January 24, 2007
The State of the Union II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 06:15 PM EST On the subject of the State of the Union address, John Steele Gordon writes approvingly of George Bush’s most recent speech (which I did not watch, as I am in England) and adds, “Having watched more State of the Union speeches than I might wish (I remember watching President Eisenhower in 1958), there is one aspect of these speeches that has annoyed me for nearly 50 years, and I wonder if I’m the only one who is annoyed by it. When the President arrives, the sergeant at arms walks down the aisle, stops, and says, ‘Mr. [or last night, Madame] Speaker! The President of the United States!’ The President then enters the House Chamber, and everyone rises to their feet and greets him with tumultuous applause as he makes his way to the rostrum.” And so on, and so on. Like many viewers, Mr. Gordon is impatient with the constant standing and sitting, applauding and cheering, and endless string of redundant introductions. A slight and not particularly important correction: Until 1995, when the GOP took control of the Congress for the first time in 40 years, it was the doorkeeper who announced the President. The Republicans abolished this office and streamlined many of the functions of the other House officers, including the clerk, the chaplain, and the sergeant at arms. Officers of the House are elected by the representatives (which is to say, they are selected by the majority leadership), have lifetime floor privileges (just like members), and are paid a salary equal to that of congressmen. Some, like Edward McPherson, were former members themselves. McPherson served as a Republican representative from Pennsylvania from 1859 to 1863, lost his seat in the 1862 off-year elections (in part a backlash against the Lincoln administration’s failure to win a swift victory against the Confederacy), and went on to serve several stints as clerk. Generally, House officers fulfill a combination of administrative and ceremonial functions, but on occasion their work matters a great deal. At the opening of each new Congress, the clerk presides over the House until a speaker is elected. In December 1865, when the Thirty-ninth Congress convened, McPherson refused to call the names of several dozen congressmen-elect from the recently defeated Southern states. McPherson was acting at the behest of his political patron, Thaddeus Stevens, a congressman from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, who was the de facto majority leader. Though President Andrew Johnson had unilaterally readmitted several former Confederate states to the Union, Stevens and his Republican colleagues were determined to wrest meaningful concessions from the vanquished rebels, including a commitment to the rule of law, agreement to basic civil rights for black freedmen, and the exclusion of former high-ranking Confederate military and civilian officials from the political process. Over the hoots and hollers of Democratic congressmen, McPherson held his ground and excluded the Southern pretenders from the swearing-in ceremony.
January 24, 2007
The State of the Union Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:00 PM EST I thought the President gave a good speech last night, especially given the fact that State of the union speeches are rarely memorable. I was, perhaps predictably, less impressed with the Democratic response.
The President called for victory in Iraq: “On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle. Let us find our resolve, and turn events toward victory.” Senator Webb called only for “a proper conclusion,” which seems to me to be just a euphemism for cutting and running. It certainly isn’t victory. Franklin Roosevelt, on December 8, 1941, called for gaining the inevitable triumph, not reaching the proper conclusion.
To be sure, Senator Webb did reject the idea of “a precipitous withdrawal,” which many on the left would like to see. Instead he called for a “shift toward . . . a formula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.” Not having had a Jesuit education, I am not able to conjure up a whole lot of substantive difference between “precipitous withdrawal” and “leaving in short order.” The only difference, perhaps, is that the latter formulation allows time to come up with a fig leaf to cover, however briefly, defeat, a defeat that would, as the least of its ghastly consequences, prove Osama Bin Laden correct in his idea that when the going gets tough, Americans go home.
Having watched more State of the Union speeches than I might wish (I remember watching President Eisenhower in 1958), there is one aspect of these speeches that has annoyed me for nearly 50 years, and I wonder if I’m the only one who is annoyed by it.
When the President arrives, the sergeant at arms walks down the aisle, stops, and says, “Mr. [or last night, Madame] Speaker! The President of the United States!” The President then enters the House Chamber, and everyone rises to their feet and greets him with tumultuous applause as he makes his way to the rostrum.
When he gets there, he hands copies of the speech to the speaker and the Vice President, and the speaker, having waited for the tumultuous applause to finally wind down, then rises and says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I have the high honor and distinct personal privilege to present the President of the United States!”
Whereupon everyone—apparently stunned to find themselves unexpectedly in the same room with so august a personage, despite having cheered him to the rafters 30 seconds earlier—leaps to their feet and greets him with tumultuous applause.
January 24, 2007
Humility and History Posted by Alexander Burns at 10:10 AM EST Amidst the flurry of news surrounding the State of the Union Address and Hillary Clinton’s announcement of her presidential candidacy, I’m going to be unconventional and talk about an event that’s practically ancient history: Barack Obama’s declaration of candidacy last week.
There is much to be said for the young senator from Illinois. He is clearly a shrewd and articulate man. The former editor of the Harvard Law Review and the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama has distinguished himself as an appealing, energetic spokesman for his party and a persuasive advocate for moderate liberalism. Though my sample is limited, it seems to me that he’s generated an amazing degree of enthusiasm among college students. It goes without saying that the media love him. So far, the affection seems to be mutual.
The most significant criticism of this aspiring President, however, is that he is glaringly inexperienced. Serving a few terms in the state legislature before winning his Senate seat in 2004, Obama has spent only two years in the federal government and has done so as a member of the Senate’s minority party. He has little legislation to his name and few credentials on important national issues like foreign relations and national security. He’s no less experienced than some of his chief rivals; John Edwards and Hillary Clinton may be more accomplished politically, but neither has considerable executive experience or better national security bona fides. Still, it seems hard to argue that Obama’s fully qualified to run a country like this one.
All these are strikes against the Obama ’08 campaign, but what really turns me off from the Illinois legislator is not his inexperience or his preening before the camera. It’s the way he and his allies have decided to use history in the interests of his campaign. In response to the argument that Obama is prohibitively inexperienced, some supporters of his have circulated a cute little retort: “He has more experience than Lincoln did in 1860.” Furthermore, Obama has reportedly decided to formally announce his campaign in early February in Lincoln’s hometown of Springfield, Illinois.
It is, of course, factually true that Obama has more experience in public office than Lincoln had before his election as President. It is also true that Obama occupies the Senate seat that Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas in 1858, so comparisons between Obama and Lincoln are bound to arise (although the same could hardly be said about Lincoln and Obama’s immediate predecessor, Peter Fitzgerald, or Fitzgerald’s predecessor, Carol Moseley Braun). It seems like bad form, though, for a political candidate, particularly one as green as Obama, to draw such shameless comparisons between himself and the sixteenth President. Lincoln was certainly one of the most important and most admirable figures in American history. While Obama might be a promising candidate, he’s hardly earned the right to claim Lincoln’s mantle, and it comes off as awfully arrogant when he and his surrogates try to do so.
I disagree with her about almost everything, but I think Peggy Noonan may have dealt with this kind of behavior best in a column from last year in which she excoriated both Obama and Bill Frist for the preening, self-congratulatory tone of their public speeches. In her column, Noonan notes that Obama hangs a portrait of Lincoln in his office and he says that it “asks [him] questions.” Noonan suggests a question Lincoln might ask Obama: “Barack, why are you such an egomaniac?” Her point, and mine, is that politicians and other public figures ought to have a little more humility before their audiences and before history.
There’s nothing wrong with a politician drawing inspiration from past greatness. There’s nothing wrong with setting out to match a historical figure’s accomplishments. A better model for this, though, might be Lyndon Johnson, who hoped to enact such sweeping social reforms as to make Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal footnotes to his own chapter in history. Obviously Johnson failed, but at least he tried to pair good works with faith in himself. I wish I could say the same about the top tier of the Democratic presidential field.
January 23, 2007
State Lotteries Posted by John Steele Gordon at 10:55 AM EST I blogged yesterday about how governments, in the nature of things, are always desperate for money and will sometimes resort to dubious means to obtain it. Today’s New York Times reports a case in point: Illinois is considering selling its state lottery for $10 billion. The lottery last year had revenues of about $2 billion and profits of $630 million, a profit margin of 31.5 percent, which is a lot better than most oil companies can claim, so one wonders why the state would consider selling so fecund a cash cow. The answer is immediate money. The governor wants to put $6 billion of the proceeds into a fund to pay schools $630 million a year for sixteen years and use the other $4 billion for school construction. That would mean, of course, that seventeen years from now the state will have to either find new ways to continue funding schools or cut funding. But seventeen years is an eternity in politics and it will be someone else’s problem by then. Lotteries used to be called the numbers racket when they were still in private hands (i.e., organized crime), but gambling has become an ever-increasing source of revenues for states in recent years, since New Hampshire began the first modern state lottery in 1964. New York’s lottery is the state’s fourth-largest income source, and the Foxwoods resort and casino is Connecticut’s largest. Given the extraordinarily long odds against winning a lottery, it is said that they are a tax on people who are bad at math, and it is certainly a regressive tax, as lotteries appeal most strongly to those who have the least disposable income. Another way of looking at it, perhaps, is that a lottery ticket is a cheap chance to dream, providing good entertainment value for the price, at least until someone else wins it. But then there is always next week. The early history of state lotteries in this country is, to put it mildly, checkered, but no less colorful for that. For more on it, see my American Heritage article on the fabulously corrupt Louisiana State Lottery of the 19th century.
January 22, 2007
Conan the American Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:05 PM EST I just learned, from an e-mail from a mailing list, that today is the birthday of Robert E. Howard. In case the name is unknown to readers of this blog (and it probably should be), Howard, one of the premier pulp writers, created Conan the Barbarian, along with a horde of less well-remembered heroes—characters with names like Wulfhere the Skull-Splitter. He is also one of the very few people to actually invent a genre of popular writing, in his case the one subsequently dubbed “sword and sorcery.” That niche is normally distinguished from the rather more prestigious genre of epic fantasy, which is traced to J. R. R. Tolkien. Cambridge dons and Harvard profs will reminisce without shame of their childhood love of Tolkien, but Tolkien, of course, was himself an Oxford don. I have never heard anyone make an un-ironic reference to a childhood acquaintance with Robert E. Howard. Much of what Howard wrote is somewhat embarrassing to recall but apparently remains deeply pleasurable to a fair number of early adolescent boys—a lot of it is still in print. When I was a kid, in the 1960s, Howard’s pulp novels were marketed with extremely lurid covers drawn by artists like Frank Frazetta; looking over the reproductions of the current cover art on Amazon, the art is now a bit more decorous. Howard was born in 1906 in Peaster, Texas, never graduated from college, and died 30 years later, a suicide. He sold his first fiction in 1927, and was prodigiously productive, writing over 300 stories and 700 poems. He published in venues like Weird Tales and Action Stories, and eventually invented a durable world and time, his Hyperborean Age, after bumping into a book on the ancient Picts. Given the mildly racy and very violent fantasies he mass-produced, I was surprised to learn that Howard was physically a pretty formidable character; I too easily assumed that characters like Conan and King Kull would be dreamt up only be wheezy nerds enmeshed in escapist fantasies. Howard, however, grew up on what had very recently been a frontier, hearing reminiscences of gunfights, Indian raids and lynchings, and built himself up, TR-like, into a pretty fair boxer; he turns out to have had a notable reputation for toughness in a very tough milieu. I hadn’t thought about him for decades, but today, reminded of his existence by that e-mail, he seems to me to be an oddly resonant American figure. Before making a pretty good living as a writer he’d been a soda jerk, picked cotton, and branded horses. He remade himself into what he desperately wanted to be—a writer, a boxer—and he made something new in the world. The thing he made is probably more or less scorned by anyone but some early teenage boys and historians of popular culture, but when you catch a few moments of a cheesy sword-and-sorcery movie on cable, it is interesting to remember that someone actually invented this sort of tale. Americans cannot claim to have invented mass culture, but we invented a fair piece of it. The piece of it Howard invented melded and mutated into other things, most of it a lot better than he was, but still distantly indebted to him. Another e-mail I received today linked to a Variety story saying that one of the best current fantasy writers, George R. R. Martin, is going to have a cycle of his fiction filmed by HBO, with each novel in a series expected to number seven scheduled for a season. Martin’s books are a fusion of epic fantasy and many other things—some Tolkien, some Shakespeare, some medieval history, and, as it happens, while at a great remove, a very, very little bit of Robert E. Howard.
January 22, 2007
More on Runnymede Posted by Frederic D. Schwarz at 03:45 PM EST John Steele Gordon points out that Great Britain gave a small piece of Runnymede to the United States in 1965. Whether this makes it the “farthest east” American territory depends on where you choose to place the endpoint. Greenwich is as good a point as any, I suppose, though since it is defined as 0 degrees, it might make even more sense to say that it is the least far east one can go. Alaskans like to point out that the last couple of islands in the Aleutian chain are just west of the 180-degree line, so their state contains the farthest west, farthest east, and farthest north points of American territory. As for criminals and babies, you’d have to consult a lawyer to make sure, but according to this item (scroll down to “Land ceded to a foreign country”), the United States owns the land but does not exercise jurisdiction over it. The same is true of the American military cemetery at Normandy.
January 22, 2007
Runnymede Trivia Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:40 PM EST Fredric Smoler‘s reference to Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed in 1215, reminded me of the ultimate trivia question: What is the easternmost point of American territory, if the Greenwich prime meridian is regarded as being as far east as one can go? Most people say Maine (which reaches to about 67 degrees west longitude), although the U.S. Virgin Islands (64 degrees) are more easterly. But the answer is not the Virgin Islands either. It is the one acre of Runnymede (less than 1 degree west longitude) that was ceded by the Queen to the United States in 1965 as a memorial to President John F. Kennedy. American sovereignty over this one acre is, to be sure, nominal—no customs barriers, no passports required—but nonetheless real. I imagine that criminals could not be arrested there by British police and that if a woman were to manage to give birth there, her child could claim American citizenship. I hope this doesn‘t set off a stampede of crooks and the heavily pregnant in the direction of Runnymede.
January 22, 2007
The Power to Create Money Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:10 PM EST Barney Frank, the new chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is a very liberal Democrat. That’s fine with me, as the people of his district reelected him last year unopposed, which would seem to indicate strong support. And he is also, by all accounts, highly intelligent and a killer debater. But, as quoted in George Will’s recent column in the Washington Post, Rep. Frank has some scary things to say. Quoting Will: “The Fed, says Frank . . . , should not be considered ‘above democracy’: ‘We can debate whether Terri Schiavo’s life should be recognized as over’ and other fundamental questions of existence, ‘but God forbid anybody in elected office should talk about whether or not we need a 25-basis-point increase’ in interest rates. ‘Somehow that’s sacrosanct. No, it isn’t. It’s public policy.’ . . . Frank says Congress should not intervene in monetary policy . . . ‘unless.’ By monitoring whether the Fed’s governors act as they said they would when they were being confirmed, Congress would be ‘setting the predicate for intervention if they act otherwise.’” The Fed, of course, is the Federal Reserve System, the country’s central bank. It is run by a board of seven governors who are nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate to fourteen-year terms. The chairman and vice chairman are chosen from among the governors by the President, again subject to Senate confirmation, and serve four-year terms. The term of office of the governors is so long (two and a third times as long as the term of a senator, and seven times as long as a congressman’s term of office) precisely to insulate the board from politics. The reason is that the Federal Reserve possesses an awesome power—the power to create money—and history shows as clearly as clear can be that politics and the power to create money should be separated. Indeed history abounds with examples of the disaster that inevitably comes to pass when politicians control the money supply. Governments are always short of money, regardless of how rich the country may be. There is always an infinite demand for government services and grants, and the politicians have to choose which to fund and which to say no to. Politicians, regardless of whether they are of the left, right, or center, hate saying no their constituents. They’d rather say no to someone else’s constituents. Since the money to give out to grateful voters must ultimately come from ungrateful voters in the form of taxes, politicians are forced to make choices and just hope to choose well enough to get reelected. It should never be forgotten that politicians, first, last, and always, are in the reelection business. So if they possess the power to conjure money out of thin air, the temptation to do so, sooner or later, will prove irresistible. Politicians are as human as the rest of us, after all. Exactly how the money is conjured has changed over the years. In the ancient world, the money supply consisted of coins of a given weight of metal—copper, silver, or gold. It didn’t take the kings and emperors long to figure out that if they used just a little less precious metal and a little more base metal in the coins they minted, leaving the face value the same, they could mint more coins and thus spend more money. At first, they probably got away with it. But as the coinage became more and more debased, as the kings kept trying the same trick over and over, the people caught on and took action: prices went up. In the third century after Christ, the Roman Empire, its coinage debased to a fare-thee-well, suffered a severe economic crisis that the emperor Diocletian tried to cure with a new coinage and, since he didn’t have enough precious metal, price controls. The new coinage helped considerably, but the price controls were evaded through black markets and barter, as price controls always are. As paper—backed by assets—began to replace metal as the basis of money, politicians, when they could, began to print their way out of problems. The “Continentals” issued by the Continental Congress to pay for the Revolutionary War were backed by nothing but vague promises for the future. They soon degenerated into worthlessness, and the phrase “not worth a Continental” was part of the American lexicon for a hundred years. Alexander Hamilton established the Bank of the United States, modeled on the Bank of England, which was privately owned despite its public functions as a central bank, to take the power to create money out of the hands of the government. Hamilton minced no words as to why: “It appears to be an essential ingredient in its structure, that it shall be under private not a public direction—under the guidance of individual interest, not of public policy; which would be supposed to be, and, in certain emergencies, under a feeble or too sanguine administration, would really be, liable to being too much influenced by public necessity.” Although the Jeffersonians destroyed Hamilton’s Bank of the United States and its successor, the Second Bank, politicians did not acquire the power to create money, which fell into the hands of the regular banking system (although the federal government issued $450 million in “greenbacks”—paper money not backed by precious metal—to help finance the Civil War). Because the United States lacked a central bank from 1836 until 1913, the business cycle in this country was much more pronounced than in most European countries, alternating between the sky’s-the-limit boom and deep depression. Finally it was recognized, even by the heirs of Thomas Jefferson, that an economy as large and diverse as that of the United States had to have a central bank to control and protect the banking system and, therefore, the power to create money. It took a while to get it right, and the modern Fed only emerged in the New Deal. But while politically insulated, the Fed itself has sometimes been too influenced by “public necessity.” Under Arthur Burns in the 1970s, the Fed focused on accommodating the government’s ever-increasing borrowing needs and rapidly increased the money supply to keep down interest rates. The result was the worst peacetime inflation in the country’s history and a stagnating economy. It was only when Paul Volcker became chairman and focused on controlling inflation rather than interest rates that the situation changed. The result was, first, the most severe recession of the post-war era—the inevitable hangover after the monetary bender of the 1970s—and then a nearly uninterrupted 25-year period of low inflation and ever increasing prosperity and wealth creation (which is by no means the same thing as money creation), the most prosperous quarter-century in the history of the American economy. If ever there was a situation to which the if-it-ain’t-broke-don’t-fix-it doctrine should be applied, it is the political independence of the Federal Reserve. Someone please tell Barney Frank.
January 21, 2007
Wannsee and Victory II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:45 PM EST I’ve been thinking more about Josh Zeitz’s article on yesterday’s anniversary of the Wannsee conference, where the extermination of European Jewry was, as Josh carefully puts it, formalized. A number of years ago I went to see the villa where the conference occurred, a handsome building now preserved as a museum. Wannsee is a lake, actually two lakes—Berlin is, among other things, a city of lakes and forests—and the villa has terraces looking over the shore; Wannsee is one of the longest inland beaches in Europe. It was winter, so there were no swimmers and nude sunbathers teeming on the shore, as happens on the beaches in better weather, but you could rent boats at a marina near the villa. At the time, the idea of going boating on the Wannsee seemed bizarre to me, because as a tourist seeing the place for the first time, the name was malignantly resonant in a very pure way, and the idea that masses of people could and did swim and sunbathe there seemed quite fantastic. The museum is chillingly effective—understated, with placards and photographs of what was decided there—and the name Wannsee echoed and re-echoed in my mind; for me, the name meant nothing but the hideous thing there resolved. By a fluke of fortune, a dear friend later moved to Wannsee, which is also a splendid Berlin suburban neighborhood, and I have since spent a lot of time there. One of her daughters is my goddaughter, and I have since the early 1990s spent weeks at a time living in Wannsee, getting on and off the commuter line that takes you into the center of Berlin, playing with a child in the playground near that train station, walking a large and very friendly dog through Wannsee’s streets by night. Slowly the power drained out of the word; Wannsee became in my mind more than a dreadful name, it was also a rather beautiful place, the scene of the collective life of thousands of people, a life that predated the conference. For example, there is another villa in Wannsee, very close to the notorious one, a villa that was, from 1909 until 1935, the residence of Max Liebermann, the greatest German Impressionist. Once you know that, and Liebermann’s painting, the focus on what happened down the street becomes a little less exclusive. A party at a house in Wannsee, one designed by a great Bauhaus architect, also diluted the power of the name; it was amazing to be in a house designed by such a genius, rather than horrific to be in terrible Wannsee. I had always been taught that Germany was more than the Final Solution, and now Wannsee, too, became more than the Final Solution. I am not sure what I make of this process. Most sites of awful events are places we go to only to ponder a single moment of the past, but the sense of that power is dependent on a kind of ignorance. We need to know nothing else of a place, to experience the power of its name in its purest form. Some places where ghastly things happened are preserved in a pristine state, so that all we can think of when we see them is the famous and terrible thing that happened there—Antietam is such a place. Wannsee is no longer such a place for me. On balance, I think it is better to drain names of their power, as long as we do not cease to attend to the things that were once all we attached to them. Sometimes, of course, this process is reversed. An English friend grew up in Old Windsor, where his mother still lives, and where I sometimes visit. I was astonished to learn one day that what looked like a little island in the river there, more properly, I think, called a water meadow, was Runnymede, where Magna Carta was signed. And there I learned that the ordinary place can become eerily resonant, just as the eerily resonant name can finally become almost ordinary.
January 21, 2007
Wannsee and Victory Posted by Fredric Smoler at 08:30 AM EST Josh Zeitz’s lead piece on the website, “The Final Solution: What Happened at Wannsee?, is published on the anniversary of the Wansee Conference, where, as Josh puts it, the German government “formalized” plans for the extermination of European Jewry. Josh uses the word “formalize” with deliberation, seeking to avoid once-aggressive arguments between historians who think that the genocidal assault on the Jews had been long-meditated by Hitler and those who think that the Final Solution developed slowly and was not the product of a single intention or order. Josh spends some time canvassing theories on when the Final Solution “began” and notes Christopher Browning’s conclusion that an agreement to exterminate European Jewry dates from July of 1941. One thing Josh does not mention is the probable reason for that date. Many historians now believe that in July of 1941 Hitler had decided that Germany had pretty much won the war. The invasion of the Soviet Union had begun in late June, and in July it seemed as if nothing could stop the German armies as they raced toward Moscow. With Churchill’s last possible Continental ally apparently going down, Hitler looked forward to absolute victory and could now do as he pleased. This suggests that fear of the consequences might have deterred the Final Solution, but that in the summer of 1941 that fear vanished. It seemed clear that there could be no consequences. Josh’s column made me think a bit on some other reading I have been doing this week, Jörg Friedrich’s The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, which has just been published in an English translation by Columbia University Press. Friedrich’s book, a great success in Germany and elsewhere—according to its author, it has already been read by half a million people—has sometimes been taken to be an attempt to erode the distinction between Germany’s conduct of the Second World War and the moral worth of the tactics employed by her British and American enemies. If you take this line, Germany murdered civilians but so did Great Britain and the United States, and “murdered” has to be the right word, since civilians were often the direct rather than the indirect objects of attack. There are, I think, many things deeply wrong about this equation of Allied and Nazi morals, an equation very neatly encapsulated in the now-common, smug, and careless little phrase “Auschwitz and Hiroshima,” but Josh’s piece made me focus on one of them. When Germany and Japan surrendered, Allied attacks stopped on a dime. Since Hitler and the German Army, and German officialdom, grievously misread the prospects of the Red Army in the summer of 1941, we cannot know exactly how Germany would have exploited the victory that in July seemed so certain, but we can be sure that the Final Solution would not have stopped with the fall of the Kremlin. Victory in war was for the Nazis the means to a genocidal world empire, while victory in war was for the Allies the means to abort that ghastly possibility. The Allies did some dreadful things to win, while their enemies sought to win to do dreadful things. Blurring this distinction seems to me to be, at best, idiocy. It is, of course, fair to say that the distinction would have been lost on German civilians killed before VE Day. It is also fair to say that if you were a German civilian alive on VE Day, the distinction was probably more striking, and Poles, whose country had been conquered back in 1939 but suffered an additional six million fatalities under German occupation, have had little difficulty with it. What seems odd is that people who blur the distinction invariably seem proud of their historical sophistication.
January 20, 2007
Robert E. Lee III Posted by John Steele Gordon at 05:25 PM EST I’m inclined to agree with Fredric Smoler that the Civil War would not have been a six weeks’ war regardless of which side General Lee was on. However Lee’s aggressiveness, coupled with the greatly superior Northern resources and manpower, might well have shortened it significantly. I especially wonder what would have happened had General McClellan trained the Army of the Potomac, something, as Mr. Smoler noted, he was particularly good at, and then, since he was more than a little reluctant to actually hazard its use (Lincoln wrote him at one point, “General McClellan, if you are not going to use the Army, do you mind if I borrow it?”), it had come under the command of Lee, who had no such reluctance at all. We’ll never know, of course. As my Gordon grandparents were Southerners (he from Tennessee and she from South Carolina), Lee was an icon, and the Civil War, 79 years in the past when I was born, was very much a living presence still. My grandfather’s father had fought in the war and been captured by the Yankees in 1863. The orders he was carrying at the time—”You will report yourself and detachment at General Joseph Wheeler’s Hd Qrts as soon as practable [sic]”—hangs above my desk. I have a silver serving spoon whose handle has been obviously repaired. According to family legend, at least, it was broken when it was dug up along with the rest of the family silver after General Sherman had passed through. Since the house is still very much in existence, and Sherman’s army did not pass particularly close, I have my doubts about that, to put it mildly, but it’s a great story anyway. My grandfather always hoped that one of his children would be born on January 19. My grandmother, who couldn’t have cared less, was not able to accommodate him in this regard, but was vastly amused when her fourth child, my Aunt Eleanora, decided to come into this world on April 27, which is General Grant’s birthday.
January 19, 2007
Robert E. Lee II Posted by Fredric Smoler at 06:35 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes, on and of Robert E. Lee’s 200th birthday, that Lee was a superb and daring tactician, and wonders whether if Lee had accepted a command in Union army, “the Civil War might have been a lot shorter and a lot less bloody than it was.” This thought—what if Lee had fought for his country, rather than against it?—is a hardy perennial on the what-if list. Lee did have great abilities his initial opponents lacked, but how much would his decision to fight for our country have changed the outcome of the war? There is a case that such a decision would not necessarily have greatly shortened the war. The Confederacy was on the defensive, in an age in when the greatly increased effective range of rifled muskets had suddenly conferred a significant advantage on defenders, in part because the range and destructiveness of field artillery had not increased in proportion. When entrenched, inferior numbers of infantry armed with rifled muskets could often hold their ground, exacting a dreadful toll on comparably armed attackers. A fascinating chapter in a book by John Terraine, primarily known as a military historian of the First World War, compares the Civil War to the world wars of the twentieth century, argues that our Civil War was the first and necessarily attritional war of the industrial age, and observes that barring flukes, such wars were very likely to be long and bloody. The book containing that chapter is titled The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-Myths of War, 1861-1945. It has just been republished and is very much worth reading. Part of the case against Lee’s decision changing everything might go like this: The Confederacy had a number of able generals, so Lee could have been replaced, in some respects with advantages—more on this below. Raising and training the Union’s armies would have taken a lot of time, no matter who commanded that effort (and McClellan was in fact very good at building and inspiring armies). In the earlier part of the war, the loss of Richmond seems unlikely to have constituted a knockout blow, any more than the capture of Madrid or Moscow secured Spain and Russia for Napoleon, or the loss of successive capitals cost the Patriots the American Revolution. Neither would a few more defeats necessarily have broken the Confederacy’s will; cumulative losses over four years were a large part of what did that. In the latter part of the war, had Lee commanded our army at places like Cold Harbor, Petersburg, the Wilderness of Spotsylvania, it is not clear to me that he would have done any better than Grant did. Lee also had recurring flaws. While fighting on the strategic defensive, he much preferred offense, and his troops and his cause paid the price. Had he stayed out of Maryland and Pennsylvania, the Confederacy might have outlasted the political will of its enemies, so if the Confederacy had any chance, those campaigns threw it away. Lee’s two great offensives doomed what he took to be his country, and may have saved ours. In terms of tactics rather than strategy, Lee also had his flaws. He was sometimes unwilling to break off a losing attack. This happened most famously at Cemetery Ridge, but also happened at Malvern Hill, the final battle of the Peninsular Campaign. Of that attack, entirely unnecessary from the point of view of the Confederacy, one of Lee’s generals (D. H. Hill) later wrote, “It wasn't war; it was murder,” and Lee’s troops took 5,355 casualties. It is worth noting that many people who stress and in some cases overstate Lee’s gifts have a tendency to unduly deprecate Grant’s and Sherman’s abilities. Sherman did something like Malvern Hill once, at Kennesaw Mountain, and never did it again—luckily for the Republic, Lee was not such a quick study. Grant repeatedly displayed remarkable abilities; for various reasons, Grant’s iron resolve is better remembered than his daring and occasionally remarkable finesse, but the Vicksburg Campaign is a good place to look at those latter qualities. Grant’s image as nothing but a clumsy butcher is part of the myth of the Glorious Cause, and the cult of Lee is another part of that myth. The cult of Lee may owe less to his generalship than to his being taken to be the sort of man the Confederacy wanted to imagine defended it. Lee was thought to be supremely chivalrous and vastly appealing in various other ways. His chivalry can be exaggerated. According to the testimony of Wesley Norris, in 1859 Lee ordered that 2 of his 63 slaves, who had fled for their liberty and been recaptured, be flogged and have brine rubbed into their backs. One of those slaves was a woman, and flogging women is normally thought to be an imperfect mark of chivalry. Interestingly, the two slaves Lee ordered flogged thought themselves to have been freed, for Lee had inherited them under a will requiring him to do that within five years, a provision apparently intended only to allow the legal work of manumission to be done under no terrible pressure of time. Lee instead kept the slaves as long as he legally could, which does not seem to have been their former owner’s intention. Lee is widely reputed to have been opposed to slavery, but there is evidence on both sides of that question. There is also evidence on both sides of the proposition that he was a military genius. At Chancellorsville, concerning which John Steele Gordon says Lee “played Joseph Hooker like a fiddle, bluffing him into a defensive posture when he had overwhelming superiority,” Hooker in fact brilliantly outmaneuvered Lee and got 70,000 men over the Rappahannock and Rapidan with no loss of any kind. The first portion of the Chancellorsville campaign is better evidence of Hooker’s gifts than of Lee’s. However Hooker, under the influence of the catastrophe at Fredricksburg and ill-served by several incompetent subordinates, gave Lee an opportunity, one Lee brilliantly exploited, but I have never thought that Lee achieved his opportunity by success at bluffing. Hooker, in his own words, that day lost faith in Joe Hooker, and he did it pretty much unaided, rather than being outwitted. While my memory is that most commentary on the battle argues that Hooker’s fatal error was waiting to be attacked, my memory is also that Lee had committed himself to attacking superior numbers with no knowledge of Hooker’s fautly deployments. Had Hooker been better served by his subordinates, Chancellorsville might have been another battle where Lee’s habitual aggressiveness wrecked his own army. It is an oddity of what-if history that almost no counterfactuals imagine better Union decisions bringing the war to an earlier conclusion. For whatever reasons, most Civil War counterfactuals imagine the worst of outcomes, Confederate victory. Similarly, few counterfactuals imagine better Allied luck in World War II. The devil doesn’t only get all the best tunes; his causes seem to elicit the most protracted daydreams as well. If Terraine is right, of course, generalship, which matters enormously on many occasions, was not necessarily the decisive element in protracting the great industrial wars. But counterfactuals are very often invented by people who are sure that it is.
January 19, 2007
Robert E. Lee Posted by John Steele Gordon at 01:10 PM EST Today is Robert E. Lee’s 200th birthday.
Surely not since Hannibal has a general on the losing side of a war achieved so much immortality. The reason for this immortality, of course, is that both Hannibal and Lee were superb and daring masters of tactics. The battle of Cannae (216 B.C.), when Hannibal annihilated a larger Roman army, is still considered perhaps the tactical masterpiece of all time.
At Chancellorsville (1863), Lee, facing a vastly larger and better equipped army, nonetheless divided his forces—usually a suicidal move in those circumstances—and achieved a smashing victory. Abraham Lincoln’s reaction was typical. Given the news, he said, “My God! My God! What will the country say?”
In both cases, the winning generals had the losing generals’ numbers. Hannibal chose a day when he knew that the impetuous Roman consul Terentius Varro would be in charge of the army, not his more cautious co-consul Aemilius Paulus. Lee played Joseph Hooker like a fiddle, bluffing him into a defensive posture when he had overwhelming superiority.
But tactics, however imbued with genius, cannot defeat in the long term an enemy possessing superior resources, unless that enemy abandons the fight. The Romans, sadder but wiser, built a new army, avoided large battles where Hannibal’s tactical genius could come into play, and slowly wore Hannibal, whose supply lines were tenuous at best, down. The Union utilized its greatly superior financial and manpower resources and, finally, found some competent generals.
It is one of the great what-ifs of American history that Lee was offered a major command in the Union Army just as the Civil War was starting. Lee had opposed secession and was willing to take that command as long as Virginia remained in the Union. When it did not, he resigned his U.S. Army commission, his loyalty to his native state overriding his loyalty to the Union. Had he seen things the other way, the Civil War might have been a lot shorter and a lot less bloody than it was.
January 18, 2007
Guerrillas Posted by Fredric Smoler at 10:25 PM EST An interesting article in Foreign Policy titled “Insurgencies Rarely Win—And Iraq Won’t Be Any Different (Maybe),” takes on the oddly durable historical myth that guerrilla insurgents always win, and thus is worth a look. Donald Stoker, a professor at the Naval War College’s Montery Program, notes that in the last century guerrillas have at different times lost wars in, among other places, Malaya, Greece, the Philippines, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Bolivia, Angola, Peru, and South Africa, in some of these places more than once, while winning in Cuba, part of Ireland, and in Algeria (though I’d add that other guerrillas subsequently lost in Algeria). Most people could quickly come up with various additions to the list of guerrilla losses—Stoker himself parenthetically adds Vietnam, won by North Vietnamese regulars—and most people would also add a few more guerrilla victories, for example Afghanistan. Stoker, however, refuses to list Afghanistan as a guerrilla victory, noting that the regime left behind by the Soviets lasted for three years, and that the Soviets pulled out as a result of economic and political weakness at home rather than as a result of military defeat. A reply to this would be that in wars of occupation, simply outlasting a regular army is much of what guerrillas need to do to win; that is what Hezbollah has twice done in Lebanon. Still, Stoker’s case is more right than wrong. The mystique of the guerrilla has a lot of sources, but a grasp of military history isn’t one of them. Stoker does make the point that what are often termed guerrilla “victories” were wars finally won by regular armies, to which guerrilla forces were useful adjuncts. He notes that Mao won the Chinese Civil War with regular forces, and I’d add that in another famous and generally miscategorized case, Tito’s Axis enemies withdrew when their main regular armies were destroyed elsewhere, by other regular armies (and a Soviet army ended the war in Yugoslavia, part of one of the better regular armies the world has ever seen). Going back to the early nineteenth century, the two most celebrated guerrilla campaigns were successful only because guerrillas were adjuncts to regular armies—this was the case in both Spain and Russia, and was the case for guerrilla forces in the American revolution too. Later in the nineteenth century, guerillas lost pretty decisively, both in innumerable colonial campaigns and in the Franco-Prussian War. As for Iraq, Stoker points out that defeating guerrilla insurgencies normally takes, on his count, eight to eleven years, and he thinks that the administration’s mismanagement has been so gross that we may see “a rare, decisive insurgent victory.” That last seems improbable. If Sunni Arab Iraqi insurgents outlast the U.S. Army, which seems quite possible, it is not clear how they can possibly defeat either Iraq’s Shiites or Iraq’s Kurds. A regular Iraqi Shiite army, probably equipped by Iranians, looks like a much better bet as the eventual victor in most of Iraq. If anyone destroys the Kurdish militias, it will be one or more regular armies—maybe a Turkish one, maybe an Iranian one, maybe both—but it will not be Sunni Arab guerrillas, and probably not Shiite militias. It is very hard to imagine how Sunni guerrillas could possibly defeat whatever sort of army Iraqi Shiites eventually produce. The mystique of the guerrilla insurgent—the conviction that history is on his side—is almost always a mistake and is often a catastrophic mistake. In this war, the greatest casualty of the guerrilla mystique is likely to be the Sunni Arab population of Iraq, who were persuaded by a myth, and some of whom believed such tactics made them invincible. One tragedy of those tactics is already unfolding in Iraq: People employing them can kill a few soldiers and many civilians, but those tactics cannot defend civilians; guerrillas can provoke an enemy to terrible brutality, but they cannot rescue the most probable victims of their provocation, those in whose name they fight, vast numbers of whom who will die in reprisals. Most historical myths are pretty harmless. Some are not.
January 18, 2007
Etymology and History II Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 10:20 AM EST In his post on etymology and history, John Steele Gordon wrote, “It wasn’t until after the Second World War that this ‘fashionable’ anti-Semitism [in the United States] began to wane. The novel by Laura Hobson, Gentleman’s Agreement, made into a movie directed by Elia Kazan that won the Oscar for best picture in 1947, marks, perhaps, the beginning of the end of this form of anti-Semitism.”
In many ways, Gentleman’s Agreement was of a piece with other staples of the new culture of pluralism that emerged from World War II. Throughout the 1940s, the American government’s Office of War Information actively worked with Hollywood studios to churn out “platoon films,” each of which featured an ethnically (and, much more rarely, racially) diverse group of soldiers or marines. Movies like Air Force (1943), Bataan (1943), Guadalcanal Diary (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), Objective Burma (1945), and A Walk in the Sun (1945) encouraged ordinary servicemen and civilians to think of the nation’s diversity as a source of strength, while paradoxically blunting the real differences between people of different races, religions, and national backgrounds. In Pride of the Marines, a wounded Jewish serviceman named Lee Diamond tells his comrades (over the background score of America the Beautiful), “One happy afternoon when God was feeling good, he sat down and thought up a beautiful country and named it the U.S.A. . . . Don’t tell me we can’t make it work in peace like we do in war. Don’t tell me we can’t pull together. . . . Maybe some guys won’t hire me because I celebrate Passover instead of Easter. . . . We need a country to live in where no one gets booted around for any reason.”
This was a radically inclusive message—certainly a break with the 1920s and 1930s, when raw prejudice was still very much a staple of the public culture. Though African-Americans fared less well by the new ethic of diversity (they were usually, though not always, excluded from platoon films, an omission that was at least an accurate reflection of military policy), they weren’t entirely absent from the litany of artistic and political endorsements of an open society. In the Oscar-winning 1945 short film The House I Live In, Frank Sinatra teaches a group of white ethnic street kids that religion and national origins are completely inconsequential. Importantly, though the group does not include a black kid, Sinatra sings, “. . . all races and religions, that’s America to me.” It’s unimaginable that he could have voiced a comparable sentiment five years earlier.
On the other hand, the new culture of diversity tended to emphasize what Americans shared in common in such a way as to blunt the very real (and usually benign) differences between Catholics and Jews, Irish and Italians, African-Americans and whites. In Gentleman’s Agreement, Gregory Peck, whose non-Jewish character poses as a Jew for several weeks in order to better understand the workings of anti-Semitism, explains to his son that Jews are just like all other Americans, except that they go to “church” on Saturday. Fair enough. But not exactly right.
Clearly there was a tension between celebrating diversity and emphasizing the importance of national unity. Most movie artists and politicians erred toward the latter in the 1940s.
There’s a great story, perhaps apocryphal, about Gentleman’s Agreement. After the film won its Best Picture Oscar, a reporter asked one of the members of the crew what lessons he had learned. He replied that it’s important not to treat someone badly because he’s Jewish, because he might actually turn out to be a Christian.
Progress is progress.
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