Nation: LINCOLN AND MODERN AMERICA

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of large and small facts of his life grew a man whom it is difficult to call a genius, and even more difficult to call anything less; a man so unheroic in appearance that he looks uneasy in stone, and yet beyond question a hero; a man so much himself, even when bending to others, that it is almost redundant to describe him as an individual.

Mankind Minus One. Abraham Lincoln's life connects colonial America with modern America; Jefferson died when Lincoln was 17, Woodrow Wilson was eight when Lincoln died. While America was fighting its war, the greater battle of the modern world was already joined.

John Stuart Mill had finished his essay "On Liberty," in which he expressed the horror with which 19th century liberalism regarded the state, and enunciated the magnificent principle that "if all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion," mankind would still not be justified in silencing him. Yet at that very time, Karl Marx was writing Das Kapital, striking back at liberal individualism in the name of mankind. For the industrial worker, argued Marx, had been "reduced to a mere fragment of a man, mentally and physically dehumanized," and only collective action, state action, could redress his wrongs.

Thus began the long Marxist offensive that eventually led to Communism and fascism. Just as the U.S. had succeeded in tempering and transforming the forces that became the French Revolution, it tempered and transformed the Socialist Revolution. America had its age of ruggedly individualistic businessmen, when popularizers turned Darwin's theory of natural selection into a doctrine of economic predestination, according to which the damnation of the weak was a law of nature. But out of this era grew the sometimes uneasy partnership between business and government that in effect built a capitalist welfare state and an almost universal middle class society.

This is the central fact about the individual today. The life now led by Americans (and to a great extent by Europeans) was made possible only through industrial, and organized, civilization. Hence what is often denounced as regimentation of the individual is the price paid for giving virtually every individual a chance to live a wider, longer, richer life.

Burden of Choice. Americans have never really learned to speak of the "masses." Vast crowds do not give the U.S. the sense of doom that Ortega y Gasset felt when he shuddered about "mass man." Yet, sheer numbers are an overwhelming factor in the individual's existence. Demographers calculate that, given a U.S. population density of ten people per square mile in the mid-19th century, each American inside a ten-mile radius could "interact" with about 3,000 others. But the density in the U.S. today is 60 people per square mile, making possible interaction with nearly 20,000 (in cities the figure rises into the millions).

Says the University of Chicago's Philip Hauser: "In a mass society, we are more anonymous, but it also makes for far greater variety and for relationships that were never possible in a smaller society. Today, far more than in a simpler, more settled society, a man is forced to choose his wife, his education, his occupation, his friends, the place he lives. He never used to determine how many children he would