The worst wrongs that capitalism can commit upon labor would sink into insignificance when compared with the hideous wrong done by those who would degrade labor by entailing upon it the rapid lowering of self-reliance. The Roman mob, living on the bread given them by the state and clamoring for excitement and amusement to be purveyed by the state, represent for all time the very nadir to which a free and self-respecting population of workers can sink if they grow habitually to rely upon others, and especially upon the state, either to furnish them, charity, or to permit them to plunder, as a means of livelihood.
Theodore Roosevelt, The Foes of Our Own Household, 1917
illy Graham died last week at age 99. My sainted mother, uber Catholic that she was, used to watch his crusades on TV in the Sixties. In his prime, Graham was on a par with Ronald Reagan as a spell-binding orator, but more than that he was a voice crying out for Christ in a dark world. I I will miss him and may he now be enjoying the Beatific Vision.
Something for the weekend. On the week in which Billy Graham died there can only be one song: Just As I Am. In his crusades Graham used his hymn in his altar calls. Written by Charlotte Elliott in 1836 the hymn powerfully conveys the humble dependence of all Christians on the power, grace and mercy of Christ:
Just as I am – without one plea,
But that Thy blood was shed for me,
And that Thou bidst me come to Thee,
-O Lamb of God, I come!
Just as I am – and waiting not
To rid my soul of one dark blot,
To Thee, whose blood can cleanse each spot,
-O Lamb of God, I come!
Just as I am – though toss’d about
With many a conflict, many a doubt,
Fightings and fears within, without,
-O Lamb of God, I come!
Just as I am – poor, wretched, blind;
Sight, riches, healing of the mind,
Yea, all I need, in Thee to find,
-O Lamb of God, I come!
Just as I am – Thou wilt receive,
Wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
Because Thy promise I believe,
-O Lamb of God, I come!
Just as I am – Thy love unknown
Has broken every barrier down;
Now to be Thine, yea, Thine alone,
-O Lamb of God, I come!
Just as I am – of that free love
The breadth, length, depth, and height to prove,
Here for a season, then above,
-O Lamb of God, I come!
A recording of Woodrow Wilson from the 2012 campaign.
Ah, how our technology changes our perceptions of public figures. Until the internet this type of recording was not widely available. My perception of how Woodrow Wilson sounded was shaped five decades ago by the portrayal by Alexander Knox of Woodrow Wilson in the film Wilson (1944). Go here to view that movie. Where it is so easy now, with the internet, to hear the actual historical figure since the advent of recordings, films will have less ability to shape the perception of a historical figure. Of course when the original film was released 74 years ago, quite a few people in the audiences would have heard Wilson through recordings or in person. Now those people are all gone while the film remains, a memorial to Wilson as film director Daryl F. Zanuck, a fan of Wilson, intended it to be, but perhaps less of a memorial as time, and technology, march on.
You have summoned me in my weakness. You must sustain me by your strength.
President Franklin Pierce, Inaugural Address, March 4, 1853
I have never liked Presidents’ Day. Why celebrate all presidents when only a select few of them, like Washington and Lincoln, deserve to be celebrated? Officially the date is still the commemoration of George Washington’s birthday, which actually won’t occur until February 22. However, I will keep up my tradition of writing about presidents on this day. Today we will look at a President who has vanished from popular memory.
Franklin Pierce was a doughface, the pejorative applied to Northern politicians prior to the Civil War who embraced the South’s view of slavery. While personally opposed to slavery, where have we heard that formulation before, Pierce also opposed all efforts to restrict slavery, fearing that such efforts would merely antagonize the South and ultimately lead to civil war. He was thrust into the Presidency as the darkest of dark horse candidates, nominated by the Democrats in 1852 on the 49th ballot, winning easily in the fall against his former Mexican War commander, Winfield Scott, the last presidential candidate of the dying Whig Party.
Historians, the few who have examined his term in office in detail, have been generally scathing about his service as President, as Pierce did nothing to halt the drift towards the civil war he so feared, with his steadfast determination to yield to the South in the face of growing Northern anger. Perhaps fortunately for his historical reputation, Pierce ranks high on the list of forgotten presidents, his life largely going down the memory hole of the general public. That process began during his lifetime, as the whirlwind of events that would lead to the Civil War passed him by. Pierce perhaps sensed this himself, stating as he left office in 1857, that all he had left now to do was to get drunk. To be fair to Pierce, few men had more to get drunk about, all three of his sons having died in childhood, his last son at eleven years of age after having been almost totally decapitated in a train accident in front of his shattered parents, just before Pierce assumed the office of President. After his wife died in 1863, his drinking got completely out of hand and he died of cirrhosis of the liver on October 8, 1869. President Grant, who had served with Pierce in the Mexican War made sure that the forgotten man received the honors in death that he warranted as a former President. In his memoirs Grant went out his way to praise Pierce and we will let him have the last word on Pierce:
General Franklin Pierce had joined the army in Mexico, at Puebla, a short time before the advance upon the capital commenced. He had consequently not been in any of the engagements of the war up to the Battle of Contreras. By an unfortunate fall of his horse on the afternoon of the 19th he was painfully injured. The next day, when his brigade, with the other troops engaged on the same field, was ordered against the flank and rear of the enemy guarding the different points of the road from San Augustin Tlalplan to the city, General Pierce attempted to accompany them. He was not sufficiently recovered to do so, and fainted. This circumstance gave rise to exceedingly unfair and unjust criticisms of him when he became a candidate for the Presidency. Whatever General Pierce’s qualifications may have been for the Presidency, he was a gentleman and a man of courage. I was not a supporter of him politically, but I knew him more intimately than I did any other of the volunteer generals.
Grant reminds us that public service of a President can tell us only so much about the private man, and here endeth the lesson.
Korea has often been called The Forgotten War. I had an uncle, who died in 2012, Ralph McClarey, who served over there as a combat infantryman in the Illinois National Guard. He had a great sense of humor and would tell me stories about the war. He served during the latter part of the war when fierce battles were fought for outposts. These battles were obscure to most Americans at the time, and completely unknown to most Americans now. This is the story of one of these forgotten battles.
Outpost Harry was a tiny outpost on a small hill in the Iron Triangle, an area 60 miles north of Seoul. The Chinese high command decided to capture this position, assuming that a victory would strengthen their hand in the ongoing truce negotiation. They assumed that it would fall to them easily, after all, Outpost Harry was a small position that could be only held by one company at a time, the four American companies and the Greek company taking turns holding the position. The position was tiny but important. Lose it, and the Chinese could direct fire on the Un Main Line of Resistance and force a six-mile withdrawal to the next defensible line by the Eighth Army. Outpost Harry had to be held.
Aerial reconnaissance from June 1-June 8 indicated to the American high command that a major Chinese offensive was in the offing, spearheaded by the 22nd and 221rst regiments of the Chinese 74th division. (more…)
Something for the weekend. Hail to the Chief. The Presidential anthem, it was written by James Sanderson in 1812 and became associated with the Presidency in 1815 to honor George Washington and the ending of the War of 1812. Andrew Jackson was the first living president for which the song was played. During the Civil War it was played for both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis. Chester A. Arthur did not like the song and had John Philip Sousa write a replacement, the Presidential Polonaise. After Arthur’s term of office the Marine Corps Band went right back to playing Hail to the Chief to announce the President. The song is preceded by four ruffles and flourishes, the highest of musical honors, for the President. Here are the almost never sung, thank goodness, lyrics:
Hail to the Chief we have chosen for the nation,
Hail to the Chief! We salute him, one and all.
Hail to the Chief, as we pledge cooperation
In proud fulfillment of a great, noble call.
Yours is the aim to make this grand country grander,
This you will do, that’s our strong, firm belief.
Hail to the one we selected as commander,
Hail to the President! Hail to the Chief! (more…)
On his way to Washington in 1861 to be sworn in as President, Abraham Lincoln made a number of speeches in the cities and towns his train passed through. Most of them were short and rather forgettable. However the speech in Cleveland on February 15, 1861 is interesting. It is part of Lincoln’s efforts to reassure the nation that the crisis wasn’t as bad as it seemed and that all will be well. Lincoln throughout most of his life had lived in a nation that seemed to be on the point of dividing North and South: The compromise of 1820; the Nullification Crisis of 1828-33; the conflict over the admission of Texas into the Union as a slave state; the Compromise of 1850. In each of these prior political conflicts cooler heads had prevailed and the Union had been preserved. Lincoln, and much of the North, at this point thought that the South was bluffing and that after yet another compromise was patched together, the Union would go on as it had until the next round of crisis and compromise. After he became President, Lincoln would swiftly learn that this time things were very different, and the time of talk and compromise was now a thing of the past. Lincoln’s speech in Cleveland: (more…)
Know, O prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars – Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west.
Robert E. Howard
In my misspent youth I devoured the works of Robert E. Howard. The creator of Conan the Barbarian, Howard was a writer for the pulp magazines of the twenties and the thirties. He had a knack for creating literary worlds and populating them with unforgettable characters. His characters were men of violence, but usually not without a sense of honor. His puritan hero, Solomon Kane, set in sixteenth century Africa, had a faith in Christ:
“Nay, alone I am a weak creature, having no strength or might in me; yet in times past hath God made me a great vessel of wrath and a sword of deliverance. And I trust, shall do so again.”
Not to be mistaken for great literature, Howard’s stories almost always make great, rattling reading, and sometimes even give a thing or two to think about.
Catholic science fiction author, a convert from atheism, John C. Wright, has a good review up of a Conan tale: The Tower of the Elephant:
Conan is young here. The internal chronology of the stories is subject to some guesswork. But it is fair to say that this is the second or third tale in Conan’s career, taking place after Frost Giant’s Daughter (1934). We see him for the first time in what will be his signature costume: “naked except for a loin-cloth and his high-strapped sandals.”
I found, as I often do, that not only is Robert E. Howard a better writer than I was able, as a callow youth, to see he was. He also easily surpasses the modern writers attempting to climb his particular dark mountain. From the high peak, brooding, he glares down at inferior writers mocking him, and, coldly, he laughs.
Particularly when Howard is compared with the modern trash that pretends to be fantasy while deconstructing and destroying everything for which the genre stands, he is right to laugh.
Let us list the ways.
Howard, as many pulp-era writers had to be, is a master of structure.
The Tower of the Elephant is divided into three chapters. The first introduces the set-up. In the most lawless quarter of a city of thieves, in a stinking tavern where rogues and lowlifes gather, rumors are spoken of a silvery tower that looms above the city in an isolated garden on a hilltop. In it is a gem of fabled worth and eldritch powers, that is the talisman of a sinister wizard. The tower seems strangely unguarded, or, rather, guarded strangely.
The wall is low, the way is not difficult: but none of the famous thieves will dare approach it. Our very own Conan (whom last we saw as a king) is here a barbaric lad who asks about the tower and the gem, is rudely answered, and rashly vows to make the attempt. Words are exchanged, and a fight ensues. We soon see how tough Conan is.
The second chapter is a heist. We are introduced to Taurus the Prince of Thieves. He and Conan join forces, attempting to elude or outfight the dangerous or unchancy defenders, human or otherwise, guarding the treasure. When even the Princes of Thieves is unable to overcome a particularly strange peril, a second fight ensues. We soon see how tough the Tower is.
The final chapter is pure awesomeness. The weird and supernatural secret of the Tower reveals itself. Even bold Conan, who fears no mortal blade, is petrified, if only for a moment. The dire and supernatural revenge which follows those who meddle in the outer secrets unfolds.
Howard is also the master of the one trick that always seems to elude postmodern writers. He knows how to pen a proper ending: As in a fairy tale of old, Conan is wise enough to obey the supernatural being when it speaks, and a pathway to safety is opened for him. He escapes with his life.
Go here to read the rest. Howard had a short and sad life of thirty years, ending in suicide when his beloved mother slipped into a coma, but he left behind works still being read 82 years after his death. Not a bad feat for any writer.
On his 209th birthday it is perhaps appropriate to consider how the world would have changed if Abraham Lincoln had died young. Unlike many great figures in history, Lincoln did not matter in a historical sense until around the last decade of his life. Up to that time his political career had been mostly undistinguished and he had attracted little national notice. If he had died in 1855 his name would now be unknown except in the pages of the most comprehensive histories of Illinois in the middle of the Nineteenth Century. With his birth in the harsh conditions of a pioneer family, death was certainly not a stranger. His brother Thomas died before he was three days old. His mother died at the age of 34. His sister died at age 20 in childbirth. Lincoln came close to death when he was kicked by a horse in the head at 9 years of age in 1818. He was clubbed in the head during a robbery attempt in 1828. He contracted malaria in Illinois and had two bouts of it in 1830 and 1835. He suffered from bouts of depression and some of his friends feared on at least one occasion that he might try to commit suicide. Lincoln in 1838 may have published a poem, authorship is still debated, called The Suicide’s Soliloquy:
Here, where the lonely hooting owl Sends forth his midnight moans, Fierce wolves shall o’er my carcase growl, Or buzzards pick my bones.
No fellow-man shall learn my fate, Or where my ashes lie; Unless by beasts drawn round their bait, Or by the ravens’ cry.
Yes! I’ve resolved the deed to do, And this the place to do it: This heart I’ll rush a dagger through, Though I in hell should rue it!
Hell! What is hell to one like me Who pleasures never knew; By friends consigned to misery, By hope deserted too?
To ease me of this power to think, That through my bosom raves, I’ll headlong leap from hell’s high brink, And wallow in its waves.
Though devils yell, and burning chains May waken long regret; Their frightful screams, and piercing pains, Will help me to forget.
Yes! I’m prepared, through endless night, To take that fiery berth! Think not with tales of hell to fright Me, who am damn’d on earth!
Sweet steel! come forth from your sheath, And glist’ning, speak your powers; Rip up the organs of my breath, And draw my blood in showers!
I strike! It quivers in that heart Which drives me to this end; I draw and kiss the bloody dart, My last—my only friend!
Lincoln was a remarkable man, and perhaps not the least remarkable feature about him is that he survived long enough to become a national figure and President.
Now let us assume that fate was not so kind, and Lincoln departed this Veil of Tears circa 1855 or earlier. What would have been different in 1860? The Democrats would still have been facing a party split. Southern Democrats were unwilling to support a nominee who was not a forthright no compromise advocate of slavery. The Northern Democrats, facing the rising Republican Party, realized this was political suicide and would still have rallied around Douglas as their political standard bearer. On the Republican side, Seward of New York would likely have won the nomination unless a dark horse moderate on the slavery issue had arisen. That of course is how Lincoln ultimately won the nomination, Republican party leaders viewing Seward as too radical on the slavery issue and potentially scaring away moderate Northerners and costing the Republicans their first win at the White House. However, in the absence of Lincoln, who was a moderate on slavery but who gained a good deal of support from abolitionists due to confronting Douglas on the slavery issue in the Lincoln-Douglas debates in 1858, I think it likely that Seward would have gained the nomination. Seward would have gone on almost certainly to win the general election, the Democrat split making a Republican victory in 1860 almost a foregone conclusion.
If Seward had been elected would the South have seceded? Almost certainly. Lincoln was largely an unknown quantity in the South while Seward had been in the anti-slavery vanguard for many years. Seward had been a devil figure in the South since his maiden speech in the Senate on March 11, 1850 with this passage:
I deem it established, then, that the Constitution does not recognize property in man, but leaves that question, as between the states, to the law of nature and of nations. That law, as expounded by Vattel, is founded on the reason of things. When God had created the earth, with its wonderful adaptations, He gave dominion over it to man, absolute human dominion. The title of that dominion, thus bestowed, would have been incomplete, if the lord of all terrestrial things could himself have been the property of his fellow- man.
With this appeal to natural law, Seward ever after in the South was viewed as an anti-slavery radical who regarded a higher law demanding freedom as putting the safeguards of the Constitution, that the South relied upon to protect their Peculiar Institution, as mere parchment barricades that could be breached instantly. Secession likely would have been swifter under a President Elect Seward than it was under a President Elect Lincoln.
This of course would have been immensely ironic since Seward was quite willing to give the South virtually everything it wanted to avoid secession historically in early 1861. Of course his vantage point would have been quite different as incoming President than as the incoming Secretary of State, but the urge to avert splitting the nation by surrender on the slavery issue would have been the same. Would it have worked? Almost certainly not. Lincoln gave half-hearted support to a Thirteenth Amendment that would have enshrined slavery in the Constitution and that had zero impact on the desire of the South to form the Confederacy. The South was not in a mood to accept anything short of independence.
Once compromise failed would Seward have fought to preserve the Union? Likely no. Seward historically was in favor of evacuating Fort Sumter. He also thought that starting a foreign war with France or England would cause the Confederates to rejoin the Union. That last idea was so divorced from reality, I suspect that Seward viewed a war to preserve the Union prior to the firing on Fort Sumter as being unthinkable. A President Seward may well have evacuated federal installations in the South and adopted a policy of watchful waiting to see if the South would have come back voluntarily. This policy would have ended in de facto recognition of the independence of the Confederacy, and probably a bitter civil war within the Republican party that would have led to Democrat victories at the polls in 1862 and 1864. There would have been many areas where a Confederate States and United States would have come into conflict, including territories in the West, the border states, runaway slaves and further efforts at foreign expansion by both countries, but they are beyond the scope of the present exercise in musing on alternate history. Thus we leave President Seward presiding over a rump United States and return to our reality.
Donald R. McClarey
Paul Zummo
Almost Chosen People 