Looking Back Like Lincoln

Independence Day is the occasion for a traditional patriotic exercise, and I’m not talking about the hike from the parking lot to the fireworks venue. I refer to an intellectual exercise, as this is the day we meditate on our founding documents and the way they express our bond as a nation. While I yield to no one in my admiration of the majesty and genius of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, another uniquely American document just might be my favorite. While not part of our charter, it’s a big part of our national character. My choice is a speech.

Abraham Lincoln was a great admirer of the nation’s founders with a firsthand appreciation of their moral fiber. That’s why in the fall of 1863 it took him just slightly more than two minutes, standing among the graves of America’s newest national cemetery, on America’s saddest battlefield, to summarize the nation’s founding dreams and current duties: liberty and equality for all, and “the unfinished work…the great task” of bringing freedom to fruition and establishing an enduring government of, by and for us.

Lincoln was three years old when we again fought the British for American freedom in the War of 1812. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson lived until Lincoln was 17, and for him their historic work was as much current affairs as it was history. He knew just how far the young nation had come in a short period of time. If you doubt how keenly one might appraise the trajectories of events 87 years removed, give it a try from our current point on the timeline:

Four score and seven years ago…

• American Robert Millikan won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work to determine the elementary charge of an atom and the photoelectric effect, work that helped establish the basis for modern particle physics;
• Working in Pittsburgh, immigrant Vladimir Zworykin perfected a design he would patent as “Television Systems”;
• Col. Jacob Schick patented the first electric shaver;
• Roy and Walt Disney founded the Disney Company and established Disney Studios;
• Born were actress Jean Stapleton, pilot Chuck Yeager, Project Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Wally Schirra, Senator Bob Dole, game show host Bob Barker, gossip columnist Liz Smith, television producer Aaron Spelling, novelist Joseph Heller, Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian, former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Price winner Henry Kissinger, and actor Don Adams;
• Yankee Stadium hosted its first baseball game.

To a grateful beneficiary of events three generations past – both momentous and mundane – those events convey a heightened contextual awareness. Lincoln was looking back four score and seven years to find parallels between one war and another, a moral continuity from era to era, and his context was insightful.

Our own equivalent look back finds an equally informative parallel, for 87 years ago all America was scandalized by another vast pool of oil. It was during an affair called Teapot Dome in which, without competitive bids and influenced by bribes, the secretary of the interior leased vast U.S. Navy underground oil reserves to a pair of petroleum tycoons. The oil fields were eventually restored to the government and, more significantly, in the scandal's wake the Supreme Court established Congress’ power to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas and compel testimony under pain of fine and imprisonment.

There’s a scant 60 year gap – that’s three score – separating the date of Lincoln’s address from the earliest date of our modern four score and seven year retrospective. Though slightly more mature and blessed by progress, despite our considerable global reach we are still an adolescent nation. Of the 12 founding members of NATO, we are the fifth youngest.

But we are old enough to remember our dreams and duties as well as Lincoln did at Gettysburg. And to remember that he, like the founding fathers whose memory he invoked, got it right.