Every day at President Lincoln’s Cottage we engage with visitors in conversation on difficult topics, from grief to slavery to American identity. And occasionally, we get asked a question on a tour that stops us in our tracks – one we wish we could spend a half hour answering. Some of these questions, on their face, were innocent or simple, but on a second look they contain a level of complexity that leaves us wanting to know more.
Thanks to generous donations from our supporters, we created “Q & Abe” – a podcast that investigates real questions from visitors to the Cottage. Come on down the rabbit hole with us as we seek the answers – we always start with Lincoln and the Cottage, but we often end up in unexpected places.
For this episode, we’re talking about a question asked by a college student hoping to make contemporary political connections. Along the way we learn the difference between agrarian, republican, socialist, and democrat, hear some of Lincoln’s speeches, and discuss the process of unionization here at the Cottage. Come along with us!
In addition to the embedded media player below, you can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Stitcher or wherever you get podcasts. You also can read below for a transcript of the episode (coming soon!)
Joan Cummins: Every day at President Lincoln’s Cottage we engage with visitors in conversation on difficult topics, from grief to slavery to American identity. Visitors, young and old alike, connect with us from next door and from around the globe.
Callie Hawkins: And occasionally, we get asked a question on a tour that stops us in our tracks, one we wish we could spend a half hour answering. Some of these questions, on their face, seem innocent or simple, but on a second look they contain a level of complexity that leaves us wanting to know more. Each episode, we’ll investigate a single real question a visitor asked us here.
JC: At President Lincoln’s Cottage, we’re storytellers, historians, and truth seekers, so we called on people whose expertise could speak to all the facets of these questions.
CH: I’m Callie Hawkins.
JC: And I’m Joan Cummins. This is Q&Abe. Come on down the rabbit hole with us!
CH: Let’s take that half hour now.
JC: For this episode, we’re talking about the question “Would Lincoln have been a social democrat?” I got asked this question by a college student, who stopped me after the tour to follow up. I had told their group that Lincoln believed that if you put the work in, you should get the benefits out, and the student was trying to make connections to her own experience.
CH: If you’ve heard of social democrats, you’ve probably encountered the term used to describe contemporary politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Both of those folks are members of the Democratic Party, but there’s also a much smaller political party called the Democratic Socialists of America. Their platform includes the Green New Deal and Medicare for All as well as support for public housing, infrastructure, and decarceration.
JC: If anyone had asked Lincoln himself about being a social democrat, what might he have said? We spoke to Sean Griffin, a labor historian and author of The Root and the Branch: Working Class Reform and Anti-Slavery. What terminology was in the air in Lincoln’s time?
Sean Griffin: The term socialism, or social democracy, did exist. As far as socialism, it was not necessarily in the form that was sort of later theorized and popularized by Marx and his followers. There was a sort of a small circle of mostly German speaking workers, but outside of that, you know, we’re really sort of talking about a pre Marxian kind of socialism with, you know, origins coming out of the French Revolution and English social thinkers like Robert Owen and William Gray. And, even going back to the English Civil War. Contemporaries in the 19th century, in the early 19th century, used terms like agrarian, which we think of as referring to an agricultural or, or rural based society. But 19th century people used it to mean a sense of property redistribution – not necessarily what they termed “levelling,” right? Abolition of private property or complete equality of property, but the idea that what they termed a rough equality of wealth and property, especially property in land, was essential to the functioning of a republic. And that idea enjoyed a pretty broad consensus.
JC: So, from Sean’s point of view, calling Lincoln a social democrat would be a stretch.
CH: Now I have some folks in my life for whom “socialism” is a boogeyman – something that represents everything wrong and scary about the world. So I asked our next guest, friend of the show and renowned Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, where he thinks this fear might come from.
Harold Holzer: That’s a really good question. My impression was always that, I mean, it started as a campaign in the Gilded Age to suppress union organizing, but it, it found a useful straw man during World War I, when organized socialism was antiwar. They were violent, but they were antiwar. So there was an image of socialism as a violent uprising kind of a thing, rather than, a movement for working people, because obviously working people have dominated the population forever. As Lincoln said, God must have loved common looking people because he made so many of them. So that, that lingered for a long time. Socialism and, uh, violent upheaval. The, uh, the astonishing thing is how the social structure, the social safety net has been built up over the generations over the last 90 years. That people don’t quite understand how the state has extended people’s lives, protected their health and done all sorts of things that we take for granted. People have embraced the tenets of democratic socialism without ever embracing the name. And that’s been a workaround that’s been very brilliantly done by progressive politicians.
CH: Would similar fears have been around in the 1800s? Here’s what Sean said:
SG: Yeah, very much. I mean, the term agrarian does become kind of a buzzword and it’s, is used as kind of a scare word. Another one a little bit later in the, particularly in the 1850s – I think the term comes out of the 1848 revolutions in Europe – but the term is “red republican,” small r republican, you know, sort of alluding to the association of early socialism and republicanism in Europe. And, you know, um, slaveholding politicians are among the ones who, who deploy that term and sort of express a lot of alarm and fear. There’s this group the national reform association that calls for, you know, on the one hand they want the freedom of the public lands, they want the government to give away tracts of land in 160 acre plots, for free. On the other hand, they want to limit the size of land holdings and make them inalienable from seizure for debt and other things like that. And on one hand, they get denounced as agrarians, but on the other hand, some of those ideas get mainstreamed over time. People like William H. Seward, who’s a, a Whig politician in New York, is sympathetic to these ideas. The New York legislature passes alienability laws and, and so forth. And then, the biggest outcome of all is the Homestead Act in 1862, which, uh, there’s an argument that it was directly inspired by the working class land reformers of the 1840s and 50s. But as the slavery issue heats up in the late 1840s and 1850s, you know, it kind of becomes intertwined with the slavery issue. Abolitionists like Garrett Smith, uh, adopt land reform because they think it’s going to be an antislavery measure. If you break up a land monopoly and give away the Western lands in 160 acre homesteads to individual working men and their families, then there will be no way for slave owning planters to spread out with their, with their slave plantations. And so you start to get pushback. In fact, a lot of the Southern slaveholding politicians really turned against land reform.
JC: The Homestead Act is one of Lincoln’s biggest legacies, in terms of its impact on the economy and demographics of the United States. Communities across the Midwest can trace their roots to its land distribution.
CH: Sean said that in the 19th century, land and politics intertwined in ways that are less common today.
SG: Land is kind of the most common form of wealth in the United States in the 19th century, and it’s something that everybody wants to get their hands on. But nonetheless land remains key to, you know, being seen as independent. You can’t be truly independent unless you have access to land or some other form of productive property. And this, this harkens back to the sort of Jeffersonian yeoman ideal of the landed independent farmer being the ideal Republican citizen.
JC: So it’s sort of an idea that only people who have land participate in the government, so if we want more people to participate in the government, more people have to be involved in owning the land?
SG: Yes, but there’s also the idea that, you know, large concentrations of property or wealth and particularly property in land are detrimental to the healthy functioning of a republic.
JC: My sense of contemporary socialist-adjacent movements is that they’re still interested in distributing more evenly the resources people need to be independent, but that the focus has moved away from land and farming. There’s more of an emphasis now on healthcare, housing, and employment options.
CH: All of today’s social democrats – and really any political theorists more broadly – are in conversation with the work of Karl Marx, whose ideas had an enormous impact on socialism in the 20th century. But would Lincoln’s thinking have had anything to do with Marx?
SG: Marx was alive during this period. And, you know, even corresponded with the Lincoln administration during the Civil War. But before the war, he was not really widely known in the US. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case with Lincoln personally. He’s not in close contact with Karl Marx, you know, Marx is just addressing a letter on behalf of the working men of London, or of Great Britain.
HH: I don’t think he read Marx, but I think he might have known that Marx read him. I didn’t even know if he knew he was German. He probably just thought he was an English socialist since he was basically based in Britain. But Lincoln assiduously read the New York Tribune and Marx contributed to the New York Tribune. And Lincoln loved his own publicity. Lincoln clipped out. He, he did his own clipping. There are lots of uh, clippings in the Lincoln papers that either arrive with letters or Lincoln saves himself. So he liked, and we all know that when he was assassinated, he had some of those clips in his wallet praising him. So, Marx, Karl Marx wrote a lavishly praiseworthy story about the Emancipation Proclamation, hailing it, and giving the best explanation of the period of why the prose may be drab. Richard Hofstadter famously criticized it and said it has all the, you know, the moral grandeur of a bill of lading. And Marx got it right. He said, Lincoln is a brilliant lawyer politician. When he’s doing something small, he speaks in grand terms. When he’s doing something momentous and gigantic, he writes it in small ways, so that the act has the grandeur instead of the words, the legal act. But he, he really got it, why the Proclamation had to be legalistic rather than eloquent. And I’m sure that’s a clip Lincoln saw.
CH: Since you usually learn about them in completely different history classes in US schools, I don’t know that most folks would automatically think of Lincoln and Marx as contemporaries.
JC: I also think many people think of ‘communist,’ ‘Marxist,’ and ‘socialist’ as all the same kind of thing. One of the things I learned in working on this episode is that there’s a difference between social democrats, who want to work towards more economic equity within our existing systems, and democratic socialists, who want to change the system itself. It’s the latter group that has the third-party affiliation we mentioned at the beginning of the conversation.
CH: We reached out to more than five chapters of the DSA across the US, but weren’t able to actually reach anyone on their teams who could tell us about their work in more detail. I was pretty disappointed we didn’t get their perspective.
JC: Though Lincoln of course was not a member of the DSA, you could make an argument that he belonged to a third party as the first Republican president. We asked Harold – how did he end up there? How did Lincoln choose his party affiliation?
HH: So it’s a mystery how he decided to be a Whig in the early days. I think he always had aspirations for improvement, and the party of improvement on a personal and economic level was the Whig Party. This was always a tough one for me because in a sense he was a Jacksonian in some spirit, maybe not in, you know, the anti bank and pro slavery aspect, but in terms of populism, that is, everybody has a voice, he was kind of a small P populist. But he went for opportunity, and opportunity came through investment, and investment was the calling card of the Whigs. You know, in 1855, he writes to his best friend in Louisville: I’m not a Know Nothing, meaning I’m not a nativist anti immigrant guy, I suppose I’m a Whig, but I’m not sure there are any more Whigs. So Lincoln gets in on the ground floor of a new movement, which is basically an American anti slavery expansion party. But as a great political organizer, because he was, he believes in casting a wide net, and he works to bring in Democrats who had turned against slavery expansion, Whigs who had nowhere else to go, but believed in infrastructure and other aspects of the party that could be sustained, even nativists. Lincoln wanted nativists to join the Republican Party, and he was just going to kind of quiet over their fears. And certainly he wanted new Americans. He wanted Germans who were anti slavery, he wanted immigrants. He believed in the rule that you only had to be in this country five years before getting your citizen’s papers and the right to vote. And he believed in open borders. There were no restrictions or constraints in that period. So here he’s building a party from scratch and his ideal party is one that’s committed to free labor.
CH: What did that mean, when people talked about free labor? Sean said it’s another piece of terminology with some complications.
SG: The ideology is evolving, the legal sort of understandings of what free labor was, were still evolving as we’re kind of moving out of, you know, an older system based on paternalistic relationships, things like apprenticeship and indentured servitude, even slavery, and into a system which, as it’s becoming defined, again, the sort of mainstream or consensus definition, you know, it means the freedom to compete for wages in a marketplace for labor, and it’s governed by contracts between laborers and employers. This is kind of the classical liberal definition or understanding. And that, that, that I think is what Lincoln and the Republicans meant by it. Uh, although Lincoln is also a little more sympathetic to the rights of labor, probably the clearest example of this that everybody cites is in his address to the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society. When on the one hand, he makes the point that you just made, well, if anyone fails to sort of rise up out of the system, it’s their own fault. You know, but on the other hand, he says that capital is dependent on labor and, whether you interpret that as workers themselves or just, labor as a commodity, is what’s really valuable, what’s really important. So in that sense, he’s sort of echoing what many labor reformers and working class folks is sort of see as the value of their own labor.
JC: Harold confirmed that this point of view was consistent across Lincoln’s political career. I had wanted to make sure that what I’d told the student about Lincoln’s beliefs on labor was correct.
HH: It is true, and it was consistently true that Lincoln believed that labor had the superior position over capital. He said it when he was a congressman. He was complaining that working people did all the labor and owners and money took all the fruit of the labor, or too much of the fruit of the labor. That’s 1847 when he’s in Washington, DC as a lowly one term freshman member of Congress and during the Lincoln Douglas debates, eight years, nine years later, he was pretty art – you know, the Lincoln Douglas debates are not the greatest examples of political oratory, for all of their great reputation. They’re argumentative, they’re petty, but in the last debate, in Alton, Illinois, Lincoln’s final words kind of summed up what he thought forced labor was, and he likened it to the exercise in this country of the divine right of kings. It was no better than royal control of human lives and human existence. So he condemned it even then. And then, even though he lost, he used the idea of the superiority of free labor in speeches across the West in 1859 to talk about labor having the superior position and comparing free labor and free opportunity to slavery, and obviously forced labor versus free labor. So Lincoln had two, two observations that he made for these first 10, 12 years of his national political life. One is that labor was superior to capital. He would say it soon enough directly. And the other that obviously, opportunity was superior to slavery. I don’t know if that puts him in a category of 21st century political philosophy, but it put him pretty firmly on the side of working people in the 1850s.
CH: There’s a widely held understanding that Lincoln’s belief in the importance of receiving the rewards of your own work – and maybe even his opposition to slavery – stemmed from the period of his life where he did various work in Illinois but his father Thomas received the money. How much of his stance came from this conflict with his dad?
HH: I’m not entirely sure that Abraham Lincoln felt particularly enslaved by this long-traditional routine where if a boy couldn’t work at home, that he could work and the pay could be collected by the adult until he reached his majority. Otherwise, why would Lincoln have stayed with his father for a year longer than he, his 21st birthday, to help him do labor. to build a cabin for him in Illinois? I think it’s much more complicated. And I think if that’s a story Lincoln told, and I don’t doubt that he did, he was having fun with it, and he loved to use examples from his life to illustrate his political beliefs. I don’t really think he felt enslaved. I don’t think Lincoln really liked physical labor. And while he saw it as the cornerstone of building opportunity for yourself, everybody has to start somewhere and work really hard to get where he wants to go – and I’m using the male pronoun intentionally because Lincoln didn’t think that this applied to women at the time. Even though he said all that, he didn’t like farm work, he didn’t love flat boating, he didn’t love rail splitting, and two things have been ironic to me: one is that he built himself up to such a strong guy by doing the work he hated, but B, he made that kind of hard work a cornerstone of his political philosophy when he had, would much rather have been reading every second of his life.
JC: Harold also connected Lincoln’s principles on labor to how the president thought about the meaning of the Civil War.
HH: It was about elevating the condition of men, lifting the artificial weights from all shoulders, and giving all people an equal chance and an unfettered start in the race of life. He loved to use triplets in his writing. Of the people, by the people, for the people. We cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. In terms of his views on opportunity, I think that triplet from the July 4th message, lift the weights from all, give everyone the fair chance in the race of life, elevate the condition of men. It’s not as succinct, it’s not as pithy, but it’s just as important to him in terms of charting the course of opportunity. That’s what this, the war was about. It wasn’t an abstract thing about, you attack my fort, you want to spread slavery. Slavery was the antithesis of opportunity and he was all about clearing the path of laudable pursuit. That’s what he said. Today’s worker becomes tomorrow’s owner, and the day after that, he can hire other people to work, and then they work, and then they own, and then they hire. That was his view of the, of the American system. Whether it ever would have spread to the social safety net, I mean, I think Lincoln would have adapted. The idea of organized labor might’ve been a little dicey in the 1840s, but if we’re talking about the democratic socialist belief in government investment to create more access and, what we then call public works, Lincoln called internal improvements, Biden called infrastructure – Lincoln was all in on that. But it was mostly about opportunity.
CH: If you’ve been on a tour of the Cottage, you may remember that we end with a quote from Lincoln that expresses this sentiment: “I happen, temporarily, to occupy this big White House. I am a living witness that any one of your children may look to come here as my father’s child has. It is in order that each one of you may have, through this free government which we have enjoyed, an open field, and a fair chance for your industry, enterprise, and intelligence; that you may all have equal privileges in the race of life with all its desirable human aspirations – it is for this that the struggle should be maintained. The nation is worth fighting for, to secure such an inestimable jewel.”
JC: It’s one of my favorite examples of his vision for the country’s future. Some of the limitations of the 1800s thinking on this issue appeared when we asked Sean how the terms “free labor” and “wage labor” were connected.
SG: They view free labor as as wage labor, competing for wages in a marketplace governed by contract. You know, on the other hand, you know, Lincoln, again in the Wisconsin address, seems to be of the belief that wage labor for most people is just a temporary status, right, on the road to becoming independent. So that’s important. But again, you know, a lot of labor reformers are challenging the very notion that working for somebody else, working for an employer, represents genuine freedom. I mean, they’re also, of course, challenging things like, you know, the amount of wages and the conditions in factories and the hours of labor. But some are arguing, you know, that you can’t be truly free if you’re dependent on an employer, and this is what they call “wage slavery.” There has been a, a lot of work on this question because I think, you know, the term “wage slavery” strikes people. Even if we’re talking about, you know, factory conditions that were miserable and people working 12 or 14 hour days, you know, how could they compare themselves to enslaved people? Slavery is handy as a metaphor for all kinds of oppression. Many different groups sort of compare their plight to enslaved people during this time. And so, there, there are labor abolitionists or, uh, anti slavery labor reformers who, you know, use that language too. It becomes problematic, however, you know, I think some of those, even those who are genuinely abolitionist or genuinely anti slavery, you know, sometimes there’s a sense that even though they want to see the abolition of chattel slavery, they’re prioritizing the oppression of, you know, wage laborers and people like them. They’re prioritizing the needs of, as David Wilmot put it in the Wilmot Proviso, “free white labor.”
CH: Even Southern enslavers would have described themselves as very committed to democracy – but only democracy for them and not for others.
SG: You know, I mean, there’s this phrase, “the white man’s democracy,” which I think, you know, in fairness, is not limited to the South or not limited to Southern slaveholders. I mean, this is, it’s used as a metaphor for sort of Jacksonian democracy. As property qualifications and other restrictions are stripped away and white men gain the franchise, sometimes there, you know, barriers to African Americans or other minorities voting are raised. The famous example of this is in New York state in 1821, there’s a new constitution and the property qualification for white men is stripped away, but it’s raised to, I think, $200 for free black men. So that’s kind of a classic example of the white men’s democracy in action. Again too, there are certainly elements of that in the labor movement, you know, the idea that the rights of labor, you know, apply to free white men only.
JC: The way poor white wage laborers were seeking to distance themselves from enslaved people is a great example of two groups of people experiencing oppression who might have had better success making change if they had been united rather than divided. As Sean put it, it was a barrier to solidarity.
CH: Harold told us about the limits on the way Lincoln himself was thinking about opportunity. A heads up that this excerpt includes a historical term that’s now a racial slur.
HH: He was not particularly sympathetic to Asian immigration. He eventually signed a bill that had a horrible title to it, it was the Coolie Act of 1862. And Lincoln later said he signed it because he thought allowing Chinese laborers to move freely into the West Coast was akin to reigniting the slave trade. It wasn’t racial. But it was! And he had absolutely no sympathy to Native Americans. And whether that comes from growing up as a white kid in the West or serving his only military experience in a war against native peoples or knowing very little of his family history on either side of his family, except that his grandfather, whose name was also Abraham Lincoln, was killed by Indians, and that was deep in his consciousness. Lincoln repeated several times that that’s the one story he knew about his ancestry. So there were limits.
CH: It’s outside our scope for today, but there are many examples in American history of racial divisions hampering economic equality for all. It shows up in the early history of unionization, for example.
JC: Some of that early history includes mine workers, maybe the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that you’ve heard of, but I don’t know that a lot of folks would think of those as the same category as abolitionists. Is anti-slavery work labor activism?
HH:I mean, there was some form of labor rights activism in the mid 19th century. And I think Lincoln identified it, identified with it. Here’s another example that I just thought about. Everybody has the right to strike. Lincoln said that in New Haven in 1860. The area around New Haven had been gripped by a shoe factory strike that was triggered by unsafe conditions in these factories. And Lincoln said, well, he believes in the right to strike. So he was a labor activist in the year he was campaigning for the presidency, and that was not exactly a safe political place to be because the idea of organized labor frightened a lot of people, especially the old Whig part of his constituency, in the new Republican party. I hadn’t thought of that. So, the right to strike was part of his ethos, even in the year he ran for president.
JC: As you most likely already know, Lincoln worked on the Emancipation Proclamation while in residence here at the Cottage. While I think his careful, meticulous political work on it is quieter in tone than a strike, its impact on labor circumstances was nevertheless dramatic. Here’s our colleague Haley, who is President of our UAW Local 863, on how the history of this place influenced our own unionization here. Our first contract went into effect in January of this year.
Haley Bryant: In a historical sense, the Cottage is a natural place for a union. Slavery was and is a labor issue, in addition to being deeply rooted in racism, capitalism, and colonialism. We see this reality echoed across the history of the Civil Rights movement, with leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. asserting that economic equality is inseparable from racial equality, right through to today with modern slavery and human trafficking. Lincoln’s views on slavery as an economic, moral, and political issue – and especially as a labor issue – were changing up to the moment of his death. In his first inaugural address, he said of enslaved people who attempted to self-emancipate, that they, “shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due.” So, they should be returned to their owners, to whom they presumably owe their labor. By his Second Inaugural address, Lincoln’s views had shifted, and he said of slavery that, “It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces.” For whatever moral value he did or didn’t ascribe to the institution of slavery, and despite how that value changed over time, Lincoln always saw slavery through the lens of work, and particularly fair compensation for work. This was true, too, when he was drafting the Emancipation Proclamation here at the Cottage. Every word of that document was carefully, painstakingly chosen to have the precise impact that Lincoln wanted it to have, so it is telling that in addressing the enslaved people whose freedom the document recognized, he advised “that, in all cases when allowed, they labor faithfully for reasonable wages.” Today at the Cottage, our mission, vision, and everyday operations strive to embody so many of Lincoln’s views and approaches, while recognizing him as a flawed human creature who may or may not have addressed slavery – among other issues – in ways we agree with today. One thing Lincoln was particularly good at was recognizing when he had more to learn and acknowledging when change had to come, personally and collectively, to improve conditions for everyone. I see the process of unionization and negotiating our first union contract here as an embodiment of that. I’m proud that our collective agreement further solidifies our commitment to the humanity and worth of every member of our staff and prioritizes fair and equitable wages.
CH: From the start, our full team was committed to centering our organizational values of curiosity, care, and transparency in the unionization process. This is a really positive new phase in the life of the Cottage, and I’m so proud of where we ended up.
JC: Sean had one more thing to add about how we think about socialists, union organizers, and others in the past.
SG: Historians, and other folks, too, regular folks, um, should avoid what E. P. Thompson called “the condescension of posterity.” And what he meant by that, I think, was the tendency to sort of dismiss ideas and figures and movements that that may have never been mainstream. And I don’t think in the case of socialism, right, it certainly wasn’t a mainstream or majority movement in the 19th century or in the United States ever, really. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t significant. When you look into the writing and thought of many of these groups, there’s really an amazing degree of complexity and sophistication that you’ll find, and, and what you’ll rarely find is consensus.
CH: I’ve heard folks joke that if you have three socialists in the room, you’ll have at least nine ideas about what socialism is. But despite any of the disagreements about terminology we’ve discussed so far, at the end of the day we should all be able to agree that people should be treated fairly.
JC: And like Sean said, just because an idea isn’t mainstream doesn’t mean it’s not important, or that it won’t prevail in the end – like Lincoln’s work on slavery here at the Cottage did. We’re very aware that the project of democracy in America is an ongoing project, and we always hope that connecting with us gives people a chance to figure out how they can contribute.
CH: We want to encourage you to think about: what problems might you have in common with people you’re currently divided from? How can you advocate for the value of your work and the work of those around you? What does Lincoln’s legacy tell you about what might need to change in the present? If you picked a political identifier as a young person, does it still align with your current values?
JC: This episode was produced by me, Joan Cummins, with Callie Hawkins, Haley Bryant, and additional support from the President Lincoln’s Cottage team. Music for Q&Abe was written, performed, and is copyrighted by Clancy Newman.
CH: Your support makes Q & Abe possible. If you enjoy being curious with us, please show your support by making a contribution at lincolncottage.org. Whether it is five dollars or five hundred, we couldn’t do it without you. You can also support us by hitting subscribe, by leaving a review, or by sharing with someone you know.
JC: To the student who asked this question, thanks for helping us think about how we talk about what matters. Thanks also to all of you who joined us for our live show last week, and thank you for joining us for season seven.
CH: Comments? Questions? Write to us at [email protected].
JC: President Lincoln’s Cottage is a home for brave ideas. Stay curious!
