If you think Obama's a socialist, check out THIS guy...

The right has had surprising success in labeling Barack Obama a socialist, even though he deserves that label about as much as Rob Zombie deserves to be called Mr. Subtlety. How can anyone blast as a bolshie the president who unleashed Larry Summers and Tim Geithner...?

Let's talk about a president who has a much better claim to the S word. Let's talk Lincoln. He was the reddest leader of the 19th century -- and perhaps the most scarlet president we've ever had.

Although many spurious quotes have been attributed to Honest Abe (we'll deal with one infamous example anon), the following quotations are the real deal:

“Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”

That one is particularly interesting in context. See here.

"The legitimate object of government is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities."

Sounds like the kind of thing a proponent of single payer health insurance might say.

"Inasmuch as good things are produced by labor, it follows that all such things of right belong to those whose labor has produced them. But it has so happened, in all ages of the world, that some have labored and others have without labor enjoyed a large proportion of the fruits. This is wrong and should not continue. To secure to each laborer the whole product of his labor, or as nearly as possible, is a worthy object of any good government. It seems strange that any man would dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing bread from the sweat of other men's faces."

That sentiment is the quintessence of Marxism, and no serious personage with political ambitions would today dare to say such a thing.

Is the passage authentic? It appears in Basler's The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, which claims that it hails from an 1847 "tariff discussion." Here you will find an interesting analysis of this passage from a 1904 issue of Peterson's Magazine. Apparently, the words quoted above became, at some point, conflated with the following:

As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

Snopes considers the "corporations have been enthroned" section to be spurious; apparently, it never saw print until 1896. However, Snopes relies on Lincoln scholar Merrill Peterson, who confirms that Lincoln really did write those very socialistic words about securing "each laborer the whole product of his labor."

Here's another reason why I, like Lord Buckley, am a Lincoln cat:

"The strongest bond of human sympathy, outside of the family relation, should be one uniting all working people, of all nations, and tongues, and kindreds."

Come comrades, come rally, this last fight let us face...

By the way, if you are looking for the exact sourcing for the above, go here.

Now let's talk about some words Lincoln did not say, even though they have been attributed to him by many Republicans (including Ronald Reagan).

You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich.
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong.
You cannot bring about prosperity by discouraging thrift.
You cannot lift the wage earner up by pulling the wage payer down.

And so on. The above version comes from a local Republican party chapter, under the heading "Abraham Lincoln on socialism (i.e., the Obama initiative.)" In most previous versions, the "thrift" line comes first. Not that it matters, for Lincoln never said anything like it. Nevertheless, I suspect that conservatives will continue to attribute these platitudes to Abe long after you and I are dead. (For more background on this and other famous fake quotes, see Morris Kaminsky's classic The Hoaxers.)

Can we say that Lincoln harbored genuinely socialistic sympathies? As with many other aspects of that man's life -- such as his views on religion and human equality -- he offered statements open to varying interpretations. People tend to ascribe their own prejudices to the 16th president. People also twist the man's words and deeds for malign ideological reasons. (Some might accuse me of doing the same thing here and now, but I think I'm operating within the bounds of fairness.)

We do know this: Lincoln was a disciple of Kentucky Senator Henry Clay, one of the great early exponents of what modern conservatives call "big government." Clay favored high tariffs, a national bank, and massive government building projects -- including the building of canals and railroads. In the midst of war, Lincoln fulfilled Clay's expensive dream of a transcontinental railroad. Clay also supported left-wing revolutionaries in Latin America and Greece.

Lincoln admired the pioneering British socialist Robert Owen, and he came to know Owen's son, Robert Dale Owen of Indiana, also an avowed socialist and a leader of the Workingman's Party. Robert Dale Owea implored Lincoln to free the slaves -- a plea which resulted in the Emancipation Proclamation.

Lincoln, in short and in sum, favored big government. After all, we would not today have an Internal Revenue Service if not for Abraham Lincoln. He instituted the progressive income tax in order to pay for massive infrastructure projects as well as the war effort. He imposed conscription. The Emancipation Proclamation was nothing if not Big Government in action.

Here's Fortune magazine on Lincoln:

Also leading to permanently big government were the large spending programs and new federal agencies that started with the Civil War and never ended. The federal government's first system of old-age and disability insurance was veterans' pensions, which grew from 2% of all federal spending in 1866 to 29% in 1884. The Department of Agriculture began during the war, as did the Government Printing Office, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, and the National Academy of Sciences--set up in 1863 to seek technological innovations useful for the war effort. The first federal Department of Education wasn't created in 1980, when Jimmy Carter started one, but in 1867.

All these new government agencies and programs meant, of course, more and more government workers. During the war the number of civilian federal employees increased almost fourfold and by 1871 was still 40% above its prewar level.

One of Lincoln's greatest admirers was Karl Marx, then the leader of the International Working Men's Association, as well as a correspondent for the New York Tribune. Here's part of the letter that Marx wrote to Lincoln on the occasion of his re-election in 1865:

From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world.

In typically Germanic fashion, those sentences just don't know when to stop. Here's the even more telling (or at least more comprehensible) reply from the Lincoln's ambassador, Charles Francis Addams:

I am directed to inform you that the address of the Central Council of your Association, which was duly transmitted through this Legation to the President of the United [States], has been received by him.

So far as the sentiments expressed by it are personal, they are accepted by him with a sincere and anxious desire that he may be able to prove himself not unworthy of the confidence which has been recently extended to him by his fellow citizens and by so many of the friends of humanity and progress throughout the world.

The Government of the United States has a clear consciousness that its policy neither is nor could be reactionary, but at the same time it adheres to the course which it adopted at the beginning, of abstaining everywhere from propagandism and unlawful intervention. It strives to do equal and exact justice to all states and to all men and it relies upon the beneficial results of that effort for support at home and for respect and good will throughout the world.

Nations do not exist for themselves alone, but to promote the welfare and happiness of mankind by benevolent intercourse and example. It is in this relation that the United States regard their cause in the present conflict with slavery, maintaining insurgence as the cause of human nature, and they derive new encouragements to persevere from the testimony of the workingmen of Europe that the national attitude is favored with their enlightened approval and earnest sympathies.

No modern administration would dare to emit such words. If only Dubya and Cheney had heeded the sentiments which I have placed in boldface...

And they call Obama a socialist? Obama, the man who robbed from the poor to give to the Wall Street robber barons? Obama, the man who refused to nationalize the "too big to fail" banks? Obama, the man who refused to hold legally accountable the malefic and misleading managers of our financial institutions? Obama, the man who has invited a repeat of Bush's disaster by refusing to impose meaningful new regulations on the world of big finance? He's supposed to be a socialist?

Imagine how Abe the Red would have handled the current crisis...

(By the way, I think that the Heath Ledger makeover looks weirdly flattering on Lanky Linc. Click on the image to enlarge.)