Word: powerful
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Telling the story with an even, unemphatic clarity and selective power, Sandburg adds incident to incident, utterance to utterance, personality to personality until he recreates the wild winter of 1860-61, when the election of Abraham Lincoln, on a platform committed to the limitation of slavery, aroused the fire-eaters of the South to take their States out of the Union. History that is considered an old story takes on new body and quality in such bits as this...
...stave off war. "Night and day he had conferred and negotiated, become weary and rusty, vulgar and profane beyond his old habits, worn and frazzled as a castoff garment." He had a theory that war between the States could be stopped by getting a war started with some foreign power (Lincoln's observation on this later was "One war at a time"). On April 1 he sent a memorandum to Lincoln embodying this and other suggestions which implied that "Lincoln was a failure as a President but he, Seward, knew how to be one." One of many Lincoln classics...
...Lincoln, revealed in touches both familiar and unfamiliar (e.g., Emerson's noting that he "showed all his white teeth" when he laughed). On the bitter subject of conscription, North and South, Sandburg gives the fruit of original research. Nothing in the narrative, however, stands out with such power for readers in 1939 as the deep tenacity of Lincoln's efforts: first (vainly) to win the South to gradual, compensated emancipation; then to forestall class and sectional savagery, to maintain representative government in the torn border States (sometimes he seems to have done so by an act of will...
Cawley felt that the real reason for Russia's attempt to conquer Finland was that this little country would make a very valuable buffer state against the growing power of Germany. But if Russia moves on and attacks the Aaland Islands it would then seem evident that Sweden and Norway were Russia's real goal...
...Russia was a religion, a state transecuded by a burning desire to bring peace on earth, good will to men. Soviet Russia, these disillusioned folk know now, is as lustful and cruel as her neighbors. Like her neighbors, she must look first of all to her own security and power. Nations have always committed murder and rape while quoting the Bible or the Declaration of Independence. But while France and England can fight to save their empires and still succeed in selling the idea that they are battling for "the oppressed peoples of the world," Russia's clumsy justifications...