Allen C. Guelzo

SPECIAL REPORT NO. 100 | FEBRUARY 8, 2012 FIRST PRINCIPLES Abraham Lincoln or the Progressives: Who was the real father of big government? Allen C. Guelzo B. KENNETH SIMON CENTER for PRINCIPLES AND POLITICS The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institution—a think tank—whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. Our vision is to build an America where freedom, opportunity, prosperity, and civil society flourish. As conservatives, we believe the values and ideas that motivated our Founding Fathers are worth conserving. As policy entrepreneurs, we believe the most effective solutions are consistent with those ideas and values. This paper is part of the First Principles Initiative, one of 10 Transformational Initiatives making up The Heritage Foundation’s Leadership for America campaign. For more products and informa- tion related to these Initiatives or to learn more about the Leadership for American campaign, please visit heritage.org. Abraham Lincoln or the Progressives: Who was the real father of big government? Allen C. Guelzo SR-100 About the Author Allen C. Guelzo is the Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College and the author of several books and articles, including First Principles Essay No. 14, “Prudence, Politics, and the Proclamation.” Photos on the Cover— Lincoln: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-7725 Wilson: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction number LC-USZ62-13028 This paper, in its entirety, can be found at http://report.heritage.org/sr0100 Produced by the B. Kenneth Simon Center for Principles and Politics The Heritage Foundation 214 Massachusetts Avenue, NE Washington, DC 20002–4999 (202) 546-4400 | heritage.org Nothing written here is to be construed as necessarily reflecting the views of The Heritage Foundation or as an attempt to aid or hinder the passage of any bill before Congress. ABRAHAM LINCOLN OR THE PROGRESSIVES: WHO WAS THE REAL FATHER OF BIG GOVERNMENT? Executive Summary hat our current government is the father of big government. He But Abraham Lincoln is not, nor Tbigger—both in terms of size does reveal that some of the confu- was his Administration, any model and reach—than anything that the sion is understandable as the early for what today seems so objection- Founders envisaged, none can deny. Progressives co-opted Lincoln’s able in the modern welfare state. The question of who spawned this legacy to justify their program of His unwavering commitment to Leviathan, however, remains a dis- expansive government powers over natural rights and the Constitution’s puted one. Whereas most point the American life. In so doing, they framework of limited government, finger to the Progressives, some put obscured how their philosophy of as well as the comparatively limited the blame on Abraham Lincoln and government broke with Lincoln and forces he called into the defense his administration. the Founding to which he was heir. of the nation during the Civil War, We asked Allen C. Guelzo, the Nevertheless, some conservative not only place him in philosophical Henry R. Luce Professor of the Civil and libertarian thinking today has opposition to the Left, but dispel any War Era at Gettysburg College and assumed, at once and without seri- notions that he set the stage for the a noted Lincoln scholar to settle the ous reflection, that the Progressives’ expansion of government in the 20th question once and for all. appropriation of Lincoln (and the century. In this special report, Guelzo continued appropriation of Lincoln refutes the canard that Lincoln was by the American Left) was legitimate. III ABRAHAM LINCOLN OR THE PROGRESSIVES: WHO WAS THE REAL FATHER OF BIG GOVERNMENT? I have said, very many times…that no man believed more than I in the principle of self- government; that it lies at the bottom of all my ideas of just government, from beginning to end.… I deny that any man has ever gone ahead of me in his devotion to the principle, whatever he may have done in efficiency in advocating it. I think that I have said it in your hearing that I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights—that each community, as a State, has a right to do exactly as it pleases with all the concerns within that State that interfere with the rights of no other State, and that the general government, upon principle, has no right to interfere with anything other than that general class of things that does concern the whole. I have said that at all times. —Abraham Lincoln, “Speech at Chicago, Illinois,” July 10, 18581 henever the name of Abraham interests. For a long time, these voic- is substituted for the truth… . He WLincoln emerges in a public es belonged either to unreconstruct- is pictured … as slipshod, slovenly, forum, there are two likely sets of ed Confederates or (once the supply and shiftless to such an appall- responses. The first set is the most of surviving Confederates began to ing degree that some of his debts predictable—a quasi-reverent hush; diminish in the early 20th century) remain still unpaid. We are told an allowance that any debating point assorted Progressives and leftists of by them of Lincoln’s passion for connected to Lincoln enjoys auto- various persuasions. funny stories, particularly for matic validity; even a few testimonies dirty ones; of a repellent poem he of admiration, awe, and the inevitable THE PROGRESSIVES’ REJECTION OF wrote, a salacious wedding bur- 4 WWLD (What would Lincoln do?). LINCOLN WAS COMPLICATED, SINCE lesque too indecent to quote. These are the responses captured first and best by Walt Whitman: SO MANY OF THEIR LEADERSHIP— At least, Tyler’s fury could be set AND PARTICULARLY THEODORE down as simple losers’ pique. The THIS dust was once the Man, ROOSEVELT AND WOODROW Progressives’ rejection of Lincoln Gentle, plain, just and resolute— WILSON—STRAINED TO DRAW was more complicated, since so under whose cautious hand, many of their leadership—and par- LINCOLN WITHIN THEIR IDEOLOGICAL Against the foulest crime in his- ticularly Theodore Roosevelt and tory known in any land or age, ORBIT AND FEED ON HIS REPUTATION. Woodrow Wilson—strained to draw Was saved the Union of These Lincoln within their ideological States.2 The embittered Confederates are orbit and feed on his reputation. But no surprise, since they never forgave in the 1920s, after the Progressive This is the Lincoln memorialized Lincoln for their loss of power and cause had been wrecked by the in over 220 statues across the coun- the destruction of race-based slav- high-handed self-righteousness of try and even overlooking Parliament ery. Lyon Gardiner Tyler, the son the President whom H. L. Mencken Square in London, the Lincoln of 1,500 of former President John Tyler and sneered at as “the Archangel books and two symphonies (by Daniel himself president of the College of Woodrow,” Progressives concluded Gregory Mason and Roy Harris), the William and Mary (from 1888 until that the image of Lincoln had all Lincoln of Mount Rushmore.3 1919), denounced Lincoln in terms along been their worst enemy and But there is another set of which would have caused even Mme. that he needed to be denounced responses, far less consequential Defarge’s knitting needles to drop rather than embraced. but also correspondingly much stitches: The Progressive Indiana Senator, more shrill for being so largely Albert Beveridge, author of a biog- ignored, and those are the responses Lincoln’s speeches, addresses, raphy of Lincoln, gradually became that denounce Lincoln as a tyran- and conversations are scarcely convinced that Lincoln had been nical dictator, a coarse vulgarian, more than a collection of soph- “strongly conservative and in firm and pliant tool of big, malevolent isms in which a flourish of words support of vested interests and the 1 ABRAHAM LINCOLN OR THE PROGRESSIVES: WHO WAS THE REAL FATHER OF BIG GOVERNMENT? conduct of business, unmolested as This appropriation has been the libertarianism, driven almost entirely far as possible, by legislative or any source, since the 1960s, for a species by its identification of Lincoln as the kind of governmental interference” of conservative–libertarian rejection Trojan horse that compromised the all along. Edgar Lee Masters, whose of Lincoln as the “father of big gov- purity of republican government and Lincoln: The Man (1931) falls con- ernment.” Disturbed by the metas- allowed the Progressives to work siderably short of the Progressive tasis of central government power their havoc from within. After all, the poetry he wrote in the more famous under the New Deal of Franklin driving lever of the New Deal and its Spoon River Anthology, endorsed Roosevelt and the Great Society of massive expansion of government Beveridge’s biography as “so factual Lyndon Johnson, conservative critics was, according to Murray Rothbard, and dispassionate that no judicious of both neo-Progressive initiatives “strong central government, large- mind can refuse it credit” and then turned in wounded fury to the task scale public works, and cheap credit denounced Lincoln as a man whose of identifying the long-term causes spurred by government”; but Lincoln’s “acts were against liberty” and “to the of their anguish, and—influenced by Administration was also built on “high advantage of monopoly and privi- the uneasy alliance many conser- tariffs, huge subsidies to railroads, lege.” Masters’ Lincoln was “an ugly vative thinkers had struck up with public works.” Ergo, Lincoln was the duckling,” one with “lawyers and Southern agrarians—the root system forerunner of Franklin Roosevelt.

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