Wednesday was the 150th anniversary of Lincoln’s death. It’s hard to spend too much time reflecting on Lincoln; I use the first thing he ever published, comparing two infrastructure projects in a local election campaign, as an example of policy analysis avant la lettre, and he just gets better and better from there. Even David Brooks says he becomes a better man spending quiet time in the Lincoln Memorial. The second inaugural is one of great works of public discourse; terse, just, humane. I think French’s portrait nails it: brilliant, menschlich, determined; open hand, closed fist. Lincoln makes everyone reach a little higher.
I listened the grooves off this wonderful cantata when I was a kid, and I’m pleased to find that someone has posted it here , here, and here. It was performed live, after fifty years on the shelf, in 2009.
There’s no video; remember how to make your own pictures in your own head? Take a half-hour, just to be sure we don’t forget what a real American is.
Author: Michael O'Hare
Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy, University of California, Berkeley, Michael O'Hare was raised in New York City and trained at Harvard as an architect and structural engineer. Diverted from an honest career designing buildings by the offer of a job in which he could think about anything he wanted to and spend his time with very smart and curious young people, he fell among economists and such like, and continues to benefit from their generosity with on-the-job social science training.
He has followed the process and principles of design into "nonphysical environments" such as production processes in organizations, regulation, and information management and published a variety of research in environmental policy, government policy towards the arts, and management, with special interests in energy, facility siting, information and perceptions in public choice and work environments, and policy design. His current research is focused on transportation biofuels and their effects on global land use, food security, and international trade; regulatory policy in the face of scientific uncertainty; and, after a three-decade hiatus, on NIMBY conflicts afflicting high speed rail right-of-way and nuclear waste disposal sites. He is also a regular writer on pedagogy, especially teaching in professional education, and co-edited the "Curriculum and Case Notes" section of the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management.
Between faculty appointments at the MIT Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, he was director of policy analysis at the Massachusetts Executive Office of Environmental Affairs. He has had visiting appointments at Università Bocconi in Milan and the National University of Singapore and teaches regularly in the Goldman School's executive (mid-career) programs.
At GSPP, O'Hare has taught a studio course in Program and Policy Design, Arts and Cultural Policy, Public Management, the pedagogy course for graduate student instructors, Quantitative Methods, Environmental Policy, and the introduction to public policy for its undergraduate minor, which he supervises. Generally, he considers himself the school's resident expert in any subject in which there is no such thing as real expertise (a recent project concerned the governance and design of California county fairs), but is secure in the distinction of being the only faculty member with a metal lathe in his basement and a 4×5 Ebony view camera. At the moment, he would rather be making something with his hands than writing this blurb.
View all posts by Michael O'Hare
Such a rosy filter is time.
Lincoln's reputation is resilient.
Who can now look at Thomas Jefferson selling young black men, and cohabiting with a teenage slave woman, without a queasy feeling? Or feeling the same way about one of Lincoln's predecessors, James K Polk, buying and selling slaves while he was in office? Or about Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, calling Frederick Douglass "a nig*ger who would slit your throat in a minute"?
Yet when we look at Lincoln through Douglass' eyes we see a man who (said Douglass) seemed to have no racial feeling whatsoever. Lincoln was politically cautious about extending civil rights to blacks, yet it seems a miracle that he escaped the pervasive sense of white superiority common at the time, and still attained the highest office in the land.
James,
Thanks for the link. I was aware of Lonesome Train but had never actually heard it. It's a completely different consideration of Lincoln's assassination than Whitman/Hindemith's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, which is roughly contemporary. I think I prefer Hindemith, but I'd leap at the opportunity to do Robinson's work.
Thanks again for the link.
Pretty much.
And thanks for the link — I've never heard (of) it.