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.

Guilt-Gems - Part 2

At the reception station we received our haircuts, immunizations, uniforms, etc. But after three days or so, trucks arrived to take us to our assigned training units. Basic training began in earnest.

Boy, did it ever begin in earnest.

“That’s your ride, dickhead” said a helpful NCO, pointing toward an olive drab pickup truck. I clambered into its bed. The trip to my destination took about fifteen minutes: the last fifteen minutes of relative peace I would experience for the next several weeks, until the conclusion of Phase Fucking One of basic training, strictly speaking one station unit training (OSUT), because my fellow recruits and I would be together for a total of fifteen weeks, combining together both our basic and advanced individual training.

As soon as the pickup truck arrived, its passengers were greeted by several screaming drill sergeants who gave every indication that they would love nothing better than to beat the living shit out of us.

At some point I learned that I was now in C Battery of the7th Training Battalion, specifically in its 4th Platoon. The platoon’s ultimate task would be to learn the skills of a field artillery forward observer. The immediate task involved mastery of such skills as making the blanket of your cot so taut that you could bounce a quarter off it.

A second critical task involved sorting out who would steal your stuff from who wouldn’t. Imagine a pigeon hole desk whose pigeon holes grew steadily more numerous. I started off with two pigeon holes. I wound up with 50, because the platoon contained 50 men and by the end of OSUT I knew the strengths, weaknesses, and personality of each one.

At age 23 I was the second oldest member of the 4th Platoon—henceforth the “Fawth Platoon” because of the way a guy from Harlem pronounced it and his pronunciation has stayed with me. Most of the guys were 18, and they behaved like 18-year olds, with numerous squabbles and occasionally knock down drag out fights, the prohibition against physical violence notwithstanding. It was not the weaker members who got drubbings; it was the more obnoxious members. The single most obnoxious guy got beat up so thoroughly and his face was so bruised and swollen, that he was dubbed “the Elephant Man,” to whom in the wake of his drubbing he did indeed bear an uncanny resemblance.

Just about everybody got nicknames. There was, for example, “Volkswagen,” who had ears so big they made his head look like a Volkswagen with both doors open. There was also a guy from New York named Neidecker, whose surname won him not one but two nicknames: “Needle Dick” and “My Pecker.”

The guys could not quite figure out what to make of me, but taken on the whole they accorded me an unusual degree of respect, at least by the coarse standards of the Fawth Platoon, and I went by three nicknames: “Grims,” “Lieutenant,” and “Senator.” I was proud of the fact that I had such dignified nicknames, and crestfallen when one drill sergeant, who evidently thought I should be taken down a peg, eventually christened me “Poindexter.”

I have dealt with the nicknames at such length for two reasons: first to convey a sense of the coarseness that was a staple of Fawth Platoon; and second to indicate the limited insight of my comrades: for by all rights I should have been called “Gandhi.”

That was because I consciously modeled my behavior on Gandhi, for two reasons. The first was that I frequently used my knowledge of Gandhi’s principled convictions and techniques to de-escalate conflict, which won me respect for my skill in that area. The second was that a Gandhi-like persona reduced the chance that someone would elect to beat the shit out of me.

Then one day an event occurred in which I behaved in a way totally unlike my usual persona. The platoon included a young recruit who especially looked up to me. That particular day the recruit said something—I forget what—and for some reason I replied with the same casual brutality as anyone else. A look of hurt flashed across the recruit’s face that I will never forget.

John Updike once wrote a story entitled “Guilt-Gems.” It describes a middle-aged man named Ferris who discovers in his memory “certain bright moments that never failed to make him feel terrible.” In one of several vignettes, Ferris leaves home despite his youngest son’s desperate attempts to prevent this. He recalls the moment of his departure and of the expression on his son’s face. “Had Ferris imagined his son’s tears of despairing fury? He thought not; there has to be some shine of the extreme, to make a guilt-gem.”

Updike describes several other such episodes, each of which yields its own guilt-gem. None involve major wrongs. They consist instead of swipes at people that might seem minor but cut deeply. Updike ultimately says that “a guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression.” That is how Ferris recalls these various episodes in which he has wounded others. And by reducing them “to a few baubles that he could, as it were, put in his pocket and jingle, he was, doubly, guilty.”

Unlike Ferris, I have a number of major regrets. So perhaps I have collected fewer guilt-gems. But I do have the guilt-gem of that casual cruelty at Fort Sill.

Because if you’re going to play Gandhi you have to go all out. You have to live your life in such a way that, although you will undoubtedly make mistakes that hurt others, you will not reduce those mistakes to mere baubles. It is not the mistakes but the trivialization of those mistakes, the people you have hurt, and the harm you have done, to mere baubles, that betrays your real nature.

The theme of this project, which I have decided to entitle “The Struggle for Peace,” is that the best and probably only chance to save this country lies in our willingness to change our behavior. The power of the supposed villains of our contemporary crisis rests upon the fact that we have willingly given them that power. And having relinquished power for so long and so lustily, we have created a situation that can only be defused by a massive effort to change ourselves.

In its way, this struggle will be as difficult and will involve as much sacrifice as in the Civil War, but unlike that struggle, this one can be won on no battlefield save the one in our own hearts. And what of the guilt-gems? By the way that we chronically conduct, day after day, seemingly minor partisan political squabbles with one another that nonetheless trivialize the humanity of our "opponents," we are amassing guilt-gems of sufficient weight that, taken in aggregate, will crush our republic as surely as condemned convicts were once crushed with stones.

Guilt-Gems - Part 1

Although I expect to publish entries at the rate of one per day (and may find that pace too ambitious), today I plan on three. Of them, this one, divided into two parts, is the most important. Indeed, it may well be the most important entry I write during the whole year ahead.

This coming August—August 29, to be exact—will mark the 36th anniversary of the day I boarded the plane that carried me on the first leg of my flight to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where I was about to embark upon my initial active duty training—just call it basic training—in the Army. I changed planes in Atlanta and again in Dallas. This last plane was a mere two-engine puddle jumper. Most of the other passengers had the same reason for being on board: we were all about to embark upon the unknown experience of basic training. Some of the guys may have talked to each other, probably did talk to each other. But I did not, and in memory the trip is made complete silence save for the droning engines.

It was nearly midnight when we landed. We were greeted by the Specialist Fourth Class detailed to transport us to the reception station. As with every Spec4 I would encountered during my time at Fort Sill, when in the presence of trainees this one could not refrain from behaving as if he were … well, it could vary somewhat, depending upon the specific Spec4: Clint Eastwood in “High Plains Drifter,” John Wayne in “Sands of Iwo Jima”, Youngblood Priest in “Super Fly.” I would later become a Spec4 myself, but of the variety accorded respect, in most cases, and simple human dignity at the very least. At a training installation like Fort Sill, however, a Spec4 is a menial; a pathetic soul excluded from the drama of basic training unfolding around him (for drama it most certainly is). If you have ever seen a pubic hair glued to a toilet rim by dried urine, you have seen this variety of Spec4. No wonder they threw their weight around on the rare opportunities when they could.

But Spec4’s never fooled anyone, even tired civilians like us, nervous about what awaited us in the minutes just ahead. When the Spec4 pulled his “I’m in charge and you guys better shape up” routine, we didn’t even bother to roll our eyes.

We reached the reception center and met our NCO, probably a Staff Sergeant, but that’s just a guess. Like most NCOs he approached his duties matter of factly. Even the drill sergeants we would soon encounter went about their duties matter of factly (as we would eventually discover) when not obliged to assume the drill sergeant persona, which was performance art, albeit performance art at which most of them excelled.

The Staff Sergeant gave us a brief orientation, chief among them instructions about the Amnesty Box. The Amnesty Box looked vaguely like a postal mail box, although in point of fact it lay behind a barrier and we saw what it looked like only when each of us, one at a time, obeyed the order to go to the Amnesty Box, use it if necessary to get rid of any contraband, and then give its pulldown slat a loud slam, so that no one could tell who had actually deposited contraband. We were then issued regulation olive drab boxers or briefs, depending upon preference, and taken to the sleeping bay in which we would spend our first night. The bay had rows of bunk beds. We selected our berths==I chose an upper one—and then the lights went out.

In the darkness beneath me, it transpired, was a burly African American who somehow had already acquired the sobriquet “New York,” probably because New York could not shut up about having come from New York nor, for that matter, anything else. Basic training has any number of inexplicable moments and New York formed my introduction to this reality. He found it entertaining to carry on a loud, unfocused monologue, to which the other recruits responded with ever more insistent demands that New York shut the fuck up, which pleased New York no end. Soon New York owed his continued existence only to the fact that we had strict orders against using any physical force whatsoever.

The situation was clearly hopeless. But finally I mustered the courage to look down from my bunk to confront New York—or rather the darkness that contained New York: we could see each other, but just barely. I explained, calmly and respectfully, that we had all had a long day, faced another long day in the morning, and that it was important that he be quiet so that we could get the sleep we needed.

But New York just continued his act. I could think of nothing to do to stop him and, for lack of any better idea, simply peered down at him in silence.

After a moment New York said, “Damn. He mean it.”

New York subsided and was soon asleep. Within a minute or two all I could hear was the breathing of the men around me. I then fell asleep myself, but not before reflecting with wonder that Gandhi’s philosophy, of which I had only read, could actually work in real life.

A Father, A Daughter, and Politics

As this fledgling project has begun to evolve, I have come to understand that it cannot be linear in structure, that while its entries must certainly display a coherent relationship to each other, a non-linear approach is, within limits, actually the best organizational strategy.

So today’s entry shifts direction a bit.

To be sure, I had already decided to publish the present entry, but in a week or two rather than now. My reason for accelerating the timing of publication stems from my respect for a reader who offered a comment below the link to the latest installment of NBC’s “Meet the Press;” a comment demonstrating that he had actually followed my strong suggestion that all my readers should watch that installment in its entirety.

As I have already said in my introduction to the installment, it departed from the program’s usual format to focus exclusively on exploring “our post truth society, and how a changing media landscape has created chaos out of order.” In my introduction I endorsed the show as having been “superbly well done—I would even venture to say stunningly well done—and absolutely worth the investment of time required to watch it.”

The reader, as far as I was concerned, had honored me by following my suggestion.

The episode focused almost entirely on right wing examples illustrating the contours of this “post truth society.” My reader opined that although he accepted the examples as being on target, the show would have been “much stronger if he [host Chuck Todd] had used some examples from other politicians and networks. He presented this as if only Trump uses the tactics in coordination with Fox News.”

If I understand this criticism correctly, the reader was arguing in favor of the position that the mainstream media and left-leaning officials also offered proof, just as much as did Donald Trump and the right wing media, of the existence of this “post truth society.”

In my response to his comment, I said first off that I appreciated the fact that he had watched the show, that I also appreciated his taking time to write a comment, but that I rejected his tacit assertion of an equivalence between the mainstream media (which most conservatives regard as snugly in bed with the political left) and right wing outlets such as Fox News and Breitbart.

But I concluded my response with the statement that he deserved a detailed, evidence-based explanation for my opinion.

Herewith is the first installment of that explanation.

It's possible I may have misapprehended what his comment was actually driving at, but I shall write this essay as if I understood him aright.

I do not know the actual political views of my reader, but for the sake of this essay I will assume that they are conservative. And the conviction of conservatives, by the most charitable view they can muster, is that the mainstream media and the conservative media are equally biased.

This, however, is a minority view. With most conservatives it is an article of faith that the mainstream media is blatantly biased and thus should not be trusted at all: that, as the president insists, the mainstream media is really in the business of manufacturing and distributing “fake news.” Rush Limbaugh calls the mainstream media the drive-by media. My personal choice of tagline would be Fake News, Inc.

I shall devote the next several entries to this phenomenon, because it drives the widespread belief that “objective reporting” is as mythical as a unicorn.

This ever expanding belief is assuredly the main engine driving the hyper partisanship that I fear may be on the verge of pushing the republic straight off a cliff into the abyss below.

The origin of the hyper partisan demon we have conjured, initially innocent of the idea that we were doing so, is generally assumed to track back to the emergence of Rush Limbaugh and his inspired invention of a radio talk show that was fun-filled, compulsively interesting, and unabashedly, fearlessly conservative in its commentary.

As usual, the conventional wisdom is incorrect.

The real origin was a rather obscure political movement, not at all malicious in its intentions, which first emerged in the 1930’s.

To explain what I mean, my account will lean heavily upon a recent, carefully researched, and accessibly written book by Nicole Hemmer, entitled “Messengers on the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” published in 2016 by University of Pennsylvania. That is because, expert though I am on other subjects, on this one I can count myself as merely an intelligent layman.

In fact, the best I can do will be to give you a detailed summary of Hemmer’s book. And since I have already written some 725 words, for today I will limit myself to the vignette with which she opens it….

It is a warm June day in 2004 and a youthful Nicole Hemmer is on a pleasant car trip—pleasant because seated at the wheel of the car is her father, with whom she shares the kind of affectionate relationship I hope to sustain with my 8-year old daughter, now blissfully asleep on the rather tired love seat in our den, a few feet removed from her father, who is tapping away at his laptop at precisely 5:22 in the morning, with gusts of wind buffeting the modest 50-year old split level we call home.

Nicole is old enough to have left the nest, and so the moment is made even more pleasant because it is taking place during her annual visit home.

Seemingly out of nowhere, Nicole’s father announces: “My project this summer is to get you to vote for George Bush.”

Well, seemingly out of nowhere to the aging historian seated, in imagination, in the car’s back seat.

But scarcely out of nowhere to Nicole, because a prominent feature of the relationship with her father are frequent, earnest, but loving exchanges about politics. Her father is staunchly conservative. Once upon a time Nicole had shared his conservatism, but over the years she had slowly shifted to the left, while her father had done just the opposite.

Let the aging historian shut up for a bit, and permit Nicole to speak for herself:

“The divergence of [political] opinion ended up drawing us closer together. Political debate became the secret language of our relationship, the way we conveyed love, respect, disagreement, and admiration. So there was nothing extraordinary about an afternoon spent debating politics.”

Nothing extraordinary, that is, except that on this particular afternoon, as the bland Indiana countryside rolled by, her father did something that would embark Nicole upon a years-long intellectual journey:

He turned on the radio.

In Which Our Hero Indulges Himself on the Way to Getting a Tacit Rebuke By a Major Scholar

Here's the latest installment of historian Heather Richardson's nightly commentary on the events of each and every day since the Ukraine Scandal--which might better be called the impeachment drama--first came to light back in August. I religiously read each installment--which incidentally can be read not just on Facebook but in your email accounts (you can easily sign up to receive it that way).

Heather has a Facebook Page identical to mine, with the exception that my Page currently boasts 149 readers who "like" my Page, and 165 outright subscribers, whereas Heather's Page fares somewhat better: 142,454 readers who "like" her Page (as of this evening) and another 174,377 people who follow it. If I recall correctly the latter figure has increased by more than 100,00 since early September, when, if memory serves, it numbered about 65,000.

On Facebook these nightly posts are without any collective title, but the email version terms them "Letters from an American."

On average, on any given evening about 4,000 readers (including me) share her posts to their personal FB accounts. In this respect my track record is a bit more modest: currently I have only one person who follows this practice, namely Mark Grimsley.

I hope to better that record, although my best no shit assessment is that my own Page must wait at least two years to become an overnight success. That was the case with a blog, focused on academic military history, which I maintained from 2004 through 2010. For two years I toiled in virtual anonymity. Then a much bigger blog pointed to mine as one worth reading, and my number of visitors skyrocketed, although by just how many I do not know, because in those days no statistical system had yet evolved to provide anywhere near an authoritative answer.

I do have two achievements I can lord over Heather: in 2006 I won the first "Cliopatria Award," invented by History News Network, as the best individual blog (versus group blogs); and around 2012, when the flagship academic organization for military history, the Society for Military History, created a modest fellowship whose revenues would suffice to pay one lucky graduate student to coordinate the SMH's social media presence; e.g. its Facebook Group and Twitter account.

Someone pointed out that the SMH bylaws required that each fellowship must bear the name of an individual. After a bit of discussion the new fellowship officially became the Society for Military History Mark Grimsley Social Media Fellowship. So far as I know, Heather has garnered no such honor.

A few words about Heather herself (as well as a few gratuitous words about myself). Heather--who in her professional work goes by the name Heather Cox Richardson--is currently on the faculty of Boston College, where she teaches courses on the American Civil War, the Reconstruction Era, the American West, and the Plains Indians. She is somewhat younger than me and in physical appearance somewhat more attractive.

As I have perhaps already alluded to, some 24 years ago I published my first book. It made something of splash. It won me tenure a year early as well as second place in the prestigious Lincoln Prize--this in a year in which it was almost universally assumed that David Donald, the foremost authority on Abraham Lincoln, who had published his magisterial capstone biography of Lincoln, would walk away with the entire $50,000 cash award that went along with winning the prize.

Instead some upstart, whose name as yet was barely known, essentially robbed Donald of $10,000 by earning second place for that first book, entitled "The Hard Hand of War: Union Military Policy Toward Southern Civilians, 1861-1865." After nearly a quarter century it remains in print--deservedly so, since it remains a standard work on its subject--and by now it has been required reading for two generations of graduate students specializing in the Civil War. It has also been the focus of at least two academic conferences devoted to appreciations of its influence upon the field.

Altogether, not a bad record for someone who at age 35 was considered, in the judgment of one senior Civil War historian, "the best Civil War historian of his generation"--defined as historians younger than age 40--while another senior historian in the field insisted that "The Hard Hand of War" was "one of the best books of military history published in twenty-five years."

It was a promising start for a young historian expected to go on to publish a steady stream of other major works. Instead, as I enter the final decade of my career, I can boast only one other book to my name, along with a few co-edited volumes of essays. At 35 I was a rising star. At age 60 I am unmistakably regarded as a rising star that flamed out.

In short, I had failed to achieve a record remotely comparable to that of Heather Cox Richardson, who has already turned out five books, each one a major contribution to the field, with a sixth going into production.

For present purposes I need mention only one: "To Make Men Free: A History of the Republican Party," (2014), which I feel certain that Joe Snuffy, the loud-mouthed Trump supporter at the end of the bar, would automatically dismiss, sight unseen, as a typical left-wing hatchet job. In the utterly unlikely event that he happened to read it, he might be surprised to find that it is not only superbly researched, rich in analysis, and beautifully written, but basically admiring of the GOP in terms of the totality of its history. Even without cracking open the hinge, Joe Snuffy might discern that its main title, "To Make Men Free," indicated that it was probably not the left wing hatchet job he had earlier assumed.

I take time to compose so lengthy an introduction to make the point that anyone who reads Heather's nightly reports on the impeachment drama is receiving the appraisal of one of the best political historians this country can boast. And that those nightly reports are, in effect, a spontaneous act of intellectual generosity propelled by the conviction that we are at a critical moment in our country's history. Thus the reports also testify to her commitment as an American citizen and American patriot.

She is also--and I shall finally bring this lengthy introduction in for a landing--a major scholar, citizen, and patriot who thinks I am dead wrong in my belief that our republic stands in grave danger of destruction.

This is why I have chosen to share her latest post, usually shared on my personal page, on this public page.

****

December 29, 2019 (Sunday)

These days, I often hear people despair of America. They’re afraid our democracy is doomed.

Maybe. But what I was trying to say yesterday was that nothing, nothing, nothing is written in stone until it actually happens. And sometimes, underneath what seems to be a consensus, there is an alternative story developing. When it comes into view, it seems the world turns on a dime.

We have an example of that before us tonight, as Americans are mourning the news that 79-year-old Georgia Representative John Lewis has Stage IV pancreatic cancer. Now a beloved congressman, helping to construct laws for our nation, Lewis began his adulthood breaking the laws of his state: those upholding racial segregation. He organized voting registration drives and in 1960 was one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington D.C. to New Orleans to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled.

An adherent of the philosophy of non-violence, Lewis was beaten by mobs and arrested 24 times. As chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC—pronounced “snick”) he helped to organize the 1963 March on Washington where the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., told more than 200,000 people gathered at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial that he had a dream. Two years later, as Lewis and 600 marchers hoping to register African American voters in Alabama stopped to pray at the end of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, mounted police troopers charged the marchers, beating them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull.

To observers in 1965 reading the newspapers, Lewis was simply one of the lawbreaking protesters who were disrupting the “peace” of the South. But what seemed to be fruitless and dangerous protests were, in fact, changing minds. Shortly after the attack in Selma, President Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) honored those changing ideas when he went on TV to support the marchers and call for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. On August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically under-represented.

New black voters helped to elect Lewis to Congress in 1986. He has held the seat ever since, winning reelection 14 times.

If you had told the angry men beating Lewis unconscious in Montgomery that he would one day serve more than a dozen terms in Congress and the news that he is ill would bring an outpouring of lament…. Well, the world can turn on a dime.

We have had a lull in political news since Christmas, but there were glimmerings today that the past week has shifted some minds in Washington as more and more media outlets are warning that Republican talking points simply echo Putin’s disinformation. This morning, Meet the Press ran its special on the techniques of disinformation and Russia’s use of them.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who has been carrying water for Trump over the Ukraine scandal, has suddenly started to sound more cautious. After asking Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to testify in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which Graham chairs, about whatever he turned up in his recent dirt-digging trip to Ukraine, today Graham warned Giuliani that he should share his information with the Intelligence Community to make sure “it’s not Russian propaganda.”

Graham and other GOP Senators have good reason to be cautious. The extremism and antics of Representatives like Jim Jordan (R-OH) and Devin Nunes (R-CA) made for good theater in the House of Representatives, where they were in the minority. But the Republicans cannot use a similar game plan in the Senate because they are the ones in charge.

Perhaps more important, there was another big development today in the Ukraine scandal. The New York Times reported that Trump’s demand that the Pentagon withhold money from Ukraine at a crucial time in its war with Russia roiled the White House. The hold was implemented from the Office of Management and Budget, and was overseen by Mick Mulvaney. Aides were concerned that the hold was illegal and at one point tried to rope the Pentagon into assuming responsibility for it, prompting one official to respond: “You can’t be serious. I am speechless.” Eventually, lawyers at the Office of Management and Budget began to develop the argument that Trump could override Congress’s law based on his role as commander in chief. (The whistleblower’s report cut that argument short: Trump released the funds once he knew the scheme had been exposed.)

The story reveals that Trump’s own top national security advisors tried to talk him out of his determination to withhold the money. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton met with Trump together to convince him to release the aid because it served American interests. He refused.

It is no wonder he does not want any of them to testify. We can now safely exclude the possibility that their testimony would exonerate him.

It is also appalling that this crisis—one that weakened our ally Ukraine in its war against Russia, thereby giving Russia a huge advantage in upcoming ceasefire negotiations—went on for almost three months without anyone knowing until the whistleblower called it out. That helps to explain Trump’s furious insistence that the whistleblower was out of line to object to the scheme. It also illustrates how much the whistleblower deserves our thanks.

Republican Senators might reasonably be nervous about more revelations continuing to turn public sentiment against Trump and against the GOP in general. So they are continuing to try to suppress votes. In 2013, in the Shelby v. Holder decision, the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act… the same law that LBJ endorsed shortly after police fractured John Lewis’s skull as he and fellow demonstrators prayed for voting rights.

As soon as the decision came down, states began to implement various methods to cut down on voting by populations that tend to vote Democratic. This has been a big issue in Georgia, especially after 2018 candidate for governor Stacey Abrams inspired new minority voter registrations. At the beginning of December, Georgia officials purged more than 300,000 voters from the rolls because they had not voted since 2012 (the last election in which President Barack Obama, who turned out new minority voters, was on the ballot). Opponents challenged the purge of about 98,000 of those voters on procedural grounds, but on Friday, the same federal judge who approved the purge rejected the challenge.

Georgia’s Secretary of State, Republican Brad Raffensperger, told a newspaper that “Proper list maintenance is not only required by long-standing laws but is also important in maintaining the integrity and smooth functioning of elections.”

It’s an interesting quotation on a day when we are thinking of Representative John Lewis. “Proper list maintenance,” long-standing laws, and "the smooth functioning of elections" were precisely what he marched against sixty years ago.

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The Hour of Maximum Danger - Part 2

In the introduction to my last entry I began with a question and response:

“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.”

Yesterday I focused on my convictions as an historian. The focus of today’s entry concerns the root of that personal compulsion. It centers on my relationship with my brother Scott.

The introduction to my last entry also included this declaration:

“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.”

Scott entirely concurs. But he approaches that “imminent risk” from the perspective of a lifelong Republican, whereas I myself have been a lifelong Democrat.

The history of our relationship is fundamental to understanding why I feel a passion strong enough to place at risk my professional career and what remains of my reputation as an historian. So the remainder of this entry is a narrative of that history.

Scott and I were born only eleven months apart, and as a result of being near contemporaries we did nearly everything together from early childhood until about the age of 22, when our life paths began to diverge to a significant degree.

Our relationship had two primary characteristics: the closeness that resulted from having so much in common—including nearly identical interests—and, paradoxically, a strong pattern of near continuous competition. For many years we acknowledged the existence of this pattern but could puzzle out its basis. In recent years, however we have come to believe that it stemmed from the very thing that made our relationship a close one so much of the time: the minimal distance in our ages.

As a result, Scott tended to resent my status as the older brother (especially because I played the role of older brother with gusto). He developed a compulsion—the tyranny of chronology notwithstanding—to catch up with me. Which in turn produced a near continual obsession with achieving that goal.

In this obsession I reciprocated, albeit for a different reason: I have a competitive nature, and when anyone attempts to compete with me my standard response is to compete right back. Thus, as a youth, if someone attempted to outrun me, I made a maximum effort to foil them. I often didn’t succeed, but my failures did nothing to dampen that competitive nature.

Thanks to my permanent status as older brother, there was really only way available to Scott in terms of overtaking me: I was pretty smart and well-informed. He sought to become even smarter and better-informed.

Inevitably, this dimension of our competition took the form of debates characterized by oversized passion and forcefulness. And as we combined a common interest in politics with contrasting political world views, we came to model in microcosm the hyper partisanship that now threatens to destroy the republic.

We had other issues that divided us, of course, the result of the numerous collisions and squabbles common to siblings. And I’m convinced that the forcefulness of our political debates owed in considerable measure to a subtext reflecting the rage and resentments resulting from those issues.

For reasons unrelated to our competition, I came to adopt the conviction that partisan political debate was pointless, because to win an argument was actually to lose it: it did nothing to convince the other person. It dug them instead even more deeply into their existing political convictions. Thus I lost interest in political discussion if it manifested itself as debate.

But Scott’s preferred style of political discussion remained debate, and eventually, between my impatience with collisions over politics and a mutual inability to resolve our other differences, I pulled away from Scott altogether. For a period of about fifteen years we were almost completely estranged. Our friends initially looked upon this estrangement with hope and expectation that it would end, but finally they uniformly formed the conviction that it was permanent.

Yet in fact the estrangement indeed ended, suddenly and unexpectedly, with the main catalyst being the birth of my daughter Chloe in 2011. Her emergence into the world generated a desire to function as a family that almost miraculously dissolved our seemingly invincible estrangement. To be sure, it did not eliminate the old grudges and wounds, but it did produce a quest to heal them.

The task proved difficult, and our relationship often remained turbulent. And we sometimes found the effort so exhausting that we would suspend our relationship, sometimes for months at a time. But we consistently reunited to continue our search for what Leo Tolstoy once expressed as “the discovery of peace.”

Scott and I retained a common interest in politics, and frequently engaged in discussions about it, but these almost invariably remained a rather militant dialogue of the deaf.
All that changed in 2016, spurred by the incredible, highly divisive rise to power of Donald J. Trump.

Concerning Trump there is practically no middle ground. One either loves him or loathes him. But Scott and I attempted—successfully for the most part—to elude this pattern. More precisely, we considered it secondary to our mutual realization that the hyper partisanship that plagued American politics constituted, at the very least, a serious threat to the ability of Americans to address the major issues of the day; and just possibly of the survival of the American republic altogether.

By now the roots of my “deeply rooted compulsion” to understand the dynamics that have brought us to this precipice should be obvious. It stems from a desire—also embraced by Scott—to find a way to sidestep the almost helpless tendency to fall into the pattern of destructive debate that bedevils and instead find a way to achieve constructive dialogue. It has become the central feature our ongoing quest to achieve that elusive discovery of peace.

Will We Die By Suicide?

A subscriber to this Page asked two very good questions significant enough that I reprint here both his questions and my answers.

Responding to “The Hour of Maximum Danger -Part 1,” he wrote:

“Very eloquent. A few questions: (1) the Civil War had a clear geographic fault line for people to separate on. The current tumultuous times don't. Does that make a difference? (2) how does this differ from the turbulence of the 1960's and 1970's which had some violence but ultimately resolved itself via civil society politics?”

I replied:

“Good questions. 1. It’s possible that a Confederate victory might have resulted in two viable republics, but the historical examples we have of previous republics suggests that the two republics would not long survive. Speculatively, you would simply see the creation of hyper partisanship in both republics and thus the equivalent of the current situation, only in two parts. I haven’t time to elaborate on this point, but the CSA was for all practical purposes an oligarchy from the outset. [This is essentially the opinion that George Rable offered one his 1995 book, “The Confederate Republic.” The gist is that the political structure of the republic made it impossible to exert any effective action to check the power of President Jefferson Davis.]

As for the USA, in Lincoln’s first important political address (in 1838) he accurately saw indications of a penchant among Americans for resolving conflicts via mobs and riots. He went on to say that “the Constitution and rule of law in the United States are ‘the political religion of our nation.’” And by implication he was saying that if that “political religion” dissolved, the effect would be the destruction of the republic.

He concluded his oration by pointing out that the geographical position of the US offered ample protection against any external danger. Instead:

“If it [mortal danger] ever reach us it must spring up amongst us; it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."

Arguably too many Americans have abandoned the “civil religion” of which Lincoln spoke, and we now face the very crisis about which he warned.

Your second question is much simpler to answer: during the 1960s the US had a functioning government, dominated by the so-called “Establishment,” and all the tumult was not about the destruction of this functioning government but rather a clamor against being excluded from it and a clamor to become part of it.