As the text part of
Part II: Enough Light to See the Darkness
Subtitled: Seeking a Divine Inspiration,
comes to completion, I found myself inspired by Elizabeth Samet's
Looking for the Good War: American Amnesia and the Violent Pursuit of Happiness.
I realized my last newsletter didn't capture Taylor Caldwell's very different approaches to WWI and WWII. Partly, that was because my life had so little of the former but has been dominated by all manner of mythology about the latter, while TC's first 40 years wrap WWI and refer to its relation to the Civil War.
Specifically, Samet ends her book with a brilliant reminder of how much Abraham Lincoln meant to our nation, presenting him and Ernie Pyle among the heroes who drove her book (she is a West Point literature Professor) and much of her life's work leading up to it.
Previous newsletters advertised Dear and Glorious Physician as centered on TC's mid-career inspiration to open to her Catholic background by featuring the first person (admittedly of many, but still with a unique role) who seriously tried to fathom Jesus – who left no writings of his own. One way to see Dear and Glorious Physician is as TC following St. Luke, as an emulation of her literary attempt to fashion Luke's following a path to Jesus's mother Mary. Openroad has a promotion of DAG today.
Only after the period of DAG and her 'new' religious concentration on Jesus did her conspiracy-mongering concentrate on people from WWII. Especially FDR and the acts of his (first female) cabinet member Francis Perkins, who gave us Social Security, seriously progressive income taxes, and subsidized health care. These are services provided to average Americans that TC and other conservatives hated (still do). They use them but can't abide that people they don't like get them. TC though was rich. Her hatred of the services was primarily because they meant she paid income taxes to America.
One of Samet's heroes is Vasily Grossman, who wrote "Life and Fate" during the last part of the '50s. She starts by documenting the extraordinary lengths that Stalin went to, to kill this book. Grossman had sent a copy out before the suppression worked, and it was published in the West in the 1980s. Then, in Russia in 1988.
The book laid out the consequences of a limited war fought at a great geographical remove by a small professional force. She lists Grossman as seeing it through Tolstoy's "War and Peace," Napoleon's invasion of Russia. He uses many voices. Grossman's anatomy of the Soviet System's corrosive nature and its resemblance to that of the fascists is why Grossman's book becomes a political casualty.
"Political fictions," like justifying the Iraq war for its liberation of Afghan women from the tyranny of the Taliban, did not confuse Grossman. He regarded wars as seething struggles, not object lessons. Real wars, unlike pieces of literature like the Illiad or Life and Fate, resist shapely plots and satisfying conclusions. He says
The war had given way to peace, a poor, miserable peace that was hardly any easier than war.
Samet lists items of the American WWII peace:
The Berlin Lift,
Marshall Plan,
The United Nations and NATO.
Also, how the generation that fought WWII subsequently brought us the worst excesses of the Cold War: The Red Scare at home, irresponsible military expeditions abroad, all cloaked in the rosy glow and atomic fallout of WWII. She discusses two speechs of Lincoln, who said our founders were giant oaks but not up to taking the American Republic into the future.
Lincoln called the founders "Iron Men."In his 1838 speech he was horrified by St. Louis radical mob violence. As in TC's description of troll-like creatures worshipping Cataline, the enemy of Cicero we can see them as avatars of violence prone worshippers of demigogues today. He noted that "deep-rooted principles of hate and the powerful motive of revenge" (against the British) were no longer the best resources for perpetuating the Republic. Of these giant oaks, he says "an all-resistless hurricane has swept over them and left just shards of them." They were heroes for their time, but in 1838, violent passion, in the form of the chaos of mob rule, threatened the very rule of law th founders had established.
We needed a different heroic attribute if the Union was to be sustained: "Reason, cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason, must furnish all the materials, for our future support and defense." ... [mold those into a general intelligence, sound morality, and reverence for the constitution and laws.]
Samet says Lincoln recognized that only truth could conquer the dangerous distortions of myth. Twenty years later, in the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln returned to the theme of generations. In reminiscing over the 80 years of the Fourth of July meetings, he explores the relationship between the men of the Revolution and the present generation. Instead of an enduring connection between the heroes of the past and those present-day listeners, he notes an astonishing new development: In the land of now 30 million people, more than half have no connection to those vaunted forefathers (a statement also true of TC). They can't imagine themselves back in the glorious revolutionary period. Yet when they hear "all men are created equal," they can take it to heart as though they were the flesh of the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence."
"Lincoln replaces a false history of blood," one that fostered aristocracies – one still capable of producing nativists, white supremacists and America Firsters – with sentiments in the principle "created equal." This was instigated by what my heroes, Luke and Paul and such modern versions as Reinhold Niebuhr, recognized in Jesus. Seeing the principles of a world as laws of equal regard for all. No less than Tolstoy put Lincoln above Napoleon, Caesar, and Washington: a "universal individual" who knew that the superstitious veneration of our founders incited a backward-looking attempt to recover illusory greatness that could never sustain a republic. That requires connecting future generations based on principles equally sharable by all of mankind. In particular, the hunger of Evangelicals and Baptists to dominate the rest of us can be nothing but an aberration, not for a nanosecond intended by God or supported by Jesus.
