The 'Cult' of Abraham Lincoln and the Strange Survival of Liberal England in the Era of the World Wars

This article explores the significance of what George Bernard Shaw called the 'cult' of Abraham Lincoln in England in the aftermath of the First World War. It argues that the effort to 'Anglicize' Lincoln by rooting him in English traditions, values and genealogy, was a way of 'domesticating' the larger meaning of 'America', reflecting a search for reassurance that the rising power of the United States was an extension, not a threat, to British cultural and political power. The article also suggests that the imagined Lincoln offered a way of understanding and validating the sacrifice of the 'One Million Dead' of the British Empire and that liberalism as a framework through which to understand the world had popular currency even into the inter-war period. Lincoln was important in large measure because he was represented as having pursued liberal and moral ends through the means of war. As such he provided an inspiration for Lloyd George and, later, for Churchill.