Grisly and surreal. Japanese bombers turned the US Battle Fleet - several spic-and-span warships of state, so clean under a tropical sun shining throuGrisly and surreal. Japanese bombers turned the US Battle Fleet - several spic-and-span warships of state, so clean under a tropical sun shining through white deck awnings - into labyrinthine tombs, zones of industrial disaster, poison pockets of chemical menace. Also, as sites of mass carnage, these wrecks shat on the democratic conceit of individuated sailors as sons of families and hopeful citizens - "Join the Navy, Learn a Trade"- and the religious conceit of a named headstone over identified remains. Raymer and the other divers worked in total darkness, felt their way in an oily murk; they were guided by topside tenders explaining the lucid ship's plans through the helmet phones; they risked their lives in every descent to make working, personal surveys of the collapsed decks, the bubbles of explosive gases, the jagged traumas of metal, the clusters of bloated bodies being eaten by crabs, and the absurdly comical bricolage of debris. And, of course, they recovered tons upon tons of shells and still-usable equipment, and righted and dewatered the salvageable ships (there's a war on, you know, and every bullet counts). Raymer is often funny, ribald; he doesn't pretend he and his team weren't also twenty-one year olds thinking of pussy and booze. He describes youthful insouciance and antic shore liberty with nice dirty immediacy, but also describes the daily work so finely that the shadows of later reflection fall just where they should....more
Staggeringly bad, like something you'd read in Vanity Fair. Daugherty didn't have Didion's cooperation - but Didion is a singular stylist who has writStaggeringly bad, like something you'd read in Vanity Fair. Daugherty didn't have Didion's cooperation - but Didion is a singular stylist who has written plenty of memoirs, and Daugherty was able to consult her drafts in the Bancroft Library. That should have been enough to produce something more substantial than this. Daugherty is not resourceful or imaginative in his choice of filler (if you find Dominick Dunne's spat with Frank Sinatra and taste in bachelor pad decor matters of compelling interest, then this is your book), and his period summaries are embarrassing ("Freedom Summer became the Summer of Love," shit like that). Read her books, especially the novels....more
A Backward Glance: An Autobiography takes readers up to 1934, but Wharton's account of the years post-1918 barely amount to an epilogue. She is not deA Backward Glance: An Autobiography takes readers up to 1934, but Wharton's account of the years post-1918 barely amount to an epilogue. She is not desolate, she still draws from her usual sources of joy. Writing, reading, the conversation of a circle of brilliant though fast-dwindling friends, travel, especially yachting the Aegean and motoring in far reaches (given her identification with the French elite, I found it perfect that her exploration of Morocco was smoothed by none other than General Lyautey). But, she says, life is not the same, many have died, much is ended. Her account of Henry James' decline and death during the war, in a nightmare of empathetic anguish, is hard reading:
I have never seen any one else who, without a private personal stake in that awful struggle, suffered from it as he did. He had not my solace of hard work, though he did all he had strength for, and gave all the pecuniary help he could. But it was not enough. His devouring imagination was never at rest, and the agony was more than he could bear. As far as I know the only letters of mine which he kept were those in which I described my various journeys to the front, and when these were sent back to me after his death they were worn with much handing about. His sensitiveness about his own physical disabilities gave him an exaggerated idea of what his friends were able to do, and he never tired of talking of what he regarded as their superhuman activities. But still the black cloud hung over the world, and to him it was soon to be a pall. Perhaps it was better so. I should have liked to have him standing beside me the day the victorious armies rode by; but when I think of the years intervening between his death and that brief burst of radiance I have not the heart to wish that he had seen it. The waiting would have been too bitter. ...more
"In the morning Sherman imposed full discipline, rounded up his stragglers, issued one hundred rifles to such civil authorities as remained, and march"In the morning Sherman imposed full discipline, rounded up his stragglers, issued one hundred rifles to such civil authorities as remained, and marched on, to the next stop of what O’Connell aptly calls the 'roadshow' of emancipation. Sherman’s culminating performance was the Grand Review of the returning armies, May 23 and 24, 1865. Two hundred thousand troops paraded down Pennsylvania Avenue, past the boxed dignitaries of Washington and seventy-five thousand cheering citizens. Sherman’s forces marched on the second day. Whitman, then clerking at the Indian Bureau, noted that divisions were preceded by pioneer battalions of 'real Southern darkies, black as tar,' marching smartly with shouldered axes. They had felled forests and laid the log roads on which the army had crossed the Carolina swamps. And taking up the rear, the families of freed people who had followed Sherman’s army out of bondage, and into an uncertain future. Black residents of Washington would also trail President Grant’s second Inauguration Day parade, and be jeered. With Lincoln killed, these generals were their hope."
This account of Grant’s long dying, of the lucid lingering in which he composed his Personal Memoirs, made me think many times of Memoirs of Hadrian -This account of Grant’s long dying, of the lucid lingering in which he composed his Personal Memoirs, made me think many times of Memoirs of Hadrian - especially the short opening section in which the emperor begins to discern, after a life of warfare and perilous travels, his quiet, domestic death, and in which he describes the abdications of his failing body:
To give up riding is a greater sacrifice still…if the choice of my condition had been left to me I would have decided for that of a centaur. Between Borysthenes and me relations were of almost mathematical precision; he obeyed me as if I were his own brain, not his master. Have I ever obtained as much from a man? ... My horse knew me not by the thousand approximate notions of title, function, and name which complicate human friendship, but solely by my just weight as a man. He shared my every impetus; he knew perfectly, and perhaps better than I, the point where my strength faltered under my will.
“Horses seem to understand Ulysses,” said his mother, perhaps hinting only horses could. From his cadet years he was acknowledged the finest horseman in the army, and the mastery of large, spirited, unmanageable-looking mounts was one of the few personal demonstrations this shy man allowed himself. Tellingly, he chose to smoke his doctor-decreed last cigar with a Hudson Valley horse breeder, on a fine autumn day, while they were out having a look at the colts.
Flood’s book is blandly written and strangely organized, but the latter chapters quote a wealth of contextual detail. The get-well letters from schoolchildren, the condolence telegrams from former rebel generals and lodges of Confederate veterans, all the funereal logistics of Manhattan crowd control and mourning fashion (by 4:00pm on the day Grant died Bloomingdale’s was sold out of black crepe; the New York Times noted that “in the narrow streets and the tall crowded buildings where the poor make their homes the sign of grief is nearly on every door post…in many cases it is nothing but a narrow strip of cheap black cambric fluttering in the breeze from the topmost story of some tenement house or a small flag bordered with a piece of folded crepe from a wornout bonnet”) allow the reader to sense the nature and magnitude of Grant’s fame in the twenty years he lived after the war. He was the foremost living symbol of peaceful unity – the nation was locally fraught, but generally at peace; its unity mocked, beset, but not fatally endangered by labor strife in the North, racial terrorism in the South, and, out West, amid the piecemeal settlement, sporadic warfare and nigh-genocidal dispossession. A society traumatized and confused but mostly functional, its injustice and inequality somehow borne, its ideals regularly betrayed but still vital enough to inspire immigrants and the young, its citizens ever-hopeful of adapting, rising, overcoming; a country always, said Bernard DeVoto, in the process of becoming something it had not been; a welter of souls strangely channeled, by force, by whim, and deposited somewhere. The semblance of community, and frequently the substance.
The national tributes Grant received in his illness, especially those from old rebels, gave a calm to the “Conclusion” of his Personal Memoirs. “The expressions of these kindly feelings were not restricted to a section of the country, nor to a division of the people.” A prospect of felicitous integration – what he called “a commingling of the people.” The styles of Grant and Yourcenar’s Hardrian intersect at a lyrical legalism, a civic sublimity:
Prior to the rebellion the great mass of the people were satisfied to remain near the scenes of their birth. In fact an immense majority of the whole people did not feel secure against coming to want should they move among entire strangers …This is all changed now … The war begot a spirit of independence and enterprise. The feeling now is, that a youth must cut loose from his old surroundings to enable him to get up in the world. There is now such a commingling of the people that…the country has filled up “from the centre all around to the sea”; railroads connect the two oceans and all parts of the interior; maps, nearly perfect, of every part of the country are now furnished the student of geography.
I desired that the might and majesty of the Roman Peace should extend to all, insensibly present like the music of the revolving skies; that the most humble traveler might wander from one country, or one continent, to another without vexatious formalities, and without danger, assured everywhere of a minimum of legal protection and culture…
Yourcenar said that in her wartime hiatus from work on the novel, the emperor, “the most official yet the most hidden form of all,” had gradually emerged from Hadrian’s other selves – “The fact of having lived in a world that was toppling all around us taught me the importance of the Prince.” Grant’s memory was for a long time obscured in his nation’s era of general peace, when unity was assumed, order assured, and rebels romantic; what does his memory mean for us now that the Federal political system of the United States is again broken, again at an impasse?...more
It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are alwDated? Not at all.
It can be objected that I am speaking of political freedom in spiritual terms, but the political institutions of any nation are always menaced and are ultimately controlled by the spiritual state of that nation. We are controlled here by our confusion, far more than we know, and the American dream has therefore become something much more closely resembling a nightmare, on the private, domestic, and international levels. Privately, we cannot stand our lives and dare not examine them; domestically, we take no responsibility for (and no pride in) what goes on in our country; and, internationally, for many millions of people, we are an unmitigated disaster. ...more
She admits to tracing Didion’s sentences as Didion admitted to tracing Hemingway’s – much of this is Didionish, personal-historical, my neurosis interShe admits to tracing Didion’s sentences as Didion admitted to tracing Hemingway’s – much of this is Didionish, personal-historical, my neurosis intersects the vastness – but three of the essays, "Time and Distance Overcome," “Is this Kansas,” and “No Man’s Land,” are distinctive and strong. You can read them on her site and you should. I liked the shoutouts to Marilynne Robinson and the fighting abolitionists of the Middle Border. The blurbs oversell her; if Biss tells you a “story of our country” that you “never saw coming” – then you ig’nant. Or were. Or are a teenager - this is an ideal book to assign to undergraduates. I say that without snark – her’s is a young, “relatable,” approachable, wise and stylish voice telling Americans what they always need to hear: “the past is never dead; it’s not even past.”...more
I laughed and nodded when McFeely cited, as evidence Ulysses Grant felt complete only in battle , the fact that GNot a float; June was a busy month...
I laughed and nodded when McFeely cited, as evidence Ulysses Grant felt complete only in battle , the fact that Grant finished the Mexican War with two big promotions and a sterling combat record despite never having been assigned combat duties. He was his regiment’s quartermaster, the supply guy in the rear of the column, back with the mules. But dude could not stay out of a fight. During the final assault on Mexico City, future adversary Robert E. Lee and the spearhead of US troops were pinned down under fire before San Cosme gate. Earlier, during preparations for the assault, Grant had, on his own hunch, reconnoitered a church whose belfry looked to him as if it could command the back of the San Cosme defenses. Now he rounded up some volunteers, unpacked a portable mountain howitzer, darted and dodged over the intervening terrain, parlayed with the padre in a politely intimidating Spanish, mounted the belfry, reassembled the gun, and began lobbing shells that scattered the Mexican troops.
I once saw, but cannot locate for a link, the ad for Old Crow Bourbon that celebrated this feat (the image used was Grant in Mexico by Leutze, the painter of Washington Crossing the Delaware). In a 1950s print campaign, the distillers of Old Crow advertized the Famous Americans – Henry Clay, Mark Twain – who had once relished or praised the unrecoverable ancestor of their product. It seems they were eager to enroll Grant in the pantheon, or at least associate their brand name with the mythical fighting whiskey of Lincoln’s famous and possibly apocryphal quip. Warned by the paper-pushers that “Grant Drinks,” the president said he wouldn’t insist on proof of the allegation beyond the name of Grant’s favored brand — so that he could send barrels of it to his other generals. (I love that so much!) We know that Lincoln did say, “I can’t spare this man; he fights.”
I had heard that McFeely’s book, a Pulitzer Prize winner, was flawed by the author’s dislike of his subject. I found disappointment instead of dislike; and besides, the object of a biographer of the underrated and caricatured Grant, McFeely writes in the preface, is not to make the reader like Grant, but to take Grant seriously. If you want to know why Grant is important, read this book. McFeely will not tell you why Grant was a great commander or how he won his campaigns (Grant will tell you that, in his modest and frightful Zen way), but he will introduce you to one of the defining figures of the nineteenth century, of the “bourgeois ideology” in all its nation-building grandeur and dollar-worshipping grotesquerie. This book made me think that Grant is an opaque figure — is opaque to us, and was to those who dismissed him during his interwar ennui — because his importance cannot be comprehended in a quick glance. And a quick glance is all we’re prepared to give historical figures — just as a quick glance was all the people of St. Louis were prepared to give the sullen sphinx who sold cordwood on the street corner, draped in a faded blue army overcoat.
Ulysses and Julia Grant emerge from this book naïve and obscure people, rootless and rather alienated. Mayakovsky’s line about America’s never-quite secure “lower middle-class mass” is apt; Julia’s father was one of those unprepossessing Southern farmers who because he owned a handful of slaves demanded to be addressed with that undiscriminating regional honorific, “the Colonel” (Twain is acidic on this affectation). Ulysses’ brilliant campaigns in Mississippi and Tennessee, and his conclusion of the Civil War in the political theater of Virginia – his willingness to face what Lincoln called “the arithmetic” of the North’s numerical superiority, the relative replaceability of the Army of the Potomac (let’s fight nonstop, for a month, and when both armies are broken, we’ll just get a new one; the other guy, we know, won’t be able to get a new one, a plan which will go hand-in-hand with Sherman’s idea to march through the Confederacy’s economic heartland and burn it down) – elevated the Grants to the White House, to the heights of celebrity and power. The society of which Grant was idol and ruler was one in profound confusion. Grant’s friend Mark Twain — he roasted the general at one of those frenzied veterans’ banquets that for me capture the triumphant but traumatized “Gilded Age” North, feasts supplied with orgiastic amounts of whiskey and brandy, oysters and steaks, with drunken toasts and old camp songs shouted far into the night — said that where Americans had formerly “desired” money, after the war they fell down and worshiped it — and worshiped it no matter how it was acquired. I had tried to package, into a pithy or at least readably convoluted sentence (sorry about that shit above), synonymous testimonies of the postwar coarsening of American public morals; but why compete with Lionel Trilling’s essay on Twain?
And the war that brought an end to the rich Mississippi days also marked a change in the quality of life in America which, to many men, consisted of a deterioration of American moral values. It is of course a human habit to look back on the past and find in it a better and more innocent time than the present. Yet in this instance there seems to be an objective basis for the judgment. We cannot disregard the testimony of men so diverse as Henry Adams, Walt Whitman, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain himself, to mention but a few of the men who were in agreement on this point. All spoke of something that had gone out of American life after the war, some simplicity, some innocence, some peace. None of them was under any illusion about the amount of ordinary human wickedness that existed in the old days, and Mark Twain certainly was not. The difference was in the public attitude, in the things that were now accepted and made respectable in the national ideal. It was, they all felt, connected with new emotions about money.
I said McFeely seems disappointed by Grant, an intelligent and sensitive man who because of a “dangerous” naïvete and circumambient cultural poverty, deferred to oligarchs and market manipulators in the monetary policy of his administration, and trusted them in the management of his post-presidential fortune, and even in the use of his name, in the Ponzi scheme which, for a while, was able to masquerade as a respectable Wall Street brokerage firm, Grant & Ward. (McFeely affects a bewilderment that Grant, who had been a poor man, an economic victim, could defer so eagerly to the interests of the wealthy; but he knows Grant wanted to join them.) Weeks after Grant found out he was broke, he was diagnosed with throat cancer; and wrote his Personal Memoirs while dying a horrible death – slow starvation as tumors expanded and blocked his esophagus – and in full view of a media circus. “Grant was destitute and on display as an object of national pity…but this very degree of humiliation laid the base for his last and greatest victory. He would treat his countrymen to another performance of heroism.” Penning famously “unmistakable” battlefield directives under shell fire is good practice for writing a lucid deathbed book – a book that started as a patriotic pity-bestseller (widowed Julia was well provided for by royalties) but never went out of print, and has survived to classic status. Motherfucker could write! People who dismiss Grant as a drunken nonentity evade the fact that his book has long outlasted the generation taught to revere it.
I didn’t quite follow McFeely on the twists of Grant’s monetary policy, but his naiveté is apparent enough, and totally normal for Americans of that day (and to a great extent, of ours): the unquestioning belief in “progress,” without much idea of what “progress” (read “convenience”) means – or what it can destroy; the smug confidence that because republics (read “democracies”) are few and embattled, they are less rapacious than monarchies (read “dictatorships”), and are virtuous underdogs; the denial of class barriers enabled by the belief that because financiers and industrial robber barons do not constitute a hereditary aristocracy, then any working man with enough gumption can rise and join them; and finally, the outright worship of money, or at least the assumption that the amassment of riches signals virtuousness and moral strength, an assumption which I suppose is as the same as worship. McFeely calls Grant “the enshrined hero of a noble cause and the wayward antihero of sham values” – line that perfectly places Grant as symbol of time in which the free labor ideology was becoming a fig leaf for a new plutocracy. (Grant’s a much better symbol than Lincoln, whom some historians like to describe as a “corporate” or “railroad” lawyer – that he often was, but the railroads of the 1850s weren’t the monstrous and ungovernable conglomerates of late century.) Few scenes illustrate this ambiguity better than his reception in Newcastle, England, in 1877, at the outset of his post-presidential world tour. The working and middling classes of England had cheered the Union cause as the struggle of tradesmen and small farmers against an arrogant slave-owning aristocracy, and thousands of workers from the North Country poured into Newcastle to see Grant that day. He reviewed a procession of guilds and unions and workingmen’s associations – miners, plumbers, “brass molders and finishers,” carpenters and joiners, chainmakers, mill sawyers and machinists. And there is poignancy in the tanners of Elswick parading past with a banner that read, “Welcome back, General Grant, from Arms to Arts.” Grant was a tanner’s son and he despised the trade, returned to it only when he had five mouths to feed and no other options. He didn’t want to be one of them.
I’ve read that in her Four in America, Gertrude Stein, indulging a sort of solemn biographic burlesque, wrote the latent lives or alternative careers of famous Americans. Henry James, who enjoyed reading military memoirs and in a spell of deathbed delirium thought he was Napoleon, is a general. Grant is a religious guru – Edmund Wilson found this bit persuasive, in view of Grant’s “majestical phlegm, an alienation in the midst of action, a capacity for watching in silence and commanding without excitement,” and he cites a letter in which Sherman said that Grant’s power lay in his “simple faith in success, which I can liken to nothing else than the faith a Christian has in his Savior.”
For me elements of Grant’s character and life could to be arranged to suggest a poète maudit – the irony, the contextual vertigo, being that Grant’s alienation from and unfitness for the bourgeois hustle made him admire the hustle rather than scorn it. Grant stirs ironic Baudelairean echoes, at least in me. Baudelaire placed the solider among the few noble, that is immemorial and pre-capitalist, occupations, alongside that of the priest and the poet (“to know, to kill, to create”). When we consider that Grant found easy what others found hard – that he failed utterly as an entrepreneurial farmer, the typical profession of his male peers, but could administer and inspire the largest armies the modern world had then seen – how can we fail to recall Baudelaire’s “The Albatross,” in which The Poet is likened to a bird majestic on the wing but clumsily vulnerable on the hard ground of daily life, “the cripple who can fly”? How can we read of Grant’s imperturbability in battle, the concentration and self-command he felt under fire, and not think of Baudelaire’s Albatross-Poet, “who haunts the storm and laughs at the archer”? There is also a sartorial affinity, an imaginatively bridgeable distance, between the plutocratic president and the anarchist dandy, between the consummate Yankee and the poet who, in his partisanship of the Virginian Poe, disdained Yankees. “Though sometimes thought of as the most unkempt of our presidents,” writes McFeely, “Grant was, in fact, exceedingly well tailored,” clad in the black frock coat of the nineteenth century power elite, usually from Brooks Brothers. Baudelaire, for all his execration of the bourgeois, embraced the black frock coat as the “outer skin of the modern hero,” and might have been alluding to his own subtly tailored and soberly colored wardrobe when he wrote:
…as for the eccentrics, who used to be easily distinguishable by their violent contrast of color, they content themselves nowadays much more with discreet differences of design and cut than of color.
But I feel a little silly trying to imagine certain of Grant’s features – his failures, his floundering impracticality, the listlessness and ennui and drinking that shadowed his unused energies – as they might be manipulated into a Baudelairean persona of articulate alienation and mythopoeic guignon, when McFeely has so brilliantly portrayed those features in Grant’s actual social context. The historical Grant had no oppositional artistic mythos to sanctify his oddness; he was desperate to catch up, and when he reached a high place, to stay there. Ulysses and Julia Grant were common people who valued respectability, as their respective memoirs indicate: his are about the two wars he fought so well in, to the exclusion of anything about his difficult civilian existence; hers seem, at least from the excerpts McFeely provides, a genteel romance not unlike the memoirs of Elizabeth Custer, a sentimental fantasy of events in which horses are “bonny steeds” and her father’s (few) slaves “our old colored people”; a book in which her severely depressed husband’s resignation from the army, under a cloud of alcoholic rumor, is recorded thus: “Captain Grant, to my great delight, resigned his commission…and returned to me, his loving little wife.”
This book is excellent social history. Excellent political history, too: I’ve harped on Grant the man as representative of a cultural and economic era, but McFeely also places the Grant’s administrations in a seemingly appropriate importance. Grant oversaw the Federal government’s gradual walk-back from Reconstruction (I had heard that he busted the KKK in his first term, which is true except that his Klan-busting attorney general was appointed for unrelated reasons, and sacked when he tried to regulate the railroads); pivotal Indian policy (Grant was considered a liberal here, because he pushed policy in which Native Americans were to be “resettled” (forced onto) reservations and brainwashed of their religions and languages, and made Christian farmers; the other side of the debate advocated wholesale extermination; this is a terrible world); and the beginnings of U.S. overseas imperialism, trying to make the Caribbean a U.S. lake, before the navy or the public was quite ready. He spent a lot of political capital trying to convince Congress to annex the Dominican Republic and make it a state; he thought blacks could be encouraged to emigrate there and boom! the Negro Problem would be solved, and the United States would have a naval fortress in the Caribbean. McFeely, and some other historians I’ve skimmed, argues that Grant’s presidency appears inconsequential because his main achievements were in foreign policy, and were aimed at the long game. Grant laid the foundation for the twentieth century Anglo-American alliance with a treaty that resolved all the old border disputes (the U.S. agreed to never invade Canada) and secured some maritime restitution from the British – during the Civil War Confederate commerce raiders built in Liverpool shipyards had decimated the American whaling and merchant fleets. The epilogue of his memoirs is a choppy delirium of advice to the nation: build a big-ass navy...cough...dominate the waters...cough...the Civil War was insane but putting it off would have put us behind in the race to build empires...cough...and we showed the world how badass and warlike we are...USA! USA!
Still trying to get my head around this guy.
He won the Civil War for the North, and re-established the Union which today has grown into the vastest consolidated power since the fall of Rome. He fought some of the greatest campaigns in history; was never defeated, and after the war was twice chosen by his countrymen as their President. If there is not food for myth here, where shall we seek it? His story is as amazing as Napoleon's, and as startling as Lenin's; yet enigma he lived and enigma he died, and though occasion was propitious and circumstances were favorable, enigma he remains. (J.F.C. Fuller, 1932)
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Shoddy exploitation followed Grant right to the grave. He was already the enshrined hero of a noble cause and the wayward antihero of sham values. McFeely doesn't quite pull off his Edmund Wilson impersonation but this book is still awesome. Review to follow, if I can digest. Grant's is one of the essential stories of the nineteenth century. I love that during Grant's two-year world tour Li Hung Chang and Bismarck both greeted him with something like: "I too fought and won massive wars and consolidated a future Great Power. Welcome to the Club." And in a bizarre upheaval of court practice, the Emperor Mutsuhito shook his hand....more
So, so good. Family memoir, social history, contemporary reportage and literary criticism (of Frank Norris, Jack London, and Joan Didion) in perfect pSo, so good. Family memoir, social history, contemporary reportage and literary criticism (of Frank Norris, Jack London, and Joan Didion) in perfect proportions, synthesized in her sad and piquant prose, her "astringent lyricism." A patient autopsy of the myths of the American West, of Progress. I want to shelve this with the Bridge novels and Son of the Morning Star; Didion and Connell children of the Plains and the Far West, with their doubts and dry wits, sly siblings winking to each other across the mid-century WASP dinner table. (The grandparents settled this west for what reason, at what cost, to establish what kind of culture?) And when she's funny she makes me smile all day:
A Thomas Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire.
Of her nonfiction, this is my second-favorite, just behind The White Album. ...more
Robert Gould Shaw’s drinking and gambling buddies, his fellow Harvard oarsmen and comrades in white regiments all recorded his gaiety, cheerful temperRobert Gould Shaw’s drinking and gambling buddies, his fellow Harvard oarsmen and comrades in white regiments all recorded his gaiety, cheerful temper, and frank, easy manners. But he came of crusading stock. The namesake grandfather summoned the sixteen-year-old to his deathbed and exhorted him to use his “example and influence” against the ills besetting the republic, intemperance and slaveholding. His sickly mother constantly reminded him that if he worked for righteousness she could face her impending death serenely (she outlived him by forty years). When his time came, Shaw accepted the colonelcy of the 54th Massachusetts after only a night’s brooding, and, aged twenty-five, and newly wed, went forward to certain martyrdom on Morris Island showing only a slight twitching at the corners of his mouth.
On TV Shelby Foote said the Fifty-Fourth “nevah shouldah made that chahge.” Bull-shit. Of course they should have. Given that doomed assaults, last stands and forlorn hopes were dear to Victorian hearts; that for all its sentiment, the age imposed a harsh ideal of conduct, often saw heavy losses as proof of a regiment’s “gallantry,” its fortitude in the thick of the fight; and given that most Northerners, even or especially reformers and abolitionists, viewed men of an enslaved race as feminized, in the mold of Beecher Stowe’s passive and good Uncle Tom, a heart-melting wretch but no one’s idea of a manly citizen—given all that, it seems to me that charging headlong into a rebel bastion and fighting its defenders hand-to-hand until half the assaulting force is dead or wounded is exactly what you should do, if you want to demonstrate to such a public and to Army brass that the black race produces “true” men who can fight bravely, die “gallantly.” Remember, this was a culture that (like most in human history) felt “only murder makes men” (Du Bois’ wry phrase). People were deeply impressed that Shaw fell at the head of his regiment. The commander rallying his men, waving his sword in one hand and clutching his picturesquely bloodied breast with the other, was a figure of immense romance. Many reveled in Christ comparisons, because of the contempt shown Shaw’s corpse: the Confederates stripped it naked and displayed it within the fort, before doing what they thought was the ultimate dishonor, tossing it to the bottom of ditch and covering it with the bodies of forty-five of his men. One might see in the burial of a wealthy white officer under a pile of blacks a Confederate version of crossroads crucifixion beside thieves—ineffectual degradation. The Northern press exulted in Shaw’s burial, called it the crown of his efforts. After the rebels abandoned Fort Wagner—the decomposing 54th had poisoned its freshwater well—Shaw’s father begged the army not to disturb his son’s remains.
Shaw repeatedly told his lieutenant-colonel he would perish in their first major fight. Was he planning such a death, or accepting it as preordained, as his duty? The tone of the testimony is vague. Shortly after the assault Shaw’s brother-in-law Charles Russell Lowell, a cavalryman killed the following year, wrote his wife that “the best Colonel of the best black regiment had to die, it was a sacrifice we owed,—and how could it have been paid more gloriously?” In any case, the regiment’s unfaltering performance—of stoic composure, of the rite of the suicidal charge, of gyokusai, say—quieted doubts about black troops and opened the floodgates of enlistment. And the 178,000 black soldiers who followed in the wake of the 54th not only helped win the war that destroyed slavery, they got our foot in the door, civically: Lincoln at his most cautious and conservative knew he could not, postwar, deny black veterans the vote.
In the darkness of their bondage, In the depths of slavery’s night, Their muskets flashed the dawning, And they fought their way to light.
(Paul Laurence Dunbar, “The Colored Soldiers”)
When General Thomas rode over the field [at Nashville], and saw the bodies of colored men side by side with the foremost on the very works of the enemy, he turned to his staff, saying, “Gentlemen, the question is settled: Negroes will fight.” How extraordinary, and what a tribute to ignorance and religious hypocrisy, is the fact that in the minds of most people, even those of liberals, only murder makes men.
(W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction)
But about Burchard’s book…it is skimpy and uninspired. Wikipedia says he wrote mostly for children and young people. In desultory follow-up reading, I saw Burchard listed among the revisionist historians—little Stracheys lifting Shaw’s statue to expose wormy neuroses and Freudian family strife. Bland Burchard must be their least emphatic, most peripheral member; or simply a pioneer who first published the documents. Nothing in the book more than hints at the revisionist reading in which Shaw is a troubled young man who briefly rebels against—but in his need for approval, becomes the half-willing sacrifice of—Sarah Sturgis Shaw, his powerful mother and quintessence of New England’s evangelical, sentimental, abolitionist-reformist matriarchate. It is true that teenage Rob did much to scandalize expectations. The revisionist reading is founded on abundant evidence that Robert was at times the black sheep among his four older sisters (future social workers and suffragettes), domineering-because-sickly mother, as noted, and father who, at his wife’s urging, retired from business as a young man in order to evangelize reform (their money funded the Transcendentalist commune, Brook Farm, and an array of antislavery and feminist agitation). The revisionists see the father’s relinquishment of his career, the “male sphere” of Victorian gender division, as evidence of the castrating gynarchy of the Shaw household. Rob drank and partied across Germany while his sisters dutifully availed themselves of Paris, as a school of linguistic and musical finishing (the Shaws, like the Jameses, spent the 1850s educatively abroad; Wilkinson James, Henry’s younger brother, was an officer in the Fifty-Fourth). He wanted to attend Columbia instead of Harvard (oh, naughty boy!), and though forced into Harvard dropped out after two years. He rolled his eyes at abolitionism, wrote nasty things about blacks and the Irish his mother later scissored from his letters, and once declared, to parents consumed by national sin and public expiation, by what family friend Elizabeth Gaskell called “the deeper responsibilities of their position,” that he had no taste for anything but amusing himself.
I find the revisionists’ mother-hating proto-Hemingway as lifeless as the Abolitionist Saint—“the angel of God come down to lead the host of freedom to victory,” John Greenleaf Whittier called him—and am persuaded, at least for now, by Joan Waugh’s centrist and synthetic argument that in soldiering Robert found a confidence, a sense of his powers, and a version of his mother’s ideals, but cast in his own intensely masculine terms—recruiting the Fifty-Fourth he rejected one-third of applicants, and everyone from Boston reporters watching them drill to Confederate opponents burying their bodies remarked what “fine, strong, muscular fellows” the chosen men were; and he dreamt of leading his men into action alongside a white regiment and doing better. Waugh thinks Shaw’s sudden and secret abandonment of the job found for him after Harvard, in the offices of an uncle’s firm, to march down Broadway and off to war with the 7th New York, at the outbreak in 1861, marked the consummation of his youthful rebellion and its end, the initiation of a maturity that saw him reconcile his ferocity and love of contest to his family’s public spirit and humanitarian piety. Reading Yourcenar on the Japanese tradition of hopeless battle I thought of Waugh’s interpretation, one of many covering the corpse of this young man long dead, Robert Gould Shaw:
After that, the leaders of the peasant class are lettered samurai, deeply imbued with neo-Confucian doctrines which accept thought only insofar as it ends in action, and who consider, like William the Silent in Europe, that “one need not hope in order to undertake.”…Civilization is the guardian of justice. Many hollow idealists have proclaimed similar slogans. Ōshio and Saigō signed theirs with their blood.
I think I read this novel, or, this novel-like cluster of prose poems — a Deadwood-slangy, Ondaatje-dreamy imagining of the ultimate broodings of Fred I think I read this novel, or, this novel-like cluster of prose poems — a Deadwood-slangy, Ondaatje-dreamy imagining of the ultimate broodings of Frederick Benteen*, the second-in-command of the Seventh Cavalry who despised Custer and was despised in turn, and who survived Little Bighorn, rallied and saved the remnant of the white force, only to be partially but popularly blamed for letting ol’ Goldilocks die — at just the right time. The “right time” is now that I’ve read enough about America’s Civil and Indian Wars that I wonder less about the battles than about the aftermath, the long shadow, of battles; the coping with, the recounting of; about the memories, the old wounds, the passing of the armies; about Winslow Homer’s The Veteran in a New Field (1865); about Evan S. Connell’s remark that some of the officers of the Seventh had been shot up so bad in the Civil War they needed to be helped into their coats, helped into the saddle each morning; about Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain governing Maine, teaching at Bowdoin, composing his grandiloquent prose — all fifty postwar years of that — atop a mangled pelvis, conducting an exemplary late Victorian public life – riding horseback down flag-draped parade streets – through decades of ineffective surgeries, primitive catheters, impotence, incontinence, chronic urologic agony.
He wants to write the lost thoughts of soldiers. No, not the grand story, he has never known his life that way, but the seams and spaces in between. This is history too, he thinks, the weight of gathered thoughts…
~
It is a myth we prove ourselves in war, he thinks; we test ourselves in silence.
A three-star rating doesn’t keep The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers out of the little pantheon of books I cherish as the mordant and meditative distillate, the funerary essence, of the great wars of consolidation and conquest that made the modern United States between 1861 and 1890. Falconer, like Whitman in Specimen Days and Connell in Son of the Morning Star, favors collage over argument, digression over narrative; these writers don’t force everything to make sense – they let some of the chaos stay chaos, leave many of the mysteries mysteries, tarry sweetly on the frontiers of the knowable. (Whitman concluded his book of Civil War notes with the admission that “the real war will never get into the books” – including his own!) Of course, Falconer takes liberties – puts words in a dead mouth – but I’m cool with historical fiction – fiction whose characters actually existed – if, like The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, it’s frankly and openly a poet’s diffuse dream over incidents of the record, a lyric consideration of the past voiced with a transparent ventriloquism. And Falconer is very concerned with a dissonance that obsesses me – wars of annihilating nationalistic ferocity, race wars of liberation and subjugation, recounted in the courtly language of sentimental memoirs. And she writes so beautifully:
In a chest upstairs, packed away in tissue and camphor, his old military jacket with his brevet rank that she will lay him out in. It is dark and heavy, a hint of grog and horsehair still about the lining. After a drunk, he would lie on his bed with it on his face, cool as coffin silk, and fill it with his breath. Sour caper juice in his throat, ready for ignition. His own ghost shape in the sleeves and the thick curve of the shoulders. Talking to Star-gazer and others out there somewhere in the blackness.
~
How little they really told each other of their own lives; they did not try, as women do, to make each other less predictable, to rifle in the secret drawers, to find each other out. Instead, each gratefully took over the role assigned, made his language over, offered up his inner longings only as a punchline. We are the fastidious sex, he thinks.
~
Look at our photographs, he thinks, and you can see that we carried the idea of the Indians around inside us, big as another continent, just as they carried our love letters and our pocket watches, not for their meaning but the weight of a future yet to be conceived. The Indians’ thoughts lost to us already, from the time we arrived here. But out on the plains we were, for the time those wars lasted, linked by our grim geography of fire beds and bullets, in a terrible third nation of our own.
_____________
* Connell writes: "In not a single photograph does Benteen look formidable, not even very military. He appears placid, gentle, benevolent, with feminine lips and prematurely white hair. Only after contemplating that orotund face for a while does one begin to perceive something rather less accommodating. Embedded in that fleshy face are the expressionless agate eyes of a killer. One might compare them to the eyes of John Wesley Hardin or Billy the Kid. Now, this sinister absence of expression could be nothing more than a result of myopia, a condition afflicting him after the Oklahoma winter campaign of 1868-69 when he lent his protective goggles to a regimental surgeon. Still, in Civil War photographs he has almost the same look." ...more
Some reviews on this site mention Taylor’s “leftist bias,” allege a soft-pedaling of Native American violence and environmental impact. I don’t reallySome reviews on this site mention Taylor’s “leftist bias,” allege a soft-pedaling of Native American violence and environmental impact. I don’t really see it. Sure, Taylor has his moments of passionate phrasing, but a work of this scope and synthesis (all colonial experiments in North America, and most in the Caribbean, from Columbus to the California missions) is a poor vehicle for agitation; the reading, and perhaps the writing, of any lofty historical survey insinuates an abstraction, a detachment, invites a vast indifference. This book can no more take a side than a time-lapsed film of mold spreading on a sandwich can sway one to the mold or to bread. Reading Taylor’s descriptions of the genocidal microbes explorers unwittingly carried, the livestock breeding feral packs that devoured unfenced Indian crops, the hardy Old World weeds that spread in the over-grazed landscape, I begin to think of the Europeans as simply the most sentient and motivated organisms of a rapacious ecosystem, their mastery of navigation just a transit of creatures.
It’s an immediate humanitarianism, without aims of conclusions, that overwhelms me now. I feel a tenderness as if I were seeing with the eyes of a god. I see everyone with the compassion of the world’s only conscious being. Poor hapless men, poor hapless humanity! What are they all doing here? I see all the actions and goals of life, from the simple life of the lungs to the building of cities and the marking off of empires, as a drowsiness, as involuntary dreams or respites in the gap between one reality and another, between one and another day of the Absolute. And like an abstractly maternal being, I lean at night over both the good and the bad children, equal when they sleep and are mine. (Pessoa)
What a panorama of enslavement and extermination the New World presents! Barbados was almost totally deforested and planted with sugar cane “even to the very seaside.” (From the trees that remained recalcitrant slaves were suspended in cages, for slow exemplary deaths from thirst and hunger; a practice called “hanging a man out to dry.”) Food, livestock and lumber had to be imported from New England. As in Brazil, the planters found it cheaper to work slaves to death and purchase replacements, rather than invest in diet and housing. Of the 130,000 Africans brought to the island between 1640 and 1700, only 50,000 were alive in 1700. And it didn’t get any better. During the eighteenth century, at least one-third of slaves died within three years of arrival. Infant mortality hovered around 50%, a figure containing an unknowable number of desperate, Beloved-style infanticides. Suicide is another theme. An English slave ship captain noted that “the Negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of the canoes, boat, and ship; they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbadoes than we can have of hell.” Successful planters, Taylor writes, “sought to escape the profitable but troubling world they had made.” Perhaps justly, most died before they could return to England, felled by tropical fevers and an evil-sounding array of pathogens introduced by their slaves—“yaws, guinea worm, leprosy, and elephantiasis” “Parish registers from the 1650s for the white population list four times as many deaths as marriages and three times as many deaths as baptisms.” England; gentility; a green estate…ambitions nearly achieved, flickering finally as the figments of a deathbed delirium…while outside: the sweltering, shade-less island of mass graves!
The holy wars of the New England Puritans and the Pequot, Wampanoag and Narragansett make a grim old chronicle—carved boards, metal clasps and corners, massacrous woodcuts. The Plymouth and Connecticut colonists won the Pequot War of 1636-38 with a massacre whose curt decisiveness fits my image of a more than usually self-righteous people. Guided deep into Pequot territory on the Mystic River by Mohegan allies, the colonists ringed a major fortified village with ranks of musketeers, set the wigwams alight, and cut down anyone who came fleeing out of the flames. Only five of the village’s four hundred inhabitants survived. Plymouth colony governor William Bradford saw his god working in the Puritan victory:
It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to enclose their enemies in their hands and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enemy.
The heavy death toll from epidemics, defeats like the Mystic River Massacre, and the steady westward encroachment of the colonists discredited tribal shamans and convinced many Indians they were forsaken by their gods. So it was an experience of renewed spiritual power for Wampanoag and Narragansett warriors to wipe out entire settler families and torch their farms when King Philip’s War broke out in 1675. Roger Williams recorded a Narragansett as boasting that “God was with them and Had forsaken us for they had so prospered in Killing and Burning us far beyond What we did against them.”
The New England colonists could not have won King Philip’s war without the aid and instruction in “the skulking way of war” provided by Indian allies, particularly the Mohawk, one of the Iroquois Five Nations. The Five Nations are central to the transformation of intertribal politics and warfare wrought by European guns and germs. In the 1630s, over half of the Five Nations died from European diseases. Dutch-allied, they attributed the epidemics to the sorcery of the Huron, their French-allied rivals in the fur trade. The Huron were also Iroquois-speakers who had insultingly resisted becoming a Sixth nation. Well-armed by the Dutch, the Five Nations launched a “mourning war”—kill the adult males, absorb the women and children, who would take the names and join the families of disease victims—which wiped out the Huron. In the 1650s the war widened to a general rampage around the Great Lakes. A Jesuit priest thought they meant “to ravage everything and become masters everywhere.” The remnants of some Great Lakes tribes withdrew far north, putting a depopulated buffer zone between them and the Five Nations, whose tireless war parties nevertheless periodically erupted out of the wasteland in search of more scalps and captives. Some fled south. One group of refugees, the Westo, who had dwelt near Lake Erie, trickled down to Virginia. Colonists there, mindful of the unconquerable bands of escaped slaves that menaced the Jamaican hinterland, armed and paid the Westo to capture African runaways. In time the Westo drifted to the Carolinas. There they found a profitable niche raiding southerly tribes for captives to sell to Virginia slavers, and later to the transplanted Barbadians who ruled Carolina. “In their violent displacement, new identity, and devastation of other natives, the Westo represented the power of European intrusion to send shock waves of disruption through a succession of Indian peoples living far beyond the colonial settlements.” A jealous faction of Carolina colonists, rivals of the patrons of the Westo, recruited the Shawnee to destroy and enslave them.
The Shawnee, the Creek and the Yamsee were next to ride the tiger of alliance with the whites. This was a Hobbesian nightmare in which, Taylor writes, “victimized peoples desperately sought their own trade connection to procure arms for defense; but to pay for those guns, they had to become raiders, preying upon still other natives, spreading the destruction hundreds of miles beyond Carolina.” In 1702, warriors from the three tribes formed the private army Gov. James Moore led into Spanish Florida. That force destroyed thirty-two villages, enslaved ten-thousand mission Indians and tortured most of their priests to death. Having run out of Indians on which to prey, Shawnee soon fell behind on their debts to the Carolina traders, who hired the Catawba to attack and enslave them. The Yamsee, too, fell behind on their debts; when traders started seizing their children, they revolted, and were soon joined by the Catawba and the Creek; allied, they killed four hundred colonists in 1715, before being crushed by Five Nations Iroquois, who, as in King Philip’s War, hired out their war parties to desperate colonists. The Five, soon Six Nations became a crucial to the balance of power in the New World, playing the French and English off one another, and acting as hired enforcers for use against other tribes. In 1746 the royal governor of New York was sagely advised, “On whose ever side the Iroquois Indians fall, they will cast the balance.” The devastated native world over whose northeastern corner the Iroquois held sway is disturbingly evoked:
Scholars used to assume that nineteenth-century Indian nations were direct and intact survivors from time immemorial in their homelands. In fact, after 1700 most North American Indian "tribes" were relatively new composite groups formed by diverse refugees coping with the massive epidemics and collective violence introduced by colonization.
…they ran their ops until the wind changed and the ops got run back on them. (Michael Herr)
I love “Camelot” because it’s such a meretricious fantasy, …they ran their ops until the wind changed and the ops got run back on them. (Michael Herr)
I love “Camelot” because it’s such a meretricious fantasy, a cunning compact of sleaze and style, one of the most vulgar political dreams the country has entertained, and one perfect for a society then at the apex of its power and prosperity, but at the same time uneasy, immature, and already overstimulated by electronic mirages. To cautious counselors President Kennedy bragged: “They can't touch me while I'm alive. And after I'm dead, who cares?”—so it’s appropriate that this elaborately cynical PR fiction began to stink and spoil so soon after the end of the career—the life—it was intended to advance. Jackie did her best to extend the romance, raise a durable myth; and Americans were, for a suitable time, hushed and reverent round the flame; but by the 70s “Camelot” was a byword for sordid hubris. The Kennedys endure as historical soap opera. Their story pushes the same buttons, excites the same dreams of luxury and looks, the same dread of curse and delectation of downfall, as the most outlandish daytime drama. It’s a shame, then, that the stilted, self-important miniseries has been the favored mode of representing the Kennedys. They deserve so much worse, as we deserve to be better entertained.
To say “Camelot,” though, is to give disproportionate credit to Jackie. She gave a cultured and later funereal arrangement to the images of wealth and power and winning Joseph P. Kennedy had been feeding the public since the 1930s. I could read about Joe Kennedy all day. He’s a familiar American type, the self-created mogul, a monster of ruthless ambition and vast contempt, with the difference that he never tamed himself for admission to the gentler clubs. To Wills he is a rootless raider (of Hollywood, of Wall Street) rather than a stable member of a business community—“a predator on other businessmen, not their partner”—and a kind of postmodern social climber whose goals vis-à-vis “Old Money” were not acceptance and assimilation but usurpation, transcendence, and virtual displacement. His sons would play aristocrats to an audience of voters. Amassing the fortune that would fund so many campaigns (worth $500 million in 1969), Kennedy realized that a new reality was opening up, an arena of electronic dreams whose hologram aristocrats—celebrities—might wield the same power as “real” ones. In the 1920s, Wills writes, Kennedy was
giving aristocracy a new definition from the jazz age. After his rejection by the Brahmins of Boston, he oriented his world around New York and Hollywood, around the sports and journalism and cinema stars of the roaring twenties. A starlet would have disgraced the better Boston families; but Kennedy displayed his actresses as so many decorations, as signs that he was looking to new centers of power and of popular acclaim. The Boston gentry were exclusive. He would be expansive, open and racy. He was steering his family down the course that made them staples of the tabloids. As he told Gloria Swanson: “The Cabots and the Lodges wouldn’t be caught dead at the pictures, or let their children go. And that’s why their servants know more about what’s going on in the world than they do. The working class gets smarter every day, thanks to radio and pictures. It’s the snooty Back Bay bankers who are missing the boat."
Captivating the general public’s debased cinematic notions of aristocracy was easy and represented a lesser prize than the seduction of the chattering classes. My favorite parts of this book were those devoted to the selling of JFK as an Intellectual, and darling of “educated” taste. Joe Kennedy had the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock substantially re-write Jack’s callow undergraduate thesis, and, with the aid of Henry Luce’s Time-Life promotional machine, was able to package Why England Slept (1940) as a daring eve-of-war meditation on preparedness in peacetime. A crack team of ghostwriters and Krock’s secret lobbying delivered Profiles in Courage and the 1955 Pulitzer Prize for History. War hero, rakish stunner, and historian of heroes, JFK was a major saint (Hemingway being God) in the Hefner-Mailer era of upper-middlebrow masculine self-fashioning. Everyone worshiped the “existential” hero—the gunslinger, the jazzman, the astronaut orbiting earth in his lonely little pod—but even the working stiff might, under the tutelage of Playboy and Esquire, seduce a woman with apposite quotation from Nietzsche and Freud while Ravel revolved on the Hi-Fi; might nonchalantly explain a canvas of forbidding abstraction, appreciate Hard Bop as a strenuous spiritual wager, and be at ease with hip Negroes (Wills: “It is easy to forget that the Sinatra ‘rat pack’ was considered a liberal phenomena in the late fifties. After all, it admitted one black performer to its carousing”).
Later, under the dreaded Nixon, celebrators of the New Frontier began to express misgivings about the Imperial Presidency. Schlesinger himself then traced the growth of presidential power, admitting faults in his heroes, Jackson and Roosevelt and Kennedy. But Kennedy’s short time in office was not just an acceleration of prior trends. It added something new—not so much the Imperial Presidency as the Appearances Presidency. The man’s very looks thrilled people like Mailer: “If the nation voted to improve its face, what an impetus might be given to the arts, to the practices, to the lives and to the imagination of the American.” Kennedy was able to take the short cuts that he did, command support for rash acts, because he controlled the images that controlled the professional critics of our society. They had been recruited beforehand on minor points of style. He was not Eisenhower—and that was sufficient achievement for the “eggheads” who had been mocking Eisenhower for years. Kennedy was the Steerforth who flattered and tamed the schoolboys by standing up to their master. He was their surrogate, their dream-self, what all the old second lieutenants from World War II wished they had become. Through him they escaped their humdrum lives at the typewriter, on the newspaper, in the classroom. From OSS to MLA is a rude descent.
Kennedy’s affinities with Reagan, Wills argues, go much deeper than the cheesy surface histrionics (“Camelot,” “Morning in America”) of the “Appearances Presidency.” Wills traces the demise of the Rooseveltian “liberal consensus” to Kennedy’s glamorous personalization of the office; to his campaign claim that Eisenhower’s cautious bureaucracy had hampered America’s ability to combat the spread of communism in the globe’s far corners; to his redefinition of the president as a “charismatic” figure who to accomplish anything (protect us from Communism/terrorism, eliminate Castro/Saddam) must concentrate power in himself and deploy it outside of, or even against, the inherited procedures and bureaucracy of “big government.” This “delegitimation” of the idea of government is now central to both parties and a fact of the terminal decline of our political instutitions. Domestically, it has allowed politicians in the pay of various poisoners and exploiters to make “regulation” a dirty word—as if regulation isn’t what keeps the feces out of your Happy Meal—and to brand as tyrannical services and infrastructure that most voters, if they could stop and think for a minute, if they could put aside their cinematic nostalgia for simpler self-sufficient times, might understand as essential to the civil society they wish to live in. In foreign affairs Kennedy’s charisma also casts a shadow. The Kennedy Imprisonment was first published in 1982, so there are no Iraq parallels, but reading Wills on the Bay of Pigs (and on the opening moves in Vietnam), one fills them in: the bureaucratic fractiousness, the governing against government; the Joint Chiefs and traditional intelligence heads sidelined or browbeat by secret planners; the caution innate in generals dismissed as lethargy or spinelessness; the “lean” forces that turn out to be skeletal, inadequate; the promised “flexible response,” the delivered overreach and quagmire. And I wasn’t surprised to read that Kennedy’s men had no plan for a post-Castro Cuba, should the invasion have succeeded.
I really, really like this:
If bureaucratic “big government” gets defined, permanently, as a doddering old sheriff, then each presidential election becomes a call for some new gunfighter to face the problems “government” cannot solve. Kennedy’s successors have drifted, steadily, toward this conception of their role. But their appeal to Roosevelt as a model in unjustified. It is true that crises gave Roosevelt quasi-dictatorial power, and that dictatorship in the old Roman sense became respectable again in the thirties. A widespread disillusionment with parliamentary procedures, combined with a fear of the radical Left and with economic breakdown, led to a call for strong leaders—for Hitler and Mussolini, Franco and Salazar. This mood even gave a momentary glamour of menace to American figures like Huey Long and Father Coughlin or an Englishman like Oswald Mosley. But Roosevelt’s achievement, like Washington’s, was to channel his own authority into programs and institutions. In that sense, Roosevelt resisted even while exercising “charisma,” relegitimating institutions at a time when other strong leaders were delegitimating them. This made Roosevelt differ not only in historical moment from the Kennedy period, but even more basically from Kennedy’s conception of power. Theorists of “deadlock” in the Eisenhower fifties felt that the lethargy of the public, the obstructionism of Congress, the external menace of communism made it imperative for a President to seize every margin of power available to him: he was facing so many hostile power centers that only the glad embrace of every opportunity could promise him success. No internal check upon one’s appetite for power was needed; the external checks were sufficient—were overwhelming, in fact, unless the President became single-minded in his pursuit of power. But Roosevelt did not have this ambition of seizing power to be used against his own government. He sought power for that government, and set up the very agencies and departments that Neustadt and his followers resented. He created subordinate power centers, lending them his own authority. He began that process of “routinizing” crisis powers that is the long-range meaning of the New Deal. There is something perverse about the “liberal” attack on Eisenhower’s bureaucracy in the nineteen-fifties, which simply revived the Republicans’ first response to the New Deal.