It is telling that the greatest presidential speech in American history begins with a sentence that summarizes 87 years of our national story. It is a sentence above the fray, in fact 30,000 feet above the fray. It describes, from the perspective of outer space, the journey of our fathers from Europe to North America, and how they carried with them, like the Israelites carried their sacred scrolls out of Egypt, the ideas of liberty and equality. (In case you’ve not identified the sentence to which I am referring, it begins, “Four score and seven years ago…”)
But the sentence I describe above, while it has epic scope, communicates common knowledge. Everyone at Gettysburg knew this. What American didn’t know that her fathers and mothers brought forth on this continent a new nation? Abe was stating the obvious. Why did he do that? Why did he waste his time telling the audience the obvious?
It’s also a positive and reassuring sentence. There is no threat in it. No tension. No drama. Or rather, no overt drama. No reference to the American Revolution. He skips over the fact that people had to fight and die to bring forth the new nation. It’s quite a serene and stately sentence. “Bringing forth” feels sort of effortless. But the sentence also feels like a set up.
And indeed it is. It is a set up. It establishes the setting for the story about to be told. Because the next sentence is the sucker punch. It’s the sentence that basically tells the American people that it is highly likely that the country that our fathers brought forth with such “serene ease” will not survive, that the experiment of self-government may not be successful, and that life as we know it may soon be over. Essentially, the president is telling his audience to prepare for the possibility of national collapse—chaos, confusion, extinction.
This second sentence is dramatic. It tickles our anxieties (or rather their anxieties, our ancestors who were lucky enough to have been there, or be alive at the time to read the speech in the newspapers.) It makes the muscles beneath the skin tighten. It causes us tension. And tension is the stuff of drama.
But the real point here is that we need both sentences, the first and the second. We need the setting to establish location and, in this case, character—who the story is about. And we also discover in the first sentence that the main character (our tribe, our nation) has a dream of establishing a country based on personal liberty and equality. The second sentence creates the drama because it interrupts that dream, and in so doing makes us anxious. We begin to look for answers in our minds, to restore ourselves to the path of stability, and the president helps us do that in the rest of the speech. But the first two sentences are doozies.
We can all go to school on the Gettysburg Address.