Sublime

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” Lincoln wrote in 1858. “This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

representative of black freedom.

There were few broadcasts and almost no mailings to drum home to voters that the supposedly anti-labor candidate had been endorsed by labor.1 Nor, of course, were voters or businessmen aware that Robert Oliver, organizing director for the Congress of Industrial Organizations in Texas, was quietly lining up “a number of local (CIO) unions” in Texas

On each civil rights vote, he would use the minimum number of westerners necessary to accomplish his purposes, not requiring the others to vote with the South. But the fundamental nature of the deal is what Johnson said it was—in return for southern votes for Hells Canyon, “I got the western liberals to back the southerners” on civil rights. While,

“a country club Klan.”

It’s not clear whether Lincoln recalled, or even had read, Adams’s message to Congress in 1825. Both shared, though, this central point: that “liberty is power,” and that “the nation blessed with the largest portion of liberty must in proportion to its numbers be the most powerful nation upon earth.”87 To that end, Lincoln

didn’t know Lee Adams or his family, but as far as we were concerned, after Johnny Appleseed (who had lived briefly in our town), he was the most famous person to have emerged from Mansfield.

That Woodrow Wilson, a Southerner, would seek to roll back empires made sense. His sympathy for the colonized was no doubt fueled by his anger at how the North had treated what Wilson called its “conquered possessions”—the former Confederate states—after the Civil War. But there was another, darker side to Wilson’s Southern identity. He was not jus