1850s Lincoln and the Know Nothings

In the mid-1850s the Know Nothing party was perhaps at the height of its influence, being a nativist party opposed to the foreign and Catholic influx into the country. Lincoln was not inclined to be seduced.

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[A committee of Know Nothings came to interview Lincoln, hoping to get him to join their political party.[

Lincoln asked “who the native Americans were. ‘Do they not,’ he said, ‘wear the breech-clout and carry the tomahawk? We pushed them from their homes and now turn upon others not fortunate enough to come over as early as we or our forefathers. Gentlemen of the committee, your party is wrong is principle.’” He added humorously: “When this Know-nothing party first came up, I had an Irishman, Patrick by name, hoeing in my garden. One morning I was there with him, and he said, “Mr. Lincoln, ‘What about the Know-nothings?’ I explained that they would possibly carry a few elections and disappear, and I asked Pat why he was not born in this country. ‘Faith, Mr. Lincoln,’ he replied, ‘I wanted to be, but my mother wouldn’t let me.’”

[Later, in a letter to Joshua Speed, when asked where he stood politically, with the Whigs now defunct as a party, Lincoln replied thus.]

“I am not a Know Nothing,” he declared. “That is certain. How could I be? How can anyone who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that ‘all men are created equal.’ We now practically read it ‘all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics’ When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty - to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hipocracy.” Lincoln “avowed that if the Know Nothing movement was successful, that he could be no longer of any use to his fellow men in politcs.”

-- Michael Burlingame, “Abraham Lincoln: A Life” (volume 1, paperback edition 2013, p. 375-376)

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Wednesday

Since all three cats came inside this morning, I took the opportunity to mow the lawn. The ground is so dry. Thus far I have taken a ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude about watering the lawn, ‘if it doesn’t rain, that’s not my problem’. But it is a problem. Our next water day is not until Tuesday. I think I am going to have to use that day.

A Eulogy for Twitter

People are still using Twitter, but they’re not hanging out there.

-- "A Eulogy for Twitter" at The Atlantic

It looks like Twitter is finally beginning to lose its luster. It is asked what will be the next big thing, but I wonder if there will be such a thing. Maybe the Internet has reached a maturation point such that we no longer feel a need to congregate at the 'next coolest thing'. In the past, the next big thing was already up and running and growing. People left old websites to go to the new, glitzier party. But there is nothing like that now.

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If Twitter is fading, what's next?

Probably many things. The Internet is characterized by the narrowness of its streams. Already we've fanned out to platforms like Vine, Snapchat, Instagram, etc., etc. Some of the would-be tweets we never send are instead text messaged or chatted to our friends.

-- ADRIENNE LAFRANCE AND ROBINSON MEYER at The Atlantic

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Maybe fragmentation is the last adult stage of the Internet. Now it is more about the friends you have than it is about new websites and making new friends there. People will use a little of this and a little of that to connect their lives and schedules. As I have observed before, we no longer have this sense of e-life vs. real life. It is all real life now, and the Internet is kind of like a more functional telephone. If you never had much of a real life, then I guess you are simply out of luck. Or, who knows, maybe this is an opportunity for Google-Plus to finally catch on!