On his birthday, let's keep Lincoln's Name out of Republicans' Mouths

Today is February 12, which is the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, our nation's first Republican President. Some historians have argued he is our single best president. I wouldn't go quite that far; in my view, Franklin D. Roosevelt is clearly our nation's best. Dramatically improving the rights of working people in the face of what he called the "economic royalists" of corporate America set a very high bar, and no other president has ever matched up. Still, Lincoln might just be the second-best president we've ever had. (I bet you didn't think you'd open the Minocqua Brewing Company substack today to read nice things about a Republican).

Lincoln certainly wasn't perfect--no person is--but he led the US through a massive constitutional crisis and played a major role in ending the institution of slavery. Put simply, our 16th President led an effort to put down an insurrection built on white supremacy instead of leading one.

If you've been reading my pieces for the substack, you know by now the importance of making sure we get the story of American history right. This is all the more important given how Trump and right wing authoritarians are trying to distort our collective memory as Americans.

My brother Kirk's essay on Sunday laid out the monumental task ahead of us if we are going to defend, and hopefully deepen, democracy in the near future. I couldn't agree more with the reality he lays out. And getting our story right is going to be essential in building the kind of resistance he calls for.

So to celebrate his birthday, let's talk about how the party of Lincoln went from its noble origins--eliminating the national embarrassment of slavery--to becoming the wholesale anti-American embarrassment it is today.

Lincoln quickly emerged as a prominent Republican leader and won the presidency in a very contentious four-way race in 1860, and his election was so threatening to the Slave Power that they quickly led their states to secede from the US. Talk about patriotism!

Now it's true that Lincoln wasn't fully committed to ending slavery at the onset of war, but he had always despised the institution and revised his calculation during the next few years, particularly after being pushed by Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists and seeing the important contributions Black troops made to the war effort.

The 13th Amendment--which Lincoln helped shepherd through Congress--was likely his greatest policy achievement. But Lincoln's vision for the US was more than just about ending slavery. He was driven by a deeply-rooted respect for the livelihoods of working people. In fact, just one year into the war, Lincoln argued in a speech to Congress that "Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration."

I know it is hard to believe, but here was a Republican arguing that working people were more important than corporations.

In the years after the Civil War, Republicans like Ulysses S. Grant took a huge stand against white supremacy and deployed federal power to smash the Ku Klux Klan and other right wing groups. Black Republicans in the South were elected to offices up and down the ballot.

So how did we go from a party born in ending slavery and white supremacy to the band of authoritarians and kleptocrats like Trump and Elon Musk today?

It's a little complicated, but in the twentieth century, Democrats became the party that squarely supported workers' rights and economic democracy. The big realignment was under FDR in the 1930s, as new rights for workers to collectively bargain and social supports like Social Security made the Democrats the closest thing to a working-class party in American history. But it was prominent Democrats' commitment to civil rights--led by luminaries like Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey and California's Augustus Hawkins--that finally led white supremacists like Strom Thurmond (South Carolina) and Jesse Helms (North Carolina) to jump ship once and for all, particularly in the wake of the Civil Rights Act in 1964.

These are the origins of Trumpism. As late as the 1950s and 60s, there were still Republicans--like Dwight D. Eisenhower--who understood the importance of workers' rights and at least some version of multi-racial democracy.

But since that era, the story of the GOP is a straight line of deeper and deeper capitulation to capital and accommodation with Christian nationalism and white supremacy. You know the rest of the story--from Ronald Reagan's open cultivation of anti-abortion evangelical extremists to George W. Bush's massive tax expenditures on millionaires and billionaires.

In our state, Republicans like Scott Walker eliminated workers' union rights (quite possibly unconstitutionally in the case of public sector workers) and undermined our public schools by increasing voucher subsidies. Following a national trend, Republicans in the state legislature have repeatedly sought to make it more difficult for people to vote, and Wisconsin is now one of the most difficult states in the nation in which to cast a ballot. This is a far cry indeed from the party of Lincoln, who brought us the right to vote for African Americans during the 1860s.

So what Trump is doing these days is a feature, not a bug, of Republican Party politics. From Thurmond to Bush, from Reagan to Walker, the sorry history of the recent GOP is a complete reversal of everything Lincoln stood for. No wonder Trump and the Republicans propping him up lie constantly about our history. With a story like theirs, the only way to maintain their power is to rewrite the past.

But we won't let them, will we? In the next few years, together, we will make sure everyone in our nation knows just who are the true heirs of the American promise.

Jon Shelton
Green Bay
reprinted here without permission
borrowed from Minocqua Brewing

Jon Shelton is a professor and chair of Democracy and Justice Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. He is the author of The Education Myth and Teacher Strike!, which won the International Standing Conference of the History of Education's First Book Award. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, Dissent, Jacobin, and more. Shelton has served as Vice-Chair of Green Bay's Equal Rights Commission and sits on the boards of the Labor and Working-Class History Association and the Wisconsin Labor History Society. He is also Vice-President for Higher Education of AFT-Wisconsin.