Saying Much, With Few Words

SEVEN SCORE AND TEN YEARS AGO today, Abraham Lincoln gave a two minute two hundred and sixty nine word speech on a miserable day at a miserable place, which everybody thought was a miserable speech. You can't blame them; Lincoln's speech did nothing for them, promised nothing, provided no guidance for the future with specific ideas on exactly how to deal with the miserable mess eveybody was in. The only good thing about Lincoln's speech for the people who heard it, was that it didn't last very long, and everybody could go home, and get warm ahd dry. Lincoln had only been invited at the last minute to speak at the ceremony in a pasture to honor thirty thousand people killed there three months earlier. The only person who realized that Lincoln had remade America with words was Edward Everett, the great speech maker, who talked for two hours before Lincoln talked for two minutes. "That speech aint gonna scour" said Lincoln. Everett replied: "Mr President, you just said more in two minutes than I did in two hours." Civil War historian and movie maker Ken Burns has a project to get as many Americans as possible to memorize the Gettysburg Address. Its really easy to do. The words in the speech are all so simple, but so easy to understand and remember. Lincoln himself thought the speech was a miserable failure, and didn't live long enough to find out otherwise. He made it up and scribbled it down hastily on his way to Gettysburg, like a school kid scribbling something, anything, on a piece of paper so as to have something, anything, to turn in as homework completed. Fortunately for us, Lincoln didn't just blow off the assignment altogether, and tell the country that his dog ate his speech. But the people at Gettysburg on that cold windy day wouldn't've cared if he had.