Lincoln Legacy: La Plus Ça Change
Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president and The New York Times was the first Republican newspaper. It’s been 150 years since he…
Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president and The New York Times was the first Republican newspaper. It’s been 150 years since he was assassinated. A lot has changed. I think.
There is irony in this piece in the The New York Times, “Abraham Lincoln, the One President All of Them Want to Be More Like”. The piece says that all presidents, Democrat and Republican, want to measure their own legacy by that of Abraham Lincoln. It even manages to identify Lincoln as a Republican president (without acknowledging that he was the first, the product of a wrenching change in political parties that preceded the Civil War).
But the article fails to remind the reader that The New York Times itself was The Republican newspaper of New York City. The article does this despite quoting Dorothy Kearns Goodwin, from whom I learned this fact — as a result of reading her most readable recounting of Lincoln’s political strategy for becoming president as the dark horse candidate in a field of 7, A Team Of Rivals. I read that book because Candidate Barak Obama cited it as a key reference for his strategy for getting elected President the first time.
At that time, in 2007, when Obama was getting his campaign in gear, we Americans were all trying to figure out who the heck he really was. That’s why I read the book, but I had an unrelated epiphany directly as a result of reading it. More than halfway through the book, there is a sentence: “The editor in chief of The New York Times was appointed chairman of the Republican National Convention.” (I didn’t bother looking the sentence up to make sure of this, because I don’t want to know if I’m not remember it correctly!)
What the fuck, I said to myself!? I put the book down. Was Professor Kearns smoking crack?! I couldn’t keep reading.
I’m a pretty well informed guy, and I am a former journalist, born of a family that reported on politics. No journalist in their right mind would compromise their political principles by chairing a major political convention! Not to mention the chief editor of the bastion of liberal journalism for the entire country chairing the convention for the conservative political party.
I had to think. And then it dawned on me.
The Republican Party in 1860 was the liberal party; The Democrats were slave owners, and the Republicans came to power in part over the issue of freeing the slaves. Indeed, it was Abraham Lincoln who made that happen — during the Civil War. People who get upset about one political party or another should remember that in the last 150 years the parties have switched places, completely. Our perspective is formed by our lifetimes and mine spans the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower through to the election of the country’s first black president, Barak Obama. There wasn’t any time during that 60+ year period that anyone mentioned to me that the aligment between Republican and Democrat was the opposite of what I know, including any of my teachers.
I wasn’t through thinking about this. Regardless of alignment, a fundamental principle of modern journalism is that reporters and editors are supposed to remain aloof observers of the political process (and a bunch of other stuff). The editors of major daily newspapers do not chair major political conventions! Ever.
This took longer to understand. By chance, I happen to go to an event in Washington, D.C. that was hosted at Newseum. It’s a remarkable museum in a city littered with museums. It’s a museum for newspapers and news. They even have one of the coolest exhibits I’ve ever seen: a room of front pages of newspapers going back to what might be considered the very first, which is in old German and unreadable to a modern person like myself.
While I was walking down the long hall showing newspaper front pages from history, I stopped at the papers from that war-torn time in our country’s history: And I finally understood. The New York Times was started in 1851, introduced into an incredibly competitive environment where at least a dozen other newspapers were already published, and at a time when the Republican party was establishing itself. The king of the newspaper industry in New York City was the New York Herald, already 16 years old when the Times was introduced.
Most important to me and the core of my epiphany is that newspapers in that day and age did not separate politics and news. People — consumers in our modern term — wanted to know what was happening from their point of view, so they bought (not subscribed!) the newspaper that reported from their point of view, defined by the political party they joined and the groups that they aligned with. The New York Times started with Republicans! It was both a business and an editorial strategy to be what we now call differentiated in a competitive environment. So it was an honor and an endorsement for the editor in chief of The New York Times to be named chairman of the Republican National Convention.
Full circle. Political parties change. News changes. The reporting of news changes. Nothing stays the same. La plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.