When I was eight years old, I memorized it from my Abraham Lincoln Classics Illustrated comic book, which contained the speech’s complete text. Decades later, in 1992, Gary Wills published his brilliant, Pulitzer-Prize-winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America. I read it. I loved it. And the following year, on November 19, 1993, the 130th anniversary of Lincoln’s delivery of the Gettysburg Address, I performed a one-night, one-man show for friends and family, in a Los Angeles theatre rented for the occasion. In preparation for that night, I worked for weeks with a couple of professional theatre people I knew, developing a script and rehearsing repeatedly. For the performance, I lost weight – so as to be rail-thin, like Lincoln – grew a beard, and donned a stove-pipe hat.
All of this I offer as background simply to point out that I have some familiarity with and appreciation for the Gettysburg Address, one of the finest political speeches ever given by a U.S. president or by any American politician. I honor the Gettysburg Address. And so I was a bit upset to learn, just yesterday, that Cornell University recently removed its Gettysburg Address exhibit after someone complained. The exhibit consisted of a bust of Lincoln and a plaque with the text of the address. We don’t know who complained or why. But if a single anonymous complaint can result in taking down an exhibit honoring one of America’s greatest speeches, written and delivered by one of America’s greatest presidents, then something somewhere has gone haywire in this country.
Cornell claimed that it had always planned on eventually taking down the exhibit rather than leaving it permanently in place. That may be so, but then why take it down and leave an empty pedestal where a bust of Lincoln was formerly displayed?