Review

Harold Holzer and Norton Garfinkle. A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity. New York: Basic Books, 2015. Pp. 311.

 
What would Abraham Lincoln do? Can his wisdom elucidate 21st-century problems? Particularly during times of discord and polarization, Americans regularly revisit the life and legacy of the sixteenth president. Writers of all political stripes have loved Lincoln and loathed him; some eagerly co-opt his image, while others curse his memory. Various left-leaning authors have praised Lincoln’s virtues, rebuked his racism, and debunked the “Great Emancipator” narrative.[1] As a group, conservatives tend to be more critical. Libertarian revisionists, for instance, have condemned Lincoln for using the Civil War as a pretext to aggrandize his power. By their reckoning, an ongoing decline in American liberty can be traced directly to Lincoln’s presidency.[2] Others have tarred Lincoln as a socialist sympathizer with dictatorial tendencies.[3] In contrast, conservative scholar Thomas Krannawitter has defended Lincoln against attacks from the right and left alike.[4] Lincoln’s legacy remains fiercely contested within and between segments of the political spectrum.

The worst of these books, which are legion, rip facts and quotations out of context and arrange them to support a pre-ordained partisan position. But when trained scholars, who respect nuance and are well-versed in primary and secondary sources, take up the case, their findings deserve close consideration. A Just and Generous Nation: Abraham Lincoln and the Fight for American Opportunity is a good example. Co-authored by prolific Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer and economist Norton Garfinkle, this book reappraises Lincoln in light of the economic issues, including wealth disparities and diminishing social mobility, which shape modern political debate. Much like scholars who probed Lincoln’s racial beliefs during the Civil Rights Movement,[5] Holzer and Garfinkle invite us to reevaluate Lincoln’s economic ideas in the era of Occupy Wall Street and the campaign for a $15 minimum wage. Lincoln regularly fell short of 20th-century standards for racial egalitarianism, but Holzer and Garfinkle find that Lincoln has much to teach us about liberty, equality, and economic opportunity. They contend that “Lincoln, as our most clear-eyed president, was the first to fully understand what America is all about and to tell us so in unfailingly clear terms how to use positive government action to build and maintain a successful middle-class society.” (257)

The authors develop their two-pronged thesis in a fast-paced and accessible book divided into two parts. Part One focuses on Lincoln’s life, weaving his economic thought into an engaging narrative which covers his humble origins, swift rise to prominence, and tumultuous presidency. The main point is that Lincoln, a quintessential antislavery Whig, consistently supported public policies that fostered upward mobility by creating opportunities for working people to attain middle-class comfort and security. For Lincoln, government was part of the solution, not part of the problem. Tariffs, internal improvements, and investment in education helped make his dream of a vibrant middle-class society a reality—at least in the North.

Lincoln’s middle-class American Dream also shaped his stance on slavery. Restrictions on slavery’s expansion would shield socially mobile northerners from the stagnant, aristocratic South, where laborers languished in servitude or grinding poverty. Fully convinced of American—specifically free-state—exceptionalism, Lincoln believed that the fate of working people was at stake in the battle over slavery’s westward extension. It was to protect their opportunities that Lincoln joined the Republican Party and, eventually, fought the Civil War. “Lincoln focused his entire political career, in peace and war alike, in pursuit of economic opportunity for the widest possible circle of hardworking Americans,” write Holzer and Garfinkle. “To achieve this ambition he was willing to fight a war to maintain the perpetual existence of the one nation in the world that held the highest promise for people dedicated to his cause.” (2) Economic ideals formed the bedrock of Lincoln’s antislavery Unionism.

After outlining the origins and substance of Lincoln’s economic worldview, the authors argue that it shaped his handling of the Union war effort and his eventual support for abolition. At times Lincoln’s economic vision seems rather tangential to the narrative, particularly during discussions of Civil War strategy and campaigns. But the authors demonstrate the depth of Lincoln’s commitment to upwardly mobile free labor and illustrate how profoundly it shaped his Unionism and his critique of slavery. Anyone wondering why “the Union” mattered so much to Lincoln, or why an Illinois attorney was so preoccupied by the fate of Kansas, will find compelling explanations here. As a fresh and accessible discussion of Lincoln’s political and economic thought, A Just and Generous Nation is a welcome contribution to a crowded field.

Part Two traces the post-1865 history of Lincolnian political economy. Building on Garfinkle’s The American Dream vs. The Gospel of Wealth: The Fight for a Productive Middle-Class Economy (2007), the authors argue that American politics has hinged on a contest between Lincoln’s version of the American Dream, upheld by the likes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and an elitist Gospel of Wealth which coalesced during the Gilded Age and persists under the guise of supply-side economics. Ironies abound. Post-Civil War economic development supplanted Lincoln’s society of independent producers with one dominated by corporate titans who defined freedom in Social Darwinian terms and rejected public programs to help working people. Long-cherished ideals of thrift, industriousness, and personal responsibility now justified staggering inequality. According to the increasingly authoritative Gospel of Wealth, the notion that one could rise through hard work was “transmuted from Lincoln’s message of hope” into a “rationale for . . . condemning the working poor for their very poverty.” (175)

When Lincoln’s vision returned in the 20th century, it was primarily embraced by Democrats, who consciously aligned themselves with the first Republican president. None did so more faithfully than Franklin Roosevelt. Holzer and Garfinkle contend that the New Deal “was a modern version of Lincoln’s commitment to government action to support a prosperous middle-class society.” (198) It updated Lincoln’s policy prescriptions to fit the realities of an industrial society, but its spirit was similar. Crucially, it worked. For several generations, key New Deal innovations, including unemployment insurance, regulation of financial markets, and Social Security, undergirded a flourishing middle-class society. Late in the 20th century, however, conservatives counterattacked by giving the Gospel of Wealth a populist appeal. Claiming to be Lincoln’s heirs, they sponsored policies that created vast disparities of wealth and limited upward mobility for the poor. Perhaps nothing better demonstrated their misappropriation of Lincoln than Ronald Reagan’s speech at the 1992 Republican National Convention. Reagan contended that Republicans adhered to Lincoln’s principles, quoting several memorable maxims as proof: “You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. . . . You cannot help the poor man by destroying the rich.” (224) Days later, a sharp-eyed journalist showed that the sayings were not Lincoln’s at all, but aphorisms written fifty years after Appomattox by William Boetcker, a minister who conscripted Lincoln into serving his anti-trade union activities.

Holzer and Garfinkle admire Lincoln’s American Dream and urge present and future policymakers to rediscover it. They argue that Lincoln “left a legacy of guidance for subsequent American leaders” to achieve his worthy goals. (156) In a prescriptive final chapter, they endorse proposals, from an estate tax hike to investment in infrastructure that would harmonize federal policy with Lincoln’s ideals. They acknowledge the difficulty of selling these programs to a skeptical electorate and a recalcitrant Congress. But they also demonstrate that Americans need not look overseas to figure out how to use “the resources of the federal government to give reality to the idea of America as an enduring middle-class society.” (259) Lincoln and Roosevelt can be our guides.

Some of the ideas in this book will be familiar to specialists. In 1978, renowned historian Gabor Boritt published Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream, in which he argued that the “right to rise” was essential to Lincoln’s vision of a just and prosperous society. Striving to find consistency between Lincoln’s obscure early career and his illustrious presidency, Boritt argued that Lincoln’s commitment to “the ideal that all men should receive a full, good, and ever increasing reward for their labors so that they might have the opportunity to rise in life” was a “central theme” of his political life.[6] Early on, it encouraged Lincoln to champion a Whiggish program of state-supported economic development. After the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), it inspired Lincoln’s antislavery activity and steeled him to battle the Confederacy. Published in a time of economic stagnation, popular disillusionment, and ideological polarization, Boritt’s study remains relevant today, and Holzer and Garfinkle cite it approvingly. Their book can be read as an effort to reinvigorate and popularize Boritt’s thesis after forty years of political history shaped by the Reagan Revolution and the ascendancy of the Gospel of Wealth.

Holzer and Garfinkle’s post-1865 analysis and policy prescriptions distinguish A Just and Generous Nation from Boritt’s work and will likely make their volume more controversial. Some readers might balk at the authors’ candid search for a useful past. But if we refuse to learn from history, what good is it? Still, even the most sympathetic readers may wonder if this book will change many minds. Holzer and Garfinkle write with great passion and sophistication. But in a contentious political climate, a direct appeal to Lincoln’s legacy may not win many converts. The recent popular literature on Lincoln—not to mention the sentiments expressed in customer reviews and other online sounding boards—suggests that many people who support policies associated with the Gospel of Wealth also detest Lincoln. In this context, it would require Lincolnian political skill to convince skeptics that an active federal government can promote individual freedom, upward mobility, and economic growth.

Some specialists may also wish that the authors had explored the less-inspiring foundations of the middle-class northern society for which Lincoln spoke, fought, and died. In terms of labor and social mobility, it was certainly very different from the Old South; no honest reader of James H. Hammond’s “Mudsill” address could deny it. But the slave plantation was an integral part of the national and global economy.[7] Northern workers processed slave-grown cotton. Northern consumers smoked slave-grown tobacco. Northern farmers sold food to slaveholding buyers. These interconnections suggest that antebellum America’s distinctive but interdependent regional economies cannot be compartmentalized. Upward mobility for northern laborers may have been threatened by slavery’s expansion, but it was also bolstered by slavery’s existence. When one reflects on the dispossession of Native Americans—who appear as shadowy foes during Lincoln’s abbreviated Black Hawk War service—the story of northern economic opportunity grows even grimmer.

These observations do not discredit Holzer and Garfinkle’s key arguments about Lincoln’s economic and political ideals. They have grounded Lincoln’s career in an inspirational vision of broad opportunity, and they have clarified what Lincoln was doing when he fought to preserve, and eventually expand, American liberty. But one hopes that efforts to revive Lincoln’s American Dream will not promote veiled or invisible injustices. Lincoln’s contemporaries readily ignored the miseries of those who were overlooked or oppressed by the American Dream. It would be easy for us to do the same, particularly because we have outsourced so much of the labor exploitation and environmental devastation that makes modern middle-class life possible. Holzer and Garfinkle have explored many pertinent questions about liberty, opportunity, and public policy in the 19th and the 21st centuries. Hopefully, their work will inspire other scholars to follow suit.

1. Compare Mario M. Cuomo, Why Lincoln Matters: Today More than Ever (Orlando: Harcourt, Inc., 2004); Lerone Bennett, Jr., Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, 2000).

2. Thomas DiLorenzo, The Real Lincoln: A New Look at Abraham Lincoln, His Agenda, and an Unnecessary War (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002); Thomas DiLorenzo, Lincoln Unmasked: What You’re Not Supposed to Know About Dishonest Abe (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2006). For a thoughtful evaluation, see Daniel Feller, “Libertarians in the Attic, or A Tale of Two Narratives,” Reviews in American History 32, no. 2 (June 2004): 184–195.

3. Al Benson, Jr., and Walter Donald Kennedy, Lincoln’s Marxists (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2011); John Avery Emison, Lincoln Über Alles: Dictatorship Comes to America (Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing Company, 2011).

4. Thomas L. Krannawitter, Vindicating Lincoln: Defending the Politics of Our Greatest President (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2008).

5. Among the most provocative interventions in this discussion is Lerone Bennett, Jr., “Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?” Ebony 23, no. 4 (February 1968): 35–42.

6. G.S. Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis: Memphis State University Press, 1978), quotation on p. ix.

7. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2014).