Evolving Concepts of Masculinity

The presidential election reflects competing understandings of what it means to "be a man" in our society. 

Is a real man someone who attempts to dominate others? Who incessantly insults his rivals? Who in public wants to be seen with beautiful women and who in private does what he wants to women without their consent? 

Or is a real man someone who defends and protects others? Who not only treats others with respect and dignity but who helps others; who heals and teaches and coaches others. 

The concept of masculinity is evolving because the needs of society are evolving. We no longer need people who can physically defend the clan or the community in a lawless setting. We need people who obey the law and who enforce the law; people who respect the rule of law.

A real man doesn't carry a gun. A real man wields a scalpel in surgery, or codes on a computer, or designs estate plans for families.

Physical strength is no longer necessary to survive. We hunt for pleasure, not out of necessity. We farm with tractors; no longer do we plow by hand. Our factories are mechanized, our cars and trucks and trains and ships bear our goods for us.

Going into the future the economic well-being of individuals and society depends not on physical strength but on knowledge and skill. Education is the engine of our economy. We need doctors and lawyers and programmers and engineers. 

The era of war is nearly over. Thank goodness world peace is now on the horizon. Europe's expansion and colonization of others is in the past. The United States has no more territorial ambitions. Russia will gain nothing from its invasion of Ukraine. China knows that it will lose what it has if it invades Taiwan and seeks to annex it.

Competition among different nations has shifted from war to trade. A country's wealth depends upon its ability to produce goods and services that people want. We no longer steal from other peoples and societies, but trade for what we want. Free trade in goods makes us all wealthier, and free trade in ideas makes us all happier and more capable.

Men and women are now equal. A real man not only acknowledges this equality but celebrates it.

Lincoln on Immigration -- Blood of the Blood and Flesh of the Flesh

In 1858 Lincoln ran against Stephen Douglas for United States Senator from Illinois. A minority yet significant presence on the American political landscape at that time was the American Party, known as the "Know-Nothings" because when asked about its inner workings its members claimed to "know nothing." The primary ideology of the American Party was that it was anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant. The Party had originally been known as the Nativist American Party, and it retained its nativist, Protestant orientation.

The Republican Party was first formed 170 years ago in 1854 in Ripon, Wisconsin, to protest the expansion of slavery caused by the adoption of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Two years later on May 29, 1856, Abraham Lincoln helped to found the Republican Party in Ohio is his rip-roaring "Lost Speech" in Bloomington, Illinois. According to William P. Kellogg, in this speech Lincoln rebuked Stephen Douglas for obtaining the passage of Kansas-Nebraska, saying, "You can fool all of the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time." According to J.O. Cunningham Lincoln deprecated the use of force to oppose the expansion of slavery, saying "I'll tell you what we will do, we will wait until November and then we will shoot paper ballots at them!" According to Will Porter Lincoln's directed some of his remarks to the people of the South, warning them against secession: "We WILL not go out, and you SHALL not!" And according to George Brown, in the Lost Speech Lincoln declared, "It is to be remembered that the Union must be preserved in the purity of its principles as well as in the integrity of its territorial parts."

By 1858 Lincoln and the Republican Party had to make a choice. Should the newly-formed anti-slavery Republican Party appeal to the Know-Nothings in order to capture the 20% of the electorate that they represented? Or should they, as Lincoln had argued in Bloomington, stay true to the ideals announced in the Declaration of Independence?  

Lincoln made his decision in his inaugural speech in his campaign for the Senate against Douglas. The date of the speech was July10, 1858; it was an Independence Day event. And the speech was in Chicago, Illinois, bursting with growth. In 1830 Chicago had been a village with a population of 250. By 1840 it was a large town with a population of 4,500. By 1850 it had grown into a city of 28,000, and by 1860 it was over 100,000, the ninth largest city in America. Lincoln was speaking to a diverse crowd, at least half of whom were immigrants. What could he say to them about patriotism to America, about American independence, and about the principles of the Declaration? Would he seek the nativist vote by declaring natural-born citizens superior to them?

Here is what Lincoln said. I have highlighted one sentence in bold type.

We are now a mighty nation, we are thirty – or about thirty millions of people, and we own and inhabit about one-fifteenth part of the dry land of the whole earth. We run our memory back over the pages of history for about eighty-two years and we discover that we were then a very small people in point of numbers, vastly inferior to what we are now, with a vastly less extent of country, - with vastly less of everything we deem desirable among men, - we look upon the change as exceedingly advantageous to us and to our posterity, and we fix upon something that happened away back, as in some way or other being connected with this rise of prosperity. We find a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers; they were iron men, they fought for the principle that they were contending for; and we understood that by what they then did it has followed that the degree of prosperity that we now enjoy has come to us. We hold this annual celebration to remind ourselves of all the good done in this process of time of how it was done and who did it, and how we are historically connected with it; and we go from these meetings in better humor with ourselves – we feel more attached the one to the other, and more firmly bound to the country we inhabit. In every way we are better men in the age, and race, and country in which we live for these celebrations. But after we have done all this we have not yet reached the whole. There is something else connected with it. We have besides these men – descended by blood from our ancestors – among us perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe – German, Irish, French and Scandinavian – men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things. If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are. That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world.

Lincoln rejected nativism. Instead he embraced immigrants as blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of us all.

Lincoln and Vallandigham

In 1863 General Ambrose Burnside declared martial law in Ohio and arrested Clement L. Vallandigham, a pro-slavery politician who had made a speech opposing the war and allegedly encouraged soldiers to desert the army of the United States. Vallandigham was tried by a military tribunal and exiled from the United States. In 1864 while in Canada Vallandigham became the Supreme Commander of The Order of Sons of Liberty (originally known as the Knights of the Golden Circle), many of whom discouraged enlishtment in the Union army, encouraged soldiers to desert, and then shielded the deserters. The Order also plotted to foment an armed rebellion in the northern states; that rebellion never took place. The treasonous entreaties of the Order were largely unsuccessful. In May of 1864 my ancestor Henry Huhn of MacArthur, Ohio, like over 300,000 other Ohioans before him, enlisted in the United States army. He served at City Point in Virginia.

In May of 1863 a meeting of members of the Democratic Party objected to Vallandigham's arrest, military trial, and exile and sent a letter to President Abraham Lincoln contending that Vallandigham was merely exercising his right to freedom of speech. In his letter to Erastus Corning of June 12, 1863, Lincoln responded to their concerns. 

Lincoln conceded that if Vallandigham was not encouraging soldiers to desert then he was wrongfully arrested. But if Vallandigham was encouraging desertion then he was rightfully arrested under the provision in the Constitution that provides, "The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it." Lincoln wrote to the members of the meeting:

Take the particular case mentioned by the meeting. They assert [It is asserted] in substance that Mr. Vallandigham was by a military commander, seized and tried "for no other reason than words addressed to a public meeting, in criticism of the course of the administration, and in condemnation of the military orders of that general'' Now, if there be no mistake about this -- if this assertion is the truth and the whole truth -- if there was no other reason for the arrest, then I concede that the arrest was wrong. But the arrest, as I understand, was made for a very different reason. Mr. Vallandigham avows his hostility to the war on the part of the Union; and his arrest was made because he was laboring, with some effect, to prevent the raising of troops, to encourage desertions from the army, and to leave the rebellion without an adequate military force to suppress it. He was not arrested because he was damaging the political prospects of the administration, or the personal interests of the commanding general; but because he was damaging the army, upon the existence, and vigor of which, the life of the nation depends. He was warring upon the military; and this gave the military constitutional jurisdiction to lay hands upon him. If Mr. Vallandigham was not damaging the military power of the country, then his arrest was made on mistake of fact, which I would be glad to correct, on reasonably satisfactory evidence.

Lincoln then appealed to their sense of fairness. Does it make sense to punish those who commit a treasonous act while doing nothing to those persons who persuaded them to commit treason?  

I understand the meeting, whose resolutions I am considering, to be in favor of suppressing the rebellion by military force -- by armies. Long experience has shown that armies can not be maintained unless desertion shall be punished by the severe penalty of death. The case requires, and the law and the constitution, sanction this punishment. Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wiley agitator who induces him to desert? This is none the less injurious when effected by getting a father, or brother, or friend, into a public meeting, and there working upon his feeling, till he is persuaded to write the soldier boy, that he is fighting in a bad cause, for a wicked administration of a contemptable government, too weak to arrest and punish him if he shall desert. I think that in such a case, to silence the agitator, and save the boy, is not only constitutional, but, withal, a great mercy.

Several members of the Knights of the Golden Circle were tried and convicted in military courts during the Civil War. After the war the Supreme Court reversed their convictions and ruled that military trials of civilians may not be conducted in places where the civil courts are open. Ex Parte Milligan, 71 U.S. 2 (1866).

In times and places of invasion or rebellion the public safety may require that freedom of speech be curtailed. People can rationally disagree whether Ohio was such a place in 1863. In the Corning Letter Lincoln invoked the example of General Andrew Jackson who arrested and detained a journalist and his lawyers at the Battle of New Orleans.

 After the battle of New-Orleans, and while the fact that the treaty of peace had been concluded, was well known in the city, but before official knowledge of it had arrived, Gen. Jackson still maintained martial, or military law. Now, that it could be said the war was over, the clamor against martial law, which had existed from the first, grew more furious. Among other things a Mr. Louiallier published a denunciatory newspaper article. Gen. Jackson arrested him. A lawyer by the name of Morel procured the U.S. Judge Hall to order a writ of Habeas Corpus to release Mr. Louiallier. Gen. Jackson arrested both the lawyer and the judge. A Mr. Hollander ventured to say of some part of the matter that "it was a dirty trick.'' Gen. Jackson arrested him. When the officer undertook to serve the writ of Habeas Corpus, Gen. Jackson took it from him, and sent him away with a copy. Holding the judge in custody a few days, the general sent him beyond the limits of his encampment, and set him at liberty, with an order to remain till the ratification of peace should be regularly announced, or until the British should have left the Southern coast. A day or two more elapsed, the ratification of the treaty of peace was regularly announced, and the judge and others were fully liberated. A few days more, and the judge called Gen. Jackson into court and fined him a thousand dollars, for having arrested him and the others named. The general paid the fine, and there the matter rested for nearly thirty years, when congress refunded principal and interest. The late Senator Douglas, then in the House of Representatives, took a leading part in the debate, in which the constitutional question was much discussed. I am not prepared to say whom the Journals would show to have voted for the measure.

It may be remarked: First, that we had the same constitution then, as now. Secondly, that we then had a case of Invasion, and that now we have a case of Rebellion, and: Thirdly, that the permanent right of the people to public discussion, the liberty of speech and the press, the trial by jury, the law of evidence, and the Habeas Corpus, suffered no detriment whatever by that conduct of Gen. Jackson, or it's subsequent approval by the American congress.

And yet, let me say that in my own discretion, I do not know whether I would have ordered the arrest of Mr. V. While I can not shift the responsibility from myself, I hold that, as a general rule, the commander in the field is the better judge of the necessity in any particular case. Of course I must practice a general directory and revisory power in the matter.

In normal times we draw the line between advocacy of lawbreaking and incitement of lawbreaking. An individual is within their rights to propose that violence is appropriate or even necessary at some point in the future. But if violence is imminent - if there is a clear and present danger that a serious law violation will occur if the individual says their piece -- then speech crosses the line from advocacy into incitement, and the public safety requires that we be able to punish such speech.

And there is yet another reason beyond protecting the general public for making incitement to riot a crime. Is it just that the fools in the audience who listened and obeyed the speaker go to prison while the "wily agitator" who ruined their lives goes free? 

America's Children Are Your Children

 In developing America's economic policy - how we should tax and spend - our guiding principle should not be "What is best for me personally?" but rather "What is best for the people of our country?" This is but one example of the Golden Rule.

If you have children you have probably made many sacrifices for them. You want what is best for them. You take them to the doctor and you do whatever it takes to keep them healthy. You pay for their education as best you can, striving to find them the best schools to attend as well as to pay for extra experiences that lead to growth and that open opportunities for them -- sports, camps, trips, music lessons -- anything that help them to understand and thrive in our society.

But the imperative of love asks more of us. Do you accept that all of the children in this country are your children? No matter where they live, no matter their race or religion, no matter their family's level of income or social status? Is your heart big enough to want all children to have the finest health care and the greatest education you can afford? Does your heart break when children are hungry or cold or unsafe or unloved?

Universal health care and universal education are not luxuries. We now live in an ultra-wealthy society, a post-scarcity civilization, one that can easily afford to treat every child as if it were our own. Given that, it isn't civilized for us to let our children go without.

Love and Truth, Not Hate and Lies

Our guiding principles in politics as in life must be love and truth, not hate and lies.

In assessing what to do about climate change, abortion, immigration, the economy, drug use, education, medical care, and every other issue we must base our policies on as much accurate information we can acquire and by committing ourselves to helping as many people as possible. Hate and lies only distract us from our best version of ourselves.

As to climate change, it is now obvious that the burning of fossil fuels is befouling our planet and that we must transition, as quickly as possible, to other sources of energy. To deny this is to deny our children and grandchildren their rightful inheritance - the same beautiful, bountiful home that our ancestors bequeathed to us.

Regarding abortion, extremists spend much energy on how much they hate the other side, how immoral they are. But that ignores the genuine suffering of those with whom they disagree. Fetal life is precious and worthy of protection. But so is a person's body and the freedom to make decisions about our own lives. Abortion requires compromise between those fundamental imperatives, and the solution will be forged by those who are willing to listen to each other.

Hatred of immigrants is an age-old problem, as are lies about them. Immigrants in America do not eat cats and dogs. They are not rapists and murderers. They do not poison our blood. Christians ought to remember better than any of us what Christ had to say on this subject. To hate immigrants is to hate your own mother and father. The truth is that immigrants are far more law-abiding than native-born Americans, and they are here because they chose to be and because they love this country, which is more than I can say for those who were born here and who despoil the Statue of Liberty and all that she stands for. Immigrants are proof of American exceptionalism. People want to come here because you can live better here, and more freely. Just from a selfish standpoint the truth is that immigrants stimulate the economy and make America wealthier. Welcome them. Thank them. Love them.

When we speak of the economy we must focus not only on our fears ("Bills, bills, bills!") but on our hopes and our dreams. How can we expand opportunity for all? How can we stimulate commerce, support small business, and make it possible for anyone willing to work to rise?

One approach to drug use is fear and anger, and to blame others (like immigrants) for our own weakness and indulgence. It is true that opioids are a curse - over 80,000 Americans die from opioid overdoses every year. People die from other drugs as well - over 30,000 from meth, over 25,000 from cocaine, over 5,000 from heroin. But the problem is far worse when we consider legal drugs. There are over 175,000 deaths annually from alcohol (not to mention the thousands that drunk drivers kill on the road) and 480,000 deaths per year from cigarettes, including 40,000 per year from secondhand smoke and 400 infant deaths from secondhand smoke. If you are angry about drugs, you should focus your anger on alcohol and cigarettes. If you want someone to blame, blame ourselves. No-one forces us to drink or smoke or take drugs. Instead of hate try love. Let's attack the root causes of drinking, smoking, and drug use - people are lonely, people are depressed, people are cold and hungry. And let's not put people in jail - let's treat them, and teach our children how to live productive lives instead of chemically altering their mental state.

Let us make education and medical care universal rights, not  luxuries that people receive only if they pay for it. The truth is that we are the richest country in the world. If other industrialized countries can bless their inhabitants with these basic human rights then we can as well. Stop worrying about whether someone else receives a benefit that our country can easily afford, and start being grateful that we live in an age where it is possible for everyone to live healthy lives and to reach their highest potential. 

Our best version of ourselves is achievable by adherence to the truth and commitment to love.