Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln’s Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric by Jason R. Jividen (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 90 OHIO VALLEY HISTORY Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln’s Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric Jason R. Jividen Jason Jividen’s Claiming Lincoln adds to the growing subfield of what might be termed Lincoln memory studies: books that examine the various ways subsequent generations of Americans have manipulated Lincoln’s legacy and image. Jividen focuses on five presidents —Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama—all fairly identified as liberals/ Progressives who tried in various ways to connect his administration’s policies to Lincoln. Jividen is especially interested in how these presidents used Lincoln’s ideas about social and economic justice to legitimize their own particular political agendas. “American politicians’ attempts to appropriate the Lincoln image have often turned on an appeal to the American promise of equality,” Jividen points out, and they “have claimed to continue Lincoln’s unfinished work in the name of the American promise ” (3). But in doing so, they misunderstood and distorted Lincoln’s legacy. “U.S. presidents and presidential candidates appealed rhetorically to the Lincoln image,” Jividen argues, “only to mischaracterize and distort his understanding of equality in the process” (5). Jividen rests his argument on a thorough examination of exactly what Abraham Lincoln said about equality; he finds a set of Lincolnian ideas about the subject that lie on a different ideological plane than the ideas of his Progressive successors. According to Jividen, Lincoln embraced a theory of equality that envisioned allowing individual Americans the personal liberty necessary to maximize their talents, but one that was also rooted in what Jividen terms Lincoln’s “realistic view of the human condition.” “Recognizing the imperfections of an unchanging human nature,” Jividen argues, Lincoln followed the Founders’ thinking in his “understanding of equality [and] did not seek to eliminate the natural inequalities between human beings but, rather, sought to compromise with these inequalities in the best manner possible” (23). This point of view was entirely different from the five Progressive presidents. According to Jividen each in his own way misread and Jason R. Jividen. Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln’s Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2011. 248 pp. ISBN: 9780875804354 (cloth), $38.00. BOOK REVIEWS WINTER 2011 91 misused Lincoln to bolster a much more openended definition of equality of condition than Lincoln would ever have countenanced, a definition transcending immutable human differences and in some cases the legal/constitutional system itself. Lyndon Johnson, for example, approvingly cited Lincoln’s legacy in his attempts to secure passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and his Great Society legislative agenda, all of which aimed, in Jividen’s words, to achieve an “equality of results” and “abolish racial injustice entirely” (136, 140). Such goals, Jividen writes, stood at odds with Lincoln’s inherent prudence, his sense of political and constitutional realities, and above all his abiding understanding of the limitations of human beings in an imperfect world. “Lincoln’s thought and the basic tenets of American Progressivism are incompatible” (97), Jividen flatly states. He tends to somewhat exaggerate the point, ignoring potential commonalities between modern American liberalism and some of Lincoln’s more expansive statements about the Declaration of Independence, as well as Lincoln’s quite “progressive” (for his day) embrace of Radical Republican politics during his last months in the White House. But on the whole Jividen’s argument is sound enough: Abraham Lincoln was not a “progressive” in the modern sense, and the five presidents Jividen examines did cut and paste Lincoln’s words and ideas to fit their own particular needs, often without taking into account Lincoln’s own intentions or the significant differences of context between their times and his. But what are we to do with this information ? A meticulous and careful scholar of both Lincoln’s ideas and various subtle nuances of American political thought, Jividen proves these presidents were neither meticulous nor careful in their treatment of Lincoln. Nor were they scholars ; they were politicians, and as such saw Lincoln as a handy political tool. They did not bring a scholar’s level of sophistication to the task. This being the case, one wonders what...