Struggle for Peace

I had supposed I’d discuss William F. Buckley, Jr., today, but although the OSU library has sent me the standard bio of Buckley and a volume of his interviews, I still don’t have his first book, God and Man at Yale, which vaulted him immediately into the front rank of movement conservatism in the 1950s. I want to read that for myself before I continue.

So I find myself temporarily on hold. Which gives me a chance to discuss the proposed main title for this evolving book: “Struggle for Peace.”

When I first decided to fashion these blog posts into a book, its title came to me spontaneously. It took me a couple of days to puzzle out what it actually meant. “Struggle” is obvious: it will take a tremendous effort to end this epidemic of divisiveness, much of it quite deliberately created and maintained. But the goal—“Peace”—what did that actually mean?

I decided that it was like the peace that prevails in a healthy family. Conflict arises, sometimes quite serious and hard to solve, but it occurs in the context of love and fundamental respect for each family member, as well as the necessary skill set to resolve conflict constructively and a commitment to adhere to that goal— constructive engagement with the conflict and a determination to resolve it in a mutually respectful way, one that does not rend the fabric of the family. Such a family may be said to be at peace, no matter the challenges it must inevitably face.

Transferring this model to political culture, it involves a turning away from the demonization of political opponents and a determination not to resolve problems; that ideological purity is instead the overriding concern. In this toxic culture, mutual respect is absent, consciously replaced with mockery, scorn, habitual imputation of the worst motives to the other side, dismissal of basic comity in legislative relationships. Efforts at bipartisanship are interpreted as betrayal.

A family whose internal dynamic followed a pattern even remotely like this would yield nothing but hurt, rage, and alienation. And it would frame the basic world view of family members, extending it to life in general: that no one can be trusted, that cries for help will be met with scorn and rejection, that even basic questions will be dismissed as invalid, as inappropriate even to dare to ask them, that rage is the only response to the inevitable conflicts that arise in in life. It is, quite simply, a world view that Is a self-imposed hell.

And it is a dynamic that tumbles down from generation to generation, like a pursuing wraith—until someone finds the wisdom and strength to turn and face this dynamic, see it for what it is, take a stand against it, refuse to replicate it in one’s own family. Such a person will save the generations that follow. These persons may themselves be forgotten, but their legacy will endure. They will have, by whatever unlikely chance or perhaps with the aid of a loving, divine power that reaches out to help, discovered peace, creating families that are also at peace, in the sense that I have described.

And occasionally, albeit very occasionally, I have seen such heroes, so I know that such outcomes are possible. They struggle for peace, and they achieve it.

There are people—more people than one might suppose—already engaged in such activity in the public sphere, who reject the toxic political culture and are devising practical ways to combat it. If they succeed, they will save the republic. If they fail, we are truly lost, for this toxic culture will also tumble down from generation to generation, chasing us down the years, driving us to the same fate as so many republics, so many democracies.

Uncovering the First Wave of Conservative Media - Part 4

It is July 1988. A 37-year old radio talk show host, rising fast but still known only regionally, leaves KBFK in Sacramento and moves to Manhattan, where he makes his inaugural broadcast on WABC. He does so under a deal that has him do a daily local program, essentially for free. In exchange, the ABC Radio Network has agreed to air a second, national program each day on its affiliates. Within a month, fifty-six stations are broadcasting the national show to an audience estimated at 250,000.

After two decades in the radio business, Rush Limbaugh has hit the big time.

By 1990 the national audience numbers 20 million. “New York Times Magazine” runs a profile on him. So does “Vanity Fair.” So, for that matter, does “Cigar Aficionado,” with a piece written by a reporter for the New York Times. Ted Koppel, the well-known host of ABC’s “Nightline,” brings him on the show, telling viewers, “There is absolutely no one and nothing else out there like him, anywhere on the political spectrum.”

There’s just one problem: among the media elite Limbaugh is a pariah. “You have no earthly idea how detested and hated I am,” he tells New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, who knows exactly how detested and hated Limbaugh is. “I’m not even a good circus act for the liberals in this town,” he continues, seemingly oblivious to the fact that just possibly the liberals in town are not enthusiastic about his ceaseless attacks upon liberals.

In my lifetime I’ve seen my share of mavericks who thumb their nose at convention, and then are genuinely puzzled to reap the consequences a maverick ought properly to expect.

But his situation is by no means all bad. Barely a month after he begins his national show, Limbaugh receives an invitation to a reception hosted by Wall Street investor and conservative benefactor Lewis Lehrman. Lehrman’s splendid salon contains a harpsichord, seated at which is a figure Limbaugh recognizes at once: 62-year old William F. Buckley, Jr., a Renaissance man who is a gifted musician, world-class sailor, expert skier, and, once upon a time, formidable amateur boxer. Not to mention a novelist who writes spy fiction inspired by his days as a CIA operative in Latin America, as well as a one-time candidate for mayor of New York (a quixotic effort he recounts in one of the 55 books he will write over the span of his 82 years).

Buckley also happens to be the most famous conservative in the country, mainly because he is the host of “Firing Line,” aired on PBS and well on its way to becoming the longest running public affairs show in television history, boasting 1,504 shows over 33 years.

Limbaugh is thrilled to discover that Buckley is one of his listeners, flattered when Buckley pours him a drink, and utterly bewildered when Buckley holds forth with a group of editors about whether James Joyce’s “Ulysses” could still find a publisher in the present cultural climate. But overall, Buckley lavishes attention upon Limbaugh. What are his thoughts on politics, the secrets to his broadcasting success, his aspirations for the future? It is heady stuff, and years later Limbaugh will still shake his head in wonder. “It was one of the most memorable nights of my life . . . that night I was made to feel welcome in the conservative movement as started by its leader.”

Buckley is everything Limbaugh is not: poised, patrician, and able to articulate the conservative world view in a way that is compelling rather than off-putting. And yet Buckley becomes Limbaugh’s patron, introducing him to such luminaries as Henry Kissinger, Norman Podhoretz, and Richard Brookhiser. In the mid-1990s Limbaugh will host Buckley at his own home. They will smoke cigars and sip brandy and presently Limbaugh will raise his snifter in a heart-felt, almost worshipful gesture, saying, “You know, my father passed away in 1990, but you make me think my dad’s still alive here with me.”

But what is Buckley’s story? That will be the focus of my next post.

Uncovering the First Wave of Conservative Media - Part 3

The other main players in the modern conservative movement emerged at about the same time, embodied the same alienation from mainstream politics, and had the same mission: to restore genuine conservatism to the Republican Party.

At this distance it may be hard to recall how similar the Republican and Democratic parties once were. Both were in broad agreement on numerous issues: anti-Communism (though not nearly enough for the taste of purists), acceptance of the “guarantor state” created by the New Deal, and a foreign policy built around military containment. Each included conservative, moderate, and liberal politicians, and their differences focused on how best to operationalize a common centrist agenda rather than to stake out distinctive ideological positions. Their relations in Congress were marked by what now seems a golden age of comity.

This so-called Establishment was overwhelmingly white and male, and it excluded a huge number of Americans, particularly women and African Americans, who spent the 1960’s in a determined bid to breach the edifice. But to conservatives like Clarence Manion the exclusion of women and Blacks was more or less as it should be. What drove them up a wall was their own exclusion from the halls of real political power—indeed, their status as near pariahs.

Aside from Manion, two figures stand out as founders of the first wave of conservative media: Henry Regnery and William F. Buckley, Jr. We’ll take Regnery first.

The life of Henry Regnery (1912-1996) followed a trajectory similar to that of Manion. Like Manion, he was well educated—Manion had a law degree from Notre Dame, Regnery had a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Harvard—and like Manion he was initially a Democrat and a fan of the New Deal. But he too became disillusioned with the New Deal, broke with the FDR Administration over its interventionist foreign policy, and joined the America First Committee. The US entry into World War II destroyed America First but failed to alter Regnery’s evolving conservatism and his growing suspicion that liberal elites molded public opinion and that an alternative voice was urgently needed. In 1944, therefore, Regnery co-founded “Human Events,” a newspaper—which still survives online and is staunchly pro-Trump—that took its name from the first clause of the Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events…” It was a way of reclaiming, as Manion would do, the mantle of “true Americanism.”

Then in 1947 Regnery founded Regnery Publishing (which also still survives), as a means of combating “the reigning intellectual orthodoxy.” It put out a steady stream of conservative works, the first of which critiqued Allied treatment of Germany and the emerging postwar order. They didn’t sell well but Regnery didn’t care. His goal was not to reach a mass market but rather to influence opinion makers. He nonetheless published a surprise hit by a brilliant young intellectual, William F. Buckley, Jr. (1925-2008). Entitled “God and Man at Yale” (1951), it was not exactly a best seller, but it did achieve exactly the kind of impact that Regnery had in mind when he created Regnery Publishing—and if movement conservatism has a founding text, it is “God and Man at Yale.”

I’ll deal with Buckley next time.

Uncovering the First Wave of Conservative Media - Part 2

Hemmer’s book, “Messengers of the Right” (2016) casts a much wider net than her dissertation, focusing on a number of other major figures who shaped the first wave of conservative media. These are interwoven in the book. But let’s stick for the moment with Clarence Manion.

Manion (1896-1979) came from a Democratic family and remained comfortably within that allegiance until midway through the New Deal, when he found his ambitions for political office thwarted. He shifted from a proponent of the New Deal to critic. But his real departure from the Roosevelt camp came with his opposition to FDR’s policy of intervention in the looming Second World War. Manion joined the America First Committee—and incidentally became Dean of the University of Notre Dame Law School, a post he held from 1941 to 1952 and attempted to transform into something of an enclave for conservative thought.

Although the attack on Pearl Harbor crushed the America First movement, in the immediate postwar era Manion became a vocal critic of the United Nations and the numerous collective security agreements (NATO, for instance) that operationalized the Truman Administration’s Containment policy. Manion objected to the expansion of government that characterized the emerging national security state, disdained the effort to make the United States a world policeman, and advocated for a return to what he regarded as America’s traditions of godly morality, individual liberty, and limited government—a constellation of values he identified as “Americanism.”

Manion set forth these views in “The Key to Peace: A Formulation for the Perpetuation of Real Americanism” (1950), the first of his several books and one that struck a chord with many Americans—enough to make it a best-seller and give him the fame and influence he had so long craved. Manion embarked on an extended speaking tour, which proved so successful he resigned his post as law school dean to devote himself full-time to political activism. Nominally still a Democrat, he backed Ohio’s Senator Robert Taft—“Mr. Republican”—for the 1952 GOP presidential nomination. Eisenhower got the nod instead, and won the election, upon which he appointed Manion head of the “Commission on Intergovernmental Relations,” which was essentially Ike’s way of placating his political right flank. But Manion alienated Eisenhower with his support for another Ohio Senator, John Bricker, a prominent critic of Ike’s foreign policy. In 1954 Eisenhower forced Manion to resign.

By this time Manion was disillusioned with both political parties and consequently the political mainstream. As a way to champion his creed of “Americanism” he created the Manion Forum of Opinion, which went live on 29 radio stations in October 1954. Too controversial to attract business advertisers, Manion’s weekly show—each consisting of 15-minute speeches—depended instead on some 400 fellow true believers to sponsor it. The technique worked. Hemmer notes that the show remained on the air for 25 years, racking up nearly 1,300 broadcasts in all. The show provided a platform for a number of conservative activists, of whom the best known today was William F. Buckley, Jr.

Almost 60 when he launched the Forum, Manion lived to age 83, becoming in effect the elder statesman of movement conservatism. But he was far from the only such figure. My next post will consider some of the others.

Uncovering the First Wave of Conservative Media - Part 1

About a month ago I began a series on the early rise of conservative media with a post entitled “A Father, A Daughter, and Politics.” I’m afraid I didn’t get beyond that initial post, and although you can find a link to it here, for the sake of convenience I’m going to reprint much of it below.

***

It is a warm June day in 2004 and a youthful Nicole Hemmer—Niki to her friends—is on a pleasant car trip—pleasant because seated at the wheel of the car is her father, with whom she shares an affectionate relationship. Niki 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, Niki’s father announces: “My project this summer is to get you to vote for George Bush.”

Well, scarcely out of nowhere to Niki, 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 Niki had shared his conservatism, but over the years she had slowly shifted to the left, while her father had done just the opposite.

“The divergence of [political] opinion ended up drawing us closer together,” Niki would later observe. “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.

***
That flip of the knob carried Niki and her father to one of the local AM conservative talk radio stations. For the rest of the summer, whenever they traveled together, they listened regularly to “The Rush Limbaugh Show” and “The Sean Hannity Show.”

“I found it both grating and captivating,” Niki recalls, “a heady mix of personality and passion and politics. During ad breaks we feasted on each segment’s arguments and insights, dissecting the surprisingly wide variety of philosophies and logics (and illogics) at play. In addition to engaging from my own adversarial perspective, I observed my dad’s response as a sympathetic listener. He absorbed some arguments, rejected others, and refashioned still others to fit with his life experiences. This dynamic interplay confounded the common stereotype of talk-radio listeners as sponges soaking up the host’s message. It was compelling stuff. And while it didn’t change my vote, it did change my life—and led to the book you are reading now.”

That book is “Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics,” published in 2016. It’s a refinement of Niki’s PhD dissertation, done at Columbia University. From the dissertation’s acknowledgments section I can discern that Niki first grappled with the topic as a seminar paper in 2005, hard on the heels of the 2004 election, which underscores the weight of those sessions listening to El Rushbo and Sean Hannity with her father. As with all dissertation acknowledgments, it credits not just the institutions and faculty that gave her support, but also an array of family and friends. The final paragraph is poignant:

“This dissertation began with my dad and our spirited political debates. In an effort to better understand his outlook, I delved into the world of conservative media. He taught me it is possible to listen, understand, and disagree all at the same time, and convinced me that political debate is of little use absent respect for the other side’s humanity. He died before I finished this dissertation, but he never stopped shaping it. To him this work is lovingly dedicated.”

I’d like you to read that paragraph again, carefully. Yes, it’s sad that her father never saw the finished dissertation (much less the distinguished book into which it evolved), and it’s touching that she would dedicate it to him. But what stands out are the lessons he taught her:

“It is possible to listen, understand, and disagree all at the same time.”

“Political debate is of little use absent respect for the other side’s humanity.”

Those lessons are really principles to undergird the skill set required for constructive dialogue with people who disagree with us about politics, and I’m tempted to veer directly to that subject, which is close to my heart and one of my core concerns as a citizen. But I’ll discipline myself to stick with the main subject: the rise of conservative mass media, the topic with which I commenced this blog back in late October.

Nicole Hemmer—with the opening vignette out of the way, let’s refer to her professionally—began her research with the then-conventional interpretation of the rise of the modern American conservative movement. “The long accepted narrative,” she writes, “said that the modern conservative movement started with intellectuals in the 1950s, took root in organizations in the 1960s and 1970s, and won political influence in the 1980s. Only then did a powerful and influential conservative apparatus emerge, first in talk radio and then in cable news.” In other words, she assumed that when her father introduced her to Rush Limbaugh he was introducing her to the first wave of conservative mass media.

As often happens, however, the evidence soon declared otherwise. Her early research soon had her flipping through back issues of the Nation, where she encountered an article, published on May 25, 1964—early in the presidential campaign season that year—entitled “Radio Right: Hate Clubs of the Air.”

I pulled the article. Here’s the opening paragraph. It took no prisoners:

“Right wing fanatics, casting doubt on the loyalty of every President of the United States since Herbert Hoover, are pounding the American people, this election year, with an unprecedented flood of radio and television propaganda. The hate clubs of the air are spewing out a minimum of 6,600 broadcasts a week, carried by more than 1,300 radio and television stations—nearly one out of every five in the nation—in a blitz that saturates every one of the fifty states with the exception of Maine.”

The article included a map of the United States, with a dot representing each radio or television station from which a “right wing” broadcast emanated. Unsurprisingly, many of these are clustered in the South, but as a reminder that California was once upon a time not part of the Democratic blue wall, that state includes more than two dozen. Also surprising are the dozen or so stations in the Seattle area.

The article raised an obvious question: where on earth did this immense network of media activism originate? It was that question that carried Hemmer to the archives, which, in turn, soon led her to the central figure of her eventual dissertation: Clarence Manion, a college dean turned conservative activist who found himself shut out of the Republican Party of the 1950s—a party that had largely made peace with the New Deal order—and in 1954 launched the Manion Forum of Opinion.

The Forum began with 29 radio stations and over the next 25 years, as Hemmer puts it, Manion “built it into a national weekly radio and television show. From heads of state to housewife activists, from pundits to politicians, the Manion Forum emerged as the crossroads of conservatism from the 1950s to the 1970s.” Manion was a whirlwind of energy and his activities ranged well beyond the Forum, but the Forum was key. I’ll turn to it in my next post.

Millennium - Part 3

If American Christians viewed the Civil War through the lens of post-millennialism, American Christians for whom millennialism is still meaningful—mostly evangelicals—view the current political climate almost entirely through the lens of pre-millennialism. It is the opposite of post-millennialism. Whereas post-millennialism views the world as steadily getting better, pre-millennialism sees it as steadily getting worse, with a stream of signposts that signal we are in the “end times.”

The end times, as you will know if you’ve seen any of the “Omen” films, noticed the “Left Behind” series in the fiction section of a book store, or seen the movie version of the inaugural novel, will begin with the Rapture, when faithful Christians—by which is meant faithful evangelicals—will be taken directly to heaven, thereby avoiding both death and the seven-year hellscape to follow. The Antichrist will take over and life will become, let’s say, interesting. But at the end of seven years Christ will return, defeat the Antichrist, and save or damn the residue of humanity.

I’ve seen it argued that the Civil War influenced the turn from post- to pre-millennialism: it was hard to preserve a sense of an improving humanity amid the reality of a destructive war that killed almost 3 percent of the American population. But the main factor was a mainline Christianity that became increasingly earth-bound and bereft of the supernatural. In the late 19th century, mainline churches turned to the Social Gospel, a laudatory movement but one that was but little different from secular movements aimed at helping the poor and fighting back against the evils of monopoly capitalism and urban corruption. Seminaries began to teach “higher criticism,” which essentially dissected the Bible, revealing the Old Testament as a shotgun marriage of various Jewish theological perspectives and the Gospels not as reliable biographies of Jesus but as an evolving expression of the early Christian community.

Evangelicals responded with alarm, a rejection of intellectualism, and an insistence upon certain “fundamentals,” chief among them Scriptural inerrancy—which, while it might surprise many evangelicals to discover this, was something new. Though Bishop James Ussher might famously have dated the first day of Creation to October 23, 4004 BC, based on an ingeniously literal reading of the Bible, many educated Christians did not see Scripture in such terms. It was common to view some events set forth in Scripture as being symbolic and even to question whether certain books of the Bible belonged in the canon. (Martin Luther, for instance, considered the Letter of James to be “an epistle of straw.”)

Lest it seem as if I am trashing evangelical Christianity, let me pause here long enough to say that it has enormous strengths. These are well captured in Alistair McGrath’s “A Passion for Truth: The Intellectual Coherence of Evangelicalism” (1996), p. 22:

1. A focus, both devotional and theological, on the person of Jesus Christ, especially his death on the cross;

2. The identification of Scripture as the ultimate authority in matters of spirituality, doctrine and ethics;

3. An emphasis upon conversion or a “new birth” as a life-changing religious experience;

4. A concern for sharing the faith, especially through evangelism.

These attributes apply to many “mainstream” denominations as well, but evangelical Christians are among their most determined and least apologetic advocates.

But to return to pre-millennialism, evangelicals, to varying degrees, are convinced that we are living in the end times. They take pleasure in the fact that President Trump has followed through on a commitment, made by Congress years ago, to move the U.S. embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and are, at best, indifferent to the fact that this has hamstrung America’s ability to influence a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian question. It’s a move in the direction of bringing about the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem—which would have to be done by eliminating the Dome of the Rock, one of Islam’s supreme holy places. This, in turn, would pave the way for all Jews to return to the Holy Land, which would set the stage for the Rapture; and for Jews to accept Jesus as the Messiah. (Evangelicals manage to combine sympathy for Jews with a basically anti-Semitic view that they must and shall reject Judaism.)

Pre-millennialism also helps to explain what, to many onlookers, seems inexplicable: the fawning adulation that some evangelicals have for Donald Trump, a man whose sexual history is problematic, to say the least; whose public persona is that of an unabashed bully; who knows next to nothing about Christianity, does not concede that he has ever sinned, and therefore is in no need of salvation. The president nonetheless has made good on election promises that address evangelical concerns, particularly the appointment of federal judges likely to overturn Roe v Wade and undo gay marriage.

Evangelicals have squared the circle by likening him to King Cyrus of Persia, a pagan used by God to liberate the Jews from the Babylonian Captivity. Earlier this month, at an “Evangelicals for Trump” rally, Miami megachurch pastor Guillermo Maldonado was explicit on this point. “Father, we give you the praise and honor and we ask you that he can be the Cyrus to bring reaffirmation, to bring change into this nation, and all the nations of the Earth will say America is the greatest nation of the Earth.”

Millennium - Part 2

Book of Revelation, chapter 20, verses 1-6 (King James Version)

"And I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit and a great chain in his hand.

And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him a thousand years,

And cast him into the bottomless pit, and shut him up, and set a seal upon him, that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled: and after that he must be loosed a little season.

And I saw thrones, and they sat upon them, and judgment was given unto them: and I saw the souls of them that were beheaded for the witness of Jesus, and for the word of God, and which had not worshipped the beast, neither his image, neither had received his mark upon their foreheads, or in their hands; and they lived and reigned with Christ a thousand years.

But the rest of the dead lived not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection.

Blessed and holy is he that hath part in the first resurrection: on such the second death hath no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and shall reign with him a thousand years."

***

But exactly when will Crist’s “thousand-year reign”—the millennium—arrive? Christians disagree. So millennialism comes in three flavors:

Pre-millennialism, post-millennialism, and amillennialism.

Let’s deal with the last one first. If you’re amillennial you don’t believe in a literal millennium, and you think Christians who do are pretty much wasting a colossal amount of time, intellectual pondering and above all, emotional energy.

But if you like the other two flavors you think amillennials Just Don’t Get It.

Nowadays pre-millennialism is the most typical form of thought among Christians who care about it (mainly evangelicals). It generally consists of a scenario in which, first, good Christians are “raptured.” [The Rapture is a reading of 1 Thessalonians 4:17. The concept originated only in the 19th century but I don’t think it became “a thing” (to use slang) until the publication of William E. Blackstone’s “Jesus is Coming,” published in 1878. Second, the doctrine postulates a seven-year period in which the rest of us get tattooed with the Mark of the Beast and have to contend with the anti-Christ, the spectacle of dogs and cats living together in sin, etc.

But in 19th century America pre-millennialists—who surely interpreted the war as a sign of the imminent coming of the End Times—were a small minority. The dominant view was post-millennialism, and by this reading the Civil War was an act of cleansing violence that would sweep away the remaining evil standing in the way of the Millennium, and the shit would hit the fan only after the Millennium. In other words, the general trajectory of history was that things were getting better and better and with just one more big push, Christ would return.

In other words:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

The third verse makes the case more directly:

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace
shall deal
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel
Since God is marching on.”

Which of course is “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” with lyrics written by Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910). Howe was an abolitionist and suffragist. The way I heard the story, in 1861 Julia Howe and her husband Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876) visited an army camp and heard soldiers lustily singing “John Brown’s Body,” which personally I think was pretty cool:

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave;
John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave!
His soul’s marching on!

Julia Howe remarked that she liked the melody (which incidentally was ripped off from a hymn entitled “Oh! Brothers,” whose first line was, “Oh! brothers shall we meet you over on the other shore?”) But she didn’t like the lyrics. So she went home and composed better ones.

But there’s another story merely to the effect that she wrote it after meeting Lincoln. Which may be accurate but sucks in comparison to the way I learned it.

The lyrics were published in “Atlantic Monthly” in February 1862. The final verse in Howe’s original manuscript, however, wasn’t published:

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time
His slave, Our God is marching on.

Which is about as millennial as it could possibly be, although I imagine it was omitted not for ideological reasons but rather for reasons of space or because it seemed weaker than the earlier verses or maybe just because the previous stanzas were beating the theme ever more thoroughly to death and the Howe’s original last stanza was just plain overkill.

Not so incidentally, Julia’s husband Samuel Gridley Howe was one of the three members of the Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission, which examined the current state of freedpeople within Union military lines and offered recommendations about the role the government should (and should not) play in assisting freedpeople. Howe actually authored most of its two reports (preliminary, 1863; and final, 1864) the Commission sent to the Lincoln administration.