Claiming Lincoln: Progressivism, Equality, and the Battle for Lincoln's Legacy in Presidential Rhetoric

5. Lyndon Johnson’s Lincoln

FIvE Lyndon Johnson’s Lincoln A F T E R T H E N E W D E A L , the Lincoln image continued to be associated with what many referred to as “expanded” or “deeper” notions of equality. If the Lincoln image underwent a revitalization in Roosevelt’s New Deal, then the rhetorical appeal to that image exploded from the late 1950s to mid-1960s during the American civil rights movement. In the summer of 1963, standing on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, Martin Luther King, Jr., reminded his audience that one hundred years ago Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Yet, one hundred years later, King suggested, “the Negro is still not free . . . the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination.” King argued that the civil rights movement was an attempt to cash a “check,” to fulfill a promise offered by the authors of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution that “all men would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” King went on to his famous proclamation: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident—that all men are created equal.’”1 In 1964 and 1965 Lyndon Johnson too would adopt the Lincoln image as his own, incorporating Lincoln into the rhetoric of the Great Society and promising to make real the “promise of America”—that in due time weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, that all men should have an equal chance. According to Johnson, when Lincoln signed the Emancipation Lyndon Johnson’s Lincoln 135 Proclamation he freed the black man from the chains of slavery, but he could not free him from the burdens of bigotry and discrimination. Thus, Johnson suggested, emancipation remained merely a proclamation and not a fact. The self-professed aim of the Johnson administration was thus to make it a fact. Echoing the language of the Gettysburg Address, Johnson frequently claimed that if we could make emancipation a fact we could finally fulfill the “unfinished work” of Lincoln and the men who died at Gettysburg.2 I have argued that Lincoln’s equality was an equality of opportunity for individuals to pursue their interests under the rule of law, while expecting an inequality of results or outcomes in that pursuit. For Lincoln, and the men who framed the Reconstruction Amendments, equal opportunity was understood as the security of individual rights of person and property and access to the legal system that enabled individuals to pursue their interests under the rule of law.3 The federal civil rights and voting rights legislation of the middle 1960s were meant to help secure these ends by removing racial, ethnic, and religious discrimination against individual citizens, and to ensure that no citizen is denied the right of suffrage on account of race or color. Yet there was a growing sentiment that mere legal protections were insufficient to integrate black citizens into American society. Johnson himself would eventually suggest that the problem of racial injustice was more complex than anyone had previously understood, growing more critical by the moment. In the memoirs of his administration, Johnson claimed that even though the Civil and Voting Rights Acts began a process by which the barriers to freedom had begun to fall, “these legislative victories served to illuminate the full dimensions of the American dilemma . . . the time would come when we would realize that legislative guarantees were not enough.”4 According to Johnson, for all the successes of the 1960s in securing the rights of black Americans, these citizens nevertheless remained “excluded from real equality.” Both North and South were often unwilling to grant the “social acceptance and compassion that would make the formal rights meaningful.”5 Johnson argued that the interconnectedness of the problem of racial discrimination with problems of poverty, educational opportunity, housing, delinquency, and unemployment “could not be solved entirely by laws, crusades, or marches.” The “effect on the black man of centuries of discriminationhadbecomealltoovisibleintheformofapathy,hatred,anger, and violence. The problems at this stage could not be solved by goodwill and compassion; they required large expenditures of public funds.”6 To secure real equality for blacks, and for all Americans, the federal government had 136 C...