Editor’s Note: Yesterday, Jay Nordlinger began a series prompted by Rich Lowry’s most recent book, Lincoln Unbound: How an Ambitious Young Railsplitter Saved the American Dream — and How We Can Do It Again. Part I of the series is here.
Throughout his book, Rich writes about Lincoln’s America, or the America of the mid-19th century, and our own. He says, “We are not quite the highly mobile society we imagine ourselves” to be. He says that many other countries do better in this regard, including Nordic countries. “If he were writing today, Horatio Alger might set his stories in Finland.”
Ouch. That one really hurts.
‐“It is famously said that Lincoln is the second most written-about figure in history after Jesus Christ,” Rich says. Interesting. When I was in college, it was Napoleon. I mean, people said that Napoleon was the second most written-about figure.
Are people still writing about Jesus? They are still writing about Napoleon, and Lincoln.
‐Rich stresses that Lincoln was not an Everyman. No, he was exceptional, in a hundred different ways. Bear with me, but I remember writing an appreciation of Ben Hogan, when he died in the 1990s. Several people, especially on the PGA Tour, were saying that Hogan represented everyone. Well, he may have represented what they aspired to be. But he was highly, highly exceptional — working harder, and persevering more, than others.
(He was also an SOB, or could often be, which was part of his success, in a way. Lincoln strove to be a Christian gentleman.)
‐“Getting right with Lincoln” — that was a phrase of David Herbert Donald’s, as Rich mentions. It means, adapting Lincoln to your own purposes (basically).
Speaking of appreciations: I wrote a little blogpost about Donald when he died in 2009. Allow me to reproduce it, because it’s semi-interesting, I think. By the way, I still have not read his famous Lincoln biography (Donald’s). I would have to analyze why.
I had Professor Donald for two classes. He was a soft-spoken, gentle Mississippian — no marshmallow, though. I’ll tell you something he told us once, kind of touching. He said he wanted to be a schoolteacher and a band director. Wanted to teach history and direct the band. “That was to be my life,” he said. He became a teacher, all right, on an exalted level. But that original dream, or ambition? He would have been good at that, too.
P.S. Tell you something else. He once said, “You want to write better? See a ballet, listen to a symphony — get some art in you. Get some artistry in your prose.”
P.P.S. I remember his smiling, wearily, at being confused so often with Donald Herbert Davidson (the philosopher). You can understand the confusion: David Herbert Donald, Donald Herbert Davidson. Good gravy.
Anyway, I’m glad I encountered him — Professor Donald.
‐“Kendall and Meyer think Lincoln should have let the South merrily go its own way in 1861,” writes Rich. He is talking about two famous mid-century conservatives (mid-20th-century): Willmoore Kendall and Frank Meyer. I thought of Horace Greeley’s title over one of his editorials: “Let the Erring Sisters Go in Peace.”
At least, I think that was his title. I’m going from memory. And I’m not going to look it up. I like it too much the way it is in my memory.
Isn’t that terrible?
‐Rich quotes a famous statement from Lincoln: “In all that the people can individually do as well for themselves, government ought not to interfere.” He also quotes this: “I believe each individual is naturally entitled to do as he pleases with himself and the fruit of his labor, so far as it in no wise interferes with any other man’s rights.”
I thought of something I learned a long, long time ago, although I have not heard it or seen it recently — “seen it,” because it has a visual component.
Democratic freedom consists of being able to extend your arm just to the point where it reaches another man’s cheek.
Okay, but I’d give him a speck more space than that . . .
‐One thing I appreciate about this book: Rich zings Richard Hofstadter. Puts him in his place. Always a good and vital thing to do.
‐Lincoln “was a man utterly unburdened by nostalgia,” says Rich. Oh, what a blessed condition. I hope I, too, am unburdened by nostalgia. I think I am.
‐This is a nice line, from the author: After World War II, “America blossomed into a broad-based middle-class society that was the envy of the world and — looking back on it from the vantage point of our current economic and social discontents — is the envy of us, too.”
As I think I said above, ouch.
‐In 1829, when he was 20, Lincoln wrote a couplet. That’s something people did, write couplets. Rich uses this one as a chapter-opening epigram: “Good boys who to their books apply / Will make great men by & by.”
‐Rich also quotes a statement made in a lecture delivered in 1858 — a lecture on discoveries and inventions. Said Lincoln, “Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship.”
How like a proverb that is. (Is it true, by the way? Probably, but I’m no naturalist.)
‐An old Whig colleague from Illinois, Joseph Gillespie, said this about Lincoln: that he “deprecated everything that savored of [the] revolutionary.” That is practically a definition of conservatism (one definition).
Paine said (something like), “We have the power within us to begin the world anew.” Reagan loved to quote this. George Will said it was the least conservative statement ever made.
(I knew what Reagan meant, I think, and I loved him for it, and agreed with him.)
‐Uh-oh — Lincoln committed hate speech. He will never work again. Speaking of the discovery of gold in California, he said that “yankees” had quickly unearthed what “had been trodden upon, and overlooked by indians and Mexican greasers, for centuries.”
When I was growing up, “greasers” was an epithet for Italians (“Eye-talians”).
‐I love this, from Lincoln: “There are more mines above the Earth’s surface than below it. All nature — the whole world, material, moral, and intellectual — is a mine.” It is up to man “to develop . . . the hidden treasures of this mine.”
‐Rich Lowry writes, “For all Lincoln’s clear-eyed realism about human nature, he had a deep faith in the generative capacities of man.” That strikes me as a very important combination (the realism and the other).
‐In the mid-1830s, Francis Wayland wrote a book called “The Elements of Political Economy.” Rich quotes William Herndon, Lincoln’s law partner — who said that the future president “ate up, digested, and assimilated” this book. Makes me think I thought to read it.
Wayland, by the way, was president of Brown University, as Rich tells us. He was a moral philosopher (like Adam Smith). Want a strong flavor of his thinking? I will quote Rich:
Wayland gave pride of place to private property and to labor. He argued “that every man be allowed to gain all that he can,” and “to use it as he will.” He maintained that property “lays at the foundation of all accumulation of wealth, and of all progress in civilization.” If government fails to protect it, “capital emigrates, production ceases, and a nation . . . sinks down in hopeless despondence.”
Question: Could Wayland make it at Brown University today? Forget as president, and forget as a teacher: How about as a student?
‐Another question: Did Wayland really write that property “lays at the foundation . . .”? I bet he did. And I bet he was not wrong, grammatically. The rules change over time (which can be annoying).
“Lay down!” people say to their dogs. Should be “Lie down!” Or should it, President Wayland?
Guys, I think I’ll save the rest for tomorrow — closing with a bang. Thanks so much for joining me. Lincoln never loses it, does he? I mean, he always absorbs.