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Historic debates challenge students' understanding

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Contributed by: YourHub.com on 10/6/2008

Lincoln-Douglas re-enactment sheds light on lightweight debates

While Democrats and Republicans were trying to drive home the last of their expectations-setting talking points in advance of the vice presidential nominee debates on Oct. 2, a different debate was already taking place on Auraria Campus, between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas.

The re-enactment, heavily trimmed down from a series of seven three-hour debates in 1858, pitted the former one-term Congressman Lincoln, portrayed by actor Dan Hiester, against incumbent Sen. Douglas, portrayed by Professor Stephen Hartnett, chair of Communications at the University of Colorado Denver, for Douglas' senate seat.

The two were part of a panel, along with UCD assistant professor of English Gillian Silverman and discussion moderator and UCD assistant professor of philosophy David Hildebrand.

If the only measure of success is a victory at the ballot box, Lincoln lost the debates. He was, after all, against difficult odds as the member of a fledgling political party and challenging a popular incumbent. But his performance would raise his national profile and eventually help elevate him to the presidency.

As such, the debates did little to answer the question at hand: slavery's role in the new western territories. But they became an indispensable part of the history of one of America's most revered presidents. So how do the Lincoln-Douglas debates match up to debates of today?

First, it would be a mistake to assume that Lincoln and Douglas' matchups were the height of dignified politics.

"It was a rowdy affair," Hartnett said of the contests, which took place outdoors and full of raucous crowds where "people were getting liquored up." The atmosphere on the whole, then, was more that of a football game than a solemn affair. Silverman noted that Douglas' backers went so far as lugging a brass cannon to each debate to fire off after witty retorts.

"Lincoln's supporters actually covered Douglas's carriage in human excrement," she said. "Talk about a smear campaign! If McCain and Obama want to borrow a page of Lincoln-Douglas I think they should, but not because it will dignify their campaigns in any way."

The event was political theater in more ways than one. True enough, there were actors re-staging a moment from history, but in the middle of the presidential election's debate season, simply holding the historic debates up for comparison is making a statement: For all the ruckus raised by backers whose intensity rivals today's sports fans, Lincoln and Douglas debated in a day when rhetoric and argument mattered.

Rather than constricting candidates to just a few minutes per issue as this election season's debates have done, Lincoln and Douglas spent a full three hours on one question, and took the debate from town to town.

As moderator Hildebrand put it, "short answers lead to sound bites and sound bites lead to misunderstanding."

The decline is severe enough that "rhetoric," no longer carries the connotation of elaborate, reasoned argument, but of partisan hot air.

What's responsible for undercutting the tradition of argument? Among other things, Hildebrand blamed the decline of print in everyday life.

"I think there's no doubt about it," he said. "The debates are suited to the dictates of television. The average political sound bite is, what, less than eight seconds?"

Associate professor of English Philip Joseph added that in the day of Lincoln-Douglas, "everybody's read (The Constitution) -- everybody knows the common text. We don't have a common text anymore. What do people turn to for authority? Their and their opponents' voting records? It doesn't have the same kind of gravitas."

By the end of the discussion, panelists had students looking at the importance of one-liners and talking points, and more carefully deconstructing how they view this year's candidates.

That, Hildebrand said, was important. "Let me try to be pithy for you. I think seeing a re-enactment of the Lincoln-Douglas debates gives people something with which they can compare the debates of today. They can say, 'did I get information? Did I get argument?'"

It was no small irony, of course, that Hildebrand himself was distilling hours of discussion into a few short sentences.

"I live in my culture," he said.

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