BY GARY ANDRES
Reprinted from Weekly Standard
The day Abraham Lincoln delivered his electrifying speech at New York City’s Cooper Union in 1860, he sat for a now famous photograph by Mathew Brady. Lincoln’s stem-winding perorations that night won him high praise from political elites, but the picture – widely used and reproduced in the campaign that year — contributed as much, or more, to his presidential victory.
Reprinted in newspapers in the days and weeks that followed, the photograph created many Americans’ first impression of the next president. Instead of an awkward, gangly, thin-faced man with dark eyes, Brady’s photograph made the future president look learned, proportional, and statesman-like.
Historian Harold Holzer, who wrote Lincoln at Cooper Union, notes that when the president-elect encountered the photographer in Washington a year later, he said, “Brady and Cooper Union made me President.”
Fashioning the “new Lincoln” constituted the first major use of photography in American politics. It was a triumph of that epoch’s new media.
The pace and content of media use in governing and politics is always in flux. But the velocity of progress is escalating.
Today’s new media evolution progresses like Darwinism on steroids – change happens in weeks and months, not millennia.