Loathing Lincoln by john mckee barr

Author:john mckee barr
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-06-15T16:00:00+00:00

Most of his quotations from my work on Lincoln are reflections of academic commonplaces—the books and essays of Edgar Lee Masters, Donald W. Riddle, Willmoore Kendall, Edmund Wilson, Gottfried Dietze, and Will’s one-time editor [at National Review], the late Frank Meyer. My contribution to the critique has been an analysis of Lincoln’s rhetoric, an idiom that contributed to the death of 600,000 American boys. I have also spoken of Lincoln’s use of troops to win elections, the graft of his administration, his abuse under the war powers of his political opponents in the North, his claims to intimacy with the divine will (a limited link to such political demigods as Napoleon, Lenin and Hitler) and his willingness to waste Northern lives in search of a Republican general to command his armies. 168

The brouhaha over the Bradford nomination was an interesting and illuminating controversy, for it pointed to a basic and perhaps irresolvable tension within conservatism itself. As historian Eric Foner astutely put it, the dispute was not simply an argument about Lincoln but a larger one about “states’ rights, morality in government, and race” and some fundamental problems within conservatism that the controversy exposed. 169 Mainstream conservatives were suspicious of exercising state power at home but not abroad in the Cold War fight against communism. Similarly, they extolled the virtues of capitalism yet to an extent ignored how it undermined traditional communities. “Rather than freeing the nation from Lincoln’s legacy,” Foner maintained, “modern conservatism has embraced the worst parts of Lincoln’s heritage while abandoning the best. After all, the aspiring Illinois politico of the 1850s who pandered to the racial prejudices of his audience had, by the end of the Civil War, arrived at a remarkable sensitivity to the plight of blacks in American society. The growth of Lincoln’s vision was the hallmark of his Presidency. Will his Republican descendants prove as capable of a broadening and humanizing of their own views,” Foner asked, “or will they irrevocably cut themselves loose from the heritage Lincoln bequeathed them?” 170 Like their godfather William F. Buckley Jr., most conservatives indeed broadened and humanized their stance toward Lincoln—and federal power—but not without consequence to their political unity.

In fact, Bradford’s denial of the chairmanship of the NEH caused long-lasting bitterness within the conservative movement. It foreshadowed, if not caused, a future split within conservatism itself between, as English professor Benjamin B. Alexander observed, “the thinkers of the old right like Bradford, who were rooted in the prescriptive conservatism of Edmund Burke and Samuel Johnson, versus the neoconservative thinkers, who enshrined Lincoln as the paragon of presidents and extended the adoration to the mythic iconography of Martin Luther King.” 171 In his collection of essays Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (1993) traditional conservative and newspaper columnist Samuel Francis, who later maintained that “neither ‘slavery’ nor ‘racism’ as an institution is a sin,” explained that “the bitterness felt by many Old Rightists at Bennett’s finally winning the nomination was due not so

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