It was his tragic triumph to thwart and ultimately to overcome the discrediting, original sin of American political history. We mustn’t let the memory of him fade.
It was his tragic triumph to thwart and ultimately to overcome the discrediting, original sin of American political history. We must not let the memory of him fade.
I t is a pity that at the national level we do not celebrate Lincoln’s birthday as a separate holiday, instead of putting it together with Washington’s as “Presidents’ Day” as we now do. The two men and their historical settings were vastly different, and whatever Washington’s many personal virtues, his beginning a series of Virginian slave-owners as presidents — himself, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe — gave a fatal ambiguity to the American founding that has reverberated more loudly in recent years. It was Christian humanist Samuel Johnson who pointed out the devastating irony that the “loudest yelps for liberty” in America in the mid 1770s seemed to come from “the drivers of Negro slaves.” It was Lincoln’s tragic triumph to thwart and ultimately to overcome the discrediting, original sin of American political history.
It may seem absurd to suggest that Americans are “losing Lincoln,” given the vast literature that we have on him. As long ago as 1984 the New York Times journalist Herbert Mitgang asserted that there were 5,000 books on Lincoln, and in the intervening 40 years many have been added, some of them very distinguished: scholarly works by such figures as Harry V. Jaffa (his second great work on Lincoln), James McPherson, Eric Foner, J. P. Diggins, James Oakes, and Allen C. Guelzo, and popularizing works by Guelzo, Richard Brookhiser, and Richard Lowry, the last three being regular writers for National Review.
But Western and world present-mindedness has increased in ubiquity and intensity in a way that seems to make any history older than yesterday afternoon utterly irrelevant and uninteresting to generations raised on intense, constant, audiovisual stimulation. The long-term redefinition of the core high-school course in American history as “social studies” — a chief aim of the Deweyite “progressives” since the 1920s — has given us generations of young people (and thus adults) who see the past as negligible, optional, or oppressive, or as a curiosity shop from which to grab picturesque bits of decoration or vignettes for immediate, ideological political use.
On the “high” cultural level, Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and their tenured disciples seem to have interred the discourse of natural law, natural rights, constitutionalism, and their theological-political vocabulary, premises, and implications — even the idea of truth — in the junkyard of inert and irrelevant bric-a-brac.
Yet many of those who know Lincoln’s life, work, and words have come to think that he is the uniquely instructive and noble figure in the history of the United States, although of course his ideological enemies will never wholly disappear. What has happened now is the ascending indifference — or even hostility — to Lincoln of a blatantly hedonistic public culture, whose source can be seen as either market-driven advertising and nihilistic entertainment or left-wing self-assertion and identity politics, valorizing novelty (“neophilia”) — in fact both of these are genetic causes. (A hundred years ago the Russian communist artist-aesthetician El Lissitsky created “prouns” — “proun” being “the Russian acronym for “projects for the affirmation of the new,” according to historian Yuri Slezkine.)
The moral and symbolic stature that Lincoln has for those who know him has something to do with the tragic sense of life — the vast losses of the Civil War, the history and legacies of slavery, segregation, and racialism, the martyr’s death by assassination. It might be imagined that the history of the rest of the world since 1914 would augment and intensify this sense of tragedy, so utterly opposite to the Hegelian ideological assumption of inevitable, cumulative historical progress, an assumption whose multiform descendants and propagandists have done so much to confuse modern persons and societies.
Yet an older French woman in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in central France, site of heroic, systematic Protestant resistance to French and Nazi antisemitism in World War II, told me during a visit there 25 years ago that she and her generation did not want to tell their young about those dark years (les années noires) or their heroic dissenters: It was too sad. Younger generations apparently should not be burdened with the weight of historical sin and tragedy, and so the utopian sensibility burgeons alongside, though in apparent opposition to, cynical self-interest. Though the French state seems to erect museums for pretty much anything, when I visited Chambon there was no museum or memorial to its heroic dissenters, and the young people I spoke with knew nothing about them.
Yet however anti-historical we too are, Lincoln retains some residual, numinous attraction for Americans of many backgrounds. The clever novelist-aesthete Gore Vidal, a very agile nihilist, surprised the American historian Eric Foner 40 years ago with his novel on Lincoln: “Vidal, uncharacteristically, holds Lincoln in a kind of awe . . . and views him as a giant surrounded by men of small talents and limited imaginations.” We have had some fine films on Lincoln (from Henry Fonda to Daniel Day-Lewis), and the theatrical producer Willard Swire brought out in 1961 a volume of “three distinctive plays about Abraham Lincoln” — E. P. Conkle’s Prologue to Glory (1937), John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln (1919), and Mark Van Doren’s The Last Days of Lincoln (1959). None of these works had much success in performance, with Conkle’s demotic rural slang an impediment to memorability and longevity, but Drinkwater’s and Van Doren’s plays have passages of great insight and pathos in them. I doubt that they are ever taught in high school or college, though they would be very suitable.
What Homer was to the ancient Greeks, Lincoln’s words and acts should be to the American people and, thank God, at an infinitely higher level of morality and veracity than the primitive, brutal, pagan, quasi-mythological world of the archaic Greeks. Lincoln’s conceptualization and articulation of the American political proposition remain unexcelled, as do his theology and personal nobility, his physical stature oddly equivalent to his moral stature. The high hopes and unresolved issues raised eloquently in the American Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Federalist Papers (and the underlying Jewish and Christian traditions), as well as our whole political history, can be studied and meditated on most fruitfully in the history of the United States from 1850 to 1877 and of Lincoln’s role in it.
Yet in October 2020 the student council of one of our most eminent public institutions of higher education, the University of Wisconsin–Madison, voted unanimously — twelve to zero — to remove the prominent statue of Abraham Lincoln on the campus. “The main sponsor of the resolution” said that “many students do not feel comfortable seeing him every day” while walking to classes, according to a report on the decision. The grotesque, arrant absurdity of this “discomfort” tells us that something really has gone terribly wrong in our culture, in our high schools and colleges, and in the teaching of history in the United States.
<p”>In The Jewish Century (2004, 2019), an outstanding, award-winning study of modern-world history, Yuri Slezkine, a Russian immigrant historian to the United States, argues for the importance of a common “conceptual currency” in modern states: “Even the epitome of non-ethnic liberal statehood, the United States of America, has created a nation bound by a common language-based culture and thus by a sense of kinship more tangible and durable than the cult of [its] political institutions.” The noble, now decades-long K–8 educational project of E. D. Hirsch Jr., “the Core Knowledge” curriculum, certainly has this as one of its chief objectives, implicitly rejecting the Hegelian-Deweyan “multicultural” and “progressive” project that has so badly confused and damaged our civilization.
In the “high” culture there has recently been gratifying and enlightening research on and debate over Lincoln’s beliefs, views, and actions and their significance, in books including the anthology Knowing Him by Heart: African Americans on Lincoln, edited by Fred L. Hord and Matthew D. Norman (see my review of it last year), and The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and Antislavery Constitutionalism, by James Oakes (see the review by David W. Blight in the New York Review of Books). The historian Oakes has written very judiciously and lucidly about Lincoln over the past 15 years, reviewing Allen Guelzo’s book on the Lincoln–Douglas debates and doing a wonderful demolition of the trendy recent book by Noah Feldman on Lincoln, slavery, and the constitutional issues: “Noah Feldman registers the conceit, all too common these days, that his is the first generation of white Americans to denounce racism and slavery.”
Oakes follows in the line of fellow New Yorkers Reinhold Niebuhr (who thought Lincoln our greatest theologian) and Oakes’s own CUNY predecessor John Patrick Diggins. In Diggins’s On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History (2000), he criticized fashionable postmodern perspectivalism, “schools of thought that claim we can get along without the authority of truth.” Diggins’s fine last book, posthumously published in 2011, was Why Niebuhr Now? And if Niebuhr (1892–1971) is indeed our most profound modern moralist — as I think he is — Lincoln is not only our greatest American statesman but (pace George Will’s promotion of the sly Virginia hypocrite Thomas Jefferson) the greatest statesman of the last millennium.
Looking back across the apocalyptic, hysterical carnage of the 20th century, Niebuhr thought there was nevertheless something “beyond tragedy.” Lincoln’s character, life, and achievement give substance to this faith.