What Made Lincoln and the Roosevelts Great Leaders (and what is key to creating a better society)

Abraham Lincoln grew up in poverty. He was born in Kentucky but his father left for Indiana (and then Illinois) because he could not compete with the slaveholders. Abe wanted to go to school but had to work, clearing land and farming for his father. Once he left home, he eventually moved from a log cabin to a frame house, working his way up from poverty to influence.

Lincoln's vision of the Republican Party was that it would enable the poor - even slaves - to make a better life and felt that policies should enable this rise. It should be hard work and not birth that determined one’s fortune. This was in contrast to southern Democrats view of how an economy worked, a place where only 1% deserved to be truly wealthy.

South Carolina Senator Hammond delivered a speech in 1859 that captured the southern, pro-slavery view that there were gentlemen and mudsills and that the economy did not need to provide opportunity for all for the simple reason that so many didn’t deserve it.

"Hammond described an America that sounded a lot like an oligarchy. When things were ordered correctly, he explained, the bottom of society was made up of drudges: stupid, unskilled workers who were strong, docile, and loyal to their betters. He called these workers “mudsills,” a reference to the timbers of a building that were driven into the ground to support the loftier structure above. Members of this mudsill class would never rise. They were too stupid, for one thing, and they were happy where they were. On this mudsill, according to Hammond, rested higher civilization—those gentlemen who led 'progress, civilization, and refinement,' men like him. It was right for southern slave owners to control the country, he said, because they were the wealthiest men in the nation, proving that they alone had figured out a true system of political economy. The southern system was the only safe one, Hammond explained. Members of the mudsill must have no say in government, for if they did, they would demand a redistribution of wealth. So long as they had no political power, their stupidity—and cupidity—could never challenge the system that Hammond insisted worked so well. The North, he warned, used white men as its mudsill and thus courted disaster. Northern workers had a terrible potential to destroy society because, unlike black slaves, they could vote. Indeed, they made up the majority. If they worked together, 'Where would you be?' he asked. The government would be overthrown and property redistributed."
- from Heather Cox Richardson's To Make Men Free

Because Lincoln and the new Republican Party rejected this nonsense, it not only overturned slavery but put in place policies that helped to create millionaires and change the lives of everyday people with a plethora of new products. Never in history had there been more progress felt more widely more quickly. Only 1% could be served by slaves; a growing percentage could be served by the machinery of the industrial economy.

Curiously, though, the folks who made it to the top of this new economy ended up with very similar feelings about how their accumulation of wealth in contrast to the poverty of others was simply evidence that some people were superior (that would, of course, be them) and that society was made better – not worse - by income and wealth disparities.

Just 30 years after Hammond’s mudsill speech, after Republican policies had helped Americans to move into the industrial economy,

"steel magnate Andrew Carnegie published an article titled, simply, 'Wealth,' in the popular Republican magazine North American Review. Carnegie’s view of a good economy sounded much like James Henry Hammond’s. Great disparities of wealth benefited everyone, he wrote, for they enabled some men to cultivate the highest and best in literature and arts and 'all the refinements of civilization.' If such wealth were scattered to the masses in higher wages, it would undoubtedly be squandered on food and small luxuries. Carnegie parted from Hammond by defining society’s elite class not by race but rather by its members’ ability to work hard. This is what the Republican vision of every man being able to work his way up to comfort had become: all men had a chance to work. The talented ones would make a fortune; the rest would be society’s mudsills."
- from Heather Cox Richardson's To Make Men Free 

Beliefs like Carnegie's would divide the Republican Party. Some embraced the progressive agenda of Teddy Roosevelt. Some embraced the conservative policies of his successor, William Taft. Roosevelt argued for the federal regulation of business, inheritance tax, and a revival of Lincoln’s income tax that had enabled grand infrastructure projects and the creation of universities throughout the country during Lincoln’s presidency. Taft’s views were much like Carnegie’s.

By 1933, Teddy’s progressive vision had been adopted by his distant cousin Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a Democrat.

To this day you can tell a great deal about a person’s worldview and politics by whether they believe differences in wealth and income are better explained by natural superiority or social inventions. Those who believe that such differences are inevitable and there is nothing a community can do to change those outcomes are right, of course. They create a world with growing income and wealth disparity that proves their point. But as Lincoln and FDR have shown us, those who believe that there are things that a community can do to change income and wealth disparities - to change opportunities for those who were not born into the manor - are also right. They, too, create a different world, one that gives a growing number of people higher incomes and more wealth.

Whether a community believes that wealth is destiny or believes that it can be created for a growing percentage of people, that community will be proven right. Given that, the belief that a large chunk of us should simply be mudsills seems like a terribly odd belief to hold, much less defend.
To throw up your hands to say that the system we now have is the best we can imagine and that poverty must be proof of inferiority is less testament to what is inevitable than the limits of our imagination. What makes great leaders like Lincoln and our two Roosevelt presidents? They find the world they imagine even more compelling than the one they're born into.