He played baseball?
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Good point. Not much, really. It just reduced tremendously the trouble they had to go through to initiate their muggings.
Weeeelllll … if the 16th Amendment hadn’t passed, and Federal income tax laws had continued to go through the messy and precarious business of figuring out which income was derived from property (Pollock “direct tax”) and which wasn’t.
I personally believe that, in that case, we would now have a great big oppressive Federal SALES tax instead of a great big oppressive Federal Income tax. In other words, they would merely have initiated a different KIND of government extortion. 
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Are you trying to make the argument that Lincoln was a racist?
He did not wake up one morning, wash his face, and give a speech commencing, “I cannot say for certain that all negros are even human.”
Put it in context.
Lincoln also said “This nation cannot stand half slave and half free”. He did more than anyone else to free black people from slavery, since he went out and fought a war which resulted in more than a million dead in order to put an end to slavery. Yes, I know I’m oversimplifying, but the root cause of the war was slavery and the end of it resulted in slavery’s end.
There is certainly evidence that Lincoln was a racist. There is a lot more evidence that Wilson was. Lincoln actually did something at enormous cost to help black people. What did Wilson do to help blacks?
[QUOTE]
There is certainly evidence that Lincoln was a racist.
QUOTE]
What “certain evident.” You did not present any. Care to share?
Biographer, David Herbert Donald, notes that
Lincoln’s administration was distinguished for “greater infringements on individual liberties than in any other period in American history.”
Up the Irons!
Mr. Donald’s statement is absolutely true. Of course, the two statements “Lincoln took away more rights” and “Lincoln took away more rights for the duration of a civil war” do tend to convey somewhat different messages. Habeas corpus was a big victim of Lincoln’s policies, but we still have it today. (Rhenquist has suggested more long term restrictions than Lincoln ever imposed.)
It also a bit misleading to say the “Lincoln” took away those rights as if it was his personal intent to modify society. He was in the midst of a war. It is hardly likely that any president would have done differently. (There is certainly no evidence that Washington or Jefferson would have acted in any way that was not expedient to a situation.) TR’s trust busting and labor law agendas were issues he brought out from his own ideals. Lincoln’s efforts (anti-slavery, suppression of rights, whatever) were all driven by the overriding concern to preserve the union. The fact that he actually did achieve more than merely preserving the union in terms of expressing an American Ideal is what has made him one of our greatest presidents.
As to the whole issue of Lincoln and black people: He group up in a particular culture that was only at that time in the process of stepping back and assessing its own values. In that milieu it is not hard to find dozens of quotations that indicate that he considered all people truly equal and others that indicate that he thought blacks might be inferior. Regardless of individual out-of-context statements harvested from 30 years of discourse and regardless of the pure political motivation for the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln clearly set public policy with an eye toward treating all citizens equally (including suppressing all of their rights to habeas corpus if that is what it took to preserve the union).
Tom~
Of course, if we wanted to debate “Who was a bigger racist, Lincoln or Wilson?”, we’d have to clarify whether we meant “who was a bigger racist relative to the standards of his own time?”, in which case Wilson would win; or “who was a bigger racist in an absolute sense?”, in which case any president elected before the Civil War would probably beat Wilson.
Oh – and, yes, Lincoln was elected prior to the Civil War. 
So, I guess it’s okay for one man to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, authorizing himself to authorize arrests, and attack the separation of powers, just to preserve the union.
I have no idea whether, in some sort of ideal land of purely rational thought and philosophical ponderings, it is “okay for one man to suspend” any rights. Had I lived and voted in the U.S. in 1861-1865, I would have been protesting his actions vigorously. In retrospect, however, the historical reality is that the union was preserved, the rights of the individuals were restored at the conclusion of the conflict, (although a number of general governmental powers were expanded and not relinquished), and the philosophy expounded as the justification for the war in which rights were curtailed were used to Amend the Constitution in ways that broadened the availability of rights to all citizens.
I would have opposed Lincoln on the grounds that surrendering rights “for a while” is simply not a good idea. We never know when the authorities will deign to return them (witness Indonesia and the Philipines). However, having suspended those rights, Lincoln did not move to make those suspensions permanent and he did not put people into power below him who would work to keep those rights suspended.
Lincoln may have been philosophically wrong, but he succeeded in what he attempted to do. Had the union been severed, a large percentage of people living in the Confederacy (and not simply blacks) would not have the rights that we currently enjoy inthe U.S. (Go look at the Confederate Constitution.) The “Civil War” Amendments would probably never have been written in the Union, either.
The point is not that Lincoln was perfect or did no wrong. The point is that with 20-20 hindsight, what he did “wrong” was done for the best of intentions (not a valid defense, but an accurate assessment) and was done with a minimum of intrusion to the life of the country. He siezed powers as the president acting in a state of emergency; he never asked that his actions be enshrined in law; he made no provision to continue his actions when the emergency had passed.
Tom~
My points:
-Any president can declare a “state of emergency”, and suspend whatever rights we have left.
-Executive orders are now used to achieve results a president can’t get by legislative process.
-The more power a president claims and exercises, the more likely he is to be deemed “great.”
Hey, Freedom? Could you expand on this? I don’t want rhetoric or hyperbole; just tell me how specific policies or beliefs of Roosevelt and Wilson furthered an ideology that could in any way be described as “socialist” (as opposed to democratic or republican, or even Democratic or Republican). Hell, I could call Ronald Reagan a fascist if I wanted to, because I disagree with the goals of his administration, but that doesn’t mean he was one. It’s just empty name-calling.
So how, really, are Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson socialists, as opposed to Debs and Shaw?
Actually, I think a president would have to show a fair amount of evidence to “declare an emergency.” Somehow, I think the actual dclaration of seccession by around seven states (with threats by six more) and the attack by newly mobilized military forces on Fort Sumter does indicate a state of emergency. Wild-eyed fiction aside, it takes a bit more than the president standing behind a podium to declare an emergency.
This, of course, is outside the entire area of assigning the blame for that to Lincoln. Faced with seccession, how many of our presidents (or their “better” opponents) would have refrained from calling for a state of emergency? In an analysis of comparative worth of presidents, assigning demerits to Lincoln, who probably behaved more responsibly than 95% of all of our presidential candidates could have, looks almost like a cheap shot. If we are evaluating performance, we have to look at the environment in which they performed.
Executive orders are directives to executive agencies on the policies to follow in carrying out the laws passed by Congress. We have had some really bad EO’s (such as the Japanese internment–again, a bad decision made during a period of legitimate crisis), but the president has no power to simply order all members of the opposition party to be rounded up and imprisoned. The courts are available to challenge EO’s just as they are for any government action. I hardly think we can blame Lincoln for their existence or their potential for abuse. (Note that Jackson’s removal of the Cherokee occurred many years prior to Lincoln’s presidency.)
Tom~
Gadarene
Nah, you had it right. He was a fascist.
I think several posters here have made a cogent case that Teddy was a better president that Woody Wilson.
As for the Lincoln administration’s suspension of habeas corpus: The U.S. Constitution clearly gives the government the power to suspend these rights in time of war or insurrection. If the Civil War does not qualify as an insurrection, I don’t know what does.
Any country that can sustain an insurrection for 4 years sounds pretty virile and potent to me!
(Er, sorry.)
From Paul Johnson’s A History of the American People (Note: Johnson is very pro-Lincoln but recognizes the flaws that we today might see in him):
“Lincoln did not regard blacks as equals. Or rather, they might be morally equal but in other respects they were fundamentally different and unacceptable as fellow-citizens without qualification…He freely admitted an attitude to blacks which would now be classified as racism: ‘My own feelings will not admit equality’. The same was true, he added, of the majority of whites, North as well as South…He told a delegation of blacks…‘There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us’…He even founded an experimental colony (of American blacks) on the shores of Santo Domingo”.
We would consider today a person who espoused Lincoln’s views to be racist. Does this mean Lincoln was a bad person or a bad President? Of course not. His views on race were probably well ahead of those of most other Americans at that time, and as I said before, he probably did more to further the cause of black Americans than anyone else, before or since.
Wilson, on the other hand, was an out-front racist who did everything he could to hinder the cause of black Americans. Is that the only reason he was a bad President? Again, as I said before, there are a lot of other reasons to impugn Wilson’s competence.
Let me say this on the importance of context:
In 1999, a white man who thought blacks should be second-class citizens was a racial reactionary.
In 1899, a white man who thought blacks should be second-class citizens was a racial moderate.
In 1799, a white man who thought blacks should be second-class citizens was a racial visionary.