Epiphany on the Road Home

This is a long entry—1,741 words—but I have decided that it cannot be divided effectively into two parts. So before embarking upon it, you may want to make yourself a pot of coffee or brew some tea or crack open a beer. Oh: and be forewarned that the entry is unusually personal.

Last night, after an especially good day with especially good friends, I got into the driver’s seat of my 2012 Honda Civic. My daughter Chloe got into the back seat, and for the last time in her life, buckled herself into the booster seat. She is eight years old now, tall enough and weighs enough that she no longer needs it. Her mother has already removed the booster seat from her own car. This morning I’ll remove the booster seat from mine.

We began the 45-minute drive home. I spent the time thinking about my life and this project and the fact that I was enjoying it and the implications that enjoyment might have for what remained of my career, and what had happened to that career, anyway?

My friends live in Lancaster, Ohio, the birthplace of William T. Sherman, a Union commander with whom my professional reputation happens to be closely associated. It was he, together with two other Ohio-born generals, Ulysses S. Grant and Philip H. Sheridan, who delivered the death blow to the Confederacy that rescued American democracy. So there you have the first connection between today's story and “The Struggle for Peace,” which has emerged as my personal attempt to play some small role—at this point surely a minuscule role—in making sure that American democracy will not need rescuing a second time.

The fame of my linkage to Sherman, if I can phrase it that way, tracks back to the success of my first book, “The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865,” published way back in 1995. This year, come to think of it, will mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication. It is still in print. Indeed, it is a standard work on its subject for graduate students studying to become Civil War historians. The fact that I have done nothing comparable since, however, makes me feel like Gloria Swanson in “Sunset Boulevard.”

In April 1996, a few months after its publication, “The Hard Hand of War” won the Lincoln Prize, arguably the most prestigious award in the field of Civil War history and certainly the most lucrative, for it carried (and still does) a cash award of $50,000. Of that sum, I received $10,000. The other $40,000 went to David H. Donald, one of the heavy-weights in Civil War history and indisputably the greatest authority on Abraham Lincoln. Donald received the prize for “Lincoln,” a major biography—and I lay stress on the word “major—that was the capstone achievement of a distinguished career.

It was the practice in those days for the name of the winner to be kept secret until revealed at a banquet hosted by two well-known and fabulously successful Wall Street investors. It was assumed that year by one and all that Donald would receive the entire $50,000. I mean, the guy was interviewed on NBC’s “Today Show,” for Christ’s sake, if that helps you understand what a big deal “Lincoln” was.

But of course he didn’t get the entire $50,000, and I suppose by some reckonings that means I robbed David H. Donald of $10,000.

Donald did receive the splendid reproduction of the famous St. Gaudens bust of Lincoln that accompanied the prize. A few days after returning from Manhattan (the Lincoln Prize reception had been held at the J. Pierpont Morgan Library, the dinner in a banquet hall in the New York Public Library), I received a certificate that looked like it came out of an oversized box of Cracker Jacks. It was so pathetic—my graduation diploma from basic training is fifty times more impressive—that it seemed almost a veiled insult. I never bothered to frame it.

Still, those were heady days, days which I assumed were just the beginning of a career that would carry me to ever greater heights. But for reasons that still elude me, by 2000 I felt myself start to falter. My rate of productivity plummeted, and by 2005, three years after the publication of my second book, I began to acquire the dreaded reputation of being a Stalled Associate Professor. If there is a prize somewhere for stalled associates, I have a good claim to it, because 2020, in addition to being the twenty-fifth anniversary of “The Hard Hand of War,” will also mark the twenty-third year in which I have remained in rank as an associate professor. I’m now 60 years old. And although no one has said it to my face, it is widely assumed that I will retire as an associate professor and will never publish another book. And frankly I shared those assumptions as well—until the drive home from Lancaster in the darkness.

I now questioned the second assumption—the first I think remains correct—because I had to concede to myself that, whether or not I was comfortable with the fact, I was headlong into the task of writing a book. “The Struggle for Peace” feels like a book, and in any event I have not been so absorbed by a project since my work on the doctoral dissertation that became “The Hard Hand of War.”

You might think that realization elated me. You would be dead wrong.

I have bipolar disorder, and any time I’m in an unusually good mood or feel an unusual degree of optimism, I have to entertain the possibility that I may be “decompensating;” that is to say, tipping from what passes for a normal life into a hypomanic episode. As I drove along I mentally reviewed the symptoms of a hypomanic episode and compared them to my current condition.

I will ask you to imagine what it is like to have to seriously ask yourself if enjoying a good mood or feeling optimistic about life just might mean that you are in big trouble.

I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1986—thirty-four years ago, more than half of my lifetime, and over the years I have developed techniques to answer that question.

One tool I used, in this instance, was to abandon this project for several hours and do things like answer email, honor a colleague’s request to review a new reading list, write up the documentation required needed to receive reimbursement from my research fund for some work-related books, and fine-tune the syllabi for my Spring Semester courses. I have thereby reached the conclusion that if I’m hypomanic, the hypomania is manifesting itself in the form of an unusually close focus on ordinary workaday responsibilities. Which is pretty damn sneaky of it.

After attending to these chores, I took time to dump all of my entries to date from this project into a single Word file. The word count came to 26,120. For the uninitiated, 60,000 words is the usual threshold at which a publisher will consider publication of a book, which means that I’m already 43.5 percent of the way to a book—if of course I want the book to be published by a vanity press.

The reality is that, sure, I’ve made a good start on an enjoyable project (which is wonderful), but writing a book requires me to get serious about adhering to the canons of my profession. Mentally telling my department to go fuck itself was a useful device to reacquire a sense of intellectual freedom—a highly distinguished colleague of mine, since retired, once suggested using the same device in precisely the same language. (But that did not mean, by any stretch of the imagination, that she produced anything less than solid scholarship.)

Tthe decision to treat this as a book will now require change; for example, taking an entry such as “Ask Your Physician If Rage Is Right For You?” and tracking down the clinical studies of addiction to anger (not the pop psychology stuff), and posing such questions as when those studies emerged, what prompted their emergence, and what work has been done, if any, to extend that research into the question of addictions being fueled by politics. I have to acquire competence regarding a number of other subjects. I have to place all of this in a larger historical context—what is similar about this era of hyper partisanship with the hyper partisanship of the 1850’s and what is different. I have to figure out the degree to which the deliberately casual style of these entries will work(or not) in a book.

In short, I suddenly have a lot to do. But that “lot to do” will still include having fun. I will not again break faith with the kid I once was, who decided to sacrifice a substantial income in favor of pursuing a career that would involve less income but more fulfillment.

I don’t want to close this entry without thanking the many readers who responded to the entry entitled, “If Dad Could See Me Now”, published on December 27, 2019. (The specificity is for the benefit of future readers who might want to see it.) I was overwhelmed—everyone was so supportive and affirming. I had no idea at all that so many and such positive responses were even in the cards.

I think I have crossed this particular Rubicon primarily because I became convinced that a book like “The Struggle for Peace” could bring a historian’s eye to what is clearly a major problem in American life—and would be even in the absence of fears that we might lose our democracy (fears shared by some Republicans as well as Democrats, albeit obviously for different reasons.) At the heart of the book will be a questioning of the inability of most Americans to successfully navigate a basic task for the political health of the republic: the ability to share ideas and perspectives in a way that would enhance rather than corrode the civic virtue on which the Founders pinned such heavy hopes.

Bu perhaps a more accurate way to put it is that I came to desire to cross it—but your support gave me the courage and sense of possibility to actually do it.