As presented in the article, during the presidential campaign of 1860, a political organization arose in Connecticut that was to help elect Abraham Lincoln as well as lead to the outbreak of the Civil War. A group called the Wide Awakes.
Here is a link to that article which I highly recommend you read, if the link works when you encounter this post.
Should the link not work, in summary, the Wide Awakes movement began inauspiciously in February of 1860 when Edgar S. Yergason ducked into the textile shop where he worked, and quickly fashioned a cape and hat from waterproofed black cambric, while brandishing a torch he had "borrowed" from someone who was marching in the parade following a recent political speech. Along with a few of his fellow clerks who donned a similar outfit, the young men stood out from the large crowd which had gathered to hear that evening's speech.
From there, the young men began meeting, their group grew in size, they fine tuned their costume, and named themselves the Wide Awakes, a popular expression of the time which was used by people who were standing up for themselves.
The politics of 1860 were much different than today's, in that the Republicans of the time, especially those living in the northern sates, were anti-slavery, while it was the Democratic party, particularly the southern democrats, who were using their economic and political power to protect slaver's rights. It was a not unfamiliar case where the minority held more sway than the majority.
It was also the case that the presidential election of 1860 was a four way contest, with two prominent democrats, one from the south, one from the north, vying for the office, plus a ticket comprising the Whig and Know Nothing parties in addition to Lincoln's Republican party.
If you want to read a quick summary of the election, here is a Wikipedia link.
To finish this history lesson, Lincoln won the election with just under 40% on the vote, hardly a mandate but victory nonetheless as he garnered 172 electoral votes to 123 for the other 3 tickets combined. This was due in no small part to the formation of Wide Awakes chapters all across the northern states which endorsed Lincoln while believing that slavery was an evil that must be eliminated.
While it is true that Lincoln did not run as a strict abolitionist, once his presidential victory was confirmed, the southern states began to secede, and Lincoln was now faced with a shattering Union.
Which brings me to the current political movement called MAGA, which stands for Make America Great Again, and which has taken over the Republican party.
In some ways, the impetus for the Wide Awakes and MAGA, is similar in that there was a real belief by the everyday people of 1860 that a minority of people were controlling the economy and politics of the nation, and that the silent majority were suffering for this situation.
There is certainly evidence that a similar demographic voted for Trump in 2016, a demographic that felt that its needs were not being met by the Washington DC establishment.
In a way, that is the definition of a popular movement.
In 1860, the powers that be were rich, profitable and powerful because they had slave labor to draw upon to do the hard work of farming without the accompanying costs. In turn, their money bought politicians who were either uncaring about enslaving African Americans, after all, many of our founding fathers owned slaves, or were accepting of the necessary evil of slavery to drive America's economy, or preferred not to have to make the difficult decisions related to how to winnow America from its slavery addiction.
While it all seems so obvious today, in 1860 it was far from clear cut.
Sadly, as a result of Lincoln's election, hundreds of thousands of Americans were killed at the hands of fellow citizens, cities and towns were destroyed, and our economy suffered tremendously.
In the case of the MAGA movement, there is certainly a justification for putting America first. For making political decisions that improve the lives of everyday Americans before worrying about the lives of those who live south of the border or across the ocean. It is an attractive slogan, not unlike the idea of being "wide awake" to the evils of slavery, and the power of slavers to control our government.
If we assume that the Wide Awakes were driven, even if only in part, by the belief that slavery was evil, then their movement, while perhaps a bit reflective of putting America's interest first, did so by deciding that treating an entire race of people as inferior was wrong.
To me, it is the ultimate expression of selfishness to consider a man your slave, and so, while the Wide Awakes may have been selfish in their desire to be heard by those who refused to hear, to take power from those who hoarded power for its own sake, it was far from selfish to include the prospect of freeing the enslaved.
I have written a number of posts about the growing selfishness that seems to be permeating our society. How the MAGA movement, while holding the laudable proposition that we should act to make our country great again, are focused more on who shouldn't be included in this improvement, whether those people be immigrants seeking a better life, or Americans who wish to exercise their freedom to make decisions about their own body, or when to become parents, or how to vote, or who to love, or which gender makes them more comfortable.
Finally, the Wide Awakes movement was about the future, and about rejecting a past where keeping people as slave was accepted while much of the MAGA movement is about going backward, treating women as baby factories, immigrants as vermin, and anyone with a different idea of finding love and happiness, or even one's true self, as not worthy of American freedom.
The pessimist in me believes that, like the destruction that accompanied the Civil War in the years following Lincoln's election, and in the decades which followed during the Reconstruction years when African Americans were still legally treated as second class citizens despite the lofty goals of the Wide Awakes movement, we are living in a similar time.
Similar, not because there are thousands of Americans being killed by other Americans, but because the animosity which could lead to such a possibility is all around us.
Fortunately, as I have detailed in my previous post about having two thought in one head, the optimist in me thinks that we will survive this phase. That we will become Wide Awakes in realizing that we can do both.
That we can keep America great while sharing this greatness with people born on the wrong side of our southern border, or whose country borders Russia, or who live, love and perceive themselves in a different way than we perceive ourselves.
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