American History Revised (23 page)

Today’s White House staff totals more than 1,500 people—a bloated bureaucracy. Anyone who thinks that today’s needs are more complex than Lincoln’s can look to World War II, when America faced its greatest national emergency. Franklin Roosevelt had a staff small enough—fewer than fifty—so he could deal with each assistant personally, and he ordered that his assistants have “no authority over anyone in any department or agency” and should “in no event be interposed between the President and the head of any department or agency.” FDR was his own chief of staff (as were Truman, JFK, and LBJ). Sam Rosenman, legal adviser to FDR during World War II, had no assistants at all. The man in that position today has at least fifty. Said Rosenman, “I can’t imagine what they all do!”

Back to Abraham Lincoln. Because his staff was small, he had to do his spadework himself. He would hold public receptions twice a week, whereby anybody could come along and offer ideas and complaints to the president. Sometimes as many as fifty people would show up. “I call these receptions my public-opinion baths,” he said, “and, though they may not be pleasant in all particulars, the effect as a whole is renovating and invigorating to my perceptions of responsibility and duty. It would never do for a President to have guards with drawn sabres at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.”

1862
When Abraham Lincoln gave his magisterial Gettysburg Address, it was considered “an oratorical disaster” because it was too short—just two and a half minutes. People were used to long-winded speeches like Edward Everett’s two-and-a-quarter-hour oration that preceded Lincoln’s remarks; the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which lasted almost four hours; and the Daniel Webster speech to the Whaling Association in Nantucket, whereby he began his talk and
suddenly—in a dramatic flourish—raised his arms and delivered the rest of his speech to “the whales of the sea.”

Lincoln’s short talk left his audience adrift and mystified: Was that all? If the president was going to give a speech, why not talk for hours like everyone else? Hadn’t he done his homework?

Indeed he had. Lincoln had worked very hard on his speech. The rumor that he jotted it down while on the train to Gettysburg is totally wrong: he had worked on his speech for days, and wanted fervently for it to be epochal. One is reminded of Mark Twain’s famous line forty years later: “I am sorry to write you such a long letter, I did not have time to write a shorter one.”

Lincoln had written and rewritten his speech many times until he had the message down just right. He knew the difference between giving a speech in a campaign debate and giving a speech as president: people gave very long speeches—but not presidents. Ever since Washington, the person occupying the nation’s highest office was expected to write out his speeches beforehand—not stand at the podium and extemporize ad infinitum. He must maintain the dignity of the office and not make empty promises just because he thought that was what people wanted to hear. Warned the Founding Fathers in the
Federalist Papers:
“Of those men who have overturned the liberties of republics, the greatest number have begun their career by paying obsequious court to the people, commencing demagogues and ending tyrants.”

Later, even in the razor-thin election of 1876 where the voter turnout was an astounding 82 percent, both candidates stayed home and focused on strategy, leaving their supporters to do the campaigning. “It was not a contest of personalities,” says the historian Lloyd Robinson. “In those days before radio and television, the personalities of the candidates did not matter much to the voters….The voters made their decisions on the basis of ideas and issues—not how a man looked or how warmly he smiled.”

Nowadays, of course, we have no Gettysburg Address. In today’s endless campaigns, candidates give hundreds of lengthy speeches, resulting in a precious loss of original thought. Since 1920 no president has written his own speeches—“and there is some evidence they can’t read them either,” says Gore Vidal.

1863
The Emancipation Proclamation, our nation’s most revolutionary document after the Declaration of Independence, is heralded today as a bold and courageous act that put the major issue of the Civil War on its pedestal, defined the war’s purpose, and set blacks on the path to freedom.

At the time, however, it was not viewed that way. In fact, the Emancipation Proclamation was such a rash move it almost cost Lincoln the war when he released his
“pre-official” version in the fall of 1862. Up until then, the purpose of the war had been to save the Union. It was a well-accepted cause that attracted plenty of volunteers. In his pre-release of the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln was redefining the war as one to free the slaves. In one quick moment, Lincoln lost much of his volunteer support.

Northern whites had very mixed views about freed blacks. On the one hand they agreed that slavery was an evil, but like today’s congressmen who scream NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) whenever their favorite social programs or pork-barrel projects get cut from pending appropriations, they didn’t want black hordes coming to the North and taking away jobs and creating social unrest.

The immediate result of Lincoln’s proclamation was an immediate drop in enlistments. Lincoln had to respond with new conscription procedures that were even more unpopular. Then when he presented the Thirteenth Amendment in 1864, codifying the Emancipation Proclamation in the Constitution, it was quickly rejected by Congress. The Democratic Party was firmly opposed, calling it “unwise, impolitic, cruel and unworthy of the support of civilized people.” Feverishly working the back room, twisting arms and making deals, Lincoln persisted. Among those opposed to the Emancipation Proclamation were certain Northern slaveholders. To win their support, Lincoln ingeniously expanded the word “Union” to include “Union-held areas” in the South such as seven counties around Norfolk, Virginia, and several Louisiana districts (one crucial vote belonging to a Louisiana congressman).

Finally in 1865 he called for another vote. This time it passed, by the slimmest of margins: three votes.

1742–1900
Many of our leading consumer products were originally intended for different uses from what they later became famous for. Or, as a businessman would say, if a product doesn’t catch on with its intended market, try to think of another way to sell your product. Listen to the consumer!

The Franklin stove has a clever design of flues and air vents that reduced the heat lost up the chimney. But that was not how Benjamin Franklin advertised it when he merchandised his product in 1742. He claimed his stove would suppress aging of women’s faces caused by harsh, hot air.

The original Levi’s blue jeans made for California Forty-niners were made for a very specific purpose having nothing to do with style or fashion or even work clothes. They were made out of hemp sailcloth and rivets so the pockets wouldn’t rip when filled with gold panned from the sediment.

In 1886 a pharmacist in Atlanta invented a concoction called Coca-Cola. It was not
a soft drink, but a mouthwash and gargle, guaranteed “to whiten the teeth, cleanse the mouth, and cure tender and bleeding gums.” When the mouthwash market failed to materialize, the pharmacist repositioned his product as a family beverage to taste and swallow. One problem with this new strategy, however, was the substantial amount of cocaine in the drink (hence the name “Coca-Cola”). In 1903 the formula was altered and the label stated, “Cocaine Removed.”

Like pioneer plane designers who all failed because they insisted on designing a plane with moving wings like a bird’s, so the typewriter almost never got invented because it was modeled after the wrong example: the sewing machine. The type-writer’s inventors positioned it not as a business machine, but as a device to use at home (target market: authors and clergymen). The first typewriter, the Remington #1, appeared in a black case with colored floral ornaments. “The type-writer in size and appearance resembles the family sewing machine,” an 1876 ad extolled. “It is graceful and ornamental … it is to the pen what the sewing machine is to the needle.” Early typewriters were so inferior mechanically to the human hand (like the plane to the bird) that the keyboard had to be designed to a QWERTY format to slow down typists and prevent them from jamming the mechanical keys. The concept of creating a machine so advanced as to challenge humans was never considered.

1872
In New York’s Central Park in 1872 a statue was unveiled commemorating “The Master of Our Thought, the Land’s First Citizen!” He was called by James Fenimore Cooper “the great author of America,” despite the fact that he was not an American. But no matter: Americans have “just as good a right” as any to claim him as one of their own. He was even more popular in America than in his homeland. Virtually every American knew his name, not only in the salons of New York but in the faraway mining camps of California. He was praised by Ralph Waldo Emerson for “addressing those questions which knock for answer at every heart.” He was Abraham Lincoln’s favorite author. He was a favorite of Mark Twain.