[From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists,
leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial
role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as
part of the great radical democratic tradition.]
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ABRAHAM LINCOLN IS A HERO OF THE LEFT  
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Matthew E. Stanley
February 20, 2023
Jacobin
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_ From Karl Marx to Eugene Debs to 1930s American Communists,
leftists have regarded Lincoln as a prolabor hero who played a crucial
role in vanquishing chattel slavery. We should celebrate him today as
part of the great radical democratic tradition. _

Abraham Lincoln memorial, Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.O)

 

Eugene Debs knew he had enormous shoes to fill — the type of
expectations that could only be met with history and myth. As early as
1894, while head of the short-lived American Railway Union, admirers
began to compare the embattled labor leader to another Midwesterner,
Abraham Lincoln. Hearing Debs
[[link removed]] speak
that summer, former abolitionist John Swinton saw
[[link removed]] in
the Indiana native a “new western leader in the struggle for
labor’s emancipation.” Like Lincoln, Debs was a “foe of
slavery” who championed working people, and his Socialists
represented the “logical sequence” in an emancipatory politics
that began with the early Republican Party
[[link removed]].
A growing body of followers agreed, and the names “Lincoln” and
“Debs” soon appeared side-by-side in the press as part of a new
cultural memory within the labor left.

Debs leaned hard into the analogy. He and other Socialists
consistently reached back to the previous century to frame socialism
as a homegrown political tradition and draw lessons from the Civil War
era — from John Brown
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Phillips
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and, perhaps especially, Lincoln
[[link removed]].
Leading a vigil at Lincoln’s Tomb in the fall of 1906, Debs
proclaimed that as long as capitalist domination and the slavery of
wages persisted, Lincoln’s work remained unfinished. “Slave
power,” he declared from the mausoleum terrace, “which loathed and
despised Lincoln, was no more heartless than the power of capitalism,
which to-day holds the workingmen of the Nation in bondage.”
Although most Gilded Age and Progressive Era Socialists agreed that
the fight against “wage slavery” required a “new emancipator,”
the original emancipator was never far from their minds.

Published four years later, first in the _Chicago Daily
Socialist_ and then in pamphlet form, party activist Burke
McCarty’s _Little Sermons in Socialism by Abraham Lincoln_
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the leftist affinity for the sixteenth president. “We do not claim
that Abraham Lincoln was a Socialist, for the word had not been coined
in his day,” McCarty explained. “We do not claim that he would, if
he had lived, been a Socialist today, for we do not know this.” What
McCarty _did _claim is that Lincoln was a product of the laboring
classes and that, for the entirety of his political career, his
sympathies remained with working people. Although he was not a
revolutionary per se, McCarty admitted, Lincoln nevertheless grasped
the “central concept” of socialism: the primacy of labor over
capital, and of liberty before property.

Lincoln the Working-Class Hero

Most Americans today spend little time thinking about Lincoln, but
they do carry in their minds a constellation of ideas, symbols,
images, and characterizations they associate with him. In his 1995
book, _Lincoln in American Memory_
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historian Merrill Peterson identifies five primary and frequently
overlapping Lincoln “types” within the US public’s collective
memory: the Savior of the Union, the Great Emancipator, the Man of the
People, the Frontier American, and the Self-Made Man.

But Peterson overlooked a critical sixth type, one that’s as
timeworn as the others: the workerist Lincoln. Seemingly from the
moment of Lincoln’s martyrdom, the nascent labor movement presented
him as a workingman, an ally of labor, and a symbol of the
revolutionary proletariat to organize workers and envision a more
democratic future. Freedpeople, black conventioneers, postwar labor
federations, early Marxists, industrial unionists, and interracial
farmer-labor radicals all portrayed the uncompensated destruction of
chattel bondage as the pivotal first step in a wider emancipation of
labor. In doing so they employed (often generous characterizations of)
Lincoln’s prolabor speeches, such as his comments
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the 1860 shoemakers strike in New England, the largest walkout to
date.

George Peter Alexander Healy, Abraham Lincoln, 1869. (White House
Historical Association via Wikimedia Commons)

These evocations of a prolabor Lincoln appealed to working-class Civil
War veterans; attracted African Americans to organized labor’s
cause; and cast immigrant workers with few cultural ties to the United
States as part of a comprehensible domestic tradition led by that most
American of Americans.

Above all, they sought to make good on the implied promise of
emancipation: that labor should not only be legally free, but also
possess enough power to ensure basic dignity if not full-on productive
control. Their interpretation of Lincoln’s “free labor” ideal
was not the compulsion to sell one’s labor on conditions largely
determined by owners — the “freedom” to work or starve. Rather,
it was worker power, secured through some degree of economic
democracy.

The New Deal era witnessed an enhanced expression of that power —
and of Lincoln memory. As historian Nina Silber argues
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Americans broadened
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Lincoln symbol during the 1930s beyond sectional reconciliation and
liberal nationalism and toward anti-fascism and federal power in the
service of common people.

For countless workers, President Franklin D. Roosevelt became a “new
Lincoln” and his New Deal programs a “second Emancipation
Proclamation.” As Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO)
official Len De Caux explained, “Our idea of a ‘new birth of
freedom’ is an expansion of collective bargaining and industrial
democracy.”

Marxists, Communists, and Lincoln

Marxists, in particular, fused this workerist Lincoln with racial
justice themes. While scholars including James S. Allen, Herbert
Aptheker, and W. E. B. Du Bois
[[link removed]] provided
more nuanced assessments of the president — Du Bois famously admired
him as a “growing man” —Communists in the 1930s adopted the
“Great Emancipator” symbol and cast Lincoln as a latter-day foe of
big business, Nazism, and Jim Crow.

Proclaiming “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism,” party
leaders increasingly paired Lincoln with black abolitionists
including Frederick Douglass
[[link removed]], Harriet Tubman
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and Sojourner Truth. James W. Ford, the first African American to be
nominated for vice president on a national party ticket, explained
that the memories of Lincoln and John Brown were crucial to any
interracial working-class movement because they best symbolized “the
unity of Negro and white people.”

James W. Ford explained that the memories of Lincoln and John Brown
best symbolized ‘the unity of Negro and white people.’

General Secretary Earl Browder put theory to practice in his speech
entitled “Lincoln and the Communists
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delivered before an audience of coal miners in Springfield on
Lincoln’s birthday 1936, where he called on workers to revive the
“great tradition” of the abolitionists to counter the new threat
of pro-property reaction. Although Browder acknowledged that Lincoln
may not have understood the problems of the 1930s, he nevertheless
opposed consolidated and arbitrary power and “foresaw the sharpening
of the conflict between labor and capital.” Lincoln was not a
revolutionist, Browder conceded, but revolution remained “the
essence” of Lincoln memory.

Lincoln became within Popular Front culture
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emblem of black civil rights that spoke to nonblack workers, as well
as an avatar for the “common man” (often coded as white) that
appealed to racially oppressed people. He was central to the flexible
memory politics that pervaded Communist-influenced organizations,
including the National Negro Congress
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the Southern Negro Youth Conference, as party rolls jumped from
roughly twenty-six thousand in 1934 to eighty-five thousand in 1939.
While members of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade battled fascists in
Spain, Communists at home arranged Lincoln-Lenin Memorial Meetings.
Popular Front art such Paul Robeson’s _Ballad for Americans
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the Illinoisan as a foe of both class and racial injustice, his
conviction that “a man in white skin can never be free while his
black brother is in slavery” echoing Marx’s famous adage
[[link removed]].

Lincoln remained a powerful leftist symbol through the civil rights
movement. Building off Robeson’s and Marian Anderson’s wildly
successful use of Lincoln’s image, civil rights unionists A. Philip
Randolph
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Rustin
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the Lincoln Memorial as the central site for both the 1941 March on
Washington Movement
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the 1957 Prayer Pilgrimage for Freedom, the forerunners to the 1963
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
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which marked the one-hundredth anniversary of emancipation.

Meeting of the Second National Negro Congress, Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, October 15, 1937. (Pennsylvania State Archives via
Explore PA History)

In recent decades, the Lincoln myth has lurched rightward, along with
US politics as a whole. Today, we frequently get a neoliberal Lincoln
more committed to “diversity” and “equality of opportunity”
than racial or economic justice. At worst, we find reactionary
Republicans constructing Lincoln in their own party image, with a
straight line supposedly running from 1865 to Fox News.

These developments may have drained Lincoln of some of his allegorical
power, even among leftists. But only some. Lincoln imagery has
continued to suffuse emancipatory movements from Pride to Occupy Wall
Street to Black Lives Matter.

Why Lincoln Matters

But where does history end and mythology begin? Lincoln was neither an
abolitionist nor a socialist, and scholars have long debated how and
if he thought about class relations.

Marxist historians including Hermann Schlüter
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Bimba
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and Bernard Mandel
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that although the early Republican coalition included countless
abolitionists, socialists, and artisans who were drawn to the
party’s concern for the sanctity of labor, the party’s was not a
class-based movement. And although these historians acknowledged that
Lincoln was, in Mandel’s words, “much more liberal in his attitude
toward labor than were many employers and newspapers,” they also
argued that he lacked a strong grasp of workingmen’s issues. The
railroad attorney from Illinois saw himself as a member of the petite
bourgeoisie, they claimed, and as a “free-labor
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advocate, he denied the very existence of a permanent wage-earning
class with its own particular set of interests. Eric Foner
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like the abolitionists, understood slavery not as a class
relationship, but as primarily a form of illegitimate power exercised
by one individual over another.

Would Lincoln’s sincere hatred of the Slave Power have translated
after the war to a critique of the Money Power and other forms of
wealth-based domination? Would Lincoln have expanded or attempted to
restrain his party’s democratic impulses in non-wartime conditions?

Although Lincoln was not a revolutionary, this ‘single-minded son of
the working class’ was destined to become part of a radical
tradition owing to his role in the ‘revolutionary’ project of
emancipation.

For the vast majority of leftist memory-makers, such questions have
been of secondary importance. To be sure, post–Civil War Republicans
moved away from the “abolition-democracy
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of Charles Sumner, Thaddeus Stevens, and Frederick Douglass, and
increasingly aligned with capital by the 1870s and 1880s. But part of
the Lincoln myth remained frozen in April 1865, ensconced within the
party’s more egalitarian origins. As Karl Marx suggested in 1862
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although Lincoln was not a revolutionary, this “single-minded son of
the working class” was destined to become part of a radical
tradition owing to his role in the “revolutionary” project of
emancipation.

Put simply, Lincoln’s class position or unformed views on an
undeveloped industrial capitalist system have typically been seen as
less important than how his emancipationist heritage could be
harnessed to animate contemporary struggles. Collective memory isn’t
scientific. It is, to a great degree, usable — the past in the
service of the present. Generations of leftists have therefore rightly
celebrated Lincoln’s instrumental role in the emancipation of over
four million enslaved people, which resulted in the largest
liquidation of private property assets and the greatest relative
redistribution of income in US history.

Of course, the influence of this workerist Lincoln is only as powerful
as workers themselves. Because the stories we tell about the past are
reflections of who wields authority in the present, the popularity of
Lincoln as a working-class ally, a proto-socialist, or even a
revolutionary has always been predicated on social power, ebbing and
flowing in direct relation to drops and surges in labor militancy.

In a short essay published on the eve of the Civil War centennial in
1956, historian David Donald argued that every national politician has
to, at some point, “get right with Lincoln
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By this Donald meant that it benefits any group who hopes to engage a
broad swath of Americans to align their cause with an avatar of human
freedom. Although he rejected a “Great Man” view of history,
Eugene Debs understood the power of the Lincoln imaginary, including
how Lincoln as a symbol — residing in the gray area between history
and myth — might broaden the workers movement and strengthen the
cause of labor.

In summoning Lincoln’s words and images to fuse labor and civil
rights into a “new abolitionist” memory for interracial
working-class democracy, the US left has been engaged in that process
of “getting right” for well over a century. The praxis of popular
memory is like walking a tightrope — between transformation and
tradition, and between mass appeal and staying true to a socialist
vision. But as long as the Civil War era remains, in the words of Eric
Foner, an “unfinished revolution
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the Lincoln metaphor is sure to hold currency among workers. In that
sense, Abraham Lincoln — or at least the associated legacies
embraced by Marx, Debs, and King — must belong to the Left.

_Matthew E. Stanley [[link removed]]
teaches in the department of history at the University of Arkansas._

_Subscribe to Jacobin today [[link removed]], get four
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* History
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* U.S. history
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* Abraham Lincoln
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