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PARTISAN REVIEW
Lincoln cult,-so central to the developing war ideology iu America today,
-by explaining "the ever living legend" not in the absolutist terms of
Smith ("Promoted to the purity of legend, with hardly a speck of mortality
left to dull his radiance, Lincoln's life is now the embodiment of, and his
career the irradiation of, pure principle."), but rather in
the historical
context of the rise and decline of a whole society.
("The social revolution,"
Marx wrote, "cannot draw its poetry from the past, but only from the
future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has stripped of all supersti·
tion in regard to the past. Earlier revolutions required world-historical
recollections in order to arrive at its own content; the revolution must let
the dead bury their dead. There the phrase went beyond the content; here
the content goes beyond the phrase.")
The American Civil War, after all, was the way a world ended and a
new world began.
It
was the transition from a world of Emerson and
Jackson and Silas Lapham to a world of Morgan and Grant and Frank
Cowperwood.
It
was the central turning·point of the American experience:
what preceded led up to it, what followed led away from it. And nothing
reveals more dramatically its pivotal character than this anxious return
everywhere in American comment today to the theme of Lincoln and the
war years and "the living legend."
This was, it is true, the year of oracles in American politics, when
faiths were renewed and the turn of events submitted to the spiritual guid·
ance of the national heroes. (At moments in the recent campaign it seemed
that the Republican crowd were still running the Old Railsplitter.) It was
a year of ritual and ceremonial mumbo-jumbo. However, the current invo.–
cations of "a usable past" possess, I feel, a deeper content. Today, when
capitalist society in America as everywhere else in the world is facing
alternatives which are as final as they are fundamental, no one dares to
meet the future without the strength and sanction of the past. The resurg·
ence of historical traditionalism at this point has the special character of
an instinctive and profound movement toward self-preservation. In the
beginning there was the Word-and the Word was Lincoln's. In the begin·
ning there was the poetry, the heroic illusions of a great historical tragedy.
And these today are being borrowed. The dead are being awakened-to
glorify the new struggles, to magnify the given tasks in imagination, to
find once more the moving spirit of revolution.* Hegel once remarked
---.-what has happened to "our glamour," Howard Mumford Jones inquired recently
in one of the earliest and most remarkable of the calls for "a patriotic renaissance."
"Inasmuch as the vaunted conflict among ideologies threatens to be won by the nation
with the greatest belief in its own mythology, I wonder now that scientific historians
have destroyed most of the American myth, what it is that American democrats are to
believe in during the coming struggle....
If
democracy should have to fight, will it be
emotionally inspired by the sound historic fact that the Lincoln administration is sup–
posed to have favored the high-tariff crowd? ... I cannot picture a younger genera–
tion going into Armageddon inspired by memories of railroad grants...."
"The only
war to conquer an. alien mythology,"
Professor Jones concludes,
"is
to have a better
mythology of your own.."
This ideological false-front has become, as a natural matter
of course, the central mechanism in the political theory of such publicists as Max
Lerner, Dorothy Thompson, Allan Nevins, and a host of others. The masquerade
has begun.
