This Day in History -- Deep Resonances

On this day in 1863 an embattled Republican President, under enormous pressure from Democrats to bring the boys home and end an unpopular war, delivered a short speech dedicating a military cemetary on a battlefield of that war. The media wasn't impressed. One newspaper reported that a speech "more dull and commonplace it would not be easy to produce."

Today those brief remarks are generally considered to be the greatest political oration ever delivered in America. It went like this:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that 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.

For an excellent discussion of this speech and its meaning for American political culture see Gary Wills' Pulitzer Prize Winning book Lincoln at Gettysburg: Words that Remade American History [you can order through Amazon by clicking on one of the ads at the top of the page].

Now if Dubya could only speak English....

AND THERE'S THIS:

On this day in 1919 the U.S. Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles. Actually, it was rejected twice, the second time in the spring of 1920. As a result the United States never entered the League of Nations and instead signed a separate peace with Germany in 1921. Liberal historians of the mid-twentieth century [as if there was any other kind], intoxicated by a vision of collective security that would guarantee perpetual peace, routinely portrayed this rejection as a great tragedy and variously blamed it on Wilson's intransigence or Republican perfidity. Some even went so far as to claim that failure to ratify the treaty doomed the League of Nations to impotence and thus contributed to the coming of World War II. Today many historians, having watched decades of UN ineptitude and folly and the repeated failure of collective security arrangements, are a bit more forgiving. Many of the arguments for and against the Treaty and the League resonate today with those made in the runup to the Iraq Invasion.

The Organization of American Historians Teaching Guide and source materials for the ratification debate are online. Check it out here.

The photograph is the only known one of Lincoln at Gettysburg. In case you can't pick him out of the crowd he's the hatless guy with the receding hairline sitting just to the left of Gov. Andrew Curtin. Hope that helps.