Abraham Lincoln is invoked across four episodes of The Bob Zadek Show, but the excerpts treat him chiefly as a symbol and reference point rather than as a biographical subject. He appears in a historical aside about taxation, as the central figure of a historical novel, as the origin of a claimed progressive tradition within the Republican Party, and as the thinker who located American principles in the Declaration of Independence. No excerpt offers a sustained account of his presidency, his elections, or his major policies.
The first income tax
Bob Zadek opened the August 6, 2017 episode by noting that on that day in 1861, newly elected President Abraham Lincoln proposed and got enacted into law the first income tax. Zadek described it as temporary, lasting for ten years, and said it taxed other things as well before going away, only to return several decades later in 1913, when, in his account, the country ended up with an income tax for good The War on Chinese Restaurants with Gabriel Chin (2017). The remark was a historical aside introducing a discussion of the war on Chinese restaurants with Professor Gabriel “Jack” Chin; Lincoln enters the episode only in this opening monologue and is not mentioned again in the excerpt.
Lincoln as the hero of Old Abe
The July 5, 2021 episode, “America’s Second Founding,” was devoted to John Cribb’s historical novel Old Abe. Zadek framed the conversation by arguing that one cannot fully understand the founding era without studying the Civil War period and, most particularly, the sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln. He said the founders’ aims and fears cannot be understood in full without studying the period from 1861 through 1865 and a bit thereafter America’s Second Founding (2021).
Cribb described his book as covering the last five years of Lincoln’s life, beginning with his nomination to the presidency and following him through his presidency and the Civil War. He said he got the idea in 2006 and that the book was published late the previous year, joking that his wife observed it took four years to win the Civil War but more than three times that long to finish the book. Cribb said he wanted the book to be historically accurate, with every chapter dated, and that he chose the novel form because there are many fine non-fiction biographies of Lincoln—he cited estimates of 15,000 to 20,000 books written about him—but not so many novels. His aim, he said, was to bring Lincoln to life as a walking, talking, breathing fellow rather than the stiff image on the five-dollar bill or the penny, and to remind readers of the extraordinary service Lincoln performed in saving the country and its founding principles, the principles of 1776, when many were ready to cast them aside, and in helping lead the struggle to free millions of enslaved Americans America’s Second Founding (2021).
Lincoln and progressive conservatism
F.H. Buckley, a law professor at George Mason University, appeared on the July 24, 2022 episode to discuss his book Progressive Conservatism: How Republicans Will Become America’s Natural Governing Party. Buckley argued that there is an important history of progressivism in the Republican Party, which he said can be found in Lincoln’s internal policies, in Teddy Roosevelt, and in Eisenhower Progressive Conservatism with F.H. Buckley (2022).
In the July 27, 2022 episode, Buckley returned to the theme, describing Lincoln as having expressly adopted the values of the country’s founders in a speech on July 4, 1858. Buckley said Lincoln, speaking about immigration, honored those who fought in the revolution and noted that some of their descendants were in the audience, but argued that even without a direct blood tie to the founders it is enough to subscribe to their values—that the electric cord of the words of the Declaration unites all Americans. Buckley offered this as his account of what American nationalism means, contrasting it with nationalists he called illiberal Trumpism After Trump (2022).
Lincoln and the Declaration of Independence
Steven B. Smith, in the April 20, 2021 episode on reclaiming patriotism, called Lincoln a hero—the hero in many ways of his book—and said Lincoln put the matter best. Smith said Lincoln understood that American principles were founded in the Declaration of Independence, particularly its clause of human equality, which provided the bedrock of what America as a nation was. Smith said Lincoln understood clearly that those principles had not been perfectly realized in 1776 or in 1861, but that Americans struggle to achieve those ideals Steven B. Smith on Reclaiming Patriotism (2021).
Smith made the remark in the course of arguing against the New York Times 1619 Project, which he said would have people believe that America is founded in racism and slavery and that racism and white supremacy have been the core of American national identity from 1619 to 2021. Smith characterized that as a deeply corrosive ideology and part of what he called the new-age progressivism of recent times. He said the founding principles were not pure and were argued about from the beginning, and that the country fought a great civil war over what those principles were.
Across episodes: no development
Four episodes touch on Lincoln—the 2017 episode on Chinese restaurants, the 2021 episodes with Steven B. Smith and John Cribb, and the 2022 episodes with F.H. Buckley—but the excerpts show no development in the treatment of the topic. Each guest invokes Lincoln for a different purpose, and no later episode revisits or revises an earlier claim.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not describe Lincoln’s elections, his cabinet, his assassination, or the substance of the Emancipation Proclamation, which is named only in a topic list. They do not state the content of the July 4, 1858 speech beyond Buckley’s paraphrase, nor do they identify the legislation that created the income tax. No excerpt gives Lincoln’s birth or death dates, his state of origin, or the names of his principal generals and rivals.