An American Life

He was one of the most respected-- and controversial --presidents in U.S. history. Lauded by his admirers as "the Great Emancipator", blasted by his critics as a would-be tyrant, he directed one of the most stunning economic transformations to happen in the West since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and then led a global struggle to thwart the world domination plans of Hitler’s Axis. Illinois native and four-term President of the United States Abraham Lincoln left an indelible mark on America; his impact as a leader and a man is still  being felt more than six and a half decades after he passed on.

The future four-term chief executive was born in what can best be described as modest circumstances on February 12^th, 1889 in the town of Springfield, Illinois. His father, a Civil War veteran, had little education and in spite of his best efforts to provide for his family the Lincoln household often fell on hard times; this forced the younger Lincoln to enter the work force before he was fifteen. But this didn’t stop Abe from striving daily to improve his mind, as he spent much of his free time inside Springfield’s library devouring its vast collection of books on American and world history.

Inevitably, much of the material he most frequently read focused on the Civil War. One of his most favorite such books on the subject was the autobiography of wartime President Hannibal Hamlin; before his 17^th birthday Lincoln had memorized Hamlin’s speeches almost word for word, including Hamlin’s celebrated Gaithersburg Address. As an adult, Lincoln would often incorporate Hamlin quotes into his own political speeches.

When the United States entered World War I in 1917 Lincoln, then 26 years old, enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve. His military career was brief and, to put it generously, lackluster: at one point he even suffered the embarrassment of being demoted to private. But when he was discharged in 1919 and returned to civilian life, he managed to make lemons into lemonade by applying what he’d learned from legal correspondence courses before the war to the task of establishing a law practice in Springfield’s downtown section. And by all accounts he  was fairly effective in the courtroom. What might have been the finest moment of his legal career happened in June of 1926, when he defended a Chicago factory worker falsely accused of murder; using a blend of relentless verbal attacks on inconsistencies in the prosecution’s case and diligent investigation of the circumstances behind his client’s arrest, Lincoln conclusively proved that the defendant had been framed by factory executives who deeply resented the man’s union organizing activities.

That case would bring him to the attention of a liberal political action group which aspired to make the U.S. Congress more responsive to the needs of the everyday laborer; the leaders of the group came to Lincoln in the fall of 1927 and asked him to consider the possibility of running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1928 midterm Congressional elections. At first Lincoln-- whose wife, the former Mary Todd, had been suffering from depression for years --was understandably reluctant to uproot himself and his family from their familiar surroundings. But as he pondered the idea further, he found that it appealed to him on a certain level; in early January of 1928, he formally declared himself as a candidate for the House seat. There was no doubt that Lincoln was facing an uphill fight-- his principal  adversary in the elections was veteran Congressman Stephen A. Douglas, a former Illinois state militiaman with more than thirty years’ worth of political experience and connections to spare.

To counteract this edge, Lincoln utilized the then-relatively new medium of radio appeal directly to the voting public and bypass the largely pro-Douglas Springfield newspapers. For all of Douglas’ political saavy and influence, he had little grasp of how radio could change the business of running for office; Lincoln capitalized on this vulnerability to the fullest and gradually ate away at his opponent’s lead in the polls. In an attempt to turn the campaign’s momentum back in his favor, Douglas challenged Lincoln to a pair of live broadcast debates-- a gambit that backfired in the extreme when Lincoln won both those debates.

By election day the question was less if Lincoln could take the House seat than how many votes he would need to gain it. As it turned out, he wouldn’t really need that many-- in most of the districts that Douglas had been representing throughout his Congressional career, he was so thoroughly routed by his challenger he conceded the victory to  Lincoln just over two hours after the polls closed. It was one of the biggest upsets on the Illinois political scene, if not the biggest, anyone could remember in years. Douglas, embarrassed at the utter rout he’d been subjected to at the hands of the neophyte candidate, retired from public life shortly after his defeat and would not be heard from again for at least fifteen years.

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In mid-January of 1932, just over three years into his term as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, he was approached by former Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Delano Roosevelt and  asked if he might be interested in supporting Roosevelt’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination. Although neither man knew it, this moment marked the beginning of the long, improbable journey which would end up putting Lincoln in the Oval Office a year later. Lincoln  campaigned very effectively for FDR in the Midwest, so much so that he would eventually be placed on FDR’s short list of potential running mates when Roosevelt won the Democratic presidential nomination at the party’s June 1932 national convention in Chicago.

It was fortunate for Roosevelt that he had Lincoln to turn to at this critical juncture in the Democratic Party’s bid to regain the White House. Roosevelt’s initial choice for VP, John Nance Garner of Texas, had the misfortune to drop dead of a heart attack on the second day of the 1932 convention; Garner’s death obliged Democratic leaders  to quickly revise their political calculations as they sought a man to fill the former House Speaker’s shoes in the number two slot on FDR’s presidential ticket. There was little if any argument whether Lincoln should be chosen as the new Democratic vice-presidential candidate; in the run-up to the convention, Lincoln had been Roosevelt’s most vocal and effective advocate in the American heartland, and had also landed a few timely rhetorical punches on the administration of GOP incumbent president Herbert Hoover.

The Roosevelt-Lincoln ticket easily prevailed in the November general elections, taking 41 of 48 states from Hoover and his vice-president Charles Curtis. In their victory speeches, Roosevelt and Lincoln promised "a new deal for the American people" to help them get out of the Depression...

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....but tragic circumstances would leave Lincoln to implement this New Deal without FDR. In February of 1933, one month before the presidential inauguration was scheduled to take place, an unemployed movie actor by the name of John Wilkes Booth tried to murder the new vice-president; Booth, a former Virginia resident and strong supporter  of the Ku Klux Klan, had been enraged by Lincoln’s anti-Klan attitudes during the 1932 presidential campaign and made up his mind to kill the vice president-elect when Lincoln and Roosevelt traveled to Roanoke to thank their Virginia supporters for helping get the FDR-Lincoln ticket elected.

As Lincoln and Roosevelt were being introduced by the Virginia  state Democratic chairman, Booth pulled out a .38 revolver and fired three shots at the podium. The first bullet struck a nearby tree; the second and third shots, intended for Lincoln, instead hit Roosevelt in  the chest and landed him flat on his back on the stage. As a panicked crowd fled the scene and Lincoln called for doctors to attend to the mortally wounded FDR, Virginia state police and FBI agents took off in pursuit of the escaping Booth; they finally cornered him that night in a deserted farmhouse near the Virginia-Maryland state line, where the ex-actor died in a bitter two-hour gun battle with the state troopers. Roosevelt himself would be dead the next morning despite doctors’ best efforts, leaving the Democratic Party confronted once again with the task of replacing a vice-presidential nominee as Lincoln stepped into the presidential role left vacant by Roosevelt’s assassination.

After weeks of raucous debate, Kentucky senator Alben W.  Barkley was named to serve as Lincoln’s vice-president; a veteran Congressman who’d served fourteen years in the House and another five in the Senate at the time of FDR’s murder, Barkley understood the ins and outs of Capitol Hill like few other men could. He would prove an asset to Lincoln not only because of his intimate grasp of Capitol Hill’s inner workings but also because of his appreciation for Lincoln’s distinctive brand of homespun wisdom. The two would function together like a well-oiled machine until health problems abruptly forced Barkley’s resignation in 1944.

When Lincoln took the presidential oath of office on March 4^th, 1933, he did so under heavy guard by a combined detail of Secret Service personnel and FBI agents. No one wanted to risk a repeat of  the tragic events that had claimed Roosevelt’s life a month earlier. In contrast to this cautious mindset, Lincoln sounded a note of take- no-prisoners defiance in his inaugural address, telling his listeners "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself". At a time when most  economic and social experts were convinced that an extended decline for America if not full-fledged collapse was just around the corner, the optimistic perspective Lincoln expressed in his speech was a more than welcome tonic for the morale of the American public.

One of the first major steps Lincoln took to recharge the U.S. economy was to authorize a series of massive public works projects. Few of these projects were more ambitious-- or more controversial -- than the Hoover Dam in Nevada, which was intended to provide electric power for millions of homes across the Southwest and sparked a loud hue and cry among conservationists. There was also a fair amount of grumbling among Lincoln critics on Capitol Hill who regarded the dam as an expensive boondoggle. However, Lincoln’s supporters defended the project as both an economic and infrastructural necessity as well as a  necessary boost for the American public’s collective morale. In the end, the pro-dam side won the argument and Hoover became an integral part of the main regional electrical grid for the southwestern United States.

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Lincoln was somewhat less successful in his next great political battle: the attempt to expand the U.S. Supreme Court from nine members  to twelve. Republicans in Congress condemned the proposal as a blatant attempt by the federal government’s executive branch to exercise what they viewed as undue influence over the judicial branch, and resolved themselves to fight the court expansion plan tooth and nail. Even some of Lincoln’s Democratic allies questioned the wisdom of the idea.

After weeks of intense and at times somewhat bitter debate, the court expansion proposal was quietly shelved and the Supreme Court’s size remained unchanged. In spite of this setback, though, Lincoln was able to gain his party’s nomination for a second term as president at the 1936 Democratic National Convention and later defeat Republican nominee and fellow Midwesterner Alf Landon of Kansas in the November general elections. By then, the Spanish Civil War had begun and Adolf Hitler was beginning his quest to dominate continental Europe. As his  second term progressed, Lincoln would find his attention increasingly shifting from domestic concerns toward international ones; much of his 1937 State Of The Union address was devoted to condemning the savage  bombing of Guernica. In July of 1938, during a joint Anglo-American summit in Baltimore, Lincoln grimly warned British prime minister Neville Chamberlain that Chamberlain’s policy of appeasing Hitler in order to avoid war in Europe would, in fact, end up guaranteeing it and spell disaster not just for Great Britain but for the entire world.

Lincoln’s dire prophecy would be tragically proven right on September 1^st, 1939 when German ground and air forces smashed their way across the Polish border to commence the Second World War. While official U.S. government policy at the time was to remain neutral in the already mushrooming conflict between Nazi Germany and the Western Allies, Lincoln personally and ideologically sympathized with Great Britain, and he now began to use every rhetorical tool at his disposal to try and reverse the isolationist course which Congress had been charting since the end of the First World War. The fall of France in June of 1940 and the growing expansionism of the Japanese Empire in the Pacific only served to lend added urgency to his efforts on this front.

By the autumn of 1941, when the Nazi campaign against Russia  was in full swing, the United States was part of the Allied cause in all but the strictest legalistic sense. And given that negotiations between the United States and Japan over Japan’s involvement in the war in China had reached an impasse, it was just a question of time before the Lincoln administration-- then in its third term in the  White House --walked the last grim mile towards becoming a direct combatant in the hostilities against the Axis. Even as Cordell Hull, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, was continuing to publicly express hope for a peaceful resolution to the tension between Washington and Tokyo, privately he had come to share Lincoln’s belief that war with Japan was unavoidable.

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It was just after 1:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time on December 7^th, 1941 when President Lincoln was notified of the Japanese attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. Lincoln’s  initial shock over the surprise air strike on America’s most important Pacific naval base quickly gave way to blinding rage over what he saw as a stab in the back by Japan; when he convened a joint session of  Congress the next day to ask for a declaration of war against Japan, he referred to December 7^th as "a date which will live in infamy" and denounced the Japanese government as "a pack of thugs and gangsters".  Vice-President Barkley, in an NBC Radio interview shortly before his death, would recall that he actually saw Lincoln start to noticeably shake with fury as the commander-in-chief recounted the details of the Japanese bombing raid.

No sooner had the declaration of war been passed than Lincoln  started taking a series of actions that both worried and angered civil  libertarians. One of these was an executive order calling for the roundup and internment of people designated as "dangerous aliens" by the Justice Department; these were usually Japanese-Americans living out on the West Coast, with the greatest number of them concentrated in southern California. To his great credit, the President would later scrap the internment policy, but while that policy was in force it had  a devastating impact on thousands of American families and caused many of Lincoln’s harshest critics to accuse him of being almost every bit as dictatorial as the fascist tyrants he was at war with. His stance on dealing with pacifist opponents of the U.S. war  effort was hardly calculated to win him many friends either. In the first three months of 1942 alone the Lincoln Administration invoked the 1917 Espionage Act over three hundred times to muzzle individuals, groups, and publications deemed to be engaging in acts of sedition against the U.S. government; some of these invocations involved people who hadn’t done anything more subversive than to assert their rights under the First Amendment to disagree with Lincoln’s national security policy.

The majority of Americans, however, were behind Lincoln all the way in his fight to crush Hitler’s Third Reich, Mussolini’s Fascisti, and Tojo’s militarist empire. One segment of American society had an even greater stake than most in the success of Lincoln’s war policy: the Jewish-American community, nearly all of whom had relatives that were incarcerated in Hitler’s concentration camps. Although the full extent of the Nazis’ campaign to exterminate the Jews of Europe would be largely hidden until the final months of Lincoln’s life, hints of the persecution to which the Hitler regime was subjecting Jews under its rule had been leaking out to the world press and to White House intelligence staff as early as the autumn of 1935. In fact, Lincoln’s first wartime radio address after Pearl Harbor has been credited by many modern historians with having been one of the earliest uses of the term "Holocaust" as a metaphor for the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe’s Jewish population. And throughout the rest of his days in the Oval Office, Lincoln would struggle constantly against ingrained anti-Semitic tendencies among some of his fellow Americans to try and bring the slaughter to a halt.

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1944 was a year of both exhilarating triumph and agonizing loss for the Lincolns. In June of that year President Lincoln’s oldest son Robert Todd, a U.S. Army infantry captain serving in Europe, was given the Distinguished Service Cross for heroism at Normandy; barely a few weeks after Robert received his medal, his brother Thomas(better known to family and friends as "Tad") was killed by Japanese anti-aircraft fire over the Pacific while flying an air support mission for Douglas MacArthur’s island-hopping campaign. He easily gained nomination for a fourth presidential term at the 1944 Democratic National Convention, but had to do so without his longtime right-hand man at his side; just two weeks before the convention opened, medical troubles forced Vice-President Alben W. Barkley to tender his resignation and compelled the incumbent president to rush to find a new running mate.

The task of filling Barkley’s shoes went to Harry S. Truman, a Missouri congressman who’d campaigned extensively on Lincoln’s behalf in the Midwest in 1940 and also headed a Capitol Hill subcommittee on curbing wasteful practices in the U.S. war effort. During Lincoln’s third term in the White House Truman had been one of the president’s strongest allies in Congress; now, as Lincoln’s new vice-president, he would play a critical role in shaping U.S. domestic and foreign policy over the final months of Lincoln’s tenure in the Oval Office. One of Truman’s most important responsibilities in his term as vice president was to work with Lincoln in setting up the groundwork for what would eventually become the United Nations.

On April 14^th, 1945 Truman accompanied President and Mrs. Lincoln to the Ford Majestic Theater in Landover, Maryland for a special VIP screening of the Marx Brothers comedy film Our British Cousin. Midway through the second reel, Truman saw Lincoln grasp the side of his head and groan "I’ve got a terrible headache" before he collapsed onto the floor beside his seat; the vice-president frantically summoned doctors to Lincoln’s side, but there was nothing they could do for the chief executive. At 3:24 AM on April 15^th, President Lincoln was pronounced dead at Bethesda Naval Hospital of a cerebral hemorrhage. Half an hour later Harry S. Truman was sworn in as the 33^rd President of the United States.

At his first press conference as commander-in-chief, Truman said of his reaction to Lincoln’s passing: "I felt as if the moon and the stars had fallen on me." All across the country, and the world, there were millions of people expressing similar sentiments. One longtime Lincoln supporter was so distraught by the news he committed suicide  by jumping from the roof of the building that had once housed the 32^nd President’s law office. In London and Moscow, Lincoln’s wartime allies lowered flags to half-mast in tribute to his contribution to the final Allied victory over the Third Reich.

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Lincoln was laid to rest in Springfield, Illinois on April 22nd 1945 after three days lying in state in the Capitol Rotunda and four more days being carried from Washington, D.C. to Springfield aboard a funeral train whose passing drew crowds of thousands everywhere that it went. By the time Lincoln’s casket had been lowered into his grave,  Russian troops were fighting the remnants of the Wehrmacht amid the ruins of Berlin and American forces were launching their last great campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific. Just ten days after the funeral, the Germans surrendered Berlin to the Red Army.

Mrs. Lincoln, already devastated by the loss of Tad and the deaths of Tad’s brothers Willie and Edward early in Lincoln’s third term at the White House, was left irreversibly broken psychologically by her husband’s demise. At the time of Japan’s final surrender in August of 1945, Robert Todd-- the sole survivor among her four sons-- found it necessary to commit her to a psychiatric hospital in California, where she would remain until her own death in 1975. Robert Todd would remain in the military until 1980, serving in various attaché capacities at U.S. embassies in Europe and Asia as well as a stint as instructor at West Point; he died in 1987. Robert was buried alongside his parents.

Today, as another Illinois man occupies the White House, Lincoln’s social and political legacy remains hotly debated. On the one hand a nationwide movement has lobbied for decades to have his birthday made into a national holiday to honor his achievements in ending the Great Depression, improving the lives of less fortunate Americans, turning back the Axis threat to American national security during the Second World War, and laying the groundwork for Truman’s 1947 executive order desegregating the U.S. armed forces. But on the other hand, critics of the Lincoln Administration-- mostly conservatives --suggests that Lincoln often overstepped the bounds of his authority as commander-in-chief and his massive investment in social programs may have sown the first seeds for the ballooning federal deficit and swollen bureaucracy that have plagued subsequent chief executives. But regardless of where  one stands on the Lincoln years, there is no dispute that he made anenormous impact on America and the world.