HEALING: Sandburg, Lincoln believed in The People!

FRIDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2026

CEO enters Hall of Fame: Good God! If we survive the likely madness of the next few years, our flailing nation is going to be badly in need of healing. 

In recent weeks, that had us thinking about that passage from Carl Sandburg's famous biography, Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years.

It's one of our favorite passages in all of literature. It promotes a certain view of the way a nation's story should be told.

Sandburg was a poet historian. In an admiring essay in the Wall Street Journal back in 2020, Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer cited the beauty of Sandburg's prose, then brought "The People" in:

History Through a Poet’s Eyes

[...]

Sandburg’s work has long endured. It remains the most influential and popular life of Lincoln ever published, with “The Prairie Years” alone selling some 1.5 million copies. As of this Lincoln’s birthday month, “Prairie Years,” “War Years” and Sandburg’s 1954 one-volume abridgment all remain on Amazon’s current list of the 50 best-selling Lincoln books.

An explanation for their sustained appeal may lurk within the assessment that critic Mark Van Doren proffered in the Nation in 1926: “In spite of some rather obvious poetry stuck in here and there,” “Prairie Years” was “amply and profoundly beautiful.” Yet behind the Whitmanesque free-verse vernacular was evidence of deep research...

Sandburg endures not because he is cited by modern scholars, but because he continues to be read for sheer pleasure. In my own travels on the Lincoln circuit, I am often asked: “Do you like Sandburg’s books?” My affirmative answer invariably relieves questioners who find him a guilty and perhaps outdated pleasure. Such skepticism never inhibited Carl Sandburg. Writing in “The People, Yes,” he all but predicted his own durability in verse. 

And so on from there. And yes—Sandburg once wrote an entire book-length poem called The People, Yes. The late James Hurt, another Lincoln specialist, took the idea a bit further:   

Sandburg's Lincoln within History

[...]

Sandburg himself saw his book as an American epic as often as he thought of it as a mere biography. In a preface written for The Prairie Years but dropped before publication, he wrote, "The facts and myths of his life are to be an American possession, shared widely over the world, for thousands of years..." And in his "symphonic finish" to The War Years, Sandburg wrote, "Out of the smoke and stench, out of the music and violent dreams of the war, Lincoln stood perhaps taller than any other of the many great heroes. This was in the minds of many. None threw a longer shadow than [Lincoln]. And to him the great hero was The People. He could not say too often that he was merely their instrument."

In this and in many similar passages, the figure of Lincoln becomes merged with that of Sandburg's favorite abstraction, The People, and the book becomes a democratic epic celebrating not an individual but a collective hero.   

Sandburg saw his six-volume biography as American / democratic epic. For Sandburg, as for Lincoln himself, the central player in the American story was an abstraction: The People.   

It will be hard for this nation to heal under current arrangements. Under those arrangements, corporate entities deliberately pick and choose their material to appeal to the Reds or the Blues. In our view, the Fox News Channel is demonically guilty of this deliberate pursuit of tribal division, but those of us in Blue America could do better ourselves.  

We'd been thinking of that passage from Sandburg, the one in which the poet biographer cites a somewhat mysterious source of "healing and strength." Because we clearly need to develop a politics of human feeling, we've always admired Sandburg's portrait of Lincoln as a man of the people, but also as a person of deep human feeling as his journey to Washington nears.   

On Tuesday, we showed you the way the passage in question begins, with the president-elect riding in the caboose of a freight train as he goes to pay his last visit to his stepmother, Sarah Bush Lincoln.

Do we need to stop proselytizing, to learn how to feel? This is the passage in which Sandburg imagines a source of healing and strength:

Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years 

Chapter 163

[...]

The next day Lincoln drove eight miles out to the old farm along the road over which he had hauled wood with an ox team. He came to the old log house he had cut logs for and helped smooth the chinks; from its little square windows he had seen late winter and early birds.

Sally Bush and he put their arms around each other and listened to each other’s heartbeats. They held hands and talked, they talked without holding hands. Each looked into eyes thrust back in deep sockets. She was all of a mother to him.

He was her boy more than any born to her. He gave her a photograph of her boy, a hungry picture of him standing and wanting, wanting. He stroked her face a last time, kissed good-by, and went away.

She knew his heart would go roaming back often, that even when he rode in an open carriage in New York or Washington with soldiers, flags, and cheering thousands along the streets, he might just as like be thinking of her in the old log farmhouse out in Coles County, Illinois.

The sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months would come sifting down with healing and strength; between harvest and corn-plowing there would be rains beating and blizzards howling; and there would be the silence after snowstorms with white drifts piled against the fences, barns, and trees.  

That's where the chapter ends.   

It's true! Traditionally, we humans have sometimes held hands and talked, have talked without holding hands. We humans have listened to each other's heartbeats. Sandburg is presenting Lincoln, the moral giant, as a deeply human being.

As for the possible source of healing, Sandburg cites the sunshine of the prairie summer and fall months. What role would the silence after snowstorms play? You're asked to puzzle that out. 

Will we The People find ways to heal if we survive the next two years? There's little silence and little feeling in the clatter of our public discourse as it exists today as we The People ae encouraged to split into warring camps.  

And then this week, this actually happened. No, we aren't making this up:  

Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott...Inducted Into Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame in Star-Studded NY Event

Fox News Media CEO Suzanne Scott and CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer were among the media heavyweights inducted into the Broadcasting & Cable Hall of Fame at a star-studded ceremony in New York City Tuesday night.

Scott and Blitzer were honored at the Ziegfeld Ballroom alongside a roster of prominent television personalities and industry figures, including ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith, Bravo’s Andy Cohen, and celebrity chef Bobby Flay.

Scott’s induction came just days before Fox News marks its 30th anniversary on Oct. 7. Accepting the honor, the network’s first female CEO reflected on its growth from a single cable channel into a broader media operation.

“The real recognition belongs to my entire Fox News family,” Scott said. “Next month, we will celebrate our 30th anniversary.” 

For all we know, Suzanne Scott may be the world's nicest person. Unfortunately, she's also the person who puts the braindead garbage can known as the Gutfeld! program on the air each night. Also, she sends in the clowns each afternoon, asking them to destroy the nation's brain cells while touting themselves as The Five.  

For that, she's been sent to the Hall of Fame! And none of the Blue American journos we're trained to trust will ever say a single word about any of this. They don't want to fight with Fox. To a man, to a woman, they boldly refuse to serve.

We expect full services to return next week. Scott to the Hall of Fame!