Why Lincoln Matters
Today More than Ever
by Mario Cuomo
Harcourt, 192 pp., $24
I WAS CLICKING AROUND wsws.org, the "World Socialist Web Site," the other day--and how do you kill time at the office?--when I came across a stirring defense of Abraham Lincoln. The WSWS is a publication of the International Committee of the Fourth International (both of which seem to have been named by someone at the Department of Redundancy Department). The author of the article on Lincoln was a woman called Shannon Jones. She was upset that many of her fellow socialists blame our sixteenth president for "the delay in the victory of the socialist revolution."
Nothing could be further from the truth, Comrade Shannon explained. Rather than impeding the socialist revolution, Lincoln was its forerunner. "They"--meaning these anti-Lincoln socialists--"tear events out of their historical context in order to deny the obvious progressive content of Lincoln's actions," she wrote. That Lincoln was an incipient socialist, if not a completely self-conscious one, seemed as plain to Shannon Jones as the beard on Karl Marx's face, and she looked for the day when a more rigorous understanding of Lincoln's proto-socialist achievement would inspire, as she put it, "a new revolution in property relations." Then we could strive to finish the Lincolnian task of "attacking poverty, oppression and inequality by placing finance and industry under the democratic ownership and control of the working population." With malice toward none, of course.
I enjoyed Jones's essay, if only because her portrait of a Marxist Lincoln was new to
me. I knew that groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the First Church of Christ, Scientist, had retroactively tried to enlist Lincoln as a member of their club, but suddenly seeing Old Abe the Dialectician rise up from the Fourth International was especially rewarding. What's next, I wondered? The Vegan Lincoln? Lincoln, the champion of the Tridentine mass? The Rail-splitter's hidden support for the Strategic Defense Initiative?
A day or two later the galley proofs of a new book landed on my desk and I got my answer. Here's what's next: Why Lincoln Matters, Today More than Ever, by Mario Cuomo.
This is not Mario Cuomo's first book, far from it. As one of those politicians who mysteriously acquire a reputation as a bookish fellow, the former governor of New York has--no, written isn't the word. It is more fitting to say that as an intellectual-politician, he has had his name placed in close association with a number of books: two or three wonkish tomes on public policy, a collection of his own ghost-written speeches, and two thick volumes of excerpts from his personal diaries that were, by painful contrast, self-evidently written by him. A children's book, too, rolled off the Cuomo production line a while back.
In fact, this is not even Mario Cuomo's first book on Lincoln. In 1991 he hired the historian Harold Holzer to commission and assemble a collection of scholarly essays by Lincoln enthusiasts in honor of communism's collapse--nota bene Shannon Jones--and the volume was released with both Cuomo and Holzer listed as editors. (But only Mario got to be interviewed by Larry King.)
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