Contemporary leadership defiles Lincoln legacy of Liberal Democracy

 Virtues of democratic leadership: perseverance, self-limitation, humility

Excerpting, editing by Carolyn Bennett

Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program and Professor of the Civil War Era Allen Guelzo spoke last month with Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist Web Site. This is some of what Dr. Guelzo had to say about the character and thoughts of America’s sixteenth president.

Slavery the retrograde institution poisoning the republic ─ keeping the American republic from realizing its full potential

E

verybody in the race of life ought to get a fair start and a fair chance ─ this was the star by which Lincoln navigated and the best example was his own life.

Enlightenment

“Lincoln saw in the Southern elite a defection from Enlightenment bourgeois politics toward aristocratic rule.” The complexion and structure of the plantation aristocracy of the Old South ─ similar to Prussian Junkers (19th and 20th centuries’ pejorative designation for a member of the landed nobility in Prussia and eastern Germany) who were not great aristocrats but squirearchy ─ Lincoln saw himself arrayed against that.

“Lincoln sees American democracy as a last stand, what he calls the last, best hope. And if this goes down, we may so discredit the whole notion of democracy that no one will ever want to go this way again, and so this is the test.

It’s a test of whether or not we’ll have this new birth of freedom, if we’ll finally shuck off these last husks of aristocracy and move forward in the direction of democracy.

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That for him is the vital issue.

The Civil War was “a test [of] whether this nation or any other nation so conceived can long endure. Is democracy self-destructive? Are the aristocrats right: That the only way you’ll ever have order in society is to let them run things; That you cannot put rule into the hands of ordinary people because they’ll botch it from selfishness, egotism, and stupidity?”

Union-Slavery debate

“People today often want to separate slavery and say that Lincoln was interested in preserving the union and not in destroying slavery.

“That gets it exactly wrong. The two are as knotted together as a rope because the only union worth preserving is a union that has abjured slavery.

“So for Lincoln to get rid of slavery is to purge America of the aristocratic poison. He once said that slavery was the one retrograde institution that was poisoning the American republic, keeping the American republic from realizing its full potential.…”

Incompatible with Enlightenment

“Slavery says that there is a category of people that can never be allowed to rise, that cannot improve themselves no matter how hard they try because they will always be slaves.

“It’s very much the classic disjuncture between the Enlightenment and feudalism.

“

Feudalism talks about people being born with status, and everyone comes into this world equipped with a status. This status is either free or slave, serf or nobility, elect or damned, whatever.

“For the Enlightenment, people come into this world armed with rights; and

[t]he ideal political system is the system that allows them to realize those rights, to use those rights in the freest and most natural fashion possible.

From Declaration of Independence

Lincoln was not exaggerating “when he talks at Gettysburg about the country being founded on a proposition, that’s what he means ─ that he did not have a political thought that did not flow from the Declaration of Independence ─ and specifically that all men are created equal.”

B

y equal, Lincoln means “equality of aspiration. He spoke those words about never having had a political thought which did not flow from the Declaration in February of 1861, outside Independence Hall. He believed that what the Founders meant, what the Declaration of Independence meant, was that everybody in the race of life ought to get a fair start and a fair chance. That was the star by which he navigated, and the best example he could offer to anybody was his own life.

 

“[Lincoln] had come up from grinding backwoods poverty and by dint of his own effort, intelligence, and gifts, had risen to more than a modicum of success ─ not only success in financial terms, but success socially. In every respect he was his own confirmation of his theories.…”

Democratic leadership

Lincoln combines “virtues of democratic leadership.” As opposed to aristocratic leadership, which honors valor, physical prowess, and dominance, “democratic leadership is more about perseverance, self-limitation, and humility. What we see in Lincoln is a collection of the virtues we think are most important in a democratic leadership. 

“[Lincoln] presided successfully over this incredibly critical moment we call the Civil War. He kept the union together. He defeated the Confederacy.

Anyone who sits down for a moment to think about what the alternative would have looked like—a successful breakaway Confederacy—and how that would have flowed downstream has to be with impressed with what Lincoln was able to save us from.

There is in the end no intrinsic reason why the Southern Confederacy should not have achieved its independence. And if they had, that would have had serious implications for the later role the North American continent plays in world affairs.

Imagine a North American continent as divided politically and economically as South America.

This would take the United States off the table as a major world player, and then what would you do with the history of the 20th century?

“

…In the American context Lincoln imparted to liberal democracy a sense of nobility and purpose that it has not always had in other contexts. He makes democracy something transcendent, and especially at Gettysburg where he talks about the nation having this new birth of freedom.

“…At the end of the day this is what the Civil War is about—it’s about the preservation of liberal democracy. In the 1860s the United States was the last Enlightenment experiment that was still standing.”

Sources and notes

Professor Allen Guelzo

“Understanding Lincoln: An interview with historian Allen Guelzo,” World Socialist Web Site,

April 3, 2013 (Copyright © 1998-2013 World Socialist Web Site - All rights reserved), http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/04/03/guel-a03.html

Allen Guelzo spoke with Tom Mackaman of the World Socialist Web Site in his office at Gettysburg College on a Saturday morning in March.

“A large academic conference was being held that weekend at the college entitled “The Future of Civil War History.” Gettysburg, in southeastern Pennsylvania, was the location of the bloodiest battle in the Civil War, and the city’s college is now one of the leading centers in the study of the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln.

During the period addressed in this interview, the late antebellum and the Civil War, American capitalism and its political representatives, led by Lincoln, played a revolutionary role, confronting the reactionary leadership of the American South and its system of slave labor.

Within a decade of the end of the Civil War the class struggle between the triumphant capitalist order and the working class had supplanted the earlier struggle between ‘free labor’ and slavery as the decisive issue in American history.

Professor Allen Guelzo

Allen Carl Guelzo is Director of the Civil War Era Studies Program and Henry R. Luce III Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College

Born 1953 in Yokohama, Japan, Dr. Guelzo took his academic credentials, M.A. and Ph.D. in history at the University of Pennsylvania

Most recent publications (Allen C. Guelzo)

Fateful Lightning: A New History of the Civil War and Reconstruction (2012)

Abraham Lincoln as a Man of Ideas (with Michael Lind, 2009)

Lincoln: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions, 2009)

Lincoln and Douglas: The Debates That Defined America (2008)

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation: The End of Slavery in America (2004)

Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President (Library of Religious Biography) (2003)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_C._Guelzo

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy
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Anti-war stance fearlessly rooted in preserving the Union, life, honor at home and abroad

American Civil War
War between the States

From National Archives transcript of George McGovern and Sean Wilentz in conversation on Abraham Lincoln history, current events and related matters

Editing, end comment by 

Carolyn Bennett

I

n 2009, George McGovern was talking mainly about his book Abraham Lincoln, a book about America’s sixteenth president (1861-1865), but his thoughts connected significant points about war: from the American Civil War to U.S. war in Southeast Asia, the Vietnam War, to the United States’ Second Persian Gulf War, the war on Iraq and its people. 

Self-educated, clever politician hangs on to the Union (1860-1865)

American Civil War
Wikipedia

Abraham Lincoln “was literally a self-educated man,” McGovern said.

“He had one year of formal schooling but in that one year, he learned to read.” He read and read; he read everything he could get his hands on. And he thought and thought about what he was reading.

He learned to write and learned to phrase his writings better than any other occupant of the White House. [Thomas] Jefferson and Woodrow Wilson [third and twenty-eighth presidents] were possibly somewhere close to Lincoln in writing. But Lincoln “was the best writer, bar none, that ever served in the White House,” McGovern said.

He pursued those two talents ─ and they were more than talents, they were hard-earned achievements. He didn’t have a Ph.D. at Northwestern. He wasn’t a professor at Princeton. He was a farm boy from Kentucky, Indiana, Illinois, and the various places where he lived.

Lincoln was a man with vision for the country, a man who understood the great enduring values of the nation. He was also a very clever politician, which is one of the reasons he had the capacity, even though he hated slavery ─ from the time he was a young man, he loathed the idea of people being enslaved; but he also knew that half the country didn’t share that view. 

The Union must hold

“That’s why he never joined the abolitionists. He didn’t think you could, in one fell swoop, end slavery in the United States. He thought the union had to stay together. And with those things in his mind, he approached the slavery issue in a compromising fashion.

“He told the South before the Civil War really got under way that he wouldn’t touch slavery in the South but he wanted them to understand [that] neither would he permit the introduction of slavery into any new state that joined the union.” 

From home to abroad

Better to preserve life, honor (anti-war) as thousands fall

Post-World War II Cold War, Asia’s anti-colonial rising

McGovern said when he was in graduate school at Northwestern he read several studies on Southeast Asia including Johns Hopkins University professor Owen Lattimore’s The Situation in Asia, in which he observed that “in one country after another, the old forms of colonialism and imperialism were being challenged by grass roots efforts that cannot be stopped.”

The more sophisticated the weaponry used against these revolutionary forces, the more humiliating the eventual defeat because these are forces that cannot be stopped, that are demanding the right to control their own country.

 India was pulling out of the British Empire. The Dutch were being forced out of Indonesia.

Other countries had to give up their colonies.

Southeast Asia was seeing the beginning of Ho Chi Minh [one of the prime movers of the post-World War II anti-colonial movement in Asia and one of the most influential communist leaders of the 20th century] and his revolutionary followers. We called them ‘guerrillas’ but they were a group of young men who were trying to get the French out of Indochina.

They eventually had an army of 10,000 men recruited largely from the villages and the countryside; and when the French were finally forced out of Vietnam and Laos and Cambodia, the Japanese were the ones [who] did it, and they took their place. They were in control of that area.

So when we found ourselves at war with the Japanese, the Ho Chi Minh forces were our allies. Some of my fellow combat pilots who were shot down over the jungles of Southeast Asia were discovered by Ho Chi Minh and his forces.

These forces were identified and brought back to American lines. And, McGovern says, as he watched the Ho Chi Minh movement, he “decided this was a no-win proposition. We [had] made a mistake in those eight years backing the French; and had ended up financing 80 percent of the cost of the French war to reassert [the power of the French] to crush Ho Chi Minh and his forces.”

My Lai Massacre
Vietnam War

United States invasion

Vietnam

McGovern said his “opposition to the war in Vietnam” began with the knowledge he had “of the historical forces … that were moving out there in that part of the world.”

He was part of a nucleus of U.S. senators, he says, “that began the anti-war movement”  after the deaths of “58,000 young Americans, needlessly killed and sacrificed, by people who were making bad judgments about how to handle the revolutionary forces out there.”

Though he had gained respect in the country for having taken what he called a life-changing turn, McGovern said, he was also “widely assailed for being soft on communism.”  

2003
Iraq bombed by U.S.

United States invasion

2012
Birth Defects in
Iraqi children 

Iraq destroyed, thrown into chaos, occupied, hundreds of thousands dead and displaced

Iraq “had a dictator in charge who was a first-class S.O.B.” Not the happiest situation, McGovern said, but the US. Invasion threw the country into chaos.

Homeless in Afghanistan

The United invaded a stable country, “smashed most of the infrastructure of the country, killed probably a couple of hundred thousand Iraqis, and lost nearly 5,000 young Americans.”

U.S. Drone bombs Somalia

Iraq “was not the slightest threat to the United States…; it had absolutely nothing to do with the 9/11 (2001) attack; and we all know the war in Iraq has been an utter disaster.

Yet the theory persists: “well, we’re there, anyway, and we can’t leave until there’s a stable situation.” But the truth is, “They had a very stable situation when we invaded the country.”

World War I

T

his inhumanity of man seems endless.

World War II

Failure to resolve disputes of the First World War (1914-1918) gave rise to the Second World War (1939-1945), which left 40,000,000–50,000,000 people dead, the bloodiest conflict and the largest war in history. In a few years of post-World War II, more unresolved conflict, an “unease” in the Americans and British with the Soviets, gave rise, beginning in 1947 and 1948, to the Cold War: a war “waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts with limited recourse to weapons”; an open “yet restricted rivalry” between the United States and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies.

Cold War

The years since 1947 have suffered a “norm” in war, unending wars, between western countries (with expedient allies and a compromised United Nations) and other sovereign lands anywhere to the east and south of the United States, Britain and Europe.

And in the face of incessant violence, the Nobel committee this year has awarded to the European Union comprised of countries at war its Peace Prize; as it did in 2009 to U.S. President Barack Obama after he had promised during his presidential campaign to bomb Pakistan and has, during the four years of his presidency, bombed, threatened, occupied, destabilized, and displaced peoples and nations of Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Bahrain, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and others. 

Presidential candidates
1972
Shirley Chisholm
George McGovern

The light in all this is that every now and then there comes in the march of human history a visionary with courage to speak publicly and for the long term against wars of aggression or the harm man does to man. If we look closely, we might find some linkage or political lineage between McGovern and Lincoln. 

Sources and notes

Interview posted at National Archives: Senator George S. McGovern, political figure, veteran, and historian spoke on February 12, 2009, about his book, Abraham Lincoln.  In conversation with McGovern was moderator Sean Wilentz, editor of the Times Books American Presidents series, editor of McGovern’s book, author of The Rise of American Democracy, and a Princeton University professor.

At the 2009 event McGovern Adrienne Thomas introduced McGovern as author/senator George McGovern, a Midwesterner, former U.S. Senator, presidential candidate, veteran, and historian who had earned his Ph.D. in American History and Government at Northwestern University; served as ambassador to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization; and a recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Noted at the National Archives and Records Administration site “The views and opinions expressed in the featured programs do not necessarily state or reflect those of the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Archives Experience, http://www.archives.gov/nae/news/featured-programs/090212McGovern-transcript.pdf

Britannica notes

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

Whig in Congress

“During his single term in Congress (1847–1849), Lincoln, as the lone Whig from Illinois, gave little attention to legislative matters. He proposed a bill for the gradual and compensated emancipation of slaves in the District of Columbia, but, because it was to take effect only with the approval of the ‘free white citizens’ of the district, it displeased abolitionists as well as slaveholders and never was seriously considered.”

New sectional crisis, Lincoln reemerge, rises to statesmanship (Whig becomes Republican)

“In 1854 [Lincoln’s] political rival Stephen A. Douglas maneuvered through Congress a bill for reopening the entire Louisiana Purchase to slavery and allowing the settlers of Kansas and Nebraska (with ‘popular sovereignty’) to decide for themselves whether to permit slaveholding in those territories.

“The Kansas-Nebraska Act provoked violent opposition in Illinois and the other states of the old Northwest.

“It gave rise to the Republican Party while speeding the Whig Party on its way to disintegration.

“Along with many thousands of other homeless Whigs, Lincoln soon became a Republican (1856).

Lincoln and Douglas

“Before long, some prominent Republicans in the East talked of attracting Douglas to the Republican fold, and with him his Democratic following in the West. Lincoln would have none of it. He was determined that he, not Douglas, should be the Republican leader of his state and section.

“Lincoln challenged incumbent Douglas for the Senate seat in 1858 [and lost] but the series of debates they engaged in throughout Illinois was political oratory of the highest order.

“Both men were shrewd debaters and accomplished stump speakers, though they could hardly have been more different in style and appearance … Lincoln’s prose and speeches were eloquent, pithy, powerful, and free of the verbosity so common in communication of his day.

“The debates were published in 1860, together with a biography of Lincoln, in a bestselling book that Lincoln himself compiled and marketed as part of his campaign.”

Abolition, Slavery, Races, Union (Lincoln and Douglas)

“In their basic views, Lincoln and Douglas were not as far apart as they seemed in the heat of political argument.

“Neither was abolitionist or proslavery.

“But Lincoln, unlike Douglas, insisted that Congress must exclude slavery from the territories. He disagreed with Douglas’s belief that the territories were by nature unsuited to the slave economy and that no congressional legislation was needed to prevent the spread of slavery into them. In one of his most famous speeches, he said:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe the government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.

“[Lincoln] predicted that the country eventually would become ‘all one thing or all the other.’

“Again and again he insisted that the civil liberties of every U.S. citizen, white as well as black, were at stake. The territories must be kept free, he further said, because ‘new free states’ were ‘places for poor people to go and better their condition.’

“He agreed with Thomas Jefferson and other founding fathers, however, that slavery should be merely contained, not directly attacked. In fact, when it was politically expedient to do so, he reassured his audiences that he did not endorse citizenship for blacks or believe in the equality of the races.

‘I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,’ he told a crowd in Charleston, Illinois.

‘I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.’

 There is, he added, ‘a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.’

“Lincoln drove home the inconsistency between Douglas’s ‘popular sovereignty’ principle and the Dred Scott decision (1857), in which the U.S. Supreme Court held that Congress could not constitutionally exclude slavery from the territories.”

Lincoln’s senate loss to presidency

Though he lost the senatorial election to Douglas, Abraham Lincoln gained national recognition and soon began to be mentioned as a presidential prospect for 1860. He was the sixteenth president serving from 1860 to 1865.

CIVIL WAR (American)

American Civil War (also called War Between the States, 1861–1865), fratricidal four-year war between the federal government of the United States (the Union) and 11 Southern states that asserted their right to secede from the Union.

HO CHI MINH

Ho Chi Minh (original name  Nguyen Sinh Cung,  also called  Nguyen Tat Thanh, or Nguyen Ai Quoc, b. May 19, 1890, Hoang Tru, Vietnam, French Indochina, d. September 2, 1969, Hanoi, Vietnam: founder of the Indochina Communist Party (1930) and its successor, the Viet-Minh (1941), and president from 1945 to 1969 of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam (North Vietnam).

As the leader of the Vietnamese nationalist movement for nearly three decades, Ho was one of the prime movers of the post-World War II anti-colonial movement in Asia and one of the most influential communist leaders of the 20th century.

VIETNAM

U.S. Vietnam War (1954–75, called the “American War” in Vietnam or, in full: the “War Against the Americans to Save the Nation”): a protracted conflict that pitted the communist government of North Vietnam and its allies in South Vietnam, known as the Viet Cong, against the government of South Vietnam and its principal ally, the United States.

The Vietnam War was also part of a larger regional conflict (Indochina wars) and a manifestation of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.

IRAQ

U.S. Iraq War (also called Second Persian Gulf War): 2003 -

I.                   War conventionally fought (March–April 2003): a combined force of troops from the United States and Great Britain (with smaller contingents from several other countries) invaded Iraq and “rapidly defeated Iraqi military and paramilitary forces.”

II.                War’s longer second phase: a U.S.-led hostilities and occupation of Iraq “opposed by an increasingly intensive armed insurgency”

World War II and Cold War

WORLD WAR II involved virtually every part of the world during the years 1939–1945.

The principal belligerents were the Axis powers—Germany, Italy, and Japan—and the Allies—France, Great Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and, to a lesser extent, China.

The war was in many respects a continuation, after an uneasy 20-year hiatus, of the disputes left unsettled by World War I.

The 40,000,000–50,000,000 deaths incurred in World War II make it the bloodiest conflict, as well as the largest war, in history.

COLD WAR

The Cold War “waged on political, economic, and propaganda fronts, with limited recourse to weapons,” was/is an open “yet restricted rivalry” that developed between the United States and the Soviet Union, and their respective allies, after World War II.

Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 near the close of World War II, the uneasy wartime alliance between the United States and Great Britain on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other begins to unravel and by 1947–1948, when U.S. aid provided under the Marshall Plan to western Europe has brought those countries under American influence and the Soviets have installed openly communist regimes in eastern Europe, the Cold War has solidified.

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Bennett's books are available in New York State independent bookstores: Lift Bridge Bookshop: www.liftbridgebooks.com [Brockport, NY]; Sundance Books: http://www.sundancebooks.com/main.html [Geneseo, NY]; Mood Makers Books: www.moodmakersbooks.com [City of Rochester, NY]; Dog Ears Bookstore and Literary Arts Center: www.enlightenthedog.org/ [Buffalo, NY]; Burlingham Books – ‘Your Local Chapter’: http://burlinghambooks.com/ [Perry, NY 14530]; The Bookworm: http://www.eabookworm.com/ [East Aurora, NY] • See also: World Pulse: Global Issues through the eyes of Women: http://www.worldpulse.com/ http://www.worldpulse.com/pulsewire http://www.facebook.com/#!/bennetts2ndstudy

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