How times have changed.

Top photo circa 1989 -- typewriters

bottom photo circa 1998 -- computers

William Herndon, who would become Lincoln's law partner in 1844, describes the event this way: "we had a society in Springfield, which contained and commanded all the culture and talent of the place. Unlike the other one its meetings were public, and reflected great credit on the community ... The speech was brought out by the burning in St. Louis a few weeks before, by a mob, of a negro. Lincoln took this incident as a sort of text for his remarks ... The address was published in the Sangamon Journal and created for the young orator a reputation which soon extended beyond the limits of the locality in which he lived."

The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions:
Address Before the Young Men's Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois
January 27, 1838

Donald Trump did not mention Lincoln’s First Inaugural address in his speech commemorating the spirit of American Independence at Mount Rushmore on Friday night. But the president’s speech—perhaps his most forceful and eloquent to date—vibrated with the same energy and existential commitment that fired Lincoln in March 1861.

Lincoln came to office at a time of crisis. His election had precipitated the secession of seven Southern states. His inaugural address was both a plea for conciliation and unity as well as a warning that violence would be stopped with force. “We are not enemies, but friends,” Lincoln said.

Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Donald Trump issued a kindred invitation to unity in the midst of conflict. The signing of the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in July 1776 was a world-historical event. It represented, the president rightly said, “the culmination of thousands of years of Western Civilization—and the triumph not only of spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason.” At the center of the triumph was the animating possession of liberty, made possible by the unanimous affirmation of the principles Thomas Jefferson articulated in the Declaration: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights . . .”

The president’s speech was a passionate celebration of American freedom and American greatness—a greatness, he noted, that was embodied by the sublime majesty of the heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt sculpted into the granite pinnacle of Mt. Rushmore. //

the president has promised to cancel cancel culture. Is that a contradiction, a violation of the spirit of tolerance he has promised to uphold? No.

The enemies of civilization routinely use and abuse its freedoms in order to destroy it. Candid men understand this and act to prevent it. As G. K. Chesterton put it, “There is a thought that stops thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped.” //

The president accurately diagnosed the extent of the malady and its true goal:

In our schools, our newsrooms—even our corporate boardrooms—there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished. Make no mistake: this left-wing Cultural Revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.

Remember this the next time you see a mob come for a statue of Christopher Columbus or George Washington or Teddy Roosevelt, or, indeed, of Robert E. Lee. What they are coming for is our history—who we are.

We’re surrounded today by evidence that too few of us know our history, and too many have been mis-educated to see only its flaws. //

When we obsess over our faults, we lose perspective and forget that aspect of our past. Never before had a country been built upon the idea that it was not the rule of kings but the dignity of each person that formed the basis of political and social order. We did that.

Our liberty is founded not upon the gift of a favored few, but on the idea that each of us has certain inherent rights, bestowed by God and woven into the fabric of nature itself. The magnificent fireworks we set off on this day every year symbolize one of the most explosive ideas in all human history.

Yet we take it far too much for granted. We assume that these commitments represent the default position of the human race. We’re surrounded today by evidence that too few of us know our history, and too many have been mis-educated to see only its flaws and appreciate none of its grandeur.

After years of teaching American history, I’ve come to the conclusion that to appreciate America properly, we need to know much more than we do about the rest of the world, and about how the American story compares with its real-world alternatives. That’s why I’ve often wished that every course in American history could begin with a reading of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” or Robert Conquest’s “The Great Famine,” or Jung Chang’s “Mao,” books that offer a horrifying glimpse into an alternative reality of tyranny, murder, and degradation that even the worst moments in our history cannot rival.

These are large books, so let me suggest a shortcut for this Fourth of July. Before you go out to take in the fireworks and festivities, set aside a couple of hours to watch the recently released movie “Mr. Jones,” directed by Agnieszka Holland, an eminent Polish screenwriter and director.

Perhaps we have put too much weight on ideas and political philosophy //

Christopher Caldwell’s essay on the roots of America’s partisan divide the other day. He makes a fascinating argument: the two seminal dates in American history are not 1619 and 1787, but rather 1787 and 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act passed.

That year, for all intents and purposes, a second constitution was created. American constitutional law pivoted from the ethos of ‘one law for all’ to ‘different laws for different races, sexes, sexual orientations, etc.’–seemingly a move to boost the historically disadvantaged but actually a regression to tiered inequality which America had slowly but surely been moving away from since the founding with votes for women, desegregation, and decriminalization of homosexuality.

The civil rights constitution turned old injustices around and granted poorly defined identity groups permanent privileges not available to Americans as a whole (‘privilege’ = ‘private law’). Caldwell writes:

Now we can apply this insight to parties. So overpowering is the hegemony of the civil rights constitution of 1964 over the Constitution of 1787, that the country naturally sorts itself into a party of those who have benefitted by it and a party of those who have been harmed by it.

Isotopes produced in the original Manhattan Project reactors seeded decades of research and even a few Nobel Prizes. //

On July 16 this year, on what marks the 75th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb test, a patient may go to the doctor for a heart scan. A student may open her textbook to study the complex chemical pathways green plants use to turn carbon dioxide in the air into sugar. A curious grandmother may spit into a vial for a genetic ancestry test and an avid angler may wake up to a beautiful morning and decide to fish at one of his favorite lakes.

If any of these people were asked to think about this selection of activities from their days, it would likely strike them as totally unrelated to the rising of a mushroom cloud above the New Mexico desert three-quarters of a century ago. But each item from the list has been touched by that event.

The device that was detonated at dawn on that fateful day unleashed the energy of around 20,000 tons of TNT from a plutonium core roughly the size of a baseball. It obliterated the steel tower on which it stood, melted the sandy soil below into a greenish glass -- and launched the atomic age. //

The scan, the textbook, the genetic test and the favorite lakeside retreat represent elements of the Manhattan Project’s forgotten legacy. They are connected through a type of atom called an isotope, which was deployed in scientific labs and hospitals before World War II, but whose overwhelming prevalence in the decades after the war was enabled and pushed by the government apparatus that was a direct heir of the effort to build the bomb.

“Generally when both ordinary people and scholars have thought about the legacy of the Manhattan Project, we thought about the way in which physics and engineering were put to military use,” said Angela Creager, a science historian at Princeton University whose book “Life Atomic” chronicles the history of isotopes in the decades after WWII. “Part of what I discovered was that atomic energy had just as much of a legacy in some of the fields that we think of as peaceable as it did in military uses. … A lot of the postwar advances in biology and medicine that have really been taken for granted owe a lot to the materials and policies that were part of the Cold War U.S.”

Thomas Jefferson's original "rough draft" of the Declaration of Independence, written in June 1776, includes dozens of edits from historical figures including John Adams and Benjamin Franklin. 

Transcription of Thomas Jefferson's 'original Rough draught' of the Declaration of Independence. //

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

In this speech Abraham Lincoln explained his objections to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and resurrected his political career. In the speech Lincoln criticized popular sovereignty. Questioned how popular sovereignty could supersede the Northwest Ordinance and the Missouri Compromise. Lincoln dismissed arguments that climate and geography would keep slavery out of Kansas and Nebraska. Most importantly, Lincoln attacked the morality of slavery itself. Lincoln argued that the slaves were people, not animals, and consequently possessed certain natural rights. "If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that `all men are created equal;' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another."

Source: Neely, Mark E. Jr. 1982. The Abraham Lincoln Encyclopedia. New York: Da Capo Press, Inc. //

The argument of “Necessity” was the only argument they ever admitted in favor of slavery; and so far, and so far only as it carried them, did they ever go. They found the institution existing among us, which they could not help; and they cast blame upon the British King for having permitted its introduction. BEFORE the constitution, they prohibited its introduction into the north-western Territory—the only country we owned, then free from it. AT the framing and adoption of the constitution, they forbore to so much as mention the word “slave” or “slavery” in the whole instrument.

In the provision for the recovery of fugitives, the slave is spoken of as a “PERSON HELD TO SERVICE OR LABOR.” In that prohibiting the abolition of the African slave trade for twenty years, that trade is spoken of as “The migration or importation of such persons as any of the States NOW EXISTING, shall think proper to admit,” &c.

These are the only provisions alluding to slavery. Thus, the thing is hid away, in the constitution, just as an afflicted man hides away a wen or a cancer, which he dares not cut out at once, lest he bleed to death; with the promise, nevertheless, that the cutting may begin at the end of a given time. Less than this our fathers COULD not do; and NOW [MORE?] they WOULD not do.

Necessity drove them so far, and farther, they would not go. But this is not all. The earliest Congress, under the constitution, took the same view of slavery. They hedged and hemmed it in to the narrowest limits of necessity.

In 1794, they prohibited an out-going slave-trade—that is, the taking of slaves FROM the United States to sell.

In 1798, they prohibited the bringing of slaves from Africa, INTO the Mississippi Territory—this territory then comprising what are now the States of Mississippi and Alabama. This was TEN YEARS before they had the authority to do the same thing as to the States existing at the adoption of the constitution.

In 1800 they prohibited AMERICAN CITIZENS from trading in slaves between foreign countries—as, for instance, from Africa to Brazil. In 1803 they passed a law in aid of one or two State laws, in restraint of the internal slave trade. In 1807, in apparent hot haste, they passed the law, nearly a year in advance to take effect the first day of 1808—the very first day the constitution would permit—prohibiting the African slave trade by heavy pecuniary and corporal penalties.

In 1820, finding these provisions ineffectual, they declared the trade piracy, and annexed to it, the extreme penalty of death. While all this was passing in the general government, five or six of the original slave States had adopted systems of gradual emancipation; and by which the institution was rapidly becoming extinct within these limits.

Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.

Abraham Lincoln recalls some facts that the left would rather not hear. //

Like any good person trying to change the world, Lincoln had to put forth many arguments in favor of his position and debunk many other ideas to boot.

Lincoln is still debunking arguments to this day, believe it or not. Today, Lincoln’s old adversaries, the Democrats, have crafted a narrative proclaiming that our nation was founded on white supremacy. They often cite the fact that our founders owned slaves themselves.

Like many leftist arguments, this is only partly true. It’s true that our founders did own slaves, but to say that our nation was founded on “white supremacy” and the idea that men aren’t really created equal despite their most famous document saying so is fully off the mark.

I could explain it myself, but I’m just going to step aside for a moment and let Lincoln himself explain and defend our founding fathers and the government they created during his 1854 Peoria speech.

https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/peoriaspeech.htm

Thus we see, the plain unmistakable spirit of that age, towards slavery, was hostility to the PRINCIPLE, and toleration, ONLY BY NECESSITY.

It should be understood that the founding fathers were exceedingly brilliant men who knew they were also limited by the power and culture of their time. Nevertheless, they planted seeds that would soon grow into what Lincoln would reap.

So the purpose of America was not the equality of white men, but the equality of all peoples. That’s what America was built on. To say otherwise is factually incorrect.

“Nobody is more dangerous than he who imagines himself pure in heart,” wrote James Baldwin, “for his purity, by definition, is unassailable.” This observation has been confirmed many times throughout history. However, China’s Cultural Revolution offers perhaps the starkest illustration of just how dangerous the “pure in heart” can be. The ideological justification for the revolution was to purge the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and the nation more broadly, of impure elements hidden in its midst: capitalists, counter-revolutionaries, and “representatives of the bourgeoisie.” To that end, Mao Zedong activated China’s youth—unblemished and uncorrupted in heart and mind—to lead the struggle for purity. Christened the “Red Guards,” they were placed at the vanguard of a revolution that was, in truth, a cynical effort by Mao to reassert his waning power in the Party. Nevertheless, it set in motion a self-destructive force of almost unimaginable depravity. //

Mao’s decision to use China’s youth as his vanguard was, by fortune or foresight, instrumental to the revolution’s initial success. The young may be pure in heart, but they are also high on emotion and short on life experience. Simply put, they are natural philistines. Still in their identity-forming years, China’s young had few barriers to a complete identification with the Red Guards. Conformity and intolerance of dissent followed naturally. //

With undeveloped mental immune systems, their soft skulls were fertile ground for Mao’s secular Manichaeism. Manichaeism reduces society, with all the diversity and complexity of human experience, to a blunt dichotomy: light and darkness, good and evil, right and wrong, radical and reactionary. “There is no middle way!” became a popular slogan. Ideologies like these are intellectually and morally vapid, yet their simplicity and certainty are alluring, especially to the young. Thus, Mao’s child revolutionaries could—with youthful exuberance and clarity of purpose—chain a teacher to a radiator and bludgeon him to death with an iron bar, or force a teacher to eat nails and feces, among other tortures. //

The revolution’s descent into anarchy and violence calls to mind the first stanza of W.B. Yeats’ famous poem “The Second Coming,” which begins with the “Turning and turning in the widening gyre.” For the Cultural Revolution it reads like prophecy, a forewarning of what transpires when a people, united around a single unassailable vision, finds its enemies by turning inwards. With no competing visions or ability to self-correct, the turning continues, the gyre widens, and soon:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

At one point, Fr. Stephen Schumacher of the St. Louis Archdiocese stood between them and the statue and tried to talk sense to them, explaining the history, that St. Louis when King of France had done good works for his people which is one of the reasons he’s a saint and the city is named for him. But the mob even tried to shout down a priest and showed they failed to understand history. They didn’t care what he had to say or the facts, they’ve been told to hate it so they must rip it down.

Nothing more heroic than standing, literally, in the face of the angry mob, with the calmness of truth. Notice how they also threatened the St. Louis Cathedral when he told them to go there and learn the history, one says, “Eventually, we’re taking that too, though.”

The Archdiocese issued a formal statement, defending the statue and St. Louis.

The Archdiocese said in their statement that the public “should not seek to erase history, but recognize and learn from it.”

They defended the statue of the saint and recounted his road to sainthood. When ruling Louis IX “focused on impartial justice, protecting the rights of his subjects, steep penalties for royal officials abusing power, and a series of initiatives to help the poor.” The Archdiocese also noted that Louis IX performed numerous charitable acts such as feeding the poor and creating hospitals.

“For Catholics, St. Louis is an example of an imperfect man who strived to live a life modeled after the life of Jesus Christ.” //

Claire Lehmann
✔
@clairlemon
· Jun 9, 2020
Replying to @clairlemon

Gro
ups of students at schools and universities appointed themselves as Red Guards. Many of them were as young as 13 years old. You can read about what they did here https://quillette.com/2018/12/18/the-children-of-the-revolution/ …
Claire Lehmann
✔
@clairlemon

A 1971 report from the NYT describes how sweeping the destruction of the “four olds” had been (Old Customs, Old Culture, Old Habits, Old Ideas). E.g. It was common for Chinese homes to have altars to ancestors.
Red Guards entered homes & destroyed them https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/19/archives/china-transformed-by-elimination-of-four-olds.html …

In short, African Americans were not passive in the face of slavery, but they could not and did not end it by themselves. Black abolitionists, slave rebellions, and fugitive slaves all put moral and political pressure on the American system. But how the system responded, and the choices and sacrifices it made, were the result of American ideals, American popular opinion, Republican political leadership, and the Union Army.

Modern America is far from the only place where mobs have torn down statues. “During the French Revolution there were attacks on statues,” says Jarrett Stepman, author of “The War on History.” “Of course, that devolved into attacks on people.” Stepman discusses France’s history of statue-toppling, Lincoln’s warnings on mob rule, and more. Listen to the interview on the podcast, or read the lightly edited transcript, below.

“The most effective way to destroy a people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”—George Orwell

According to The New York Times, the true founding of the United States of America did not begin with the Declaration of Independence in 1776.

Rather, the Times informs us, the founding occurred in 1619, the year 20 or so African slaves were brought to Jamestown, Virginia. The American Revolution occurred, the Times says, primarily because of Americans’ desire to keep their slaves. Consequently, “America is irrevocably and forever rooted in injustice and racism.”

My guests Robert Woodson and Kenneth Blackwell emphatically do not agree, and Woodson has launched the 1776 Project to refute the Times’ claims in its 1619 Project.

“I was particularly outraged that The New York Times would exploit America’s birth defect of slavery and weaponize race and use the conditions of the black community as a bludgeon against this country’s character, almost defining it as if it’s a criminal organization,” Woodson says. “What they are doing is insulting by implying that all blacks are victims and should be pitied.”

Blackwell says: “The 1619 Project is nothing but a group of apologists for the expansion of the welfare state. What we should be doing, and what Bob’s 1776 Project is about, is the creation of opportunities and individual empowerment in society. As Frederick Douglass said, we all have to be agents of our own well-being.”

In the wake of recent Black Lives Matter protests—in response to the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer and the important dialog that has resulted—I am inclined to revisit The New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project.

This project propagates a popular narrative, which has taken hold among many in the media, politics, and education, to link the foundational origins of the American experiment not to the context of the American Revolution of 1776 but to 1619, the year that enslaved Angolans arrived on the shores of colonial Jamestown, Virginia.

In this view, all of America’s current institutions, public attitudes, economics, and social structures—or, perhaps more pointedly, the alleged horrors and woes therein—are a result of slavery.

Among other claims, it credits slavery for the dismal state of America’s prison system, for suburban traffic congestion, for the prevalence of obesity and diabetes, even for capitalism itself. All this, even though many of this narrative’s adherents belong to the most respected, most lucrative institutions in the country—which is a testament to the unique constitutional freedoms that Americans enjoy.

Many who hear or read such views are incredulous, including the founders of the 1776 Project, who are attempting to dispel the belief that black America’s destiny has been shaped in the crucible of slavery and racism.

Bob Woodson, the 1776 Project’s founder, objects to the argument that the “shadow of slavery and Jim Crow” hangs over the destiny of black Americans.

“Nothing is more lethal,” he says, “than to convey to people that they have an exemption from personal responsibility.”

The 1776 Project’s organizers, for example, criticize the characterization of America as a place in which all whites are villains and all blacks are victims. It is easy, they argue, “to point to slavery and Jim Crow and then be done with your account of black American history. But that is lazy thinking.”

In fact, despite what the liberal media would have you believe, many African Americans have bitterly fought the narrative that blacks are eternally constrained by the attitudes and structures of racism.

A pivotal moment in world history occurred when Mary Ball Washington forbade her eldest son from joining the British navy as a cabin boy—one-third of whom died at sea.

After obeying his mother this time, George Washington lived to fight and lead another day. Despite a sometimes complex relationship with his mother, he said a maternal hand led him to manhood, Craig Shirley writes in “Mary Ball Washington: The Untold Story of George Washington’s Mother.”

Shirley joins “The Right Side of History” to talk about the book and why the mother of the Father of Our Country was a far more nuanced person than the “June Cleaver” or “Joan Crawford” depictions in other Washington biographies.

"As the mob rises, civilization recedes." //

Peaceful protests are guaranteed under the First Amendment. Rioting, looting, vandalism, and destruction of private and/or public property is not a First Amendment-protected “right” in any way, shape, form or fashion. //

As all of this has played out, there have been precious few leaders on either side of the aisle who have been willing to step up and say “enough” and to call for action. Tucker Carlson has talked about this numerous times during his opening monologues since the riots started.

“If you can’t tell the truth when the truth actually matters, then nothing you say matters,” he stated last week about people who were unwilling to stand up to rage mobs out of fear of being canceled. //

FortesFortunaJuvat
2 hours ago
It is not the role of government to protect citizens. The role of government is to protect the rights of citizens, to protect and defend the entirety of the Republic, and to ensure representative government within all of the states. The failure of government - local, state, and federal - to enforce existing law against those who are attempting to destroy the United States leaves it to the citizens to not only defend themselves but to defend their way of life.

Unless or until government acts to enforce the laws against those who seek anarchy and destruction then the people are left to rely on themselves to do so.

The brand new Pan Am board game will appeal to kids, and their parents who are aviation aficionados and Pan Am followers.