Talk:Forced into Glory

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Ha, wow...

This article's tone violates WP:NPOV in one of the worst ways possible. —ᚹᚩᛞᛖᚾᚻᛖᛚᛗ (ᚷᛖᛋᛈᚱᛖᚳ) 02:29, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm sure the wording of the article can be improved in detail, but I think it roughly covers the situation in which rather few historians take this book very seriously, since it doesn't judge Lincoln realistically according to the context of his period. For example, it's useless to beat up on Lincoln for not being an immediatist abolitionist, since no immediatist abolitionist could have been elected president of the US in 1860, and Lincoln was pretty much the closest thing to an immediatist abolitionist which had a realistic chance of being elected (the fact that he had been a Whig rather than a Free-Soiler in 1852 was part of why he won the Republican Party nomination). Similarly, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates Lincoln expressed just about the minimum amount of racism that was necessary for him to be a realistic candidate for senator from Illinois in 1858 (some might say that he expressed less than the necessary minimum, since he lost that election). And much as we might find it distasteful now, blackface minstrelsy was the prevailing form of popular entertainment of the day, so it's pointless to obsess over Lincoln attending a show and laughing at it (along with hundreds of thousands of others at the time). Etc., etc. To put it another way, Frederick Douglass supported Lincoln's candidacy in 1860 (he knew that Lincoln hated slavery, which none of the other significant presidential candidates in 1860 did), and who is Lerone Bennett, Jr. to say that he understands the needs of Blacks in those years, and the realistically-available possibilities for meeting such needs, better than Frederick Douglass did? It's perfectly reasonable to resent traditional accounts according to which Blacks were merely passive recipients of emancipation bestowed from above as a beneficent favor by the great white father in Washington, and to seek to set the record straight on that point, but the book as a whole seems to contain many arguments which are not too reasonable... AnonMoos (talk) 01:39, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Oh I know, you're right about everything you said. I just feel that the article's tone does nothing but discredit the contents of the book (which, from what I can tell, would be accurate to do, in all truthfulness), but that's not so much for Wikipedia's place to do, ya know? More information about the book, in addition to the academic criticism (backed up by the fact that the book attempts to put forth misconstrued or wrongfully-interpreted history), would be the best bet. —ᚹᚩᛞᛖᚾᚻᛖᛚᛗ (ᚷᛖᛋᛈᚱᛖᚳ) 08:50, 27 March 2009 (UTC)

Interesting article

About how Bennett's book has been embraced by neo-Confederates and even white racists here: [1]... -- AnonMoos (talk) 02:43, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

David M. Potter comment

In The Impending Crisis: 1848-1861 by David M. Potter with Don E. Fehrenbacher, he comments on a 1968 Ebony magazine article by Lerone Bennett Jr. which was a precursor to the book:

"The major objection to concluding simply that Lincoln, like Douglas, was a `white supremacist' is not that the conclusion is literally false, but that a categorization so loose that it fits Douglas as well as it fits Lincoln does not say very much"

Stephen A Douglas saw no moral issue with the enslavement of blacks (who in his view were clearly inferior), and he sometimes committed political errors because he had a very difficult time understanding how a politician of goodwill who was not a "fanatical" abolitionist could have any legitimate concern with slavery. For Lincoln, slavery was a moral issue from start to finish... AnonMoos (talk) 23:24, 2 June 2018 (UTC)

Balance: Conflict between Lincoln critics like Bennett, and critics of those critics

Moved from User talk:SMcCandlish § Forced into Glory

Your actual edits to the article seem to be OK, as far as I can tell now, but your edit summaries contained some semi-inflammatory and pointless remarks. I'm not sure that anybody cares about Bennett's "tone"[sic] -- what they care about is that he's basically incapable of evaluating things within their historical context. Also, it's interesting that his book has been embraced by neo-Confederates and white supremacists. I wonder if you read some of the previous comments at Talk:Forced into Glory? AnonMoos (talk) 13:45, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

I'm not interested in what the drive-by commentary is; I actually read the book, and other scholarship in the area. Have you? The majority of editors at that article have likely read nothing but reviews of the book, most of which were written by Bennett's opponents (whose work was criticized by him in great detail and for good reasons). It's not "interesting" that his book has been embraced by X, any more than Hitler liking cake is interesting, or a bad reflection on cake. It's the oldest fallacy in the book.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:17, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

The category of "Bennett's opponents" is something that you basically invented and is not particularly useful or interesting. They're professional historians who go about their work on various topics, and only devote a very small fraction of their time to Bennett. Claiming that 1950's physicists defined themselves as "Velikovsky's opponents" would be just as inaccurate and pointless. If you ever incorporate the loose, inaccurate, and semi-inflammatory language you use in your edit summaries and on this page into your actual edits on the article itself, then you will probably find yourself being quickly reverted for very good reason. AnonMoos (talk) 21:27, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

Um, the article has – and had before I ever touched it – an entire paragraph beginning "Bennett's critics ...", so no I did not "basically invent" anything. Most currently/recently active "Lincoln aficionado" historians like Foner have written scathing reviews of FiG; most of them had also already had their material specifically criticized in FiG in great detail; various other reviewers are less critical and have no self-defensive reason (though some may have a patriotic doctrine-defensive one) to skew their reviews; yet our article gives WP:UNDUE weight to the critics like Foner who were previously criticized by Bennett in FiG. It has nothing to do with exactly what percentage of someone's output is Lincoln-praising work versus other historical biography. And comparison to the advancement of a hard science like physics is a false analogy. I have no idea why you'd say something genuinely inflammatory like your closing sentence, as if someone here since 2005 somehow doesn't know the difference between encyclopedia content, and editorial talk and edit-summary rationales – or needs to receive some kind of WP:OWNish threat in that regard. It'd be easy to take that as deliberate escalation instead of collaborative consensus building, but I'm going to instead assume it was just a heat-of-the-moment thing. None of us are robots or Vulcans, after all.

What really needs to happen at this article is a separate section on the dispute between Bennett and other Lincoln critics versus more Lincoln-praising "traditional Lincoln narrative" historians. This is a research and doctrinal dispute within the field, and one about which material has actually been written. Then have a separate section on independent critical response to the book (i.e., by people who have not published their own Lincoln books!). Foner, McPherson, Morel, and Dirck are firmly primary sources, not neutral reviewers, when it comes to Bennett; they have a vested reputational and fiduciary interest in discrediting him. You should agree with this distinction regardless whether you think Foner et al. or Bennett are in the right about Lincoln. This isn't about who is right (WP:TRUTH, WP:GREATWRONGS), it's about (perhaps unwitting) misuse of source material to effectively pick a side in a real-world dispute among professional authors of reputably published source material within a field. In particular, the treatment of Dirck's review as if it is independent, by excluding it from "Bennett's critics, including ..." is extremely misleading of the reader, since Dirck is also a major Lincoln-praising book author. It's just not right for us to treat opposing and criticized authors as typical academic book reviewers in the sense that our readers expect. We should not forget (or pretend to forget) that academia is highly politicized. We should approach this the same way we do other internecine academic-consensus disputations in other fields.

PS: We may have similar problems with Woodrow Wilson and women's suffrage, though I have not looked deeply at our coverage. He was largely a blockade to it, until Congress forced his hand, making it clear that a veto by him would be overridden. WP should not be helping to perpetuate the "Wilson got American women the right to vote" myth. This is not DeificationPedia. :-)
 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:22, 11 November 2019 (UTC)

The fact that you're insensitive to the difference between the word "opponents" and the word "critics" is part of the problem here. The word "opponents" carries a connotation that that such individuals define themselves in opposition to X, while the word "critics" has no such connotation. They're professional historians who spend a very small amount of their time on Bennett. They also don't think of themselves as "Lincoln-praisers" but as historians of the Civil War era and surrounding years. Your use of the word "fiduciary" unfortunately implies a rather strange conspiracy theory. If you try to introduce such a conspiracy theory into this article, then you'll basically be on the same level as persons who try to insert WP:FRINGE material into articles. Also, Bennett is not particularly a professional historian as I understand it... AnonMoos (talk) 06:32, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

The fact that you're assuming "insensitivity" says much more, as does this obvious straw man and ad hominem of suggesting a conspiracy theory, a phrase you don't seem to actually understand. (Nor do you seem to understand what "opponent" means, either, for that matter. E.g., I'm an opponent of Trump remaining in the White House, but I certainly do not "define myself" by that position.) As I already covered in detail at bullets 7 and 8 below, it's clearly demonstrable that Lincoln scholarship has coalesced into factions, about which RS have been writing for some time.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:04, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Some additional stuff to work into this article:

• I think we're all aware of WP:CONTROVERSY: We describe the controversy and its sides, quoting or paraphrasing as necessary for balanced treatment; we don't give the article over to one side of the debate.
• Even some curricula for American history education seem to be getting this right, and include the views of Bennett, even DiLorenzo, not just those of McPherson and company [2].
• Various reviews in mainstream, major publications are also going to be critical or skeptical, but they'll be so with more credibility (not being side subjects of the book itself), and with more balance. A good example is Steve Chapman's in the Chicago Tribune (which took under 5 seconds to find). It actually says pretty much all the critical things our article mentions (i.e., can be used as a drop-in replacement citation instead of Dirck, who should move to the material on in-field critics/dispute) while also conceding various important points that Bennett got right.
• The principal criticism toward the book (from other than academics with their own competing Lincoln books) isn't that it's an attack or factually incorrect in its details, but that it sometimes misapplies modern standards of how to define racism to an earlier era. This is something pretty much all the critics agree on (including ones essentially independent of the subject), so it's not a criticism about which Wikipedia needs to hedge much. Most or all of the other criticisms, however, are limited to particular critics and thus need to be attributed directly to them.
• Another thing we need in there is details on support Bennett's analysis gets from some other historians and political scientists, including Michael Lind (U. of Texas at Austin, What Lincoln Believed: The Values and Convictions of America's Greatest President), Stephanie McCurry (Columbia U.), and Howard Zinn (Boston U.), among others.
• The book has been cited in at least 162 journal articles (not always positively, and not always in notable journals, of course. But it's worth looking into, by someone with access to a full-text journal search site.
• When in-the-same-field academics (with their own highly praising Lincoln books or online equivalents) title their "reviews", their attempts at rebuttal, with things like "Lincoln the Devil" (McPherson, New York Times Book Review, 2000), and "Great Emancipator or Grand Wizard?" (Steers, of the obviously one-sided AbrahamLincolnOnline.org), and "Emancipation Deniers Target Lincoln’s Reputation" (Allen C. Guelzo, Gettysburg College, op-ed in Wall Street Journal [3]), they're childishly mischaracterizing Bennett's views in a transparent straw man fallacy. Guelzo in particular has made up a fake and patently dishonest label under which to shove Bennett, Zinn, and others. There is no doubt that there's an ideological "opponents" camp, and that it is a camp set up in opposition to another camp. We are really obviously not in a position to treat them as neutral and reliable; they're impassioned opinion pieces, and are the other side of the real-world dispute we're supposed to be neutrally describing. Their orthodoxy, virtually unquestioned for generations, is being challenged and they're clearly pissed off.
• Not only is something ideological going on, it's been going on a long time and The Chronicle of Higher Education makes no bones about it. In their review of Steven Spielberg's Lincoln (2012, with Daniel Day Lewis), they not only observe that it's a Hollywood "challenge[ to] a decades-long scholarly, if not popular, vision of [Lincoln] as halfhearted and reluctant in his efforts to eradicate slavery", they also call out to Bennett's book, in the same paragraph as analysis of the civil-rights movement's ambivalence toward Lincoln and the middling results of his version of emancipation.[4] I.e., BBC is providing several forms of context, which our article sorely lacks.
• And we really need some non-American sources on this, for less myopic context. This BBC News piece [5] puts Bennett's work in the same context as Lincoln re-examination by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Harvard) and Donald Yacovone (Harvard), as well as the culturally broader context of post-Obama American society and of the Lincoln bicentennial. Some key quoted material: "But amid the commemorations, it is easy to forget that Lincoln ... never lacked for critics. Even in this anniversary year, there has been vigorous debate over his legacy. One lingering source of controversy among historians is Lincoln's moderation on the slavery issue. ... Yacovone says complexities have been lost in celebrations that have focused on hero worship." (I mean key material this thread; it's probably off-topic for quotation in the article, but would be good for a broader article like Abraham Lincoln and slavery.)
• Most criticism of Lincoln comes from far-right quarters, yet Bennett was the opposite, with very different concerns. (Same goes for Zinn.) This has been commented upon in the press and in more academic circles. It relates directly to the reason the book, among a sea of Lincoln books, is independently notable. As even a conservative reviewer put it, Bennett is "no conservative or friend of the Confederacy".[6]
• There's no question that the book was "controversial" and "provocative"; even some African-American academics have said so [7][8], but we don't cite any of them.
• What of later American politics? Not always what a reader might expect. Rand Paul, for example, endorsed the book [9] – not in some kind of Tea Party, pro-Confederacy, crypto-racist, weirdo-'Publican way, but as a defense of abolitionists and abolitionism among the American public of the era.
• And what of later re-consideration in academic and mainstream-news material? It's not right to only look at reviews (and opposition) from ca. 2010 when the book came out. Bennett died in 2018, and there's a lot of high-end obituary material out there, most of which mentioned the book. The more it's "news" the more primary-source it is, and subjects like this benefit from time for analysis and impact (and analysis of impact).
• The US Supreme Court's official blog goes into some detail about a Justice Kagan-hosted Supreme Court Historical Society lecture by Lucas Morel (Washington and Lee University). Not only did Morel directly quote (in agreement) one of Bennett's central points in the book, so did SCotUS's blog.[10]
• Singling out DiLorenzo as someone whose work should be compared to Bennett's is bullshitty, since DiLorenzo has known extreme/fringe political leanings. There are numerous other writers who should be mentioned for balance. An obvious one is Robert W. Johannsen (Lincoln, the South, and Slavery), plus aforementioned ones like Yacovone.
• In closing, for now, I'll just point out that I dug up all of this in the space of under five minutes. It took far longer to put it in a bullet list.

 — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  03:38, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

• Adding one more: We should also cover the original (much earlier) article version of Bennett's material, which was "an academic controversy" in and of itself. And do so in a balanced manner; the critical quote about it in a thread above is good, but will need a counter-point.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:31, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

You produce a lot of verbiage very quickly, but not all of it is worth replying to in any detail. The main issue is not really that Bennett "sometimes misapplies modern standards of how to define racism to an earlier era". Pouncing on someone who was born 213 years ago for not complying with every single one of the latest ever-changing standards of political correctness or "wokeness" of the current micro-moment is a very shallow game, and not necessarily the main substantive issue involved -- which is more that Bennett seems to be basically incapable of evaluating things within their historical context. If Lincoln passed every one of Bennett's tests, then he would have been someone like Gerrit Smith, and would have had as about as much political power as Gerrit Smith did during the 1860s. It seems to me that Bennett's real issue should be with nature of the United States as it existed in 1860, where Abraham Lincoln was the closest thing to an abolitionist who had a chance of being elected president, while a thoroughgoing abolitionist like Gerrit Smith had zero chance of being elected (he ran in 1860, and received 171 votes). Making it be about Lincoln's personality is missing the point in a big way. AnonMoos (talk) 06:32, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

PS: I have now read it, and what I see in this very meagre talk page is that others have previously raised some of the same concerns I have, going back more than a decade to 2009.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  04:22, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

What is "others" (plural) supposed to mean?? There's only been one other individual who previously commented on this page, and that was User:Wōdenhelm, who expressed some general concerns about language, but did not identify himself as a Bennett defender (though if you look at his user page, you can see he's apparently some kind of neo-Confederate). AnonMoos (talk) 06:32, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Wow, if best you can muster after all of this is a quibble about a typo, I'm likely to decline to engage with you further, unless your half of the discourse improves markedly. Especially since your compact but ranty bit above avoids almost every matter of substance and is just a personal, subjective, exaggeratory venting about Bennett for not writing the book you'd rather have read. You seem to be too emotionally close to this subject, frankly. The one on-topic thing you said was about Gerrit Smith, but we're not interested in your original-research views on what "the point" is in Lincoln history and historiography or "what ifs" about Lincoln's chances had he been more clearly anti-slavery earlier on (see WP:NOT#FORUM). It's probable that you're correct, but a) we need reliable sources saying this, and b) it's only one of many points of dispute between Lincoln critics and Lincoln boosters, so it need not be dwelt on in particular. As I've laid out above, we clearly need a section here (or perhaps better-developed material at Lincoln and slavery to link to with {{Main}} and just WP:SUMMARY treatment here with a focus on Bennett) that lays out out all their significant disagreements in a balanced manner.  — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  22:04, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

I got rather tired of all this nonsense some time ago, but for the sake of completeness:

1) There is no alternative history or parallel universes involved -- it's simply an attested fact that more than 1,800,000 votes were tabulated for Abraham Lincoln in 1860, while 171 votes were tabulated for Gerrit Smith in 1860. Therefore it's a natural and extremely probable deduction that if Abraham Lincoln's views had been much more like Gerrit Smith's (as Lerone Bennett Jr. wished), then his vote total would have much closer to 171 than to over 1,800,000. This highlights the fact that Bennett's real quarrel should be with the state of U.S. society and political culture in which this was true -- making it be about Lincoln's personality instead is extremely pointless and (more importantly) ahistorical.

2) Much of the acrimony of the previous discussions here and elsewhere has been due to the suspicion that you're trying to introduce your personal garbage about "Lincoln-praisers"[sic] and "fiduciary interests"[sic] into the article itself. If you can honestly promise that you won't do that, then the temperature of the discussion will naturally immediately be lower.

3) Your position did not receive any support at Wikipedia:Neutral point of view/Noticeboard (one negative response to you by User:RaiderAspect), and the remarks by User:Wōdenhelm above are far from being an enthusiastic defense of the Bennett book as a whole, so please don't exaggerate the amount of on-Wikipedia support you've received again.

4) If you had read https://www.salon.com/2013/07/11/rand_paul_completely_mangles_lincoln/ which I linked to above six years ago, then you would know that Rand Paul's support for "Forced into Glory" isn't as free of neo-Confederate taint as you would seem to believe. (Thomas diLorenzo's name is only mentioned once in that article, briefly in passing.)

5) Some people are not really able to grasp in their minds what seems them to be the contradiction that it was possible to hate slavery, or think that it was morally a grave sin, and yet not support the immediate abolition of slavery within the slave states (something which was legally beyond the power of the federal government to do as the U.S. Constitution existed before the Civil War), or not support the full political and social equality of blacks (something which was only advocated by a tiny minority of U.S. whites before 1861). But however paradoxical and contradictory this may seem to some now, it was a position held by millions of Northern whites in the 1840s and 1850s. If you collapse the distinction between those before 1861 who thought slavery immoral and opposed slavery's territorial extension vs. those before 1861 who didn't care about slavery's morality (or even thought it a "positive good") and didn't oppose territorial extension, and call them all indiscriminately white supremacists, then that may make you feel smugly woke, but it's not good history (as mentioned in the quote by David M. Potter above on this page).

6) However, your position has received some support from 53% of Republicans recently polled, who rank Donald Trump as a better president than Abraham Lincoln, so take whatever satisfaction you can from that fact! AnonMoos (talk) 17:15, 2 December 2019 (UTC)

Your replies are garbage. I haven't the time nor patience to rip you to shreds on each point, but suffice it to say from your petty ad hominem attacks and straw-manning that your POV is exceedingly clear. In a word, Amerikkkan! 2607:FEA8:BFA0:BD0:7C64:2DA:559A:4840 (talk) 14:27, 15 December 2019 (UTC)

Who are you, and why should anyone care about the vituperative rantings of an anonymous IP? "Lincoln apologist"[sic] is even more tendentious than "Lincoln-praiser". Since you're aligning yourself with the neo-Confederates in your personal hatred of Lincoln, it would be easy to consider you to be more "kkk" than I am. AnonMoos (talk) 00:14, 17 December 2019 (UTC)

By the way, I'd like to know what there is that makes it necessary to meaningfully "apologize" for Lincoln. When he was inaugurated in 1861, he was by far the most anti-slavery U.S. President ever to that point -- something which southern-state leaders were very well aware of at the time, even if some others seem to have forgotten it since. He never claimed to be an immediatist abolitionist, and no informed person at the time or afterwards thought he was an immediatist abolitionist. (In any case, an immediatist abolitionist could not have been elected president in 1860, as I've pointed out repeatedly on this page.) Nevertheless, he personally hated slavery, and his policy positions aimed at territorially confining it so that northerners could be confident that it was "in the course of ultimate extinction" (contracting, not expanding).

He was willing to work within the U.S. Constitution as it then existed (which did not give the federal government any authority over slavery inside the slave states), and to stave off the impending threat of war by agreeing to a rough-and-ready compromise over the territorial issue which had disrupted politics during the 1854-1860 period (immediately admitting "New Mexico" -- i.e. New Mexico & Arizona -- as a slave state, with the understanding that all remaining U.S. territories were off-limits to slavery). Nevertheless, he was absolutely rigid and inflexible on the point of forbidding slavery in all territories to be acquired by the U.S. in future (an important issue at the time, which led directly to the failure of the Crittenden Compromise).

Before 1861, the idea of full political and social equality of blacks was considered rather extreme in terms of public opinion in the United States, and only a tiny minority of whites ever advocated for it, none of them successful in politics. Lincoln didn't advocate for this, and probably didn't believe it -- but nevertheless, he was vocal in insisting that blacks were included in the "all men are created equal" wording of the Declaration of Independence, and had rights to basic dignity and to enjoy the fruits of their own labor (i.e. to eat the bread which they had earned by the sweat of their brow) equal to whites, something which probably didn't do Lincoln much good in the 1858 Illinois senate election.

At the beginning of the Civil War, large numbers of people in the lower North, NYC, and elsewhere were very loud in declaring that they were fighting to maintain the Union, not for the benefit of blacks. If Lincoln at that time had stated that the main issue of the war was abolishing slavery, he would have found it very difficult to recruit the necessary number of soldiers to the Union cause, and probably additional states beyond Kentucky would have sought to remain neutral. Nevertheless, it was under his leadership that slavery ended up being abolished.

In short, Lincoln had a strong personal and moral aversion to slavery, but he was in many ways a practical politician, who sought to achieve and maintain political power, and use that power to do good, within the framework of what was achievable at the time. That meant that he couldn't be an advocate for theoretical advanced positions which went significantly beyond what public opinion in the U.S. was willing to accept at that time. When U.S Presidents have become zealous crusaders for issues in advance of public opinion, it hasn't always worked out very well (see Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations). If Lincoln had been what Lerone Bennett Jr. wanted him to be, then he couldn't have achieved any political power to do anything much in the first place (see Gerrit Smith). I'm sorry if your junior-high-school history textbook blurred over the distinction between anti-slavery-extension and immediatist abolitionism, and gave you a very misleading impression that the Civil War was fought from the beginning to free the slaves, but there's no reason to take out your disappointment over later deceptive popular myths on Lincoln himself. AnonMoos (talk) 01:25, 20 December 2019 (UTC)