Lincoln Unbound (22 page)

It's impossible to know exactly what Abraham Lincoln, who rode the muddy roads of the circuit on a horse, would have made of the new industrial age illuminated by Thomas Edison's lightbulb and connected by Alexander Graham Bell's telephone. A common interpretation is that he would have rued the creation of a Frankenstein monster of business predation, his unwitting progeny, his vision of small-­scale capitalism gone horribly awry. “He was not consciously aware of the significance of the whole economic program of industrial capitalism,” intones Louis Hacker. The French author Cyrille Arnavon noted that Lincoln's war broke the slave aristocracy but also “initiated the prodigious industrial expansion of the northern states that resulted in the clearest crystallizations of the capitalist economy.” According to Arnavon, “Abraham Lincoln's ambiguity rests on this historical situation.” Daniel Walker Howe believes that “the triumph of the northern bourgeoisie ushered in an era very different from anything Lincoln could have expected or wanted.”

But these are guesses, usually based on the presumption that Lincoln would have turned up his nose at postbellum America like all subsequent purveyors of polite opinion. Of course, we can't be certain what specific policies Lincoln would have favored in the turn-­of-­the-­century context.

Would he have been a labor union man? Those who like to think so might point to speeches in Connecticut as a kind of encore to his smashingly successful Cooper Union address in February 1860. Stephen Douglas had criticized a strike by Massachusetts shoemakers, blaming it on tensions between the North and South. Lincoln stuck up for the strikers: “I am glad to know that there is a system of labor where the laborer can strike if he wants to!” Of course, the larger point was less about trade unionism than the desirability of free labor itself: “If you give up your convictions and call slavery in upon you instead of
white
laborers who
can
strike, you'll soon have
black
laborers who
can't
strike.”

Would he have joined Teddy Roosevelt in harrying the business trusts? Roosevelt, a determined Lincoln body snatcher, certainly thought and said so. “The official leaders of the Republican party today,” he thundered in 1913, after he turned his back on the party to run for president as the nominee of his own personal Progressive Party, “are the spiritual heirs of the men who warred against Lincoln.” It's a neat trick to transform the friends of Northern industry and finance into descendants of the planter aristocracy that hated both.

This we do know. Lincoln defended wage labor at a time when it was becoming increasingly prevalent. (Although he did talk of wage labor, anachronistically, as something ­people should graduate out of.) He was desperate for industrial development. Throughout his political career he favored giving it the advantage of the protective tariff, and indeed, prior to the Civil War, factory production had steadily risen. He exulted in new technologies. He gave no pride of place to agriculture. He wanted a sophisticated national banking system. He never attacked wealth. He objected to the very notion of class conflict. He considered property in all its forms (except slavery) sacrosanct. He worked with the biggest corporate entities of his age, the railroads, when corporations had already long been the subject of attack as tools for “the rich, and never for the poor.” In fact, as a politician, he pretty much never told the railroads “no.”

If every jot and tittle of the new order can't, of course, be attributed to Lincoln, its fundamentals can. There's no lack of consciousness, no ambiguity about it. Postwar America constituted the rough working-­out in the real world of the Lincolnian economic vision.

That doesn't mean he would have surveyed the ever-­shifting, continent-­wide drama in its entirety and approved of it all. It does mean that he would have eschewed prominent schools of criticism. He certainly wouldn't have sympathized with the agrarian reaction. He would have recognized in William Jennings Bryan—­the scourge of “the idle holders of idle capital”—­a version of the same rustic romanticism at the bottom of Jeffersonian and Jacksonian economic populism. Bryan bellowed in his classic “Cross of Gold” speech at the 1896 Democratic convention, “You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.” For Lincoln, this would have been eloquence as emetic.

Nor is Lincoln a natural enlistee to progressivism, although all the way from TR to Barack Obama, progressives have been after him like Mormons baptizing the dead. Lincoln wouldn't have taken to progressivism's view that the Founding was an inconvenient anachronism, or to its contempt for the idea of natural law—­true for all time, in all circumstances—­securing individual rights. Lincoln would have recognized in the roll call of villains in Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 Commonwealth Speech the ­people whom he had encouraged and identified with: “a mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, and organizer of more corporations.” And Roosevelt's goal of “distributing wealth and products more equitably” would have been anathema to him. Nonetheless, FDR bestowed upon Lincoln the honor of being a posthumous father of the New Deal.

By the 1930s, the American economy had undergone several more revolutions, removing it yet further from that of Lincoln's day. In World War II, its formidable industrial capacity made the difference in a global conflict the sweep and destructiveness of which would have astounded the statesmen of the nineteenth century. As in the Civil War, the United States largely manufactured its enemy into oblivion. It could do so partly because it had mustered its own strength in the Civil War era, avoiding national dismemberment and embracing economic modernity. It wouldn't have beaten the Axis on the strength of agricultural staples, a bristling sense of honor, and sheer martial pluck—­in other words, the Confederate approach. American factories belched out tens of thousands of tanks and landing crafts, hundreds of thousands of airplanes, millions of guns and shells, and on and on.

What William Seward had said in the heat of the sectional conflict in the mid-­1850s proved prescient: “Political ties bind the Union together—­a common necessity, and not merely a common necessity, but the common interests of empire—­of such empire as the world has never before seen. The control of the national power is the control of the great Western Continent; and the control of this continent is to be in a very few years the controlling influence in the world.” Eighty years later it proved so.

America emerged from the inferno with an unheard-­of global strength and an economy that went a long way toward achieving what had been Lincoln's ultimate end of creating the widest possible field for individual advancement. The Lincoln fundamentals can be seen in mid-­twentieth-­century America at a hundred years remove from his life—­in a country that had the world's most powerful economy, that continued to move away from agriculture, that was highly educated, that stood for freedom and finally began to fully embrace it at home, and that rested on a foundation of cultural orderliness. America had become the greatest middle-­class society the world had ever known.

In short, we achieved a prosperity consistent with America's—­and Lincoln's—­ideals. The question, in the spirit of Benjamin Franklin's after the Constitutional Convention, is if we can keep it.

 

Chapter 6

“Work, Work, Work”: Recovering the Lincoln Ethic

Among democratic nations, new families are constantly springing up, others are constantly falling away, and all that remain change their condition. . . .

—­
A
LEXIS D
E
T
OCQUEVILLE,
D
EMOCRACY IN
A
MERICA
, 1840

T
he Lincoln of our public consciousness is the nineteen-­foot-­tall benevolent god of the Lincoln Memorial, presiding in his Greek Doric temple among the honeyed words of the ­Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural. It is a monument to Lincoln the war leader, Lincoln the Great Emancipator, Lincoln the martyr, who as soon as he breathed his last, “belonged to the ages,” in the immortal words of Secretary of War Edwin Stanton at his deathbed.

The gawky young man looking for a chance, the circuit-­riding lawyer, the Senate candidate curled up on a seat on a train, trying to get some shut-­eye, even the president awaiting news at the War Department telegraph office would be bemused at his secular deification.

It is altogether proper that we celebrate Lincoln the war leader and the emancipator. He transfixes us, and always will. The events stretching from Secession Winter in 1860–61 to the assassination at Ford's Theatre constitute the greatest drama in American history this side of the Revolution. But they aren't all there is to Lincoln. Long before any shots were fired, he was committed to a vision that would create the predicate for modern America.

Lincoln believed in a dynamic capitalism that dissolved old ways of life. He thought all men were created equal and deserved the opportunity to make the most of themselves. He urged them to make the effort to do so. He found in America's constitutional system and its free institutions the best possible platform for the realization of this vision. This is the Lincoln that is too often lost—and must be found—­to truly understand him and, really, to understand who we are as a ­people.

Or at least who we
should
be as a ­people. In the 1850s, Lincoln bitterly regretted our national backsliding. In that excoriating letter to George Robertson in 1855, he wrote “we are not what we have been.” He said that “we have grown fat,” and “that the fourth of July has not quite dwindled away; it is still a great day—­
for burning fire-­crackers
!!!”

It is hard not to have the same autumnal feelings about the current state of the American Dream. It is flabby and declining from its former glories. This is not the work of one president, one party, or any one factor easily reversed by a magic-­bullet public policy. It has been a long-­running process, a concatenation of economic and social trends augmented by government failures and inefficiencies. We are on the path to a class society inimical to our ideals and our history.
We are not what we have been
.

The temptation is to cushion our fall in a cosseting social ­democracy. This has been our drift, and lately our lurch. But social democracy is where the vitality of great nations goes to die. It is something that nations settle into rather than embrace in a rising spirit. It tends to suppress growth and take the edge off individual initiative, never mind the question of whether it is fiscally sustainable. All around the Western world, the welfare state is in crisis and our aging population means we face the same grim math. The social democratic model promises gentle decline—­at best.

If this is not going to be our future, the challenge facing us is quite basic: How do we revitalize the wellsprings of America as a Lincolnian republic? How do we preserve those qualities that have made our country an unsurpassed vehicle for the pursuit of happiness?

That pursuit revolves around making the most of our capabilities in Lincoln's “race of life.” There are few better benchmarks for our success as a society than whether we are creating the greatest possible opportunity for the maximum number of ­people, as free and independent actors, treated with inherent dignity and worth, to succeed. If we are, we are well and truly American. If we aren't, we are merely another country, an extensive and powerful one to be sure, one where we light firecrackers on the Fourth of July, but not one animated by the restless quest for self-­improvement that has been our hallmark.

Foreign visitors in the nineteenth century remarked on what the American journalist Hezekiah Niles called “the
almost universal ambition to get forward
.” The English writer Frances Trollope—­mother of the novelist Anthony—­wrote that in Cincinnati, “I neither saw a beggar, nor a man of sufficient fortune to permit his ceasing his effort to increase it.” Harriet Martineau, another English writer, observed, “When a few other neighbours besides frogs, gather round a settler, some one opens a grocery store.” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “An American taken at random will be ardent in his desires, enterprising, adventurous, and above all an innovator.”

The visitors didn't always approve of the relentless and ­unembarrassed quest of Americans for what Trollope described as “that honey of Hybla, vulgarly called money.” She thought “­neither art, science, learning nor pleasure can seduce them from its pursuit.” But the words of these writers convey a big, bustling, unstoppable country of striving—­materialistic, yes, but also open, frank, democratic, and at the end of the day, very, very successful.

Striving is desirable in and of itself, regardless of the effect it has on the country's growth. It is
good
for us, and it is written into the country's DNA. Charles Murray writes in his classic book,
In Pursuit
, “What allows man to fulfill his own nature in the Founders' vision is the process of individual response to challenge, risk, and reward.” They were right. Ideally, Arthur Brooks points out in his book-­length study of happiness, work brings a sense of productivity, control, and success—­all key ingredients of happiness. “By all the evidence that science has been able to muster,” ­Murray writes, ­“people
need
to be self-­determining, accountable, and absorbed in stretching their capacities, just as they need food and shelter.”

As Lincoln put it to that aspiring lawyer so long ago, “Work, work, work, is the main thing.” We need to ensure that government and society create the most favorable environment to reward work and support aspiration, and that more ­people don't fall by the wayside of the bustling highway of American life. For our purposes here, there are a few key questions: Where were we in the immediate aftermath of industrial America's triumph in World War II, and why? Where are we now? What might ­Lincoln do about it? Which party is best positioned to give concrete expression to a truly Lincolnian agenda?

We emerged from World War II into the sunny uplands of a social and economic golden age that boosted millions into the middle class. A few years after the return to peace, we churned out half of the world's manufacturing output, and produced ­almost 60 percent of its steel and 80 percent of its cars. We underwent a revolution in educational achievement, thanks in part to the G.I. Bill. By 1950, more than twice as many ­people were earning college degrees as in 1940. In 1950, almost 90 percent of white Americans had nonfarm jobs, more than a third of which were white-­collar. With the civil rights revolution, which finally fully extended to blacks the promise of the Declaration, the South fully joined the American mainstream. After a long detour, it was in a position to take the maximum possible advantage of its low costs for labor and land.

On top of this, the bourgeois virtues remained solidly intact. Divorce rates that had crept up since 1900 began to fall a ­couple of years after World War II. The marriage rate hit a high in 1946. And these ­couples had children at an astonishing rate; in 1964, about 40 percent of the population had been born since 1946.

It is hard not to see this era, for the most part, in a gauzy glow. But the economic dispensation of the post–World War II world couldn't and didn't last. For one thing, the advantage we had over the rest of the world in manufacturing couldn't be sustained, since a swath of the developed world had been flattened by the war. Japan and Germany would inevitably recover. Communist regimes cut off a substantial proportion of the world from the market, a condition that would come to a blessed end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. The United States owned an enormous advantage in education, as economist Luigi Zingales notes—­44 percent of the world was illiterate, but only 2.2 percent of Americans were; 8.2 percent of the world had high-school degrees, but 37 percent of Americans did. This education gap, too, would end.

Putting it slightly differently in his book
The Great Stagnation
, the George Mason economist Tyler Cowen says we picked all “the low-­hanging fruit” in prior centuries. We had free and fertile land widely available for anyone with the pluck to take advantage of it. We had spectacular technological breakthroughs from roughly 1880 to 1940 that transformed economic life in a way that, even with the computer revolution, hasn't been replicated since. We were pulling kids into higher education who just needed the chance, as opposed to the marginal new students of today, who are often woefully unprepared. We did the easy stuff, and what's left now is harder.

The starting point for our current economic discontents is that growth, overall, slowed in recent decades. This slowdown—­which holds true for basically all advanced economies since the early 1970s—­comes in the context of growing inequality. The widely cited research of economists Thomas Piketty and ­Emmanuel Saez shows that the percentage of income held by the infamous top 1 percent rose above 20 percent before the Great Depression. It dropped precipitously after the Depression and World War II, hovering around 8 percent in the 1960s and 1970s, before beginning to rise again, to 18 percent in 2008.

Even if growth has slowed overall and even if inequality has grown, all has not been wrack and ruin for the American middle class. As Scott Winship of the Brookings Institution points out, ­calculating income trends over time is hideously complicated, since so many variables—­changing family size, the value of health-­care benefits, the entry of so many low-­skilled immigrants—­complicate the picture. According to Winship, if you make all the necessary adjustments, the median American family is twice as rich today as it was in 1960, although much of that gain occurred before 1979.

Nonetheless, trends in the middle and the bottom of the income distribution are dismaying. By the crudest measures, the income of the lowest fifth has been essentially flat since 1973 and the same is true of median male wages. Adjusting for various ­factors makes the picture look a little better, but there's no question male high-school graduates without a college degree have been hit hard. In the decades prior to the mid-­1970s, high-school graduates had been catching up a little to college graduates in earnings. Since then, the earnings differential has been sliding the other way. The gap in median income between a man with a bachelor's degree and with a high-school degree doubled since 1979, from roughly $12,000 in 1979 to about $25,000.

What is going on? The simplest and most tendentious explanation—­the American government has been seized by the rich, who have distorted it to increase their share of the economy at the expense of everyone else—­is false. Median-­income growth has been roughly the same in Canada, France, Germany, and Sweden over the last 30 years. And European countries have seen growing inequality, as well. The top 1 percent accounts for a greater portion of federal income taxes today (about 40 percent) than it did in the 1970s (less than 20 percent), under a tax system that is more progressive than that of any other advanced nation.

Much of the run-­up in pay at the top can be attributed to globalization. There is more of a premium on excellence, because the rewards for succeeding in a global market are so much greater. Meanwhile, technology is eliminating lower-­skill jobs, and the global labor market puts downward pressure on wages and moves some jobs offshore. We can make more with fewer hands. Manufacturing employment has been declining, even as manufacturing output as a percentage of GDP has held steady. With an education system universally considered inadequate, economic change has been outrunning our capacity to provide the human material suitable for it, with lamentable consequences.

Inequality in itself isn't a problem, so long as everyone has a good chance of moving up. We like to pride ourselves on our economic mobility. Few things are as all-­American as the up-­from-­the-­bootstraps success story. But we aren't quite as fluid as we think. We are less mobile than many Western European countries and than other major English-­speaking countries. Our income distribution is “sticky” at the bottom, meaning that ­people starting out at the bottom are more likely to stay there than would be suggested by random chance. And sticky at the top.

The lack of mobility at the bottom is a function of the economic struggles of lower-­skilled men, but also of culture. The rise of illegitimacy, the decline of work, and the erosion of an ethic of delayed gratification all undergird stagnation at the bottom and augment the advantages of those at the top who largely avoid these cultural pitfalls. A gross and steadily increasing inequality in cultural capital is more telling and significant than any economic statistics.

Out-­of-­wedlock child­bearing, especially, undermines economic aspiration. Today the illegitimacy rate is 73 percent among blacks, 53 percent among Latinos, and 29 percent among whites. For the first time, more than half of births to mothers under the age of thirty are out of wedlock. This is quite simply a ­social ­catastrophe. Illegitimacy is a generator—­and perpetuator—­of poverty, while growing up in a two-­parent family brings enormous social advantages. Children in intact families perform better in school, and are less prone to behavioral problems of all kinds.