We are moving into the postwar period and then well be there for the rest of the class. Right . Were gonna we are moving into the post war period. Than, well be there for the rest of the class. Were going to start here in 1945, and go all the way until the end of the 20th century. As you know, this is the u. S. Survey, so its sort of the greatest hits of American History. Thats my job. Todays lecture though is a lecture that you get because of what i am a specialist in. This is a lecture you might not get from another professor in this Department Teaching this class. This lecture is really going to situate us in the 1950s, and really talk about gender and families in that era. You know, as all lectures, you should feel free to ask questions in the middle if you want, or at the end also. And zoom people, the questions will be in the chat. So, of all the nations in the world at the end of world war ii, only the United States emerged stronger and more prosperous than when the war began. Europe and asia, of course, had been devastated by the war. And americas farms and factories were all intact. Despite social tensions that were everpresent, and still during the war, the fight against fascism head seemed to unify americans, and given them a sense of purpose. Victory seemed to confirm their struggles. So theres a new sense of prosperity, and some kind of security, in the post war period. But there was also in security in this world, because of course after world war ii, the United States would be facing a new international enemy, the soviet union. And the next 40 years of American History would be defined by the contest with it. Right . Which of course you know is the cold war. We will be talking in detail about that in the coming weeks. But the awesome and destructive power of the atomic bomb, in addition to that ongoing everpresent cold war, made americans feel vulnerable in new ways in the post war period. And we can see the effects that both this prosperity and the insecurity in ideas about American Families in the 1950s. Paul before i get to the argument, i want to give you a little story. To situate us in these families. So this is a couple in 1959. They married and decided to have their honeymoon in their bombshell tour. This, what they called a sheltered honeymoon, was featured in life magazine, which is what we know about it. They have these pictures of them outside their bombshell tour, surrounded by their consumer goods, and the article joked, fallout can be fun. What they had, they would take all the supplies into the bomb shelter and then have 14 days of what they called unbroken togetherness in a shelter. The idea here was this honeymoon, and really this marriage, all you needed was consumer goods, sexuality, of course, and total privacy. This was an ideal Nuclear Family in a nuclear age. They were isolated, sexually charged, cushioned by abundance, and protected by the wonders of modern technology. This would be an emblem for what these families in the 50s, the ideal, of American Families would be. Fromthese would be families tht supposedly fulfill all its members, but also be a tight essential protection from the outside world. This kind of family would be an essential defence against russian incursion. Americans believed deeply that russians had very different values of all kinds, but also, americans increasingly believed in the 50s that this kind of family would protect against any corrosive elements within the United States. So heres the argument. The argument of this lecture. In the 1950s, americans made the Nuclear Family central to national identity. They demanded conformity to that ideal, and punished those who deviated. The 1950s, americans made the Nuclear Family central to national identity, demanding conformity to that ideal, and punish those who deviated. Lets talk about some of these big demographic changes that happened in the 50s. Sorry, heres my outline. We are going to start with talking about marriage and families in the 50s. We will talk about some of these tensions built into ideals in the 50s. We are going to talk then about two important groups that, as deviations from this ideal, were punished in different ways. We will talk about the lavender scare and then unwed mothers. Let me talk about these big demographic changes that affected americans in the 1950s. So in the 1950s, the americans remained single, and most married young. And younger than the people who were marrying and the decades before. By 1959, nearly half of all American Rides were under the age of 19. And their husbands were usually only a year or two older. This kind of early marriage, like much more common teen age marriages, you would think parents are experts would be upset by this. Parents and experts in the 1950s very much approved of these young marriages. Less than 10 of americans in the 50s believed that an unmarried person could be happy and life. Most newlyweds quickly had babies. An average of three and usually had those babies in their twenties. Almost all married couples in the United States, regardless of race or class, wanted a large family in the 50s. And this is really a shift. So in the 40s, two children was the ideal for most American Families. By 1960, most families wanted for. And of course, this massive amount of reproduction produced what becomes famous as the baby boom. Right . Baby boomers are the people who are born out of this era. In these families, often, and this was the ideal and attempted practice, were men and women in these marriages often took distinct and different roles, with a male breadwinner and a female homemaker. So this was mostly a one income family. And this was made possible in the 1950s for a few reasons. During the 50s, more and more families were able to live in middle class comfort on one salary. Thats partly because of the postwar economic boom, which i will talk about more on thursday. Also, this is a period where there are strong unions that are sort of spreading wealth into working class homes in more equal ways. And the government has got a number of programs that are funneling money into a variety of homes, which again i will talk about on thursday. So by the mid 50s, nearly 60 of americans had a middle class income, and that is just unprecedented in American History up until this point. So to give you a comparison on that, the roaring twenties, right . Famous for its prosperity, only 31 of americans had a middle class income. In the 19 50s, 60 . Right . Thats a huge leap. So its possible economically for a lot more people in the 50s than before. Also, there are strong incentives for wives and mothers to stay home. Good childcare was rarely available in the 50s, and a lot of these families are increasingly moving to the suburbs, away from their extended kin networks, who would have been that essential childcare that they would have used in previous generations. So you have a lot of people who have fewer access to their relatives to take care of their children. So you have women who simply have to stay home, at least in part. And a new cohort of childcare experts insisted that a mothers fulltime attention was necessary for her childrens wellbeing. So this is a period where a lot of experts, anything that might be wrong in society, there is a hook. One of the common explanations was something went wrong with the mothering relationship. Either she was working, or she was over protective, or overbearing, or whatever. Just to give you a sense, just to remind us about how unusual the 50s are here. For the first time in 100 years of American History, the age of marriage and motherhood fell. It had been gradually increasing overtime. Fertility increased, fertility had been on a slope downward since 1800. And divorce rates declined. Again, divorce rates had also been on the incline. So the 50s breaks hundredyearold trans in all of these areas. So this was a really unusual moment, and people who were in it, who were living it, acknowledged it to be unusual. People who, americans had talked about this particular type of family, at this particular type of lifestyle, as the modern way. We might, people might think of it as sort of a traditional family, but at the time they were much more likely to think about it as very distinct from the families that came before. They thought of traditional as extended kin networks, where you live next to your family, these suburban homes where you relied on just parents and Children Together . That was modern to people in the 50s. It felt modern to kind of strike out on your own in this way. Also, the labor of mothering in this family was modern and a break from the past as well. So during the 19th century, most middle class women had servants. Servants who did much of the housework and childcare. And of course, that domestic situation was built on the labor of other people, usually women and sometimes children, sometimes they were poor peoples. Before the civil war it was enslaved people who did this kind of work. And the 1950s, middle class women do the bulk of the domestic service. So 1950s homes focused on the wife during the labor, and it being a fulfilling part of the job. So the amount of time women spent doing housework actually increased in the 19 50s despite the fact that the 50s is this moment where you have an explosion of convenience foods, and also, labor saving appliances. And yet, the time that women did housework increased. Childcare absorbed twice the amount of time as it had for women in the 1920s. So in the 50s, surveyors who talked to housewives found that housewives really thought of housework as not just labor, but a medium of expression. A way to express their identities that became essential to their sense of self. Now, men also were invited to root their identities in home and family in the 1950s. We can see this very briefly, even thinking about movies that were very popular in the 30s and 40s, versus the 50s. So the 30s and 40s, you have a whole range of films focused on tough mail loners. Right . Like humphrey bellegarde over here is one of our better examples, hes kind of films. In the 50s, you have a lot more films that focus on the domestication of men. The storyline often syrup centered around a good woman who gets a man to settle down. And you might think of these, if anyone watches old movies, sort of rock hudson and doris de movies being good examples of those kinds of films. So, individuals were supposed to be rooting their identities in home and family, this particular type of modern Nuclear Family in the 50s, but that family was also absolutely essential to the sense of what it meant to be an american in the 1950s. Because in this time, in this era, parenting, family life, your home, was your civic duty in many ways. That mothers and fathers were supposed to be creating future patriotic generations that would extend the american way of life. And having a family that operated correctly would prevent people from going astray, from the various things that americans at the time thought the nation stood for. Right . And we can see this connection to American Nationalism in these very famous debates that happened in 1959, called the kitchen debates. So in 1959, Vice PresidentRichard Nixon traveled to the soviet union for the American National exhibition in moscow. And he is just supposed to be going and going through this exhibition, and hes engaging with the soviet premier, nikita khrushchev. In this sort of process of walking through this exhibition, these two men, who were already engaged in a deep cold war, have a very famous verbal sparring match in the exhibition. And what they are doing in a broad sense is arguing about the relative merits of the american way of life or the relative merits of the soviet system. But what is important is that they did not talk about missiles or bombs or modes of government. What they actually talked about was washing machines and televisions and electric ranges. And these became known as the kitchen debates. So, what nixon says is that washing machines were not just evidence of american ingenuity, but they allowed american women a time saving tool that would allow them to sort of root their lives, and have better lives, in the home. Nikita khrushchev countered with pride and said that the soviets value female workers, and did not have time for what they called capitalist attitudes towards women. He said that the soviet system had no time for, and no use for, fulltime housewives. But for nixon, and for a lot of americans in the 50s, american superiority rested on the ideal of the suburban home. Complete with modern appliances and distinct gender roles for family members. That consumer goods and suburban homes proved that america provided an abundant life in an intimate age. And in this home, women could achieve their glory as housewives, and men could display their economic success. So in the 50s, perhaps more so than any other moment in American History, the idea of home and a particular type of family comes to stand in for the nation and for democracy, the value of capitalism and democracy. All right, im going to move into tensions here, i want to talk about how even in the moment where theyre really strong ideals around gender and families, there are tensions built into american ideals. The first thing i want to talk about is sexuality. Really, i think that men and women are being pulled in multiple directions. Im really gonna focus on the ways women are being pulled in multiple directions by the imperatives of this era. So, during the cold war, there was a new emphasis on containing sexuality in order to preserve social order. We can see this in a whole host of pop culture venues. So, for example, sexually liberated women were linked in Popular Culture to communist subversion. We have a lot of popular novels who narrate sexy women as infiltrators and spies, right, that sex is very connected to political subversion. So just like the soviet threat had to be contained in eastern europe, female sexuality had to be contained within marriage or that really risked some type of social stability and maybe even the free world. Others spoke about what would happen, the sexual breakdown in the family if more and more women left, which also could lead to some kind of social collapse. The logic of the time went that the way to prevent communism from seeping in to the American Society was through the Nuclear Family. That if you had a wife at home who is caring for her children, raising them to be future patriotic americans, and also loving her husband, like there is a very strong idea of a sexy wife. This was not an ideal that was absent of sexuality, sex was central. She had to, this married couple had to have plenty of sex in the marriage in order to keep the husband from straying. Because if he strayed, if she did not keep him happy, then he might fall into the hands of loose women, sex workers, pornography, or homosexuality. All of that could lead you straight to communism. And yet, so, there is this incredible boundary, these incredible dangers to excessive sexuality. Here is marilyn monroe, this torrent who is uncontrollable, right . And yet, there was signs of sexuality everywhere in the 1950s, especially among young people. There is this hyper attention to sexuality, the importance of sexuality, but it had to be contained. For young people, through strict dating and rituals, strict dating rituals an early marriage. We can even see this in the way that fashion is changing in the 1950s. So, here we have the streets more boyish look in the 1920s of the flappers. And then you have the shoulder patted strong women of the 30s and 40s, catherine hepburn. The 50s, it was a very different kind of fashion ideal that speaks to some of the problems, or some of the tensions around sexuality. So in the late 40s and 50s, you have a move towards long wide skirts, exaggerated bust lines, a pinched waist, this is sort of the era that inaugurates the push up bra, right . This fashion created an aura of, what historians have called, untouchable eroticism. The body was made into a guarded fortress through girdles and bras that told a man to keep his hands off but promised great things in marriage. Of course, this is jane mansfeild here, who was a famous star, shes also the mother of four those fans out there. Anyways. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, when you have this embrace of sexuality but these really strict boundaries and the dangers that run alongside of it, the people cross those boundaries, right . Sometimes by accident, sometimes in a moment of weakness. So, you actually have an increase in premarital sex in the 1950s. At a moment where it was still pretty hard to get contraception, abortion is illegal, so you have an increase in out of wedlock pregnancies also in the 1950s. So you also see some tensions around education. Educational ideals in the 50s. So, to do their civic duty, men and women are encouraged to seek Higher Education during the cold war. During the cold war, everyone needed to go to school and go to college to make the United States number one. And so, as a result, in the 50s, you have americans really working for an improved educational system and greater access to college education. In the name of the cold war, right . In the name of competing with the soviet union. Importantly, these reforms really applied to both men and women. So, for example, just one small example here, in 1958, Congress Passed the National Defense education act. Which authorized low interest long term loans go to college and graduate students. This is a funding package in many ways. It was open and able to be equally accessed by both men and women. This big piece of legislation, opening up college, helping people fund college, open to both men and women. But, actually, once women got to college, textbooks would often warn that there were dangers if women actually competed with men. Magazines of the era called career women a third sex. In 1960, less than 4 of lawyers and judges where women. Just to give you an example of this, when future Supreme Court justice ruth ginsburg, she went to law school, she graduated at the top of her class of Columbia Law School in 1959. When she got out, she could not find a job. No one would hire a woman lawyer, even though she was top of her class at columbia. And this was part of the tension built into these educational experiences in the 50s. Women were encouraged to go to college, need to excel as americans, to put america on top. But when they were in college, especially when they got out, they were not necessarily supposed to embrace careers. The idea was, women are supposed to go to college and go to graduate school, and then go home and use that education to educate their children. This education was supposed to make them better mothers. We also see tensions around work in the 1950s. So, obviously, there is a celebration of homemaking and domesticity. But even women who really wanted to be fulltime housewives often found themselves having to manage both wage labor and family responsibilities. So, in fact, womens employment in wage labor doubles between 1940 and 1960, and 40 of american women who had children between the ages of six and 17 do some kind of wage labor in this decade. Why . Why would you going to wage labor . Especially for those who are deeply committed to being fulltime housewives . Well, the trappings of the suburban American Dream of the 1950s were very expensive. Even if, you know, you can potentially get by with one income, they may not always. So, a majority of these women worked parttime for a specific family goal. A new car, maybe College Tuition for their children. And when they were in that wage market, whether they really wanted to be there or not, they faced discrimination. So, at this time, you found a job, often people found a job through want ads in the newspaper. It was very old school, right . But if you look to the want ads, what you would find are two columns. Help wanted, male and help wanted, female. All jobs were divided by gender in the newspaper. And, so, women were already shuttled into certain kinds of work. These female fields include, included maids, secretaries, teachers, nurses, and often those professions were lesser paid. And overall, female fulltime workers in this era earned about an average of 60 of white fulltime male worker was paid at the time. So, even for people who really invested themselves and believed in this Nuclear Family ideal in the 50s faced these tensions. Even for people who were totally on board, wanted to be part of this, they still would be facing some kind of pressure within that ideal at some point in their life, most often. But now im going to turn to two big groups who were clearly falling outside of this Nuclear Family in the 1950s and are really punished as a result. So the first group i want to talk about our game men and lesbians. As i mentioned in a previous lecture briefly, there was awareness of queer people, especially by urban americans in the early 20th century, but its after world war ii where that awareness of homosexuality explodes across the nation. People are just like, the rate of people talking about gay people, being familiar with some terms, just explodes after the war. Gay men and lesbians receive a different kind of public attention after world war ii. Importantly, in this era, they become a new kind of enemy in the 1950s. I can give you a million examples of this, but im just going to stick to one. So im going to talk about the lavender scare, and its connected to the red scare, which im going to talk more indepth about later, but it sort of originates out of the same process. So, Joseph Mccarthy, famous senator from wisconsin, led witch hunts in the early 50s looking for communists in the federal government and also in hollywood. And hes really feeding into the Strong National paranoia that there could be communists all among you, that there is like a fifth column, you never quite knew, you always had to be on guard. The communist might be your neighbor, your teacher, your grocer. So in 1950, Joseph Mccarthy claimed that there were 205 cardcarrying communists in the federal government. And the department replies, theyre like, no, no, no, not communist. They said they have no communists, they do say they forced out, they called, security risks, among those were 91 gay people. And then, you have a public, a press, that takes up this piece of information and says, this is evidence that the entire government was infiltrated with what they called at the time sex perverts. And it led to the firing of thousands of government employees. So in 1950, many thought that gay people posed more of a threat to National Security then communists in the United States. And you have agencies across the country boasting that they were firing up to one gay person a day, which is more than double the rate for those considered politically disloyal. So, why . What is the logic of this . So, there were these two categories that federal agencies were working with to ferret out people they didnt want to be working there. One was those who they considered disloyal, and these were people who would be guilty of espionage or who had connections to allegedly subversive organizations, like the communist party in the United States. So, the people who were disloyal, in that category, the Government Agencies believed they had a willful desire to betray state secrets. There was another category and this is really where gay people fell. That is the security risk. So, a security risk, for a person who had behaviors or associations that might lead them to inadvertently or unwillingly betray secrets in the future. And so, the various groups of people who fell into this category were alcoholics, people who talked too much, and the homosexual. However, only the homosexual was always a security risk. All the other categories of security risks had qualifications. Like, you could be an alcoholic and not always be a security risk. And most government efforts to ferret out security risks focused on gay people. The logic here was that gay people were supposed to be so gregarious, outgoing, that they were unable to keep secrets. They said, the state Department Said they were often alcoholics because of internalized shame. And they said they were easily blackmailed. And all of those things together made them a security risk. And this really escalates very quickly. So in 1953, president eisenhower issues an executive order barring gay men and lesbians from federal jobs. And quickly, state and municipalities followed suit in implementing their own ban by banning queer people employed by their agencies. All the agencies began to watch their employees closely for gay tendencies. These are not people who are out in the modern sense. These are people who are private. You have employers who are now trying to figure out whether they are gay. These purges, that are from the federal government all the way that down begin in 1950. They continue to be Standard Practice long after mccarthy lost his public authority. Mccarthys story is very brief in a certain way. He leads this mess sort of movement, and then he sort of falls from grace within a few years. But that is not the case with this outcome of this lavender scare. These practices last well into the 1970s. Because really, in this era, in the 1950s, questions of sexuality and gender merge with loyalty in this profound way, and make queer people an enemy of the state, in this and many other instances in the 1950s. So the other group i want to talk about, who are violating the rules and rolls of the 1950s, are unwed mothers. Are some besides non homosexuality, non childbearing was treated is the most profound violation of the ideals of the era. All unwed mothers were punished and in this era and the decades after, but there were very different punishments and responses focused on white unwed mothers and women of color who were unwed mothers. I will talk you through this here. So, for white women who were unwed mothers, sometimes they were teenagers, sometimes they were adults, the growing discipline of psychiatry was utilized to contain this deviant act. White women, white unwed mothers, were diagnosed as being particularly immature, or more commonly, had a temporary mental illness. So, in 1965, to harvard psychiatrist wrote, quote, bree unwed mother is to some degree a psychiatric problem. The victim of mild, moderate, or severe emotional or mental disturbance. I want to say here, in this vision of where unwed pregnancy came from, theres really no man in the story at all. Theres no man involved in the act of getting pregnant. It was a womans pathology. She allowed herself to get pregnant because of her mental illness. She is made into a patient. So for white women, they have shame and this temporary mental illness, but there was a process, a coercive and punitive process that allowed them to be rehabilitated and redeemed. Okay, so the first, let me go back here, so the first step is that you had to remove these women from their homes. Right . They went to their aunts, whatever, a vacation to their aunts house for six months, for a vacation, but really the usually went to a Maternity Home. There were about 47 about 47 Florence Crittenden homes across the country, they were a quarter of all Maternity Homes. Florence crittenden homes hosted about 10,000 unwed mothers each year. Florence crittenden homes only would allow white women to come in. You can see the structures of the institution allows only for unmarried white women. She had to be removed from her home. She went to the Maternity Home. Once there, there was a strict pathway to go through to get redeemed. She had to express remorse. She had to say that she knew she was wrong. She had to say it was a terrible thing and demonstrate her readiness to adapt to a heterosexual adjustment on a realistic basis. This is the second step that she had to relinquish her child for adoption. The Maternity Home council to her to give up her child for adoption, and 85 of all the women who come through Maternity Homes did. This protected her identity. It allowed her to not be an unwed mother when she got out. It allowed white infertile couples access to a white baby who could allow them to fulfill their family ideals. Some women who came to Maternity Homes, really did imbibe this. One pregnant girl wrote, this is a quote, she did not think any unmarried girl had a right to keep her baby. I know i did not have that right many others did not want to go after children for adoption. A whole range of practices were used to try to get them to. Some women were told, after labor, that their babies died and that they were taken from them. Many were pressured to sign away their rights, either during lab or labor, or immediately afterwards. To be redeemed, she had to give up her child for adoption, and of course, have no connection to it after that. There was no open adoptions in this era. She also had to show her renewed commitment to marriage, that she had to commit to herself, commit that her destiny was a wife, a mother, and a real woman. The school that happens in his Maternity Homes was about preparing a girl to become a wife and mother. Through this pathway, she would be redeemed for the marriage market. So, historians have estimated that these coercive practices were used on about one and a half million women in the United States between the 1940s, and it extends really all the way up into the late 60s early 70s. So for women of color, they were largely excluded from these Maternity Homes and this whole process rehabilitation and redemption. Commenters at the time, because people were talking constantly about unwed pregnancy, where its coming from, most american venues sort of define their pregnancies as a product of family and community disorganization. But this was a community dysfunction that produced unwed pregnancy for women of color, or it was narrated as a product of biology. And of course, this built on longstanding racist stereotypes around women of color, and especially black women, as both hyper sexual without consciousness about sex, and also natural mothers. So in a total inversion of what happens with white women, if a woman of color, especially a black woman, wanted to give up her child for adoption, she was often prevented from doing so by state agencies. There are many cases in this era where black women attempt to legally give up their children for adoption, and then are not allowed to, but then are also charged with desertion as a result. So really, theres very few pathways for redemption, especially outside communities of color, that women of color are only punished for their unwed pregnancies. And we can see this escalating into the 60s and 70s as women of color and their children get increasingly blamed for relying too much and snapping state funds. So you have a variety of ways they are punished. If you had a child out of wedlock, you are easily evicted from public housing. You have a variety of public agencies who punish out of child rearing, sort of excluding them from benefits. But i think one of the other major ways that we can see women of color punished for unwed pregnancies is a massive increase in forced sterilizations, that occur, the 50s and 60s, escalating into the 1970s. I just want to take you back a little bit. If you remember, when we talked about the Eugenics Movement in the early 20th century, remember that there were states that passed sterilization laws for the state, they would choose certain rubrics about people who would be sterilized by the state agency. But that is not how these women in the post war period are sterilized. There is not a law that allows a state to sterilize these women. This massive increase in forced sterilizations in the post war period was more of a defective trend. This was something that many doctors and hospitals sort of took up on their own. And what would happen is a woman of color would go to a hospital to give birth, and again, during labor, during the heat of labor, the pain of labor, the pressured to sign onto sterilization. But as commonly, or even more commonly, a doctor would just do the sterilization without permission. Many people were not told that they were sterilized until they were released from the hospital. Fanny lu hammer, whos a very famous civil rights activist who we will talk about later, in 1965 she claimed that 60 of the women who came out of her local mississippi hospital had all been sterilized. They became so common that people locally called the mississippi appendectomies. They were so common, like removing your appendix. This happened all over the country, and really, it doesnt and in the 50s. It escalates into the 60s and 70s. In fact, you have it becomes so much a part of the experience of Reproductive Health care for a woman of color, that it affects women who were too young to even get pregnant. You have young women who are sterilized as young as 12 and 14, because doctors imagine they will be unwed mothers in the future. And as i said, this really affects black women, latinas, and native women. The Indian Health service is one of these agencies that is at the heart of doing a lot of these forced sterilizations on native women. Its hard to tell because a lot of people feel shame about being sterilized, but estimates say that a quarter of all native women were forcibly sterilized in this post war era. One person found that all the full blood, thats a complicated term, members of the tribe in oklahoma were sterilized. But we know between 1970 and 1980, the number of children born to native americans dropped by a third. But because the logic of unwed pregnancy for women of color was rooted in communities, and especially in biology, that their deviance was imagined as permanent, and could only be addressed through a punitive and often biological solution. So, i want to end here and say that this family, which is so important for us, we often imagine it as in a historical family, but in fact, i want to suggest to you that its a very historical family. One that is absolutely necessary for us to understand the 1950s. It was a product of this era and absolutely central to some parts of it. And also, will set up so many contests stations around families, gender, and sexuality in the coming decades. Any questions about that . This family, was it considered progressive at the time . Yeah, great, progressive, modern, the way the family should go. This was an embrace, you know, this was not a partisan family at all. Like, people of all parties embraced this version of family. [inaudible]. There were four underline words, i will email them to you. Any other questions . All right, thank you so much. Have a good day. A good day. Our abraham lincolns february with a conversation from the National Constitution center. They talked about the 16th president speeches and what they reveal about his views on the constitution. Heres a portion of the conversation. Let me start by saying the plenty of people have looked at the address and seeing drew tension very actively to this. The speeches also suffused with biblical language and a biblical idea of morality. Its the beginning, in my view, of lincoln articulating his own moral vision of the entire history of the United States. In the second inaugural address, which, maybe we will come to in our next round of conversation, hes most explicit about tibet. He starting to do that in the gettysburg address. Publicizing its biblical. Two americans in the 19th century, almost all of whom were protestants, biblical language meant general morality. 19th century americans believed that morality was derivative heavily protestant protestants that you should read the bible and through the bible you can get access to morality. Lincoln could not interpret the history of the constitution in these moral terms. The constitution enshrines slavery he was committed to the constitution under the rule of law. That meant he was committed to a compromise that included a compromise with immorality. That put him in a contradictory situation. After emancipation, she was now able to describe the concept when he said that the our country was not only conceived of liberty but dedicated to the proposition of all men created equal, he could not have said that about the constitution until he broke the constitution because the constitution was not dedicated to that proposition. Because the constitution enshrined slavery. Once emancipation was and established fact by lincoln, he could reconceptualize a country in the. Storms this is where the new birth of freedom park comes in i think is in the audience, which is one of the early readers of my book. New birth is a very resident phrase for 19th century americans all of whom i think would have recognized immediately the idea of new birth in christ. Im not arguing here that lincoln was making a consciously christian argument im saying he was drawing upon the comment threat of protestant moral thought to express a new idea. The idea here was that just as the Old Testament had been superseded by Christian Liberty in a new testament, so the new birth of freedom would supersede the slavery president in the original constitution. The country would then be reborn he plays out this idea more fully in the other inaugural address as a moral country. One that, therefore, could be a proper fulfillment of the ideals of morality that were present in the original declaration of independence. But were not present in the constitution. That, i think, is the explanation for why lincoln was able to use this kind of religious language both in the gettysburg address and ultimately in a second inaugural speech. He was freed up to do so by emancipation which ended the immoral qualities of the constitutional compromise and opening the possibility of a moral accounting. That was very appropriate at a funeral because after all, in a way, a commemorative for people who had died he would give specific