What Would Lincoln Do?

DAVID VON DREHLE

Abraham Lincoln's marble temple in Washington is as

familiar as the back of a penny. But the figure enthroned

inside will always be above and apart, a demigod --

martyr, prophet, scourge and healer rolled into one. That

he was killed on Good Friday with hosannas of triumph

still echoing in his ears added a religious overtone to the

grief of his countrymen and, from the hour of his death,

guaranteed that Lincoln could never again fit into the

frame of an ordinary man.  

But he was a man, in ways as familiar as the guy next door. He liked sports, dirty jokes and being the alpha male. He

flirted with pretty women and suffered occasional

deafness when his wife was talking. He put his feet on the

furniture, encouraged his sons to roughhouse and break

things, suffered from bad digestion. And he spent a lot of

his life thinking about money. Not that he was greedy --

quite the opposite -- but he had a poor boy's

understanding of the fact that money is a powerful

tool, the lever that makes ambition possible.

"The penniless beginner in the world," he once explained,

"labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to

buy tools or land, for himself; then labors on his own

account another while, and at length hires another new

beginner to help him."

This steady, gradual advance, Lincoln insisted, is "the

prosperous system, which opens the way for all -- gives

hope to all, and energy, and progress, and improvement

of condition to all." We know it as the American Dream,

and it certainly worked for him. Beginning with nothing,

Lincoln managed to educate himself, raise a family in

comfort and subsidize his history-shaping political

campaigns -- all thanks to that useful instrument, money.

This mundane fact may seem so obvious that it isn't worth

mentioning in the middle of a flood of Lincoln hoopla.

February marks the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth.

Bookstore shelves are sagging under the weight of new

Lincoln tomes. Museums, galleries and lecture halls

across the country and around the world have scheduled

Lincoln programs. New pennies are being minted, old

controversies revisited. And this already keen interest

has been further stoked by what Lincoln Bicentennial

Commission executive director Eileen Mackevich calls an

"Obama wind." The new President, another slender fellow

from Illinois, has been busy reading about Lincoln, quoting

Lincoln, evoking Lincoln. The Lincoln Memorial was

among Barack Obama's first stops in Washington, and

when Obama was sworn in last month it was, for many,

the culmination of a long march that began with Lincoln's

Emancipation Proclamation.

Inevitably, the main focus of all this attention is Lincoln's

views on race and equality, and his leadership during the

cataclysmic Civil War. Yet given the fix we're in, Lincoln's 

economic ideas deserve some attention too. Long before

he gave his first speeches about Union or slavery, Lincoln

was a crusader on questions of economic development

and banking. He cut his political teeth on conditions

painfully topical for us today: an economic crash that left

the young legislator struggling to shore up a failing bank

while arguing for government spending on public works.

Lincoln would surely be intrigued to see the son of an

African man living with his wife, the descendant of slaves,

in his old digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But what

might fascinate him even more, were he to materialize for

his bicentennial, is the extent to which the American

economy has fulfilled and exceeded his urgent vision of

an entrepreneurial, innovative marketplace geared to

upward mobility. The man who once said "I know of

nothing so pleasant to the mind, as the discovery of

anything which is at once new and valuable" would have a

swell time visiting Apple headquarters or touring a

genetic-engineering lab. Among the mansions and

pretensions of our millionaires and billionaires, he would

shrug and say (as he said in 1860),

"I don't believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich;

it would do more harm than good. [But] while we do not

propose any war upon capital, we do wish to allow the

humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody

else."

His stepmother Sarah Bush Johnston organized the home

and encouraged Lincoln to read. Armed with that crucial

skill, he would walk to Gentry's store, two miles away,

where he occasionally found newspapers. In these, he

learned of a miracle under way in a far-off state called

New York. At the urging of Governor DeWitt Clinton, a

great canal had been dug nearly 15 times as long as any

previous American canal, connecting one end of the state

to the other. Attacked and derided as government waste,

the Erie Canal was carrying more freight within a few

years than the entire Mississippi River. Thousands of

hardscrabble farmers and isolated craftsmen -- people like

the Lincolns -- were suddenly able to move their produce

to distant markets, and the boom at the port of New York

created thousands of new jobs. The New York governor

also founded a bank where these "penniless beginners"

could "save a surplus." Their little savings could be

gathered into the capital needed for further economic

development -- an idea, historian Daniel Walker Howe

writes, that "seemed novel at the time" but proved to be a

"huge success."

Lincoln had found a key to unlock the prison of poverty.

Here was an upward path that did not depend on the favor

of aristocrats or the force of arms. This was the vision

that propelled him into politics. In Indiana, Lincoln

experienced the liberating thrill of earning his first half-

dollar, for ferrying a pair of strangers to a newfangled

steamboat on the Ohio River. Later, having reached

manhood, he helped his father move one more time, then

left the farm without regret. He soon found himself in New

Salem, Ill., a riverside village bursting with hopes, if only

its little waterway could be widened for commercial traffic.

With this ultimately fruitless project as his first grand

undertaking, Lincoln began to puzzle his way toward the

goal of becoming "the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois."

The Right to Rise

"He wanted the government to develop Illinois, to make it

a great state in which success would be open to anyone,

poor or rich," says Gabor Boritt, a Lincoln scholar at

Gettysburg College. Self-taught in economics (as in all

other subjects), Lincoln subscribed to the Whig Party's

belief that private investment alone was unreliable for

creating the canals, railroads, bridges, highways and 

navigable rivers required for growth. When he emerged

from the Indiana woods and moved quickly into the Illinois

legislature, Lincoln championed a huge public-works

program and a state-chartered bank to back it up.

This aspect of Lincoln's career was largely ignored for the

first century after his death, until Boritt came along. His

background as a refugee from European tyranny made

him keenly receptive to Lincoln's economic philosophy,

which Boritt eventually dubbed "the right to rise." By 1956,

when he joined the Hungarian revolt against Soviet

communist rule, Boritt already had a lifetime's experience

of oppression: forced from home by the Nazis, close

relatives murdered at Auschwitz, father and brother seized

by Stalin's minions. He recalls the words of the

Gettysburg Address resounding from the radios of

Budapest to inspire the uprising.

Boritt's first book -- Lincoln and the Economics of the

American Dream -- was published in 1978 and has come

to be viewed as one of the most important (if under-read)

works on the 16th President. His Lincoln was a man far

removed from the familiar yarn-spinning charmer of the

cracker barrel: enterprising, visionary and persuasive.

Still in his 20s, as a member of the legislature's finance

committee, Lincoln became a driving force in the

development of preindustrial Illinois.

In this role, he first experienced an economic collapse:

the crash of 1837, which brought on one of America's

deepest depressions. Financial markets froze;

government debt soared; public opinion soured on the

maneuvering of bankers and the schemes of politicians.

At the risk of his budding political career, Lincoln struggled

to save the canals and railroads. Once, when his

opponents tried to force a vote against the state bank,

Lincoln clambered from a statehouse window in a wild

attempt to derail their plans.

Lincoln's argument was a sort of primitive foreshadowing

of today's Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. While

Democrats all the way up to President Andrew Jackson

were demonizing the banks, Lincoln maintained that the

way to save the system was to pump more money into it.

He was convinced that once confidence was restored and

commerce began humming again, the public works --

roads, canal routes, widened rivers and rail lines -- that

seemed so expensive during the slump would repay their

cost many times over. In his folksy way, he compared a

stalled economy to a steam engine and thus summed up

the idea we now call stimulus. At the engine's "dead

point," Lincoln said, even a single turn is "extremely

difficult." But jolt it back to life, and it quickly regains

momentum. Then "all will be well again."

He wasn't entirely successful, and in the short term,

Lincoln's vision saddled Illinois with a heavy public debt.

But he carried lessons from that experience into his far

more famous fights against slavery and for the Union.

Lincoln's presidency worked an unprecedented economic

transformation on the country. For the first time, the

Federal Government taxed income, floated bonds on a

large scale and issued paper currency. The national

wealth -- land -- was leveraged to promote sweeping

social, educational and technological initiatives. Some

ideas didn't work as planned, like the Homestead Act.

Others, like the Morrill Act to create land-grant colleges,

worked brilliantly. Still others achieved their aims only at a

cost of waste and graft, like the Transcontinental

Railroad.

But all shared Lincoln's characteristic stamp of creative

finance, large ambition and spirit of economic

advancement. "I published my book at a time of great

pessimism about America," explains Boritt. "I wanted to

remind people of Lincoln's strong ideas about America

and the right to rise." He continues, "Now the country is in

another difficult period, and I believe the optimistic ideas

Lincoln put forth can once again be central."

Lincoln exhorts us to take risks. Bet on America. But

never lose sight of the goal: economic freedom for

individuals -- the right to rise and prosper. To the extent

that President Obama's controversial stimulus plan

advances that cause, Lincoln would say it is priceless.

But only to that extent.

Of all the places where Lincoln lived, only one remains

essentially as he knew it. It is the home he made with his

wife Mary in Springfield, Ill. The handsome clapboard two-

story at the corner of Eighth and Jackson exudes middle-

class comfort: carved and upholstered furniture, woven

carpets, colorful wallpaper and sumptuous drapes. I

toured it recently on one of the coldest mornings of the

year and couldn't help noticing that nearly every room was

equipped with a radiating stove -- state-of-the-art energy

efficiency circa 1860. When the tour concluded in the

kitchen, my National Park Service guide, Mike McPeak,

noted that this one room was about the same size as the

entire cabin in which Lincoln was born.

It's vain to scoff at such progress as being merely

material. Lincoln's journey from a frigid hovel to a toasty

double parlor was a personal declaration of

independence, his emancipation from poverty's dead end.

The house in Springfield is a reminder that by the time he

left for Washington to save his country, Abraham Lincoln

had fully escaped the prison of his birth. He was a free

man, possessed of a mission to free others.

轉貼自︰

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1877093_1877109_1877111,00.html

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