On Good Friday, April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln rose with great and unaccustomed cheer to greet the final day of his life.
The more you read about a subject, he advised me, the more interesting it will seem.
What fired in Lincoln this furious and fertile time of self-improvement? The answer lay in his readiness to gaze in the mirror and soberly scrutinize himself. Taking stock, he found himself wanting. From the beginning, young Lincoln aspired to nothing less than to inscribe his name into the book of communal memory.
Find time and space in which to think. As Lincoln began to survey the darkening landscape of the war and consider a new strategy regarding slavery, he needed time to reflect upon both the constitutionality and the ramifications of issuing an emancipation order.
Things are certainly kaleidoscopic,” Roosevelt telegraphed.
The country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation. It is common sense to take a method and try it: If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.
Taft generally ate alone. Forever struggling to lose weight, he limited his midday meal to an apple or a glass of water.
The worsening context of the war, which threatened the survival of the Union and the Constitution itself, provided a suitable resolution to this dilemma.
Fearing that Taft would be too reticent on the stump, Roosevelt barraged him with incessant advice. “Do not answer Bryan; attack him!” he counseled in early September, adding, “Don’t let him make the issues.
Generations of historians have agreed with Holmes, pointing to Roosevelt’s self-assured, congenial, optimistic temperament as the keystone to his leadership success.
For nearly two years, under Lyndon Johnson’s domestic leadership, Republicans and Democrats had toiled together to engineer the greatest advances in civil rights since the Civil War and to launch a comprehensive, progressive vision of American society that would leave a permanent imprint on the national landscape.
As Roosevelt figured out details of his radical plan, he pressed ahead on two less extreme fronts. “It is never well to take drastic action,” he liked to say, “if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic fashion.
With public sentiment, nothing can fail,” Abraham Lincoln said, “without it nothing can succeed.
With “not the slightest sign of an end to the strike,” Roosevelt readied a second plan – the creation of a Blue Ribbon Commission to investigate the causes of the strike and make recommendations for both executive and legislative action. Scrambling once again to find warrant for such intervention, he argued he was empowered by his constitutional duty to report to Congress on the state of the Union.
So surely did Lincoln midwife this process of social transformation that we look back at the United States before Abraham Lincoln and after him.
If you are cast on a desert island with only a screwdriver, a hatchet, and a chisel to make a boat with, why, go make the best one you can. It would be better if you had a saw, but you haven’t. So with men.
For political leaders in a democracy are not revolutionaries or leaders of creative thought. The best of them are those who respond wisely to changes and movements already under way. The worst, the least successful, are those who respond badly or not at all, and those who misunderstand the direction of already visible change.
There was little to lead one to suppose that Abraham Lincoln, nervously rambling the streets of Springfield that May morning, who scarcely had a national reputation, certainly nothing to equal any of the other three, who had served but a single term in Congress, twice lost bids for the Senate, and had no administrative experience whatsoever, would become the greatest historical figure of the nineteenth century.
American philosopher William James wrote of the mysterious formation of identity, “that the best way to define a man’s character would be to seek out the particular mental or moral attitude in which, when it came upon him, he felt himself most deeply and intensely alive and active. At such moments, there is a voice inside which speaks and says, ‘This is the real me!
The books my mother read and reread provided a broader, more adventurous world, and escape from the confines of her chronic illness. Her interior life was enriched even as her physical life contracted. If she couldn’t change the reality of her situation, she could change her perception of it. She could enter into the lives of the characters in her books, sharing their journeys while she remained seated in her chair.