Posted by Steve M., et al on 7/19/2001, 6:20 pm

Posted by Steve M on 5/12/2001, 12:22 am In recent years, I have gone from being an admirer of Lincoln, to the point where I now believe him to be our most tyrannical president -- the individual most responsible for our bloodiest war. This article by Joe Sobran is an example of the kind of arguments that have swayed me. ~SM McCarthyism and Lincolnism April 26, 2001 by Joe Sobran Old liberals still recall "the McCarthy era" with shudders, as they recall the way Wisconsin's Senator Joseph McCarthy smeared innocent people with baseless charges of Communism, ruining lives and careers with abandon. That's the way the story is usually told, anyway. We still use the word "McCarthyism" for reckless assaults on freedom of speech and thought. Can anyone name McCarthy's victims? How many were there, really? And were they all innocent? The truth is that McCarthy did very little damage. He did make some wild overstatements, but he was dealing specifically with the problem of Communist infiltration of the federal government. During Franklin Roosevelt's administration, the Soviet Union was welcomed as an ally of the United States, and the bloody tyrant Joseph Stalin was affectionately nicknamed "Uncle Joe." American Communists and sympathizers eagerly moved into government jobs; at least two Soviet agents -- Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White -- had Roosevelt's ear. McCarthy wasn't interested in persecuting people in private life; his purpose was to get Stalin's little helpers out of the U.S. Government. And he did strike fear into the hearts of liberals who, taking their lead from Roosevelt himself, had been guilty of flirting with Communism. Despite liberal hysteria about McCarthy's "hysteria," there was nothing for ordinary people to be hysterical about. Civil liberties were safe; there were few false or arbitrary arrests; McCarthy had little power to hurt anyone if he had wanted to. The average educated American -- that is to say, each of us, in his dull and passive moments -- would be startled to learn that Abraham Lincoln was a greater menace to civil liberties than the infamous McCarthy. Lincoln's most recent biographer, David Herbert Donald, observes that the four years of Lincoln's presidency saw "greater infringements on individual liberties than in any other period in American history." Lincoln's most notable transgression was his suspension of the privilege of habeas corpus, an emergency measure that enabled the government to make thousands of arbitrary arrests -- without charges, without trials. Since the Constitution lists the power to suspend habeas corpus among the powers of Congress, Lincoln was usurping a legislative prerogative. McCarthy never did anything approaching this. Chief Justice Roger Taney ruled that Lincoln's act was in violation of the Constitution. Lincoln, said Taney, was exercising executive, legislative, and judicial powers simultaneously -- that is, acting as a dictator, not as a constitutional executive. Lincoln ignored Taney's ruling, continued the arbitrary arrests, and even wrote an order to arrest Taney himself -- one of the most high-handed acts of any American president. McCarthy never did or could have wielded such power. When Maryland's state legislature rejected Lincoln's request for troops, supplies, and money, condemning his war as "unconstitutional," Lincoln ordered the arrest of 31 of the legislators, along with the mayor of Baltimore and a Maryland congressman. He installed a puppet government in the state for the duration of the war. So much for "government of the people, by the people, for the people." In the course of the war thousands of critics of the government were jailed and hundreds of newspapers were shut down. Northerners who objected to the war on the Confederacy were smeared as "Copperheads" and "traitors." All these measures were far beyond the capacity, or the aspirations, of McCarthy. It was Abraham Lincoln, not Joseph McCarthy, who conducted a "reign of terror," with thousands of real victims. So why do liberals still use McCarthy, not Lincoln, as a symbol of political repression? Shouldn't they warn us against "Lincolnism"? Ah, but McCarthy was fighting for a "reactionary" cause -- anti-Communism. And Lincoln was fighting for "progressive" causes -- strong centralized government and (later) the abolition of slavery. If you crack down on liberty for what liberals consider "progressive" reasons, your sins are forgiven. That's also why liberals forgave Stalin so much. As Lenin said, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs. Lincoln once argued that it might be necessary to violate part of the Constitution in order to save the whole. By that reasoning, a man who is sworn to uphold the Constitution could justify violating 99 per cent of it. Joe McCarthy had no need of such arguments, because he never found it "necessary" to violate anyone's constitutional rights. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Read this column on-line at "http://www.sobran.com/columns/010426.shtml". To subscribe to the Sobran columns, see http://www.sobran.com/e-mail.shtml or http://www.griffnews.com for details and samples or call 800-513-5053 or write fran@griffnews.com. Copyright (c) 2001 by the Griffin Internet Syndicate, www.griffnews.com. All rights reserved. ---------- McCarthy, Lincoln, power abuse, measures taken in national emergencies and the big picture (Part 1) Posted by Bill Engle on 5/17/2001, 5:17 pm , in reply to "Revisionist history re Abe Lincoln" My! A lot said about a subject that never was an issue at our church. Your agenda strikes me as strange, as does your reason for wanting to start up the Civil War again—in the 21st Century—and I confess, I'm having a hard time figuring out what this has to do with Community Chapel, and why you're trying to convert the remaining ex-Chapelites who are congregating together on this board into a pro-Confederate political philosophy, of all things. But nevermind that now. Let's address the issue you brought up. The article you promote above starts out saying: "The average educated American... would be startled to learn that Abraham Lincoln was a greater menace to civil liberties than the infamous McCarthy." First of all, I'm not really worried today about the issue of how right or how wrong McCarthy was. Don Barnett used to portray him as a man who was completely in the right, who made no mistakes and never made any false accusations against anyone. A few friends and I in our last years at Chapel came to modify that viewpoint on McCarthy a little: he started out doing the right thing—publicly revealing the communists in government and getting them out—but then after he gained so much power from doing so and got to enjoy it for a long enough time, he did what most people would do: he began to corrupt, and in some cases he used his power to carry out some personal vendettas. This doesn't make communism right, but it also holds true that corrupting and misusing one's power is not right either. This is the modified viewpoint we came to believe about McCarthy. So I give McCarthy a grade of... maybe 80 or 90 percent right. (The viewpoints and deeds of his public life, anyway.) I later came to observe that in all Don Barnett's theories about how government should be run, he appears never to have taken into consideration one all-important fact: the tendency of the fallen human race to corrupt when they are given too much power and are allowed to live in it and enjoy it for too long a time. (I'll elaborate more on this point in a later post.) Now, about Lincoln. Your article continues: "Lincoln's presidency saw 'greater infringements on individual liberties than in any other period in American history'.... Lincoln's most notable transgression was his suspension of the privilege of habeas corpus, an emergency measure that enabled the government to make thousands of arbitrary arrests—without charges, without trials. ... McCarthy never did anything approaching this." One big difference between Lincoln and McCarthy: at the time Lincoln was president, the whole country had just split in half and he was faced with the task of doing what it took to put it back together. Some emergency measures were necessary. Now from the point of view of someone who wanted the South to win and for slavery to continue, anything anyone does to thwart that agenda is going to be looked upon with anger. And when the person in question has to make a choice between the lesser of the two evils and choose the lesser evil to avoid the greater evil, the party who sees the greater evil as something good is going to focus his attention on how evil the choice of the lesser evil was, ignoring how great the greater evil was. But doing that is throwing the whole situation out of balance. It's ignoring a horrible consequence in order to worry about a lesser evil—which, in fact, was inevitable. (Continued)