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- [00:00]
Martin
Oh hey, welcome to gift wrapping.
- [00:02]
Jim Oakes
Whoa.
- [00:02]
Martin
So is Saldana.
- [00:03]
Jim Oakes
Hey, can you wrap these please? Wow. IPhone 17s. You splurged at T Mobile. You can get four iPhone 17s on them. The new center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies.
- [00:13]
Advertisement Voice
It's the perfect gift for everyone.
- [00:15]
Jim Oakes
I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe.
- [00:17]
Martin
Well, it's better than socks.
- [00:19]
Jim Oakes
So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No AT T Mobile. There's no trade ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone too for my aunt Rosa.
- [00:30]
Advertisement Voice
Forget that.
- [00:30]
Jim Oakes
Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama.
- [00:33]
Advertisement Voice
Oh, I got it.
- [00:34]
Jim Oakes
I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with. Hey, where are you going?
- [00:37]
Martin
To T Mobile. The holidays are better.
- [00:39]
Jim Oakes
AT T Mobile get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch plus four lines for just 25 bucks a line. And now T Mobile is available in US cellular stores with 24 monthly bill.
- [00:49]
Martin
Credits and four eligible board ins on.
- [00:50]
Jim Oakes
Essentials for well qualified customers bought or pay plus taxes, fees and $35 device connection charge credits and depends if you pay off early or cancel. Contact Us Finance Agreement 256 gigabytes. $830 required.
- [00:59]
Advertisement Voice
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- [02:47]
Martin
As it happens, it's May 18, 1860 on the third ballot at the Republican National Convention in Chicago, Abraham Lincoln was nominated for President. The seventh point of the Republican Party platform declared that the new dogma that the Constitution of its own force carries slavery into any or all the territories of the United States is a dangerous political heresy at variance with the explicit provisions of that instrument itself, with contemporaneous exposition and with legislative and judicial precedent, is revolutionary in its tendency and subversive of the peace and harmony of the country. The platform went on to declare that the normal condition of all the territory of the United States is that of freedom raw for the choice of the.
- [03:39]
Jim Oakes
Nation, our chieftain so brave and so true. We'll go for the great refuge formation for Lincoln and Liberty too. We'll go for the son of Kentucky.
- [03:53]
Martin
That November, just six years after his party was established, the former Whig Abraham Lincoln won a four way race for the White House, America's first anti slavery President. And after the Civil War, the party of Lincoln would become the party of US Grant and then Eisenhower if we skip ahead to the 20th century and then the party of Reagan if we're to pass over a lot of Republican presidents between 1860 and today when it is now the party of Donald Trump with the exception of the late great Abraham Lincoln, I can be more presidential than any president that's ever held this office.
- [04:33]
Jim Oakes
That I can tell you nobody has done more for the black community than Donald Trump. And if you look, with the exception.
- [04:42]
Martin
Of Abraham Lincoln, possible exception, but the.
- [04:45]
Jim Oakes
Exception of Abraham Lincoln, nobody has done what I've done.
- [04:49]
Martin
So last week I produced an episode about the conservative movement at a crossroads because of this civil war between more traditional conservatives and libertarians on one side and the new right on the other, populists, post liberal intellectuals and more reactionary and racist elements, the so called groipers who follow the white supremacist Nick Fuentes who has a large online following of young men. In that podcast episode, the National Review's Dan McLaughlin argued the modern conservative movement were inheritors of Abraham Lincoln's legacy.
- [05:22]
Jim Oakes
The Republican Party was founded as fundamentally.
- [05:25]
Martin
A classically liberal party. Lincoln was probably the most purely classical.
- [05:29]
Jim Oakes
Liberal figure in the history of the American presidency. Those principles that go back to the.
- [05:34]
Martin
Declaration and the Constitution, the American Founding, they're part of our American patrimony. I think a big part of the.
- [05:40]
Jim Oakes
Whole National Review, Buckley and then Reagan Project was to fuse that with traditional conservatism and explain why the two fit together, naturally.
- [05:50]
Martin
Is the Republican Party today at least the surviving Reaganite elements? Is it still the party of Lincoln? We'll examine that question in this episode, the first of two exploring political lineages in America with historian Jim Oakes, a premier scholar of antebellum politics and slavery and an expert on Abraham Lincoln and the author of Freedom the Destruction of Slavery in the United States. Our conversation next. But remember, you can support History As It Happens by subscribing for ad free listening bonus content and access to the Entire catalog of 500 episodes. Tap subscribe now in the show Notes or go to history as it happens.Supercast.com for everyone who solves crime from their couch, knows more about forensics than their own job, and has trust issues with small town sheriffs. Amazon Music's millions of podcast episodes are calling. Just download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite true crime podcasts ad free included with Prime. Jim Oaks, welcome back.
- [06:59]
Jim Oakes
Good to be back, Martin, as always.
- [07:01]
Martin
I can always find a reason to talk about the 19th century on this show. But you know, before we get to that, as a historian, you're not very online, are you?
- [07:11]
Jim Oakes
No.
- [07:12]
Martin
Good for you. Good for you.
- [07:13]
Jim Oakes
A friend of mine, I once had a conversation with Eric Foner about this. I said, you know, I don't do any of that social media stuff. He said, neither do I. We write books.
- [07:21]
Martin
That's right. So I'm wondering then, because you're not online, how aware you are, if you've been following this blow up on the right, you must be aware of it to some extent.
- [07:30]
Jim Oakes
Yeah. I mean, I look at stuff, but I never put my own two cents in.
- [07:34]
Martin
Yeah. So we have this infighting on the, on the right between, I don't know, the more traditional Buckley conservatives and libertarians versus the so called new Right.
- [07:44]
Jim Oakes
Right.
- [07:45]
Martin
One of my recent episodes, you listen to it. Dan McLaughlin of the National Review is on. We were talking about the history of the conservative movement and what is going on with all the crazies today who've always Been there. As a historian, is it possible to trace a lineage from say, the establishment of a political party in 1856 to today's Republicans? Dan McLaughlin argued that the conservative movement of William F. Buckley and Ronald Reagan, they are inheritors of Abraham Lincoln.
- [08:15]
Jim Oakes
Well, you go back that far, eventually everybody is descended from William the Conqueror. I suppose a friend of mine once was. He wrote a review a long time ago when I was in graduate school of Roots. Remember the Alex Haley book? He said it should have been called root because back six generations you have 126 people to choose from or something like that. And he choose one. Sure. You can draw if you want to do a zigzag line back through a particular idea and get it back to the Republican party in the 1850s, you could do that, but it's a tricky kind of thing. It's the kind of thing actually that intellectual historians repudiated a very long time ago. You know, trying to trace an idea over time that way.
- [09:00]
Martin
It's more of a political argument too. I mean the society is so much different now than it was then. But you know, the conservatives would argue their values, their principles are timeless. Rule of law. So for instance, secession was illegal, just like an insurrection today would be illegal. Unacceptable. Free markets, capitalism. Let's go to the history. You're a historian, I had you on to talk history. Formation of the Republican Party. Like today we see all these factions on the right. The Republican Party was a group of factions when it was formed, right? Or a group of factions came together.
- [09:36]
Jim Oakes
To form was an unwieldy combination of radical abolitionists, conservative Whigs, angry Democrats about the expansion of slavery into the territories and things like that. Anti Southerners. The bulk of the party comes from where Lincoln came, which is the Whig party because the Northern Whigs were always anti slavery. They weren't an anti slavery party and anti slavery wasn't something they put in any of their platforms. But if you look at the votes in Congress, the Whigs vote against the gag rule, they vote against the Mexican War, they vote against the Fugitive Slave Law. And that's one of the reasons I think Lincoln is a little bit naive about the Whig party because all of his northern fellow Northern Whigs are just take their anti slavery convictions as a given and he doesn't appreciate the degree to which they're dragged away from that by the Southern Whigs and other things like that. So they believe in a lot of different things. And because of that, because they are an unwieldy coalition from a lot of different Sources, you can say a lot of different things about Republicans and find people who will justify that observation. You want to find a racist, you'll find racist, especially among the former Democrats who want to keep slavery out of the territories because they want to keep black people out of the territories, for example. That's not what the Whigs thought. But there's plenty of that in the Republican Party if you want to find it. There are free traders and there are tariff people.
- [11:09]
Martin
I was going to ask you about protectionism. That was definitely a Republican Party thing. Later on in the 19th century, early 20th century, I guess any new movement or any political movement, there could be infighting, there's factionalism, but they agree on who they are opposed to. In this case it was the centrality of slavery. The centrality of slavery, yes.
- [11:28]
Jim Oakes
The common ground of all those different factions was hostility to slavery, but more specifically hostility to slavery's expansion in the territories. Right. And as I say, some parts of that coalition were only concerned about the expansion of slavery in the territories. But the mainstream Republican Party that Lincoln comes into the party as part of was opposed to slavery as such and had a lot of things that they thought the federal government could do to undermine slavery and thought the government should actively engage in in policies designed to, as Lincoln said, put slavery on the course of ultimate extinction. He's not the only one who said that. Lots of people use that language about extinction extinguishment, you know, things like that. That was standard talk and it was an activist kind of government.
- [12:21]
Martin
Something that we've discussed in the past is this term abolitionism, that it's wrong just to consider William Garrison.
- [12:29]
Jim Oakes
William Lloyd.
- [12:29]
Martin
William Lloyd Garrison, yeah. I've only read a giant biography of the guy, William Garrison as the model abolitionist. All of these people could be considered abolitionists of a kind. Maybe they weren't immediateists. But the 1856 platform, for instance, the Republican party called for Congress to abolish slavery in the territories. That's a pretty strong platform.
- [12:52]
Jim Oakes
Yes, yes. And their opposition, their two major sources of opposition to this are the northern Democrats who think Congress should leave that issue alone and let the territorials legislatures decide for themselves. And the southern pro slavery politicians argued that Congress had absolutely no power to do that. So Lincoln's position and the Republican Party position is that the government does indeed have the power to go into a territory and say you can't have slaves. Right. So it's not exactly a limited government argument. I mean, there are other aspects of the anti slavery position that are states rights Oriented when it came to fugitive.
- [13:34]
Martin
Slaves personal liberty laws.
- [13:37]
Jim Oakes
Yeah, the mainstream position had always been it's up to the states. There's no enforcement clause in the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution. It was deliberately taken out and therefore it was left to the states. And there had long been an anti slavery position that it was for the states to determine. So you get kind of states rights backlashes in some northern states after the Fugitive slave law of 1850 based on the principle that, you know, the federal government should not be doing this. This is a state thing.
- [14:07]
Martin
So you know, as a historical matter, it probably is ridiculous to try to draw a line from Lincoln to, I don't know, McKinley or James Garfield, he's the subject of a new TV show to Calvin Coolidge, to Eisenhower, to Reagan, to. I'm not saying anyone does this but you party of Lincoln, party of Eisenhower, party of Reagan. Now we have, well, I don't know, the party of Trump. These ideas are out there in this big blow up that's happening on the right. As I mentioned, I just spoke to national reviews. Dan McLaughlin. Reaganism is still very important to him. Lincoln too, but you know, there's still wisps of Reaganism floating in our atmosphere today. But let's go back to Lincoln. He was a Whig.
- [14:48]
Jim Oakes
What did he stand for until 1854? For the first 20 years of his career, he's basically a standard Whig. And that means he thinks government should take a more active role in economic development. It should dredge rivers, it should build railroads, it should build schools. There should be universal public education. He was in favor of a much more as. As the Whigs were in favor of a national bank, tariffs, protective tariffs. So the Whigs were the party of active government when Lincoln entered politics and stayed that way. And stayed that way.
- [15:23]
Martin
What was Lincoln's relationship to capitalism?
- [15:26]
Jim Oakes
I suppose until you get a socialist party in the early 20th century, there is no explicitly anti capitalist parties anywhere. And there are certain elements in American political culture that could be called anti capitalist even if they're not talking about the overthrow of the system. I mean people have made the case that the slaveholders are anti capitalist because they're not the supporters of free labor. Right. And if you define capitalism as free labor or you think free labor is an, is a kind of indispensable part of what capitalism is, then slaveholders are anti capitalist and Lincoln is the arch capitalist. By that standard.
- [16:08]
Martin
Free soil, free labor, free men.
- [16:11]
Jim Oakes
Yes. If you think capitalism is limited government, laissez faire. Lincoln is, is not that, that's not his position.
- [16:21]
Martin
The United States was founded on capitalism, free markets, private enterprise, self improvement.
- [16:27]
Jim Oakes
There are other things, though. The slavery debate injected an awful lot of principles we take to be fundamental into American political culture. And they're still there, like in the 14th amendment or in the 13th amendment. The idea that slavery is a state institution until we get a, an amendment that abolishes slavery everywhere in the United States, that's an imposition that's overriding what had traditionally been a state issue through a constitutional amendment. And then the 14th amendment does the same thing. It says national citizenship is the primary form of citizenship. And every state is obliged to recognize the basic rights that come with being a U.S. citizen. And if you are born in the United States, you are a citizen of the United States. And it empowers the federal government to go into states that are failing to protect the civil rights of people in ways that hadn't been the case before the Civil War. Same thing with the 15th Amendment. The 15th Amendment, it says, you know.
- [17:31]
Martin
You powers the federal government.
- [17:33]
Jim Oakes
Yeah. It, it tells the states they cannot discriminate in voting on the basis of race. That obviously has dramatic effects for the south and that's one of the reasons there's a backlash in the South. But one of the things it also does that is not fully appreciated is that it abolishes all the racial discriminations against voting in the northern states. Right. In New York, you had to have, if you were white and male, you could vote, you know, an adult. If you were black, you had to have $250 worth of property. Right. Some states it was just outright, you couldn't vote if you were black. Well, the 15th amendment abolishes all of that stuff in the North. And after that, blacks could vote in the north as well as the South. So it's a dramatic increase. The Civil War and the Civil War amendments, sometimes called the Reconstruction Amendments, represent a dramatic increase in the power of the federal government over the states.
- [18:27]
Martin
So I'll ask another modern question about a mid 19th century figure. Was Lincoln a conservative in the sense.
- [18:35]
Jim Oakes
That he was absolutely committed to the constitutional order and to rule of law? Sure. Yes. It depends on what you think counts as conservative in the middle of the 19th century. If the issue of the day was is slavery? Which it was, let's say in 1860, and you drew a spectrum of American politics on the French model. Left wing, right wing, right. The right wing would be composed of pro slavery southerners. The centrists would be the upper south constitutional unionists and the Northern Democrats and the left wing of the American political spectrum would be the Republicans. And Lincoln is smack dab in the middle of the left wing. What does that make him? Conservative compared to the radical Republicans? He's conservative, sure. Compared to Jefferson Davis, he's a bloodthirsty Jacobin.
- [19:28]
Martin
Modern labels don't really help us here. What can the second session of the 37th Congress teach us about the party of Lincoln? I'm holding open the book Battle Cry of freedom by James McPherson. I have your book over here too. Freedom National. The second session of the Congress says McPherson, was one of the most productive in American history. Not only did the legislatures revolutionize the country's tax and monetary structures and take steps toward the abolition of slavery, they also enacted laws of far reaching importance for the disposition of public lands, the future of higher education and the building of transcontinental railroads. These achievements were all the more remarkable, he says, because they occurred in the midst of an all consuming preoccupation with the war. So what is this legislative record of the Republicans? Because the Senate, or I should say the Democrats had left the Senate and the House, they were vacant.
- [20:23]
Jim Oakes
Right.
- [20:23]
Martin
What does this tell us about, well, what they stood for in the context of our conversation here about political lineages?
- [20:30]
Jim Oakes
Well again, you know, this is a party that is dominated by its Whig lineage. But it's also important to know that by the 1850s the Northern Democrats had substantially abandoned a lot of the anti statist stuff that they had inherited from the Jacksonian era. So one of the reasons the northern Democrats get angry at Polk, it's a northern Democrat that famously introduces the proviso David Wilmot of Pennsylvania saying, you know, no slavery in the territories we take from Mexico. But they're very annoyed at Polk for having having vetoed a Rivers and harbors bill, that the Northern Democrats wanted to promote economic development. They wanted the federal government actively involved in those kinds. So they have substantially abandoned a lot of their earlier anti government rhetoric as well. Not completely, not as much as the Republicans, but. So that means that going into the Civil War, once the south is gone, the blockage that the southern pro slavery Southerners represented in Congress is gone. So they could do things they had wanted to do for a long time. So you get a Homestead act, right, which opens up the western territories to settlement, rationalizes the settlement in ways that it, it wouldn't have been otherwise. You get a transcontinental railroad. I mean we all know that where are they going to put us? A railroad is a big source of controversy in the 1850s, you know, Jefferson Davis wants. And the pro slavery Southerners want a southern route to the Pacific and Stephen Douglas wants it to come from Chicago. They finally get a Pacific Railroad act through. They get a Department of Agriculture, which I think if you know the history of the. What the Department of Agriculture does in the late 19th century and very few people know it, it's an enormously powerful bureaucrac. They are empowered and successfully manage to order. For example, if a disease outbreak happens among cattle, they order the slaughter of tens of thousands of animals. It's an incredibly powerful bureaucracy that's created during the Civil War. You get the first national banking system, effectively, since it's the second bank. And you basically make the dollar, the federal dollar, legal tender and every other currency that's been flo disadvantaged by that. They set up the land grant college system which produces University of California, University of Wisconsin, University of Michigan. These great universities that come out of this land grant college system that they create, you know, that too had been a source of controversy. The idea that the federal government should, should be in any way involved in creating universities is like, that's, that's new.
- [23:11]
Martin
Not sure Ronald Reagan would have approved of that.
- [23:13]
Jim Oakes
It's not a limited government position in the way that some of the, the famous quote from Reagan, you know, government isn' solution to the problem, government is the problem. You wouldn't really hear Republicans talking that way.
- [23:25]
Martin
So after the Civil War, you already mentioned this, Jim. 13th, 14th, 15th amendments, those are driven by the Republicans. Not every Republican was a champion of civil rights, but by and large the party was the party of civil rights during Reconstruction. US Grant as well, trying to protect black freedom in the South. The Republicans were the party committed to upholding black freedom. You hear this a lot today. I don't say a lot and I'm not sure by whom, but I'll just say some people on the right will say the Democrats were the party of Jim Crow, they were the party of segregation. They're the ones whose arms had to be twisted to break the filibuster in the 1960s to get all. But that ignores the party realignment that took place in the past half century or more. I don't know what you make of all of that, but we could talk about how the Republicans were a big civil rights party after the Civil War.
- [24:13]
Jim Oakes
Tarring Democrats with the the long history of racism into the present is as simplistic as trying to find a direct lineage from Lincoln to Reagan. I have been on panels with historians who have said explicitly said that in the 19th century the Republicans were the party of civil rights and the Democrats were the racists. Today it's the opposite.
- [24:35]
Martin
And historians have said that.
- [24:37]
Jim Oakes
I have, I've heard historians say that.
- [24:39]
Martin
So I don't feel bad about asking my question now. This stuff is out there.
- [24:43]
Jim Oakes
But when you look at somebody like, I suppose he's cranky, but Dinesh d' Souza made this argument a long time ago. Right. The Democrats, you know, the Republicans now are the party of equal justice under law. Justice is blind, no race based distinctions in law. And the Democrats are the ones who keep upholding race as the criteria for whatever. You know, affirmative action, civil rights, voting rights, things like that. It's the Democrats who are obsessed with race and the Republicans who are arguing against those kinds of racial analysis. There's a splinter of truth to that, but it only goes to show why trying to draw direct lineages from one era to another is tricky.
- [25:22]
Martin
What is our most important inheritance of Lincoln's legacy today?
- [25:27]
Jim Oakes
Obviously the abolition of slavery is a Republican Party that's gigantic. It's the most important social revolution in American history. And it was purely a Republican Party project from start to finish. It's the, the raison d' etre of the Republican Party is getting slavery put away. Nothing in American history makes sense without that, since the Civil War without that. But they're also the party that they, they were the party of civil rights, of equal rights. And I think it has enormous practical consequences. But it, it's a more abstract proposition that the Republicans. It's in that 1856 platform that you mentioned, saying that the Declaration of Independence is the picture and the Constitution is the frame. The idea that the principle of fundamental human equality, that all men and women, blacks and whites, are all equally entitled to the natural rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that gets firmly implanted dead center of American political culture in a way that is profoundly significant. Profoundly significant. We're living with that. But there are other things too. To make the anti slavery argument stick, you had to be able to say slaves are not a constitutionally protected species of property, that the slaves are made property by Southern law and Southern law only. And there is no extraterritorial reach of that law beyond the state that creates that, because slavery is a violation of natural rights of natural law. So the ability to say that some things are not legitimately commodities beginning with human beings is also an important part of what we consider essential to American political culture. And it can be trivial, it can be Christmas is too commercialized but it can also be. Health care is a right, not a commodity. The idea that some things should not be commodified is also there.
- [27:27]
Martin
We should never, ever, ever, ever understate or overlook the enduring importance of the abolition of slavery, an event of world historical importance. But post 2020 and George Floyd, I'll just share this anecdote. And also because of the way Reconstruction ended or was destroyed, what I'm trying to get at here is in 2020, George Floyd, I would see memes online. Abraham Lincoln never really abolished slavery. The 13th Amendment allows for that loophole for the prison system. Right. So we still have slavery today. People are still, though, drawing that straight line of white supremacy. All through American history, the meme was, nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. And it's funny, because it is people more on the right who challenged that idea. It was people on the left. And yes, maybe in your profession who went along with that crazy stuff.
- [28:15]
Jim Oakes
Yes, yes, that's correct. I think that became a standard liberal Trump group. I'm on the Upper west side of Manhattan. I used to hear it all the time. You know, New York liberals talk that way all the time. Nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. You had an incident of, you know, a racist cop kills African American, and nothing's changed. You see? Nothing's changed. I have heard tenured professors, African American professors at the University of Chicago, say, we were never emancipated. Do you know what slavery was? Do you know what. What it means to have been a slave? To have, you know, you're. It's illegal to teach you to read. Your. Your marriages aren't legal. You can be bought and sold. It's like a failure of imagination. And it's like, if you say things are different, it means they're wonderful. That's not what anybody is saying. That's not what anybody is saying.
- [29:06]
Martin
Our discourse these days is terrible. You and I usually don't discuss current politics here, but, you know, this does have a historical edge to it. I think it's a shame when people on the left, Democrats, disown Lincoln without having to say, I'm disowning Lincoln. When they make comments like that, you're disowning Lincoln.
- [29:22]
Jim Oakes
They were disowning themselves, too. That's the thing about it. It's like there's some kind of arrogance involved in thinking that you are the first person in the history of the United States to really believe in racial equality. Like, you have no lineage, you have no ancestry. Like, why would you give that up. If you're a liberal, why would you say all of American history belongs to the conservatives? It's always much more successful to claim that. Just do what Martin Luther King did. You know, we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal. Right. You know, you invoke that he had.
- [29:55]
Martin
The promissory note from Thomas Jefferson.
- [29:57]
Jim Oakes
You invoke it, you don't repudiate it.
- [29:59]
Martin
When you were getting into the history profession. And this will get us into a conversation for a bit about the modern conservative movement. William F. Buckley, backlash to the New Deal, hostility to the civil rights movement, at least for a time. 1950s, 1960s, when you were getting into the history profession, conservatives weren't, weren't really happy with Lincoln. Or at least there was a grouping of people who thought Lincoln was a tyrant, not on board with efforts to desegregate the South.
- [30:29]
Jim Oakes
Right, right. That was a strand of Republicanism. But there's this great book by this Straussian at Claremont, Carrie Jaffa, called A Crisis of the House Divided. And it was like one of the first major books on LICA that I ever read. And, and he is pro Lincoln and he represented a, a very powerful pro Lincoln strand in American conservatism. That's still there.
- [30:54]
Martin
I think he influenced Buckley at a time when the National Review was not printing pro Lincoln stuff.
- [30:59]
Jim Oakes
Right.
- [31:00]
Martin
You want to make a dichotomy. You had people who were maybe pro Calhoun and then some pro Lincoln.
- [31:05]
Jim Oakes
Right. The Calhoun stuff.
- [31:07]
Martin
Well, you know, antipathy to civil rights, defending states rights, states rights to keep segregated societies. So I don't see that much on the right anymore, maybe on the lunatic fringes.
- [31:17]
Jim Oakes
But that's why I say, in my experience, since I started writing at Lincoln, conservatives have been much more receptive to what I have to say, at least among historians, not all historians, but law professors are much more open to disagreeing. There's a much wider spectrum of thought in legal scholarship than there is in mainstream US historical scholarship, I think.
- [31:40]
Martin
And so I guess it depends. Depends on the issue. There's race. There's also the issue of Lincoln's war powers, where he was taking extraordinary measures. We discussed habeas corpus on the show, things like that.
- [31:53]
Jim Oakes
Well, for any constitutional scholar, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments are profoundly significant. Profoundly significant. They change the Constitution in some very, very fundamental ways. And the Supreme Court didn't always uphold the true significance of those amend, but they didn't go away. As I said about invoking the Declaration of Independence, you know, you invoke that legacy of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments. And it's a. It's a liberationist invocation. It's about equality and it's about freedom. It's about federal protection of freedom.
- [32:30]
Martin
Is the Republican party today still the party of Lincoln?
- [32:35]
Jim Oakes
There is a part of that legacy. You know, they're coming off out of a political culture in which, especially the north, the Republicans are a northern party, and their. Their opponents in the north are the Democrats, and the Democrats are viciously, demagogically racist. Right. So they get to the Reconstruction and they want to protect the freed people. Right. So they pass these laws in contrast to what the Democrats would say, say, like the Southern homestead Act, designed to get freed people land. It says explicitly that the distribution of this land cannot be based on race. They're erasing race as a criterion because they're coming out of a political culture in which that kind of thinking is what their opponents are all about. So there is a sense in which the modern. Certain strands of the modern Republican Party. Not anymore. Under Trump, it's changed the. The McLaughlin strand that says, you know, that's important. True equality, true racial equality depends on the government not allowing race to be a criteria for the distribution of land. Homesteads, for example, things like voting, eliminating racial qualifications. So the hostility to affirmative action or DEI and stuff like that, some of that is racist, but some of that is a legacy of that strand of the Republican party.
- [34:00]
Martin
Now, principled opposition to those things. I don't think there's really any way to defend Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights act, but he would. He did say he made a mistake. He admitted he made a mistake, but he would have put himself in the principled aisle rather than the George Wallace aisle. So the 1964 Civil Rights Act, 136 Republicans in the House supported it, 27 Republicans in the Senate. Our friend Sean Wilentz wrote a book, the age of Reagan, pages 180 to 187, details the Reagan administration's hostility to the civil rights advances. I mean, today's Republican Party, the party of Trump, is not Lincoln's party. It is not Ronald Reagan's party anymore.
- [34:41]
Jim Oakes
You know, I don't know what to make of the current Republican Party. I mean, there is a way in which Reagan is certainly a turning point in modern American conservatism. It's a much more aggressive repudiation of the New Deal. Anti New Dealism is a strand that goes back to the New Deal. Right. 1934, the Republicans run against the New Deal, and they've been running against the New Deal ever since. I do think hostility to regulation. It's not like let's say the Zoran Mamdami saying we need less regulation, the bureaucracy is too heavy handed and things like that. That's a statist saying we need the state, but the state has to be flexible and it has to be right. Whereas there's a kind of of root and branch hostility to regulation. That's part of the conservatism that is different to the very idea of regulation. Imagine the settlement of the west without a homestead law that basically graphs out the entire West. You know, you look at a map of the any Midwestern state and there's squares, right? And there's squares within squares within squares because the federal government has laid out these patches for purchase, right. It's hard to imagine the settlement of the west without that. And it's hard to imagine the settlement of the west without the US army. Right?
- [36:02]
Martin
Yes. Oh, that's true.
- [36:04]
Jim Oakes
So it's inconceivable that that could have happened. And then you get Pacific Railroad Acts and you get all sorts of government involvement. Not like now, it's not as big and bureaucratic, but it's there. It's there as a strand. And it's hard to imagine American history without that kind of stuff. And like I said, we underappreciate what, what the regulatory apparatus that got set up with the establishment of the Department of Agriculture. It is enormously significant, is enormously for scientific and research purposes in the banking regulations.
- [36:39]
Martin
You can't understand American history without understanding the government's indispensable role in so many of these things.
- [36:44]
Jim Oakes
So you're a settler and you go out and you claim a homestead. What's the first thing you do when you claim your homestead? You go to the office of the government and you ask for a deed. Right. And the government issues the deed. One of the reasons, famous reasons that Abraham Lincoln's father left Kentucky is because it wasn't gridded out. It wasn't part of the Northwest Ordinance, so land titles were unclear because everybody was settling on top of everybody else. You had to go north to get a clear sense of what the boundaries of your of your share or were. Because the government did that.
- [37:20]
Martin
You know. My next episode I'll be speaking to Max Boot about the party of Reagan. Reaganism. The way some people today mythologize Reagan and what they remember about him doesn't actually match the record. You know, the Reagan revolution actually failed in many respects. Just to name one, the federal budget got a lot bigger during I remember.
- [37:40]
Jim Oakes
I remember California first started beefing up the auto emissions regulations because it was so big it could do its own and Reagan tried to overrule it. States rights? I don't think so. The states rights. When you want states rights, you know you're for states rights. And when you don't want states rights, you're not for state rights. Is the Republican Party opposed to the military industrial complex?
- [38:03]
Martin
No.
- [38:03]
Jim Oakes
That's as big as big government gets. We are a nation that has a government, not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed. It is my intention to curb the size and influence of the federal government, federal establishment and to demand recognition of the distinction between the powers granted to the federal government and those reserved to the states or to the people.
- [38:53]
Martin
On the next episode of History As It Happens, we'll continue with the theme of political lineages. Max Boot will be our guest guest and we will discuss the party of Reagan. Go to history as it happens.Supercast.com to subscribe and don't forget my free newsletter. Just go to Substack and search for History As It Happens. Marketing is hard, but I'll tell you a little secret. It doesn't have to be. Let me point something out. You're listening to a podcast right now and it's great. You love the host. You seek it out and download it. You listen to it while driving, working out, cooking, even going to the bathroom. Podcasts are a pretty close companion. And this is a podcast ad. Did I get your attention? You can reach great listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre produced ad like this one across thousands of shows. To reach your target audience in their favorite podcasts with Libsyn Ads, go to Libsyn ads.com that's L I B S Y N ads.com today.