Lincoln’s Mantle

Claiming Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln’s Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric

by Jason R. Jividen

Northern Illinois, 243 pp., $38

When Barack Obama launched his presidential campaign in 2007, he did so just two days shy of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, standing in front of the old Illinois State Capitol where Lincoln had delivered the “House Divided” speech that helped propel him to the White House. Two years later, Obama rode to Washington following Lincoln’s same train route, ate an inaugural luncheon menu reminiscent of Lincoln’s favorite foods, was sworn in on the same Bible Lincoln used, and chose “A New Birth of Freedom” as his inaugural theme. In short, the new president did everything but grow a beard to signal to the American public that a new Emancipator had arrived. (Though what Obama wishes to emancipate us from remains hazy. Solvency, perhaps?)

As Jason Jividen shows here, progressives have been trying for a century to reinterpret the 16th president’s words and deeds in order to claim him as their predecessor. This progressive sleight-of-hand has been so effective that even some on the right have fallen for it, denouncing Lincoln as the first big-government liberal. Such grousing, mercifully, is limited largely to neo-Confederates at the margins of American politics; for the rest of us, Senator Everett Dirksen’s words remain as true, and challenging, as they were 50 years ago: The first task of an American politician is “to get right with . . . Lincoln.”