Posted on 02/04/2003 3:42:54 AM PST by kattracks
Washington (CNSNews.com) - A video presented at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington appears to suggest that former President Abraham Lincoln would have supported modern-day, left-of-center political causes such as homosexual rights, abortion rights and the modern feminist agenda.
One tourist from Wisconsin, who viewed the video in the memorial's Lincoln Legacy Room, called it "awful" and said the "political correctness of it is beyond words." Other visitors to the memorial told CNSNews.com they believe the video clearly implies that Lincoln would have supported left-wing political causes.
A National Park Service spokesman told CNSNews.com he was "reluctant" to comment on the Lincoln video because the whole issue had the "potential to be quite controversial."
The video features an actor who sounds like Lincoln speaking about the Civil War and slavery. He then leads into clips of Martin Luther King's 1963 March on Washington.
About halfway through the approximately eight-minute video, footage of modern-day marchers is shown over "Lincoln's" booming voice as patriotic music and songs associated with the civil rights movement play.
At this point, the video shows snippets from modern-day marches. A sign reading, "The Lord is my Shepard and Knows I am Gay" kicks off a series of visuals featuring left-wing social causes, while "Lincoln's voice" and patriotic music blare.
The other visuals include signs reading "Gay & Lesbian Sexual Rights," "Council of Churches Lesbian Rights," "National Organization for Woman" (NOW), "Reagan's Wrongs Equal Woman's Rights," "ERA Yes," "Ratify the Era," "I had an illegal abortion in 1967 - Never Again," "Keep Abortion Legal," "I am pro-choice America," a Vietnam-era video clip of a woman asking: "President. Nixon where are our men?" and a sign reading, "Who will Decide NARAL (National Abortion Rights & Reproductive Action League).
The video features the theme song of the civil rights movement, "We Shall Overcome," and continues with visual display of liberal causes, including signs reading "In Opposition to King Richard [Nixon]," "U.S. out Now," "Equal Opportunity for All," "Peace," "Hell No We Won't Go," "No More Lies, Sign the Treaty Now Coalition," and marchers chanting U.S. Out Now" (crowd chanting).
The video also features an excerpt from a Martin Luther King speech and then progresses into a banner reading "Pass the Brady [Gun Control] Bill Now." Pro-life demonstrators appear in the video once, in a brief clip where they are shown clashing with abortion rights activists. No other political causes that could be considered right-of-center appear in the video.
'Beyond Words'
CNSNews.com asked several of the tourists visiting the memorial what they thought of the video and whether they believed it implied Lincoln would support modern-day causes such as homosexual rights and abortion rights.
"I liked it... I think [Lincoln] would have [supported homosexual and abortion rights] because that's how Lincoln was; he was very supportive of the people. He didn't care who you are and what you are, he loved everybody," said Elizabeth Baksi, a high school student from Houma, La., after viewing the video.
Darre Klain of Baltimore, Md., also agreed that Lincoln would have supported today's liberal political causes as implied in the video.
[Lincoln] seemed like a very progressive, forward-thinking man, ahead of his time," Klain said.
But Paul Meisius of Sheboygan, Wis., rejected the video's message as he interpreted it, and he chastised the National Park Service for showcasing it.
"That's awful," Meisius said as he finished watching the video. "The political correctness of it is beyond words. I don't think that's proper. They are giving themselves credit to be able to say whatever they want about Lincoln's political views," Meisius told CNSNews.com.
"Our national monuments are being stripped of their true heritage. They are being uprooted and taken and changed. It's an atrocity that they are rewriting history in the sense that these people have political agendas," Meisius said.
Meisius, who was visiting Washington, D.C., with his wife and five children, believes the video is an attack by revisionist historians.
"The wrongness and incorrectness of this -- this stripping of the true essential biblical aspects of our foundation - are being replaced by political correctness," he said.
Angela Brewer, a program instructor for the Close Up Foundation, a citizenship education organization, denied the Lincoln video implied the former president would have supported modern-day, left-wing social causes.
"[The Lincoln Memorial] has frequently has been used as a backdrop for groups that seem to me to be liberal. I don't know that there is a particular purpose behind [the video]," Brewer said.
Gary Perkins, who coordinates exhibits at the Sweetwater Historical Museum in Green River, Wyo., has written about the difficulty our national museums face when presenting historical materials. Perkins believes that the National Park Service may be guilty of historical overreach with the video in question.
"We do not know what Abraham Lincoln thought of gay rights. We have no clue, he never talked about it," Perkins said after hearing CNSNews.com's description of the Lincoln Memorial video.
"We can't really infer he supported gay rights," Perkins added.
'Quite Controversial'
Bill Line, a spokesman for the National Park Service's National Capital Region, told CNSNews.com that the Discovery Channel produced the video for the Lincoln Memorial.
Asked if the video intentionally makes it appear as though Lincoln would have supported homosexual rights, abortion rights and feminist causes, Line was unequivocal in his initial answer.
"I have seen the video, and I don't know how you can contrive that out of it," Line said.
However, after specific examples of "liberal causes" were pointed out to him, Line backed away from his previous comment.
"I am reluctant, quite frankly, to say much to you because I don't know the whole other premise that you are coming from or the background or the fuller context that the story is being written in, and it has potential to be quite controversial," Line explained.
Finally, Line announced he needed to see the video again before he would have any official comment.
"It's been a while since I reviewed the videotape. Before I can adequately comment and give to you something you can use in your story, I need to go and review that videotape myself," Line said.
As of press time, Line had not contacted CNSNews.com with further comment on the video.
'Left-wing gestapo'
Cultural critic David Horowitz was not surprised by the description of the video that CNSNews.com provided. Horowitz believes that left-wing political perspectives are the dominant philosophy of the curators of the U.S.'s national monuments. Horowitz, a former 1960s radical, is co-founder of the Los Angeles-based Center for the Study of the Popular Culture.
"The whole museum field has been taken over by the left wing Gestapo," Horowitz said.
"People have to wake up. This is the America hating left. It is in charge of our national monuments. It's a disgrace and testament to how the academic history profession is totally dominated by the political left," Horowitz said.
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This is from "Lincoln at Gettysburg" by Garry Wills:
"Lincoln was here to clear the infected atmosphere of American history itself, tainted with official sins and inherited guilt. He would cleanse the Constitution-not as William Lloyd Garrison had, by burning an instrument that countenanced slavery. He altered the document from within, by appeal from its letter to the spirit, subtly changing the recalcitrant stuff of that legal compromise, bringing it to its own indictment. By implicitly doing this, he performed one of the most daring acts of open-air sleight of hand ever witnessed by the unsuspecting. Everyone in that vast throng of thousands was having his or her intellectual pocket picked.
The crowd departed with a new thing in its ideological luggage, the new Constitution Lincoln had substituted for the one they had brought there with them. They walked off from those curving graves on the hillside, under a changed sky, into a different America. Lincoln had revolutionized the Revolution, giving people a new past to live with that would change their future indefinitely.
Some people, looking on from a distance, saw that a giant (if benign) swindle had been performed. The Chicago Times quoted the letter of the Constitution to Lincoln-noting its lack of reference to equality, its tolerance of slavery-and said that Lincoln was betraying the instrument he was on oath to defend, traducing the men who died for the letter of that fundamental law:
'It was to uphold this constitution, and the Union created by it, that our officers and soldiers gave their lives at Gettysburg. How dared he, then, standing on their graves, misstate the cause for which they died, and libel the statesmen who founded the government? They were men possessing too much self-respect to declare that negroes were their equals, or were entitled to equal privileges.'
Heirs to this outrage still attack Lincoln for subverting the Constitution at Gettysburg-suicidally frank conservatives like M. E. Bradford and the late Willmoore Kendall. But most conservatives are understandably unwilling to challenge a statement now so hallowed, so literally sacrosanct, as Lincoln's clever assault on the constitutional past. They would rather hope or pretend, with some literary critics, that Lincoln's emotionally moving address had no discernible intellectual content that, in the words of the literary critic James Hurl, "the sequence of ideas is commonplace to the point of banality, the ordinary coin of funereal oratory."
People like Kendall and the Chicago Times editors might have wished this were true, but they knew better. They recognized the audacity of Lincoln's undertaking. Kendall rightly says that Lincoln undertook a new founding of the nation, to correct things felt to be imperfect in the Founders' own achievement:
"involving concretely a startling new interpretation of that principle of the founders which declares that "All men are created equal." Edwin Meese and other "original intent" conservatives also want to go back before the Civil War amendments (particularly the Fourteenth) to the original Founders.
Their job would be comparatively easy if they did not have to work against the values created by the Gettysburg Address. Its deceptively simple-sounding phrases appeal to Americans in ways that Lincoln had perfected in his debates over the Constitution during the 1850s. During that time Lincoln found the language, the imagery, the myths, that are given their best and briefest embodiment at Gettysburg. In order to penetrate the mystery of his "refounding," we must study all the elements of that stunning verbal coup....
But, as Kendall himself admitted, the professors, textbooks, the politicians, the press, have overwhelmingly accepted Lincoln's vision. The Gettysburg Address has become an authoritative expression of the American spirit-as authoritative as the Declaration itself, and perhaps even more influential, since it determines how we read the Declaration.
For most people now, the Declaration means what Lincoln told us it means, as he did to correct the Constitution without overthrowing it. It is this correction of the spirit, this intellectual revolution, that makes attempts to go back beyond Lincoln to some earlier version so feckless. The proponents of states' rights may have arguments to advance, but they have lost their force, in the courts as well as in the popular mind. By accepting the Gettysburg Address, and its concept of a single people dedicated to a proposition, we have been changed. Because of it, we live in a different America."
The G-burg Address:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met here on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.
But in a larger sense we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here, but can never forget what they did here. It is for us, the living, rather to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they have, thus far, so nobly carried on. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom; and that this government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
[end] Lincoln wrote privately to the new governor of Louisiana in 1864 asking him to consider giving the vote to black soldiers. A year later he went public with this position. John Wilkes Booth was in the audience. Three days later he shot Lincoln.
Walt
-- Ronald Reagan , first inaugural address, January 20, 1981
A hundred and one hundred and twenty years ago the greatest of all our Presidents delivered his second State of the Union Message in this chamber. "We cannot escape history," Abraham Lincoln warned. "We of this Congress and this Administration will be re membered in spite of ourselves." The "trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor to the latest generation." Well, that President and that Congress did not fail the American people. Together, they weathered the storm and preserved the union. Let it be said of us that we, too did not fail ; that we, too, worked together to bring America through difficult times. Let us so conduct ourselves that two centuries from now, another Congress and another President, meeting in this chamber as we're meet ing, will speak of us with pride, saying that we met the test and preserved for them in their day the sacred flame of liberty this last, best hope of man on Earth.
-- Ronald Reagan , State of the Union Address -January 26, 1982
We knew then what the liberal Democrat leaders just couldn't figure out....I heard those speakers at that other convention saying "we won the Cold War" -- and I couldn't help wondering, just who exactly do they mean by "we"? And to top it off, they even tried to portray themselves as sharing the same fundamental values of our party! What they truly don't understand is the principle so eloquently stated by Abraham Lincoln:
"You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help the wage-earner by pulling down the wage-payer. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot help men permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves." If we ever hear the Democrats quoting that passage by Lincoln and acting like they mean it, then, my friends, we will know that the opposition has really changed. Until then, we see all that rhetorical smoke, billowing out from the Democrats, well ladies and gentlemen, I'd follow the example of their nominee. Don't inhale.
---Ronald Reagan, 1992 Republican Convention Speech
It was this spirit that helped black folks in America to survive and even begin to move toward prosperity during the years of legalized oppression after the Civil War and well into the 20th century . It was also this spirit, when it came to light in the Civil Rights movement of the late 50's and 60's, that had the power to transform the hardened conscience of America. Surprised and edified by the quiet dignity of black Americans seeking justice, the people of this country were called back to some respect for the first principles of America's life. For the Civil Rights movement followed the example of the American Founders, and of Lincoln, who had proclaimed that every single human being had a worth that comes not from laws and constitutions, but from the hand of God. With quiet determination the freedom marchers insisted that every government, every law and every power whatsoever is obliged to respect that worth....the temptation to succumb to worldly judgment about the dignity of individuals, particularly those not favored by fortune with wealth, position and beauty, can be overwhelming. Black Americans have faced this temptation, and defeated it. Lincoln led the public battle against the doctrine of human inequality, but countless anonymous others have steadfastly done their work over the decades to keep the flame alive and to spread it
--Alan Keyes, Februrary 17, 2001
Restoring the mantle of Lincoln to the Republican Party is a noble goal and, indeed, an essential one. But it is not enough to adopt the slogan. To lead the party in the footsteps of Lincoln requires that we understand clearly and deeply the soul of Lincoln's own deepest ambition -- the wellsprings of the sometimes heartbreaking and, ultimately, healing acts of political and presidential leadership that constitute the legacy of Lincoln. What was the real purpose that animated the striving of that great man, for which he spent the last resources of his noble soul and ultimately paid with his life? The answer occurring readily to most Americans would probably be that Lincoln's career, and his presidency, were devoted to the task of freeing the slaves. How then are we to understand the following words, written by Lincoln during the war, to one of the foremost abolitionists of the day?
"My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it."This quotation can seem almost scandalous in its apparent disregard for the abolitionist cause, particularly for those who are perceptive enough to realize that not all "unions" justify such devotion -- the Soviets, after all, had a "union" and freely accepted the necessity of slavery in their attempt to perpetuate it. Soviet acceptance of slavery in the cause of its union was, of course, deeply wrong.
Was Lincoln wrong as well? If we wish to understand, to wear again, the mantle of Lincoln, we must follow his thought deeper, and ask what it was about the Union that could move such a man -- whose deepest moral sentiments were outraged by the institution of slavery -- to defer the cause of abolition if it meant allowing the end of the political union of the American Republic.At stake was the survival of a community of free men still devoted, however imperfectly, to the attempt at just self-government. Lincoln understood the Founders to have formed a Union dedicated to vindicating the possibility of such a community. He believed that the Founders had understood that the institution of slavery, although it ultimately contradicted the principles of the republic, did not vitiate the solemn founding commitment to the pursuit of just self-government. Accordingly, Lincoln argued, the Founders had placed the institution of slavery "in the course of ultimate extinction" partly through a series of practical political concessions such as the constitutional time limit on the slave trade. Far more important, however, was the fact -- as Lincoln argued in scholarly depth -- that the founding generation universally understood that they were committing the country to a perpetual struggle to conform their lives and political institutions to the principles stated in the Declaration that gave birth to the Union itself. They, and Lincoln, knew that slavery could not survive such a commitment.
A Union that had formally broken its commitment to the Declaration, Lincoln believed, would no more be the Union of the founding. It would in fact be no less broken than the divided polity which the secession of the Southern states threatened to cause. Preserving the Union meant preserving the national commitment to the pursuit of justice in self-government, a goal never perfectly attained, but most definitely not to be abandoned because of any dispute about the manner of its accomplishment.
This, I believe, is what Lincoln meant in the famous words at Gettysburg, when he identified the "great task remaining before us." That task, he said, was "that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.".....or save the Union on the basis of the Declaration, Lincoln knew, required that slavery be returned to its condition at the Founding -- namely, that it be put firmly on the course of ultimate extinction. The delay in its extinction might be painfully long. But if it was necessary to endure that delay rather than admit that we could not govern ourselves under the principles of the Declaration, Lincoln was prepared to do so.....The resolve to evoke from his fellow citizens their assent to the eventual triumph of justice was Lincoln's greatest ambition, and his failure to do it without war was his greatest sorrow. In our time, the mantle -- the burden -- of the Declaration remains the source of what must be our own greatest ambition. The Republican Party must indeed reclaim the mantle of Lincoln -- we must highly resolve, as Lincoln said, to lead the nation to a renewed determination to seek justice according to the principles of the Declaration.
--Alan Keyes, August 12, 2000
You: No they don't.
You're being selective. If you look at Lincoln's public comments about Blacks and about slavery, you get a confused image. What his personal attitudes were are less than clear.
I'm not going to drag down books from my shelves just now to make this argument, but I could. There are few respected historians who think Lincoln conducted the Civil War in order to free the slaves, or that he maintained the same position over time about Blacks -- even from week to week or day to day. He conducted the war in order to preserve the Union.
My point remains the same. Emancipation was a by-product of the Civil War, not its purpose.
I mainly object to Lincoln being re-cast into a marching buddy of Martin Luther King and gay rights advocates on an eight minute tape that is now being shown by the National Park Service at the Lincoln Memorial. In terms of what is known about Lincoln, that is not accurate.
You should study the ideas of colonization and understand why many people supported it. They predicted correctly that even with the end of slavery, blacks would not be accepted as full citizens in this nation. He and others like James Madison, Henry Clay and even R.E. Lee saw colonization as a way for blacks to establish their own nation where they could really be free. It was not a hatred of blacks that drove him to those beliefs, but an understanding that white America would not allow blacks to be equal. 100 years after Lincoln's death, blacks were still being denied fundimental liberties.
Okay. On that I agree wholeheartedly. His own words and actions bear him out. He was for centralization and destruction of the Republic. He supported the federal government in building a railroad system that went broke shortly after. He supported colonization and separation of the races. He supported and allowed the first federal income tax to continue his tariff war. At best he was what I would consider a Socialist by today's standards with his stance on government control. Now tell me again why we have a monument to a man that stood for everything the Constitution didn't?
The Democrats, both the Douglas and Brackenridg factions, also supported building the railroad. Read the party platforms from 1860. All three had virtually identical words on the railroad.
You: No they don't.
You're being selective. If you look at Lincoln's public comments about Blacks and about slavery, you get a confused image. What his personal attitudes were are less than clear.
I quote Lincoln. You do not.
Here are some more Lincoln quotes:
"Whereas, while heretofore, States, and Nations, have tolerated slavery, recently, for the first time in the world, an attempt has been made to construct a new nation, upon the basis of, and with the primary, and fundamental object to maintain, enlarge, and perpetuate human slavery, therefore,
Resolved, that no such embryo State should ever be recognized by, or admitted into, the family of christian and civilized nations; and that all Christian and civilized men everywhere should, by all lawful means, resist to the utmost, such recognition or admission."
"I will say now, however, I approve the declaration in favor of so amending the Constitution as to prohibit slavery throughout the nation. When the people in revolt, with a hundred days of explicit notice, that they could, within those days, resume their allegiance, without the overthrow of their institution, and that they could not so resume it afterwards, elected to stand out, such amendment of the Constitution as now proposed, became a fitting, and necessary conclusion to the final success of the Union cause. Such alone can meet and cover all cavils. Now, the unconditional Union men, North and South, perceive its importance, and embrace it. In the joint names of Liberty and Union, let us labor to give it legal form, and practical effect."
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be wrong. God can not be for, and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God's purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By his mere quiet power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And having begun He could give the final victor to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds."
This is a world of compensations; and he that would -be- no slave, must consent to --have-- no slave. Those that deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves, and under a just God cannot long retain it. All honor to Jefferson -- to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicible to to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyrany and oppression."
How is Lincoln unclear?
Oh, here is something for you to contrast with Lincoln:
"Defenders of slavery contrasted the bondsman's comfortable lot with the misery of wage slaves so often that they began to believe it. Beware of the'endeavor to imitate...Northern civilization" with its 'filthy, crowed, licentious factories,' warned a planter in 1854. 'Let the North enjoy their hireling labor with all its...pauperism, rowdyism, mobism and anti-rentism,' said the collector of customs in Charleston. 'We do not want it. We are satisfied with our slave labor.' "
-- "Battle Cry of Freedom, James McPherson, p. 99)
Walt
Roger that.
Walt
No one is disputing that, Don Quixote.
But he always personally hated slavery and worked to end it. That is why he was hated in the south.
Walt
Of course not.
But to say Lincoln's position wasn't clear is also incorrect and just as unfair to his memory.
Walt
Yes Walt. They do. Stephen Douglas made an issue out of this in their debates and cited The Lincoln's conflicting statements before the audience. The move left The Lincoln flustered, prompting him to engage in a staky semantical bullsh*t fest to recover from the embarrassment caused to him by Douglas. His response was basically to say that the previous debates had been published in the newspapers, and therefore he wouldn't have conflicted his earlier statements - a non-necessary conclusion from his argument. Douglas won the debates because of this.
Now, I know that certain Lincoln cultists out there like to deny that he ever said or did anything contradictory. This is pure nonsense and stems not from a factual consideration of history, but rather the idolatrous worship of a man. You cannot bring yourself to admit any wrong, error, or falsehood on Lincoln's part, Walt, because you have extended to him the attributes of a diety. To you, he is infallable and never erred, no matter how much history says otherwise.
Why is it that idolaters always act that way when they are outed?
Yes Walt. They do. Stephen Douglas made an issue out of this in their debates and cited The Lincoln's conflicting statements before the audience. The move left The Lincoln flustered, prompting him to engage in a staky semantical bullsh*t fest to recover from the embarrassment caused to him by Douglas. His response was basically to say that the previous debates had been published in the newspapers, and therefore he wouldn't have conflicted his earlier statements - a non-necessary conclusion from his argument. Douglas won the debates because of this.
Now, I know that certain Lincoln cultists out there like to deny that he ever said or did anything contradictory. This is pure nonsense and stems not from a factual consideration of history, but rather the idolatrous worship of a man. You cannot bring yourself to admit any wrong, error, or falsehood on Lincoln's part, Walt, because you have extended to him the attributes of a diety. To you, he is infallable and never erred, no matter how much history says otherwise.
You don't quote Lincoln either.
Walt
A perfect example of a dumb-down teenager of today.
[Lincoln] seemed like a very progressive, forward-thinking man, ahead of his time," Klain said.
You mean like shipping blacks out of the continental United States because they were "inferior" (Lincoln's words) to whites? Yes, very progressive indeed.
"Our national monuments are being stripped of their true heritage.
Couldn't agree with him more.
It's quite a leap from 19th century social reform and uplift to 20th century PC. The problem is that that 19th century tradition is also more or less the environment that produced Garfield, Taft, Coolidge, Hoover, and Reagan. It was also more or less the tradition that William Jennings Bryan came out of, and for all his populist ardor, one can't imagine him supporting abortion, gay rights, or even the teaching of evolution in the public schools. It was a large part of 19th century American culture, the largest chunk in much of the country.
Today's Americans draw a firmer line between mainstream churches and evangelicals or fundamentalists than was done at the time. Unitarians and Universalists were denounced by the orthodox, and pro-slavery interests made the most of those attacks, but mainstream denominations then were far more orthodox than they have been in recent years. PC is an aberration of the moment, more a result of the decadence of that Protestant moral reform tradition than of the tradition itself.
This is a controversy that can't be resolved. We can't bring Lincoln back and can't even really imagine a 21st century Lincoln. A railroad lawyer in Springfield Illinois or a anti-slavery activist today probably wouldn't have grown up on the frontier and been shaped by it. In most states, someone who had no college or law school would not be admitted to the bar. And someone who's highest position was defeated Senatorial candidate would never be elected President today.
I'd say that Lincoln was never wholly a "country club Republican." There was something of the small town lawyer in him even as he advanced up the ladder. The atmosphere of budding frontier capitalism was very different from what came later. A Washington or Lincoln who golfed or played tennis probably wouldn't be much like the historical Washington or Lincoln. To say that a 20st century Lincoln would be Wendell Willkie or Adlai Stevenson is to say that a 20th century Lincoln probably wasn't possible.
What I do notice about Lincoln is that he never had the radical chic attitude that one can find traces of in Jefferson or FDR. For much of his life he was privately skeptical about the religious enthusiasms and orthodoxies of the day, but he was never an outright public or strident mocker, and his attitude toward religion deepened and mellowed as he grew older. Like many a provincial lawyer, he might make merry over the prejudices and foibles of his neighbors in private, without being truly hostile to them or militantly committed to urban and modernist values.
Lincoln had more in common with Edgar Lee Masters, and Masters' small town types, or with Faulkner's and Harper Lee's country lawyers than with Clarence Darrow, Alan Dershowitz or the average corporate lawyer today. Perhaps this is why Masters hated Lincoln so much: one quaint, eccentric country lawyer disliked the competition, real or imaginary, from another.
Life in 19th century Springfield was life on a smaller stage and at a smaller pace. Introduce 21st century ideas about feminism or multiculturalism or deconstruction into that environment and you destroy it. So it's hard for me to imagine Lincoln as a 21st century liberal, even though he may have been discontented with some things in his own time.
If I may weigh in, I do not believe there is evidence that Lincoln himself was a marxist. The strongest case that could be made otherwise is his acceptance and espousal of one marxist principle, the labor theory of value.
That being said, I DO think that an overwhelming majority of the modern historical presentation of material about Lincoln is of a heavy marxist leaning. He is interpreted and upheld as a hero in the marxian terms first put forth by Marx himself in the 1860's. It is largely unknown, but Marx adored Lincoln and thought him to be a revolutionary hero and martyr for the working class. He wrote at length in support of Lincoln during the war, conveyed to Lincoln his personal support and that of the communist party, and eulogized Lincoln in a letter to Andrew Johnson after the assassination.
I believe that a great many historians still view Lincoln in these very same terms. They do so as they too are often of marxist political persuasion. As a brief example, take the case of two of the most well known modern historians on the war - Eric Foner and James McPherson (Foner and McPherson were also in the select group of "historians" who recently "evaluated" civil war sites in a Jesse Jackson Jr. backed PC content-sanitization of those sites). Foner, also known as "Eric the Red," is an avowed marxist with far left political persuasion. McPherson is a Democrat from the far left "Pacifica radio" wing of that party and has many political affiliations with marxists.
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