president scribbled his remarks on scrap paper on the train from Washington. At least five handwritten, slightly different copies survive.

The crowd interrupted Lincoln multiple times with applause -- or not at all, depending on who’s telling the story. The Associated Press reporter who transcribed Lincoln’s speech inserted brackets five times to indicate applause, but years later said he’d arbitrarily included the brackets and wasn’t sure there had been any applause, says historian Glenn LaFantasie.

   

Some say Lincoln thought the speech a failure. “That speech won’t scour!” he supposedly said afterwards. “Scour” referred to plows used on the prairies that failed to turn over the heavy soil, Donald explains. Wills says Lincoln was satisfied with the speech.

One thing is clear. When we read the address 150 years later, Lincoln’s ideas still speak to us. It’s well worth remembering the power of words.      

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