Give ’em Hell 54th!

 

The negroes fought gallantly, and were headed by as brave a colonel as ever lived.” –

Confederate Lieutenant Iredell Jones, who observed the 54th’s fateful advance on Fort Wagner.

In a Civil War mood lately because of current events.  The above scene from the movie Glory (1989) never fails to move me.  Courage is a precious virtue and the just never fail to honor it, even when displayed by foes.

Ah, Mary pierced with sorrow,
Remember, reach and save
The soul that comes to-morrow
Before the God that gave!
Since each was born of woman,
For each at utter need —
True comrade and true foeman —
Madonna, intercede!

Rudyard Kipling

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Dark Powers

(I originally posted this at The American Catholic and I thought the science fiction mavins of Almost Chosen People might find it amusing.)

 

Would extraterrestrial alien civilizations be friendly or malevolent?  Here is a post that argues they would be benign:

 

 

The second possibility is a little more intriguing. Imagine a benevolent or benign spacefaring alien species, akin to the Vulcans from Star Trek. If they’ve figured out how to successfully traverse the distances between the stars, then they have technology that’s at least hundreds of years beyond our own, and potentially thousands, tens of thousands or more. We have enough problems on our world figuring out how to manage our own planet, and we have the resources of an entire world, a solar system, and a massive, energy-giving Sun. For a species to come as far as an intelligent, spacefaring alien would have come, they must have figured out a solution to a whole slew of problems that humanity clearly still grapples with. Meeting a civilization such as this could only have positive outcomes for our own.

The Entire Civil War

Any understanding of this nation has to be based, and I mean really based, on an understanding of the Civil War. I believe that firmly. It defined us. The Revolution did what it did. Our involvement in European wars, beginning with the First World War, did what it did. But the Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things. And it is very necessary, if you are going to understand the American character in the twentieth century, to learn about this enormous catastrophe of the mid-nineteenth century. It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.

Shelby Foote

 

 

 

An excellent brief retelling of the Civil War by the Civil War Trust using animated maps.

One People

 

Something for the weekend. The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. When I read Civil War history I do not read it in an us v. them spirit. Everybody involved is an American: Confederate, Union, black slave. It is the great American epic, our Iliad. It was visited upon us by God, I believe, for the reason Lincoln stated:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

The great lesson of the Civil War is that we are one people, North and South, black and white, and when I study that period in our history I always attempt to remember that fact.

One Reason We Didn’t Have Unending Civil Wars

 

 

 

 

One reason we didn’t have unending civil wars after the one that ended in 1865 is because of the generosity of spirit by Abraham Lincoln, Lieutenant General Grant and by Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, he of Little Round Top Fame:

The choice of the two officers to oversee the surrender ceremony at Appomattox, Union General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and Confederate General John Brown Gordon, was quite appropriate.  In a War where the vast majority of soldiers were volunteers and not regular soldiers, both these Generals were volunteers, not professional soldiers.  They both during the War saw more combat than most professional soldiers see in an  entire career.  After the War both became active in politics and both often spoke of the need for love of the reunited nation and a forgetting of the angry passions of the Civil War, while ever remembering the courage of the men who had fought it, especially the courage of those who never came back from the War.

 

 

Chamberlain helped begin the healing of the dreadful wounds to the nation caused by the War  at Appomattox.  As the Confederates passed by, Chamberlain ordered a salute to them by the Union troops. He explained why he did this:

“I resolved to mark it by some token of recognition, which could be no other than a salute of arms. Well aware of the responsibility assumed, and of the criticisms that would follow, as the sequel proved, nothing of that kind could move me in the least. The act could be defended, if needful, by the suggestion that such a salute was not to the cause for which the flag of the Confederacy stood, but to its going down before the flag of the Union. My main reason, however, was one for which I sought no authority nor asked forgiveness. Before us in proud humiliation stood the embodiment of manhood: men whom neither toils and sufferings, nor the fact of death, nor disaster, nor hopelessness could bend from their resolve; standing before us now, thin, worn, and famished, but erect, and with eyes looking level into ours, waking memories that bound us together as no other bond;–was not such manhood to be welcomed back into a Union so tested and assured?”

Theodore Roosevelt and the East Saint Louis Race Riot of 1917

 

On July 2, 1917, the nation was rocked by one of the worst race riots in its history.  Black men, women and children were slain in East Saint Louis, estimates of the killed ranging from 40 to 200.  President Wilson said almost nothing about this atrocity.  Former President Theodore Roosevelt on July 6, 1917, at a mass meeting in Carnegie Hall to welcome the representatives of the new, and fated to be short-lived, democratic Russian government, in his remarks spoke about the riot:

 

 

“Before we speak of justice for others it behooves us to do justice within our own household. Within the week there has been an appalling outbreak of savagery in a race riot in East Saint Louis, a race riot for which, as far as we can see, there was no real provocation, and which, whether there was provocation of not, was waged with such an excess of appalling brutality as to leave a stain on the American name.

Now, friends, the longer I live the more I grow to abhor rhetoric that isn’t based on facts, words that are not translated into deeds. And when we applaud the birth of democracy in another people, the spirit which insists on treating each man on the basis of his right as a man , refusing to deny the humblest the rights that are his, when we present such a greeting to the representatives of a foreign nation, it behooves us to express our deep condemnation of acts that give the lie to our words within our own country.”

Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, spoke next and in this remarks attempted to place the blame for the race riot on employers importing cheap black labor from this South.  This attempt to justify the riot outraged Roosevelt who spoke again:

 

 

“I am not willing that a meeting to commemorate the birth of democracy and justice in Russia shall seem to have given any approval of or apology for the infamous brutalities that have been committed on negroes at East St. Louis. Justice with me is not a mere phrase or form of words. How can we praise the people of Russia for doing justice to the men within their boundaries if we in any way apologize for murder committed on the helpless? In the past I have listened to the same form of excuse advanced on behalf of the Russian autocracy for pogroms of Jews. Not for a moment shall I acquiesce in any apology for the murder of women and children in our own country. I am a democrat of democrats. I will do anything for laboring man except what is wrong.”

June 8, 1918: The Great American Eclipse

Map showing path of total eclipse of the sun across the United States, June 8, 1918

Today, August 21, 2017, the US will experience a total solar eclipse that will go across the continental United States, from the Pacific to the Atlantic.  The last time this occurred was on June 8, 1918, proceeding from Washington State across the US to Florida.  The press gave heavy coverage to the eclipse and rightly warned of the risk of blindness by looking at the eclipse with the naked eye.

I would note that my son’s alma mater, SIU, is in the path of totality of the current eclipse and is running several events today.  Go here to read about it.

 

Did Government Meddling Bring About the Great Depression?

The above video says yes, and attributes the bad policy to Herbert Hoover.  Considering the cycle of boom and bust that America had long seen, the Great Depression stands out for both its length and severity.  Perhaps this is not the answer, but it it is certainly more accurate than the historical myth that says that Hoover did nothing in the face of the Great Depression.

Homeward Bound

 

Something for the weekend.  Homeward Bound by Simon and Garfunkel.  My family and I are homeward bound from Indianapolis and will spend the day at home before running our daughter up to her library school tomorrow.  Written by Paul Simon in 1964 the song was debuted by the duo in 1966 and made it to number nine of the top 100.

World War I in Six Minutes

 

Posts about World War I will become an increasing part of this blog over the next year and so a good short video giving a brief introduction to the Great War.