Today’s GOP Mischaracterizes Lincoln and Cancels Teddy and Ike
MAGA Republicans often call themselves the “Party of Lincoln and Reagan,” as though the mere coupling of their names – Lincoln and Reagan – affirms a spiritual and ideological link. Who can blame them? Such a coupling conveniently dissolves from memory the names of other Republican mediocrities and failures like Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Nixon, Ford, the Bushes, and Trump.
Isn’t it strange, though, that today’s GOP never invokes the names of two of their genuinely successful and legendary Republican presidents -- Theodore Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower?
An earlier generation revered Roosevelt sufficiently to chisel his face on Mt. Rushmore along with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln.
Certainly, Eisenhower’s record as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in World War II and his successful record as a post-war president merits similar praise and greater respect from today’s GOP.
Why has the GOP canceled Teddy and Ike?
Two answers: (1) Today’s Republicans do not know or do not care what Lincoln and the Republicans stood for in 1860. (2) Today’s Republicans are willing consumers of a disinformation campaign pitching Reagan as a worthy and creditable counterpart to Lincoln.
To be a Republican in Lincoln’s day was to approximate what a Democrat is today. In his essay on the GOP’s “convenient distortions of history,” Pulitzer Prize winner, Peter Balakian, states:
Lincoln’s government was not one of small, non-intrusive government, minimal taxation, traditional social mores, and white supremacy. It was the party of strong federal intervention and moral directive against the institution of slavery and Southern secession, the party of federal funded education, federally funded national transportation and social welfare.[i]
Balakian states that Lincoln’s administration and his legacy “brought welfare to a persecuted and disadvantaged minority. It also issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, Fifteenth Amendment, guaranteeing suffrage, Freedman’s Bureau to aid newly freed African Americans.”[ii]
The overriding objective of Lincoln’s philosophy was to unite Americans and bring the country closer to the standard set by the Declaration of Independence. As Michael Zucker mentions, “He asserted that the Declaration was not a historic relic but a living document with a set of goals to be realized over time.” Zucker quotes Lincoln’s 1854 Peoria Speech:
‘Nearly eighty years ago we began by declaring that all men are created equal; but now from that beginning we have run down to the other declaration, that for some men to enslave others is a “sacred right of self-government.” Our republican robe is soiled and trailed in the dust. Let us repurify it. Let us re-adopt the Declaration of Independence, and with it, the practices, and policy, which harmonize with it. If we do this, we shall not only have saved the Union: but we shall have saved it, as to make, and keep it, forever worthy of the saving.”[iii]
Roosevelt proclaimed an activist governing policy like Lincoln’s: “I took the view that the President as a “steward of the people” should take whatever action necessary for the public good unless expressly forbidden by law or the Constitution. ‘I did not usurp power,’ he wrote, ‘but I did greatly broaden the use of executive power.’”[iv]
Roosevelt was a Nobel Prize winning, reform-minded president who sought a “square deal” for all Americans of every class and race: “Justice for all alike – a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor.” This meant he exerted bold “trust busting” measures to curtail the too-cozy relationships between business and government.[v]
Roosevelt stood against “special interests that had perverted government to their own ends and robbed hard workers of what they had earned.”
“He believed an active government was needed to restore an even economic playing field. He believed that “government should regulate both big business and the terms of labor. He called for graduated and inheritance taxes to prevent the accumulation of huge fortunes. He also insisted that the government must provide natural resources for future generations rather than industrialists grab them all. To guarantee that all men could rise, he called for minimum wage and maximum hours measures. As well as for better factory conditions. And to make sure that future citizens grew up healthy and sound he called for the regulation of child labor and women’s work.”[vi
President Eisenhower also presided over an activist government. He continued most of the New Deal and Fair Deal programs. As desegregation of schools began, he sent troops into Little Rock, Arkansas, to assure compliance with a federal court order; he also ordered the complete desegregation of the Armed Forces, believing, “There must be no second-class citizens in this country.”[vii]
Eisenhower also supported banking regulations, collective bargaining, and public spending on infrastructure like the Interstate Highway System. Significantly, the 1956 Republican Platform maintained many New Deal components:
1. Protect social security.
2. Provide federal assistance to low-income communities.
3. Provide asylum for refugees.
4. Extend minimum wage.
5. Improve unemployment benefit system so it covers more people.
6. Strengthen labor laws so workers can easily join a union.
7. Assure equal pay for equal work regardless of sex.[viii]
So, no. Reagan is not a Lincoln Republican. The party’s name may be the same, but its ideologies have reversed since Lincoln was president. Reagan denounced activist government and dramatically cut or reduced funding for Social Security, Medicaid, Food Stamps, and federal education programs.
He believed, like Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover that “the business of America is business.” For the rest, laissez faire — let government be operated by trickle-down theories that favor lower taxes for the rich, and lower taxes and minimal regulation of corporations -- theories that since 1980 have spurred financial crises and created a disturbing wealth differential between America’s upper and lower classes.
Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower, on the other hand, used government to act for the good of the country, and for people of all classes and races, to “swell the chorus of the Union” in Lincoln’s words, so that we might be touched “by the better angels of our nature.”
[i] https://lithub.com/president-lincolns-republican-party-was-the-original-party-of-big-government/#:~:text=Today's%20Republicans%2C%20with%20their%20passion,they%20do%20with%20Lincoln's%20party
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] https://www.quora.com/How-different-was-the-Republican-Party-of-Abraham-Lincolns-time-from-the-current-party
[iv] http://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/theodore-roosevelt
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Heather Cox Richardson, To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party, (NY: Basic Books, 2014), p. 161.
[vii] http://www.whitehouse.gov/about-the-white-house/presidents/dwight-eisenhower
[viii] https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-the-GOP-and-conservatives-idolize-Eisenhower-the-same-way-they-do-with-Reagan-Isnt-Ike-more-of-a-pragmatic-conservative