Simon Schama: Barack Obama recalls Abraham Lincoln as America revels in making history
[Simon Schama is a British professor of history and art history at Columbia University.]
So by mid-morning in the capital there were no papers to be had: no Washington Post, no New York Times, no Chicago Tribune. By the time I was back in Union Station, all the vendors had to offer lying forlornly in their bins were copies of Investors' News and, believe me, no one was buying that item.
America wanted to freeze-frame its moment of rebirth; wanted to have that headline shouting, like the Boston Globe "O-BABY" fixed in memory. This was the day when well-nigh everyone you talked to – and this included Republicans – said it made them proud to be an American. On this one day they – million upon million of voters – had done something a nation seldom gets to do: vindicated their democracy; taken back their country from the manipulators of power; returned to the ideals around which the republic was founded. No wonder heads were held high. At the diner strangers lifted palms for a high five and you slammed yours back.
By the Lincoln Memorial a tourist pointed to the sky and shouted: "There's a bald eagle!" It was, of course, one of Washington's overgrown gulls wheeling by the Washington Monument, but the patriotic birder could be forgiven his myopic excitement since heady symbolism was in the air. A young woman slowly mounted the steps of the beautiful memorial from where Martin Luther King told the immense throng, stretching as far as the eye could see, about his revelatory dream and that though he might not live to see it realised, he knew it would one day come about. The woman set a single white rose at the foot of Lincoln's statue. It joined a crowd of flowers. People had been coming to the memorial through the night as Obama delivered his victory speech in Chicago, wanting somewhere to pay homage to the transforming moment; to set, as the President-Elect said, with his unerring feel for the right words, "their hand on the arc of history".
Obama has something of a pardonable obsession with his fellow Illinois citizen – so much so that his speech on Tuesday night in Chicago quoted Lincoln's first inaugural address in 1861 without at first identifying him – as if the whole watching political nation would automatically know who he was talking about, especially since Lincoln's words spoke achingly of a national reconciliation even on the very threshold of civil war.
It's easy enough to guess what Lincoln, the 16th president, would make of Obama, the 44th. But what about the third? It was from Jefferson's hand that so much of the tragic atrocity, as well as the ennobling idealism of the American experiment, followed. For unlike Washington, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who proclaimed to the world as a truism that all men were created equal, could never bring himself to free his 100 or so slaves. And although Jefferson professed to believe in the universal fraternity of mankind, he thought black people intellectually inferior to those of European descent and patronised appallingly the most gifted of their race – like the scientist and inventor Benjamin Banneker.
In August 1791, Banneker presumed to write to Jefferson in Paris asking him, as a man of enlightened ideas, to "eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect to us" since "your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that the Universal Father hath given being to us all and that he hath made us all of one flesh but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties".
This was all very nice. But then Banneker took a step too far, adding his dismay at finding that Jefferson himself was one of those who detained "by fraud and violence a part of my brethren groaning under captivity and cruel oppression" and that "you should at the same time be guilty of that which you professedly detested in others". Jefferson wrote back crisply from Paris that "no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men". But then he added, with fatal condescension, that "the appearance of the want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America".
Jefferson insisted that no one "wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be". But his ardour apparently stopped well short of emancipation.
And there, in a historical nutshell, you have the entirety of the American race tragedy; the raw contradiction between profession and deed; a contradiction that endured from the Civil War to the battle to end segregation and the first unequivocal commitment of the government to enforce voting rights made by Lyndon B Johnson in both speech and statute in 1965. As he signed that Voting Rights Act – the law that made Barack Obama's victory possible, via the astounding registration drive his campaign mounted – LBJ is said to have declared that one of its results would be that the South would now be lost to the Democratic Party.
For all his sins and tragic flaws, Johnson was in this respect at least a brave and righteous prophet who did the right thing. So how he would have relished the exhilarating irony of this week when his own state, Texas, stayed deepest red-Republican, but the Old Dominion, Virginia, the home of the founding fathers and four of the first five Presidents of the United States, went Democratic for the first time since his own sweep in 1964, so that an African-American could be elected president and the original sin of the republic finally wiped clean.
There is another respect, too, in which American ideals, to which custodians like Lincoln clung in the face of bitter reality, have at long last been vindicated. Government "of the people, for the people, by the people" now has indeed a better chance of not perishing from the earth. For the election embodied the victory of democratic optimism over cynical manipulation...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
So by mid-morning in the capital there were no papers to be had: no Washington Post, no New York Times, no Chicago Tribune. By the time I was back in Union Station, all the vendors had to offer lying forlornly in their bins were copies of Investors' News and, believe me, no one was buying that item.
America wanted to freeze-frame its moment of rebirth; wanted to have that headline shouting, like the Boston Globe "O-BABY" fixed in memory. This was the day when well-nigh everyone you talked to – and this included Republicans – said it made them proud to be an American. On this one day they – million upon million of voters – had done something a nation seldom gets to do: vindicated their democracy; taken back their country from the manipulators of power; returned to the ideals around which the republic was founded. No wonder heads were held high. At the diner strangers lifted palms for a high five and you slammed yours back.
By the Lincoln Memorial a tourist pointed to the sky and shouted: "There's a bald eagle!" It was, of course, one of Washington's overgrown gulls wheeling by the Washington Monument, but the patriotic birder could be forgiven his myopic excitement since heady symbolism was in the air. A young woman slowly mounted the steps of the beautiful memorial from where Martin Luther King told the immense throng, stretching as far as the eye could see, about his revelatory dream and that though he might not live to see it realised, he knew it would one day come about. The woman set a single white rose at the foot of Lincoln's statue. It joined a crowd of flowers. People had been coming to the memorial through the night as Obama delivered his victory speech in Chicago, wanting somewhere to pay homage to the transforming moment; to set, as the President-Elect said, with his unerring feel for the right words, "their hand on the arc of history".
Obama has something of a pardonable obsession with his fellow Illinois citizen – so much so that his speech on Tuesday night in Chicago quoted Lincoln's first inaugural address in 1861 without at first identifying him – as if the whole watching political nation would automatically know who he was talking about, especially since Lincoln's words spoke achingly of a national reconciliation even on the very threshold of civil war.
It's easy enough to guess what Lincoln, the 16th president, would make of Obama, the 44th. But what about the third? It was from Jefferson's hand that so much of the tragic atrocity, as well as the ennobling idealism of the American experiment, followed. For unlike Washington, the author of the Declaration of Independence, who proclaimed to the world as a truism that all men were created equal, could never bring himself to free his 100 or so slaves. And although Jefferson professed to believe in the universal fraternity of mankind, he thought black people intellectually inferior to those of European descent and patronised appallingly the most gifted of their race – like the scientist and inventor Benjamin Banneker.
In August 1791, Banneker presumed to write to Jefferson in Paris asking him, as a man of enlightened ideas, to "eradicate that train of absurd and false ideas and opinions which so generally prevails with respect to us" since "your sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are, that the Universal Father hath given being to us all and that he hath made us all of one flesh but that he hath also, without partiality, afforded us all the same sensations and endowed us all with the same faculties".
This was all very nice. But then Banneker took a step too far, adding his dismay at finding that Jefferson himself was one of those who detained "by fraud and violence a part of my brethren groaning under captivity and cruel oppression" and that "you should at the same time be guilty of that which you professedly detested in others". Jefferson wrote back crisply from Paris that "no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men". But then he added, with fatal condescension, that "the appearance of the want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa and America".
Jefferson insisted that no one "wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body and mind to what it ought to be". But his ardour apparently stopped well short of emancipation.
And there, in a historical nutshell, you have the entirety of the American race tragedy; the raw contradiction between profession and deed; a contradiction that endured from the Civil War to the battle to end segregation and the first unequivocal commitment of the government to enforce voting rights made by Lyndon B Johnson in both speech and statute in 1965. As he signed that Voting Rights Act – the law that made Barack Obama's victory possible, via the astounding registration drive his campaign mounted – LBJ is said to have declared that one of its results would be that the South would now be lost to the Democratic Party.
For all his sins and tragic flaws, Johnson was in this respect at least a brave and righteous prophet who did the right thing. So how he would have relished the exhilarating irony of this week when his own state, Texas, stayed deepest red-Republican, but the Old Dominion, Virginia, the home of the founding fathers and four of the first five Presidents of the United States, went Democratic for the first time since his own sweep in 1964, so that an African-American could be elected president and the original sin of the republic finally wiped clean.
There is another respect, too, in which American ideals, to which custodians like Lincoln clung in the face of bitter reality, have at long last been vindicated. Government "of the people, for the people, by the people" now has indeed a better chance of not perishing from the earth. For the election embodied the victory of democratic optimism over cynical manipulation...