NOT JUST LITERARY:

Twist and Shout: a review of What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President
by Michael Lind (James M. McPherson, The Nation)

The title of this book is incomplete. It should be What Michael Lind Believes Abraham Lincoln Believed. And what Lind believes suffers from a strange case of literary schizophrenia. In the first and last chapters, the author develops the theme that Lincoln was "the champion of liberal democracy" who "continues to inspire people throughout the world." But in the six interior chapters, this Dr. Jekyll Lincoln becomes a Mr. Hyde white supremacist and "lifelong segregationist" who wanted to create a racially homogeneous America by settling blacks in Africa or Haiti and who inspired the ethnic cleansing fantasies of such twentieth-century bigots as Senator Theodore Bilbo of Mississippi. For good measure, Lind also brands President Lincoln as a "profoundly illiberal" executive who justified his wartime suspension of certain civil liberties with "sophistical reasoning and deliberate lies" and whose 1864 re-election was abetted by "massive electoral cheating."

Puzzled readers may be forgiven if they come away from this book convinced that Lincoln's beliefs were closer to those of the Ku Klux Klan than to those of the NAACP--for that is precisely Lind's argument in most of the book. Or perhaps they will conclude that Lind does not know what he is talking about when he maintains that there was no inconsistency between Lincoln the liberal democrat and Lincoln the racist despot.

It's hardly news that Michael Lind is a cretin.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2005 3:15 PM