This day in The Record in 1916

Saturday, Feb. 12, 1916

Lincoln’s Birthday is an occasion for looking forward rather than backward at the Pafraets Dael Club tonight, while for the Republican Club Lincoln remains the ideal Republican.

At the Republican Club dinner, James H. Potts assures his colleagues that Lincoln was “an organization Republican, and a man who believed in partisanship.” In other words, or so Potts claims, Lincoln believed in a party hierarchy guided by strong leadership at the top, and in “orderly procedure, the only method by which any thing that counts can be gained.”

Potts is skeptical toward appeals to nonpartisanship. Partisanship, he says, is “something that could be defined, whereas non-partisanship meant nothing and could not be.”

At Pafraets Dael, the subject for the evening is “preparedness,” one of the buzzwords of 1916. With war raging in Europe and civil war in Mexico, Americans are being advised to be prepared for military intervention to the south or to the east.

“I don’t take any stock in this preparedness slogan,” says State Senator George B. Wellington, “because most of the men discussing it mean preparedness against invasion.

“Invasion by whom? The Eskimo? Just as likely that the Eskimo will come down to invade the country as it is that any other nation will come over the seas to do it. It wouldn’t pay.”

Preparedness isn’t quite ambitious enough for Wellington. While he wants “so large an army and navy that we wouldn’t have to wage war on any one,” he really wants the U. S. to be able to take punitive action against “offenders of our national honor” anywhere on earth.

“If preparedness means that, I am for it,” Wellington says. He believes the U. S. should be willing to go to war, not merely to defend itself from attack, but to uphold its national honor, as Lincoln did against Southern secessionism.

“My motto for our government is ‘ Honor first!’ ‘Safety first’ may be all right at a railroad crossing, but not in a crisis of a great nation. It would be infinitely better for us to get into war than it would be for us to lose our national honor.

“We can not be a great nation if we are not proud. There isn’t such a thing as a moral man who has not pride. Pride lies as one of the cornerstones of character.

“I know you will say, ‘ But you must keep us out of war.’ Well, there are many things that are worse than war. The past teaches us there isn’t anything worth while in life that you don’t have to fight for.”