It is a theory of democracy that a free society will produce men fitted for leadership when leadership is needed. It does this sometimes in unlikely ways. No one could have foreseen, for instance, that frontier Illinois would bring forward an Abraham Lincoln, or that the narrow Knickerbocker society of New York would send up a Theodore Roosevelt, at the precise moment when such men were wanted. But it does happen; not invariably, but often enough to make all the difference.
How this happens is a mystery. Men get hammered into shape, somehow. Occasionally the process is painful, with greatness coming out of what looks like a succession of failures. At other times it looks like nothing more than the simple progression, in a job or profession, of a rather ordinary person who is trying to do nothing much more than make an honest living. Then, when a man of special talents and stature is needed, suddenly there he is.
As a case in point, consider the career of Henry L. Stimson. He may or may not have been a “great” man; a good deal depends on how you define greatness, and perhaps even more depends on your appraisal of the final effect which his life and career had on his country. But he was a man of vast strength and of profound integrity at the exact time when such a man was desperately needed in a position of very great importance.
His life, in other words, deserves study, and a genuinely first-rate biography is now available in Elting E. Morison’s Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson. Like all really good biographies, this examines not only the man himself but the times that produced him.
Stimson was not exactly a typical American. (It would be interesting, as a matter of fact, to try to figure out if there ever was such a person.) He came out of the upper crust in New York City, went through the Harvard Law School, and became an eminently successful and prosperous corporation lawyer—excellent things, all of these, but not quite characteristic of the generality of men who are remembered as great public servants. He came, in fact, out of what is slightingly called the Gilded Age. Born in 1867, he grew up in a period that is generally supposed to have been a time of unrestrained getting and spending, when no standard much higher than the standard of the market place prevailed. But the Gilded Age contained various strata, and Stimson’s happened to be one which could implant in a young man an abiding sense of duty and responsibility, even a firm desire—as a distinguished preacher of that generation said—“to do good, do good, do good.” Even as a teen-ager, Stimson recognized “the dead level of materialism and mercantilism” about him, and when he came to choose his profession he wanted more than anything else a channel “for the right use of strength and influence.”
Turmoil and Tradition: A Study of the Life and Times of Henry L. Stimson, by Elting E. Morison. Houghton Mifflin. 686 pp. $7.50.
The practice of corporation law does not always offer such a channel; which means, perhaps, that a man finds what he really wants to find no matter where he looks for it. Stimson found what he was looking for. He became a successful lawyer, prospering financially, and he became also a public servant of distinction, a Theodore Roosevelt Republican at a time when great reforms were in the making. He served as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York during Roosevelt’s second term as President, fighting and winning important antitrust cases, doing much to implement his chief’s demand that “malefactors of great wealth” be detected, punished, and kept from riding roughshod over American society.
He served President Taft as Secretary of War, doing as much as anyone could have done to help bring an archaic War Department up to date; helping, also, to rivet down the basic American conception that the civil authority is always superior to the military. He served Calvin Coolidge as governor general of the Philippines, and at last he became President’s Hoover’s Secretary of State.
It was a bad time to be Secretary of State. The European world was in the process of going off to perdition in a hand-basket, and in Asia things were moving even more rapidly in the same direction; and under the circumstances—including the profound weight of American isolationism—there was very little the Secretary could do about it. Stimson did his best, and he summed up his failure in an illuminating sentence about the difficulties President Hoover and he labored under: “We were then fighting in the hopeless cause of working for peace when there wasn’t going to be any peace and when we didn’t have any weapons to compel peace and we both were helpless.” In 1933 Hoover’s term ended, and Stimson went out of office. He was sixty-six. To all appearances, his public career was over.
Then came World War II; and, in 1940, Franklin Roosevelt called this veteran back into service and made him Secretary of War again. That he was a strong Secretary of War, at a time when a strong Secretary was desperately needed, is a matter of recent memory. What was more important is that he was one of the few men who pushed to a successful conclusion the enormous task of getting the atomic bomb ready for use—after which he was one of the even smaller group that finally decided to use it.
That this decision must have come hard is evident from jottings in Stimson’s diary, where he referred guardedly to the power which was being developed as “the dreadful,” “the terrible,” “the dire,” and “the diabolical.” But he had learned, from hard experience, the sad things that can happen when (as Mr. Morison puts it) available power is “renounced as an instrument of policy.” Now, in 1945, there was “an available force commensurate with the apparent needs of the occasion, a force that could put an end to an evil situation that would otherwise continue.” In the early thirties he had to work for peace without any weapons that would compel peace. Now he had a weapon that would compel the most recalcitrant. He voted to use it.
He did not stand alone, of course. He followed the recommendation of a carefully chosen advisory committee; and after he had delivered the recommendation, the final determination rested with Harry S. Truman. Nevertheless, it was Stimson who delivered the recommendation. He decided, as Mr. Morison says, that “the bomb was needed and should be used.”
Stimson was fully aware of the sweeping implications of the use of atomic energy as a weapon. It would take everyone, he confessed, “right down to the bottom facts of human nature.” It placed upon the nation a terrible responsibility, still not entirely faced; gave it, also, an opportunity “to bring the world into a pattern in which the peace of the world and our civilization can be saved”—this, likewise, not yet wholly faced. Stimson, in other words, did not make his decision blindly. In that moment of unspeakable crisis America had at least produced a man big enough to see what the epoch-making choice meant; big enough, as well, to leave a final word of warning: “Unless we now develop methods of international life backed by the spirit of tolerance and kindness, viz.: the spirit of Christianity, sufficient to make international life permanent and kindly and war impossible, we will with another war end our civilization.”
The Reformer
Between the career of Stimson and that of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts there is a striking contrast. One was a man of immense solidity, moving slowly to his tragic moment of decision, aware that what seemed to be a choice for good might also be a choice for undying evil; the other was all flame and arrogance, sure of his own wisdom, plagued by no doubts, plunging ahead with the unshaken conviction that what he was doing was just and righteous altogether. Yet each man helped take his country into a decision of enormous consequence whose implications would go on echoing for generations to come. If the meaning of Stimson’s life came at last to be embodied in what the nation did about the bomb, the meaning of Sumner’s was wrapped up in what the nation did about slavery. Helping to lead the country, each man in his own way partly reflected it.
Sumner, to be sure, had less to do with starting the Civil War than Stimson had to do with dropping the bomb. Yet in an odd way he played a central part in it. If not a man appointed to decide, he was at least an agitator who worked powerfully upon the men who did decide. He helped to create the climate in which the war was fought, in which it took its final momentous shape. (It has even been said that he managed to embody, in his own elegant person, the very essence of the thing the southerners wanted to secede from.)
As with Stimson, a truly perceptive study of the man is now at hand: the first volume of David Donald’s definitive study, entitled Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War. If it does not precisely make him lovable, it at least makes him comprehensible. It presents an essential chapter in the study of the war.
Sumner had a hard time finding himself. Born in Boston in 1811, he came up from under; the rest of the country looked on him, in the end, as something of a representative of the Boston Brahmins, but actually he was nothing of the kind. He fought his way up, and for a long time he had no good notion of just what he was fighting for, except that he wanted to be eminent and successful, and one of the minor mysteries of his career is how he ever managed to achieve this end. A promising lawyer, he had no talent at all for the hard, routine work of legal practice. Politics drew him, but he was basically a cold fish—the last man, one would suppose, who could go out and win votes. For years he seems to have been nothing more than a born reformer in search of a cause.
He found this cause, at last, in slavery, after trying his hand at prison reform, world peace and what-not. He came in, as a matter of fact, somewhat late, and in the early days of the vast realignment of parties caused by this thorny issue, he was relatively unimportant. He had no particular following; he was basically a lone wolf, and Henry Adams remarked acidly that “he had nothing but himself to think about.” Not until the i85o’s did he throw himself completely into the dawning Free Soil movement—concluding, as Mr. Donald says, that “high principle was good politics.” Then he went whole hog, and in 1851 a coalition of Massachusetts Democrats and Free Soil Whigs sent him to the Senate; and in the course of time he became recognized as the most eloquent congressional spokesman for the antislavery cause.
Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War, by David Donald. Alfred A. Knopf. 416 pp. $6.75.
Oratorical styles have changed since Sumner’s day, and the speeches with which Sumner, in the Senate, exerted so much influence sound odd now. They were loaded with statistics, filled with classical allusions and Latin quotations, touched with wind-blown exaggerations. He was utterly without humor; when a friend confessed he had never found a joke in one of Sumner’s speeches, Sumner replied tartly: “You might as well look for a joke in the book of Revelations.” But with all of his remote, scholarly loftiness he had a gift for personal invective. He spoke without fear, at a time when there was much to frighten an antislavery speaker; and his complete, unswerving belief in his own righteousness somehow made his orations convincing.
The point of all of this is that perhaps more than any other man Sumner helped push northern antislavery opinion past the point where a reasoned adjustment with the South was possible; and, by reverse action, helped push slavery’s spokesmen to the same point. Between 1850 and 1860 an atmosphere was created in which it became humanly impossible for the issue to be compromised.
This could result, finally, in nothing but violent action, and the violence struck Sumner himself first of all. This happened in the spring of 1856, when Sumner delivered a speech of unbridled passion in which he denounced “the crime against Kansas” and went out of his way to asperse the character and attainments of a colleague, Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina. A day or so afterward, Butler’s nephew, Congressman Preston Brooks, strolled into the Senate chamber and beat Sumner almost unconscious with his cane.
No caning in American history ever had more farreaching results. Sumner immediately became a martyr. His political position in Massachusetts had been, at that time, extremely shaky; now it became unassailable, and a New York politician said astutely that Sumner “is made by this act, senator for life.” The bitterness that was putting the slavery issue beyond the realm of possible settlement was profoundly intensified. In a real sense, here was the first blow of the Civil War.
Sumner remained away from his desk for three years, believing himself permanently crippled. His political opponents denounced him for shamming illness; Mr. Donald, examining the evidence carefully, believes that he was not shamming. Sumner suffered, apparently, psychosomatic wounds almost beyond healing. The point by now is of no great importance either way. By what he was, by what he said and did, and at last by what was done to him, Sumner had contributed substantially to the strange, tragic decision that America at last made about slavery—that it must be destroyed by violence.
To be sure, Sumner himself never felt that he had any responsibility at all for bringing on the war. As far as he could see, he had simply spoken up for truth and justice; other men, disagreeing with him, had caused the war. But when the war came he welcomed it. Now the evil he opposed could be disposed of. This man was as deeply conscientious as Stimson; the trouble was that he totally lacked the capacity to see any other point of view than his own.
The Manipulator
Neither the profound sense of reaching forward into the unknown nor the bitterness of unbridled passion attaches to the career of Judge David Davis of Illinois; yet this man’s life, too, is worth examining, even in the context set by the examination of the lives of Secretary Stimson and Senator Sumner. For Judge Davis had a great deal to do with the purely political decision that made Abraham Lincoln President, and this was possibly the most momentous choice the electorate ever made. Like all political decisions, it did not just happen. An expression of the popular will, it was nevertheless managed; behind the scenes, someone was pulling the strings. Judge Davis was the man who pulled most of the strings.
Born in eastern Maryland in 1815, Davis went to the Illinois country as a young man to make his way as a lawyer. The growing frontier territory was a good place for a bright, energetic, and careful young man who wanted to get on in the world, and Davis got on. He had neither the sense of dedication that marked Stimson nor the blind desire to lead mankind to righteousness that characterized Sumner; he was just a good man who planned to do his best, hoping to become a useful and successful citizen. Like the others, he found what he was looking for, and a fine study of his life is at hand in Willard King’s Lincoln’s Manager, David Davis. (It has been a good season for biographies.)
The first thing Davis found was Lincoln himself. Like other lawyers in that time and place, Davis “rode the circuit,” going from one county town to another to try cases before the itinerant circuit judges, and he was also active in Whig politics; in both realms he found Lincoln a good friend and a good man to work with. They must have made an odd pair—Lincoln, so long and slim, and the compact Davis whose weight quickly rose to a solid three hundred pounds—but they established an intimacy. Eighteen years before the famous Debates the two men made common cause against another circuit-rider, Stephen A. Douglas, in the Harrison-Van Buren election.
Their friendship was dampened for a time, when Lincoln refused to help Davis get a judgeship that Davis wanted, but the trouble was presently smoothed over. Davis won another judgeship before long, in 1849 he supported Lincoln’s unsuccessful (and seemingly inexplicable) desire to win appointment as Federal Land Office commissioner in Chicago, and a year later the two were as intimate as ever. Renewed comradeship on the circuit helped pull them back together; so, too, did the growth of Free Soil sentiment in the West, which found the two men standing together more and more against slavery, against Douglas, and against the Kansas-Nebraska Act and all that went with it. By 1860, when Lincoln was an avowed candidate for the Presidency, and a Chicago politician advised him to “get a feller to run you like Seward has Weed,” Lincoln unhesitatingly chose Davis.
Davis ran him well. He had an organization—a carefully chosen set of skilled political operators—but he was the strategist. When the Republican convention met at Chicago in May, 1860, it was Davis who went about lining up delegates, strengthening the faithful and persuading the undecided, and (here and there) making the deals that would mean blocs of votes. He gets blamed, Mr. King indicates, for making worse deals than were actually made; by and large, he committed his candidate to very little more than Lincoln was willing to be committed to, and the accepted story that he won the Indiana and Pennsylvania delegations by making ironclad bargains that Lincoln detested but felt himself bound by does not quite stand up under Mr. King’s examination.
Lincoln’s Manager, David Davis, by Willard L. King. Harvard University Press. 352 pp. $6.75.
In any case, the story of the Chicago convention is one of the most fascinating stories in American politics. Davis emerges as a shrewd, hard-working manipulator, a role which he continued to play in the national campaign. The Republicans (as is obvious now) were bound to win that election, provided various defeated candidates for the nomination did not kick over the traces. Davis saw to it that they did not.
Davis survived the man he managed. Lincoln made him a justice of the Supreme Court, where he served with distinction, and late in the 1870’s he resigned to accept election as senator from Illinois (see “The Election That Got Away,” page 4). He died what he originally wanted to be, a wealthy and distinguished citizen. Meanwhile, he had had a part in great events … and there is something fascinating about looking at him in conjunction with Stimson and Sumner: the man of decision, the reformer, the manipulator—each one notable, and highly controversial, in his own field; each one leaving his mark on his times.
