Know Your Enemy: Lincoln at Gettysburg
Matt and Sam discuss Garry Wills’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America.
Know Your Enemy is a podcast about the American right co-hosted by Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell. Read more about it here. You can subscribe to, rate, and review the show on Apple Podcasts and Stitcher, and receive bonus content by supporting the podcast on Patreon.
We’re ringing in the 250th anniversary of the United States with an episode on Garry Wills’s superb, Pulitzer Prize–winning 1992 book, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade the America. It’s central argument is that Abraham Lincoln succeeded in revolutionizing how Americans thought of the founding of their country, especially the Declaration of Independence, with the Gettysburg Address—a revolution not just in “thought” but in “style,” one that placed the Declaration’s assertion of equality at the very center of our political tradition. The book is one that only Garry Wills could have written, with his PhD in classics allowing him to compare Lincoln’s “funeral oration” to that of Pericles, with his long meditation on the American presidency and leadership preparing him to grasp the enormity of the task Lincoln set himself, and with his time at National Review in his youth helping him understand why the American right never forgave Lincoln for succeeding. We discuss all this and more in our conversation about one of our favorite writer’s very best books.
Tickets for Sam’s events: Tuesday with Tad Devine / Thursday with Dan Denvir.
Previous KYE episodes on Garry Wills:
The Kennedy Imprisonment (with Jeet Heer)
Bomb Power (with Madeleine Baker)
Sources:
Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (1992)
— Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State (2010)
— Martin Luther King Is Still on the Case!, Esquire (1968)
— The Blind Teach Us to See, Boston Globe (1970)
Abraham Lincoln, Letter to Joshua Speed (1855)
Harry V. Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959)
Russell Kirk, The Roots of American Order (1974)
Willmoore Kendall and George W. Carey, The Basic Symbols of the American Political Tradition (1970)
…and don’t forget to subscribe to Know Your Enemy on Patreon for access to all of our bonus episodes!