by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
Recently by Thomas DiLorenzo: Paul
Krugman Proves Himself To Be a Fraud (Again)
A philosophy professor named Allen Guelzo discovered in 1995 that one way
out of academic obscurity (where most philosophy professors reside) is to
become a "Lincoln scholar." He began writing books that tell the
same old, same old, line about Lincoln: he died on Good Friday; he supposedly
died for the sins of America just as Jesus died for the sins of the world;
etc., etc. His first book of this time is entitled Abraham
Lincoln: Redeemer President. Seeking redemption for your sins? Then
become a Lincoln worshipper, says Allen Guelzo.
Guelzo now teaches at Gettysburg College. He was recently interviewed by
the World Socialist Web Site which describes itself as an arm of the
"International Committee of the Fourth International" and "the
leadership of the world socialist movement" that is "guided by a
Marxist world outlook." The interview is entirely friendly with every
question a "softball pitch." One striking feature of the interview
is how Guelzo's comments on Lincoln and economics are exactly the opposite of
historical reality.
One of Guelzo's first comments on Lincoln's economic policies is based on
a fake Lincoln quote about which Guelzo is apparently unaware. The Marxist
Web site asked, "did [Lincoln] not privilege labor [over capital]"?
Guelzo's response is "He does indeed talk about labor having priority
over capital . . ." Part of the Lincoln mythology is that Abe supposedly
said: "All that loves labor serves the nation. All that harms labor is
treason to America . . . . If any man tells you he loves America, yet hates
labor, he is a liar." In their book, They Never Said it: A Book of Fake
Quotes, Misquotes, and Misleading Attributions (Oxford University Press,
1989), Paul Boller and John George concluded that "there is no record of
[Lincoln's] ever having uttered these words."
The biggest howler of the interview is where Guelzo claims than an
un-named "observer" supposedly said that "on political economy
[Lincoln] was great, that there was no one better than Lincoln." Nothing
could be further from the truth. Lincoln was a Hamiltonian, which is to say
he was a mercantilist. He was slavishly devoted to the Whig policy of
economic nationalism as expressed by the "American System" of
Hamilton and Clay. This "system" was comprised of protectionist
tariffs for the benefit of mostly Northern manufacturers; corporate welfare
for road and canal-building and railroad corporations; and a national bank to
finance subsidies and bailouts and to ladle out cheap credit to
politically-connected businesses.
"Few people in the Whig Party were so committed to its economic
agenda as Lincoln," wrote Michael Holt in The
Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party. "From the moment Lincoln
first entered political life as a candidate for the state legislature he
demonstrated an unswerving fidelity to Henry Clay and to Clay's American
system," wrote Robert Johannsen in Lincoln,
the South, and Slavery. Lincoln himself once said that all of his
economic ideas came from Henry Clay.
In his book Lincoln
the Man Edgar Lee Masters gave a perfect description of the
Hamilton/Clay/Lincoln "American System":
Clay was the champion of that political system which doles favors to the
strong in order to win and to keep their adherence to the government. His
system offered shelter to devious schemes and corrupt enterprises . . . . He
was the beloved son of Alexander Hamilton with his corrupt funding schemes,
his superstitions concerning the advantage of a public debt, and a people
taxed to make profits for enterprises that cannot stand alone. His example
and his doctrines led to the creation of a party that had no platform to
announce, because its principles were plunder and nothing else.
This was neo-mercantilism, the very system that genuine "greats"
in the field of political economy, such as Adam Smith, have always condemned,
contrary to Allen Guelzo's silly and uninformed opinion. Lincoln's
ruminations on political economy ranged from wrongheaded to ludicrous. He
claimed that protectionist tariffs would cause lower prices, the exact
opposite of the truth; he advocated autarky, or the complete prohibition of
all imports of anything that could be grown or produced in the U.S., thereby
depriving consumers of the benefits of international competition and the
division of labor; and he compared the sound-money critics of a central bank
run by politicians to Judas in one of his zanier speeches.
Guelzo informs the World Socialist Web Site that Lincoln never had a
political thought that did not flow from the Declaration of Independence.
What Lincoln actually said, however, is that all of his political thoughts
flowed from the politics of Henry Clay, not the Declaration of Independence.
He once said that his career aspiration was to be "the DeWitt Clinton of
Illinois." DeWitt Clinton was the early nineteenth-century governor of
New York who perfected the spoils system during the building of the Erie
Canal.
Guelzo also repeats the mantra of Lincoln's supposedly great
"love" for the Declaration of Independence. But the Declaration of
Independence was a declaration of secession from the British empire.
In it the states are described as "free and independent" in the
same sense that Great Britain, France, or Spain were "free and
independent" states. Lincoln most certainly could not have
"loved" the document that proves that America was created by an act
of secession, the very principle of the American Revolution.
And of course there is the blather about how Lincoln "did keep the
union together." Of course, in reality Lincoln's war destroyed the
voluntary union of the founders and replaced it with a coerced, Soviet-style
"union" held together literally at gunpoint. Had he not done this,
says Guelzo, "This would take the United States off the table as a major
world player, and then what would you do with the history of the 20th
century?"
Let me take a crack at answering this question. Without U.S. entry into
World War I, financed in part by the new national bank of the sort that
Lincoln longed for his entire adult life, the European powers would have
eventually settled their disputes, as they always had done in the past. There
would have been no Versailles Treaty that pushed Germany into the hands of
Hitler, and the Russian communists would have been much weaker. Consequently,
there would not likely have been a World War II and a 45-year long Cold War
that followed.
As a decentralized, federal system that had long ago abolished slavery
peacefully, as all the rest of the world did in the nineteenth century (including
New England, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, etc.) America would
have been a counter-example to all the world compared to the centralized,
socialistic bureaucracies that dominated the 20th century (especially Russia
and China and all the other socialist countries).
America may well have not been transformed from a constitutional republic
to an empire with military bases in more than 150 countries. Presidents and
their propagandists would not have repeated the Lincolnian mantra that
"all men everywhere are created equal" to "justify"
foreign military intervention in hundreds of places in the name of
"spreading democracy and freedom" (but in reality for the purpose
of confiscating resources or imposing mercantilism on foreign lands by
military force for the benefit of American corporations).
This is not "capitalism" but corporatism or neo-mercantilism.
Real capitalism is a system of mutually-advantageous, voluntary trade and
does not require imposition at the barrel of a gun. Allen Guelzo is of course
oblivious to all of this and relies instead with such silly rhetoric as when
he tells the World Socialist Web Site that sleazy, corrupt,
politically-connected lawyer/lobbyists like Lincoln were "the shock
troops of capitalism."
Thomas J. DiLorenzo [send him mail] is
professor of economics at Loyola College in Maryland and the author of The
Real Lincoln; Lincoln
Unmasked: What You're Not Supposed To Know about Dishonest Abe, How
Capitalism Saved America, and Hamilton's
Curse: How Jefferson's Archenemy Betrayed the American Revolution — And What
It Means for America Today. His latest book is Organized
Crime: The Unvarnished Truth About Government.
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