A student of the speech that changed Lincoln’s career visits the place where he gave it
The first time I ever visited the great hall of New York City’s Cooper Union, I was not yet a teenager, but I was already mad to learn everything I could about the most famous man who ever appeared there. Abraham Lincoln’s 1860 Cooper Union address—his first and only campaign speech in New York—dramatically introduced the Western leader to the East. For Lincoln, it proved a personal and political triumph.
I knew few details about this milestone speech when I made my own maiden pilgrimage. But even in the early 1960s—it was, after all, the era of the Civil War Centennial—I already knew that it had somehow helped make Lincoln President. Today, having just spent three years researching and writing a new book on this very subject (Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech That Made Abraham Lincoln President), and after countless return visits, I can confirm that my infant impressions were pretty much on the mark.
Cooper Union was Lincoln’s watershed, the event that transformed him from a regional leader into a national phenomenon. Here the politician known as frontier debater and chronic jokester introduced a new oratorical style: informed by history, suffused with moral certainty, and marked by lawyerly precision.
My guide for my long-ago visit was my older first cousin, Gerald Ehrenstein, now a retired physicist, then a recent Cooper Union graduate eager to show me his alma mater. After a long subway ride downtown and a march through the quaint lobby and down a flight of stairs, here at last was the shrine: a cavernous yet somehow claustrophobic basement auditorium from whose stage Lincoln had aroused his audience with the cry “Right makes might.”
I never forgot the visit. But I didn’t see the Great Hall again until 1977, when I was the young, absurdly self-assured press secretary for Bella Abzug, then running for mayor of New York in a crowded field of men. That autumn a civic group hosted a mayoral debate there. Newspapers breathlessly reported that the eventual winner might well, like Lincoln, emerge from the Cooper Union test marked by destiny.
Before us that night sat eight candidates for City Hall: Bella, Rep. Ed Koch (who went on to win the election), state senator Roy Goodman, the future governor Mario Cuomo (for whom I would one day work as well), the harried incumbent, Abe Beame, the local leaders Percy Sutton and Herman Badillo, and a businessman named Joel Harnett.
The debate was in full swing when a young man suddenly came racing down the aisle, carrying an object in his right hand. In a flash, he reared back and hurled it toward the debaters. It turned out to be a harmless apple pie, which did nothing worse than splatter Beame and Abzug. Miraculously, almost simultaneously, Cuomo leaped off the stage and flew at the prankster, whom he knocked to the ground before startled police officers joined the tangle to hustle him away. Cuomo later modestly explained: “I thought he might have been throwing something more dangerous.” And another hero was born at Cooper Union.
Beame and Abzug are gone now, and both Cuomo’s three terms as governor and Koch’s three as mayor are behind them, but the old place has not changed much. The platform in Cooper Union’s Great Hall is still too high to make viewing from the front rows comfortable. Floor-to-ceiling iron pillars still obstruct many views. Generations ago the stage was relocated perpendicularly; once it stood on what is now the left side of the chamber (looking in from the rear doors) at the end of a long, vertical hall illuminated by hissing gaslights, and furnished with plush red chairs. But the painted iron rostrum with its fringed coverlet, said to have been used by Lincoln, still occupies the stage at special events. Those occasions, now few and far between, attract scant crowds these days. I confidently wrote in my book that nothing very important happens there any more.
It did not take long for me to be proved wrong. My book was still in galleys when the Democratic presidential aspirant Howard Dean chose Cooper Union to make a major speech of his own in November 2003. Dean used the occasion to talk about fundraising and to pass out ballots so the people in his campaign could choose if he should opt out of the federal campaign financing system. Dean was adept at fundraising and so could forgo federal money, but Lincoln was on shaky ground when he made his own Cooper Union address: Less than a month later, Lincoln wrote to the editor Mark Delahay “I can not enter the ring on the money basis—first, because, in the main, it is wrong; and secondly, I have not, and can not get the money.” Much to my amazement, the old venue was back at the epicenter of national politics.
Past and present converged at the Great Hall only a few weeks after Howard Dean left the stage. On November 22, 2003, New York marked the fortieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy’s assassination inside the historic auditorium with a group reading of Jim Bishop’s book The Day Kennedy Was Shot. A number of celebrities, including Martha Stewart and Joel Grey, took turns reciting.
One of the famous readers that day was Kitty Carlisle Hart, the nonagenarian singer who is something of a historical landmark in her own right, having made her stage debut in 1932.1 spoke to Mrs. Hart a few hours after her performance. She joked that she was not quite old enough to have been at Cooper Union when Lincoln spoke there.
But had she felt the presence of Lincoln on the Cooper Union stage? “Oh, yes, darling,” she laughed. “Ever since Ford’s Theatre, no actor goes onstage at a theater without thinking about Lincoln.”
But only at the Great Hall of Cooper Union can audiences so easily inhale Lincoln’s presence too—there to imagine not the dying but the living man, not the bearded icon of myth but the clean-shaven, fresh-voiced political original who conquered all New York here on the way to the White House and immortality.
—Harold Holzer
Editors’ Bookshelf
In this issue Gene Smith writes about a city that has long fascinated him: Hudson, New York. In Hudson’s Merchants and Whalers (Black Dome Press, 224 pages, $24.95), Margaret B. Schräm describes how Hudson once had wealth and influence far out of proportion to its size, as can be seen in an 1847 lament to its decline: “There is no bustle of seamen along its wharves, no song of the ropemaker upon its hills, no throng of wagons from the interior, no crowds of men in its streets. The shipyards are overgrown with grass, the wharves have moldered away…. And yet the surrounding scenery is as beautiful as ever.”
Worth its weight in gold?
A storied steamer filled with treasure, pickles, and history is recovered off Georgia’s coast
The floor of the Atlantic ocean is littered with shipwrecks, but few approach the value, financial or historical, of the Republic. When it sank, it took with it $400,000 in gold coins, which could be worth as much as $150 million today. As of this writing, more than 1,700 coins have been pulled from the wreck by a marine salvage firm called Odyssey Marine Exploration.
The Republic was a side-wheel steamer built in Baltimore and launched in 1853 as the Tennessee. It was heading south in October 1865 when it sank more than 100 miles southeast of Savannah, Georgia. There it lay undisturbed until 1991, when Odyssey began searching for it, using computer models of ocean currents to predict possible locations. Last September, after 12 years spent combing 1,500 square miles with sonar, magnetometers, and underwater cameras, Odyssey finally located the Republic. In January it paid $1.6 million to the company that had insured the Republic, and now Odyssey owns the wreck and its cargo outright.
Besides the coins, Odyssey’s crew has also recovered some well-preserved artifacts. The ship’s bronze bell shows some erosion but still bears the letters SSEE from her days as the Tennessee. The team has also brought up jars of pickles, mustard, and pepper sauce as well as champagne bottles and patent medicine, offering historians a unique look at what passed from North to South during Reconstruction. Greg Stemm, the company’s director of operations, wondered: “It’s the beginning of Reconstruction. In this valuable space, why were they sending down pickles?”
The Buyable Past
Playing Cards
The history of cards contains its share of controversy. A Swiss edict prohibiting them antedates the oldest surviving European examples, which were made during the fifteenth century. American decks began appearing after the Revolution and during the next century became wonderfully various and elaborate. Some collectors focus on single-ended faces, which have their suit symbols and numerical values or court ranks printed on one end rather than both, while others prefer unusual face designs or specific back motifs. Cards promoting businesses or brands ranging from General Electric to Pabst Blue Ribbon beer are highly popular. So are cards with patriotic themes and political subject matter, as well as those once sold as souvenirs of tourist destinations and railway routes. The list goes on and on.
As for prices, decks with pinup girls sell for as little as $20, while mint examples illustrated by the celebrated Alberto Vargas fetch about $100. A Union Civil War deck with patriotic shields, stars, eagles, and the flag for suit marks might cost $1,000. One high-stakes player recently anted up more than $10,000 for an 1819 deck commemorating the First Seminole War, but five-figure prices are rare in the American card-collecting game.
—David Lander
To Learn More
One prominent collector, Stuart Kaplan, suggests following the auctions held by 52 Plus Joker (www.52plusjoker.org), “very serious collectors” who deal in the “absolutely authentic.” Another group, the Chicago Playing Card Collectors (www.cpccinc.org), specializes in single cards but also sells some full decks.
No serious collector of antique and vintage cards from the United States can do without The Hochman Encyclopedia of American Playing Cards. Its more than 300 pages classify and illustrate hundreds of different decks, and cognoscenti use Hochman catalogue numbers as shorthand when referring to them. A softbound version costs $45 plus shipping, and a companion price guide is available for $15 more (www.usgamesinc.com).
The Streets Are Paved With Wigwams
The great American road hits the road
A longtime friend of this magazine, John Margolies, has spent the last quarter-century photographing America’s vanishing roadside architecture. He was among the first to find enduring appeal in mom-and-pop tourist cabins, concessions shaped like hot dogs, and gas stations ornamented with a windmill or a B-17. Now the U.S. State Department has organized an exhibit of 56 of Margolies’s pictures, which will tour through the end of 2006, appearing n museums and cultural centers in Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. (Last month the show opened in Kiev, Ukraine; Ankara, Turkey; Vientiane, Laos; Maputo, Mozambique; and Kuwait City.) What message does the government hope to convey with these photographs of one-off homegrown design? “As cars became affordable for millions of people,” reads the exhibition brochure, “… the American free enterprise system responded….”
Screenings
My Darling Clementine
There aren’t too many dvd releases of classic Hollywood films that justify an elaborate concept. For the most part, they’re filled with gratuitous commentary and frivolous interviews. The special two-disc issue of John Ford’s My Darling Clementine is a rare and lovely exception. More than just a nostalgic evening at the movies, the discs trace the film’s evolution into a classic and then look back to its legendary roots.
Like virtually all frontier lawmen, the real Wyatt Earp was no saint but a rough-edged character who spent most of his formative years in saloons—which, of course, was where most of the action was. (“We had no YMCAs,” he explained to his biographer Stuart Lake.) The most famous of all Western shootouts, the so-called Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, came about as the result of numerous professional and personal complexities, including Earp’s political rivalry with the shady Cochise County sheriff, John Behan, and, possibly, both of their affections for a young Jewish girl named Josephine Marcus, who ended up spending nearly half a century with Wyatt.
Neither Marcus nor Behan puts in an appearance in the film, though in fact Ford knew the real Wyatt and had Stuart Lake on hand for consultation. Their presence would have complicated the director’s near-primeval vision of good versus evil—evil, here, being personified by Walter Brennan’s Old Man Clanton, who horsewhips his sons for forgetting that “when you pull a gun, kill a man.” Victor Mature’s Doc Holliday, a character who lives close to the fine line between right and wrong, gives his loyalty to Wyatt for a simple compelling reason: Earp represents something better than the Clantons.
Ford took only the barest bones of the Earp-Tombstone saga, omitting what he chose and embellishing what he kept. Henry Fonda’s taciturn portrayal of Earp is letter perfect as far as it goes, but Doc Holliday, a frail dentist from Georgia, is transformed into Mature’s robust surgeon from Boston. (Mature is also fine, though as tubercular looking as a Kodiak bear.) In this telling of the Earp saga, the facts hardly matter; as Wyatt Earp III phrases it in the section on historical commentary, “You don’t come to this film looking for the facts, you come looking for the poetry.”
You can see the movie’s reflection in recent Westerns such as Tombstone (1993) and last year’s Open Range. My Darling Clementine illustrates why this generation of film enthusiasts embraces the films of John Ford, not for a nostalgic view of history—Ford’s intention was never to depict history—but to connect with the vision that Ford and much of America once held of itself.
