Category: History

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Lincoln Again

I should probably wait until I finish the Lincoln book I’m in the middle of now — “Team of Rivals” — before embarking on another one. But The New York Times Book Review today writes up a volume by British historian Richard Carwardine, “Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power.” The review, by novelist Kevin Baker, is worth a read (it’s available on the Times site for a week):

“In dissecting Lincoln’s triumph, Carwardine has provided us with a democratic version of Machiavelli’s ‘Prince,’ a primer on how power can and should be won and used in a free society. Lincoln, he shows us, expertly employed both the machinery of his new party and the authority of his office. He preferred peaceful and lawful means to his ends, but he did not hesitate to press constitutional bounds to the breaking point — for instance, suspending habeas corpus, shutting down the occasional newspaper and detaining thousands of Southern sympathizers — in the desperate struggle to keep the nation together.”

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Dead Veeps Club

You know, looking at the histories of Dick “Gunner” Cheney and Aaron “Unfriendly Fire” Burr — brothers in the fraternity of vice presidents whose hunts have netted human trophies — disclosed yet another fact that until now escaped me: the number of U.S. vice presidents who have died in office. Here’s a brief list. Take note: November is the cruelest month for our unrevered second bananas, having claimed four of the seven executive understudies who died in office.

George Clinton (1739-1812): Served as vice president in Thomas Jefferson’s second term and was re-elected to the office for James Madison’s first term. Died April 20, 1812, the first vice president to expire in office.

Elbridge Gerry (1744-1814): Clinton’s office sat vacant, and Gerry — the Massachusetts pol whose skill at drawing imaginative legislative boundaries is memorialized in the word “gerrymander” — was elected for Madison’s second term. But serving as No. 2 for Madison proved too much for Gerry, too. He died November 23, 1814, having served just 20 months.

Daniel Tompkins (1774-1825; honorable mention): Just missed becoming the third consecutive veep to die in the traces. He served two terms as James Monroe’s vice president, leaving office in March 1825. He died three months later at age 50 after what one biography describes as “a decade of financial privation and heavy drinking, coupled with accusations that he had mishandled state and federal funds while serving as governor of New York. …”

William Rufus de Vane King (1786-1853): Served just six weeks as understudy to Franklin Pierce in March and April 1853. Actually, “served” might be padding King’s resume a bit. He suffered from tuberculosis when he was elected and was in declining health as his inauguration approached. He repaired to Cuba for his health and was granted permission to be sworn in there (reportedly the only vice president inaugurated outside the United States). With his condition apparently terminal, he returned home to his Alabama plantation, where he died April 18.

Henry Wilson (1812-1875): Grant’s second vice president. Died midway through his term on November 22, 1875. A former Senator from Massachusetts, he was eulogized thus by a former colleague: “He was not learned, he was not eloquent, he was not logical in a high sense, he was not always consistent in his political actions, and yet he gained the confidence of the people, and he retained it to the end of his life.” Except for the “confidence of the people” part, that sounds very familiar.

Thomas A. Hendricks (1819-1885): Elected vice president with Grover Cleveland as part of the first Democratic ticket to win since 1856. Hendricks died November 25, 1885, a little more than eight months into his term.

Garret A. Hobart (1844-1899): Elected with McKinley in 1896. I’m guessing that he and McKinley are probably the only running mates to both die in office — though McKinley wasn’t assassinated until early in his second term, when he had a brand spanking new vice president in place. Hobart, described in a Senate biography as a “rotund, jovial, hospitable man,” was beset by heart problems that finally killed him on November 21, 1899. Before passing into eventual blog fodder, however, Hobart cast the deciding vote against a resolution that would have promised independence to the Philippines. He made a difference.

James Sherman (1855-1912): Taft’s vice president, he came darn close to serving a full term before dying on October 30, 1912, of chronic kidney failure. He died just days before the presidential election (Taft vs. Wilson and Roosevelt, T.), thus became the only deceased candidate for national office to stand for election (that’s an unverified claim).

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A Lifetime of Lincoln

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(Lincoln marker in Tolono, Illinois; September 2004)



Growing up in the adopted land of Lincoln, and growing up in the ’60s, when Civil War echoes were loud, reminders of the 16th president were everywhere — license plates, highway and street names, and parks. Oh, yeah: And log-cabin-type toys. So on his birthday, I’m thinking of all the places I’ve run into Lincoln.

1954

I’m born 145 years after Lincoln. The Lincoln connection: This is the year Illinois began printing “Land of Lincoln” on its license plates.

1960.1

During two weeks when I was out of school with first the chicken pox, then the mumps, my dad gets me a Fletcher Pratt history of the Civil War. Words like “Potomac” enter my vocabulary (pronounced “POT-o-mac”).

1960.2

Mom and Dad bundled the three of us kids (me and sibling costars John and Chris; my sister Ann joined the cast in ’62) into our red-and-white Ford stationwagon early one Saturday evening for a sudden road trip. I think it was a Saturday, anyway. That night, we wound up in a motel in Jeffersonville, Indiana, just across the Ohio River from Louisville, where Mom’s brother Tom was serving as a Carmelite priest. We spent the next day doing north-central Kentucky sight-seeing. The two stops I remember: The Cistercian monastery at Gethsemane and Lincoln’s birthplace near Elizabethtown. The cabin in which he was said to have been born — and later, I came to the disappointing realization that the cabin is a reconstruction — was tiny and dark.

c. 1960-62.

I see Carl Sandburg’s multivolume biography, “Lincoln, the Prairie Years and the War Years,” on my parents’ bookshelf. I don’t think I ever cracked it. On the other hand, I did open “The Day Lincoln Was Shot,” by Jim Bishop. My mom liked to tell the story of how I came to her after reading the book. She said that I was crying and told her, “They killed him.” I’d love to be able to say I remember all this like it was yesterday, but I don’t recall it.

c. 1962-63

Another semi-literary encounter with Lincoln: Another book that wound up in my hands thanks to my parents was a sort of abridged kid’s editions of notable American Heritage magazine articles. The book’s long lost now, but it seems like I spent years poring over it. It had stories about a colonial siege of a French fort, the naval exploits of Oliver Hazard Perry and James Lawrence (the latter credited with coining the phrase “don’t give up the ship), a star-crossed early Navy ship called the USS Constellation, the country’s first oil boom (Titusville, Pennsylvania), and the art of Gilded Age valentines. The book also had a piece on how when the Lincoln Memorial opened, the lighting on the statue of Lincoln was all wrong and had to be fixed (an unabridged, pictureless version of the article is online: “Light for Lincoln’s Statue“).

1970

Lincolnian Nixon: In the midst of the antiwar upheaval, right after Nixon had sent U.S. forces into Cambodia and four students had been killed by National Guard troops at Kent State University in Ohio, a big march was called in Washington. Very early the morning of the demonstration, Nixon went out to the Lincoln Memorial, where many protesters had already gathered. Getting out among the people — it was a positively Lincolnian gesture when viewed from an era in which the president systematically excludes critics from his audiences. (A second Nixon/Lincoln Memorial memory: Ask me and maybe I’ll tell you about the time I dreamed I assassinated Nixon on the steps of the memorial. Really.)

1971

My dad and my brother Chris and I drove out to Gettysburg (John was sick with pneumonia and I guess Ann didn’t come because it was a guy trip or something. I’m sure she’ll set me straight). History will little note nor long remember my visit, unlike Lincoln’s in 1863.

1973

On a whim, I hitchhiked to Washington to see the Watergate hearings. It was tough getting rides and I wound up taking a long detour to Watkins Glen, New York, where The Band, Allman Brothers and Grateful Dead were playing a one-day concert at the racetrack there. I eventually made it to Washington, but without enough money to get a motel room anywhere. I wound up at the Lincoln Memorial after dark — the first time I’d ever been there. I was so tired from the trip that I sat down, leaning against one of the columns outside, and fell asleep. It was a very warm night, and eventually I stirred myself, strolled out toward the Washington Monument, found a spot that seemed inconspicuous, and went to sleep. I got into the hearings the next day. Richard Helms, the former director of the CIA, was testifying. Dick Cavett was in the audience, wearing a blue workshirt and a kerchief around his neck.

1988

During a family visit to New Jersey, my brother John and I rented a car and with my older son Eamon (who was going on 9) took the Garden State Parkway down to Cape May, where we got on the ferry to Lewes, Delaware. We decided to drive into Washington along U.S. 50, from the east. The day had been blistering, and it didn’t cool down much after dark. We got a room at the first motel we saw, the Day’s Inn on New York Avenue, as I recall, and then went out to explore a little. We made it to Georgetown, called our Illinois friends the McCrohons about 10 o’clock, and went over to their place, on Connecticut a few blocks above DuPont Circle. We got to talking, the natural state of affairs, and didn’t leave until about 2. Eamon was asleep in the back seat, so John and I decided we should do a little more landmark reconnoitering. We wound up down at the Lincoln Memorial around 3. I’m having a hard time believing I did this — maybe we took turns getting out of the car or something, or maybe I trusted that since we were parked nearby it would be OK to leave Eamon in the car — but we spent half an hour or so at the Vietnam Memorial. We spent the next day in Washington with the McCrohons. The following day, we returned to New Jersey by way of a sweeping detour to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, and the Antietam battlefield. Antietam: Lincoln went there, too, to try to prod his commanding general into action (he wound up having to fire him).

2004

I went back to Illinois in September 2004 to take a driving trip with my dad. We weighed a couple long road trips — out to western Kansas on two lane roads, for instance — and settled on a trip down to the southern tip of Illinois. Headed down Interstate 57, we rolled through Champaign and then saw a sign for Tolono, a place I wanted to see because an old Utah Phillips railroad song carries the name of the town. Our first improbable sighting after deparing the interstate: an inline skater in the oncoming lane, wearing shorts and a backpack but no shirt. The second was in town: A historical marker commemorating Lincoln’s stop at the railroad junction there on February 11, 1861, as he headed east for his inauguration. The marker, on the grounds of a gas station, reported that Lincoln made his last speech in Illinois in Tolono (reporters on the train with him said he made “remarks” in Danville, a little further east, as well as at the Indiana-Illinois border). Dad and I drove on south to Cairo and a little beyond, then doubled back north along the Mississippi, crossing the river several times on car ferries. On the way back to Chicago after stopping to see Mother Jones’s grave in Mount Olive, we got off the highway in Springfield to see the important public buildings there. Then we found our way to the cemetery in a pleasant, leafy neighborhood north of downtown where Lincoln is buried. The tomb is heroic in scale and much more martial than I expected with statues of Union soldiers in a variety of vigllant, fighting poses. We left as the sun started to set and drove back to Chicago in the dark.

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‘Citizen King’

After that football game, of which for reasons disclosed elsewhere I saw only the last quarter, Kate came home and our ensuing channel surfing fetched up on “Citizen King,” an episode of “The American Experience” on Martin Luther King, Jr. Probably because you know the way the story is going to come out, or at least his part of it, it has the feeling of a tragedy alongside which the made-up kind pale (sorry, Will). The tragedy resounds the more deeply because of the aftermath of King’s death. One can hardly argue that we’ve reached that moment he talked about the night before he died that his people — the black, the poor, and the oppressed, would reach the promised land. It wasn’t a promised land just for those whose cause he made his own; it was a destination for the United States, too. I wonder, with the pictures of the mid-60s, and 1968 especially, fresh again, whether the nation suffered a blow, a spiritual injury, that was too big to be overcome in our lifetimes. That may be the still-impressionable spectator of the events talking; the sizable portion of the population born since then might ask what’s the big deal. But it’s true, too, that as a nation we’re swept along by the silent currents of events that predate us, predate our families’ arrival in the United States.

And speaking of family connections, there was a moment in the film when my Uncle Bill appeared on the screen. He spent a lot of time in his career as a Catholic priest in Chicago working on movement issues, and joined some of King’s campaigns in the South (the Selma-Montgomery march in 1965, for instance; amazingly, the route of the march is now a National Park Service National Historic Trail). Anyway, Bill: The documentary included an extensive section on King’s campaign in Chicago, including his marches in Cicero and the segregated neighborhoods of Gage Park and Marquette Park. Suddenly, there was film of marchers filing down the sidewalk, and for two seconds, maybe, there’s Bill. I went back and looked again (on Tivo — well, there’s one thing about the world you can say is better than the ’60s). No doubt — it was him, caught just for an instant doing what he did.

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Democracy, Iraq Style

An Iraqi professor, a Kurd, writes harsh things about fellow Kurds who rule their de facto independent state in northern Iraq. Then the liberators show up — our men and women, the Brits, the coalition of the willing, Halliburton, and every U.S. taxpayer — to throw out the Kurds’ long-time persecutor and plant the flag of democracy. The professor returns to his native country, now basking in the light of freedom. He is arrested for the mean things he’s said about the boss Kurds, subjected to a perfunctory trial, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in prison. The story is in Thursday’s New York Times.

Before I say the obvious — For this we’ve given 2,237 U.S. lives (and counting), spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and required tens of thousands of Iraqis to bear the ultimate price? — let’s consider for a minute: The merchandise we were told we would buy with all that blood and money , the goods our president insists we’re still buying, is American civics-class democracy, transplanted to a grateful nation yearning for its own modestly dressed Miss Liberty. Granted that it’s a ludicrously simplistic expectation — that is at the heart of the administration’s argument for going to war.

Now the fantasy meets the reality that was always waiting. Or, as the Times puts it, straight-man style: Iraq “has made remarkable steps away from totalitarian rule. … But it remains to be seen how far Iraq will ultimately travel toward true Western-style democracy.”

You have to wonder: If people here had been able to see a little way down the road — say to the place we’re standing now — would they have been nearly so satisfied to tell the president to go ahead with his plan? How many look at the mess Iraq is, and will likely remain for decades, and feel satisfied with our handiwork? Will it make any difference on the day that’s sure to come when this president or a successor stands up and tells us there’s another threat we need to extinguish by force of arms?

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The War We Can’t See

Sydney Schanberg, the former Times reporter (played by Sam Waterston in “The Killing Fields“), borrows on his Vietnam/Cambodia experience to speculate in The Village Voice on the past, present and future dimensions of the U.S. air war in Iraq:

“Little is known or seen of the air part of the American war of today, in Iraq. One of the reasons is that the press, with less mobility because of security risks, has to be focused on what’s happening on the ground, where the damage, human and material, is taking place. A more crucial reason is that the Pentagon and the CIA prefer to tell us as little as possible about air war operations.

“Recently, but only in bits and pieces, military officials in Washington have acknowledged that after the U.S. and Britain withdraw the bulk of their ground troops, the American air component will be kept in the region to support the American-trained Iraqi ground forces who will be taking over the ground war. While the Pentagon doesn’t say anything about increasing air power in Iraq, other military sources—speaking anonymously because the information is classified—confirm that the plans call for the air war to be beefed up and kept that way for years to come. These sources also point to Iran and its nuclear ambitions as a reason for keeping air power at a high-alert level in the region.

“Since air strikes cause a significant percentage of civilian casualties, the air war’s continuance ensures that the U.S. will wear a bull’s-eye on its back indefinitely in the Middle East. It also means that the American press will have to push harder to provide more detailed and regular coverage of the air war.”

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Real Money

Outside Illinois, the late Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen is probably best remembered for an ironic (and, it turns out, probably apocryphal) comment on federal spending. It went something like, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

The quote, real or not, needs to be updated. A couple of economists — Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate and son of Gary, Indiana; and Harvard’s Linda Bilmes — are getting some attention for a new estimate of the Iraq War and its effects: $1 trillion to $2 trillion or more. When you include that with Bush’s other trillion-dollar-plus brainstorms — tax cuts for the rich, the new Medicare prescription benefits, Social Security semi-privatization — pretty soon you’re talking real money.

The up-front costs for Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the war that will never stop are staggering enough: something like $325 billion already. The amount spent on Iraq is about three-fourths of that number, about $230 billion; that works out to just under $7 billion a month since we decided to buy Iraqis their freedom from Saddam Hussein (oh — and remove the deadly threat to our future existence, too). We’ll spend another $50 billion to $100 billion in Iraq this year, depending on who you believe. After that — who knows. In a New York Times op-ed piece last August, Bilmes tallied the direct costs of the war at $1.3 trillion if the U.S. military presence is required for another five years.

Stiglitz’s and Bilmes’s reported analysis, which is supposed to be presented in Boston on Sunday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, tries to assess the war’s indirect costs, too. From an apparent press release posted Thursday on TPMCafe:

“The study expands on traditional budgetary estimates by including costs such as lifetime disability and health care for the over 16,000 injured, one-fifth of whom have serious brain or spinal injuries. It then goes on to analyze the costs to the economy, including the economic value of lives lost and the impact of factors such as higher oil prices that can be partly attributed to the conflict in Iraq. The paper also calculates the impact on the economy if a proportion of the money spent on the Iraq war were spent in other ways, including on investments in the United States

” ‘Shortly before the war, when Administration economist Larry Lindsey suggested that the costs might range between $100 and $200 billion, Administration spokesmen quickly distanced themselves from those numbers,’ points out Professor Stiglitz. ‘But in retrospect, it appears that Lindsey’s numbers represented a gross underestimate of the actual costs.’ ”

Of course, by themselves, these numbers don’t carry any moral weight. It’s just money, and we’ll get someone to float us a loan for the kids and grandkids to pay off. But as an example of the dishonesty, irresponsibility and self-delusion behind the war, the figures are staggering. A recent Brookings Institution paper that tries to come to grips with the war’s cost notes, “Government policies are routinely subjected to rigorous cost analyses. Yet one of today’s most controversial and expensive policies—the ongoing war in Iraq—has not been.” In other words, while spending commitments for education and social welfare have to survive the equivalent of a budgetary Inquisition, Congress has been happy so far to fund Iraq based on any wild-ass guess the White House feels like making.

Not that everyone was as casual about the war’s cost as those who launched it: Yale economist William Nordhaus published an analysis of potential costs two months before the war started that concluded the direct and indirect expense might total nearly $2 trillion if the conflict were “protracted and unfavorable.”

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The News from Equality

By way of Lydell, the Chicago Tribune, and the Associated Press, news from Little Egypt:

“EQUALITY, Ill. — No major damage was reported after a minor earthquake shook areas around this small town in southern Illinois on Monday.

“The quake struck at 3:48 p.m. and registered magnitude 3.6, according to Rafael Abreu, a geologist at the National Earthquake Information Center in Denver. It was centered near Equality, which is about 120 miles southeast of St. Louis.

“Abreu said calls from people who felt tremors came from Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky, but the quake was unlikely to have caused any damage.

” ‘There might have been some rattling of objects, but not much more,’ Abreu said.

An earthquake in Southern Illinois? Not too shocking, if for no other reason than the greater Equality area is only 100 miles or so as the crow flies from New Madrid, Missouri, near the center of some of the most powerful earthquakes in U.S. history.

But Equality‘s another matter. Just the name: There’s got to be a story behind that. If a local school district page is to be believed, the town was known as Saline Lick. In the 1820s, the name was changed to honor the settlement’s French heritage; Equality refers to the Egalité of the French revolutionary motto. But neither the name nor the school’s Web page hints at the town’s historical notoriety: A local landowner, John Crenshaw (said in one article to be a grandson of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), is remembered for his part in a sort of reverse Underground Railroad. He and his many cohorts kidnapped free blacks in the north and sell them into slavery. Crenshaw also made a fortune from salt processing, an operation that depended on hundreds of “leased” slaves. (Yes — slavery in the Land of Lincoln; in fact, Lincoln is reported to have been Crenshaw’s guest during a visit to the area in 1840). A tangible piece of this legacy survives: Crenshaw’s place, now called the Old Slave House, still stands a few miles from Equality.

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The 2005 Man of Zeal Award

And the award goes to … George Walker Bush. Again.

The president says allowing the National Security Agency to secretly intercept the communications of whoever the government sees fit to scrutinize ” is a vital tool in our war against the terrorists. It is critical to saving American lives.”

Someday, maybe there’ll be an accounting of all the good work this spying program achieved. Until then, we’ll have to take the president’s word for it. By now, I’ve got a pretty strong opinion of what that’s worth.

Last year, I wrote something brief about Olmstead v. United States. The term “landmark decision” is overused in reference to the rulings of the Supreme Court of the United States. But because of a brilliant dissent by Associate Justice Louis Brandeis that cut through the legalistic myopia of the court’s majority in a 1928 wiretapping case, Olmstead became a fundamental declaration of a right to live free of “every unjustifiable intrusion by the government upon the privacy of the individual, whatever the means employed.”

Of course, the president, his cohorts, and their defenders are a step ahead of Brandeis’s objection. They say what they are doing is not only justifiable, it’s a necessity for “saving American lives.” Again, don’t wait up late for proof — that would be only helping our enemies. And haven’t we done enough for them already?

In Olmstead, Brandeis anticipated justifications such as the one the president proffers now. He wrote: “.. Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding. …”

Men of zeal, without understanding. Engrave it on a plaque. Send it to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

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‘The Highest Attribute of Man’

In — what? — 20 minutes or so, we’ll put another convict to death at San Quentin (and yes, I’m against the death penalty for all the reasons opponents usually give). The case and our governor’s refusal to really consider clemency, much less grant it, made me think about Clarence Darrow’s hours-long summation in the 1924 Nathan Leopold-Richard Loeb case in Chicago. Darrow’s clients had pleaded guilty to killing a 14-year-old boy for no other reason than that they wanted to commit “the perfect crime” and conduct an “experiment in sensation.” The only issue for the judge to decide was whether the killers would be hanged or sentenced to life in prison. Darrow concluded:

Your Honor stands between the past and the future. You may hang these boys; you may hang them by the neck until they are dead. But in doing it you will turn your face toward the past. In doing it you are making it harder for every other boy who in ignorance and darkness must grope his way through the mazes which only childhood knows. In doing it you will make it harder for unborn children. You may save them and make it easier for every child that sometime may stand where these boys stand. You will make it easier for every human being with an aspiration and a vision and a hope and a fate. I am pleading for the future; I am pleading for a time when hatred and cruelty will not control the hearts of men. When we can learn by reason and judgment and understanding and faith that all life is worth saving, and that mercy is the highest attribute of man.

I feel that I should apologize for the length of time I have taken. This case may not be as important as I think it is, and I am sure I do not need to tell this court, or to tell my friends that I would fight just as hard for the poor as for the rich. If I should succeed, my greatest reward and my greatest hope will be that for the countless unfortunates who must tread the same road in blind childhood that these poor boys have trod—that I have done something to help human understanding, to temper justice with mercy, to overcome hate with love.

I was reading last night of the aspiration of the old Persian poet, Omar Khayyam. It appealed to me as the highest that I can vision. I wish it was in my heart, and I wish it was in the hearts of all.

So I be written in the Book of Love,

I do not care about that Book above.

Erase my name or write it as you will,

So I be written in the Book of Love.

What a quaint sentiment, viewed from an age in which our only real public faith seems to be in what we might achieve by force and coercion. (Leopold and Loeb got life sentences (plus 99 years each for kidnapping their victim). Later, Loeb was killed in prison; Leopold was eventually paroled.)