Of the ..., by the ..., for the ...

In the last several days many bloggers, myself among them, marked the 40th anniversary of John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s murder with ruminations and reminiscences.  We all missed another anniversary, that of an event that took place almost exactly 100 years before JFK was assassinated.

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln was invited to offer brief remarks at the dedication of a cemetery for Union soldiers on a small portion of the battleground of Gettysburg.  Four and a half months earlier, the Union’s Army of the Potomac, under the command of General George Meade, had held off Robert E. Lee’s last desperate attempt to invade the North in a sprawling three-day series of battles in that small central Pennsylvania village.  Some seven thousand Americans lost their lives at Gettysburg, nearly evenly split between the two sides.

Lincoln wasn’t the main speaker that afternoon.  Famed rhetorician Edward Everett had already declaimed for two hours by the time Lincoln rose to speak.  His remarks consisted of just 266 words, and it took him only three or four minutes to speak his piece.

I wouldn’t begin to try to analyze the meanings and implications in the Gettysburg Address.  For that, I very highly recommend Garry Wills’s brilliant 1993 Pulitzer Prize-winning examination, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.  Instead, I draw your attention to the very last words of the Gettysburg Address, to what’s probably its second most famous phrase (the very first words, “Four score and seven years ago” take the title, I think).  As I’m sure you all know, the Address ends with this stirring phrase:

government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.

Until I saw Ken Burns’s The Civil War series on PBS in 1990, I had always spoken and always heard that phrase with this cadence and emphasis:

government OF the people, BY the people, FOR the people shall not perish from the earth.

But in the role of President Lincoln in the Burns series, Sam Waterston presented the phrase in a very different light, evoking very different images:

government of the PEOPLE, by the PEOPLE, for the PEOPLE shall not perish from the earth.

Those two ways of speaking the same words are both uplifting, but they don’t necessarily lead our thoughts in the same directions.  How did Mr. Lincoln actually close his remarks?  What did he really emphasize in the phrase?  Would that there was some way to go back 140 years to hear Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg.

How ever Lincoln spoke and intended the phrase, I have to think he’d be appalled by the changes the politicians who profess to be his descendants have wrought upon his stirring words.  In today’s Republican party, it’s very clear that any and all consideration of, by, and for the people has been removed from the agenda.  If George W. Bush were to speak in Gettysburg, he would undoubtedly finish his remarks with this phrase:

government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations shall not perish from the earth.

Corporatism is the hallmark of the Bushies.  Corporations are more important to them than are people.  Corporations are invariably and overwhelmingly favored over people by the Bushies.

It’s disgusting beyond belief.

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