“WE CAN NOT … MAKE THEM EQUALS”
What of Lincoln? Did the author of the Emancipation Proclamation believe in the equality of all men?
The Lincoln Americans know, the father figure with the wise and wonderful wit who came out of Illinois to free the slaves, who would have marched with Martin Luther King—this Lincoln would be unrecognizable to his contemporaries. While as early as 1854 Lincoln condemned slavery as a “monstrous injustice” and bravely took the anti-slavery side in his debates with Stephen Douglas, here is the Republican Senate candidate on the stump, in Charleston, Illinois, on September 18, 1858, after having been baited by the “Little Giant” on where he stood on social and political equality:
I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races,—that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races from living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.14
For a candidate to make such a white-supremacist statement today would mean the end of his career. Four years earlier, at Peoria on October 16, 1854, Lincoln confessed his ambivalence as to what should be done with the freedmen, were slavery to be abolished:
If all earthly power were given me, I should not know what to do, as to the existing institution. My first impulse would be to free all the slaves, and send them to Liberia,—to their own native land.… [But] Free them, and make them politically and socially, our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.… A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, can not be safely disregarded. We can not, then, make them equals.15
Lincoln is saying that a belief in white supremacy is a “universal feeling” of the “great mass of white people” in America. And he shares it. He believed in freedom for all, but not equality for all, other than that black and white share a common humanity and have an equal right to be free. After his assertion “We can not … make them equals,” Lincoln continued:
I have never said anything to the contrary, but I hold that, notwithstanding all this, there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence—the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas, he is not my equal in many respects,—certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual achievements. But in the right to eat the bread, without leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.16
Eloquent, and, in its time, heroic.
At the time of the Dred Scott decision in 1857, which he deplored, Lincoln explained his views as to what the Founding Fathers meant with those famous words in Philadelphia:
I think the authors of that notable instrument 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.” This they said, and this They meant.17
What Lincoln is saying is this: Negroes have the same God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as white men and the declaration of 1776 is a promissory note they shall one day enjoy those same rights. But while all men are equal in God-given rights, they are not equal in God-given talents.
A man must be measured against his time. “[J]udge not that ye be not judged!” said Lincoln in his Second Inaugural. His position on slavery, that it was evil and he would have no part in it, was that of a principled politician of courage. His views on equality were the views of his countrymen.
But if Lincoln did not go to war to make men equal, did he go to war to “make men free”? No. Lincoln went to war to restore the Union after the flag was fired on at Fort Sumter. In his first inaugural address, on March 4, 1861, he offered the seven seceded states the assistance of the federal government in running down fugitive slaves and endorsed an amendment to the Constitution to make slavery permanent in all 15 states where it existed. As he wrote Horace Greeley on August 22, 1862, “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union and is not either to save or destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.…”18
Nevertheless, on January 1, 1863, in his Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln declared free slaves in rebel-held territory, and supported a constitutional amendment to free all slaves. And in his second inaugural, a month before his death in April 1865, Lincoln declared,
Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled up by the bond-man’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, “the judgments of the Lord, are true and righteous altogether.”
Lincoln’s second inaugural could have been written by John Brown. Lincoln is saying that we Americans are being punished by God for having enslaved these people for two and half centuries and having failed to live up to the meaning of our creed. He is declaring the six hundred thousand American dead already piled up as God’s righteous retribution upon us as a people.
Yet the Second Inaugural is not about the equality of all men. It is about the equal right of all to be free, about an end to slavery. Not for ninety years after the Declaration of Independence did the idea of equality—missing from the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Federalist Papers, and from national policy—appear. And then it was in the Fourteenth Amendment and was restricted to the “equal protection of the laws.”
No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
EQUALITY—THEN AND NOW
The Fourteenth Amendment did not mandate or mention social, political, or economic equality. The Congress that approved it in 1866 had established and segregated the Washington, D.C., public schools.19 Twenty-four of the thirty-seven existing states at the time the Fourteenth Amendment was proposed segregated their schools.20 In the 1875 Civil Rights Act, the issue of segregation in D.C. and the states did not even come up.21 In Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), segregation was upheld by the Supreme Court as consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment.
In Washington, D.C., the public schools were segregated until Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned Plessy. But Brown was not based on the Constitution. It was based on sociology. The headline on James Reston’s story in the New York Times on May 13, 1954, read: “A Sociological Decision: Court Founded Its Segregation Ruling on Hearts and Minds Rather than Laws.”22
Not until the 1960s did courts begin to use the Fourteenth Amendment to impose a concept of equality that the authors of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, The Federalist Papers, and the Gettysburg Address never believed in. Before the 1960s, equality meant every citizen enjoyed the same constitutional rights and the equal protection of existing laws. Nothing in the Constitution or federal law mandated social, ra
cial, or gender equality. While the nation by the 1960s supported federal action to end segregation where it still existed, it was understood that inequalities of incomes and rewards were the inevitable concomitant of a competitive and free society.
1963: “LET FREEDOM RING”
In August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial in the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, Martin Luther King rose to deliver one of the memorable addresses of American history. His theme, however, was not equality. He mentioned it but twice, first together with freedom and next when he quoted Jefferson: “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’” The goal of the famous March on Washington was “Jobs and Freedom” and the theme of King’s speech was declared in his opening line: “I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”23 Freedom is mentioned a dozen times by King and repeated another ten times in his closing refrain, “Let freedom ring.”
What freedoms did King demand? Freedom from the “manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination” and freedom from “a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”24
1965: “FREEDOM IS NOT ENOUGH”
In the Senate debate over the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Hubert Humphrey assured the nation that the law being enacted “does not require an employer to achieve any kind of racial balance in his work force by giving any kind of preferential treatment to any individual or group.”25
Not until 1965 did the goal of the civil rights movement shift from an end to segregation to social and economic equality. The great leap forward came at Howard University in the 1965 commencement address, when the freedom King had spoken of was superseded and replaced by “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”26
President Lyndon Johnson began that address by describing freedom as but the first stage of “the revolution”: “Freedom is the right to share, share fully and equally, in American society—to vote, to hold a job, to enter a public place, to go to school. It is the right to be treated in every part of our national life as a person equal in dignity and promise to all others.”27
While the “beginning is freedom,” said Johnson, “freedom is not enough.… it is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates.”28
This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not … just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.…
[E]qual opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough. Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities. But ability is not just the product of birth. Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with, and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings. It is the product of a hundred unseen forces playing upon the little infant, the child, and finally the man.29
Law professor William Quirk wrote of Johnson’s shift of national goals—from no discrimination based on race to full equality of results based on race: “The people never agreed to that. Every poll ever taken shows that 80 percent of the people do not agree with that. Nothing in the Constitution said that. None of the statutes the Congress has passed said anything like that.”30 Johnson had committed the nation to a concept of equality American novelist James Fenimore Cooper called an impossibility in civilized society:
Equality in a social sense may be divided into that of condition and that of right. Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization and is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state. In practice, it can only mean a common misery.31
Johnson’s equality of result would soon be expanded to include men and women and Anglos and Hispanics. In Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), the Supreme Court declared that racial discrimination against whites to advance equality in America was now constitutional and moral. Said Justice Harry Blackmun: “In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. We cannot—we dare not—let the Equal Protection Clause perpetuate racial supremacy.”32
Blackmun was saying that if free and fair competition in our society repeatedly yields unequal results and rewards because one group has been crippled by history, the state must step in to assure an equality of prizes. Yet this concept of equality had no basis in the Constitution, the Fourteenth Amendment as written and intended, or in the civil rights laws of the 1960s to which Congress and the country assented. This idea of equality is rooted in an egalitarian ideology that is the antithesis of what the Founding Fathers and every president before Lyndon Johnson believed—if Johnson believed what he was saying.
Those who would change society begin by changing the meaning of words. At Howard University, LBJ changed the meaning of equality from the attainable—an end to segregation and a legislated equality of rights for African Americans—to the impossible: a socialist utopia. For where outside of socialist ideology is it dogma that “Men and women of all races are born with the same range of abilities.” It is more true to say that no two men or women were ever born equal. Talents are unequally distributed not only within ethnic groups but within families. To impose an equality of rewards for unequal accomplishments is to nullify one of the goals of our Constitution—“to establish justice.” It is to replace justice with injustice.
The only way to achieve equality when a free market, free associations, and free competition fail to deliver it is to use state power to forcibly bring about parities of income, influence, rewards, and riches. This is socialism.
At Howard, LBJ declared that the promise of America’s Revolution was insufficient for his revolution. Noting the disproportionate levels of poverty and income in America, he declared:
These differences are not [the result of] racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequences of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.… For the Negro they are a constant reminder of prejudice. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt. But they must be faced and they must be dealt with and they must be overcome, if we are ever to reach the time when the only difference between Negroes and whites is the color of their skin.33
Did Lyndon Johnson truly believe that all racial inequalities are due “solely and simply” to racism, that if the prejudice of white America is “overcome,” then “equality as a fact and equality as a result” will magically appear, and “the only difference between Negroes and whites” will be “the color of their skin”?
Where is the empirical evidence for this assertion? There is none. This is pure egalitarian ideology. As Murray Rothbard wrote, “Since egalitarians start with the a priori axiom that all people and hence all groups of people, are … equal, it then follows for them that any and all group differences in status, prestige, or authority in society must be the result of unjust ‘oppression’ and irrational ‘discrimination.’”34
The proof of LBJ’s “a priori axiom” is nonexistent. Indeed, LBJ’s speech contradicts itself. He says that unemployment for blacks and whites was the same in 1930, but black unemployment is now twice that of whites. He says that black teenage unemployment was less than that of whites in 1948, but has since tripled to 23 percent. He says that income disparity widened during the 1950s. In short, in the decades when segregation was dying out, blacks were falling further behind. How can improving white attitudes toward black Americans be the cause of worsening conditions in black America?
Aristotle said, “Democracy … arises out of the notion that those who are equal in any respect are equal in all respects.” The Founding Fathers and Lincoln disbelieved in this “notion” of equality. LBJ embraced i
t. And ever since, we have been trying to create an egalitarian society based on that false notion. We will not succeed. The republic will die before we do.
“INEQUALITY IS NATURAL”
Historians Will and Ariel Durant, authors of an eleven-volume series of monumental books written over four decades, The Story of Civilization, arrived at the opposite conclusion.
In The Lessons of History, the Durants conclude: “Nature … has not read very carefully the American Declaration of Independence or the French Revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man.”35
[W]e are all born unfree and unequal: subject to our physical and psychological heredity, and to the customs and traditions of our group; diversely endowed in health and strength, in mental capacity and qualities of character. Nature loves differences as the necessary material of selection and evolution; identical twins differ in a hundred ways, and no two peas are alike.36
Inequality “is not only natural and inborn, it grows with the complexity of civilization.”37 In refutation of everything LBJ said at Howard, the Durants declare:
Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917.38
Again, “To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed.”
That is the point of this chapter. Where equality is enthroned, freedom is extinguished. The rise of the egalitarian society means the death of the free society. “Liberty by its very nature … is inegalitarian,” writes Jude Dougherty, dean emeritus of the School of Philosophy at Catholic University: “Men differ in strength, intelligence, ambition, courage, perseverance and all else that makes for success. There is no method to make men both free and equal.”39
Suicide of a Superpower_Will America Survive to 2025? Page 21
