AP Photo
President Abraham Lincoln stands under cover at the center of the U.S. Capitol steps during his inauguration in Washington, D.C., on March 4, 1861.
CNN reports that security officials have convinced President-elect Biden not to travel on Amtrak from Wilmington to Washington for his inauguration, which Biden had planned to do as a way of re-emphasizing his 40-plus-year commuting routine, which has always been part of his “Regular Joe” persona. Fearful that far-right domestic terrorists might attack him either en route or at D.C.’s Union Station, they have convinced a reluctant Biden to make the trip by other, unspecified-for-security-reasons means.
This shift in commute uncannily echoes Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in Washington on the eve of his own inauguration. Allan Pinkerton, then a private detective engaged by the Pennsylvania Railroad, had discovered irrefutable evidence that Southern sympathizers had detailed plans to assassinate Lincoln when his train stopped at Baltimore en route to the capital. Overcoming Lincoln’s initial objections, Pinkerton persuaded him to steal away, under the cloak of—well, under the cloak of a cloak—from his inaugural train, from whose rear deck he had made multiple public appearances during the journey from Springfield to D.C. Pinkerton then had Lincoln board a different train, whereon he slipped undetected through Baltimore in the middle of the night to arrive, unharmed and unheralded, in Washington later that morning.
If this isn’t an ominous historical parallel, I don’t know what is. We have the abandonment of the inaugural train in favor of a safer, unpublicized means. We have threats from, in both cases, terrorists in the cause of white supremacy, who now as then constitute one wing of a major political party (then, a Democratic Party rooted in the white South; now, a Republican Party rooted in the white South). We have malign fantasies spun about the party and president about to take the power conferred on them by the electorate by mendacious media outlets—then, The Charleston Mercury; now, Fox News and right-wing radio.
Sixty-two years after Lincoln’s inauguration and 98 years before Biden’s, William Butler Yeats, writing of his own time’s Irish conflicts, authored the poem “Meditations in Time of Civil War,” two lines from which provide a decent guide to how American conservatism devolved into terrorist apologism:
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare …
The Irish poet Biden likes to quote is Seamus Heaney, particularly his poem “The Cure of Troy,” which contains the lines:
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
How we get from the world of Yeats’s vision to the world of Heaney’s is by no means clear, but we have to incessantly try.
