Old Book, Thoughts Still Relevant

 

In 1943 Alexander Woollcott wrote a piece called “For Us, the Living,” which was subsequently republished in Clifton Fadiman’s Fireside Reader in 1961. Fadiman wrote a 272-word introduction in his reader to Woollcott’s piece. Woollcott’s essay follows, and after it appears Lincoln’s 272-word Gettysburg Address, the subject of Woollcott’s essay. 

Fadiman's reader includes, its flyleaf informs us, passages from “great novels, gripping suspense yarns, fascinating accounts of historical incidents, inspiring stories of human achievement, humorous essays,” and “light poetry.” It would have to be in the light of historical incident that “For Us, the Living” is included in the book. Woollcott quotes some of the scathing reviews of Lincoln’s speech that were published in days following November 19, 1863. The president remarks were called “silly” (by The Patriot and Union of Harrisburg, PA); “silly, flat and dish-watery” (by the Chicago Times); and “dull and commonplace” (by the American correspondent for the London Times). Woollcott agrees with history that the audience at Gettysburg was “quite unimpressed,” but he speculates that Lincoln was not really speaking to the 15,000 present that day (who had already stood through a seemingly interminable 2-hour-long oration by Edward Everett) when he gave his own two-minute speech.

Lincoln, Woollcott notes, was an experienced public speaker and knew very well how to engage an audience, and if he did not begin with the usual settling-in preliminaries but went immediately to his point, Woollcott says, that could not have been an accident. The writer in 1943 is certain of his interpretation of the historic event:

Have these words, for example, at any time since they were first spoken, ever had such painful immediacy as they have seemed to have in our own anxious era? Yes, he was talking to you and to me. Of this there is no real question in my mind. The only question—in an age when beggars on horseback the world around are challenging all that Lincoln had and was—the only question is whether we will listen . . . It is for us, the living, rather, to be dedicated here. . . .

For whom was this speech meant? Why, the answer is in his own words. For us. For us, the living. For us to resolve and see to it—that the government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Have those words not even more painful immediacy for Americans now, in 2025, than they had in the era of World War II, when freedom-loving countries of the world, included these United States, were united against fascist aggressors?