An Historically Corrected Vote for Lincoln in 2012

Historically Corrected is a project of students and faculty at Washington College’s C.V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, where Adam Goodheart is the director and Peter Manseau is a scholar in residence.
They provided a column to the New York Times yesterday titled Vote Lincoln in 2012.
As this blog has previously referred the the 16th President in the context of this year's elections, here's what they shared over at the NYT site:

"Mitt Romney may have upstaged President Obama in last week’s presidential debate, but it was Abraham Lincoln who stole the show at the last minute. An extended promotional trailer for Steven Spielberg’s forthcoming “Lincoln” biopic aired on several major television networks — including ABC, CBS and CNN — immediately after the final fadeout in Denver. Its soundtrack of soaring strings and crashing percussion, and its images of Union soldiers dying in agony and jubilant African-Americans rejoicing in freedom, certainly made presidential politics appear more thrilling than it might have seemed during the candidates’ umpteenth round of bickering over budgetary policy.
Nor was this Lincoln’s only appearance last Wednesday. Up against the ropes in the 73rd minute of his bout against Mr. Romney, Mr. Obama turned for support to a man any 21st century candidate would like to have in his corner. “As Abraham Lincoln understood, there are also some things we do better together,” the president said:

So, in the middle of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln said, let’s help to finance the transcontinental railroad, let’s start the National Academy of Sciences, let’s start land grant colleges, because we want to give these gateways of opportunity for all Americans, because if all Americans are getting opportunity, we’re all going to be better off. That doesn’t restrict people’s freedom. That enhances it. And so what I’ve tried to do as president is to apply those same principles.

If this argument failed to land a rhetorical punch against his opponent, it could be because Mr. Obama has paraphrased Lincoln in a similar way many, many times before, including in his State of the Union address earlier this year. It could also be because he was not the only one on stage who likes to think that Lincoln has his back.

Library of Congress Lincoln the Rail-Splitter

The 16th president has been evoked so often by both sides that the current presidential race might be seen as the latest round of an ongoing custody battle over a certain young lawyer from Illinois. Although Mr. Romney himself has made only rare public references to his party’s first and most celebrated president, his supporters have not been so reticent: at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, delegates waved Lincoln fans and donned stovepipe hats.

Historically Corrected

A series about the uses and abuses of history in politics.

Indeed, there often seem to be multiple Lincolns in the political arena – not least because, setting aside his actual affiliation, he can be made to sound like the founding father of either party. Democratic Lincoln is the president of civil rights (freeing the slaves), federal power over state autonomy (saving the Union), government stimulus packages (those land grant colleges and railroads), and working-class pride (born in a log cabin). Republican Lincoln is the president of economic liberalism (freeing the slaves), strong military leadership (saving the Union) American global preeminence (think Gettysburg Address) and an up-by-the-bootstraps success story (born in a log cabin).
For Mr. Obama, the connection has often seemed less a matter of policy or ideology than a sense of spiritual kinship with a man whom he referred to in a July campaign appearance as “my homeboy from Illinois.” In February 2007, he kicked off his first campaign for the presidency in Springfield, Ill., with a speech suggesting that like Lincoln’s candidacy, his own would represent the groundswell of a new, activist American populism “gathered from the four winds.” In his convention address accepting this year’s Democratic nomination, he struck a far more modest tone: “While I’m proud of what we’ve achieved together, I’m far more mindful of my own failings, knowing exactly what Lincoln meant when he said, ‘I have been driven to my knees many times by the overwhelming conviction that I had no place else to go.’ ”

Library of Congress Lincoln Lying in state at the City Hall, N.Y.

Mr. Romney’s campaign, too, has used the language of Lincoln to connect his presidential aspirations to something larger and nobler. The foreign policy section of its website quotes Lincoln’s 1862 message to Congress: “The best ally world peace has ever known is a strong America. ‘The last best hope of earth’ was what Abraham Lincoln called our country. Mitt Romney believes in fulfilling the promise of Lincoln’s words and will defend America abroad in word and in deed.”
“We all know the president really cares about Lincoln,” said Harold Holzer, a prolific Lincoln scholar and former political speechwriter. “In my view, Governor Romney is answering him back in much the same way that he’s doing with Medicare and taxes: he’s not going to let the president take any high ground without also claiming it for himself.”
The Republican National Committee’s platform namechecks Lincoln twice – once in the context of the treatment of veterans and again in its statement against human trafficking. Laying claim to Lincoln in this way is not mere posturing. It is, instead, something of a rescue operation, an attempt to bring Lincoln back into the Republican fold after his wayward years as an avatar of the political left. A report released earlier this year by the conservative Heritage Foundation went so far as to declare Lincoln a “hostage” of progressives, with the Gettysburg College historian Allen C. Guelzo indignantly refuting the notion of Lincoln as “the father of big government.”

Library of Congress “Abraham Lincoln, the Martyr. Victorious.”

The Lincoln offered by the Romney campaign is, by contrast, a mascot for laissez-faire capitalism. In the aftermath of the “47 percent” controversy last month, Peter Wehner, an advisor to the Romney campaign, wrote a blog post for MittRomney.com enlisting Lincoln in an attack against the Obama administration’s alleged record of “economic stagnation, increasing dependency, and the expansion of the Nanny State.” According to Mr. Wehner, Lincoln would have had none of this. As evidence, he quoted a Lincoln speech given in 1860:

I don’t believe in law to prevent a man from getting rich; it would do more harm than good. So while we do not propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else … when he may look forward and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work for himself afterward, and finally hire men to work for him! That is the true system.

Much was left unsaid in Mr. Wehner’s selective quotation. In the speech, delivered in New Haven, Conn., several months before the start of his presidential bid, Lincoln was trying to draw connections between his antislavery opinions and his support of the American labor movement. Workers at Massachusetts shoe factories had gone on strike to protest wage cuts, and Lincoln – in a section of the speech unlikely to be quoted by his fellow Republicans today – declared, “I am glad to see that a system of labor prevails in New England under which laborers CAN strike when they want to.” And the ellipsis in Mr. Wehner’s version leaves out Lincoln’s statement, shockingly radical for its time, that “a black man is entitled” to partake in the American dream.
Selectivity aside, Mr. Wehner’s quotation illustrates well the difference between the two Lincolns at large in 2012: While Mr. Obama’s Lincoln fostered government programs because “some things we do better together,” the Lincoln of the Romney campaign favors deregulation and the entrepreneurial spirit above all else. Mr. Obama’s Lincoln is vaguely mystical: when he is not gathering the four winds to his cause, he is lost in contemplation. The Romney campaign’s Lincoln is nearly the opposite, a man of independent action and little reflection who encourages the independent actions of others. Offering the community organizer’s Lincoln and the corporate titan’s Lincoln, each campaign has made a Lincoln in its candidate’s image.
To be fair, it might be argued that this bifurcation dates back to the 1860s. When Lincoln ran for the presidency, his supporters portrayed him as a muscular, rail-splitting frontiersman. The other Lincoln, “Father Abraham,” martyred savior of the Union, the Christ-figure of America’s civil religion, only came later.

Washington College “Lincoln and Davis in 5 Rounds,1861″

And if the 16th president gets cable wherever he is now, he may be watching both contenders appreciatively. “Lincoln was, above all else, a politician — and a very talented one,” said Louis P. Masur, author of a new book on the political maneuvering behind the Emancipation Proclamation. “He enjoyed the game, and he knew how to evoke others’ names and ideas when it could get him political mileage.”
Despite this, the original Lincoln never took to the presidential campaign trail on his own behalf, not even when facing a tough re-election challenge in 1864 from the Democrats’ nominee, Gen. George B. McClellan. Instead, observing the custom of the era, he stayed home, kept working and let his record speak for itself. In 2012, he seems to be making up for lost time."

As they acknowledged, Students of Washington College’s Writing for Media seminar contributed research for the piece. To learn more about the Historically Corrected project,
click here.