You once wrote that “The people will live on.”
Thanks to you the people live on with a deeper insight into their nation, their fellow citizens and their own inherent dignity; you spoke to them in verse; you sang to them of their traditions; you wrote to them of Lincoln's greatness and of the greatness of the land that produced him… President Lyndon B. Johnson sent this Western Union telegram on January 6, 1966 on Sandburg’s 88th birthday.

Carl Sandburg received numerous awards and honors, and critical acclaim for his wide-ranging writings. He received a 1940 Pulitzer Prize in history for his biography of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, The War Years and a Pulitzer Prize in 1951 for his Complete Poems, a compilation of poetry published from 1916-1950.  In 1959, Sandburg addressed a Joint Session of Congress on the occasion of Abraham Lincoln’s 150th birthday. 
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In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, this nation’s highest civilian honor.

Sandburg also contributed to American children’s literature with his series of American fairytales Rootabaga Stories and Rootabaga Pigeons, and to American folk music with The American Songbag published in 1927.  He approached every project with full attention and energy. Sandburg knew no trends and followed no conventions. He was uniquely Sandburg.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, Sandburg never went abroad for a literary apprenticeship.  While other writers found their voices in Paris, London or Rome, Sandburg turned to Milwaukee and Chicago.  In the process he became the passionate champion of people who did not have the words or power to speak for themselves. 


Sandburg’s early writings tackled social justice, human dignity, and labor rights. As a labor reporter for the Chicago Daily News he saw unsafe and poor working conditions in factories, mines and mills, the absence of child labor laws and other benefits lacking for the working person. This led him to align himself with the pro-union Socialist Democratic Party at the turn of the 20th century. The 1919 Chicago race riots that he documented as a young newspaper reporter furthered his belief that a common dignity was a right for all, not some. He wrote “Here is the difference between Dante, Milton and me.  They wrote about hell and never saw the place.  I wrote about Chicago after looking the town over for years and years."

Chicago
            Hog Butcher for the World,
            Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
            Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler;
            Stormy, husky, brawling,
            City of the Big Shoulders;
They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I have seen
            your painted women under the gas lamps luring the farm boys.
And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it is true I have
            seen the gunman kill and go free to kill again.
And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is:  On the faces of
            women and children I have seen the marks of wanton hunger.
And having answered so I turn once more to those who sneer at this
            my city, and I give them back the sneer and say to them:
Come and show me another city with lifted head singing so proud
            to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.
Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on job, here is
            a tall bold slugger set vivid against the little soft cities;
Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning as a savage
            pitted against the wilderness,
                        Bareheaded,
                        Shoveling,
                        Wrecking,
                        Planning,
                        Building, breaking, rebuilding,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing with white teeth,
Under the smoke, dust all over his mouth, laughing as a young man laughs,
Laughing even as an ignorant fighter laughs who has never lost a battle,
Bragging and laughing that under this wrist is the pulse, and under
            his ribs the heart of the people,
                        Laughing!
Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth, half-naked,
            sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
            Player with Railroads and Freight Handler to the nation.
Carl Sandburg

Carl Sandburg published over a half-dozen volumes of poetry in his lifetime.  After World War I, Sandburg tired of the “imbecility of a frightened world,” and found refuge in his imagination with the invention of the Rootabaga Stories for children.  They were a series of whimsical stories and fables set in the American Midwest, in Rootabaga Country, where "the railroad tracks change from straight to zigzag and the pigs have bibs on”. He tried them out on his wife and children and worked on them with any time he could squeeze between family and his newspaper job at the Chicago Daily News, his “bread and butter job.”

Sandburg’s voice transformed much of what he wrote into a story. Poem or prose his voice brought with it a quality that kept one wanting more.

“In Sandburg’s voice lived all his poetry. It was a voice of pauses and undercurrents, with a hint of anger always in it, and a lift of defiance in its quiet tones. It was a voice that made words sound fresh, and clothed the simplest of sentences with mysteries…Whether he chatted at lunch or recited from the podium he had always the same voice. He spoke always like a man slowly revealing something.” Ben Hecht

Sandburg revealed something about America, the place he knew and loved best; America, with its strengths, its diversity, its promise. This thought is the one common thread throughout all of the works of Carl Sandburg.