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Thread ID: 1231 | Posts: 3 | Started: 2002-06-12
2002-06-12 18:02 | User Profile
Rense.com Confronting The Lincoln Cult An Interview With Thomas DiLorenzo Mises.org 6-11-2
Mises.org: Your book The Real Lincoln came out, it was a huge seller, and then this mad controversy broke loose.
DiLorenzo: The controversy began even before the book came out. Illana Mercer of WorldNet Daily wrote a column about the book, praising it to the skies. That pleased me very much. But then the critics started blasting away, without ever having seen the book. One even recommended that people not read my book. They were extremely crude, denouncing IllanaÃÂs ìcomprehensive ignorance.î These Lincoln people were outraged that there was a book out that was less-than hagiographic toward the great man.
Once the book appeared, the critics became ever more vehement. But instead of addressing my argument and evidence, they seized on a couple of errors in the book that were carried over from errors in secondary sources. Both of these are changed in the new printing. These errors shouldnÃÂt have been there but they were not by any means essential to the thesis.
Mises.org: One of the misquotations concerns LincolnÃÂs view of racial equality.
DiLorenzo: Yes, I ran across it among the 60 or so Lincoln books in my office, and it sounded quintessentially Lincolnian. Lincoln is on record opposing equality for blacks, and was a lifetime proponent recolonizing slaves back to Africa. This is beyond dispute, even if the Lincoln partisans donÃÂt like to talk about it.
In the passage I quoted, he was making fun of the idea of racial equality. It turned out that the context of this quote, among so many making essentially the same point, had Lincoln attributing the view to someone else.
The misattribution made no difference to the thesis, but these critics began writing 20-page essays flaming me for this, suggesting I had done this deliberately. It is all disingenuous because Lincoln is on record time after time rejecting the idea of racial equality. But whenever anyone brings this up, the Lincoln partisans go to the extreme to smear the bearer of bad news. One critic called me both a Marxist and a libertarian, and probably a member of the White Citizens Council.
Meanwhile, my missteps pale in comparison with the inaccuracies that my critics have introduced. David Quackenbush, for example, claims that there is only one quote from Lincoln in my entire book. This is just a kooky assertion that is easy to disprove in about 15 seconds of flipping through my book.
Mises.org: And yet, as you say, none of this touches on your central thesis.
DiLorenzo: Right, and my thesis is that Lincoln devoted twenty-eight years of his life to an economic agenda of mercantilist high tariffs, pork in the form of internal improvements, and the promotion of a central bank. The basic strategy of this economic agenda was to allow the Republican Party to buy votes from protectionist manufacturers, mining and timber companies that wanted cheap federal land, subsidy-seeking railroad companies, and white laborers who did not want competition from freed blacks or slaves.
Mises.org: You have written that Lincoln was the political son of Alexander Hamilton.
DiLorenzo: Yes, the founding father who represented the mercantilist, big-government brand of Americanism in contrast to the Jeffersonian spirit of freedom. The long-time debate between Jefferson and Hamilton was settled at gunpoint. ThatÃÂs what the War for Southern Independence was all about.
After the election and just before LincolnÃÂs inauguration, the House passed the Morrill tariff which elevated the rate to 47.06 percent--an extortionist rate. Remember that the tariff was the primary source of federal revenue in those days and the South, which wanted free trade with the world, was paying 80 percent of the total federal revenue, according to Frank TaussigÃÂs authoritative history.
LincolnÃÂs inaugural address underscored the point that he wasnÃÂt going to back down against demands from the South that tariffs be lowered, as Andrew Jackson had done. Lincoln said it was his duty to ìcollect the duties and imposts and so long as the South paid, ìthere will be no invasion.î Northern newspapers were calling for a bombardment of Southern ports, a first strike to prevent the threat that the South would ignore the new tariffs and institute free trade.
You cannot understand LincolnÃÂs place in the constellation of American history without understanding the economics of mercantilism and the need for government coercion to enforce it. To show this, I quote David Donald, the Pulitzer Prize winning historian, as saying that this was the reason that Lincoln was elected. Contemporary political figures such as Republican Senator John Sherman went on record to say that as well.
Mises.org: Then there are all the Constitutional issues that arise during the war.
DiLorenzo: Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, he jailed political opponents and newspapers writers, and violated the letter and spirit of the Constitution at every turn. I document all this, as does Jeffrey Rogers Hummel. It is amazing how the Lincoln cartel goes to such lengths to justify these activities. The difference with my book is not so much in the facts themselves, though I bring out many that Lincoln partisans would rather forget, but that I donÃÂt go to enormous lengths to provided twisted rationales for LincolnÃÂs behavior.
Hermann Belz, for example, says that Lincoln was not a dictator because he allowed the election of 1864 to take place. But Belz doesnÃÂt mention how Lincoln rigged this election. Federal soldiers had the opposition jailed. His confiscation acts covered everyone who would dare dissent from the Lincoln line. He patrolled the voting booths to kick out Democrat voters. He also orchestrated the secession of West Virginia just to gain a few electoral votes. In short, this was Mugabe-style democracy.
Mises.org: Were you previously aware that the Lincoln partisans were so vehement?
DiLorenzo: What you have here are several very well-funded neoconservative foundations that are using Lincoln mythology to advance their current political agenda of strong national and executive power. In my debate with Harry Jaffa recently, one of the last things he said, which drew a lot of boos from the audience, was that September 11 proves that we need a strong central government. This is very revealing. Essentially, these neoconservatives want big government just like Lincoln did.
So here I am, this one professor at a liberal arts college and I have these dozens of people on the payroll of foundations ganging up to call me names and otherwise smearing anyone who questions the mythology of Lincoln as a great liberator. IÃÂve noticed over the years that anytime anyone questions this they swing into action. But I suppose IÃÂve been taken aback at their tone and tactics.
Mises.org: When the Soviet Union was breaking up, didnÃÂt Gorbachev cite the Lincoln precedent to justify that empire?
DiLorenzo: Certainly, which shows that he knew something about the role that Lincoln played. The Baltic states wanted to secede, so Gorbachev said that by trying to prevent it, he was doing no more or less than Lincoln did. In fact, despots ever since LincolnÃÂs time have cited his actions as a moral precedent to crack down on political dissenters. All the great tyrants of the 20th century were consolidationists, including Adolph Hitler.
Mises.org: What did Hitler have to say about the American Civil War?
DiLorenzo: During my debate with Jaffa, he cited some source where Hitler supposedly said that it was too bad that the Confederacy lost the war. But no one ever heard Hitler say that. And we have HitlerÃÂs own book, Mein Kampf, which makes a case for the German union in the same terms that Lincoln made the case for American union.
Hitler writes that ìindividual states of the American Union . . . could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states." This was also LincolnÃÂs view.
Hitler goes on to say: ìCertainly all the states in the world are moving toward a certain unification in their inner organization. And in this Germany will be no exception. Today it is an absurdity to speak of a ëstate sovereigntyàof individual provinces.î And further: ìIn particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power." Finally: "National Socialism as a matter of principle, must lay claim to the right to force its principles on the whole German nation without consideration of previous federated state boundaries.î
Mises.org: It makes sense because centralized government is essential to central planning.
DiLorenzo: Right, you canÃÂt allow people to leave a coercive union if you have an agenda to impose on an entire country. In the American context, the tariff system relies on consolidated power. The Republican platform emphasized the need for corporate welfare and the tariff was the only way to fund it. You couldnÃÂt have states that refuse to pay. That would make big government impossible.
Decentralized government is essential to individual liberty. There has to be a check on the centralized state. This is why the American founders put so much emphasis on federalism and the rights of the individual political units. Yes, the states can be abusive of liberty, but because there are many states, you can vote with your feet. Also, the ability to leave the union provides an out for people when the center becomes tyrannical.
Mises.org: It doesnÃÂt seem like libertarians have been as focused on this point as they might have been.
DiLorenzo: They have been too willing to go along with the idea of Chief Justice John Marshall, who did defend property rights. At the same time, he didnÃÂt understand the tendency of power, once again, to be used against property and liberty. St. George Tucker, in his book A View of the Constitution, said that whenever the federal government gains the ability to be the judge of its own limits of power, you no longer have freedom; you have tyranny. ThatÃÂs the theme of his book. It was the theme of the Constitution until Lincoln came along.
In this century, libertarian legal theorists have tended to look to federal courts as the means to implement a pro-property rights agenda. They have tended to ignore the ways that the states have checked the center. One of the few to have understood the dangers of this is Gottfried Dietze, who clearly lays out why the founders wanted political power to be decentralized.
Mises.org: How many articles have you written in response to you critics.
DiLorenzo: Probably 15 or 20, on Lewrockwell.com, WorldNet Daily, and Mises.org, among other venues. Thank goodness for technology. It has made it possible to respond to these people on a day-by-day basis. For this reason, the Lincoln cartel is breaking up. Previously, these people would write books for university presses, and they would be reviewed by each other. Their views would be propounded in the classroom, where the textbooks reflected the official line. It was a closed system. But now, you can write responses to these people and your views can be out in the open. They canÃÂt get away with misquoting you or otherwise covering up the truth.
For example, during my debate with Jaffa, he said three things that struck me as wrong. He said that the King of England never recognized the states as states, that Virginia never reserved the right to withdraw from the union, and finally that Lincoln never did anything that was unconstitutional. Now, the last point was easy to answer, but I had a response out within days to the other two points, and Jaffa turns out to be completely wrong.
Mises.org: Your book is selling well?
DiLorenzo: Very. At the national meeting of sales representatives of Random House, they were sizing up the current hot sellers and my book was close to the top of the list. IÃÂm very pleased by this. The myth of Lincoln cannot stand up under scrutiny, and after all these years, the word is finally getting out. ___
Thomas DiLorenzo is a professor of economics in the Sellinger School of Business and Management at Loyola College in Baltimore, and is senior fellow of the Mises Institute. See his Mises.org Articles Archive, and send him MAIL. Also, listen to Dr. DiLorenzo's recent book discussion on The Real Lincoln (in MP3 format). His article "The Great Centralizer," written for a Mises Institute conference, was published in the Independent Review and is available online. His book is also available from Amazon.com.
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2003-02-04 21:26 | User Profile
[url=http://www.claremont.org/writings/010807leibsohn.html]Lincoln and Life[/url]
by Seth Leibsohn (Aug. 07, 2001)
On May 5, 2001, The Washington Times excerpted a speech Joe Sobran had then-recently given at Christendom College on Abraham Lincoln. The Times reported
[T]here are some facts about him [Lincoln] and his presidency that are oftentimes overlooked by historians, particularly historians north of the Mason-Dixon lineââ¬Â¦.But the most significant achievement attributed to Lincoln, that of abolishing slavery, may not according to Mr. Sobran, actually have been Lincoln's intent. Contrary to popular opinion, Lincoln was not opposed to slavery itself, rather, "he opposed the spread of slavery."
The Times continued to quote Sobran as saying "Lincoln's opposition to the spread of slavery resulted in his belief in colonization," and that Lincoln was opposed to allowing blacks to vote, hold public office, serve on juries, and intermarry with whites.
In Jack Kemp's syndicated column, he responded to these allegations against Lincoln ââ¬â those from Sobran and other, typical such allegations, made by some on the left. Kemp claimed that Sobran's criticism, the common criticisms, of Lincoln amounted to a "character assassination" of Lincoln and went on ââ¬â in his limited column space ââ¬â to defend the President known as "The Great Emancipator." Kemp quoted Lincoln directly responding to some of the exact attacks Sobran made and Kemp also quoted John Stuart Mill ââ¬â watching the Civil War unfold from England ââ¬â who brilliantly defended the idea that the arrest of the spread of slavery (Lincoln's position) was the best way to abolish slavery, especially since true abolitionists could never be elected in the United States.
A column of Sobran's, posted on Lewrockwell.com, took Kemp to task for his defense. Sobran reaffirmed his criticisms of Lincoln and further stated that "Lincoln launched a bloody war against the South, violating the Constitution he'd sworn to uphold."
The debate, has since been joined by one of Lincoln's greatest philosophical defenders, Harry V. Jaffa. This is not an insignificant debate ââ¬â the issues that Lincoln spoke of and that the Civil War were fought over go to the very heart of our regime.
Lincoln deserves defense in this century not only because his cause was just two centuries ago but because it breaks my heart when pro-life wordsmiths criticize the man who gives so many of us pro-lifers the best template for how to oppose our culture of death (As Pope John Paul calls it) and the Roe regime we now live under. We should make no mistake about Joe Sobran's credentials here, he has been (and is) one of the best writers in the defense of the unborn. We have all found great support for our cause in Sobran's writings and his defense of the weakest members of our society, the silenced, the unborn. When committed pro-lifers attack Lincoln, though, I'm reminded of Lincoln's very own words describing the extension of slavery: "Our republican robe is soiled, and trailed in the dust." I am an admirer of Lincoln not only because he saved the Union, not only because he was our nation's first Republican President, not only because he articulately opposed slavery and dedicated his political life to its extinction, but because I think we can learn from him how to handle issues we confront today. When Sobran and others in our movement criticize Lincoln, I worry less about our "Republican robe" than I do about our "republican robe."
Looking at the notorious Dred Scott decision, claiming the black man "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect," many of us in the pro-life movement see analogies to Roe v. Wade, which overturned every abortion law in the country and claimed the unborn had no rights the born were bound to respect ââ¬â that an unborn child's life could be snuffed out for any reason at all. As the years moved on, through cases such as Casey and, more recently, Carhart, which affirmed the gruesome partial-birth abortion procedure, many of us looked more and more to Lincoln who, after Scott, said of the blacks in this country:
All the powers of earth seem rapidly combining against him. Mammon is after him; ambition follows, and philosophy follows, and the Theology of the day is fast joining the cry. They have him in his prison house; they have searched his person, and left no prying instrument with him. One after another they have closed the heavy iron doors upon him, and now they have him, as it were, bolted in with a lock of a hundred keys, which can never be unlocked without the concurrence of every key; the keys in the hands of a hundred different men, and they scattered to a hundred different and distant places; and they stand musing as to what invention, in all the dominions of mind and matter, can be produced to make the impossibility of his escape more complete than it is.
Watching, as we have, the progression against the unborn that started with Roe, moved to Casey, and culminated in Carhart, many of us thought the same way about Roe as Lincoln did about Scott. In fact, in the 1970s, Jesse Jackson used to base his case for the unborn on the very same analogies against slavery. I would have hoped Sobran's abandonment of Lincoln ââ¬â along with a small segment of others in our camp ââ¬â would not follow Jesse Jackson's trajectory and example.
As for the merits of Sobran's speech and column, one simply cannot be familiar with Lincoln's writings or speeches and think he was anything but opposed to slavery. At various times in his political career he called slavery "wrong," "immoral," and "evil." He would say, again and again, that if "slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong." He believed the founders made certain compromises with slavery ââ¬â so as to have the slave states ratify the Constitution ââ¬â but that those compromises were not the principles of the Constitution which, itself, was intended to keep slavery on the road to ultimate extinction. Lincoln saw the Kansas-Nebraska Act and other attempts, such as Dred Scott, and Stephen Douglas' notion of "popular sovereignty" (which allowed people to vote slavery up or down in the territories) as a betrayal of the founders' scheme to ultimately eliminate slavery. Douglas' policy was one of "don't care" whether slavery was voted up or down. Lincoln believed that one could not vote to commit a moral wrong. Sounds familiar to the pro-life debate, doesn't it?
Sobran's most outrageous claim is that "Lincoln launched a bloody war against the South, violating the Constitution he'd sworn to uphold." More errors in a single sentence could not be made. If Lincoln launched a war, he did so by merely being elected President (an election, by the way, in which he gave no campaign speeches). Not only did seven states secede before Lincoln was even sworn into office, Lincoln did all he could to ensure a unified nation. He even reached out to Alexander Stephens (who ultimately became the Vice President of the Confederacy), offering him a seat on his cabinet. Nonetheless, it was the secessionist South Carolina that first fired on Fort Sumter. The combination of secession and the taking over of ââ¬â and firing upon ââ¬â federal forts was the "launch" of the war. As for the illegality of waging that war to preserve the Union, I know of no legitimate scholar who believes Lincoln acted illegally in defending the Union. Even the lame-duck President James Buchanan, who wanted to admit Kansas as a slave state and who supported the Dred Scott decision, claimed secession to be illegal. How could it not be?
The idea that there was a right to secede contradicts both the Declaration of Independence (which both Jefferson and Madison claimed was our "fundamental act of union") and the Constitution (which was ratified by "We the people" ââ¬â the same "ne people"and "we" in the Declaration of Independence). There was no right to overturn an election of "ballots" by a use of "bullets" as Lincoln said. That would be the end of self-government, that would be the antithesis of representative government. Nowhere did our founders indicate that should an election be disfavored, one could secede from the Union and take federal property with them. That "all men are created equal" is the principle that allows everyone to have a turn at governing and those who lose an election to peaceably be governed. There was no sense to establishing a "more perfect union" or a federal government at all if it could not be defended from insurrection or secession. The signers of the Declaration, our nation's founders, spoke of "revolution" when natural rights were being plundered (rights which Lincoln was upholding), and revolution presupposes war as the natural consequence. They did not speak of "the right of secession." Cleverly, the Southern secessionists didn't speak of "revolution," for if they did, perhaps their slaves might take note, as Harry Jaffa well points out in his new book, A New Birth of Freedom.
Sobran also misrepresents Lincoln's position on colonization. It is true that Lincoln ââ¬â at one point ââ¬â supported colonization of blacks. So too did James Madison, James Monroe, and Henry Clay. Lincoln supported it, not because he wanted an all-white nation, but because he feared retribution against blacks by racist elements in this country. He thought a repatriation scheme would provide the best opportunity for freed blacks to have their own homeland, free of white prejudice, so they could establish for themselves "the sacred right of self-government." His purposes were beneficent, not racist. Still, Lincoln was wrong. And he admitted it, calling his erstwhile idea ââ¬â quickly abandoned ââ¬â "a hideous and barbaric humbug." Lincoln's heart was always in the right place which is why Frederick Douglass said Lincoln was "emphatically the black man's president." Sobran never writes of this. It is easy to take history out of context, it is easy to be a revisionist, I just don't expect it from people on our side of the political spectrum. To read all of Lincoln is to know he was opposed to slavery. To take a handful of Lincoln's speeches on colonization and represent them as his central position is to look at Ronald Reagan's positions on the deficit in the 1970s and his signing off on the increase of capital gains in 1986 and argue that Reagan's positions on the economy were represented by a belief in increasing taxes. Such conclusions ââ¬â about Reagan and Lincoln ââ¬â miss entire forests for a few, unrepresentative trees.
As President, Lincoln sought to preserve the Union and he knew that the Union was the cause of manumission. He knew it because the founders knew it. He tried to keep the founders' faith, and his words and writings and actions should serve as an inspiration to all of us, be we conservatives or liberals, Republicans or Democrats. Misrepresenting Lincoln does history no favor and it does not advance our republican cause. It actually weakens our case for the protection of the weakest among us. Lincoln taught that "'Give to him that is needy' is the Christian rule of charity, but 'Take from him who is needy' is the rule of slavery." As someone who believes all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with unalienable rights, I believe the cause of the poor, the defenseless, the minority, is the cause of our republican form of government. As someone who believes the unborn are among the weakest, most defenseless, I further believe Abraham Lincoln provides great instruction and example in how to further their cause. I close with Lincoln's own words, and ask Sobran and his minions, to reconsider their service in debunking Abraham Lincoln:
In their [the founders'] enlightened belief, nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. They grasped not only the whole race of men, then living, but they reached forward and seized upon the farthest posterity. They erected a beacon to guide their children and their children's children, and the countless myriads who should inhabit the earth in other ages. Wise statesmen as they were, they knew the tendency of prosperity to breed tyrants, and so they established these great self-evident truths, that when, in the distant future, some man, some faction, some interest, should set up the doctrine that none but rich men, not but white men, or none but Anglo-Saxon white men were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, their posterity might look up again to the Declaration of Independence and take courage to renew the battle which their fathers began, so that truth and justice and mercy and all the humane and Christian Virtues might not be extinguished from the land; so that no man hereafter would dare to limit and circumscribe the great principles on which the Temple of Liberty was being built.
Seth Leibsohn is director of policy at Empower America.
2003-02-04 23:33 | User Profile
Honorable Mr. Tex, I'm a bit confused Cowboy. You don't actually concur with this bit of folderol, nicht wahr? Seth Leibsohn (must be one of those white Anglo Saxon protestants) is positing that those of us who object to having pristine cherubic yellow pigtailed blue eye white girls gang soiled by olfactorily offensive porch gorillas must be some sort of blood thirsty abortionists. I must have been absent on that day of logic class.
And having a member of the eternal people of the abortion knife unctuously masquerade as a defender of the unborn is a stunning display of the zhid calling the goy a k*ke!