Category Archives: history

Notes from a swing state

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Walking along this suburban-ish street today, I kept seeing young people with clipboards. Using cell phones. I giggled; this is what democracy looks like.

Those who know me well, or even knew my old blog shop, might feel puzzled that I almost never blog about electoral politics  – especially since I moved this summer to Pennsylvania, which both candidates treat as their jogging track. I didn’t blog Springsteen’s free concert in Philly, or Joe Biden’s frequent invocations of Scranton, or try one whit to write something comparable to the folks crowding my Google Reader — Sullivan, or Ezra, or Coates or Aravosis, or the brilliant Lindsay, who writes in 10 places at once. Because they all do it so well; because I’ve been spending as much time as possible working on the book, and trying to help propel the nonpartisan site that gives me my current day job. I didn’t even think of my feelings the day we lost last time, or how I talked to my students about the long haul – how only organizing could prevent it from happening again.

I didn’t know that day that someone who didn’t lose his Senate race that day, who had once worked at the very same college where I was now subjecting them to writing drills, would prove an uber-organizer.

I wonder if this week, any of those students are doing what those kids I saw today were doing. Maybe even today.

I do know that not a single canvasser, in my usually-leans-Republican Northeast Philly neighborhood, was doing so for John McCain. I’m just saying. (Update, Mon: The others were, apparently, part of a 1.9-million-voters-strong weekend.)

So much for the loneliness of the long-distance runner

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National Novel Writing Month? Me?

Normally, I’m one of those skeptical of the enterprise, the idea that a jillion people checking in online and pushing out 50,000 words had anything to do with producing quality work. Still, over the years I’ve thought of doing it, worried about it, then as I put aside the idea that fiction is what I do, mostly cheered on a friend or two from way on the sidelines.

But now, if I’m going to fulfill my contract with University of California Press, and deliver a 110,000 word nonfiction narrative by January 1 – desperate measures are called for. So when I got a note from the online community Red Room about participating in NaNoWriMo, I had one question: “Does it have to be fiction?”

The FAQ says nothing about nonfiction, so I decided to take the plunge.

After all, I just stopped calling myself a “novelist” three years ago. My book has plots, characters, more themes than you can shake a stick at and is as vivid as I can make it considering I can’t make shit up.

I’m hoping that adding the structure and mass mutual cheerleading of NaNoWriMo to my daily practice will add to my determination to produce against all odds – with little else that matters. I have six chapters, a prologue and an epilogue nowhere near drafted – and that doesn’t count fact-checking and revision. It’s still impossible. I’m still determined to do it. If it takes a jillion writers in a jillion cities, well, I never did put much stock in all that stuff about the loneliness of the long-distance runner.

watch this. then again. then vote. then cry.

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Running behind, as usual. But I finally saw this, a few days after another viewing of Brother Outsider. A week to the election and I can’t get enough of angelic troublemakers. (I also can’t wait for the flick to come out, whatever Gawker says.)

“the illusion that they have rights”

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Many people I know, especially veterans (even antiwar vets), have mixed feelings about Lieutenant Ehren Watada, whose trial was blocked today by a federal judge. Some vets saw it as a betrayal of those under his command, others that the war was best resisted from within, For other, including myself, the ambivalence stems from  the way his original decision — as the first Army officer to refuse to deploy to Iraq — was first taken up by (admittedly hard-working and sincere) front groups for front groups for the ossified sectarian left (whose militant rhetoric makes most of us giggle these days). All of which made it harder for many to simply look at what the 27-year-old college and OCS graduate was actually saying, about what he still considers an illegal order. Thank god for non-front groups like CCW and Vets for Peace, from whom I got the news today.

Those of you who’ve checked this page out more than once (why? Please comment, and lemme know!) know I’ve mostly been mired in the previous century, and mostly enmeshed in the lives of the Civil War vets who years later spoke out — opposing the annexation of what would become Watada’s home state, and joining in a grand effort to stop the Philippine War. “It is nothing but a wanton stretch of power. It is
lust for power and greed for land veneered with the tawdriness of false humanity,” wrote one, by then a U.S. senator as well as a survivor of the Battles of Shiloh and Spotsylvania. His sentiment echoes Watada’s, but the quote that gave this post a title is from far earlier, because I think it’s more relevant to what Watada faces next.

The judge in the case, Benjamin Settle, only dismissed three of the five counts against Watada:

Settle barred the military from retrying Watada on charges of missing his redeployment to Iraq, taking part in a news conference and participating in a Veterans for Peace national convention.

But the court did not rule out the possibility that the Army, after considering legal issues, could retry Watada on two counts of conduct unbecoming an officer resulting from his media interviews.

Watada’s attorney sensibly told the press that he hopes to get those charges dropped. That could be done without explicit vindication of Watada’s position. But part of me wants to see that second trial, if only to prove Sylvanus Thayer wrong.

Thayer, the “Father of West Point,” in 1819 blamed a early mutiny at the academy on “the erroneous and unmilitary impressions of the Cadets that they have rights to defend.”

Someone should write a book about soldiers and vets who hold on to that “erroneous” impression. Oh right, I forgot.

Congratulations, Lt. Watada. When can I give you a call?

NYPIRG in 1984 – me and the president

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Aaah, the commonalities of activism, at least in the 80’s. If you were in New York, you worked for NYPIRG at some point in your life. If I’d had political ambitions, I should have stayed: the guy who ran the Binghamton office, where I did some work on defense conversion before it was chic, went on to run the organization and was for a year Andrew Cuomo’s Special Advisor on Policy and Public Integrity.

I find out today that a scant 15 months later,  someone else was organizing up a storm — at the same university where I’d end up teaching writing in 2002:

Obama’s environmental education began in January of 1984, a year after he graduated from Columbia University, when he took an $800-a-month position running a chapter of the Nader-inspired New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) on the campus of Harlem’s City College. He’d arrived at NYPIRG’s campus office—a cramped trailer parked on a patch of grass next to the science building—determined to change the world, but unclear about where to begin. “He didn’t seem unsure of himself, but he seemed unsure of where he belonged,” says Alison Kelley, who was a freshman at City College when Obama came to the campus. “You could tell he was driven, but he wasn’t sure what he was driven by.” The 22-year-old organizer began a campaign protesting apartheid, and organized a trip to DC to lobby for higher-education funding. But as time went by, Obama also found himself wrestling with a wide range of environmental issues: mass transit, recycling, pollution from local incinerators and landfills, compensation for victims of toxic-waste exposure.

I sent the article to one of the organizers I know well, whose work helped spark much of what I spent my time covering at Chelsea Now. One of those road-not-taken stories that can give at least a few smiles. (Is the title a jinx, or just visualization?)

while I was gone

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That’s also the title of a terrific, underrated novel by Sue Miller, which kept me up reading a few nights during my long interregnum from this blog. Few writers — maybe Tolstoy or Lynne Sharon Schwartz –  combine as well gripping suspense and an incredible amount of thoughtfulness about marriage.

I’d kept thinking I would do an entry when I was finally free of my the 19th century — but like Marx or Baudelaire, I’m finding that exit is taking far longer than I’d hoped.

Part of the delay happened because my responsibilities at my paid blog gig changed, in a way that takes up more of my time and brain space than I like. (See the posts following this one for details.)

But the loong gestation was perhaps more the nature of the material itself — including two frigging new characters that nosed in insistently, kind of at the last minute. Just as I was about to write, “Dissent from soldiers was confined to diaries then,” along came..

Benjamin Grierson (left), longtime commander of the Buffalo Soldiers, and Silas Soule (below right),  who came from one of those fine raging-abolitionist families (his brother named after William Lloyd Garrison).

I’d thought of pasting, and will at the end of this post, Soule’s testimony to an Army inquiry about Colorado’s Sand Creek Massacre, which he answers in classic soldier’s understatement.

Were these families, women and children, scalped and mutilated?

Yes, sir. They were.

Soule was far less understated in a letter to a fellow soldier:  “I tell you Ned it was hard to see little children on their knees have their brains beat out by men professing to be civilized.

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older cities of dreams

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Which of these venerable, beloved by artists (and thus too costly for most), old streets came first?

Philly’s Old City, where I sit now (in a cafe I already love)?

Or its jealous cousin in my hometown?

I suspect the latter, due to the Dutch assault on the Lenape land predating the days of William Penn.

However, both bow down to their ancestor above, in the country of *my* particular forefathers. I’d love to live there too.

of body counts and word counts

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The quietude here has been almost a good sign: I’m finally sucked in by the book.  I walk to the gym thinking about Donelson Caffery and Lewis Douglass, sleep followed by the ghost of Bierce. I then have to remember to work in the data I sort of started with, about desertion and dissent and the size and strength of armies.

Now, when I look at Civil War photos of famous officers, their facial hair looks painted into the faces of children – just as I felt about this one of Bierce in uniform, or the one at right (after the war ended, age 22).

I’ve also been haunted by the way Walt Whitman, via his biographer Roy Morris, explained the way the last two years of the Civil War were fought:

Grant was a new type of warrior for a new kind of war, one based less on grand heroics and noble gestures than on the simple ciphering of sums he had learned in his brother’s dry-goods store. With the war now entering its fourth spring, the North had roughly twice the number of soldiers as the South, and the new Union general-in-chief intended, with Abraham Lincoln’s enthusiastic backing, to improve those odds by forcibly subtracting, one by one, the country’s dwindling stock of defenders. When enough Rebels had been subtracted, the North would win. It was as simple – and brutal — as that.

None of the pounds of Civil War lit and film I’d consumed for this chapter, none of the dry monographs or discussions on H-WAR listservs had sung that song so clearly to me. And it brought first to my mind Vietnam and body counts, the official obsession with the number of enemy dead.

I took a very deep breath.  Then I decided to try to fact-check: While I count Roy Morris as a personal avatar (nearly as much as Adam Hochschild) and adore Whitman, that kind of connection felt almost too easy. And after shaking the dust off my ears from the arguments of Civil War historians (e.g. “Grant wasn’t the butcher they said he was!”),  I was only more confused. I tried to call some trusted vets, like my friend Capt. Montalvan, for some insight, but they were all at the conventions. So I kept digging and found the shit: “The American Way of Operational Art: Attrition or Maneuver?“,  by a commander/prof at the Army War College at Fort Leavenworth. And lo and behold, perhaps I should have trusted Roy Morris.

While everyone admired the brilliant maneuver campaigns conducted by Lee, they adopted the techniques of the bloody but successful campaign of attrition waged by Grant. Professor Weigley concluded that “Despite the veneration of R.E. Lee
in American military hagiography, it was U.S. Grant whose theories of strategy actually prevailed.” ….Operational planning focused on how to best wear down the enemy’s
vast human resources. Our well known attrition concept in Vietnam  that relied on higher “body counts” as a measure of success needs no further description.”

There you have it, from the Army War College. Not just from the old poet medic, whose boyfriend broke after Antietam and begged for discharge, and said years later when asked if he ever thought about the wounded he tended back then: “I have never left them.”

(As for the word counts in the sub title: As thrilled as I am to be dreaming the book, I’m simultaneously watching my word count and worrying. So far 4500 words on this chapter, and I’m just now at New Years’ 1863. No wonder Frederic Tuten once called me a graphomaniac).

what we write about when we write about war

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My current bookshelf is weirdly focused. The collection might seem a bit scary, if you didn’t know I was writing a book. (“What kind of obsessed veteran lives here?”)  When you know, some of what’s here might then seem obvious: David Cortright’s Soldiers in Revolt, Kingston’s Veterans of Peace anthology, the trauma stuff ( Jonathan Shay’s iconic Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America, Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery) and the war-specific guides: Rich Man’s War/Poor Man’s Fight, The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell, The New Veteran ( by Charles G. Bolte, c1945).

Lately, i’ve been poring over the biographies and novels on the shelf, looking for guidance in the writing. (And kicking myself for never making the annual writers’ conference at the William Joiner Center.) Roy Morris’ invaluable  Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, Adam Hochschild’s King Leopold’ s Ghost, and James Tobin’s Ernie Pyle’s War seamlessly join narrative detail with the swing of history. So do Panther in the Sky, James Alexander Thom’s fictional biography of Tecumseh, and Joe Haldeman’s peerless 1968. (That last, however, is a bit like reading Joan Didion: you read it to be spun around by the master, not with the illusion you can write like that. )

But given the period I’m dealing with this week, I’ve been brought back to studying with Doctorow. More specifically, The March. In his 2005 review, Walter Kirn attaches to one of its core themes, which in some ways is half of mine:

The rampant destructiveness of Sherman’s march is, of course, the stuff of high school textbooks, but what isn’t so obvious is the way that destruction transfigures and transforms, pulverizing established human communities and forcing the victims to recombine in new ones. Inside the churning belly of Doctorow’s beast, individuals shed their old identities, ally themselves with former foes, develop unexpected romantic bonds and even seem to alter racially. Yes, war is hell, and “The March” affirms this truth, but it also says something that most war novels leave out: hell is not the end of the world. Indeed, it’s by learning to live in hell, and through it, that people renew the world. They have no choice.

Unlike the civilians in Doctorow’s novel, the soldiers in my story are all doing just that — either by challenging the discipline that makes war possible, or by speaking out either during service or afterward. Call it a coda to that central theme. But that’s not why I’m looking at Doctorow’s novel again.

Instead, I’m looking at a far more technical issue; how does he keep the arcs of four major characters, and an equal number of minor ones, flowing ahead together for the reader?  Can watching his transitions, his narrative spins, help me do the same, at least for this chapter? Can the transformation of Ambrose Bierce from 20-year-old hothead to Homeric figure/journalist/mystery shape one arm of this March while still getting readers interested in the parallel transformations of Lewis Douglass, sailor Edward Strickland in Florida, little Quakers like Jesse Macy? Let alone Donelson Caffery, who became an ardent opponent of the Philippine war after not only preceding Bierce at the battle of Shiloh, but seeing his Confederate commander go down at that field with the funny name, which witnessed hand-to-hand fighting that sounds like tales from 1994 Rwanda?* (Leaving aside the related question of how to write honestly about it all as a non-veteran, and to keep it bearable without trivializing it.)

Some of it is making them vivid, not just externally but with some characteristic mental tropes/phrases. But most of those, the bits of dialogue that fill Doctorow’s work and stayed with me, are from fictional characters. Except for this historic meeting aboard a ship off the South Carolina coast, so dramatically right that it’s hard to believe it happened:

The long head was in proportion to the size of the man, but intensifying of his features, so that there was a sott of ugly beauty to him, with his wide month, deeply lined at the corners….What is important, the President was saying in conclusion, is that we do not confront them with terms so severe that they continue the war in their hearts. We want the insurgents to regard themselves as Americans.

Doctorow doesn’t use quotes here, smartly not putting words in the mouth of frigging Abraham Lincoln. (I checked; that poetry about “the war in their hearts” is a Vietnam-era formulation for sure.) He does well, considering his source (Sherman’s memoirs):

Lincoln was full and frank in his conversation, assuring me that in his mind he was all ready for the civil reorganization of affairs at the South as soon as the war was over; and he distinctly authorized me to assure Governor Vance and the people of North Carolina that, as soon as the rebel armies laid down their arms, and resumed their civil pursuits, they would at once be guaranteed all their rights as citizens of a common country; and that to avoid anarchy the State governments then in existence, with their civil functionaries, would be recognized by him as the government de facto till Congress could provide others.

I know, when I left him, that I was more than ever impressed by his kindly nature, his deep and earnest sympathy with the afflictions of the whole people, resulting from the war, and by the march of hostile armies through the South; and that his earnest desire seemed to be to end the war speedily, without more bloodshed or devastation, and to restore all the men of both sections to their homes. In the language of his second inaugural address, he seemed to have “charity for all, malice toward none,” and, above all, an absolute faith in the courage, manliness, and integrity of the armies in the field. When at rest or listening, his legs and arms seemed to hang almost lifeless, and his face was care-worn and haggard; but, the moment he began to talk, his face lightened up, his tall form, as it were, unfolded, and he was the very impersonation of good-humor and fellowship. The last words I recall as addressed to me were that he would feel better when I was back at Goldsboro’. We parted at the gangway of the River Queen, about noon of March 28th, and I never saw him again. Of all the men I ever met, he seemed to possess more of the elements of greatness, combined with goodness, than any other.

Doctorow lets his own beloved Wrede Sartorius, brought in to witness the meeting, to echo Sherman’s description and to more explicitly say what many think when we see those later, brooding portraits:

Perhaps his agony was where his public and private beings converged. Wrede lingered on the deck. The moral capacity of the President made it difficult to be in his company…..His affliction might be the wounds of the war he’d gathered into himself, the amassed miseries of this torn-apart country made incarnate.

Doctorow has, I think, also added a dash of Walt Whitman, the Civil War’s Homer, who wrote after watching Lincoln’s second inaugural procession the he could see

the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, intricate questions, and the demands of life and death, cut deeper than ever into his dark brown face; yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness, and canny shrewdness, beneath the furrows.

That last except courtesy of  Roy Morris (again), in his The Better Angel: Walt Whitman and the Civil War. Morris quotes openly from both Whitman and Bierce in describing the events of their iives; I wonder if I can do something similar, while somehow using a contemporary voice to better expose all those  gathered wounds to air. Or is my object to let their voices do it, and get out of the way?

We write about war, as Kirn said, as a way of writing about our lives. But there’s got to be a way to let those experiences be what they are, for a reader, before storytellers and politicians start yammering about what it all means.

* Speaking of Rwanda — and of learning from the master—check out this incredible Christian Science Monitor piece by my friend Jina Moore. If you ever need a reminder about what journalism can do, go re-read it.

Cross-posted at Devourer of Books.

Quakers in uniform: oxymoron, or profound truth?

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I spend so much time celebrating the courage of soldiers that some might wonder where the old peacenik had got to. (If some old classmate from Binghamton stumbled here, e.g., what they might remember most is my play Too Many Martyrs, a  melodrama about the U.S.-to-Canada draft resister underground railroad.) But as I construct my Civil War narrative, I’m also cheered to report some appropriately complicated pacifist characters, whose deep abolitionist beliefs made them conflicted about what was that century’s “good war.” An early glimpse:

  • Jesse Macy, who may have invented the character of CO medic. Offered the role of cook and horseman when he shared his membership in the Society of Friends, he refused, insisting he would train and travel with his unit only if he could work for the Army surgeons, and thus help care for the war’s relentless casualties.
  • George Garrison, who after the Emancipation Proclamation went so far as to enlist and become an officer with the Massachusetts 55th Division of the United States Colored Troops  (USCT). Thus breaking the heart of his father Lloyd, the renowned abolitionist, (note to picky historians:  I know the Garrisons weren’t exactly Quakers, but Lloyd himself characterized their paths as “nearly identical.”) Garrison endured enough rough strife to explain how afterward, despite numerous efforts to get him established in business, he drifted from job to job, interested mostly in veterans’ reunions. (Unfortunately for my narrative, he did not join fellow USCT veterans Charles Francis Adams and Lewis Douglass at the end of the century in the Anti-Imperialist League of America, also known as U.S. Out of the Philippines.
  • Of course, some were less conflicted, and offer more or less the classic Quaker story. Cyrus Pringle, whose travails in 1863 Vermont eventually came to the attention of Washington. Before then, as Wikipedia notes, “Refusing to perform all military duty, he was subjected to severe
    discipline. The Friends were kept for days in the guardhouse in company
    with drunks and criminals. Finally, on October 3, 1863, at Culpepper, Doctor Pringle was staked to the ground, with his arms outstretched and his legs cruelly racked; he was left in this position for hours, until ‘so weak he could hardly walk or perform any exertion.’  He was even threatened with death if he would not give up, but his only reply was, ‘It can but give me pain to be asked or required to do anything I believe to be wrong.’ After a day of extreme pain he wrote in hisdiary, ‘This has been the happiest day of my life, to be privileged to fight the battle for universal peace.’ “

These ghosts mingle with those whose journeys had nothing to do with Quaker qualms, sharing their horror at the blood soaked into the ground during those grueling four years. And — just as much earlier and later – they didn’t inspire the kind of revulsion from their fellow soldiers that many civilians assume. Macy even writes that by the end, when he was standing up to his command just as his unit was joining Sherman’s march through Geotgia,  his peers “had agreed to stand together in forcible resistance in case extreme measures were instituted against me. I could not ask for treatment more uniformly respectful and friendly than that which I received from officers and men alike in Sherman’s army while on the March to the Sea.”  Integrity respected, perhaps above all.

Not so unlike the respect shown by Major William Kunstler to C.O. medic Lew Ayres during World War II, or by the anonymous soldiers in Baquba, Iraq, who shot surreptitious peace signs to the authors of the early underground blog Fight to Survive. I don’t mean to imply it’s all kumbaya, to minimize the real differences; but it’s kind of cool to see how long that respect has existed, among factions traditionally painted as enemies.