It’s the greatest short story in American history.
One that has resonated through the ages.
A simple, 272 words.
The Gettysburg Address.
President Abraham Lincoln – the nation’s first Republican national leader – challenged Americans with his simple but powerful words underscoring our nation’s founding principles of liberty and equality and reminding us of our mission as a free people.
That government “of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”
In working with students, apprentice reporters and those interested in submitting op-eds, I always point them to Lincoln’s famous write-up as a classic example of how strong writing can be tight.
Edward Everett – a famous orator of the era who spoke before LIncoln that historic day – said the same thing to Lincoln himself, noting “”I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
To read the Gettysburg address, click here.
A generation earlier, our first President George Washington – who after two terms left office in 1796 disgusted by partisan politics – also left us with one of the nation’s preeminent warnings and advice in his farewell letter.
Washington urged people to think of themselves as Americans, not partisans.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism,” Washington warned.
Partisanship, Washington added, “serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration. It agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection.
To read a copy of Washington’s farewell, click here.
It’s such a powerful message that reading it aloud has become one of the longest-running traditions in American political life.
Every year, U.S. Senators take time around the Presidents’ Day holiday to publicly read his farewell letter aloud on the U.S. Senate floor.
The Senate tradition goes back to the civil war when Washington’s farewell letter was first read out loud — just as the nation was tearing itself apart.
The tradition was later codified in the U.S. Senate in 1901, which has since kept a leather-bound book full of handwritten messages from every senator that’s ever read Washington’s warning aloud.
Until WWII, senators would simply sign their name in the book, acknowledging that they read the warning aloud.
But right after the war, Senators started including small notes about their take on the warning.
Last year, U.S. Senator Roger Wicker, R-MS, read the address.
Lincoln was born on Feb. 12, just 10 days before Washington’s birthday.
The Presidents’ Day tradition was first set up in the 1880s and solely celebrated Washington’s birthday until the 1960s when Lincoln’s birthday was informally added after the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, establishing the three-day holiday we enjoy today.