Wednesday , Feb . 04 , 2009 What Would Lincoln Do ? mundane : 평범 한 흔히 있 는 실제 의 세계 의 우주 의 hoopla : 고리 던지 는 놀이 ? bicentennial bi · cen · ten · ni · al 〔〕 a . 200 년 간 계속 되 는 , 200 년 마다 의 ━ n . 200 년 기념제 [ 일 ] Emancipation Proclamation Emanciption Proclamtion [ the Emancipation Proclamation ] 【 미국 사 】 노예 해방령 [ 해방 선언 ] 《 1862 년 Lincoln 대통령 이 선언 ; 1863 년 1 월 1 일 부터 발효 》 culmination 1 . 최고점 , 정점 , 정상 ; 최 고조 , 전 성 , 극치 ; 성취 , 완성 crusader cru · sad · er 〔〕 n . 십자군 전사 ; 개혁 운동가 boggling bog · gling 〔│〕 a . 아연 케 하 는 , 놀 랄 만한 bedrock 1 . 근저 의 , 바닥 의 2 . 근본 적 인 ( basic ) virtuous 1 . 덕 있 는 , 덕 이 높 은 , 고결 한 ; 정숙 한 ; 순결 한 ( ⇒ moral [ 유의어 ] ) 2 . 고결 한 체하 는 , 독선 적 인 3 . 《 고어 》 < 약 등 이 > 효력 이 있 는 sanctify 1 . 신성 하 게 하 다 , 축 성 ( 祝聖 ) [ 성별 ( 聖 別 ) ] 하 다 2 . < 사람 의 > 죄 를 씻 다 , 정화 하 다 3 . ( 종교 적 입장 에서 ) 정당 화 하 다 , 시인 하 다 ( justify ) upward mobility pward moblity 《 미 》 【 사회 】 경제 적 [ 사회 적 ] 상태 의 상승 deprived de · prived 〔〕 a . 가난 한 ( poor ) , 불우 한 ;[ the deprived ; 명사 적 ; 복수 취급 ] 가난 한 사람 들 tyranny 1 . 전제 정치 ( despotism ) , 학정 2 . 포학 , 횡포 3 . [ 종종 pl . ] 포학 [ 무도 ] 한 행위 4 . ( 고대 그리스 의 ) 참주 ( 僭主 ) 정치 ; 참주 정치국 oppression 1 . 압박 , 압제 , 억압 , 탄압 , 학대 ; 심한 차별 2 . 압박감 , 우울 , 의기 소침 ;( 열병 초기 등 의 ) 나른 한 느낌 3 . 고난 4 . 【 법 】 직권 남용 죄 maneuver │ manoeuvre 1 . 책략 , 술책 , 공작 , 책동 , 교묘 한 조작 [ 조치 ] 2 . 【 군사 】 작전 행동 4 . [ pl . ] 기동 연습 clamber clam · ber 〔, │〕 vi . 기어올라가 다 《 over , about 》━ vt . ( 손발 을 사용 하 여 ) 기어올라가 다 《 up 》; 기어 내려가 다 《 down 》━ n . [ a clamber ] 등 반 , 기어올라가 기 clamber · er n . derail de · rail 〔, 〕 vt . [ 보통 수동형 으로 ] < 기차 등 을 > 탈선 시키 다 ;< 계획 따위 를 > 실패 하 게 하 다 ━ vi . 탈선 하 다 ; 좌절 하 다 ━ n . 《 주로 미 》 탈선기 derail · ment n . [ U . C ] 탈선 demonize de · mon · ize 〔〕 vt . 악마 처럼 만들 다 , 악마 가 되게 하 다 d · mon · i · z · tion n . exhort ex · hort 〔〕 vt . 《 문어 》 간곡히 타이르 다 , 권 하 다 ( urge ) ; 훈계 [ 권고 ] 하 다 ( admonish ) ━ vi . 훈계 [ 권고 ] 하 다 emancipation 1 . ( 노예 등 의 ) 해방 《 of 》;【 로마법 】 부권 ( 父權 ) 에서 의 해방 2 . ( 미신 등 으로부터 의 ) 해방 , 이탈 , 벗어남 By David von Drehle / SpringfieldAbraham Lincoln ' s marble  temple in Washington is as familiar as the back of a penny . But the figure enthroned inside will always be above and apart , a demigod — martyr , prophet , scourge and healer rolled into one . That he was killed on Good Friday with hosannas of triumph still echoing in his ears added a religious overtone to the grief of his countrymen and , from the hour of his death , guaranteed that Lincoln could never again fit into the frame of an ordinary man . ( See pictures of Abraham Lincoln . ) But he was a man , in ways as familiar as the guy next door . He liked sports , dirty jokes and being the alpha male . He flirted with pretty women and suffered occasional deafness when his wife was talking . He put his feet on the furniture , encouraged his sons to roughhouse and break things , suffered from bad digestion . And he spent a lot of his life thinking about money . Not that he was greedy — quite the opposite — but he had a poor boy ' s understanding of the fact that money is a powerful tool , the lever that makes ambition possible . " The penniless beginner in the world , " he once explained , " labors for wages awhile , saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land , for himself ; then labors on his own account another while , and at length hires another new beginner to help him . " This steady , gradual advance , Lincoln insisted , is " the prosperous system , which opens the way for all — gives hope to all , and energy , and progress , and improvement of condition to all . " We know it as the American Dream , and it certainly worked for him . Beginning with nothing , Lincoln managed to educate himself , raise a family in comfort and subsidize his history - shaping political campaigns — all thanks to that useful instrument , money . ( See 10 elections that changed America . ) This mundane fact may seem so obvious that it isn ' t worth mentioning in the middle of a flood of Lincoln hoopla . February marks the bicentennial of Lincoln ' s birth . Bookstore shelves are sagging under the weight of new Lincoln tomes . Museums , galleries and lecture halls across the country and around the world have scheduled Lincoln programs . New pennies are being minted , old controversies revisited . And this already keen interest has been further stoked by what Lincoln Bicentennial Commission executive director Eileen Mackevich calls an " Obama wind . " The new President , another slender fellow from Illinois , has been busy reading about Lincoln , quoting Lincoln , evoking Lincoln . The Lincoln Memorial was among Barack Obama ' s first stops in Washington , and when Obama was sworn in last month it was , for many , the culmination of a long march that began with Lincoln ' s Emancipation Proclamation . ( See the greatest speeches of all time . ) Inevitably , the main focus of all this attention is Lincoln ' s views on race and equality , and his leadership during the cataclysmic Civil War . Yet given the fix we ' re in , Lincoln ' s economic ideas deserve some attention too . Long before he gave his first speeches about Union or slavery , Lincoln was a crusader on questions of economic development and banking . He cut his political teeth on conditions painfully topical for us today : an economic crash that left the young legislator struggling to shore up a failing bank while arguing for government spending on public works . Lincoln would surely be intrigued to see the son of an African man living with his wife , the descendant of slaves , in his old digs at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . But what might fascinate him even more , were he to materialize for his bicentennial , is the extent to which the American economy has fulfilled and exceeded his urgent vision of an entrepreneurial , innovative marketplace geared to upward mobility . The man who once said " I know of nothing so pleasant to the mind , as the discovery of anything which is at once new and valuable " would have a swell time visiting Apple headquarters or touring a genetic - engineering lab . Among the mansions and pretensions of our millionaires and billionaires , he would shrug and say ( as he said in 1860 ) , " I don ' t believe in a law to prevent a man from getting rich ; it would do more harm than good . [ But ] while we do not propose any war upon capital , we do wish to allow the humblest man an equal chance to get rich with everybody else . " See pictures of Barack Obama behind the scenes on Inauguration Day . See pictures of how Presidents age in office . An equal chance . Lincoln ' s thoughts on money are relevant today because he reminds us of the best aspects of the American economy — not just how to survive a crash but why it matters that we do . The boggling complexity of today ' s marketplace would amaze him , but the fact that bust has once again followed boom would not . Lincoln lived through two major economic crashes , in 1837 and 1857 , and he learned some timeless lessons . He foresaw , in the Union he struggled to preserve , an open , competitive , capitalist , enterprising nation , tied together by rapid transportation and communication . He believed that government had a leading role to play in building the infrastructure of a growing economy . But the guiding principle for all of it , the whole reason for the nation ' s being , was that " equal chance " — the humble citizen ' s right to get ahead . Lincoln understood that economic freedom was the bedrock of political liberty . one is not possible without the other . Thus it was not just virtuous but also necessary to fight the slave economy . Lincoln has been criticized for saying , during his famous debates with Stephen Douglas , that white and black might never be equal in social terms . But he was firm on the economic question : " In the right to eat the bread , without leave of anybody else , which his own hand earns , " Lincoln insisted , a black person " is my equal and the equal of Judge Douglas , and the equal of every living man . " Another time , responding to the Southern argument that Northern factory workers were , in essence , just as enslaved as plantation hands , Lincoln zeroed in on the crucial difference . " There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us , " he said . " Free labor has the inspiration of hope ; pure slavery has no hope . " ( See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama . ) There is little trace of this money - conscious Lincoln at the great memorial on the National Mall . To catch the scent of that man — the one who knows what we ' re going through and why the right solutions remain urgently important to the world — we ' re better off visiting another white - stone , Greek - style temple . Older and odder than the monument on the mall , this Lincoln memorial is situated on an out - of - the - way hilltop in western Kentucky , roughly on the spot where Lincoln was born . Humble BeginningsThe cornerstone of the Kentucky temple was laid a century ago , 13 years before the dedication of the memorial in Washington . But instead of a statue inside or tablets carved with Lincoln ' s words , the birthplace monument contains a crude one - room hut with a mud - and - stick chimney — a replica of the mythic log cabin . Putting a dirt - floor hovel inside a columned temple is a bit weird , yes . on the one hand , it is a way of sanctifying the Lincolnian ideal of upward mobility . on the other hand , the transfiguration from squalor to shrine sanitizes Lincoln ' s life story and in this way makes it harder for us to understand the intensity of his ideas about money . Lincoln knew the dead - end life of an undeveloped economy : poor , nasty , brutish and short . The romance of the log cabin masks a grim reality . ( See pictures of Abraham Lincoln . ) When Lincoln was born here on Sunday , Feb . 12 , 1809 , he entered a world as harsh and primitive as if he had been born a thousand years earlier . The simple act of giving birth put his mother in mortal danger , and her only protection was the old " granny woman " summoned from miles away . Her baby was washed in water carried uphill from a dripping spring , then wrapped in animal skin against the winter cold and put in a bed of corn husks standing on a damp earth floor beside a smoky fire . In later years , Lincoln allowed his supporters to portray him as a sort of backwoods superman , for already the young nation was beginning to glamorize its frontier roots . Even in the heat of the " rail splitter " campaign of 1860 , however , he resisted the idea that life in the wilderness was grand and pure . All the hardship and sorrow of what he called " stinted living " could be condensed , Lincoln said , into a single line from the poet Thomas Gray : " the short and simple annals of the poor . " His strongest boyhood memories were of death and near death : the time he almost drowned , the time he was brained by the kick of a horse , the early deaths of his younger brother and beloved mother and eventually his sister Sarah . Another monument , this one at Lincoln ' s boyhood home in south - central Indiana , comes a bit closer to the dark reality — especially if you approach the place in winter , as the Lincoln family did when Abe was 7 years old . A sharp wind drives scattered snowflakes , and as you walk deeper into the woods , you might try to imagine the first months , before the tiny cabin was built , when the little family huddled for shelter under a flimsy three - sided windbreak . Here sits another replica of the iconic cabin , this time in its proper physical context . Carl Sandburg calculated that the walk for water was a mile each way , but try as you might to put yourself in the place of a barefoot child making that long trip with that heavy bucket to that dark and drafty little room , it ' s almost impossible . For you know that if you grow cold or bored or turn an ankle or run a fever , you ' ll soon be back in the modern world , temperature - controlled and professionally doctored . Within two years of his family ' s trek into Indiana , Lincoln ' s mother was dead . The boy watched her suffer and probably helped make her coffin . His father Thomas Lincoln , unable to cope with farm and family by himself , returned to Kentucky , leaving his children nearly abandoned in the hardwood forest . Abe was 10 , Sarah 12 ; a teenage cousin was their only company . " The panther ' s scream filled night with fear , " Lincoln later wrote . When Thomas finally returned months later with his new wife , they found the future President and his sister living almost like animals , filthy and deprived . See pictures of presidential First Dogs . See pictures of Presidents at the beach . His stepmother Sarah Bush Johnston organized the home and encouraged Lincoln to read . Armed with that crucial skill , he would walk to Gentry ' s store , two miles away , where he occasionally found newspapers . In these , he learned of a miracle under way in a far - off state called New York . At the urging of Governor DeWitt Clinton , a great canal had been dug nearly 15 times as long as any previous American canal , connecting one end of the state to the other . Attacked and derided as government waste , the Erie Canal was carrying more freight within a few years than the entire Mississippi River . Thousands of hardscrabble farmers and isolated craftsmen — people like the Lincolns — were suddenly able to move their produce to distant markets , and the boom at the port of New York created thousands of new jobs . The New York governor also founded a bank where these " penniless beginners " could " save a surplus . " Their little savings could be gathered into the capital needed for further economic development — an idea , historian Daniel Walker Howe writes , that " seemed novel at the time " but proved to be a " huge success . " Lincoln had found a key to unlock the prison of poverty . Here was an upward path that did not depend on the favor of aristocrats or the force of arms . This was the vision that propelled him into politics . In Indiana , Lincoln experienced the liberating thrill of earning his first half - dollar , for ferrying a pair of strangers to a newfangled steamboat on the Ohio River . Later , having reached manhood , he helped his father move one more time , then left the farm without regret . He soon found himself in New Salem , Ill . , a riverside village bursting with hopes , if only its little waterway could be widened for commercial traffic . With this ultimately fruitless project as his first grand undertaking , Lincoln began to puzzle his way toward the goal of becoming " the DeWitt Clinton of Illinois . " ( See the most notorious presidential pardons of all time . ) The Right to Rise " He wanted the government to develop Illinois , to make it a great state in which success would be open to anyone , poor or rich , " says Gabor Boritt , a Lincoln scholar at Gettysburg College . Self - taught in economics ( as in all other subjects ) , Lincoln subscribed to the Whig Party ' s belief that private investment alone was unreliable for creating the canals , railroads , bridges , highways and navigable rivers required for growth . When he emerged from the Indiana woods and moved quickly into the Illinois legislature , Lincoln championed a huge public - works program and a state - chartered bank to back it up . This aspect of Lincoln ' s career was largely ignored for the first century after his death , until Boritt came along . His background as a refugee from European tyranny made him keenly receptive to Lincoln ' s economic philosophy , which Boritt eventually dubbed " the right to rise . " By 1956 , when he joined the Hungarian revolt against Soviet communist rule , Boritt already had a lifetime ' s experience of oppression : forced from home by the Nazis , close relatives murdered at Auschwitz , father and brother seized by Stalin ' s minions . He recalls the words of the Gettysburg Address resounding from the radios of Budapest to inspire the uprising . Boritt ' s first book — Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream — was published in 1978 and has come to be viewed as one of the most important ( if under - read ) works on the 16 th President . His Lincoln was a man far removed from the familiar yarn - spinning charmer of the cracker barrel : enterprising , visionary and persuasive . Still in his 20 s , as a member of the legislature ' s finance committee , Lincoln became a driving force in the development of preindustrial Illinois . In this role , he first experienced an economic collapse : the crash of 1837 , which brought on one of America ' s deepest depressions . Financial markets froze ; government debt soared ; public opinion soured on the maneuvering of bankers and the schemes of politicians . At the risk of his budding political career , Lincoln struggled to save the canals and railroads . once , when his opponents tried to force a vote against the state bank , Lincoln clambered from a statehouse window in a wild attempt to derail their plans . See pictures of the Civil Rights movement from Emmett Till to Barack Obama . See pictures of TIME ' s Wall Street covers . Lincoln ' s argument was a sort of primitive foreshadowing of today ' s Troubled Asset Relief Program , or TARP . While Democrats all the way up to President Andrew Jackson were demonizing the banks , Lincoln maintained that the way to save the system was to pump more money into it . He was convinced that once confidence was restored and commerce began humming again , the public works — roads , canal routes , widened rivers and rail lines — that seemed so expensive during the slump would repay their cost many times over . In his folksy way , he compared a stalled economy to a steam engine and thus summed up the idea we now call stimulus . At the engine ' s " dead point , " Lincoln said , even a single turn is " extremely difficult . " But jolt it back to life , and it quickly regains momentum . Then " all will be well again . " He wasn ' t entirely successful , and in the short term , Lincoln ' s vision saddled Illinois with a heavy public debt . But he carried lessons from that experience into his far more famous fights against slavery and for the Union . Lincoln ' s presidency worked an unprecedented economic transformation on the country . For the first time , the Federal Government taxed income , floated bonds on a large scale and issued paper currency . The national wealth — land — was leveraged to promote sweeping social , educational and technological initiatives . Some ideas didn ' t work as planned , like the Homestead Act . Others , like the Morrill Act to create land - grant colleges , worked brilliantly . Still others achieved their aims only at a cost of waste and graft , like the Transcontinental Railroad . But all shared Lincoln ' s characteristic stamp of creative finance , large ambition and spirit of economic advancement . " I published my book at a time of great pessimism about America , " explains Boritt . " I wanted to remind people of Lincoln ' s strong ideas about America and the right to rise . " He continues , " Now the country is in another difficult period , and I believe the optimistic ideas Lincoln put forth can once again be central . " Lincoln exhorts us to take risks . Bet on America . But never lose sight of the goal : economic freedom for individuals — the right to rise and prosper . To the extent that President Obama ' s controversial stimulus plan advances that cause , Lincoln would say it is priceless . But only to that extent . Of all the places where Lincoln lived , only one remains essentially as he knew it . It is the home he made with his wife Mary in Springfield , Ill . The handsome clapboard two - story at the corner of Eighth and Jackson exudes middle - class comfort : carved and upholstered furniture , woven carpets , colorful wallpaper and sumptuous drapes . I toured it recently on one of the coldest mornings of the year and couldn ' t help noticing that nearly every room was equipped with a radiating stove — state - of - the - art energy efficiency circa 1860 . When the tour concluded in the kitchen , my National Park Service guide , Mike McPeak , noted that this one room was about the same size as the entire cabin in which Lincoln was born . It ' s vain to scoff at such progress as being merely material . Lincoln ' s journey from a frigid hovel to a toasty double parlor was a personal declaration of independence , his emancipation from poverty ' s dead end . The house in Springfield is a reminder that by the time he left for Washington to save his country , Abraham Lincoln had fully escaped the prison of his birth . He was a free man , possessed of a mission to free others .