Unexpected greatness: Mark Roosevelt at TEDxDayton
[Music] I love many things about America. That wasn't a joke. I love bourbon. Maybe a little too much at times. I love baseball. I love jazz. [Applause] I love our national parks. But most of all, I love Abraham Lincoln. I love Lincoln because he was a good man who became a great man and who was able to resolve America's most horrific national sin, slavery. He gave us a second chance to do America right. I need Lincoln because as an American in a country that has once again lost its way, that seems unable to wrestle with our most significant problems, I need his example and I need his companionship. The inspiration we'll get from my talk and from Abraham Lincoln is not an easy inspiration. The triumphs of Lincoln and the country that he served were hardearned and came at enormous sacrifice. But it's the kind of inspiration we're going to need if we're going to do something about what we face in this country. So, let's go looking for Lincoln. His image is going to be easy to find because it's everywhere. It's on the signs of the innumerable companies named after him. And we'll see it when we stoop over to pick up one of the 450 billion pennies that have been printed with his face on one side. And we'll find that Lincoln is remembered. 16,000 books have been written about him. Spielberg made a pretty good film last year and he is taught as much as any American history is taught in our content deprived schools. But who was he? Who really was he? It's worth the effort to find out. Lincoln was incredibly unlikely. He didn't look the part. He was 6'4 in tall. He was ungainainely. He had long arms and long legs and large feet. Nathaniel Hawthorne said he was the homeliest man that he had ever seen. Audiences took a couple of minutes to get used to his high-pitched, rather unpleasant voice. We all know that Lincoln was born into a log cabin and that he only had a year of schooling. But just like his looks, this is misleading. Lincoln does not comport to what we expect from a frontiersman. He didn't drink. He didn't hunt. And he didn't hate Indians. He toiled in the fields because he had to. But right from the beginning, Lincoln's loves were reading and learning. But because of his origins and because of what he looked like, he's still most often portrayed as a common man. Up through the 1960s, the Hancock Life Insurance Company would issue advertisements saying Lincoln was just like the rest of us, only taller. But he wasn't. In fact, Lincoln is uniquely uncommon. First of all, he was a mass of contradictions. He was a a sad man given to brooding who had to fight off bouts of depression, who was also incredibly funny. He was a loner who loved company. He was deeply humble, but also incredibly ambitious. He was a visionary, but unlike almost every visionary I've ever known, he was willing to get his hands dirty in the world in order to accomplish good. Lincoln worked hard. When he was a kid and had access to so few books, he read deeply. He read the Bible and he read Shakespeare, what we now call wisdom literature. And Lincoln worked at what he believed mattered most, which was his writing and his speaking. He took every talk and letter and he paid painstakingly went over the words for their rhythms and their sounds and their inferences and their meanings. And Lincoln persevered. He lost more elections than he won. He was constantly belittled and even ridiculed. And yet he got up and he kept going and he became president of the United States. And Lincoln suffered. Lincoln suffered so much that at times you wonder how the man kept going. He had a poor marriage to marry Todd. And they had four sons they loved so much, only one of whom would live to adulthood, Robert. In 1862, the absolute worst year of the Civil War, Lincoln lost his favorite child, Willie, to fever at age 12. And Lincoln mourned Willie and he grieved Willie. But he was still commander-in-chief. So he had to get up into the middle of the night and read the telegrams telling him of battle loss after battle loss for the Union forces. And he read the names of the dead. And he mourned and he grieved some more. and he wrote letters to the mothers of those dead. And he thought about Willie and he asked himself, "What could possibly explain all of this suffering?" Lincoln wanted to understand. He searched for answers. He wrestled with his faith and he thought about God. And from this his hard work, his perseverance, but mostly his suffering and his searching, it is now that the miracle of what Abraham Lincoln became explodes into the world. Lincoln had always known that slavery was America's great national sin. And though he revered the founders, he also knew that they had failed. failed either to end slavery in their lifetime or to end it at a time certain in the future. And every subsequent president had failed as well until the stench and the stink of this horrible evil threatened to bring down the entire American experiment. It was left for the seemingly unlikely Abraham Lincoln to do something about it. But here's the truth. He'd actually been preparing his entire lifetime for this. And Lincoln was able to convince northerners to fight. He explained to them and convince them that what was at stake was America. He said that the outcome of the war would determine, in his beautiful words, whether we shall noly save or meanly lose the last great hope of earth, American democracy, which he said had been bequeathed to an almost chosen people. and Lincoln convinced a skeptical public that ending slavery was a critical strategy to winning the war. So on the first day of 1863, Abraham Lincoln issues his emancipation proclamation, overcoming objections to what whether he had the power by using his war powers. From this moment on, Lincoln is a man in full. He has no doubts about what he is meant to do. His vision is so clear and so distilled that his speech has become magnificently concise. The Gettysburg address was 272 words. It took Lincoln 2 minutes to deliver it. His magnificent second inaugural was 701 words. It took him seven minutes to deliver it. It was Lincoln's vision, his resolve, and his determination that carried the North through the war with what we can now only imagine the suffering. 700,000 Americans died in the Civil War. That is more than in all previous wars and subsequent wars combined. As the war was reaching its conclusion, Lincoln needed and he felt his country needed an even larger understanding. And while he and his country had been going through hell, Lincoln had been looking into the heavens and he came to believe that the war was a punishment given America by the Almighty for the sin of slavery. In his Old Testament driven second inaugural, he said, "Woe unto the world because of offenses." If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which he now wills to remove and that he gives to North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those who caused this offense. Shall we discern therein any departure from the divine attributes which believers in a living God always ascribe to him? Frederick Douglas calls those America's sacred words. An American president had finally told the truth about slavery. Make no mistake, the war did not need to end the way it did. The Union could have lost this war without Lincoln's resolve and his vision. It would have left two nations, one slave and one free. Or if Lincoln's political skills were fewer, he could not have been reelected in 1864 and there would have been a negotiated settlement, leaving the Union and slavery intact. It was Abraham Lincoln who made it otherwise. This is about inspiration. When we think now about how Lincoln should inspire us, it seems to me that it's all about accepting that there's some things that must be done, things that will not resolve themselves. If I look at our world today, I think that the growing disparity of resources between those who have and those who have not and our abysmal disregard for the health of the planet we call home, cry out for our attention. The next best thing to being great is to walk with the great. If you walk a while with Lincoln, if we walk a while with Lincoln, maybe we will get the courage to do what needs to be done, even if it's hard. That would be the best way to honor this man who gave more of himself and made more of himself than anyone else I know of. Thank you very much. [Music]