THE LINCOLN LEGACY
AT THE TURN OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Theodore Roosevelt became the first president, and arguably the first national politician, to give voice to a rising new national consciousness of the injustices, corruption, and abominable conditions of life for the working class under the new American industrial economy. Roosevelt, scion of a wealthy New York family, former governor of New York, and the youngest man to assume the nation’s highest office, spoke in a language that the citizens of America’s urban North could understand.
Roosevelt, who as a little boy had viewed Lincoln’s 1865 funeral procession from his family’s home in New York City, proudly told reporters that he kept a portrait of Lincoln behind his presidential desk. “When I am confronted with a great problem,” he explained, “I look up to that picture, and I do as I believe Lincoln would have done.” He also kept a lock of Lincoln’s hair in his ring—a relic he got from his secretary of state John Hay, who had once been assistant private secretary to Lincoln himself.
Roosevelt felt comfortable pursuing what he called a “Jackson-Lincoln theory of the presidency,” meaning that he would be an active executive prepared to do even what Congress was reluctant to approve. Because, he insisted, Lincoln and Jackson had done the same. Although Lincoln and Jackson had different beliefs about slavery and economic policy, they both believed that the president should use his power directly to promote the general welfare. Jackson used this power to destroy the national banking system. Lincoln used this power to restore the national bank and to manage the conduct of the Civil War. Roosevelt said Lincoln practiced what he called “tempered radicalism,” and so would he.
President Theodore Roosevelt speaks at the Lincoln log cabin in Hodgenville, Kentucky, on February 12, 1909, the Lincoln centennial and the day the outgoing president (and devoted Lincoln admirer) pledged the sacred birthplace site to the federal government.
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE
Roosevelt self-consciously presented himself as the legitimate heir to Lincoln’s political philosophy. He declared himself committed to government “for the people” rather than for the corporations or the wealthiest Americans. Roosevelt painted in bold public strokes. He famously called the presidency a “bully pulpit” (the word bully being his particular slang for “great” or “wonderful”), and he used it in this fashion just as Lincoln, in a more reticent day, used so-called public letters to speak directly to the general public. In his first State of the Union message, Roosevelt said, “The tremendous and highly complex industrial development . . . brings us face to face . . . with very serious social problems.” The “old laws, and the old customs . . . once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth” were “no longer sufficient.”
Roosevelt’s commitment to use the federal government to tackle the nation’s “serious social problems” was put to the test when 140,000 coal miners went on strike in May and June 1902. The whole country suffered under the absence of coal, which was then the principal source of heat for American homes, businesses, and public facilities. What began as a tolerable absence in the summer months would become dire in the fall. Roosevelt faced a difficult national problem, as long as the strike continued with little promise of a settlement. By October one journalist described the strike as “the most formidable industrial deadlock in the history of the United States.”
The owners of the coal mines were adamantly opposed to negotiating with the union and expected to be supported by a Republican probusiness administration in Washington. But Roosevelt was a new kind of Republican president. He interjected himself into the conflict on October 3, 1902, by inviting both the owners and the union leaders to come to Washington to discuss their differences with him. The union leaders were eager to meet, and the owners reluctantly agreed. The president greeted the two parties with the statement that there are “three parties affected by the situation in the anthracite trade—the operators, the miners and the general public.” Roosevelt said he spoke “for neither the operators nor the miners, but for the general public.”
Despite Roosevelt’s efforts to broker a deal, the mine operators rejected all suggestions for government intervention, and the strike went on. As winter weather arrived, the public was still without heat, and, not surprisingly, public opinion turned against the mine owners. With public sentiment supporting him, Roosevelt enlisted business leader J. P. Morgan to persuade the owners to settle the dispute by agreeing to accept a decision of a Federal Government Arbitration Commission. The owners reluctantly agreed. The Arbitration Commission ultimately awarded the miners a retroactive wage increase of 10 percent as well as a reduction in daily work hours from ten to nine. For Roosevelt and his supporters, this was a confirmation that Lincoln’s idea of taking positive government action for the people was possible in twentieth-century America.
Roosevelt set forth a new agenda, bold in both principle and detail. He called for the federal government to “assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing interstate business” and asked for amendments to strengthen the Interstate Commerce Act to achieve this goal. In doing so, he hoped to use the federal government’s power to regulate interstate commerce to limit the power of corporations using monopolistic methods. He proposed the creation of a new cabinet secretary of commerce and industry with jurisdiction over commerce and labor matters. He called for reform of the government’s labor policies, including legislation to limit women and child labor hours and a factory law for the District of Columbia. He praised the labor movement and suggested that government action would be necessary to protect unions.
Like Lincoln before him, Roosevelt well understood the power of his presidential statements: the “sermons” he delivered from his “bully pulpit.” His rhetoric would prove as important as his policies. His new tone and vision had a galvanizing effect on the nation. His statements echoed the feelings of an increasingly worried and conscience-stricken middle class and unleashed the pent-up energies of a whole generation of idealists and crusaders.
In the process, Roosevelt radically redefined the role and vastly expanded the prerogatives of the federal government. Taking advantage of the long-dormant provisions of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, his administration pursued a series of highly visible prosecutions against the trusts, beginning with a case against the Northern Securities Company in 1902. Federal prosecutors were successful in breaking up the Standard Oil of New Jersey Trust and the American Tobacco Company Trust. In 1906 and 1908—following the publication of Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle, exposing in gruesome detail the abusive and unsanitary practices in Chicago’s meatpacking industry—Roosevelt signed the Pure Food and Drug Act and the Meat Inspection Act, the first real consumer protection legislation. He also sponsored a series of laws aimed at conservation of the natural environment.
The cartoon Led by Lincoln’s Principles suggested that the sixteenth president had all but encouraged the twenty-sixth to make another run for the White House as a third-party Progressive candidate in 1912. TR would have agreed.
LINCOLN MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY, HARROGATE, TN
Roosevelt described the philosophic roots of his progressive beliefs in a speech in 1910 outside Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown had fought the Missouri Riders in 1856. Addressing himself to the Civil War veterans in his audience, Roosevelt said, “There have been two great crises in our country’s history: first when it was formed, and then again when it was perpetuated” by Lincoln. Now, he said, there was a looming third crisis that could be met only by the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln. He explained that Lincoln had rallied the public behind a commitment to support laborers in the battles between those who produce and those who profit. Roosevelt quoted Lincoln’s economic belief that “Labor is the superior of Capital.” He insisted property rights were secondary to the rights of the common welfare.
Roosevelt went on to contend that he was applying Lincoln’s vision to America as it existed in 1910: “The essence of any struggle for healthy liberty has always been . . . to take from some one man or class of men the right to enjoy power, or wealth, or position, or immunity, which has not been earned by service to his or their fellows.”
Roosevelt asserted that corporate owners were buying favors from local political bosses and national members of Congress. He added: “The Constitution guarantees protections to property and we must make that promise good. But it does not give the right of suffrage to any corporation. . . . The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being.”
Executives and “especially” the board members of such corporations, he insisted, should be held responsible for breaches of antitrust law. Roosevelt cited one of the proudest creations of his own administration, the Federal Bureau of Corporations, and said that it and the Interstate Commerce Commission should be handed greater powers. He further advocated a judiciary accountable to changing social and economic conditions; comprehensive workmen’s compensation acts; higher safety and sanitary standards in the workplace; public scrutiny of all political campaign spending, both before and after elections; and graduated income and inheritance taxes on big fortunes.
Lincoln had made the initial commitment to government for the people in 1863. Roosevelt took Lincoln’s commitment a long step forward in 1910. He called his approach a “New Nationalism.” One of its principal features would be a judiciary, responding to changing social and economic conditions by favoring people’s rights over property rights. In effect, Roosevelt was trying to undo some of the damage the Supreme Court had done in the 1880s and 1890s to protect big businesses from government regulation of their political influence. Roosevelt concluded his speech in 1910 with the following words: “If our political institutions were perfect, they would absolutely prevent the political domination of money in any part of our affairs. We need to make our political representatives more quickly and sensitively responsive to the people whose servants they are. . . . It is particularly important that all moneys received or expended for campaign purposes should be publicly accounted for, not only after election, but before election as well.”
Three weeks before the end of his second term in 1909, Roosevelt went off to visit Lincoln’s log-cabin birthplace in Kentucky. Even in retirement, Roosevelt was not going to abandon the Lincoln centennial to anyone else, including his chosen Republican successor, William Howard Taft.
By the time the 1912 election rolled around, TR was ready to take back the presidency from Taft, a man he felt had failed in living up to his—and to Lincoln’s—vision. He attempted a comeback as the presidential candidate of the new Progressive Party, but by then he was not alone in linking himself to Lincoln. The competition to claim Lincoln had embraced all political faiths and candidates, Republican, Progressive, and Democrat alike. Taft went off to Vermont, there to receive the endorsement of Lincoln’s son Robert. To seal the blessing, they played golf together! Roosevelt fought back by declaring that his “progressive platform of today is but an application of Lincoln’s” and dismissing Lincoln’s rich son as incapable of understanding such things. Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson created an association of his own with the great man. Explaining that he was in search of the unique inspiration only Lincoln could provide, the Democratic presidential nominee made his own pilgrimage to the sacred and hitherto exclusively Republican mecca of Springfield, Illinois, Lincoln’s hometown.
Running mates? A Teddy Roosevelt for President pin dating to his 1904 campaign for a full White House term (and the golden anniversary of the Republican Party) makes an explicit link to Lincoln.
FROM THE LINCOLN FINANCIAL FOUNDATION COLLECTION, COURTESY OF THE ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY AND INDIANA STATE MUSEUM AND HISTORIC SITES
Comparisons between Roosevelt and Lincoln reached a new level when a gun-toting assassin attacked TR during the campaign. Roosevelt survived because he had folded his long speech inside his breast pocket. The bullet stuck within the thick manuscript, saving his life. One only wonders what might have happened had TR been prone to making brief speeches like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
Still, Roosevelt finished second that year, although the total Republican vote far exceeded the Democrats. But Wilson prevailed—benefiting from the split opposition—just as Lincoln had in 1860 against a divided Democratic opposition.
Woodrow Wilson became president of the United States in 1913. He was a Southerner by birth and inclination and retained the dominant Southern racial prejudices. In his first year as president, Wilson presided over the fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg—giving a Gettysburg Address of his own that suggested that Union and Confederate veterans both deserved tribute and honor. On racial matters, Wilson could not shake his Southern heritage. He made no mention of the relevance of Lincoln’s “new birth of freedom” to the condition of African Americans in 1914. Nor did he mention the importance of the Union’s victory in the Civil War.
Wilson was not at all inclined to look to Lincoln for guidance in addressing the increasing pattern of segregation of the African American population. Indeed, he insisted that segregation be practiced in all departments of the federal government. Wilson held the basic Southern prosegregationist view that African Americans were an inferior race. He was sympathetic to the Southern view that the Confederate states had engaged not in a rebellion but rather in a “lost cause” to maintain a superior society. In the South, lost-cause proponents had conducted a sentimental campaign for a half century to overcome the memory of defeat in the Civil War. Their message was clear: the war had nothing to do with slavery. The Southerners had fought against tyranny and more particularly against the tyranny of the federal government to violate the constitutional rights of the Southern states. They presented themselves as valiant underdogs fighting to overcome unwarranted aggression.
Lincoln Steadying Wilson’s Hand suggests that the nineteenth-century president continued to influence his twentieth-century successors regardless of party, in this case Democrat Woodrow Wilson, a late-blooming Lincoln enthusiast who simultaneously embraced the racist film Birth of a Nation. Here Lincoln steels Wilson to restrain a craven politician.
LINCOLN MEMORIAL UNIVERSITY, HARROGATE, TN
The lost-cause proponents in the South were aided in their efforts by movie producers and book publishers in the North. D. W. Griffith’s highly successful 1915 film, Birth of a Nation, portrayed the resurgent, repressive, and lynch-prone Ku Klux Klan as a heroic force protecting Southern women from sexually aggressive African American males. President Woodrow Wilson was so enamored of the film that he hosted a private screening of it in the White House.
Despite Wilson’s Southern proclivities, it is remarkable that his campaign speeches in 1912 amounted to a self-conscious effort to revive Lincoln’s vision of a middle-class society. Theodore Roosevelt had spoken candidly about social evils and had used federal action and new laws to address many of them. But Roosevelt’s perspective on the issues during his presidency was always a top-down vision, the view of a patrician, of an aristocrat who felt a responsibility for his society out of a sense of noblesse oblige. His progressive agenda was fully elaborated only after he left office when he was engaged in his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency between 1910 and 1912. By contrast, Wilson looked to Lincoln from the beginning of his presidency when he initiated a series of programs guided by Lincoln’s commitment to a middle-class economy and society. Like Lincoln, Wilson reenvisioned the nation’s problems, as it were, from the bottom up. He adopted the perspective of the ordinary citizen, the common worker struggling to manage under the existing conditions of the economy and the political system. Citing Lincoln as a model, Wilson explicitly linked his progressive agenda to the cause of reviving America’s commitment to social mobility and restoring equality of economic opportunity. For Wilson, it was precisely Lincoln’s understanding of the meaning of America as an antiaristocratic middle-class society that needed to be restored. Lincoln, he said, was “a man who rose out of the ranks and interpreted America better than any man had interpreted it who had risen out of the privileged classes or the educated classes of America.”
According to Wilson, what had been lost in the Gilded Age—and in the Republican Party—was precisely Lincoln’s profound sense that America was all about the fate of the average person, about opportunities for the ordinary worker to get ahead. Wilson chided the Republicans for their elitism. “It is amazing,” he said, “how quickly the political party which had Lincoln for its first leader, Lincoln, who not only denied, but in his own person so completely disproved the aristocratic theory,—it is amazing how quickly that party, founded on faith in the people, forgot the precepts of Lincoln and fell under the delusion that the ‘masses’ needed the guardianship of ‘men of affairs.’”
Wilson rejected outright the Gospel of Wealth notion that the industrial magnate was to be revered as the engine of the nation’s prosperity, “[F]or indeed, if you stop to think about it, nothing could be a greater departure from original Americanism, from faith in the ability of a confident, resourceful, and independent people, than the discouraging doctrine that somebody has got to provide prosperity for the rest of us.”
Lincoln had spoken of the “prudent, penniless beginner.” Wilson spoke similarly of the “beginner,” the man “with only a little capital.” But industrial America was no longer Lincoln’s America. “American industry is not free, as once it was free,” Wilson said. “American enterprise is not free; the man with only a little capital is finding it harder to get into the field, more and more impossible to compete with the big fellow. Why? Because the laws of this country do not prevent the strong from crushing the weak.” Like Lincoln, Wilson believed that America needed to be a middle-class nation, a nation that assimilated beginners to the middle class. There needed to be “the constant renewal of society from the bottom.” The “middle class is being more and more squeezed out by the processes which we have been taught to call processes of prosperity,” he said. The whole point of American democracy was to provide the humble with access to the American Dream, and government should act to ensure this access. “Anything that depresses, anything that makes the organization greater than the man, anything that blocks, discourages, dismays the humble man, is against the principles of progress.” This was vintage Lincoln.
Wilson sought to keep his connection to Lincoln alive. He formally accepted Lincoln’s log-cabin birthplace as a donation to the US government in 1916, declaring Lincoln a “typical” American yet a singularly “great” leader. As a historian, the young Wilson had complained that Lincoln had “made the presidency his government.” But once he assumed the presidency himself, Wilson suddenly felt “the closest kinship” to Lincoln “in principle and political” lineage.
During World War I, Wilson encouraged the use of Lincoln’s image on war-bond and recruitment posters, quoting him to justify American involvement in a new conflict. What seems to have eluded Wilson was the irony of his quoting the Great Emancipator while resegregating the federal bureaucracy. It is no surprise that he never mentioned freedom or equality for African Americans in any of his tributes to his suddenly useful predecessor.
But Wilson’s commitment to using the federal government to support a society for the people was indeed vintage Lincoln. And his specific policies went far beyond both Lincoln and Roosevelt in proposing government action to improve the economic condition of underadvantaged Americans. The legislative record of Wilson’s first term was unparalleled. The list of his domestic achievements was stunning and amounted to a comprehensive new set of government economic policies.
First came tariff reform. Increasingly, progressives had come to see tariff laws as, in effect, a regressive tax on consumers. Notoriously shaped by the efforts of lobbyists, the tariffs protected the trusts from foreign competition and kept prices high. Consumers footed the bill. Legislation during Wilson’s first year as president essentially overturned the tariff regime of the nineteenth century, radically reducing rates on hundreds of items (while raising rates on certain luxury goods) and, following Lincoln’s lead, reinstituting a graduated income tax to provide a new revenue base for the government. In effect, the law shifted the source of federal revenues from a regressive consumption tax in the form of tariffs to a progressive tax on income. In 1916 the tax was significantly raised to cover war preparedness (after US entry into World War I income taxes were raised again), and, for the first time, a federal estate tax on large inheritances was established (the latter was a long-standing item on the progressive agenda, advocated by Roosevelt as early as 1906). This was both a new technical approach to and a new philosophy of taxation, an effort to gain lower prices for most Americans through tariff reductions and simultaneously shift the burden of taxation away from lower- and middle-income Americans to upper-income Americans.
During Wilson’s first term, he was fortunate to enjoy Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. This gave him the opportunity to follow Lincoln’s approach and use the power of the federal government for the people. With the support of Congress he established worker’s compensation and child labor laws, created the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Reserve Board, and secured passage of the “trust-busting” Clayton Anti-Trust Act.
It is tempting to conclude that Lincoln’s vision of America as a middle-class society had made a permanent comeback. Conditions were clearly improving. Once unleashed, the impetus for genuine reform had proved unstoppable. Ironically, Lincoln’s torch had been passed to Wilson and the Democrats, who now boasted a comprehensive progressive agenda to support their long-standing claim to the mantle of “champion of the common people.” Through his policies, Wilson had restored the essence of Lincoln’s economic vision, and he was vocal about doing so. In speech after speech, he made it clear to his fellow citizens that Lincoln was his model.
The True Sons of Liberty as depicted in this 1918 Charles Gustrine print are black soldiers fighting in World War I. They are inspired into battle, the print suggests, by the image of a benevolent Lincoln and a paraphrased promise of equality from the Gettysburg Address. The Great Emancipator had introduced African American military service in 1863.
COURTESY OF GILDER LEHRMAN INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN HISTORY, GLC09121
But World War I became the last great cause of Woodrow Wilson’s progressive movement, and it proved to be the movement’s undoing. By 1919, when the president returned from Paris with the Treaty of Versailles and his elaborate plan for the League of Nations, the public was sick to death of war and equally weary of Wilson’s seemingly inexhaustible store of idealistic rhetoric. As long as Wilson’s vision remained focused on improving the lives of ordinary Americans, the public stood behind him. War in the name of an abstract idea of human progress, however, left a bitter taste.
A prototypical African American veteran returns from the Great War to the embrace of his family—under the gaze of a Lincoln icon gracing the parlor wall. In truth the doughboy will receive a less enthusiastic reintroduction to segregated civilian life than promised in the title to this print: Welcome Home.
FROM THE LINCOLN FINANCIAL FOUNDATION COLLECTION, COURTESY OF THE ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY AND INDIANA STATE MUSEUM AND HISTORIC SITES
Republicans correctly gauged the public mood and hit on an apt theme for the 1920 election: “Not heroism, but healing,” declared Republican candidate Warren G. Harding, “not nostrums, but normalcy.” The swipe at Wilson’s rhetorical grandiosity (dismissing it as so many “nostrums”) struck a powerful chord. The Republican ticket (Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge) trounced the Democratic slate (James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt), winning 16 million votes to the Democrats’ 9 million.
In one respect, Harding’s postwar administration harked back to President Ulysses S. Grant’s administration following the Civil War. It would be remembered for a string of spectacular scandals. Mercifully, perhaps, the president died of a sudden stroke in August 1923 before the malfeasance had come to light. But scandals were not the most important consequence of Harding’s presidential leadership. The real significance of the Harding administration was that it ushered in twelve years of unabashed probusiness Republican rule—a revival of laissez-faire economic doctrine and a return to the Gospel of Wealth.
This time the public embraced the Republican probusiness approach with unparalleled fervor. The reason was simple: it seemed to work. The 1920s were a decade of dramatic economic growth and unprecedented rise in the living standards of most Americans. From 1921 through 1929, the gross national product expanded at an estimated real rate of 4.5 percent per year—well above the average annual growth rates of 3 percent per year in the post–World War II decades.
The prosperity of the 1920s was not produced by laissez-faire magic. It was based on increasing consumer demand heavily financed by consumer borrowing. This was all well and good, as long as prosperity continued on the upswing. But amid the exuberance of the era, it was easy to forget an elementary truth: that borrowing carried risk.
“The chief business of the American people is business,” affirmed President Calvin Coolidge in January 1925. The Republican administrations of the 1920s saw their economic mission as one of enabling business to do its job. For government, this meant mainly getting out of the way: lower taxes, less regulation, indeed virtually no regulation. Business should be helped or otherwise left alone. As business prospered, so would America. From their probusiness perspective, the 1920s Republicans claimed that prosperity was coming from the producer, from the top down. “Give tax breaks to large corporations,” Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon famously said, “so that money can trickle down to the general public, in the form of extra jobs.”
Americans for the most part were initially buoyed by the ride up the 1920s roller coaster, but the ride down was too terrible to forget. Following the stock market crash in October 1929, the American economy descended into a rapid tailspin. By 1932 12 million Americans were out of work—nearly a quarter of the labor force. Tens of thousands of men were riding railroad boxcars from town to town in a vain search of employment, and tens of thousands more were living in makeshift tent camps on vacant lots in major cities (derisively named Hoovervilles after Republican president Herbert Hoover). Countless families across the nation lacked shelter, heat, food, or even shoes and clothing for their children. The risk had simply become unacceptable. Business had taken the risks; now ordinary Americans were paying the terrible price. Overnight, the 1920s land of milk and honey had turned into a biblical land of famine.
The Wanderer Finds Liberty in America was the title of this “Americanization” pageant staged for Jewish immigrant children in 1919 Milwaukee. The man in the Lincoln regalia is unidentified, but the costumed “Statue of Liberty” is believed to be Goldie Mabovitch Meyerson—who later migrated to Palestine and eventually became Israeli prime minister Golda Meir.
COURTESY OF STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY OF WISCONSIN, MADISON, WHI X3 22831
For almost two decades, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson had done what they could to resurrect Lincoln’s vision and overturn the Gospel of Wealth. Now, however, it seemed as if the Gospel of Wealth, back with a vengeance, had utterly destroyed Lincoln’s vision of a middle-class society.