Radio Script #207
Little Talks on Common Things
December 27, 1953
This program has hitherto refrained from comment on the most controversial figure in American life. the Senator from Wisconsin. But when that senator presents Abraham Lincoln in exactly the opposite light from what we know to have been Lincoln’s stand, we cannot remain silent. We do not pretend to be an authority on Lincoln, but for more than forty years we have been informing ourselves year after year on the details of that remarkable life.
In his recent radio address Senator McCarthy presented Lincoln as saying that our danger came not from without but from traitors with in then he quoted Lincoln directly as saying, “At what point then is danger expected? I answer that, if it ever reaches us, it must spring up from amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. We must live through all time or die by suicide.”
Now the danger of garbled quotations lifted out of context is that they are always partially true. Lincoln did say the words which the senator quoted, but the senator left out five words of the quotation, and those five words make a lot of difference. Lincoln did not say boldly and unqualifiedly, “We must live through all time or die by suicide”. He said, “As a nation of free men, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
Lincoln made that speech when he was 27 years old, before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois on January 27, 1838. Did Lincoln contend that the danger from within justified any means, however unconstitutional and un-American, to eliminate the danger? That is what Senator McCarthy clearly implied, as James Reston pointed out in the New York Times on November 29.
To Imply that Lincoln took any such stand is completely to misinterpret The speech and utterly to misunderstand the kind of a man Lincoln was. Lincoln gave his address at the lyceum the title: ”The Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions”. What was he talking about? About the constitution of the United States and the protection it gave to the human rights of citizens. Lincoln was deeply concerned about guilt by association, about the tendency of men to pass judgment on their fellow man without the processes provided by law, the way in some places men were banding together to hang gamblers and bum murderers without waiting for the judgment of the courts.
Less than three months before Lincoln made that speech, a young man from Albion, and a graduate of Colby College — Elijah Parish Lovejoy — had been killed by a mob at Alton, Illinois, because Lovejoy insisted on publishing opinions against slavery, while a majority of Alton citizens thought he ought to keep silent on that excitable subject. The Constitution guaranteed that no man Should be deprived of property without due process of law. Were not slaves property?
Lovejoy, said his enemies, was a traitor to the Constitution, a menace to the security of the United States. So an angry mob gathered on the night of November 7, 1837, broke up his press, and shot the editor to death.
Other such scenes were blackening the American record when Lincoln spoke the address from which Senator McCarthy quoted. What did lincoln say about them?
Here are Lincoln’s straight, ungarbled words: “Whenever the vicious portion of population shall be permitted to gather in bands of hundreds and thousands, burn churches, ravage and rob provision stores, throw printing presses into rivers, shoot editors, and hang and burn obnoxious persons at pleasure, and with impunltv, depend upon’j t , this government cannot last.”
Now we are not for a moment implying that Senator McCarthy advocates the shooting of editors or the burning of printing plants. We are, rather, e~has i zing Lincoln’s real stand, which was that we are a nation of laws, not of men — that we have an instrument called the Constitution of the United States which protects the individual in his rights of freedom of speech and assembly, the right to be faced by his accusers. the right to tri ‘:11 b~( a jury of his peers, and the right to be considered innocent unti I proved guilty. In shortl an instrument which preserves us as a nation of free men. Again let Us hear Lincoln’s exact words: ”To the support of the Constitution and the laws, let every Amerl can p ledge hi slife, h is property and h is sacred honor.”
In the very next paragraph following the one quoted by Senator McCarthy, Lincoln said : “There is even now something of ill omen amongst us. I mean the increasing disregard for law that pervades the country, the growing disposition to substitute wild and furious passions in lieu of the sober Judgment of the courts. ”
In his time Lincoln was no more concerned with protecting gamblers and murderers than Mr. McCarthy is with protecting communists today. What then was the whole purport of Lincoln’s speech? Not that our danger was from gamblers and murderers who sometimes got themselves lynched. No, contended lincoln, the danger came from the debasement of our political institutions and from the lawless in spirit. No end, insisted lincoln, is good enough to justify unworthy means.
It has been some time since we have mentioned our old friend One Eleven, but we have not forgotten him. We are always grateful for his interesting, informative letters. Recently he has been writing us about old-time expressions.
He asks, “What is a scant II n91′: as in the express ‘on “If you can’t get a board, get a scant I I ng”. Well, he simply has the advantage of me in that saying. The way they said it over in my part of Maine fifty years ago was, “If you can’t get a board, get a shingle”.
One Eleven thinks a scantling was some sort of cleat or narrow board used in building construction. He mentions an 0ld novel which referred to getting out several thousand scant I I ng at the local saw mall. He says it was a narrow cleat, sometimes of varying width, that is, varying several inches in width from end to end.
This gives me a chance to name my favorite dictionaries. For ordinary use find the huge Webster’s Unabri dged too cumersome. My every day dictionaries are Webster’s New Collegiate and The American College Dictionary. When a case like this of One Eleven’s comes up, like to see what both dictionaries say.
Webster gives as the first definition of scantling, “A small quantity, amount or number”. As another meaning it gives, “a small piece of lumber, especially one of the upright pieces inhouse framing; a stud.”
The American Collegiate gives exactly the same meanings, but in different order. It is interesting that while both dictionaries give scantling as a synonym for stud, neither gives the meaning which I agree with One Eleven must have been its use in the expression, “If you can’t get a board, get a scantling”. There it obviously meant apiece of wood smaller than a board, and for that meaning a slat or cleat is more probable than a stud.
N~ really, One Eleven, I must scold you about one thing. In one of your recent letters you spell my old home t~n of Bridgton with an “E”. That won’t do at a II. The town is Bri dgton, a I though I admit a lot of peop Ie I inc Iud Ing the edi tor of that 1839 Gazetteer I referred to severa I weeks ago, made the same mi stake I n the spe II i ng that you made.
One Eleven I s curious about another word — the word “hass Ie”. Sportswriters are now using it unsparingly to designate a violent argument; sometimes accompanied by blows. One Eleven says he suspects it is Just one of the newswriters Invented five dollar words. It seems to imply something a little more violent than tussle, or the almost forgotten word “fisticuffs”. The .word hassle is not in either of the dictionaries I have mentioned. Does any listener know its origin?
One Eleven gives us interesting comment on the outworn p’fT~@S’word: “salient”, as It is used In such phrases as “the salient points of the propo.,..,sa I”. ”ThaT word was often used by a certa I n reporter” ~ says One Eleven, “to save time In writl ng copy. I t got so the newsman was ca lied ‘Sa I lent Sam’ by his fellow workers, and he became a distinguished feature writer for the LewIston Journal In Arthur Staples’ day and Immediately afterward.” The man, of course, was Sam Connor, one of the best known newspaper men ewr to write a co I umn In Ma i ne • As One Eleven says, “Sam cou I d cove r we I I any news from footbaI I to court cases.”
Any Colby folks listening tonight will be Interested In this comment of One Eleven on Sam Connor: ”When the fi rst look-in-to-find-focus camera came along, Sam was the first to use one in shooting a fast running Colby football man high stepping along the edge of Seaverns Field on the old Colby campus. Sam was inside the white line when he snapped that picture in 1916, but he was agile in those days and gave the crowd a big laugh as t1e jumped out of the runner’s way and snapped his coat tails at the Colby man scampering on to a touchdown.
Sam got the action on his film and beat the morning papers with the only clear photo taken on the cloudy day.”
There is a very old document which concerns both Winslow and Waterville, and which I think many of you will find interesting. It is, in effect, a taxpayers’ list, made only ten years after Winslow became an Incorporated town. Bear in mind that, for 32 years, from 1771 to 1802, the town of Winslow included what is now both Winslow and Waterville. Now listen to the quaint wording of that old document of 1781.
“An assessment of the polls and real and personal estates of the Inhabitants of the Town of Winslow and also the non-resident proprietors’ land lying in the said town, and also the polls of the adjacents, being a tax of 175 pounds, 11 shillings. 11 pence, laid on said town by the General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, begun and held at Boston on Wednesday, October 25, 1780, and continued by adjournment to the 11th day of April, 1781.”
There are two terms in that statement which are worthy of note. First, the non-resident proprietors. Who were they? The proprietors of the New Plymouth Colony, the most prominent of whom, so far as The Kennebec Valley was concerned, was Dr. Sylvester Gardiner. In 1781 only a part of the land in the incorporated town of Winslow had actually been taken by settlers. Much of it still remained in the possession of the proprietors.
The second interesting point is the expression “The adjacents”, which appears in the phrase “also the polls of the adjacents”. In 1781 Winslow was the extreme incorporated town of the Valley, the settlement farthermost up the rl ver to be recognized as a legal town. The term “adjacents” meant all the settlements farther up the Kennebec.
That grand patriarch of early Waterville, John McKechnie, heads that ancient list of taxpayers. He was responsible either for a grown son or for some other male of his household. For he is set down for TWO polls, as well as real estate and personal property. Ezekiel Pattee, a name revered in Winslow history, is charged for three polls, Zimri Haywood for two, while such remembered pioneers as Timothy Heald, James Stackpole, John Simpson, and Jonah Crosby are charged for one each.
The property tax was unbelievably small. Remember that, after his famous survey, John McKechnie claimed for himself the choice lot on the west side of the river, which included the water power of Tlconic Falls. Yet his real estate tax was only ten shillings. James Stackpole, who became one of Waterville’s wealthiest early citizens, paid only a poll tax, none on property at all. Only Zimn Heyward and Ezekiel Pattee paid a property tax of as much as two pounds, that is, about ten dollars.
In case you get to envying those pioneers for thier low taxes, remember that money was scarce and came hard in those days. As one wag used to say, “Of course George Washington could throw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock. A dollar went farther in those days.”
Year: 1953