In 1949, my father received a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from Cooper Union. Seventy years later, we found his lab reports and tests in the boxes of papers, photos, and ephemera that we had put in storage in 2013.
To be clear: this meant that my parents had taken those papers with them on six different moves: from the Bronx to Jackson Heights in 1952; to Stamford, CT in 1953; to Monsey, NY in 1957; to Summit, NJ in 1963; and to Fearrington Village, NC in 2001. I don’t remember seeing the Cooper Union papers when we dislodged my mother from the house in Summit. I do remember seeing them in 2013, when we she moved to Carolina Meadows, a nearby continuing-care community. That move – which required downsizing from a two-bedroom house with two-car garage and accessory dwelling unit – to a two-bedroom apartment with a small, climate-exposed storage unit – required serious downsizing, which was always a challenge with my mother who was, to put it mildly, something of a packrat. So it became clear that while storage units are one of the great absurdities of American life, the only way we could make that move happen was to put boxes of stuff into storage.
As we excavated the storage unit, we were confronted, yet again, with the question of what to do with the many things my parents had saved. Some people, of course, would just throw everything away. And indeed, we threw many things away. But my amazing sister Nancy not only felt strongly that we should try to find appropriate homes for as many items as possible, but also was willing to make that happen. And so, in June 2019, she reached out to Cooper Union’s library, which was interested because their archives didn’t include a lot of mid 20th century student work.
This made us happy because, as I wrote in a post last summer, my father had a soft spot for Cooper – officially The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art – because it had admitted him on short notice after Princeton University had rescinded its admissions offer. (Princeton officials said so many veterans were returning to finish their studies, that they had to reduce the size of the incoming class). My father’s love for Cooper was further heightened by his time as a junior faculty member in the early 1950s, a position he left to take a better-paying job in industry when my brother was born.
Not long after Cooper’s librarians accepted our “gift,” I found more Cooper-related materials in my father’s stamp albums. These had been sitting, unexamined, on my bookcases since about 2013, when my mother had convinced me to take them home with me because they were “valuable” and she was (supposedly) downsizing as she prepared to move. Knowing I couldn’t sell them while she was alive, I never looked at them until after she died. Little did I know what a role they were about to play in my life…
The Cooper materials I found in June 2019 included two first-day covers honoring both the school’s centennial and the 99th anniversary of a speech a seminal speech given at Cooper Union on February 27, 1860 by Abraham Lincoln, who is pictured on a 3-cent stamp issued on February 27, 1859 that is today’s #stampoftheday. The packet also included an invitation to the ceremony where the stamp was dedicated, the program from that ceremony, and a late 1950s brochure about Cooper Union. The library gladly accepted those materials, which means I don’t actually have them in my possession – the images with this post are lifted from the Internet.
While I was mainly interested in my father’s connection to Cooper, the speech turns out also be an important gem as well. In “Lincoln at Cooper Union: The Speech that Made Abraham Lincoln President,” Harold Holzer, a noted scholar who directs the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College (my mother’s alma mater), argues “never before or since in American history has a single speech so dramatically catapulted a candidate toward the White House.”
The reason is that moderate Republicans, who were casting about for a winning presidential candidate, invited many possible contenders, including the largely unknown Lincoln, to give speeches in New York. Recognizing the importance and opportunity, Lincoln deliver a lengthy, well-researched speech outlining his positions on slavery. The audience, which included almost all of the city’s key movers and shakers, was, to put it bluntly, “blown away” by his remarks, which were subsequently reprinted and distributed widely. The New York Tribune, which was edited and published by the powerful Horace Greeley, for example, hailed it as “one of the most happiest and most convincing political arguments ever made in this City….No man ever made such an impression on his first appeal to a New-York audience.”
Although it was important, the speech now is little known. And yet, it has some powerful languages, some of it quite appropriate for today. Lincoln, for example, rebuked the pro-slavery Democrats, saying, “Your purpose, then, plainly stated is that you will destroy the Government, unless you be allowed to construe and enforce the Constitution as you please, on all points in dispute between you and us. You will rule or ruin in all events.”
After noting that the only thing that would assuage Southerners would be to “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right” he concluded with a call to arms. “Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves,” he said. “Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”
I doubt my father knew what Lincoln had said, but I know he was proud of the fact that he said it at Cooper Union. And I think he’d be happy to know that some of his Cooper relics have found a permanent home at an instruction that meant so much to him.
Now if only we could figure out what to do with the more than 100 kachina dolls that he collected.
Be well, stay safe, do not be “slandered from our duty by false accusations,” fight for justice, and work for peace.