What is It Good For?

[posted by Callimachus]

"Well I'm as much agin killin' as ever sir. But it was this way Colonel: When I started out I felt just like you said, but when I hear them machine guns a goin' and all them fellas are droppin' around me, I figured them guns was killin' hundreds maybe thousands and there weren't nothin' anybody could do, but to stop them guns. And that's what I done." [Alvin York (Gary Cooper) in "Sgt. York"]

You know, I've spent a considerable amount of time, and made no little amount of money, writing about the American Civil War. As time goes by I am more amazed and moved by the heroics of average men at Spotsylvania and Kennesaw. The closer you get, in imagination, to where they stood and what they did, the more astonished I am by their devotion -- Lincoln's well-chosen word. Every summer, if I can, I walk the mile or so from the woods of Seminary Ridge in the steps of Pickett's men to the angle in the low stone wall where the 72nd Pennsylvania stood its ground.

I have a huge pile of research on two communities, one north one south, homefront and in service, that someday could be distilled into yet another book.

And the more I studied it, the more I realized it was an awful tragedy, a horrible mistake. Not just for the dead and maimed. Not least because of this: We watch American government career this way and that, now a swollen presidential head, now a renegade Supreme Court, now a meddling Congress, and yet we still foolishly revere the men who stripped the brakes off the thing back in 1861, the better to subjugate the South.

Saying the war was a mistake, a tragedy, a horror that should have been avoided, means saying American blacks should have remained in slavery, and in some cases suffered unspeakably, until 1900 or 1920 or who knows when. Saying "no" to war doesn't keep your hands above the stain.

I wish Gettysburg was just another run-to-seed central Pennsylvania county town, as obscure in the world's eyes as Carlisle or Hanover or Chambersburg. That field I cross every summer would have gone for a Target store years ago. No one would be any the wiser.

Robert E. Lee

[posted by Callimachus]



Today would have been Bobby Lee's 200th birthday. Someone's thought about him here.

War and War

[posted by Callimachus]

Perhaps it's reading too much history that prevented me from turning against the entire American Iraq experiment. There must be some explanation, because so many folks online who seemed to think like I did at the start of the thing have loudly, painfully, and repeatedly repudiated their earlier positions.

Not that history gives hope for a good outcome. Rather, history informs the initial decision to support the war; it stands like the angel with the flaming sword to warn you what you're doing.

When you support a decision to make war, you agree to let your country drop down a rabbit hole with no idea where you'll come out, except the certainty it won't be anywhere anyone anticipates at the start.

You accept that innocent civilians will be killed in batches, perhaps more of them than enemy combatants. That brave young soldiers will be maimed and crippled while cowardly old men will reap fortunes in armaments. Men will go mad in trenches and some of your own darling boys will wind up no better than monsters and murderers.

You accept that at home suspicions will be kindled, rights roughed up, institutions corrupted. That the people in despair are likely to turn to demagogues.

You accept that you'll acquire allies who are in some ways worse than your enemies. That your government will waste billions in that most wasteful of human activities, war. That it will acquire the incurable habits of a spendthrift.

You accept that reasons for being at war will shift over time once it begins (the only real reason for being at war once one starts being "not to lose it"), as will yardsticks for victory and strategies for reaching them.

That's just history talking at you. You don't wish this to be true. You fervently desire that, this time, it will be different. If you're a believer, you pray that it will be different.

But you accept that it might not be, and deep down, though you must not dwell on it, you know it likely will be as bad as all that. You just hope the country is strong enough to take it and set itself almost right again in the end.

I factored all that into my original, painful decision to support this war of choice by an administration I had little faith in. And though I share my former allies' horror at the way it has been progressing, I don't retract my initial support for the decision. You can't just send the war back because it's not the one you ordered.

Condi's Civil War

[Posted by Callimachus]

Condoleezza makes a comparison between the Iraq War and the American Civil War. As usual, nobody gets it. My newsroom editor's sarcastic reaction was, "So does that mean Robert E. Lee was a terrorist?" But that's typical.

Rice then offered a parallel between critics of the administration's Iraq policies and "people who thought it was a mistake to fight the Civil War (in this country) to its end and to insist that the emancipation of slaves would hold."

"I'm sure that there were people who said, 'why don't we get out of this now, take a peace with the South, but leave the South with slaves.' "

"Just because things are difficult, it does't mean that they are wrong or that you turn back," Rice told the magazine, which has a large audience among African-Americans.

And I suspect she knew who those "some people" were: The Democrats. You can get a lot of mileage out of comparing Bush's situation to Lincoln's, and evidently I do. It's about as useful as any such exercise: Not much, except in forcing people to rise above immediate political passions and think in terms of issues and ethics.

But the comparison Condi seems to be making here has more heft. The Democratic Party platform of 1864 makes interesting reading. The Democrats opposed Lincoln, who had an indifferent record in the state militia and had declined the opportunity to volunteer in the Mexican War, with professional soldier George B. McClellan. And they flanked him on the military side to push an explicitly "end-the-war-now" campaign:

Resolved, that this convention does explicitly declare, as the sense of the American people, that after four years of failure to restore the Union by the experiment of war, during which, under the pretence of military necessity, or war power higher than the Constitution, the Constitution itself has been disregarded in every part, and public liberty and private right alike trodden down, and the material prosperity of the country essentially impaired, justice, humanity, liberty, and the public welfare demand that immediate efforts be made for a cessation of hostilities, with a view to an ultimate convention of the States or other peaceable means, to the end that at the earliest practicable moment peace may be restored on the basis of the federal Union of the States.

The platform doesn't explicitly say "leave the South with slaves." That wasn't they way of political language, then or now. What it does say is "preserve ... the rights of the States unimpaired," which was 1860s poli-speak for the same thing. It also pointedly complains of "the administrative usurpation of extraordinary and dangerous powers not granted by the Constitution ...." Sound familiar? Even though CW isn't her specialty, I bet Condi has read it.

But of course, they also were supporting the troops -- in everything but pushing on to victory:

Resolved, that the sympathy of the Democratic party is heartily and earnestly extended to the soldiers of our army and the seamen of our navy, who are and have been in the field under the flag of their country; and, in the event of its attaining power, they will receive all the care, protection, and regard that the brave soldiers and sailors of the republic have so nobly earned.

It didn't work. Not only did Lincoln win, he outpolled McClellan among soldiers in the field, 119,754 votes to 34,291.

Among the Dead Cities

I so agree with the core of the ethical case presented in A.C. Grayling's "Among the Dead Cities" that I'm surprised how unsatisfying I find the book overall and how much I want to argue with the author.

A.C. Grayling grew up in postwar England, enthralled by the war, and he dreamed of being a fighter pilot. He built models of Spitfires and Lancasters and ran around in the yard with his arms out, dogfighting imaginary Messerschmitts. Yet he grew up to be a philosopher, not a fighter, and he's written a book that argues that much of the Allied air war -- British bombing of German cities and the U.S. bombings of Japanese cities, including the A-bomb attacks -- was an unjustifiable moral crime.

Whether we like it or not, this likely will be the judgment of the future: The area bombing campaigns will be seen as a black mark on a generally just Allied war against fascism and Japanese militarism. Which is not to say I would write such a book. As long as we still greet at family gatherings the veteran pilots and bombardiers, as well as some of the hundreds of thousands of American men whose lives were spared because Japan did not have to be conquered hill by hill, we who benefit from their bravery risk showing disrespect in condemning them via an academic exercise in ethics.

Grayling treads carefully, but I believe sincerely, around this pit. I think he passes the essential test to write this book, for those who can tolerate his conclusion. He is not a neo-Nazi and he denies he is a pacifist. He takes every opportunity his text presents to declare the Allies waged a just war. He never says the moral failure of the area bombing campaigns rises to the level where it overwhelms the justness of the Allies' war.

Nor does he blame the bomber crews or doubt their bravery, though he does mention in his conclusion that, in a perfect world, they would have refused missions known to be aimed at civilians and demanded to be sent against military targets.

Grayling's central precept is that "the means used to conduct the war must be proportional to the ends sought." This notion is not entirely accepted today, he acknowledges, but he shows it to be the essential quality of a just war, as that concept has evolved since Aquinas.

He does not claim the Allied area bombings of 1942-45 were a war crime, in that they violated any international laws then binding on the combatants. But he shows that they would have been considered such if judged by provisions set out by the victorious Allies themselves at the International Military Tribunal, the overseers of the Nuremberg Trials.

He is not concerned here with law so much as morality. Grayling's non-pacifist stance allows him to invoke the doctrine of double effect: "No wrong is committed by the belligerent if the harm he does to innocents is an unaviodable ancillary to military operations -- even if such harm can be foreseen." In other words, if the primary goal is good and legitimate, the negative secondary effect, even if foreseen, is -- not good, but not wrong.

This, too, is a controversial notion and one rejected outright by strict pacifists, for it legitimatizes some collateral damage. Grayling says the proportion doctrine applies:

Take the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: if these were claimed to be attacks on targets of military value, assuming there to have been industrial units or military barracks in these cities which 'military necessity' demanded should be destroyed, dropping an atom bomb on them is the equivalent to chopping off a man's head to cure his toothache, such is the degree of disproportion involved.

He lists the large arguments in favor of such bombing, then pushes them back. Was area bombing worse than what the Germans did to the Jews or the Japanese did in Nanking? Certainly not. But "the fact that a wrong is less than a competing wrong does not make it a right."

Did bombing civilians hasten the end of the war and thus spare the Allies greater battlefield casualties? Some say so. But saving military lives by substituting civilian ones is, Grayling says, like using civilians as human shields on the battlefield.

What's left among justifications are the lesser ones of whether the bombing did in fact have a military objective important enough to justify the civilian deaths and wanton destruction of culture and property. Grayling enlists the many historians who have argued effectively against this conclusion.

I can agree with Grayling about the moral error of the destruction of German cities and the firebombing of Toyko. But I part ways with him on his condemnation of the atomic bombs as identical to the obliteration of Dresden and Hamburg.

Yet I admit he scores points. "Bomber" Harris, who led the air destruction of Germany's cities, believed the air raids themselves would end the war in Europe, defeating the aggressors while sparing hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from death and wounds in an invasion.

This also is the common reason put forth in justification of the use of atomic bombs on Japan. And in the case of Japan, it's arguable (though not uniformly accepted) that it did hasten surrender. Nobody today argues this with regard to Germany. Yet as Grayling already has explained, saving military lives by substituting civilian ones is not morally acceptable, even if it works.

But if the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki really brought the war to a quick end, and spared Japan an invasion or a long starvation blockade, didn't that also save civilian lives? Perhaps ten times as many as were lost? Not just in Japan but in the wide swath of Asia it still occupied in 1945?

The need to wrap up World War II quickly and face the Cold War, which already had begun in 1945, is a grim fact of realpolitik, but not a justification for the A-bombs. There were other and more humane motives for ending the war sooner rather than later.

The option of setting off a bomb in an unpopulated area in view of Japanese leadership, which Grayling favors, seems to present the enormous risk of it not working.

The oddest section of the book is the chapter titled "Voices of Conscience," where he describes the opposition of British pacifists during the war to the bombing of German cities. He focuses on the Committee for the Abolition of Night Bombing, which formed in the summer of 1941 and in the spring of 1942 reorganized as the Bombing Restriction Committee.

He describes and quotes from its criticisms at length. Then he writes that the point of the chapter is to prove the bombing campaigns were controversial at the time and that the objections to them were spelled out and known to the organizers of the bombings. It is a point in the legalistic case he is building against the bombings.

But it feels like more; Grayling quotes extensively throughout his book from the British pacifist novelist and committee member Vera Brittain, who is an eloquent and principled figure even to a non-pacifist. In his own conclusions, he defers to her entirely in certain key matters, writing (probably correctly) that no one could say it better than she did. Yet she was a pacifist, and Grayling claims not to be; he claims to find certain cases of civilian deaths in war morally acceptable, and certain wars justified.

Which makes his choice of voices in this chapter all the more puzzling. He notes, correctly, that not all in the committees were pacifists. But with the exception of the Bishop of Chichester, those he focuses on, and quotes, tend to be absolute pacifists. Most of them would disagree vehemently with his distinguishing one type of war as good and another as bad.

He describes them as:

... people for whom it mattered that the war should be not only a justified one, but a justly fought one, and to whom therefore some of the Allies' actions were unacceptable.

Which makes them sound like a realistic lot who essentially agree with his propositions, not the kind of pacifists who wouldn't even fight Hitler.

As they are meant to be witnesses in his case, it is pertinent to question the competence of the witnesses. Grayling does not, but by consulting other sources we can. These individuals did not spring out of obscure and apolitical lives once news of the Allied bombing reached them.

Grayling quotes much from the organizer of the anti-bombing committee, Corder Catchpool, a British Quaker. Catchpool spent the years after World War I in Germany with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee, "Set up to further the task of reconciliation between the combatant nations. He remained in Germany for a time after the Nazi regime came to power, but his help for Jews attracted the attentions of the Gestapo, and he was arrested and interrogated by them. He returned to England soon afterward."

And there he carried on freely, denouncing the government, publishing, organizing, and opposing the war against the Nazis. Which speaks volumes about the nature of dissent and free societies, which you'd think a philosopher would at least notice, but Grayling seems not to.

"He had no illusions about Nazi Germany," (No? Then why did he claim in 1937 that National-Socialist philosophy "definitely repudiates" world-imperialist ambitions) "but he adhered to his Quaker pacifist principles despite that." I grew up among Quakers, and I am not aware that their principles include standing up for a cause only in a place where doing so won't get you arrested by the Gestapo.

Catchpool was an absolutist pacifist who welcomed the fall of France in 1940 as "the happiest day of my life" because one less nation was at war, and in 1944 he wrote, "I cannot pray for an Anglo-American victory, not even for a quick one." When the German concentration camps were uncovered late in the war, Catchpool did not condone them, but he seemed more concerned that their revelation was "a godsend to our authorities just at this juncture, and that the most is being made of them."

Such attitudes and such minds were what moved George Orwell to the famous conclusion that, in this war, a pacifist was objectively pro-fascist.

Another anti-bombing campaigner cited by Grayling, Stuart Morris, an Episcopal canon, was naive enough that in 1937 he had joined The Link, a British Nazi-sympathizer organization, and a year after the Munich agreement pronounced himself in favor "of giving a great deal more away [to Hitler]. I don't think Mr. Chamberlain has really started yet on any serious appeasement." Morris stood at a by-election in May 1941 on a platform calling for a negotiated peace with Hitler. Shortly before Christmas 1942 he was arrested in possession of "secret details about how Britain would respond to a serious challenge to its position in India." [Ceadel, "Semi-Detached Idealists']

If these were the most vocal opponents of the anti-bombing movement, it's no wonder even Eleanor Roosevelt dismissed their concerns as part of their airy world-view. They happened to be among those who were right about the bombing of civilian targets. But at the time their leadership of the cause rather damaged it than advanced it, by making it odious by association. It's an oft-rehearsed scene in American history -- think of the Abolitionists.

Grayling's book also has an annoying tendency to pick tangential fights and then walk away from them. He hints the defenders of Capt. Henry Wirz, of Andersonville notoriety, are merely a pack of kooky neo-Confederates (they aren't). Even more aggravating, he introduces the notion that the Allied insistence on unconditional surrender in World War II had the effect of "prolonging the war considerably, with consequent great destruction and loss of life," after having pre-emptively backed away from it by saying those were questions for "a different book." His discussion of what does, and does not, constitute just cause for starting a war reads like a line-by-line critique of the Bush Administration's handling of Iraq, but nowhere in it does Grayling step up and mention either by name.

He brings up the Morgenthau plan -- a proposal ginned up in the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C., and temporarily sanctioned by Roosevelt, to dismantle German industry after the war and turn the defeated nation into a demilitarized agrarian region. But Grayling's text nowhere notes that Harry Dexter White, who drew up the plan on Morgenthau's orders, was spying for the Soviet Union and the idea of a passive Germany fit White's vision of a post-war world in which planned economies would rule and the Soviets would dominate Europe. The plan was approved heartily by the Kremlin; it was the British and the U.S. State Department that opposed it.

White's double-dealing is borne out by the VENONA transcripts, even without reference to the Mitrokhin archive, which further bolsters it though that source is not universally accepted. But Grayling, in a footnote, dismisses all this as a whim of "revisionist and neo-Nazi historians" and makes it out to be mere McCarthyism, though he refutes it only with the unsurprising refusal of White's children to believe their father had been a traitor.

Grayling's misstep into the Morgenthau plan is part of an unconvincing section in which he attempts to prove wartime American blood-lust against Germans. In fact, most of the evidence he musters for that seems to me cases of political and publishing mavens trying to whip up anti-German sentiment in a population itself largely of German ancestry that had no particular race hatred for the Germans. Certainly the Americans' animosity toward the Germans was many levels below the mutual viciousness felt by the Americans and the Japanese (see John Dower's excellent book on this).

For the most part Grayling avoids making any explicit connection to modern events; he has drawn his case so narrowly around World War II that his conclusions hardly can be plugged into current event without burying them in a blizzard of caveats. Perhaps it's just as well; in the passage where Grayling tries to explain why all this should matter today, he cites the wording of U.S. military manuals from the 1990s suggesting civilian morale can be a factor in a military campaign.

Ah, those American barbarians! What would have been more interesting is to examine how air power in Afghanistan and Iraq is vastly more careful and conscientious than it was in World War II. But that seems not to interest Grayling. He skips over more pertinent modern examples of Russian bombing of Grozny or the Kurdish towns that were gassed by Saddam in the headlong rush for the easy American target, even if it's only a crime of word-choice.



Not only is the thinking in this book difficult to apply to current issues, it has limited relevance even to World War II. Grayling seems to regard as acceptable military strategy the Anglo-American bombing of French and Belgian cities, such as Caen (above, with Canadian troops at a religious service in 1944), which meted out firestorm destruction worse than many German cities suffered.

The goal in leveling Caen was to kill the German troops in it and allow a breakout from Normandy; the citizens of the town were warned in advance by leaflets that the bombs were coming. Nobody wanted to kill a lot of Frenchmen, as a military objective or otherwise. Yet nonetheless they died in the thousands and a medieval city was blown inside out, with tragic loss of historical and architectural treasures.

Further, because the British front was so close to the town, the bombers deliberately dropped their explosives a safe distance beyond the front, to avoid hitting their own men, which means the bombs apparently missed not only the British troops but the Germans as well and simply fell into the old city to no good purpose.

Grayling declares precision bombing aimed at specific military targets as legitimate and morally acceptable. This exempts most of the raids by the American air forces in Europe from his indictment, since they targeted German oil facilities and similar targets. The American bombing campaign "proved highly effective" and "was proportionate and pertinent; it could also legitimately claim to be a necessary part of the effort to defeat Germany. The area bombing of civilian populations was not necessary."

But this has problems, too. The Americans, in avoiding the heavy concentration of anti-aircraft fire around military targets, dropped from high altitudes and often with little ability to really aim for what they were after. The fact that such military targets as rail junctions and large-scale processing and manufacturing industries tend naturally to be surrounded by dense blocks of homes meant this tactic could be, and often was, as lethal as deliberate city-bombing.

And how do the ethics of air power apply to a ground war? The U.S. Army pushed through central Germany in the spring of 1945, with the German military before it mostly reduced to small ill-trained units, but when the Americans met any sustained resistance they pulled back, called in artillery, and blasted whatever was in front of them, whether it was a wooded ridge or a farming village.

The experience of Neuhof in the Frankenhöhe was typical of hundreds of other small German towns. The 92nd Cav. Recon Squadron reached it toward evening on April 15 and ran into a battle group of young SS soldiers north of the town. The Americans held off and pounded the town with artillery all night. In the morning, they waited for the fog to lift, then blasted Neuhof with phosphorous shells, setting everything ablaze. They attacked again at noon with infantry and tanks, but they still met resistance, so they poured more artillery and tank fire into the town. They finally took it at 5 p.m. that evening.

By that time only a few buildings still stood intact in Neuhof, most of the ancient village having been reduced to a glowing pile of ash and shattered stone. Cries from the wounded, strewn about with a dozen or so dead, intermingled with shouts for help from those still fighting fires and the occasional shots from American tanks to create a Dantesque atmosphere. [Stephen G. Fritz, "Endkampf," p.170]

In measuring the "proportion" and "double effect" rules, a philosopher can be content with images of cutting off heads to cure toothaches. A military commander in the field has to deal in more tangible material. Am I more responsible for protecting the lives of the men in my command than I am for those in the enemy's ranks? Yes. What about their civilians? If I kill 50 enemy soldiers and 1 civilian, is that proportionate? Are 10 civilians? If we have a 60 percent chance of killing Hitler if we bomb a certain city of 20,000 on a certain date without warning, is that legitimate?

These are questions more pertinent to the modern face of warfare. But Grayling's book is mute on them. In the end he's shone such a narrow shaft of illumination that "Among the Dead Cities" doesn't add much to what Billy Sherman said about war and hell.

April

Two lilacs out of the dead land have followed me all this month.




She was old enough to be mother to many of them -- her own daughter turned 20 in 1944 -- but she was sexuality personified, with that low, sultry, German-heavy voice, yet she was sure and at ease in that masculine world of the U.S. Army. She crooned "Lili Marleen" to the boys (and, believe it or not, also performed on the musical saw) as the snow drifted down in Luxemburg. None of them ever forgot it. She was fearless; she wore a GI's uniform and stayed so close to the front lines she almost got caught up in the German push when the Battle of the Bulge began. “Eine Mutter Teresa," Billy Wilder would say later, "aber mit schöneren Beinen.”

Maria Magdalena "Marlene" Dietrich had found herself on the other side of things more than once. Born in Berlin's Schöneberg neighborhood, she acted in German movies and cut records while dancing as a chorus girl in cabarets and in stage plays. She got her break in 1930 with the first European talkie, "Der Blaue Engel." Josef von Sternberg plucked her from a play, where she had only one line, to be his Lola Lola.

The studio heads at UFA weren't impressed. One director's assistant quipped, "The ass isn't bad, but don't we also need a face." But Sternberg insisted. And Marlene found herself in the part.

"Der Blaue Engel" premiered April 1, 1930, in Gloria-Palast, Berlin, and it was an instant hit. The next day, Dietrich departed for America, and Hollywood, aboard the SS Bremen. The German studio had thought her a mere tramp and not offered her a contract.

She was a good German girl who hadn't wanted to go to Hollywood in the first place, and if it weren't for the ambitions of the men in her life, perhaps she would not have gone. She came home again and spent the winter of 1930 in Berlin. When her contract with Paramount was running out two years later, she made plans to return to Germany for good. Her mother even rented an apartment for her in Berlin. But that was in 1933.

Hitler swept to power that year, and Marlene changed her plans. On her trip to Europe that year, she never set foot in Germany, and she renewed her Paramount contract. In 1937 she applied for American citizenship.

Her loyalty to a country came second to her loyalty to a place. That place was Berlin -- and Berlin, unlike Rome, is not an eternal city. It always was a robust, artificial place, the closest thing to an American city in old Europe. The Berlin Marlene knew was the decadent Weimar Republic capital, a heady mix of high and low. Its people had that rarest of German qualities, a sense of humor -- albeit "gallows humor." The Nazis despised Berlin. They didn't like humor, or trade unions, or homosexuals, or outspoken people with opinions, or Jews -- and Berlin was full of all of them.

They didn't like "Der Blaue Engel," either. They called it "mediocre and corrupting kitsch." But they liked Marlene. She was a blonde goddess, an Aryan queen. Hitler wanted her “heim ins Reich zu holen.” In 1936, Goebbels offered her 200,000 Reichsmark per film to come home and be a star in Germany. She replied cynically she would return only when one of her many Jewish friends could accompany her.

When artists and intellectuals began to flee Germany after 1933, they found Marlene already here to greet them. Many of the people involved in the making of "Der Blaue Engel" ended up exiles. Others who remained ended up dead.



The other shade is, in some ways, as unlike Marlene as a human could be. Yet his image in his time, like a movie star's, was made up in part of unforgettable visuals: the perfect white-bearded soldierly figure, mounted on his gray stallion, Traveller. Devout, humble, reserved, aggressive on the battlefield, unfailingly courteous off it. Robert E. Lee was the model of a Southern gentleman.

Lee and Deitrich. Both in their times forced to choose between two loyalties. They chose differently; he chose home, she foresook it. Both traitors, but both heroes.

***

In April 1861, Lincoln quietly approached a cavalry colonel on leave, Robert E. Lee, the former head of the U.S. Military Academy, about heading up the North's army in the war that had just erupted at Fort Sumter. Lincoln must have had a feeling for Lee's divided loyalties, because he chose Francis P. Blair, from the Baltimore gentry family that will give Lincoln the token "Southerner" in his Cabinet, to take the message to Lee. Blair's coach clattered across the Potomac bridge to Arlington House, where Lee had taken a leave of absence from the military to put his wife's inherited estate in order.

He had spent most of his 54 years toiling in the obscurity that was the professional U.S. Army in the 19th century. But his father and uncles had helped forge the American union with their own blood. I've seen the house where "Lighthorse Harry" Lee plotted his escapades as he played cat-and-mouse with the British in the snowbound Pennsylvania countryside in the Valley Forge Winter.

Robert E. Lee in 1861 thought the secession of the Deep South states was a tragic mistake, and unjustified by the constitution. He thought the same when Virginia, in the wake of the Fort Sumter attack, followed them out of the union. He had no special fondness for slavery (he would be among those who argued the South should surrender the institution for the sake of winning the war). But when Blair made his offer, Lee turned him down. Instead, he resigned his U.S. Army commission and offered his services to his home state, Virginia.

"With all my devotion to the Union and the feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen," he wrote to his sister on April 20, 1861, "I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home. I have therefore resigned my commission in the Army, and save in defense of my native State, with the sincere hope that my poor services may never be needed, I hope I may never be called on to draw my sword."

Another Virginia horseman who served the South looked back years later on the decision faced by men such as Lee. As he wrote, he had open before him "The University Memorial, which recorded the names and lives of the alumni of the University of Virginia who fell in the Confederate war," some 200 of them:

“[A]nd some of the noblest men who figure in its pages were Union men; and the Memorial of the Virginia Military Institute tells the same story with the same eloquence. The State was imperiled, and parties disappeared; and of the combatants in the field, some of the bravest and the most conspicuous belonged to those whose love of the old Union was warm and strong, to whom the severance of the tie that bound the States together was a personal grief. But even those who prophesied the worst, who predicted a long and bloody struggle and a doubtful result, had no question about the duty of the citizen. ... The most intimate friend I ever had, who fell after heroic services, was known by all our circle to be utterly at variance with the prevalent Southern view of the quarrel, and died upholding a right which was not a right to him except so far as the mandate of his State made it a right; and while he would have preferred to see “the old flag” floating over a united people, he restored the new banner to its place time after time when it had been cut down by shot and shell."

Lee must have known he was risking everything, including his neck. Arlington was sacked and looted, and turned into headquarters for officers superintending the defenses of Washington. The government took the home, under pretext of Mrs. Lee not paying her taxes, and turned it into a cemetery.

The government may have pardoned Lee, but the people of the North never did. An Ohio newspaper, trying to parse out the proper punishment, suggested "he be hung first and then banished." When Lee was made president of Washington College in Lexington, Va., a Northern minister wrote:

We would as soon send our son to a pest-house for health or to a gambler's den for education, as to send him to this villainous college -- Altogether he stands out the most inexcusable, vilest traitor of the whole crowd of criminals whom he headed -- Every student who receives a diploma at his hands should be hissed through life--A more flagrant, indecent, unspeakable outrrage than his election has never been perpetrated in the name of education."

Why did he do it? Principle, yes. But in his heart, he knew where was "home." And that's where he went to take his gun and stand duty when war came. I think millions of men did that, on both sides, in April 1861. Those who happened to find themselves on the other side of the line, when the line took shape, made their way to where they felt they belonged. That is how people are.

***

When World War II broke out, Marlene Dietrich's career had passed its prime and she had reached that point in the Hollywood trajectory where her best roles were deliberate parodies of herself. She had never stopped thinking in German, and never bothered to Hollywood-ize herself.

Yet when America went to war against Germany, she threw herself into war work with a will. She was one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds, and she followed the troops through North Africa and into Europe in a USO revue. She rolled into liberated Paris with De Gaulle. She recorded anti-Nazi records in German for the OSS -- the precursor of the CIA.

Why do all this? She famously replied, "aus Anstand" – a German phrase that rolls up both "decency" and "the right thing to do."

And some of those boys she sang to near the front then climbed into B-24s and rained down incendiary bombs on Berlin, where her twice-widowed mother, Frau Von Loesch, still lived.

When she met American generals, she would quietly plead with them to get to Berlin, after it fell, and find her mother.

Lt Gen James M. Gavin, US Army retired, then the 82nd Airborne Division's commander and I were two who heard Miss Dietrich's request. Another, Lt Col Albert McCleery, has since died.

Col McCleery and I were in the first American column to enter Berlin on 1 July 1945. Once inside city limits Col McCleery made a beeline for the Von Loesch address, found Miss Dietrich's mother alive and well, but meagerly fed and caring for a 95-year old aunt. Word was sent to Paris to her daughter, who immediately caught a flight to Berlin on the military shuttle, as she was in the USO then. When her estimated time of arrival was known at Berlin's Tempelhof airport, I gathered up Frau von Loesch and two photographers, and took them to meet her.

Frau Von Loesch was instructed to stand alone on the runway's great cement apron and I asked the tower to have a shuttle taxi up for her. When her daughter burst from the plane, it made for one of the most touching reunions of the war.

Later, when Gen Gavin and I were in London, two terrible messages were forwarded to us - the Army had selected the 101st Airborne Division to be the regular Army's postwar airborne unit so the 82nd would be dismantled and Frau von Loesch had died. As our plane flew us back to Berlin, Gen Gavin, softspoken as always and with his own grief about seeing the division which was so much a part of him consigned to oblivion, turned to me and said: "Do everything you can about her". He did not say her name, but it was obvious that he meant Frau von Loesch. After all, the nonfraternization regulation was in existence and no legal interrelationships were possible between Americans and Germans, even concerning burial of dead.

Once on the ground in Berlin, we learned that Miss Dietrich was flying in. There was not much time. I got four 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers to go to a nearby cemetery and dig a grave. A German undertaker was contacted to perform his role, which included the hiring of three professional mourners, who were part of such ceremonies.

Under the cover of darkness, the four paratroopers went to the second-floor flat once occupied by Frau von Loesch, where her body lay in a plan coffin. They took the coffin down the steep stairs, placed it reverently in a truck and transported it to the cemetery, where it was placed in a grave. The sun was about to come up on the dreary scene, so they went into hiding.

Marlene Dietrich arrived, escorted by Time magazine war correspondent William Walton. He had jumped with the 82nd in Normandy and since he was a member of the press, attending a German funeral would not be held against him. The graveside finalities were short. Miss Dietrich cried constantly. At the end of the service, she and William Walton cast handfulls of dirt on the coffin, turned their backs and walked away. That night, the four paratroopers filled in the resting place. It was a macabre scene, as the cemetery had been heavily bombed by artillery. Only the grave of Frau van Loesch was intact.

The cause of death was heart failure. “Ich fühlte," Marlene said, "dass ich nicht nur meine Mutter zur Grabe getragen hatte, sondern dass es das Deutschland, das ich liebte, nicht mehr gibt.”

Berliners never made peace with her while she lived. The press told ugly stories about her, but bad publicity wasn't needed. She felt she was a Berliner, but Berliners felt she was always somewhere else during their long half-century of suffering. When she visited the city in 1960, she was pelted with tomatoes and eggs and told “Marlene, hau ab,"and “Bleib wo du bist.”

She resolved not to go back, and she didn't. She died in Paris in 1992. Some 3,500 turned out for a memorial service in La Madeleine, but there was no official acknowledgement in Berlin. Yet she wanted to be buried beside her mother, in Friedenau Cemetery, in Berlin-Schöneberg. And so she was, in a coffin draped with an American flag.

Political leaders in Berlin-Schöneberg in 1996 tried to name a street for her -- an unglamorous small industrial strip -- but even that ran into insurmountable opposition. A year later, developers named a complex for her in a project they were erecting in what had been a windswept wasteland in the shadow of the Berlin Wall. "She finally found a place in the anonymous glitz of the new Potsdamer Platz," historian David Clay Large wrote, "primarily because there was no living constituency there to keep her away."

One of her online biographies explains, "That her taking the side of the 'enemy' was itself a form of love and loyalty to her homeland, represents an understanding ever elusive in Germany." As it certainly would be anywhere.

War Without End

Every generation has its own Civil War. Now, I think, we have ours.

I haven't yet read "Upon the Altar of the Nation: A Moral History of the Civil War" by Harry S. Stout. But I've been following the reviews and assessments of it since its publication this year. I'll read it after I get through my current pile (which includes John Lewis Gaddis' history of the Cold War and the cranky, brilliant book on the theory of typography by the poet Robert Bringhurst).

There never was a single, stable "Civil War" in the discipline of history, at least as academic historians write it. You get closer to the memories of the soldiers in Bruce Catton, but he's not a historian. You get closer to the battlefield realities in "Red Badge of Courage," but Crane wasn't a historian, either.

Historians bring their agendas to their typewriters. They agree on the dates of the battles, but not much else. The disagreement is not so much among contemporaries as it is between generations.

A century ago, at a time of high immigration and social unrest in America, the emphasis in Civil War works was on the consistency of white American and constitutional values on both sides.

Ella Lonn's "Desertion During the Civil War," written in 1927, long has been a standard reference work on its topic. Yet Lonn seems to be writing with an eye on her own time, in the wake of World War I, which brought up a great many of the ugly things in American democracy that we think only emerged during the Cold War. She alludes to it often, and seems intent on pointing out that the horrors of war -- any war -- are more worthy of note than the characters of men who desert from armies.

The key passage of her introduction is this one:

The writer ventures the hope that by turning a search-light on a question which could scarcely have found a tolerant reading a few decades ago, a few persons will, perchance, be led to a more tolerant view in discussing and pondering the problems of our recent World War on which passions are still inflamed.

In the '50s and '60s, the war was invoked to prove Marxism. In the 1980s, historians rewrote it yet again to emphasize the role of slavery and blacks, in part in response to contemporary social justice issues as perceived by the historians.

No lesser person than the reigning dean of American Civil War historians, Prof. James McPherson, has eschewed objective reality. He has said the process of "doing history," not the reconstruction of an elusive truth, is the goal:

I think it's probably true that in a literal sense it's impossible to establish objective, historical truth. My feeling about this is let a thousand flowers bloom' -- is that the Chinese saying? That's the nature of the writing of history, that it's constantly in flux and in contestation. That's what makes it interesting. The ideal of an objective truth about history is a will of the wisp, I don't think there is any such thing. History is basically what we think about what happened in the past, what we think it means. And everybody is going to have a somewhat different perspective on that, or different schools of interpretation are going to have different perspectives on that.

The the American Civil War would have a new birth of scholarship after 9/11 was inevitable. An astute observer even could see the shape it would take, as newspaper started invoking the Civil War in strange and unexpected ways.

"Unexpected" because in the previous generation of scholarship, the war had been presented as a tale of unremitting aggression and venality by the Southern planter class. The North was, at most, a passive partner in the union, pricked into indignation by the "slaveocrats" and their insatiable lust for control. The South provoked the war, and the North, though somewhat unwillingly, gradually awoke to its true calling and embraced the idea of liberating the slaves as the central theme of its cause. McPherson, as much as anyone, is responsible for delineating this version.

But after 9/11, in the columns and essays written by opponents of an aggressive U.S. war against the Taliban and al-Qaida, the grim, grizzled face of William T. Sherman began to appear. His furious slash-and-burn march through Georgia in 1864 was invoked as an instance of "American terrorism."

To the invokers, Sherman's March was a convenient image. They felt frustration over the U.S. government's tendency to brand the "terrorism" label on everything it doesn't like while it turns a blind eye to brutality by its allies. So these people wrote reminders of America's own record of "terrorism." In addition to the genocide of the native peoples and the Vietnam War and Hiroshima, the march through Georgia joined the short list.

To those of us who followed the Civil War for some time, hearing the liberal/left wing of the American political spectrum implicitly sympathize with the South (by reclassifying Sherman's march from "act of liberation" to "act of terrorism") was astonishing. The same side that always execrated everything Confederate, right down to the flag, now found it convenient to wave the bloody shirt over Sherman's march.

Now that the contemporary topic of obsession is the U.S. war in Iraq, and the overall "War on Terrorism," as waged by the Bush Administration. Can you guess the uses that a professor of American religiouus history at Yale would make of this?

From Publishers Weekly:

In the Civil War, Union and Confederate soldiers alike marched to battle believing God was on their side. Stout, professor of American religious history at Yale (The New England Soul), artfully and eloquently examines the evolving rhetoric of warfare, both Northern and Confederate, within the rubric of "the just war" theory of conflict. Stout ... makes clear that most high-minded utterances obscured, rather than clarified, the economic issues that lay at the heart of the conflict. Stout argues that even today the moral justifications for the carnage ring louder than do the sordid dollar-and-cents realities that underlay sectional differences. ... Stout's contention that even the North engaged in immoral acts in prosecuting the war will rattle many, but the questions he raises are important in an era when humanitarian justifications for war are increasingly common.

From Booklist:

Stout's ambitious yet compelling thesis is that Americans' sacred devotion to their nation and its symbols is the product of massive blood sacrifice; as the war transformed from a just defensive war fought for politics and necessity into a moral crusade in which both sides fought under the banner of freedom, bloodshed infused Americans with new conceptions of nationhood and new depths of horror.

From the book jacket:

When the nation tore itself apart during the Civil War, the North and the South marched under the banner of God. Yet the true moral aspects of this war have received little notice from historians of the period. In this gripping volume, Yale religious historian Harry S. Stout demonstrates how both groups’ claims that they had God on their side fueled the ferocity of the conflict and its enduring legacy today. ... Stout reveals how men and women were ensnared in the time’s patriotic propaganda and ideological grip and how these wartime policies continue to echo in the debates today.

Emphasis added throughout. Land sakes, you hardly have to read between the lines to see where this is going. The only really amusing thing for me is to watch the fluttering eyelids and trembling shock as students of history as it has been written awake to the fact that "even the North engaged in immoral acts in prosecuting the war." Can you believe it!? Those of us who have found much to sympathize with in the South's storyline and who have been slapped down as "slavery apologists" or "racists" for it, will get a chuckle or two out of this, no doubt.

Just because the North was atrocious doesn't make the South justified, of course, but so many people have been so insistent over the years on a good guys-bad guys version of the thing. Wake up and smell the nuance!

As for the Civil War's relevance to contemporary issues, I agree with the conclusion of this less-than-positive review of Stout's book by the fascinating Ross Douthat.

A decade after Appomattox, faced with a situation similar to ours in Iraq — a society half-reshaped and restive, a low-level insurgency, a mounting financial cost — the North elected to abandon Reconstruction, return power to the defeated slaveholders, and forsake the people it had fought a war to free. For a long time they were praised for it by pro-Southern historiographers who saw Reconstruction the way the Left sees the Iraqi occupation, as an overzealous attempt to impose a way of life by force on an unwilling culture. Later it was pointed out that Reconstruction was hardly worse than the apartheid that came after and that perhaps the North should have stayed longer and done more to root out the pathologies of the conquered South.

The choice is no easier in hindsight than it was in 1876. Nor are other wartime dilemmas: People are still arguing over Hiroshima 50 years later; they will still be arguing over Iraq a century hence. Just-war theory is a noble attempt to ease the tensions between Christian ethics and the nature of warfare, but neither Christians nor armchair statesmen should pretend that these tensions don’t exist. The choice between justice and necessity, or a greater justice and a smaller one, is perhaps the most difficult that any nation faces, and where we differ on which end to choose we would do well to heed Lincoln’s admonition and judge not lest we be judged.

"Team of Rivals"

I'm working on a review of "Team of Rivals." This is the rough draft. It's way too long to run, so I'll probably have to cut it in half.

Salmon Chase knew he had a silly name, and he was embarrassed by it, because he thought himself destined to be president of the United States.

He considered changing his name and came up with "Spencer de Chaucey," which, if possible, was worse than Salmon Chase. That says a good deal about why Chase never got to be president, despite his tremendous intellectual gifts, self-discipline and high moral sensibility. He had a tone-deaf awkwardness around his fellow men.

That's one of the tidbits I learned in "Team of Rivals," Doris Kearns Goodwin's latest book, a narrative about Abraham Lincoln and four key members of his presidential cabinet he assembled in 1861, three of whom had been his rivals in seeking the Republican nomination just a few months before.

Most of the book's first third consists of the entwined parallel political biographies of Lincoln, Chase and William Seward. Edwin Stanton enters the book later, and by a different route. Edward Bates' appearance is patchy, since he spent most of the crucial pre-war years in cheerful domestic retirement with his wife and 17 children until the crisis of 1860 lured him back into politics.

Their stories are the stories of the times; political men of the North and border states who gravitate from the center into the radical Republican party under the pressure of a fracturing national political system.

The most memorable of them, after Lincoln, is Seward, the consumate, charming New York politician, with his own Karl Rove-like figure in Thurlow Weed to do the dirty work while Seward kept his hands, mostly, clean.

The 1860 Republican nomination was supposed to be his coronation. But he had made too many enemies on his ascent to the throne. Chase, too, expected the nomination as a just reward for a lifetime of devotion to the causes that formed the Republican platform. In this clash of titans, Lincoln played the game of being the modest candidate who would be every delegate's second choice. Then he waited for the plot to spin out.

It was a masterful bit of politics, relying on a little luck, a little chicanery, and the sort of back-room deal-making that drained out of American life in the late 20th century. It is sobering to realize that under the current primary system, a Lincoln never would stand a chance of being nominated, much less elected.

Chase and Seward had burning ambitions to be president, while Lincoln had an ambition to be great among his fellow men.

The best quality of this book is the wealth of material Goodwin gathers on the lives of the four cabinet members, most of which will be new even to readers roughly familiar with 19th century American history. This richness renders the long blanks in Lincoln's history all the more stark. There's little new here on Lincoln himself, because the thin file that exists on his background has been hashed and re-hashed for decades.

After the imbroglio of the wild 1860 election, however, the book settles down into a conventional history of the Northern government during the Civil War. The "rivals" become less important, except as mirrors to reflect Lincoln as he grapples with the war.

Still, it's like seeing a familiar scene from a different perspective. There is a well-known daguerreotype of Lincoln's inaugural, taken from out in the crowd, looking up the Capitol steps. This book feels like seeing the same scene from the seats behind the new president, looking out past his shoulders.

Goodwin's starry-eyed Lincoln biography grows whiggish. If some crisis erupts and Lincoln does nothing, then his masterly inactivity proves his genius. If some crisis erupts and he makes a sudden change, then the bold stroke proves his genius.

Goodwin swallows whole Lincoln's assertion that he read instinctively the temper of the Northern people, and took no step, however necessary, before he felt the public was mentally prepared for it. This, too, of course, she considers evidence of his genius.

But as it is impossible to rewind the tape of history and do it another way, no one, including Goodwin, knows if Lincoln was right or not. Certainly the violent explosion of resistance to the military draft suggests Lincoln sometimes read the people poorly. But that whole affair is passed over in a few paragraphs in Goodwin's book, even though conscription was as contentious in 1862 as emancipation, to which Goodwin devotes many pages.

Very well; republics need secular saints, and long ago we decided Lincoln was to be one of ours. Centuries before that, the historians of Athens and Rome larded their chronicles with palpable fables to give the people objects of national veneration. At least with a purely fictional Numa or Theseus, you don't have the embarrassment of explaining the awkward things he really did.

Such as Lincoln's appalling transgressions of basic American rights and separations, in the name of presidential war powers. There come points where even a staunch apologist like Goodwin can't justify what was done in the North. Then she turns to the shabby lawyer's trick of abusing the plaintiffs. Everyone opposed to the administration is a traitor, or a drunk, or both.

Southerners, needless, to say, come off uniformly evil in this book, a grossly deformed race of "slaveocrats." All Constitutional scruples by Southern men are swept aside, and all their words and deeds written off as the product of a love of slavery. Calhoun and Taney are mere cardboard characters; Confederate vice president Alexander Stephens, Lincoln's one-time friend, barely raises his head. The murderous John Brown here is a mere "abolitionist," more muddled in his tactics than wrong in his aims, while it's the Southern reaction to him that is "zealous."

Still, there are revelations. I have spent much of the past five years researching and writing on the woefully understudied topic of slavery in the Northern states, but not until I read this book did I realize that Seward himself was raised in a New York slaveowning family.

Goodwin also is excellent in writing on the role of wives (and in some cases daughters or others who stood in as surrogates) in political life.

She deals ably with the topic of the warmth of male friendships in "an era when close male friendships, accompanied by open expressions of affection and passion, were familiar and socially acceptable."

How amusing that the Victorians can shock us prudish modern folk with the image of American men sharing beds, walking arm-in-arm, and writing frankly to one another of love and jealousy. Overheated modern imaginations conjure up rumors of homosexuality out of this material (Lancaster's James Buchanan is a frequent target), and if Goodwin had been so inclined she could have called her book "Team of Lovers" and probably convinced a great many gullible readers.

Instead, she dismisses all this nonsense and sanely quotes a modern historian of the period, to the effect that this "preoccupation with elemental sex" reveals more about us and our times than about them and theirs.

Goodwin is a competent prose stylist. If she never writes a line that sticks in the memory, she never writes the sort of grammatical train wreck sentences historians seem prone to producing.

Yet through all her black-and-white vision of the Civil War, Goodwin's Lincoln emerges from this book with his famous mercy for Southerners intact. And it is Chase, the least attractive figure in the book, who is the most strident abolitionist. Had she thought more about that, Goodwin might even have made a better book than this one, though this one is good enough.

Worst President

A group of historians voted on the 10 worst presidential blunders of all time. I generally agree with numbers 2 through 10.

So who had the worst blunder? President James Buchanan, for failing to avert the Civil War, said a survey of presidential historians organized by the University of Louisville's McConnell Center. ... Scholars who participated said Buchanan did not do enough to oppose efforts by Southern states to secede from the Union before the Civil War.

Sigh.

When South Carolina seceded in 1860, James Buchanan asked his attorney general, Jeremiah Black (an honest Pennsylvanian who later served Lincoln, too), to outline the constitutional position on the matter. Black concluded that, in effect, the secession was illegal, but the executive branch had been given no power to do anything about it.

Buchanan acted accordingly, scrupulously constitutional to the end. Lincoln followed him and in essence ignored the Constitution, forced the union to hold together, and let Congress write the necessary changes after the fact. No bonus points for guessing which leader is revered in history and which routinely makes "worst presidents" lists, including this one.

It was Lincoln's election victory, not Buchanan, that brought on the crisis of 1860. Buchanan was a lame-duck president from a broken political party, without a smidgen of popular backing, North or South. In the months between Lincoln's election and his inauguration, Buchanan lived amid swirling talk of coup. A GOP senator prayed that "some Brutus ... would arise and remove him from the scene of his earthly labors." A Chicago editor wrote that if Buchanan showed his face there, "he would be hung so quick that Satan would not know where to look for his tratorious soul."

So far from supporting the South, Buchanan denied its right to secede, especially if the pretext was nothing more than the election of a president who was likely to violate Southern rights. Yet Buchanan, and many other capable observers, did not find in the Constitution as it was then written the power of the federal government to attack a state. And Congress, not the president, had the authority to levy troops, alter the Constitution, and revamp the relationship between the federal government and the states.

As it was, Buchanan defended the federal government's property where he was able to do so, principally at Fort Sumter. He made clear that he considered it his duty to collect revenues in Southern ports. He stared down the South Carolinans time after time when they demanded its surrender. At one point, Buchanan wrote to Gov. Francis W. Pickens of South Carolina, "If South Carolina should attack any of these forts, she will then become the assailant in a war against the United States. It will not then be a question of coercing a State to remain in the Union, to which I am utterly opposed, ... but it will be a question of voluntarily precipitating a conflict of arms on her part ...."

He hardly had the resources to do more than hold the line: The entire U.S. Army numbered barely 16,000 men, mired in red tape, scattered across the Indian frontier and led by aged and infirm Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, who even before the election had published his opinion that the country ought to be divided into four separate confederacies.

The Constitution did not allow the president to call out a huge American army and impose his will on any place that displeased him. That is a modern view. It was invented, in part, by Lincoln.

To dismiss Buchanan's adherence to the Constitution as a cover to allow treason, as some historians do, is to write off the foundation of the American republic and the genius of the Founders. It overlooks the seriousness with which Americans once regarded their balanced government and its institutions.

During the crisis, Lincoln sat in Springfield and said nothing, baffling even his friends. The other Republican leaders, behind Seward, pursued a policy of "masterly inactivity," in a misplaced belief that Southern unionist could reign in the secessionists. The session of the 36th Congress that met in December merely made long speeches that nobody read. It voted no emergency measures, it raised no new troops. In short, nobody with the opportunity did differently than Buchanan was doing.

Any active step Buchanan might have taken would involve the incoming administration in inextricable complexities. Declare war on the Confederate States of America? Then that would acknowledge them as a sovereign power, and invoke international laws. Declare martial law? And throw Maryland and Virginia into turmoil, which would have made Lincoln's inauguration difficult, if not impossible? He had to sneak through Maryland after dark, as it was.

When Buchanan turned the government over to Lincoln, on March 4, 1861, only seven states had seceded. Virginia and Tennessee had confronted secession and rejected it at that time. Buchanan's policies let that happen. Together, Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas represented half the future CSA's population and resources and held key military installations and armories. Thanks to Buchanan's touch, Lincoln still had a chance to hold them.

Even more important, Maryland, without which the North would have had to abandon Washington, D.C., remained in the Union. Secession sentiment ran strong there. Lincoln in his turn only managed to hold the state's loyalty by martial law.

To blame Buchanan because he "did not do enough to oppose efforts by Southern states to secede" is to blame Buchanan for not being Lincoln. Yes, let's face the unpleasant facts. Buchanan was not Lincoln. If he had been Lincoln, he would have provoked the South, bypassed the Constitution, suspended civil liberties, jailed thousands without charges, thrown an untried army into meat-grinder battles under incompetent generals, offered to guarantee slavery if the South returned, then turned around and abolished it -- but only in the places where he had no power over it.

Buchanan, arguably, could have done this, but I doubt it would have improved his historical reputation.

Team of Rivals

I'm reading "Team of Rivals," and I'll probably write a book review of it for someone. Much of it is familiar ground, but even then, seeing certain facts gathered together illuminates them.

Always when you write a review, lack of space will crowd out observations you want to make.

For instance, Doris Kearns Goodwin won points with me by quoting "Spoon River Anthology." When did Americans stop reading Edgar Lee Masters? During what post-modernist spring cleaning did the keepers of the academic shrine toss out his idol, and what multi-cultural thing did they set up in its place? Surely the start of our national decline must have come not long after that.

But I probably won't find room to mention Masters.

With this book, though, something keeps punching through her thesis (which I don't think is terribly notable or important) to almost wrest control of the narrative. Yet I probably won't mention it in reviewing, because I'm not sure whether it's genuinely important or just a fascination of mine.

When I read early 19th century biographies and life stories I always notice the fearful swath death cut through young families. Seeing five different biographical stories overlaid, as in "Team of Rivals," makes that effect all the more dramatic.

Edwin Stanton lost his daughter to scarlet fever, then three years later his wife, Mary, at age 29. He buried her in a bridal gown and was distraught for months; his sister had to come live with him as he stalked the house at night, from room to room, with a lantern, sobbing and screaming, "Where is Mary?" At the time he was the leading lawyer in Jefferson County, Ohio, with a hand in almost every case, and the entire spring court session had to be canceled while his wits were lost. His younger brother, a medical student, suffered a fever that damaged his brain and he took his own life by puncturing his throat with a medical tool.

Salmon Chase lost his first wife after 18 months of marriage from complications in childbirth. She was only 23. The daughter she bore died of scarlet fever at age 5. Chase fell in love with and married a friend of his wife, but their daughter also died, and tuberculosis felled the mother at age 25. Chase married a third time, to a society belle in Cincinnati, but of their two daughters only one lived past a year and the mother soon died as well. By 44, he had buried three wives and three daughters. He never remarried, and the sole surviving child, Kitty, was his brilliant "first lady" throughout his political career.

The Sewards lost a baby daughter to smallpox in 1837. William tried to bring his wife, Frances, with him in his political posts, but she prefered to stay home. She wrote to a woman friend, "you can very well understand that I am more happy to be here -- There is a sort of satisfaction, menancholy it is, in being once more in the room where my darling babe lived and died -- in looking over her little wardrobe -- in talking with those who missed and loved her."

Lincoln himself, as a young man, lost the three women he most loved: his mother, his sister, and Ann Rutledge; the death of the latter threw him into a suicidal despair. Mary Lincoln never recovered mentally from the loss of her 3-year-old son, Eddie, in 1850, after she nursed him in vain as tuberculosis tore through his body in seven weeks.

Researchers into early nineteenth century families quickly come to accept the high death rates among children as a fact of life in those days. Families were large, medicine was crude, disease ran rampant, and it seems no family was untouched by the tragedy of a child lost.

We tend to think of death as a country for the old. It was not so then. People of all ages were vulnerable, the cold calculus of contagation meant that often if a disease got into a household parents would lose some or all of their children in a matter of days.

Parental bereavement came not only by the sudden stroke of a gunshot or accident; with tragic frequency they had to watch, deperate and powerless as death took its agonizing time with their children, who writhed as parasites dissolved their bowels or languished delirious in parching fevers. Nowadays, parents who lose a child have to go in search of support. No one, it seems, really knows how to talk to them. Parental bereavement is alien to most of us. But 150 years ago, death of a child was a common denominator among American families.

All this first struck me ten years ago when I wrote a cinder-block-sized history of a small city in Pennsylvania. In this comparatively wealthy and healthy place, as many as a third of the children born in the early 1800s died before age 10. I was reading through fat caches of letters, mainly to sort out the political evolutions of that turbulent time and trace the rise of the Republican party from wind-blown threads of abolitionists, Know-Nothings, and other fringes.

But I kept meeting family tragedies. Such as Townsend Haines, a leading political lawyer who left a voluminous correspondence and who had lost a young daughter, Sarah, in 1824.

Haines wrote to Congressman Charles Miner on Christmas Day, 1828, in a jolly, joking tone full of puns and absurd allusions. In the middle of a page he abruptly broke off the style. “I once thought I never would write such a letter again; I'll tell you why,” he wrote. “When at Harrisburg [as a state legislator] I was in the frequent habit of indulging myself in this foolish way. Among the rest whom I wrote to in this manner was Williamson, and in a day after my letter had started I got news from W. Chester that W. Williamson had the misfortune to lose his child—you remember it. I would have given a great deal to have had my letter back, but it was on the road, and all I could do was send another, sincerely apologizing for my heedless folly.”

Miner would have understood. He had lost an infant daughter in 1813, and his three children born between 1818 and 1823 had all died before they turned 2. After Miner had retired, a friend wrote requesting to name his son after him. Miner replied that he would be honored. “But, with my prayers for, and my Blessings on, the boy, let me beg of you, while you call him Charles, that, for the middle name you substitute another than mine. The early loss of a lovely child named fully after me, by my excellent friends John and Sybilla Townsend, leads me tremblingly to fear, where I should dearly love, and causes the judgment to disapprove the earnest wish.”

One of the leading men in the town in the second quarter of the 19th century fathered eleven children, eight of whom died before age 23. In the space of about five weeks, croup killed three young children of a local shoemaker and his wife.

Four daughters, age 8 to 14, fell sick in a single night in a family living in a tenant house. Within days, two were dead. The mother and son, 17, also fell ill, and three days after the death of the daughters the son followed them to the grave. A local woman from a wealthy family was among those who visited the afflicted, and soon one of her children also fell sick with the mystery disease. At the same time another family lost two children within a few days, including a son who fell sick at midnight and was dead by five a.m.

The town was in a panic. Some 140 years later, reading the simple description of the symptoms in the rag-paper newsprint, a modern reader with just a casual knowledge of medicine can recognize at once an outbreak of spinal meningitis. But the people you are reading about had no clue.

Scarlet fever broke out in the house of a local doctor in January 1854. It killed a son, age 3 years and 3 months, and three days later another, age 9 months, died of an inflammation of the lungs probably related to the fever. Three days after that the oldest son, less than a month past his eighth birthday, also died of scarlet fever. Their mother, Harriett, expressed her grief in a death notice in the local newspaper, grasping for solace in sentiment: “In one short week, what hath not death wrought? What desolation! What crushing of fond hopes! What agonizing grief! Thrice the blow has fallen on bleeding hearts, and thrice the Reaper has bidden a fire-side flower to the garden of God, and the harvest-home of Heaven. First, the prattling boy, then the nestling babe, then the eldest born. ‘Lovely and pleasant their lives, in death they were not divided.’ ”

In an 1837 letter, Haines gave a detailed description of a child’s funeral, under the direction of the Rev. Groff of the Presbyterian Church:

At the funeral of Mr. Williamson’s little boy, before the corpse was removed from the house, [Groff] held a meeting and went through the Service of the church. He gave out a few verses of the Psalm, and his, and a female voice, were the only two that sung. The melody was sweet, plaintive, and soothing, and all could feel that the heart went up in the Voice of thanks-giving with deep and reverent devotion. The hymn ended: he preached the resurrection of the dead. After some general remarks on this new evidence of the necessity of preparation, and repentance; he spoke of the resurrection of the body, and, addressing himself to the mourners, he told them their son had left them only for a little time: that they would again meet him in the same body, bearing the same appearance as when he played before them, and that they would know him as their son, and he would know them as his father & mother. I had never heard the doctrine of the resurrection of the body carried out to this extent before, and could not conceive of any belief so consoling to relatives and friends. I almost hoped they would believe it, although such consolation would be denied to me. It is a doctrine which is predicated on human attachments, without even the gloss of reason to support it.

All of this had to warp the lives of men and women, their marriages, their surviving children. For one, huge family sizes and ever-present threat of death may have kept parents from forming closer attachments to their children. Haines wrote yet again of a child’s death in 1838. He mentioned to his correspondent a mutual acquaintance who had suffered such a loss, and he said the man “had suffered his affections to entwine themselves so closely round his son that it was almost death to separate them. This ought to be avoided if possible, and while I could live only for my children I deny myself that exquisite pleasure, lest they be required to leave me.” Haines and his wife, Ann, had four sons and two daughters after little Sarah’s death in 1824, but the last son, Caleb, named for Townsend’s father, died on March 28, 1844, just after he turned 5.

It's remarkable that a tragedy so pervading, and so intense, has not been more considered by historians in examining the temper of the times. This grim fact of life seems to me to explain so much about the shape of 19th century American minds, especially where they seem different from ours: The determination to make something of oneself, the importance of family.

As Haines' letters suggest, not just the intensity of American religion but the form of it, so full of resurrection and the need to keep in God's good graces at every moment, seems to have been guided by the realities of death in that era. The hope of meeting in another world and knowing one another in the flesh again was the only solace. Lincoln, lacking it, was thrown into despair by the loss of Ann Rutledge.

[Lincoln's religion, or lack of it, has been from time to time a topic of hot argument. But, tellingly, the argument has gone on mostly among those less acquainted with the full details of the case. Historians of the times seem generally to accept that, whatever changes time wroght, Lincoln as a young man lacked Christian belief.]

Others, faithful, were able to bear the loss by convincing themselves of this theology. Mary Todd, after her child's death, threw herself into the bosom of the Presbyterian church, while Chase, who always was devout, was tormented because his first wife had died without fully affirming her Protestant faith.

Given that, I wonder if it is mere coincidence that the decline in religious intensity among the mass of Americans seems to have begun within a generation of the decline of the child death rate, reversed when medical men and women finally began to understand, and beat back, tuberculosis, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, and whooping cough.

Is it possible, too, that the thwarted loves from so many death-stalked families found outlet in furious activity? Goodwin seems to notice this when she points out that, of all the Lincoln rivals she writes about, only Edward Bates had a happy family life -- and Bates was the least politically active of the group. He retired early to his home and only reluctantly came back to the partisan fray. Would Lincoln or Chase have been so passionate for political success if their family lives had been happier? Would there have been a President Lincoln if little Eddie had lived? If Ann Rutledge had lived?

OUT of me unworthy and unknown
The vibrations of deathless music;
"With malice toward none, with charity for all."
Out of me the forgiveness of millions toward millions,
And the beneficent face of a nation
Shining with justice and truth.
I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,
Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln,
Wedded to him, not through union, But through separation.
Bloom forever, O Republic,
From the dust of my bosom!

I Spy

Ross, filling in at Andrew Sullivan's place (wasn't that a TV show in the '80s?) has a point here:

While more legally-minded types bicker over the legitimacy of the Bush wiretapping, it's worth pointing out that the odds of this fracas redounding to the Democrats' long-term benefit are somewhere between slim and none. Let's suppose, for the sake or argument, that John Dean is right, and Bush just became "the first President to admit to an impeachable offense." The Democrats aren't going to try impeaching him for it - they aren't that stupid, are they? - so all that the offense does, in the public mind, is add to the existing perception of the GOP as the party that sometimes goes too far and skirts the law in the pursuit of national security objectives. And it's almost always better to be tagged as "the party that might go too far" than as "the party that won't go far enough" - which is how the Democrats are perceived these days. This explains why the GOP can weather controversy after controversy, from Iran-Contra down through Iraq War intelligence and the secret prisons and CIA waterboarding, and still hang on to the public trust on foreign affairs - because in each case, they're perceived as having gone too far with good intentions, 24-style, and in an arena that most Americans perceive as being slightly outside the law anyway.

I've been following the NSA domestic spying matter from a distance, and don't have much to say on it yet. Except that I'm pleased with how it's unfolding. As unsavory as the activity seems, the legal minds make the point that it may yet fall under the aegis of the Constitution, in the ways we've stretched that document over the years.

Meanwhile, leaders in both parties are making the call for a Congressional investigation of this, which is the right way to get at the core of the matter, unless bloviation happens.

Even Cheney is playing his proper role, making the unpleasant case for an unpleasant behavior. Someone has to. Funny how he was pictured today getting into a military helicopter with the nickname Devil's Advocate (though Reuters, perhaps stung by the "al-Reuters reputation, cropped out the name in its version of the chopper pic).

As long as this system is functioning, it will correct itself. It's one of the lessons of American history that overzealous bids to preserve order at the expense of law, and ham-handed prosecutions, eventually recoil. Our national system is not perfect, it's dynamic. When you push on the people's civil rights, they eventually push back. And the most dramatic advances in freedom have come after the most serious transgressions. Ever since the Zenger trial in 1735, American civil right have emerged stronger from every attempt to cramp them. Almost 200 years alter, John Scopes lost his "monkey" trial in Tennessee. But the trial itself turned the hearts of Americans.

The authorities may bully, and they may have the strong arm, but eventually the case goes to court or the legislative chamber, and there the rights tend to win the day. As long as eloquence can come to their aid, personal liberties will triumph. The outcome of a particular case is no matter. Our love of liberty triumphs, in a Hollywood ending, over our yearning for order and the fear of the strange.

People tend to forget how bad it's gotten in the past. Like Global Warming activists, they tend to behave as though everything sailed along on an even keel until the day George W. Bush stepped across the threshhold of the Oval Office.

Lincoln in 1861 faced a legal fog in defining his enemy and delineating his war. He twisted a corkscrew path through the laws and the Constitution to extend his own powers as president to meet a new situation that the existing laws seemed, to him, insufficient to address. He did so to recruit and maintain a large standing army to fight a modern war, and in doing so he broke the Constitution he had sworn to uphold.

He did so in sweeping aside civil rights, including habeas corpus, and filling Northern jails with men never charged with any crime. He shut down anti-government newspapers and spied on peace movements. He did so in full knowledge that his nation was full of dissent, and his agents couldn't, or didn't care to, distinguish honest loyal opposition from active treason.

Lincoln had at his back a Congress driven by his allies. And he managed to skillfully avoid the courts. When he couldn't avoid them, he defied them.

Chief Justice Roger B. Taney denounced the notion of arbitrary military arrest and defended civil liberties, and pointed out that only Congress had the right to suspend habeas corpus. And he admitted he could do nothing to enforce his ruling in the face of a military force "too strong for me to overcome." Taney wrote as defiantly as any anti-Bush zealot today. And the cause for his wrath was more immediate and dangerous than the Patriot Act:

“I can only say that if the authority under which the constitution has confided to the judicial department and judicial officers, may thus, upon any pretext or under any circumstances, be usurped by the military power, at its discretion, the people of the United States are no longer living under a government of laws but every citizen holds life, liberty and property at the will and pleasure of the army officer in whose military district he may happen to be found.”

Lincoln then wrote out standing orders for Taney's arrest.

The Maryland legislature denounced "the present military occupation of Maryland" as a "flagrant violation of the Constitution." Secretary of State William Seward then ordered a lightning raid across the state that jailed 31 legislators, the marshal of the Baltimore City Police Force and the Board of Police Commissioners, the mayor of the city, a former Maryland governor, members of the House of Delegates from Baltimore City and County, the 4th District congressman, a state senator and newspaper editors (including Francis Scott Key's grandson). Ft. McHenry (of "Star Spangled Banner" fame) had a darker chapter in these days as the "Baltimore Bastille." Many of those arrested by federal officials were never charged with crimes and never received trials.

In the fall, Lincoln arrested allegedly disloyal members of the state legislature (Sept. 12-17, 1861), to prevent them from attending a meeting that could have voted on secession. But Maryland was not really safely in the Union until the November state elections. Federal provost marshals stood guard at the polls and arrested known Democrats and any disunionist who attempted to vote. The special three-day furlough granted to Maryland troops in the Union army, so they could go home and vote, further rigged the election. The result, not surprisingly, was a solidly pro-Union legislature. The next year, state judges instructed grand jurors to inquire into the elections, but the judges were arrested and thrown into military prisons.

Flip through the pages of U.S. government and military communiques from Maryland in these months (they're in the "Official Records") if you really want to see a government repressing dissent:

... I have adopted stringent measures to secure quiet but they are so ordered as to attract no notice. The regiments are well drilled to street-firing and in half an hour I can have 1,000 men in any part of the city; in forty minutes five times that number. ...

...

In regard to the "Exchange" and other secessionist presses in that city. I presume you are not aware that an order for the suppression of these presses was made out in one of the Departments of Washington. ... I think a measure of so much gravity as the suppression of a newspaper by military force should carry with it the whole weight of the influence and authority of the Government especially when the publication is made almost under its eye.

...

Reffered to General McClellan. I believe the "Exchange," "Republican" and "South" should be suppressed. They are open disunionists. The "Sun" is in sympathy but less diabolical.

...

No secession flag has to the knowledge of the police been exhibited in Baltimore for many weeks, except a small paper flag displayed by a child from an upper window. It was immediately removed by [the police]. They have been instructed to arrest any person who makes a public demonstration by word or deed in favor of the Confederate Government and I have prohibited the exhibition in shop windows of rebel envelopes and music.

...

Fort McHenry which has not sufficient space for the convenient accommodation of the number of men necessary to man its guns is crowded with prisoners. ... It is too near the seat of war which may possibly be extended to us. It is also too near a great town in which there are multitudes who sympathize with them who are constantly applying for interviews and who must be admitted with the hazard of becoming the media of improper communications, or who go away with the feeling that they have been harshly treated because they have been denied access to their friends.

... If as is supposed Fort Lafayette is crowded may they not be provided for at Fort Delaware? ... I certainly do not think them perfectly safe here considering the population by which they are surrounded and the opportunities for evading the vigilance of their guards.

...

The arrest of W. Wilkins Glenn, the proprietor of the "Exchange," has given intense satisfaction. Beale Richardson and his writing editor Joice, of the "Republican," are very violent and would grace the Tortugas. If the exchange should go on a Doctor Palmer and a William H. Carpenter are the ostensible editors, and both write with bitterness. They too would do well at Tortugas.

...

We are determined to prevent any rebel voting if he will not take the oath of allegiance. It is to be done by a system of challenging. The new mayor has already surrendered the pistols retained by the old police and evinces a reaidness to co-operate with the Federal authorities. His name is Blackburn. It is intimated that General Howard has taken the hint and will not accept the rebel nomination for Governor. If he does he should be sent at once to Fortress Monroe, and so too of Jarrett, the rebel nominee for comptroller.

...

My belief is that the peace convention is defunct. Still I have taken measures to have them watched and will inform you promptly of any movement by them.

...

I do not think it would be wise to cease making arrests entirely. Some evidence that the power is with the Government should be kept before the eyes of the discontented few. It has a most salutary effect.

...

"The memoranda states in substance that -- All persons who have lately uttered expressions of hostility to the Government or have spoken disrespectfully of the President of the United States are to be arrested and detained in camp."

...

You will ... please inform all the prisoners confined at Fort Warren that this Department will not recognize any person as an attorney in such cases, and that if the fact comes to the knowledge of the Department that any prisoner has agreed to pay to any attorney a sum of money or to give to him anything of value as a consideration for interceding for the release of such prisoner that fact will be held as an additional reason for continuing the confinement of such person. You will also please say to the prisoners that it is the wish of the Government that they should communicate whatever they may have to say directly to this Department.

And on and on. On Sept. 24, 1862, after fresh military disasters, with a gloomy prospect for the administration in the upcoming elections, with an unpopular conscription looming and doubt about the public's reception of the Emancipation Proclamation, the President suspended habeas corpus again, this time over the entire North. The Maryland scenes were repeated on a national scale.

Supreme Court Justice James M. Wayne upheld Lincoln’s extra-legal (at best) recruiting drive in 1861 and its retroactive endorsement by Congress. “It is my opinion,” Wayne ruled, “that Congress has constitutional power to legalize and confirm executive acts, proclamations, and orders done for the public good, although they were not, when done, authorized by any existing laws.”

Even some who supported the Northern cause blanched at this notion, but it was in keeping with the general spirit of the administration and the pro-war press, which was to “preserve the union at all costs.”

Lincoln used his presidency to pack the Supreme Court with justices who would be more sympathetic to his purposes. Three of five justices who sustained the administration in the important Prize case of 1863 were new Lincoln appointments.

The full question of whether the Constitution gave the president a special power to suspend the writ of habeas corpus during wartime never got to the Court. In large part that's because the administration made sure it didn't. It had a valid fear that the Court would rule against there being such a power under the Constitution, and such a ruling would undermine the war effort. On the other hand, by keeping the matter away from the Court, the administration could largely accomplish its policy.

Opposition, especially in the press, clamored for a test case to settle whether the arbitrary arrests were legal. Secretary of War Stanton thought it would be wise to do so, too, but Attorney General Bates talked him out of it. In a letter of Jan. 31, 1863, Bates wrote to Stanton that a Supreme Court decision against the habeas corpus policy “would inflict upon the Administration a serious injury,” and would do more good to the rebels “than the worst defeat our armies have yet sustained.”

Only after victory was secure, and only gradually and tentatively at first, did the Supreme Court begin to put the nation back on a Constitutional basis, which Lincoln and the Radicals in Congress had disrupted. Both Lincoln and Taney were dead by this time.

The significant case was Ex parte Milligan. Lambdin P. Milligan was an officer in the Order of American Knights, a sad-sack copperhead paramilitary outfit in Indiana that had dreamed of overthrowing the government, seizing the Indiana arsenal and freeing rebel prisoners. It never came anywhere near enacting this plot, and on Oct. 5, 1864, Milligan and others were captured and tried by a military commission, which sentenced Milligan to hang.

The government's lawyers claimed the President had unlimited power in time of war. "He is the sole judge of the exigencies, necessities, and duties of the occasion, their extent and duration." The decision was announced April 3, 1866. The court unanimously ruled that military commissions had no jurisdiction in a case such as Milligan's, and it ordered his sentence set aside. He was to be released. The justices took time and care in writing their opinions. The full ruling, finished in July 1866, was written by Justice David Davis, a Lincoln appointee and a longtime friend of the slain president.

"During the late wicked Rebellion," he wrote, "the temper of the times did not allow that calmness in deliberation and discussion so necessary to a correct conclusion of a purely judicial question. Then considerations of safety were mingled with the exercise of power; and feelings and interest prevailed which are happily terminated. Now that the public safety is assured, this question, as well as others, can be discussed and decided without passion, or the admixture of any element not required to form a legal judgment."

And he ruled that the administration's course had been wrong after all. "Martial law cannot arise from a threatened invasion," but only from a real one. "Martial rule can never exist where the courts are open, and in the proper and unobstructed exercise of their jurisdiction." This had clearly been the case in Indiana in 1864, as even the government's lawyers admitted.

"Wicked men, ambitious of power, with hatred of liberty and contempt of law, may fill the place once occupied by Washington and Lincoln; and if this right is conceded, and the calamities of war again befall us, the dangers to human liberty are frightful to contemplate."

Lincoln had done what was necessary to his purpose, which he saw as saving America's future, and he let the lawmakers catch up as they would. Or he left it to the courts to undo the changes long after they ceased to be necessary. Some of them were never undone, and America after 1865 was never again ruled by the government that had been created in 1787. But history forgives him these transgressions (though they are more bitterly remembered in the South) because the war he led America into had a great (if unintended) result of freeing slaves.

***

It has happened again more recently. In the years after World War I, fear of foreign-born terrorism led to domestic programs and policies that undercut the Bill of Rights. When Woodrow Wilson went to war, he organized America's first propaganda effort: the Committee on Public Information, which consisted of the secretaries of the armed services branches and George Creel, a progressive muckraker who had shone the light on child labor in 1914.

Creel at first took the high road in his Committee on Public Information work during World War I. He rallied the nation with positive images of America's best qualities. The artwork he commissioned focused on the enemy as militarism and autocracy, and on its victims. The German people, as Wilson made explicit in his war message to Congress, were not the enemy. Like many Americans, Creel had German ancestry.

But eventually he stooped to lurid attacks on the Kaiser, German-Americans, dissenters, and the opposition press. He even turned on Congress itself. Congress responded by cutting off his funding stream, which quickly caused his department to collapse. Creel had crossed the line.

Others followed. Intolerance and xenophobia during World War I were far worse than the supposed horrors of the McCarthy era. The Espionage Act (1917) and the Sedition Act (1918) put the screws to the Bill of Rights. The Sedition Act punished expressions of opinion, regardless of their likely consequences, which were "disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive" of the American form of government, the flag or the military. Under it, "Americans were prosecuted for criticizing the Red Cross, the YMCA and even the budget" [Johnson, "Modern Times," p.204].

Wilson, while he was still governing, had the opportunity to curb these abuses, but he did not. After he was incapacitated by strokes, the zealots ran wild, and the witch-hunts culminated in the notorious Palmer raids.

So far from being a new Nazi Germany (as Bush-haters insist), America today is not even as repressive as it was in 1920. The civil rights violations of the Palmer raids were far more serious than anything done or proposed in the name of the Patriot Act. (And at the same time they were far less serious than those of Lincoln's Administration in 1862 or the repression of the loyalist elements in the Revolution.)

Yet in time, the balance was restored. And after the tumult of the early 1920s, rights advanced dramatically in America in that decade, for workers and for women.

Constitutional government proved elastic enough to survive Lincoln and Wilson. It will survive Bush, too.