Good Wednesday morning Fellow Seekers of Wisdom and Truth,
On an August day 149 years ago (the actual anniversary, Aug. 21, slipped by last week while I was away), Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas held the first of their famous series of seven debates. Although they would both run for president in 1860, it is sometimes forgotten that at the time of the classic debates, the two were contending for an Illinois U.S. Senate seat, which Douglas, the incumbent Democrat, ultimately won. The first debate was in the town of Ottowa, Ill.
Of course the Lincoln-Douglas encounters have become synonymous in American lore with the apotheosis of political debate. Of course it’s a good idea to remember them in a year when great clumps of eight or more presidential candidates seem to be debating on television every couple of weeks. But if I do this right, this post will be less about Lincoln and Douglas, nor about Dennis Kucinich and Tom Tancredo, but about us and folks who listened to Lincoln and Douglas.
Aside from the silly anniversary device (newspapers do love that so), my point in raising Lincoln-Douglas today is stolen shamelessly from Neil Postman’s great 1985 book “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.” Postman’s overarching argument was that a culture is heavily shaped by its dominant medium of communication. Citizens of a culture that relies fundamentally on printed words — such as America at the time of Lincoln and Douglas — develop habits and mental abilities very different from those of consumers in a society that is dominated by broadcast images, Postman wrote.
Minds shaped by typography were more logical, better able to pay attention, and better prepared to understand complex arguments, Postman felt, whereas those shaped by TV have short attention spans, a dearth of background knowledge and tend to be addicted to amusement, so that even a political debate is judged largely on its visual images and its entertainment value.
Postman opens his chapter on the benefits of a “typographic mind” with this description of the format of the Ottawa debate:
“Their arrangement provided that Douglas would speak first, for one hour; Lincoln would take an hour and a half to reply; Douglas a half hour to rebut Lincoln’s reply.
This debate was considerably shorter than those to which the two men were accustomed. In fact, they had tangled many times before and all of their encounters had been lengthier and more exhausting. For example, Oct. 16, 1854, in Peoria, Douglas delivered a three-hour address, to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln’s turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined.
What kind of audience was this? Who were these people who could so cheerfully accommodate themselves to seven hours of oratory? It should be noted, by the way, that … at the time of their encounter in Peoria [Lincoln and Douglas] were not even candidates for the Senate. But their audiences were not especially concerned with their official status. These were people who regarded such events as essential to their political education, who took them to be an integral part of their social lives, and who were quite accustomed to extended oratorical performances…”
In Lincoln-Douglas’s times, newspapers published the full transcripts of the debates, just as they published full transcripts of major political speeches (such as the New York papers did for Lincoln’s classic 90-minute Cooper Union address of February 1860, when he was nothing more than a longshot candidate for the Republican nomination).
The editors may have been insane, but presumably they believed their audiences would read such a thing. And, since newspaper audiences were growing rather than shrinking back then, perhaps the editors knew what they were doing. And, of course, far more people would read the speech than hear it, which underscored the typographical nature of the process.
In his brilliant chapter, Postman went on to explore the transcript of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which show that the speakers felt they could quote Shakespeare, Scripture and the Constitution, cite details of federal legislation and recent Supreme Court cases, with apparent confidence that their audience could follow the references, a confidence that would hard to justify today when the overwhelming majority of Americans, yea, even Minnesotans, cannot name the U.S. senators from their own state.
Nowadays, we generally have formats that limit presidential candidates to answers of 30 seconds, one minute or, in a stretch, maybe two minutes. And those two-minute opening statements do feel kind of boring and windy, don’t they?
The news coverage of today’s debates generally focuses on a key moment or two, when one of the candidates delivers a zinger or commits a gaffe, and especially if the gaffe has audio-visual elements that 
reinforce the importance of watching it on television. The outcome of the 2000 election may well have been determined by Al Gore’s eye-rolling and audible sighing during the first Gore-Bush debate, which was widely taken evidence that Gore was a self-important boor, just like the Republicans kept saying. That eye-rolling doesn’t show up on the transcript (until you get to the transcript of the pundits analyzing why Gore lost the debate).
There’s generally one big televised speech per year nowadays, the president’s State of the Union message, and it’s a minor scandal (treated more as a political blunder) when the windier presidents (thy name is Clinton) talk for a full hour.
That’s enough of Lincoln for now (after all, he was awfully homely, and Douglas was too short to make much of a presidential candidate nowadays). And if I go on much longer, I’ll be the one convicted of windiness (and I’ll plead guilty).
Someday, this post might link up with a more explicit and politically incorrect argument about the possibility that, since the newspapers and the TV news and the politicians themselves are all competing rather desperately for the time and attention that we, the people of the United States, are ever more reluctant to grant to them, we may just have to accept a share of collective responsibility for the media and the politics that we get.
If, on the other hand, you find yourself craving more on the topic, this link will get you the full text of the Ottawa debate and, at the bottom, links to the full text of all seven debates. You won’t amuse yourself to death reading them, but you’ll know you’re not being talked down to.
I wish the outcome of the 2000 election was decided by the first Bush-Gore debate. After all, Gore won the debate by an average of 10 points in all 5 polls conducted after the debate. The American people seemed to have a pretty good idea of what happened in that debate — until the American media decided to focus more on style than substance.
Clearly many issues have changed since the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
For one thing, the US Senate race was actually a race to win the state legislature because there wasn’t direct voting for this office. In fact, Lincoln would have won if the office would have been a statewide, direct vote.
Another thing was that the “press” was structured much differently than it is today. FOr all of the liberal banter about “corporate” ownership of media, in the 19th century the press was not objective. Most of the newspapers you talk about above were partisan rags that told 180 degree different stories about the debate based on their affiliation.
Third, to a certain extent the Lincoln Douglas debates were unique. Not every Senate campaign of the time features such direct meetings between the candidates. I guess that is why they were famous and important in creating a name for Lincoln.
Fourth, with respect to the Lincoln Senate campaign, this was the second close call for Lincoln and teh US Senate office. In 1855 Lincoln was the front runner in the legislature but was 4 votes shy of winning the majority of legislators. Five votes from anti-Nebraskan Democrats consistently voted for Lymball Trumball. When it became apparent to Lincoln that if he remained in the race another Democrat would eventually win, he instructed his supporters to switch to Trumball. What made Lincoln unqiue was that he never held any animosity to those involved, and Trumball and Norman Judd, the leader of the hold outs, became his close political associates and important to his gaining the presidential nomination.
Fifth, these US Senate elections highlight a “what might have been”. If Lincoln would have won this office the liklihood of him winning the presidency in 1860 would have been reduced. Lincoln’s ultimate winning strategy for the nomination was to be the moderate and the second choice of the most delegates. As a US Senator he would have been much junior and lesser known than individuals like William Seward, Simon Cameron and Salmon Chase. Plus, as a US Senator he would have had an explicit record on issues that his opponents could have used to discredit him with some of the more important voting blocks of the era.
One should remember that the outcome of the 2000 election was decided by the Supreme Court, all other things aside.
The effects of television on imagination and attention span are getting to be well-documented. Sadly, most people don’t care, largely due to short attention spans. If one grows accustomed to the level of stimulation you can get from moving pictures with a loud soundtrack, a long, quiet book or transcript just doesn’t cut it. You can’t condense the complexity of important ideas into little clips and sound bites, so they don’t bother to try–a little flashy entertainment, and people think they know what happened.
The Lincoln Douglas audience was accustomed to limited streams of information, primarily the Bible, which they took literally; many of them heard the Bible rather than read it, and sermons were hours long. Sermons were the day’s main source of entertainment, if you can imagine.
My attention is demanded from all directions constantly (I am listening to the BBC as I write this) and easily distracted. Did I even read the complete essay above, much less the comments (no doubt more trenchant than my own)? Read Lincoln and you recognize the rhythms of the Bible and Shakespeare. People, then as now, liked what they knew, and enjoyed hearing similar cadences delivered with witty variations and self-deprecating charm, as Lincoln’s were. Lincoln’s references to the Bible were the 19th century Midwesterner’s pop-reference, not just a glib invitation to a shared piety, like today’s politicians. Audiences tolerated more because they had less. But they also threw vegetables when displeased.
As I have recently slogged through reading those Lincoln-Douglas debates again, I can certainly attest to Postman’s assertions about changed mindsets with changed media. Of interest from an historical point of view, the reading was quite a labor, and I wondered as I read how people at that time must have had a lot more time on their hands for reading — and listening, for that matter.
However, I also noted how many things have not changed: the constant need to point out the lies and half-truths of the opposition; the attempts to polarize the electorate over claims not germain to the topic (false claims about the new Republican party’s wish to make blacks the “equal” of whites, with undertones of sexual innuendo); a (dem) political machine bent on any tricks to win; the behind the scenes influence of money; a press as yellow as could be and quite sloppy about accuracy (it took a lot of research to find out what was actually said); an election won not by the votes but by political machinations in the deciding body after the election. I conclude that though the media have changed, politics in America has not, for the better or for the worse.