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EPISODE 2.01 -
August 26, 2005
Right Makes Might
Guest: Harold Holzer
Listen to Harold Holzer, author of the award-winning Lincoln At Cooper Union: The Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President analyze this long neglected but critical oratory.
Blake's Review:
I was looking forward to this conversation based on the fame of Lincoln's Cooper Union speech. Unfortunately, the interview just seemed to never touch all that much on the speech despite spending a good 30 minutes on the topic. Weird, I know. I learned about Lincoln's speechwriting, how he practiced speeches, how he traveled to New York to make the speech, what he did there, and so on and so on. But it felt like a lot of who, what, where, and when stuff but not a lot of "why" he was there.
I guess they did cover that a little. He went there to introduce himself to the eastern Republicans who doubted a westerner could capture the New England states in 1860. Having a westerner like Lincoln running on the Republican ticket was important as he might win the critical Midwest states as well as the stalwart Republican states in the east. Lincoln's success in winning over influential eastern backers became a key ingredient to his eventual success in 1860.
What did he say at Cooper Union? They never really covered that either. I did learn that the speech was written out by Lincoln and that he later gave the speech to a newspaper publisher who replicated it with Lincoln editing it the whole time. As they set the pages for the printing press (amazingly enough the same night as the speech - Lincoln did not sleep apparently) the pages were allowed to fall to the ground where they were likely swept up and thrown away or burned the next day. So while we do have Lincoln's authorized reproduction of his speech, the original is lost.
The conversation did drift, as do all Lincoln chats from 2004 - 2005, to the topic of Lincoln's sexuality. Holzer's opinion? "I don't think it is character assassination, I think it comes out of this sense that people have had for generations that Lincoln belongs to everybody and everybody can identify with Lincoln. In fact, the people who have advanced this theory are gay and are scholars of gay history." Holzer goes on to talk about the authors of the book on Lincoln's homosexuality and how they reportedly found lost love letters between Lincoln and Joshua Speed. "He (one of the authors) later admitted to me in a phone call that he made it up.... He said it was just for 'consciousness raising' and wasn't real. He said he wanted to get people to think that it was possible." Holzer is ready to put this topic to rest (as most people asked by Gerry about this are).
Overall, just an average interview with a few interesting tidbits here and there.
_________________ Gen. Blake Strickler
Confederate General-in-Chief
El Presidente 2010 - 2012
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