Like William Jennings Bryan, he was a dark horse made suddenly formidable by fortunate rhetoric. The Douglas debate launched him, and the Cooper Union speech got him the Presidency. His talent for emotional utterance was an accomplishment of late growth. His early speeches were mere empty fireworks—the hollow rhodomontades of the era. But in middle life he purged his style of ornament and it became almost baldly simple—and it is for that simplicity that he is remembered today. The Gettysburg speech is at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history. Put beside it, all the whoopings of the Websters, Sumners and Everetts seem gaudy and silly. It is eloquence brought to a pellucid and almost gem-like perfection—the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Nothing else precisely like it is to be found in the whole range of oratory. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous.
But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination – “that government of the people, by the people, for the people,” should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in that battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. What was the practical effect of the battle of Gettysburg? What else than the destruction of the old sovereignty of the States, i.e., of the people of the States? The Confederates went into battle free; they came out with their freedom subject to the supervision and veto of the rest of the country—and for nearly twenty years that veto was so effective that they enjoyed scarcely more liberty, in the political sense, than so many convicts in the penitentiary.
Portrait of an Immortal
From the American Mercury, Feb., 1929, pp. 251–53. A review of
Meet General Grant, by W. E. Woodward; New York, 1928
THE DREADFUL title of Mr. Woodward’s book is not the least of its felicities. If they had been saying such things in his day it seems unquestionable that Grant would have said, “Meet the wife.” He was precisely that sort of man. His imagination was the imagination of a respectable hay and feed dealer, and his virtues, such as they were, were indistinguishable from those of a county court clerk. Mr. Woodward, trying to be just to him, not infrequently gives him far more than he deserves. He was not, in point of fact, a man of any great competence, even as a soldier. All the major strategy of the war, including the final advance on Richmond, was planned by other men, notably Sherman. He was a ham as a tactician, and habitually wasted his men. He was even a poor judge of other generals, as witness his admiration for Sheridan and his almost unbelievable underrating of Thomas and Meade. If he won battles, it was because he had the larger battalions, and favored the primitive device of heaving them into action, callously, relentlessly, cruelly, appallingly.
Thinking was always painful to Grant, and so he never did any of it if he could help it. He had a vague distaste for war, and dreamed somewhat boozily of a day when it would be no more. But that distaste never stayed his slaughters; it only made him keep away from the wounded. He had no coherent ideas on any subject, and changed his so-called opinions overnight, and for no reason at all. He entered the war simply because he needed a job, and fought his way through it without any apparent belief in its purposes. His wife was a slaveholder to the end. At Appomattox he showed a magnanimity that yet thrills schoolboys, but before he became President he went over to the Radical Republicans, and was largely to blame for the worst horrors of Reconstruction. His belief in rogues was congenital, touching and unlimited. He filled Washington with them, and defended them against honest men, even in the face of plain proofs of their villainy. Retired to private life at last, he sought out the worst scoundrel of them all, gave the fellow control of his whole modest fortune, and went down to inglorious bankruptcy with him. The jail gates, that time, were uncomfortably close; if Grant had not been Grant he would have at least gone on trial. But he was completely innocent. He was too stupid to be anything else.
Yet, for all his colossal imbecilities, he helped in a wholesale way to pave Hell with good intentions. Like Joseph Conrad’s Almayer, he always wanted to do the right thing. The trouble with him was that he could seldom find out what it was. Once he had got beyond a few elemental ideas, his brain refused to function. Thereafter he operated by hunches, some of them good ones, but others almost idiotic. Commanding his vast armies in the field, he wandered around like a stranger, shabby, uncommunicative and only defectively respected. In the White House he was a primeval Harding, without either the diamond scarf-pin or the cutie hiding in the umbrella closet. He tried, in his dour, bashful manner, to be a good fellow. There was no flummery about him. He had no false dignity. But he was the easiest mark ever heard of. It was possible to put anything over on him, however fantastic. Now and then, by a flash of what must be called, I suppose, insight, he penetrated the impostures which surrounded him, and struck out in his Berserker way for common decency. But that was not often. His eight years in the White House were scarlet with scandal. He had a Teapot Dome on his hands once a month.
Mr. Woodward’s portrait, despite its mercies, is an extraordinarily brilliant one. The military automaton of the “Memoirs” and the noble phrase-maker of the school-books disappears, and there emerges a living and breathing man, simple-minded, more than a little bewildered, and infinitely pathetic. Grant went to the high pinnacles of glory, but he also plunged down the black steeps of woe. I don’t think that his life was a happy one, even as happiness is counted among such primitive organisms. He was miserable as a boy, he was miserable at West Point, and he was miserable in the old army. The Mexican War revolted him, and he took to drink and lost his commission. For years he faced actual want. The Civil War brought him little satisfaction, save for a moment at the end. He was neglected in his early days in a manner that was wormwood to him, and after luck brought him opportunity he was surrounded by hostile intrigue. He made costly and egregious blunders, notably at Shiloh and Cold Harbor; he knew the sting of professional sneers; he quailed before Lee’s sardonic eye. His eight years in the White House were years of tribulation and humiliation. His wife was ill-favored; his only daughter made a bad marriage; his relatives, both biological and in-law, harassed and exploited him. He died almost penniless, protesting that he could no longer trust a soul. He passed out in gusts of intolerable pain. It is hard to imagine harder lines.
If, in this chronicle, he sometimes recedes into the background, and seems no more than a bystander at the show, then it is because he was often that in life. Other men had a way of running him – John A. Rawlins during the war, Hamilton Fish at Washington, Ferdinand Ward afterward. His relations to the first-named are discussed in one of Mr. Woodward’s most interesting chapters. Rawlins was the Grant family lawyer at Galena, and had no military experience when the war began. Grant made him his brigade adjutant, and thereafter submitted docilely to his domination. Rawlins was a natural pedagogue, a sort of school-ma’am with a beard. He supervised and limited Grant’s guzzling; he edited Grant’s orders; he made and unmade all other subordinates. “I have heard him curse at Grant,” said Charles A. Dana, “when, according to his judgment, the general was doing something that he thought he had better not do.… Without him Grant would have not been the same man.” Gossip in the army went even further; it credited Rawlins with actually sharing command. “The two together,” said James H. Wilson, “constituted a military character of great simplicity, force and singleness of purpose, which has passed into history under the name of Grant.”
A Good Man in a Bad Trade
From the American Mercury, Jan., 1933, pp. 125–27. A review of Grover
Cleveland: a Study in Courage, by Allan Nevins; New York, 1932
WE have had more brilliant Presidents than Cleveland, and one or two who were considerably more profound, bu
t we have never had one, at least since Washington, whose fundamental character was solider and more admirable. There was never any string tied to old Grover. He got on in politics, not by knuckling to politicians, but by scorning and defying them, and when he found himself opposed in what he conceived to be sound and honest courses, not only by politicians but by the sovereign people, he treated them to a massive dose of the same medicine. No more self-sufficient man is recorded in modern history. There were times, of course, when he had his doubts like the rest of us, but once he had made up his mind he stood immovable. No conceivable seduction could weaken him. There was something almost inhuman about his fortitude, and to millions of his contemporaries it seemed more satanic than godlike. No President since Lincoln, not even the melancholy Hoover, has been more bitterly hated, or by more people. But Cleveland, though he certainly did not enjoy it—he was, indeed, singularly lacking in the shallower and more comforting sort of egoism—yet did not let it daunt him. He came into office his own man, and he went out without yielding anything of that character for an instant.
In his time it was common to ascribe a good part of this vast steadfastness to his mere bulk. He had a huge girth, shoulders like the Parthenon, a round, compact head, and the slow movements of any large animal. He was not very tall, but he looked, somehow, like an enormous natural object—say, the Jungfrau or Cape Horn. This aspect of the stupendous, almost of the terrific, was tempting to the primeval psychologists of that innocent day, and they succumbed to it easily. But in the years that have come and gone since then we have learned a great deal about fat men. It was proved, for example, by W. H. Taft that they could be knocked about and made to dance with great facility, and it was proved by Hoover that their texture may be, not that of Alps, but that of chocolate éclairs. Cleveland, though he was also fat, was the complete antithesis of these gentlemen. There was far more to him than beam and tonnage. When enemies had at him they quickly found that his weight was the least of their difficulties; what really sent them sprawling was the fact that his whole huge carcass seemed to be made of iron. There was no give in him, no bounce, no softness. He sailed through American history like a steel ship loaded with monoliths of granite.
He came of an excellent family, but his youth had been a hard one, and his cultural advantages were not of the best. He learned a great deal about human nature by sitting with pleasant fellows in the Buffalo saloons, but he seems to have made but little contact with the finer and more elusive parts of the spiritual heritage of man, and in consequence his imagination was not awakened, and he remained all his days a somewhat stodgy and pedantic fellow. There is no sign in his writings of the wide and fruitful reading of Roosevelt I, and they show none of the sleek, shiny graces of Wilson. His English, apparently based upon Eighteenth Century models, was a horrible example to the young. It did not even roar; it simply heaved, panted and grunted. He made, in his day, some phrases, and a few of them are still remembered, but they are all études in ponderosity – innocuous desuetude, communism of pelf, and so on. The men he admired were all solid men like himself. He lived through the Gilded Age, the Mauve Decade and the Purple Nineties without being aware of them. His heroes were largely lawyers of the bow-wow type, and it is significant that he seems to have had little acquaintance with Mark Twain, though Mark edited a paper in Buffalo during his terms as mayor there. His favorite American author was Richard Watson Gilder.
The one man who seems to have had any genuine influence upon him was Richard Olney, first his Attorney-General and then his Secretary of State. He had such great respect for Olney’s professional skill as a lawyer that he was not infrequently blind to the man’s defects as a statesman. It was Olney who induced him to send troops to Chicago to put down the Pullman strike, and Olney who chiefly inspired the celebrated Venezuela message. Cleveland, at the start, seems to have been reluctant to intervene in Chicago, but Olney convinced him that it was both legal and necessary. In the Venezuelan matter something of the same sort appears to have occurred. It was characteristic of Cleveland that, once he had made up his mind, he stuck to his course without the slightest regard for consequences. Doubts never beset him. He banged along like a locomotive. If man or devil got upon the track, then so much the worse for man or devil. “God,” he once wrote to Gilder, “has never failed to make known to me the path of duty.”
Any man thus obsessed by a concept of duty is bound to seek support for it somewhere outside himself. He must rest it on something which seems to him to be higher than mere private inclination or advantage. Cleveland, never having heard of Kant’s categorical imperatives and being almost as innocent of political theory, naturally turned to the Calvinism of his childhood. His father had been a Presbyterian clergyman, and he remained a communicant of the family faith to the end. But the Calvinism that he subscribed to was a variety purged of all the original horrors. He translated predestination, with its sharp cocksureness and its hordes of damned, into a sort of benign fatalism, not unmixed with a stealthy self-reliance. God, he believed, ordained the order of the world, and His decrees must ever remain inscrutable, but there was nevertheless a good deal to be said for hard work, a reasonable optimism, and a sturdy fidelity to what seemed to be the right. Duty, in its essence, might be transcendental, but its mandates were issued in plain English, and no honest man could escape them. There is no record that Cleveland ever tried to escape them. He was not averse to popularity, but he put it far below the approval of conscience. In him all the imaginary virtues of the Puritans became real.
It is not likely that we shall see his like again, at least in the present age. The Presidency is now closed to the kind of character that he had so abundantly. It is going, in these days, to more politic and pliant men. They get it by yielding prudently, by changing their minds at the right instant, by keeping silent when speech is dangerous. Frankness and courage are luxuries confined to the more comic varieties of runners-up at national conventions. Thus it is pleasant to remember Cleveland, and to speak of him from time to time. He was the last of the Romans. If pedagogy were anything save the puerile racket that it is he would loom large in the schoolbooks. As it is, he is subordinated to Lincoln, Rossevelt I and Wilson. This is one of the things that are the matter with the United States.
Roosevelt I
From ROOSEVELT: AN AUTOPSY, PREJUDICES: SECOND SERIES, 1920, pp. 107–28.
First printed, in part, in the Smart Set, March, 1920, pp. 138–44
ROOSEVELT’S reaction to World War I must occupy a large part of any adequate account of him, for that reaction was probably more comprehensively typical of the man than any other business of his life. It displayed not only his whole stock of political principles, but also his whole stock of political tricks. It plumbed, on the one hand, the depths of his sagacity, and on the other hand the depths of his insincerity. Fundamentally, I am convinced, he was quite out of sympathy with, and even quite unable to comprehend the body of doctrine upon which the Allies, and later the United States, based their case. To him it must have seemed insane when it was not hypocritical, and hypocritical when it was not insane. His instincts were profoundly against a new loosing of democratic fustian upon the world; he believed in strongly centralized states, founded upon power and devoted to enterprises far transcending mere internal government; he was an imperialist of the type of Cecil Rhodes, Treitschke and Delcassé.
But the fortunes of domestic politics jockeyed him into the position of standing as the spokesman of an almost exactly contrary philosophy. The visible enemy before him was Wilson. What he wanted as a politician was something that he could get only by wresting it from Wilson, and Wilson was too cunning to yield it without making a tremendous fight, chiefly by chicane—whooping for peace while preparing for war, playing mob fear against mob fear, concealing all his genuine motives and desires beneath clouds of chautauqua rhetoric, leading a mad dance whose tune changed at every swing. Here was an opponent that more than once puzzled Roosevelt, and in the end flatly dismayed him. He
re was a mob-master with a technique infinitely more subtle and effective than his own. So lured into an unequal combat, the Rough Rider got bogged in absurdities so immense that only the democratic anesthesia to absurdity so immense that only the democratic anesthesia to absurdity saved him. To make any progress at all he was forced into fighting against his own side. He passed from the scene bawling piteously for a cause that, at bottom, it is impossible to imagine him believing in, and in terms of a philosophy that was as foreign to his true faith as it was to the faith of Wilson. In the whole affair there was a colossal irony. Both contestants were intrinsically frauds.
When, soon after his death, I ventured in a magazine article to call attention to Roosevelt’s philosophical kinship to the Kaiser1 I received letters of denunciation from all parts of the United States, and not a few forthright demands that I recant on penalty of lynch law. Prudence demanded that I heed these demands. We live in a curious and often unsafe country. Haled before a Roosevelt judge for speeding my automobile, or spitting on the sidewalk, or carrying a jug, I might have been railroaded for ten years under some constructive corollary of the Espionage Act. But there were two things that supported me in my contumacy to the departed. One was a profound reverence for and fidelity to the truth, sometimes almost amounting to fanaticism. The other was the support of the eminent Iowa right-thinker and patriot, Prof. Dr. S. P. Sherman. Writing in the Nation, Prof. Dr. Sherman put the thing in plain terms. “With the essentials in the religion of the militarists of Germany,” he said, “Roosevelt was utterly in sympathy.”2
Utterly? Perhaps the adverb was a bit too strong. There was in the man a certain instinctive antipathy to the concrete aristocrat and in particular to the aristocrat’s private code—the produce, no doubt, of his essentially bourgeois origin and training. But if he could not go with the Junkers all the way, he could at least go the whole length of their distrust of the third order—the undifferentiated masses of men below. Here, I daresay, he owed a lot to Nietzsche. He was always reading German books, and among them, no doubt, were “Also sprach Zarathustra” and “Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” In fact, the echoes were constantly sounding in his own harangues. Years ago, as an intellectual exercise while confined to hospital, I devised and printed a giveaway of the Rooseveltian philosophy in parallel columns—in one column, extracts from “The Strenuous Life”; in the other, extracts from Nietzsche. The borrowings were numerous and unescapable. Theodore had swallowed Friedrich as a farm-wife swallows Peruna—bottle, cork, label and testimonials. Worse, the draft whetted his appetite, and soon he was swallowing the Kaiser of the Garde-Kavallerie-mess and battleship-launching speeches—another somewhat defective Junker. In his palmy days it was often impossible to distinguish his politico-theological bulls from those of Wilhelm; during the war, indeed, I suspect that some of them were boldly lifted by the British press bureau, and palmed off as felonious imprudences out of Potsdam. Wilhelm was his model in Weltpolitik, and in sociology, exegetics, administration, law, sport and connubial polity no less. Both roared for doughty armies, eternally prepared—for the theory that the way to prevent war is to make all conceivable enemies think twice, thrice, ten times. Both dreamed of gigantic navies, with battleships as long as Brooklyn Bridge. Both preached incessantly the duty of the citizen to the state, with the soft pedal upon the duty of the state to the citizen. Both praised the habitually gravid wife. Both delighted in the armed pursuit of the lower fauna. Both heavily patronized the fine arts. Both were intimates of God, and announced His desires with authority. Both believed that all men who stood opposed to them were prompted by the devil and would suffer for it in Hell.
Mencken Chrestomathy (Vintage) Page 26
