DuBois on Lincoln

In this time of maddening desperation toward our fools-for-representatives, this quotation of W.E.B. DuBois about Abraham Lincoln bears repeating. It is doubly appropriate in this season which brings the hope of birth.

"Abraham Lincoln was perhaps the greatest figure of the nineteenth century. Certainly of the five masters--Napoleon, Bismarck, Victoria, Browning, and Lincoln--Lincoln is to me the most human and lovable. And I love him not because he was perfect, but because he was not and yet triumphed. The world is full of illegitimate children. The world is full of folk whose taste was educated in the gutter. The world is full of people born hating and despising their fellows. To these I love to say: See this man. He was one of you and yet became Abraham Lincoln."

Wow...I still get chills having read and recited this hundreds of times. "He was one of you and yet became Abraham Lincoln." After his Cooper Union Address, he was handed his payment of $200 and was told, "Had we paid you $200,000 it would not have been enough." Leaving Cooper Union, one man related, "When I cam out of the hall...a friend, his eyes aglow, asked me what I thought of Abraham Lincoln, the Railsplitter. I said, 'He's the greatest man since St. Paul...."