President Obama is often called the first president to truly harness the power of social media. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the first to appear on television, and Calvin Coolidge was the first to make a radio address. But when it comes to naming the first tech-savvy U.S. president, a PBS documentary believes a different man deserves the title: Abraham Lincoln.
On Tuesday, the 150th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address, PBS will air Lincoln@Gettysburg, an hour-long program exploring how Lincoln became the first president to wield advanced communication technology to directly communicate with Americans. It also explores Lincoln's two-pronged decision-making strategy during the Civil War, particularly around the Battle of Gettysburg, where he used the telegraph to both command American troops and communicate to the country exactly what was at stake.
"Lincoln truly was on the frontier of this high-tech machine called the telegraph," producer and director Peter Schnall told WIRED. Schnall is an Emmy-winning filmmaker whose documentaries, which appear frequently on PBS, National Geographic and the Discovery Channel, often explain historical moments in explicitly contemporary terms. "What it allowed him to do, unlike any other president before him, was have direct communication with his generals in the field. It really changed how the commander-in-chief conducted business in war."
The documentary features interviews with Colin Powell, Melissa Harris-Perry and Lincoln screenwriter Tony Kushner and compares Civil War-era communication technology to modern counterparts like Twitter and news blogs. The program explores how Lincoln’s understanding of the telegraph’s power – much like Obama’s understanding of social media and viral content – not only gave him more open communication with his troops, but also guided what became one of the most important speeches by an American president: the Gettysburg Address.
"We’ve all grown up in a world of political sound bites, where the shorter the message, the quicker it’ll get out there... but at that time, presidents rarely went out and made speeches in front of people," Schnall says of Lincoln’s decision to speak at the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial on November 19, 1863. (This is going to sound crazy, but at one point, Americans would have enjoyed receiving spam emails a personalized message from the president with the subject line "[Your Name Here], I want to talk with you directly.")
Lincoln’s address that afternoon, which came after a two-hour speech from famous-at-the-time orator Edward Everett, contained just 272 words, a shockingly short length that allowed it to be transmitted rapidly and become, arguably, one of the first messages from a U.S. president to go viral.
"Lincoln was a master political strategist. He truly understood what it took to get the message out to the people," said Schnall. "He knew the speech would be telegraphed across the nation; within 48 hours every newspaper as far as California had printed the speech straight on the front page, which is exactly what he was aiming for. He was using the media of communication in different ways than a president had ever done before."
Lincoln@Gettysburg airs at 9:00 p.m. Eastern on PBS.
