The Great Emancipator Reconsidered

Although it may be a minority viewpoint among scholars, some intellectuals do not think that talk show host Glenn Beck’s criticism of President Woodrow Wilson goes far enough. “There would have been no Wilson if there had been no Lincoln,” Professor Marshall DeRosa said at a conference at Catholic University on September 5, 2010. “America has always been imperialist,” he alleged.

“McKinley and the Spanish American War referenced back to Lincoln,” DeRosa said, and “Lincoln was revived during the New Deal to prop up programs.” DeRosa, who teaches at Florida Atlantic University, spoke at a conference staged by the National Humanities Institute, run by Joseph Baldacchino.

“Traditionally, Christianity has emphasized humility, which guided the framers,” Baldacchino stated. “Another strain, out of New England, emphasized America as the millennial kingdom.”

Although not a New Englander, Lincoln appeared to Baldacchino and some of the panelists to subscribe to this latter school of thought. Lincoln was “the greatest articulator of civil religion,” according to Hope College historian Jeffrey Polet.

The old rail splitter, Polet claimed, divided American history into three ages:

• The Founders

• The Fall and

• The Age of [Lincolnian +] Reason.

Of the Founders, Lincoln said, “They shall be read no more forever.” Even on the issue that textbooks tell us defined the Civil War, Lincoln could be surprisingly pragmatic.

DeRosa asserts that Lincoln was committed to an “indissoluble union” “even if it meant keeping slavery.” In The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It, Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter recorded similar pre-war utterances by the Great Emancipator.

Moreover, it should be noted that even Lincoln’s admiring biographer Carl Sandburg called the beloved president a “man of steel and velvet.” Nevertheless, Wilson makes for a much more solid target for historians doing necessary revisions.

For one thing, Lincoln not only freed the slaves but desegregated the nation’s capital and government. Wilson resegregated both, half a century later.

“We must sacrifice all that we are and all that we have to redeem the world and to make it fit for free men like ourselves to live in,” Wilson said in a 1918 speech at the Baltimore armory. Apparently, he really wanted black Americans to suck it up.

“Wilson gave the finest sermon for what humans are capable of if they are not human,” George Clemenceau, the prime minister of France observed at Versailles. Score one for the French.

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.

If you would like to comment on this article, e-mail contact@academia.org