[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 32 (Tuesday, February 21, 1995)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E390-E391]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                         WORK IS THE MAIN THING

                                 ______


                           HON. DUNCAN HUNTER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                       Tuesday, February 21, 1995
  Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to call the attention of the 
House to an article by Mr. Lewis Lehrman that appeared in the Wall 
Street Journal on Friday, February 10. In the spirit of President's 
Day, Mr. Lehrman's article on Abraham Lincoln is something I believe 
that we as an institution should remember about a man who has taught us 
so much. I submit Mr. Lehrman's article for the Record.
             [From the Wall Street Journal, Feb. 10, 1995]

                         Work Is the Main Thing

                         (By Lewis E. Lehrman)

       Abraham Lincoln, whose birthday we celebrate on Sunday, is 
     generally remembered for winning the Civil War and freeing 
     the slaves. He should be. But the great lost truth about our 
     16th president is that during most of his political career he 
     focused, not on slavery, but on a policy for economic growth 
     and equal opportunity for the new nation. As Lincoln 
     explained over and over, slavery was an involuntary economic 
     exchange of labor, based on coercion; and, therefore, it was 
     theft. Slavery, in short, was the antithesis of free labor, 
     and thus Lincoln opposed it on moral and economic principle.
       One of the hidden strengths of Lincoln's political 
     philosophy was its grounding in a thorough grasp of economic 
     theory and policy. That Mr. Lincoln had a coherent economic 
     philosophy is one of the most obvious facts that emerges from 
     Roy Basler's definitive 11-volume edition of the 16th 
     president's original writings, speeches and state papers. 
     Anyone who doubts this should read Gabor Boritt's 
     pathbreaking book on ``Lincoln and the Economics of the 
     American Dream.''
       Though Jeffersonian populist in sentiment, Mr. Lincoln's 
     economics were, paradoxically, Hamiltonian in policy. We can 
     see this when, on his way to Washington in early 1861, he 
     declared in Philadelphia, ``I have never had a feeling 
     politically that did not spring from the sentiment embodied 
     in the Declaration of Independence.'' This idea he later 
     vindicated at Gettysburg in 1863 by upholding ``a new birth 
     of freedom'' in an America ``dedicated to the proposition 
     that all men are created equal.'' One year later he explained 
     to Ohio soldiers visiting the White House that the Civil War 
     itself was a struggle to create ``an open field and a fair 
     chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that 
     you may all have equal privileges in the race of life. ***''


                        equality of opportunity

       Lincoln's equality was equality of opportunity. He denied 
     explicitly that American equality was equality of result. In 
     1857 at Springfield, he said: ``I think the authors [of the 
     Declaration] intended to include all men, but they did not 
     intend to declare all men equal in all respects. They did not 
     mean to say all were equal in color, size, intellect, moral 
     developments, or social capacity. They defined with tolerable 
     distinctness, in what respects they did consider all men 
     created equal--equal in certain inalienable rights, among 
     which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.''
       He also opposed direct federal taxation, except by 
     necessity of war, because, as he said, ``the land must be 
     literally covered with assessors and collectors, going forth 
     like swarms of locusts, devouring every blade of grass. ***'' 
     Like Alexander Hamilton, he preferred a tariff because, 
     Lincoln suggested, customs collectors on the coast would do 
     less harm to the people than tax collectors roaming their 
     neighborhoods.
       He believed that government should be pro-labor by being 
     pro-business; thus for 20 years, he advocated government help 
     in creating canals, railroads, banks, turnpikes and other 
     public institutions needed to integrate a free national 
     market, to increase opportunity and social mobility, and to 
     make the American economy more productive. As the economic 
     historian Bray Hammond has noted, Lincoln was also a 
     sophisticated student of banking and monetary policy, arguing 
     throughout his political career that ``no duty is more 
     imperative on government, than the duty it owes the people of 
     furnishing them a sound and uniform currency.''
       His economic philosophy, above all, was based upon ``his 
     patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people.'' 
     He was an authentic populist. But he saw no necessary 
     conflict between labor and capital, believing them to be 
     cooperative in nature. Only cooperation could, in a society 
     of free labor, produce economic growth and increasing 
     opportunity for all. Lincoln argued that capital was, itself, 
     the result of the free labor of mind and muscle. People were 
     the most important resource, not wealth. In fact this idea 
     was so important that President Lincoln argued in his first 
     annual message of 1861 that ``labor is prior to, and 
     independent of capital. Capital is the fruit of labor, and 
     could never have existed if labor had not first existed, 
     Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as 
     any other rights.''
       He went even further and, once and for all, defined the 
     essence of the American dream: ``There is not, of necessity, 
     any such thing as the free hired laborer being fixed to that 
     condition for life. . . . The prudent, penniless beginner in 
     the world labors for wages a while, saves a surplus with 
     which to buy tools or land for himself; than labors on his 
     own account for a while, and at length hires another new 
     beginner to help him. This is the just, and generous, and 
     prosperous system, which opens the way to all--gives hope to 
     all, and . . . energy, and progress, and improvement of 
     conditions to all.''
       [[Page E391]] Born poor, Mr. Lincoln was probably the 
     greatest of truly self-made men, believing that ``work, work, 
     work is the main thing.'' His economic policy was designed 
     not only ``to clear the path for all,'' but to spell out 
     incentives to encourage entrepreneurs to create new products, 
     new wealth, and new jobs. He himself had applied for and 
     obtained a patent, declaring in 1859 the patent and copyright 
     protection of intellectual property to be one of the greatest 
     incentives to innovation of Western civilization.
       While today many Americans would dispute some of Mr. 
     Lincoln's economic policies, it is manifestly true that his 
     proposition--based on the right of every American to rise on 
     his or her merits--defined the colorblind American dream of 
     Martin Luther King. ``I want every man to have the chance,'' 
     Lincoln announced in New Haven in March 1860. ``And I believe 
     a black man is entitled to it . . . when he may look forward 
     and hope to be a hired laborer this year and the next, work 
     for himself afterward, and finally to hire men to work for 
     him! That is the true system.''
       This was Lincoln's American system, where government 
     fosters growth, where equal opportunity leads to social 
     mobility, where intelligence and labor lead to savings and 
     entrepreneurship. The black abolitionist Frederick Douglass 
     pronounced a fitting tribute when he said of President 
     Lincoln that he was ``the first great man that I talked with 
     in the United States freely, who in no single instance 
     reminded me of the difference of color.'' He attributed 
     Lincoln's open attitude to the fact that he and Lincoln were 
     both, in Douglass's phrase, ``self-made men.''
       Lincoln's economic legacy has had a powerful effect on 
     world history. Without our 16th president there would have 
     been separate slave states and free states; and thus no 
     integrated North American economy in which emerged the most 
     powerful, free-market, commercial civilization the world has 
     ever known. Without pre-eminent American industrial power--
     which Lincoln self-consciously advocated--the means would not 
     have been available to contain Imperial Germany in 1917 as it 
     reached for European hegemony. Neither would there have been 
     a national power strong enough to destroy its global 
     successor, Hitler's Nazi Reich in 1945, nor to crush the 
     aggressions of Imperial Japan. And, in the end, there would 
     have been no world power to oppose and overcome the Soviet 
     Communist empire during the second half of our century. World 
     conquest--based on the invidious distinctions of race and 
     class, the goal of the malignant world powers of our era--was 
     prevented by the force and leadership of a single country, 
     the perpetual union of the American states.


                               The Enigma

       Hovering over the whole of this history, there lingers 
     still the enigma of the private man and the shadow of his 
     personality. We scrutinize Lincoln; but we see him through a 
     glass darkly. We mine his papers, sap the memoirs left by 
     those who knew him, plumb his personal relationships. But he 
     escapes us.
       Surely we know about his humble parents, his lack of formal 
     education, his discreet but towering ambition. But we wonder 
     that, unlike the Adamses, the Roosevelts, the Kennedys, he 
     left no descendants to carry on his legacy of great deeds. It 
     is as if, like a luminous comet, he thrust himself in front 
     of our eyes, the eyes of the world--for a brief moment--then 
     to dissolve into the vasty deep of the cosmos from which he 
     came.
       This archetypal American, born poor of the South in 
     Kentucky, elected of the North from Illinois--his 
     professional achievement the very epitome of the American 
     dream--this man Lincoln is the elusive inspiration we should 
     be looking for as we commemorate his birth, 186 years ago, on 
     Feb. 12, 1809.
     

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