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Author: JMC Editor  Last Edited: 1/3/2009 10:13:00 AM

A Lincoln GPS

            The year 2008 is not quite over yet, but already, by the annual tally I do for our Civil War Era Studies website at Gettysburg College, 244 Civil War-related books have issued forth from publishers’ presses. And just as daunting, thirty of those are about some aspect of the life and presidency of Abraham Lincoln. Yes, that’s just one, as-yet-unfinished year. That only adds to the burden of sorting-out the approximately 16,000 other books which have been published about Lincoln since his death in 1865. So where, in this bewildering thicket, should someone begin reading about Abraham Lincoln?

            Although it was published in 1952, Benjamin P. Thomas’s Abraham Lincoln remains the best and most-readable of all single-volume Lincoln biographies. Thomas was the executive secretary of the Abraham Lincoln Association, with a PhD in diplomatic history from Johns Hopkins University. He served as a major contributor to the three-volume Lincoln Day-by-Day (a key reference work begun in 1933 which tracked every recorded movement of Lincoln from 1809 to 1865), wrote a short account of Lincoln’s early years in New Salem, Illinois, and published a collection of biographical sketches of major Lincoln biographers. Thomas also the first modern Lincoln biographer to have access to the Robert Todd Lincoln Papers – the vast collection of White House papers which Abraham Lincoln’s sole surviving son, Robert Todd Lincoln, had secreted in trunks in his New England mansion, and only donated to the Library of Congress under the condition that they not be opened to researchers until 21 years after his death.

            For those who want to probe more deeply into the ‘private’ Lincoln, nothing beats Michael Burlingame’s The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln (1994). Although Burlingame was constantly advised that nothing new was likely be discovered about Abraham Lincoln which was not already known, it occurred to Burlingame that Lincoln biographers of earlier generations could scarcely have crammed all of what they knew into single books. There were bound to be documents, letters and interviews which these earlier biographers had either left unused or simply filed away. And so Burlingame went a-digging in the archives and manuscript collections of Lincoln biographers (starting with the turn-of-the-century ‘muckraker’ journalist, Ida Tarbell) and turned up reams of unused and previously unknown materials on Lincoln – lost interviews with Lincoln’s friends and associates, clippings from obscure newspapers, and so forth. Burlingame brought this relentless pursuit of new Lincoln material together in The Inner World of Abraham Lincoln, which is really a series of formidably-researched essays on the Lincoln marriage, Lincoln and slavery, examples of Lincoln’s anger and (occasionally) cruelty, Lincoln’s “melancholy,” and Lincoln’s “ambition.” Not only are these essays path-breakers, but the footnotes are almost as interesting as the essays themselves.

            Professionally, Lincoln was a lawyer, practicing law for 25 years in the Illinois circuit courts, appeals courts, and federal district court. Comparatively little was known about the dimensions of his law practice, however, because so much of the paperwork was squirreled away in dimly-lit basements of small county courthouses scattered around Illinois. It was not until the 1980s that a major project to collect and codify all of Lincoln’s legal papers was launched by the Illinois State Historic Preservation Agency. And as the ‘Lincoln Legals’ project brought more and more of Lincoln’s legal papers to light, the overall shape of his legal practice finally could be identified and analyzed. The full documentary record of the Lincoln Legal Papers project was published in 2000 on DVD.[1] But the best and most accessible overall survey of that teeming mass of documents – over 100,000 papers from 5600 cases in which Lincoln participated – is Mark E. Steiner’s An Honest Calling: The Law Practice of Abraham Lincoln (2007). Written by a law professor with a keen eye for the context that makes sense of all the details, Steiner neatly situates Lincoln in the history of American law and provides an easily-understood overview of the various facets of Lincoln’s law practice, from two-dollar trespass cases to corporate law suits.

            But Lincoln was more than a lawyer. He was an Illinoisan (at least by transplant when he was 20 years old), and that made him part of ‘the West’ in the 19th century; he was a Kentuckian by birth, which made him part of an important social circle in the Illinois state capital of Springfield; and he was a Whig (until the Whig party collapsed in 1856 and Lincoln joined the new Republican party). Tying together the ‘social history’ of Abraham Lincoln requires an extraordinarily fine-grained knowledge of Lincoln’s social milieu in Illinois, his friends, his associates, and how much Lincoln conformed to the patterns of ambitious and forward-looking Americans in the decades before the Civil War. All this has been tied very neatly together by Kenneth J. Winkle’s The Young Eagle: The Rise of Abraham Lincoln (2001). Winkle has worked out the inter-connected social circles of Lincoln’s adult world, graphed and coded them, and let us see the same society Lincoln saw everyday when he walked to his office.

            But above all, Abraham Lincoln is the great champion of democracy – the enemy of human slavery and the defender of the American democracy when it was threatened, not by outside invasion, but by inward dissolution and anarchy. No single event in Lincoln’s life cast his political ideas in a starker light than the series of seven debates he conducted with Stephen A. Douglas in 1858 as they both campaigned for the U.S. Senate seat from Illinois. And no one has ever laid out the ideas behind those debates better than Harry V. Jaffa in Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates (1959). For Jaffa, the Lincoln-Douglas debates are the nearest American equivalent to Plato’s Symposium, and his magisterial treatment of the great debates shows Lincoln in his greatest moment, defending equality, natural law, and liberty as no other American before or since has done.

            I do not expect that writing about Abraham Lincoln will stand still, or that these will always remain the five greatest Lincoln books of them all (Michael Burlingame is, in fact, shortly to release a two-volume biography of Lincoln which will likely throw all previous Lincoln biographies of any shape or size into the shade). But as we stand at the doorway of the bicentennial of Lincoln’s birth in 2009, Thomas, Burlingame, Steiner, Winkle and Jaffa are the top seeds for anyone looking to strike up a worthwhile and exciting acquaintance with Mr. Lincoln – and they probably will be for many years to come.

 Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg College

Professor Guelzo is the author of several studies on the life and thought of Abraham Lincoln, including  Lincoln and Douglas: The Debate Debates that Defined America and Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President. 

 

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Author: JMC Editor  Last Edited: 12/8/2008 9:13:00 AM
We have been told of late that America, as it heads into the 21st century, must face the possibility of its own decline, especially with "the rise of the rest," as Fareed Zakaria refers to the growing importance of China and other aspiring great powers. Whether the U.S. is really on a downward trajectory, in relation to the rest of the world, remains debatable, but the concept of decline provides a shorthand for framing the question. Historians often take the cycle of rise and fall as a model for explaining world events, and the change of direction, they note, can be remarkably abrupt.

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Author: JMC Editor  Last Edited: 12/3/2008 9:31:00 AM

Closed Minds?: Politics and Ideology on American Universities

Change is an overused word in American political life, yet there is no better word to describe American higher education over the last half century.

In the 1950’s about 25% of high school graduates enrolled in colleges and universities.  Today that number is close to 65%.  Higher education is today about where secondary schools were in the 50’s measured by enrollments.  This single data point says more than any other about how higher education has changed over the last 50 plus years.  The old higher-ed was elite.  Boards of trustees, faculties and students were almost exclusively white males from higher income families. There was outright discrimination, including spoken and unspoken quotas, on women and racial and religious minorities.  Colleges and universities were conservative institutions in almost all meanings of that word.

Change came to academe rapidly beginning in the late 50’s.  Enrollments began to grow and today have reached 18 million students. The number of faculty members grew to 1.3 million. The demographic characteristics of boards, faculties and students began to mirror the population as a whole.  Some of the change was dramatic.  Women, who had been denied or severely limited in admission to law and medical schools became the majority population of these institutions. As universities expanded, they naturally became much more important institutions in American life.  They began to look demographically more like the population as a whole.

They became important research centers and the home for thought leaders.  Furthermore, they hold the keys to the good life for most people in society.

Given change the in dimensions of academe and its importance there should be no surprise that critics are taking a closer look at higher education than before.  Some claim they are overpriced and wasteful; others decry that graduates are not adequately prepared.  And echoes of older criticisms remain, as some allege that universities still discriminate in admissions and lower income students cannot gain entry.  If they do, they graduate with nearly unmanageable debt.  Although all of these criticisms are serious, probably the most frequent attack on higher education today is the accusation that universities, and certainly the elite institutions, are controlled by liberals who proselytize in the classroom, lower the grades of conservative students and discourage or even forbid open debate.  If in fact, a liberal group of faculty have gained control of universities and its classrooms the damage done to the academy would be severe.  The critics’ complaints go to the heart of the mission of the university and, if true, need to be corrected directly and quickly.

At the center of the complaint is the assumption that 1.3 million faculty members have agreed on a political orientation and managed to put into place a program to sell to 18 million students.  That is a large task especially for a group--faculty--which is enormously diverse and famously difficult to direct toward any single goal.  It is hard to imagine how ‘groupthink’ could capture an institution as large and ungovernable as the American academy.  When one examines the data on faculty and student political or ideological attitudes and data on where students acquire their political attitudes it becomes more clear that the accusations of the critics do not hold water.

It is the seriousness of the accusations which led two colleagues from George Mason University and me to examine the issue carefully in our recent study Closed Minds.  We looked at the issue both broadly and specifically, using some of the data and questions which Everett Carl Ladd and Seymour Martin Lipset asked in their well-known study undertaken in  the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, during the post-Vietnam War era.  They found a faculty which leaned to the left but was highly fractured and diverse.  Our study, forty years later found the same academy with some change in the science and engineering disciplines.  They are more liberal than they had been.

We surveyed faculty to determine if conservatives felt they had been discriminated against in hiring and promotion.  Of the 1200 plus responders only 10 percent who characterized themselves as “very conservative”  said they thought their views could affect their chances in the universities in which they are employed. 

Studies of college students have found that students as well have not encountered monolithic political views in the classroom.  Student political views are more visibly shaped by family, socio-economic status and friends than by faculty.

We concluded that, ironically, the universities have become more cautious in hiring faculty from the far left or far right.  Better to stick to the middle and to the scholar more interested in research than to stir what could become an unpleasant public debate.  Importantly, however, civic and political education have suffered under this pall of caution. As many have observed, civic education, once an important component of higher education, is no longer thought of as central to an undergraduate education.  Its virtual disappearance could be the result of the alarming but questionable criticisms of the academy as controlled by bastions of the left.  If civic education is important, and advocates on the right and left agree that it is, we should find ways to reintroduce it into the curriculum.   The only place to begin is an accurate understanding of the political and ideological situation on campuses.  Changes and reforms based on reality should trump those of casual observers.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­A. Lee Fritschler, and co-authors, Bruce L.R. Smith and Jeremy D. Mayer, Closed Minds?  Politics and Ideology in American Universities (Brookings Press, 2008).

Author: JMC Editor  Last Edited: 12/1/2008 10:43:00 AM

The 2008 presidential election has made us think afresh about the proper place of popular and elite opinion in American politics. It isn’t the first time the questions have arisen, and it won’t be the last. How is public opinion created, detected, measured, and managed? How much weight should be given to the perspectives of candidates who claim to speak for non-elite voters, or embody non-elite attitudes? How much should a democracy be required to defer to the vox populi, and how much to the voice of expertise? And what do we do when our elites seem unwise or untrustworthy? Doesn’t a democracy empower its citizens to ask that impertinent question, “Says who?”

Such questions come up regularly, and have ever since the very beginnings of the American experiment. They have been a fixture of our national life since the days of Andrew Jackson, and have been the object of reflection for countless pundits and scholars. But no one had more to say about them than Walter Lippmann, one of the great American journalists of the twentieth century, and a man far less well known today than he should be.

Indeed, there is good reason to think that Lippmann's work may come to be seen as even more important and influential in the years to come. As Americans continue to struggle with the prospects and problems of their experiment in mass democracy, Lippmann's fearless criticism of modern American democracy may serve as an increasingly valuable intellectual touchstone in contemporary debate, where the disparaging term "elitist" has too often served as the ultimate trump card and conversation-stopper. Even if Francis Fukuyama had been right in asserting that all the ideological alternatives to liberal democracy in our time were exhausted—surely a temporary state of affairs, at most—an awareness of the pathologies of democracy suggests the a continuing need for frequent and sustained democratic self-criticism.

Although the gloomy and demythologized view of democracy found in Lippmann’s The Phantom Public is hardly likely to convert mainstream American public opinion—such a development being unlikely virtually by definition—it preserves a serious and distinctive intellectual option, one with sympathetic resonances and precursors in the American past. The first epigraph of The Phantom Public, questioning the wisdom of the adage Vox populi, vox Dei, suggests an even more influential intellectual provenance: the antidemocratic skepticism of Alexander Hamilton, and the antidemotic fears of so many of the continental-minded men who drafted and campaigned for the U.S. Constitution.

Such historical continuity is not in itself a sufficient argument for Lippmann's importance. But the astonishing contemporary relevance of much of his work is. Sentences and paragraphs out of The Phantom Public could be lifted, unchanged, out of their context and be republished on the editorial pages of one of today's great American newspapers, where they might well win a Pulitzer for the plagiarist intrepid enough to appropriate them. (For instance, the book's first nine pages, which comprise a chapter entitled "The Disenchanted Man," can easily be mined for observations that seem to speak directly to the discontent of much of the current American electorate.) Moreover, Lippmann's cool, analytical acuity and complete eschewal of moral posturing should forestall any dismissive charge against him of self-interested elitism, moss-backed crankishness, or crypto-legitimism. As those who have read Public Opinion can attest, Lippmann's discussion of stereotypes and propaganda in the modern mass-communications media, written at a time when radio was in its infancy and television little more than a pipedream, has hardly been improved upon by eight decades' worth of subsequent writers, who had the advantage of observing those media in full operation.

The Phantom Public is arguably an even more valuable text, precisely because it was the clearest, pithiest, and most full-throated expression of Lippmann's crystallizing skepticism. Perhaps it was for that very reason that The Phantom Public disappeared from print so rapidly, and has remained so until now. Though it was acceptable, and even amusing, for a semicomic literary virtuoso like H.L. Mencken to mouth disdain for democracy and public opinion, such opinions were quite another matter coming from a man of Lippmann's reputed probity and wide influence. Lippmann himself came to suspect, before publication, that an untoward fate might lie in store for the book. Although he had written it as a shorter and more popularly aimed sequel to Public Opinion, which had enjoyed considerable intellectual and popular success, Lippmann worried that the more pointed and damning argument of The Phantom Public would get him in trouble, and even see him "put on trial for heresy by my old friends on The New Republic."

The [book's] argument, for all its bleakness, deserved a better hearing than it got.... [M]ost reviewers were disheartened by its seeming pessimism. The Phantom Public soon went out of print, and in the years since has been virtually forgotten. This neglect is unfortunate, for it is one of Lippmann's most powerfully argued and revealing books. In it he came fully to terms with the inadequacy of traditional democratic theory.

Indeed, no better testimony to the power and importance of The Phantom Public can be found than the seriousness and admiration with which it was read (and reviewed in the pages of the New Republic) by John Dewey, who was so stimulated by it that he went on to write one of his most ringing and durable defenses of democracy, The Public and Its Problems (1927), as an attempt at rebuttal. As it turns out, many of the contemporary reviews of The Phantom Public were unqualified raves, quite as favorable as Steel's retrospective one. Harold Lasswell enthused over its "cogent and spirited qualities." Another reviewer called it "a champion's performance" by a "dynamiter of fallacious doctrines of government and exploder of specious political arguments." Yet another proclaimed that The Phantom Public, like Public Opinion, “will become one of the modern classics of American political thought. And it is a book that will be read and reread for pure delight in its rare literary quality.”

The influential Senator William E. Borah, writing in the New York World, went so far as to call it "one of those rare books which startles one into a realization of how stupendous is the task before us as a people if we are to carry to a successful conclusion the work initiated in 1789." Given this degree of favorable reception, the mystery of The Phantom Public's phantom-like disappearance from public sight seems even harder to fathom. Perhaps the only plausible answer is the most obvious one: that the challenges it poses, and the implications of those challenges for the conduct of practical politics, have proved too unpleasant or difficult for even its most ardent admirers—or at any rate those less well-equipped than John Dewey—to face in a sustained manner.

It is not coincidental, then, that the debate with Dewey provides us a useful point of departure in exploring Lippmann's aims in writing The Phantom Public. No concept, after all, had been more central to the Progressive vision of social reform than that of "the public"; the efforts to tame special interests which so often animated Progressive reform were always undertaken in the name of "the public interest," and it was generally assumed that such a thing as the "pu