The Hour of Maximum Danger - Part 1

This post is far longer than the norm for this project. (It’s 4,800 words.) Sure, I could break it into segments. But I think it works best in one gulp. Thus I beg your indulgence….

So just why is it that I find this project so compelling that it’s worth taking a huge professional risk? The answer is twofold: first, my convictions as an historian, and second, a deep-rooted personal compulsion.

In today’s entry, I’ll give you my convictions as an historian.

It is my considered opinion that we are in imminent risk of losing the republic. Not since the Civil War has our country experienced a comparable moment of peril.

So it has to be all hands on deck, including mine.

As historical illustrations across the centuries amply demonstrate, of all forms of political society, republics have a pronounced track record of failure. Put simply, our own republic has never been more than twenty years distant from potential destruction. If any one generation of citizens proves unequal to the task of upholding it, it will cease to be, and when it does it will happen in one of two ways. Either the republic will dissolve into an American Balkans, or—much more likely—it will fall into the grip of a strongman.

It is also my considered opinion that we have maybe four years, perhaps less, to avoid this fate.

I first foresaw this danger eight years ago, and in a public lecture here at Ohio State I explained why I did.

My department then had a program designed to attract an audience of alumni—particularly alumni willing to open their wallets—and in the spring of 2011 the department asked me to give a lecture on the origins of the Civil War. The title I chose:

“The Democracy That Broke: Incivility and the Origins of the Civil War.”

The lecture exists only as a PowerPoint presentation, so I will give it to you in that format.

The title slide shows a political cartoon from the 1864 presidential election. Lincoln and Confederate president Jefferson Davis are tugging at a map of the United States with such force that the map is starting to rip.

"No peace without Abolition!" insists Lincoln.

"No peace without Separation!!" retorts Davis.

But Democratic presidential candidate George B. McClellan stands between them, with one arm shoving Lincoln away from the map and the other arm shoving Davis away from it, rebuking them both: "The Union must be preserved at all hazards!"

The second slide shows a screenshot of Jon Stewart in his famous 2004 appearance on Crossfire, a daily political mud match which employed the already hackneyed point-counterpart formula in which liberal host Paul Begala and conservative host Tucker Carlson ritualistically bickered with one another.

Stewart has since become well known as a perceptive and exceptionally thoughtful political commentator. But at the time he was known primarily as a political comedian. He was invited on "Crossfire" merely to add a spice of political humor.

To say the least, it didn’t play out that way.

The first words of my lecture:

***
“I want to begin my talk with two seemingly unrelated items. The first is a famous appearance by Jon Stewart on ‘Crossfire’ in October 2004.”

"These were Stewart's opening words:"

“‘Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America. I'm here to confront you, because we need help from the media and they're hurting us. To do a debate would be great. But that's like saying pro wrestling is a show about athletic competition.”

***
Let me pause to tell you a bit more about what transpired. (In my lecture I lacked time to do so.)

Stewart was calling them out. “Crossfire” was a sham. It pretended to offer genuine political insight. In reality it offered only performance art designed to entertain political junkies.

Carlson and Begala instantly counterattacked, repeatedly talking over Stewart and attempting to shut him down. But Stewart didn’t lose his cool. And in the next few minutes he thoroughly demolished “Crossfire.” Indeed, the show was cancelled soon thereafter, and Stewart’s appearance is widely regarded as the reason it was.

I’ve posted the video. You owe it to yourself—and more importantly you owe it to the future of this republic—to watch it. I am in deadly earnest.

***

Slide 3 features the cover of “Starship Troopers” by science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, an adventure story about a war fought in space between human warriors—the Starship Troopers—and their arachnid-like alien adversaries, the Bugs. Alongside it was a screenshot from the 1997 film adaptation by director Peter Verhoeven.

I continued:

“The second item is from ‘Starship Troopers,’ a novel for young readers, published in 1959 by the science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988). Like most science fiction, it was really thinly disguised social commentary. Heinlein wrote the novel in the 1950s, a time when the Cold War was at its height, when the United States faced nuclear annihilation at the hands of the godless Communists, when, in short, the American republic faced its hour of maximum danger -- but also when its youth were becoming soft, caught up in consumer culture, gyrating to Elvis Presley, and in short losing any sense of responsibility to anyone beyond themselves. A U.S. Naval Academy graduate, Heinlein served in the Navy from 1929 through 1934 and again as a naval engineer during World War II.”

Slide 4 juxtaposes a screenshot of a battle between the Starship Troopers and the Bugs with a photo of Iwo Jima:

“Heinlein’s depictions of combat in ‘Starship Troopers’ derive heavily from the amphibious warfare in the Pacific and the ‘human wave’ attacks of the Chinese Communists during the Korean War. The dominant theme of ‘Starship Troopers’ is that the survival of the human race (America) depends on a willingness to sacrifice one’s personal self-interest in favor of the greater community. Otherwise the Bugs (Communists) are bound to triumph.”

Slide 5 shows the cover of “The Discourses” by the Florentine political commentator Niccolo Machiavelli. The treatise is foundational to the argument that republics are inherently mortal.

Next words to the audience:

“Critics thoughtlessly consider ‘Starship Troopers’ to be about fascism. It is not. It is about classical republicanism as expounded by the Renaissance political thinker Niccolo Machiavelli. Classical republicanism holds that republics are held together not by authority imposed from above but rather from below, by the people themselves. This doesn’t happen naturally. Historically, republics have tended to fall apart—in effect, they die—because the people prove unworthy of citizenship and through laziness and self-absorption let the republic fall into dictatorship or anarchy.”

“According to Machiavelli, citizens—those who shall have a political voice in the republic—must possess civic virtue: an ability to see beyond their narrow self-interest to the good of the republic; and a commitment to placing the common good above purely personal interest. Machiavelli thought citizen-soldiers were indispensable to a sound republic, not just to keep coercive power out of the hands of one or a few people (tyranny), but also because military service both verified one’s willingness to sacrifice for the republic and instilled civic virtue to a greater degree. In ‘Starship Troopers,’ only military veterans are citizens. All others are simply civilians. They live in the republic but have not earned the right to political participation in it.”

***

By now I could see that my lecture was succeeding, that the audience was intrigued rather than perplexed. They did not seem to be mentally asking themselves what the hell relevance this had to the Civil War.

But for those few who might harbor doubts, Slide 6 begins to clue them in. It shows the famous painting of the Founders lining up to sign the Declaration of Independence.

I said:

“The Civil War, Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman insisted, stemmed from an ‘excess of democracy.’ He had a point. The Founders had established a republic, not a democracy. Well aware that, historically, most republics had failed, they were convinced that success depended upon the restriction of political participation to those with ‘civic virtue’: the capacity to understand the complexities of government and a willingness to make choices based not on narrow self-interest but on what was best for the commonwealth as a whole. To ensure this, they instituted property and residency requirements so that only those with a strong stake in the community could vote. Further, they placed a premium on consensus and had no conception of political parties as we understand the term. Instead they regarded strong differences in political opinions as evidence of a destructive ‘spirit of faction.’”

Slide 7 depicts the throngs of well-wishers outside the White House on the day of Andrew Jackson’s inauguration in March 1829:

“Despite the Founders’ wishes, the American Revolution unleashed forces that by the late 1820s had transformed the republic into a democracy characterized by universal white male suffrage. (Women and African Americans remained largely excluded.) Political parties emerged, with strongly contrasting views on government and an ability to mobilize voters seldom matched in American history — voter turnout frequently reached 80 percent. The parties flattered the common (white) man. They argued, in effect, that the common (white) man had the requisite civic virtue precisely because he was common. They relentlessly exploited the fears of voters and routinely portrayed the opposition as a threat to liberty, a trait since characterized as the ‘paranoid style in American politics.’ Shamelessly partisan, newspapers of the day slanted the news in favor of their preferred political party. They were little more than extended editorial pages.”

“Initially this system worked. The two major parties — the Whigs and Democrats — were about equally matched and enjoyed support in all parts of the country. Well aware that slavery had the ability to split the country along sectional lines, for two decades Whigs and Democrats managed to exclude it from national political life. The War with Mexico (1846-1848), however, raised a vexing issue: whether to permit slavery in the vast territories the United States acquired as a result of its victory. From that point onward, politicians never found a way to contain the slavery question, and by 1854 a major new party — the Republicans — had emerged, largely on the basis of its opposition to slavery in the western territories. At stake was a fundamental question about the nature of the United States. Was it, at bottom, a free republic with pockets of slavery; or a slaveholding republic with pockets of freedom?”

“Compromise on this issue was possible. Most Republicans did not object to slavery per se, and only a small minority regarded as a moral imperative the immediate, uncompensated emancipation of slaves and the extension of full legal, political, and social equality to African Americans.”

Slide 8 depicts a brawl on the floor of the US Senate:

“But hotheads on both sides exploited the ‘paranoid style’ for all it was worth. Tempers flared. Mob violence became common — lethally so in some cases, particularly ‘Bleeding Kansas.’ This spirit even invaded the chambers of Congress. During the debates that led to the Compromise of 1850, Sen. Henry S. Foote of Mississippi drew a pistol on Sen. Thomas Hart Benton of Missouri.”

Slide 9 shows the famous illustration of the caning of Charles Sumner by Preston Brooks.

“In 1856, during the ‘Bleeding Kansas’ crisis, Sumner denounced the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In his ‘Crime against Kansas’ speech on May 19 and May 20, Sumner attacked the authors of the Act, Senators Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois and Andrew Butler of South Carolina. He said that Butler had taken ‘a mistress who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean, the harlot, Slavery.’ Sumner's three-hour oration became particularly insulting when he mocked the 59-year-old Butler's manner of speech and physical mannerisms, which were impaired by a stroke.”

“Douglas said to a colleague during the speech that ‘this damn fool Sumner is going to get himself shot by some other damn fool.’”

“Representative Preston Brooks, Butler's nephew, was infuriated and intended to challenge Sumner to a duel. To this end, Brooks consulted with fellow South Carolina Representative Laurence M. Keitt on dueling etiquette. Keitt told him that dueling was for gentlemen of equal social standing, and that Sumner was no better than a drunkard, due to the supposedly coarse language he had used during his speech. Brooks concluded in turn that since Sumner was no gentlemen, it would be more appropriate to beat him with his cane.”

“Two days later Brooks confronted Sumner as he sat writing at his desk in the almost empty Senate chamber: ‘Mr. Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine.’ Then he struck Sumner as hard as he could, repeatedly. When several senators tried to aid Sumner, Keitt blocked them, shouting, ‘Let them be!’”

Slide 10 depicts the ruins of Lawrence, Kansas, after its sacking by “Border Ruffians” on May 21, 1859.

“In his prize-winning 1991 book, ‘The Destructive War,’ Charles Royster argues that the Civil War’s extraordinary violence can be seen as an expression of a changing political culture. The rise of Jacksonian democracy steadily created a society intolerant of limits.”

“‘Antebellum America,’ he writes, ‘was pervaded by an uncompromising insistence on personal autonomy [and] . . . a growing impatience with restraints on the ambitions of individuals or of groups. These tendencies to reject limitations and to defy unwelcome authority knew no certain means to resolve competing demands other than violence. Parties and the mechanics of government thrived on confrontation and on winner-take-all outcomes, but were far less suited to restrain them than to agitate. People so determined to have their own way and so certain of possessing right and power could not readily stop short of war or stop war, once convinced that they were threatened on matters they deemed crucial. All professing to be Americans, they found that America did not keep them together but told them to kill Americans who sought to control them.”

Slide 11 shows a photo of the abolitionist militant—one might say abolitionist terrorist—John Brown, juxtaposed with an illustration of his famous raid on Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia):

“Around 11 p.m. on Sunday, October 16, 1859, nineteen men entered Harpers Ferry, a small industrial village on the border between Virginia and Maryland and at the convergence of the Potomac and Shenandoah Rivers. Within a few minutes they reached the U.S. arsenal in the town and overpowered the single watchman on duty.”

“‘I came here from Kansas,’ a gruff, bearded man told the watchman, ‘and this is a slave State; I want to free all the negroes in this State; I have possession now of the United States armory, and if the citizens interfere with me I must only burn the town and have blood.’”

“But the raid proved a complete fiasco. No slaves joined Brown’s ‘Provisional Army’ and Brown made little effort to attract them or to leave the town while he still could. By mid-morning the next day, gunfire erupted as local militia and armed townspeople opened fire on Brown and his raiders. Most of Brown’s men were shot or captured. Brown, four followers, and eleven hostages holed up in the local fire engine-house. The day after that, a company of U.S. Marines arrived under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee, accompanied by a cavalry captain named J.E.B. Stuart. Lee dispatched Stuart under a flag of truce to see if Brown would surrender. When Brown refused, the Marines rushed the building with the bayonet, killing or wounding all of Brown’s followers, including Brown himself. Brown’s raid was over, thirty-six hours after it began.”

Slide 12 juxtaposes two images of the moment before Brown’s hanging (after his conviction on the rather bizarre charge of treason to Virginia) on December 2, 1859. The first is of Brown depicted as a secular saint about to suffer martyrdom. He stands stolidly at the doorway of the jail while an African American mother, with her babe in arms, kneels reverently before him. The second is a painting of Brown descending the steps of the jail, closely guarded by four soldiers wielding bayoneted muskets. Brown has paused for a moment to kiss the forehead of another African American infant:

“Although Brown’s raid had been an abject failure, the way he handled himself afterward won him nationwide audience and made him a figure of fascination. No matter how one felt about John Brown, few could resist his uncanny resemblance to an Old Testament prophet. He made the most of this image—at his trial, in letters written to supporters in the North, and at his hanging on December 2, 1859, just seven weeks after the raid. Just before he mounted the scaffold, Brown handed a sheet of paper to an attendant. It read:”

“‘I John Brown am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty, land: will never be purged away; but with Blood. I had as I now think: vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed; it might be done.”

“During his captivity and trial, Brown’s courage and eloquence brought a change in perception. To many Northerners, Brown came to seem a martyr, even a saint. On the day of his execution a hundred-gun salute to him was fired in Albany, New York. Church bells tolled and prayer meetings gathered in many Northern cities. Henry David Thoreau called him ‘a crucified hero,’ while William Cullen Bryant said that ‘History, forgetting the errors of his judgment in the contemplation of his unfaltering course . . . and the nobleness of his aims will record his names among those of its martyrs and heroes.’”

“Southerners responded to such talk with fury. It was as if Northerners—their supposed countrymen—were lamenting the death of a criminal who had tried to mass murder men, women and children by unleashing a slave revolt. Many white Southerners who had been pro-Union before the raid began to rethink their positions.”

“Across the South, as the 1860 election year began, thousands of young Southern males joined revitalized militia and volunteer companies to guard against the prospect of renewed abolitionist agitation—or the possibility that a Republican presidential administration might break its promise not to interfere with slavery where it existed and instead would send troops to free the slaves at gunpoint. In such an event, said an Alabama planter, ‘What social monstrosities, what desolated fields, what civil boils, what robberies, rapes, and murders of the poorer whites by the emancipated blacks would then disfigure the whole fair face of the prosperous, smiling, and happy Southern land.’”

“Before John Brown’s Harpers Ferry raid, the prospect of Southern secession from the Union still seemed remote. Afterward it seemed much more real. How had it come to pass that this one man and eighteen followers could have such an impact on American society?”

“It was not because of the raid’s intrinsic importance. After all, not one slave had been liberated and almost all the fatalities were among Brown’s own men. And the federal presidential administration had promptly dispatched Marines to quash the raid. No, the raid mattered because it touched on several of the nation’s most divisive issues: slavery, abolitionism, religion, and sectionalism. It also pointed to the important role played by perception. Sometimes the action matters less than the motivation ascribed to it.”

Slide 13 features photos of the quartet of the major candidates in the 1860 presidential election. It is composed in such a way as to highlight the fact that the 1860 election was actually two elections, with Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas being the primary contenders in the Northern contest, with Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge squaring off against Unionist John Bell in the Southern contest. That was because during the early stages of the 1860 campaign, the Democratic Party had split into two parts—through the machinations of Southern fire-eaters intent on producing this exact result. As a result, the Democratic Party fielded an establishment nominee, Douglas, but also an insurgent nominee, Breckinridge, who all but openly campaigned on the threat of secession if anti-slavery Republican Lincoln won the election.

I said:

“We think of the American democratic experience as a great success. And yet as we begin to celebrate—if that is the word to use—the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, we confront incontrovertible evidence that our democracy has not always succeeded. At one point it broke, because Americans simply refused to abide by the result of an election whose integrity no one doubts and whose result no one has ever questioned. No one thinks that Stephen Douglas, for instance, actually won the election of 1860, much less John Breckinridge or John Bell.”

***

It was Lincoln, of course, who won the election—incidentally with less than 40 percent of the popular vote--and when he did the lower South made good on its threat to secede. After the firing on Fort Sumter in April 1861 the upper South followed suit, producing a Confederate States of America consisting of 11 states and, geographically speaking, comprising about half of the now mortally endangered republic.

***

Slide 14 shows a photo of the aftermath of the battle of Antietam in September 1862, with slain soldiers so deeply packed into a portion of the battlefield known as the Sunken Road (dubbed Bloody Lane after the battle) that it resembles a mass grave with the corpses on the verge of burial:

“No one in 1861 could have imagined bloodshed on such a scale. It seemed out of all proportion to any rational political aim. ‘If that scene could have been presented to me before the war,’ admitted Massachusetts’ staunchly abolitionist Senator Henry Wilson, ‘anxious as I was for the preservation of the Union, I should have said: ‘The cost is too great; erring sisters, go in peace.’”
“Nowadays we take the enormous casualties of the Civil War for granted, but the fact that Americans inflicted and absorbed such losses for four years is arguably the greatest single manifestation of the revolutionary nature of the conflict. After all, the regional differences between the North and South had been evident since the nation’s founding. American statesmen had argued about the place of slavery in the United States as far back as the Continental Congress, yet until 1860 had always found a way to resolve the argument within the political system. The American tradition of compromise was one of its proudest and most successful features. What could have occurred to make it vanish so utterly during the Civil War years?"

"Royster and others have concluded that it stemmed from the extreme political rhetoric that flowed in torrents during the decades before the war. ‘Americans,’ he wrote, ‘did not invent new methods of drastic war during the Civil War as much as they made real a version of the conflict many of them had talked about from the start.’”

Slide 15 brings my audience back to the present day. It shows the covers of two right-wing polemical books:

“The same coarsening of political discourse has once again returned to American life. At left: Ann Coulter’s forthcoming book, ‘Demonic: How the Liberal Mob is Endangering America.’ On the right: ‘Gangster Government: Barack Obama and the New Washington Thugocracy.’ These are both examples from the Right. But if one were to object, it would not be to say that these are really examples of reasoned argument. It would be that the Left does the same thing. Which just clinches my point.”

Slide 16 features headshots of seven political pundits, some of whom are still in action and some of whom have passed from the scene. Of these, the most important are Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck.

These pundits occupy the fringes of the slide. In the center of the slide, dwarfing the others, is Rush Limbaugh, wreathed in the smoke of one of his beloved cigars, adorning the cover of Time Magazine.

I commented on the slide:

“I listen to a great deal of talk radio and I occasionally watch the rampant punditry on cable news. My favorite pundit, hands down, is Rush Limbaugh, who is a master of the game. I don’t think these pundits are serious. I think they are engaged in political theater. In my opinion, the Right does it best, but the Left is working hard to catch up.”

Slide 17 shows the moment when a Republican Congressman rises to take exception to a statement by President Barack Obama during an address delivered on the floor of the House of Representatives:

“But once again this discourse has seeped into the chambers of Congress, as when Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted ‘You lie!’ during an address by President Obama concerning the Democratic Health Care bill in September 2008. Not that it matters, but the President was not lying. He was affirming that the bill did not extend health care coverage to illegal immigrants, and this was indeed the case.”

Slide18 is an attempt at comic relief to illustrate my remark that “Sometimes this stuff is kind of fun.” It depicts Obama with hands raised to admonish his audience. “Please refrain from shouting ‘You lie’ until the end, or we’ll be here all night.”

Slide 19 offers more comic relief. This time Obama, wearing sunglasses and a broad grin, cheerfully points to an unseen person in a crowd, saying, “Sorry it took so long to get you a copy of my birth certificate. I was too busy killing Osama bin Laden.”

For the benefit of the two or three people who may still not know the reference, the “birth certificate” concerns a myth, ceaselessly pushed by elements on the Right—chiefly Donald J. Trump—that Obama had actually been born not in Hawaii but rather Kenya, and hence was not a natural-born citizen (as the Constitution requires of presidents) and therefore not legitimately president.

Slide 20 shows a summary diagram of the findings of a study of the state of the American electorate:

“But it is really isn’t fun. It has contributed to the coarsening of political exchange among the American electorate, and among this group it is not political theater. A recent study by the Pew Research Center concludes that there is a new typology among American voters, consisting of eight groups whose one common characteristic is that their views are very strongly held. Another study concludes that within Congress, the rightmost leaning Democrat is still to the left of the leftmost leaning Republican. There is simply no political middle. Moreover, both parties are increasingly tied to their political bases, each of which hold intractable, ideologically driven views.”

“Ultimately this tracks back to the political performance art of talk show pundits.”

I then ask the $64,000 question:

“Is there a way out of this?”

Slide 21 says “Certainly,” illustrating this optimistic point with a photo of Jon Stewart holding a placard that reads, “I DISAGREE with YOU, but I’m pretty sure you’re NOT HITLER.”

Slide 22 continues the theme, with the photo of another placard at a rally endorsing civility in political dialogue:

“SOMEWHAT IRRITATED about EXTREME OUTRAGE.”

Nonetheless, the final slide offers a warning that has proven all too prescient.

“But as the Civil War ought to remind us, we are playing with fire.”

“Nowadays when Americans think about the Civil War they typically do so with a sense of nostalgia. To repeat my point: they think democracy is easy. They see little problem with exporting it to other countries, even those devoid of the history, institutions, or political culture necessary to sustain it. Nor do they see danger in the extreme present-day partisanship — a renewal of the paranoid style of politics — that between 1830 and 1860 pushed the republic off a cliff. In so doing they overlook a central lesson of the Civil War: Far from being easy, democracy is extraordinarily hard.”

“I leave you with this warning from Sophocles:
‘Far-stretching, endless Time
Brings forth all hidden things,
And buries that which once did shine.
The firm resolve falters, the sacred oath is shattered;
And let none say, ‘It cannot happen here.’"

***
My audience applauded appreciatively.

Then one of my colleagues, firmly committed to the position that our proper business is to write monographs accessible only to fellow specialists, sprang up, objecting that I was offering a mono-causal explanation of the Civil War which omitted numerous important factors.

In one sense: No shit, Sherlock. In another: You just don’t get it, do you?

Courteously, I acknowledged his point. But inwardly, I seethed to myself: “This pinhead is completely missing the point of what I am trying to accomplish in this particular lecture addressed to this particular audience. So fuck him and his myopic obsession with conventional, careerist scholarship.”

But as to my intended audience: I could see it plainly on their faces, and it was confirmed by the Q &A that followed, that I had hit a home run.