by Simon Schama
Twain paid dearly for his temerity. He never ceased being seen as the greatest of all American writers although he was now also regarded as a bitter and unpatriotic eccentric. Society invitations were fewer and far between, not that Twain cared all that much for them (though he did care some). But honors still came his way, including an honorary degree at Yale in 1901. Theodore Roosevelt happened to be there on the same day. The assassination of McKinley meant that the president was kept away from crowds but he must nonetheless have heard the roar of applause that went up for Twain as he received his degree. Later in private he said that “when I hear what Mark Twain and others [meaning the Anti-Imperialist League] have said in criticism of the missionaries I feel like skinning them alive.” It had become personal. Twain wrote vicious attacks parodying Roosevelt and his worldwide popularity. The president was “the Tom Sawyer of the political world of the twentieth century always hunting for a chance to show off…in his frenzied imagination the Great Republic is a vast Barnum and Bailey circus with him for a clown and the whole world for an audience.” And he let it be known that he thought the president “clearly insane” and “insanest on the subject of war.” But as the public hostility mounted there were moments when he chose to pull his punches. When a particularly horrifying case of the water cure involving a priest, Father Augustine, came to light and the league asked its vice president to write something appropriately damning, he retreated. He was sixty-seven; he was tired; there was only so much he could do. Understandable. Sad.
TR affected to brush all this off. The last thing he wanted to be thought of was bookish. But he was a writer and a prolific one at that, and in other circumstances Mark Twain was his kind of writer: the voice of the people. (In fact it was Roosevelt who had the sententious voice; Twain the genuine rasp of American comedy.) But nothing stopped Teddy. On Memorial Day 1902, he went to pay his respects to the gallant dead at Arlington National Cemetery. He passed (as we all do) through the McClellan Memorial Gate that Montgomery Meigs had erected, presumably in a fit of forgetfulness of all the aggravation “little George” had caused him. And there, arrayed before him, some stooped, many gray-bearded, their medals hanging from lank frames, were the veterans of horror: from Bull Run, from Antietam, from Gettysburg, from Lookout Mountain, from the Wilderness. “Oh my comrades,” the president shouted, much overcome, “the men who have for the past three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Philippine islands are your younger brothers, your sons.”
It was no fault of those men, off in Mindanao, but no, they weren’t. The old boys had fought an American war for freedom. The young boys were fighting to extinguish it.
If only Teddy Roosevelt had been able to sit in on Monty Meigs’s course on “Why presidents go to war when they don’t have to.”
12. American war: Rohrbach-lès-Bitche, the Maginot Line near Metz, 10 December 1944
Sonofabitch, if it was this cold then you’d think the mud would have frozen. But it got loose enough to clog up the caterpillar treads; slowed the whole damned thing down; made the battalion sitting ducks for antitank guns, 88s coming in every which way. No wonder the 4th had had it after months of mud, taking it on the nose. Now it was the turn of the 12th, his outfit, most of them still green, snotnoses, never under fire before; him too if he thought about it, nothing Fort Benning prepared you for. You got used to it pretty damned quick though. What was he doing commanding a tank battalion anyway? Pop was navy; Grandpa too; Annapolis folks, like the Rodgers. A good place Annapolis, the piebald plane trees right down to the water; a good place for the baby to come while he was off in Lorraine trying to finish off the Reich. Maybe there was snow on the ground in Maryland. Was any of this America’s business, his business? Liberating the French? Hell, they had built the damned Maginot Line to stop the Germans, much good that had done them in 1940, and now here’s where the Panzers had dug themselves in, sixteen-year-olds and old guys, they’d said, but it sure didn’t sound like kids and pensioners. The line wasn’t what it had been in 1940, they’d said. No electricity after we cut it. Not much of anything for them to survive on. But for an army with no prospects they were putting on a hell of a show. So why was he here? Ah yes, “Duty, Honor, Country,” all that West Point horseshit. Or was it? It was a West Point war now with Bradley and Eisenhower making the decisions. That had to be good. He’d been a kid, wet behind the ears, seventeen, for Christ’s sake, when he went up the hill, put on his plebe’s gray. The family, they’d wanted him in the navy, where Meigses went lately, but he wanted something else. Maybe it had something to do with all that hurting, the broken neck; the iron brace that had pinned him; made him grit his teeth and be damned if he wouldn’t make his own way. Obstinate, the Meigses. Maybe they had all been a tad ornery, the quartermaster and his wire ropes. There they were up on Arlington Hill, the old boy and his son with his boots pointing to the stars. He wasn’t ready to join them, not yet awhile, not with the baby coming. But he had a record of getting into trouble; those motorbike accidents at Fort Benning that had nearly done him in. Dumb. It was late, how late? Needed to take a look at the maps again; figure out a way through. Better get some sleep, though; this the second night in a row; not good to be drowsy; needed to be sharp to lead the attack tomorrow, everyone in the 23rd depending on him, had better find a way to punch through to Rohrbach, get rid of the artillery, give the guys on the ground a fighting chance. Clean it out, get into Deutschland, finish them off, good guys win, bad guys, very bad guys, lose. Patton, Ike, all of them happy. Europe free of the lousy Nazis. Go home. Go home to baby Meigs. Suppose it was a boy? They’d have to call him Montgomery. Baby Monty. Why not? That’s just how it was.
On the morning of 11 December, Lieutenant Colonel Montgomery Meigs led the first wave of attacks on German positions at Rohrbach. The night before the battle he had argued against a frontal attack on enemy guns hidden behind twenty feet of concrete. He lost the argument. He was killed instantly while standing in the turret as the tanks advanced. The following day the badly mauled 23rd Battalion, supported by other units of the 12th Cavalry, took the objective. For his “utter disregard for his own life in leading his battalion,” Meigs was posthumously awarded the Silver Star and Purple Heart. His widow worried about whether his body should be brought back to the United States but opted in the end to have him rest in the American Cemetery of Lorraine at Saint-Avold. There is, however, a grave marked with his name in Arlington.
Exactly a month after his father’s death, on 11 January 1945, his son was born. His mother named him Montgomery C. Meigs.
PART TWO
II: AMERICAN FERVOR
Listen to me, says Obama, listen to me and you will catch the American future. But I pay attention and hear the American past, not a dragweight on “change”; just the solid ground beneath the high-sailing dirigible of his rhetoric. The American future is all vision, numinous, unformed, lightheaded with anticipation. The American past is baggy with sobering truth. In between is the quicksilver Now, beads of glittering elation that slip and scatter, resisting prosaic definition. Obama wants to personify all these tenses. So he takes his listeners to the next promised land via Selma, Alabama, and the 1960s, Gettysburg and the 1860s. His effort to rekindle a sense of national community suggests another Great Awakening, but he knows all about the first spiritual revival in the eighteenth century and the second in the nineteenth; upheavals of the soul that changed the country. This attachment to the past is not just cultural exhibitionism, a guaranteed vote-loser in America. Rather, it’s the grace note in Lincoln’s “mystic chord of memory”; the sonority without which appeals to invoke American spirit in tough times are just so many sound bites.
Listen to me, says Obama, check out my Cicero, my measured cadence, now legato, now staccato, the latter delivered with narrowing eyes, lips slightly pursed between the calculated pauses; the head still and slightly cocked to one side, as if awaiting the promptings of ancestry. Now whom do you hear? You hear my warrant
, an even bigger, deeper, preach: Martin Luther King. I am the fruit of his planting; the payoff of his sacrifice.
But when I see millions registering to vote for an African American, American African, a Kenyan Kansan from Honolulu, the Harvard Law Review, and the Chicago precincts, I’m reminded of someone quite different who made Obama’s nomination possible. I hear a big black woman from the Delta, preacher’s daughter, eyes wide with resolution, brow furrowed with passion; a gospel pair of lungs on her, sweating in her print dress on the Atlantic City boardwalk. I hear her start on up, the voice hoarse from many choruses sung in peril, a voice that took people like a handclasp. “Go Tell It on the Mountain” she sings, “Over the hills and everee whe-ere,” and over the oncoming cop cars it goes, over the saltwater taffee vendors, past the brush-cut politicos in limp seersucker jackets hurrying to their appointment with history, clutching their important attaché cases; all pretending that she wasn’t there, this embarrassing, overwhelming, ungainly, fired-up woman with her half-closed eyes, wet curls plastered on her forehead swaying a little as she gives it all she’s got. The song gets louder, and less harmonious, now swelled by the chorus of students and civil-rights workers, black and white, not all blessed with perfect pitch, lining up behind her along the wall of the Convention Center. Are the men with the attaché cases hearing it inside? The sound seems to bounce from the building and drift over the green, slightly soiled Atlantic Ocean…“That JEEsus Christ is born.” That’s who I remember: Fannie Lou Hamer.
13. Atlantic City, August 1964
Fannie Lou seemed like a rumpled saint to me, but then what did I know? I was nineteen, editing a reticently titled undergraduate magazine, Cambridge Opinion. In 1964 we had opinions to spare on pretty much everything from Harold Wilson to Wilson Pickett, but editorially we confined ourselves to a single topic an issue. Once a term the magazine would opine on, say, the State of Prisons or the Look of British Modern Art (for there was some) always solemnly, defensively, capitalized. This particular issue was to cover the trifling matter of the fate of the United States in an election year. My friend, co-editor, and business manager and I sailed forth on the MS Aurelia, which had been, not so very long before, a tender for U-boats, and had now converted into an Italian student liner. Scheduled to make the crossing in about ten days, roughly the same time it took Dickens a century earlier, MS Aurelia sailed straight into a frisky gale that played havoc on obligatory efforts to promote Goodwill Among Nations: no stabilizers, no “Kumbaya.” As the ship wallowed in the trough, discarded streamers bearing uplifting internationalist messages bobbed away in the wake. A counselor patrolled the Games Room looking worried, asking if anyone had seen the Belgians. No one had. The remnant of scarlet Italian meals flowered the decks, much to the irritation of the Neapolitan stewards, who would halt before these small sad deposits and confront those who they thought might have been responsible, asking accusingly, “YOURS?” What the guilty parties were supposed to do about it was unclear, but aggressive swabbing ensued.
We thought we knew America, but what we actually knew was Malamud, Bellow, Baldwin, which was something else entirely. Beyond the elegant museums on Fifth and the tonier stretches of Park and Madison, where, if we played our cards right and affected an Oxbridge accent, we’d be sure to run into Holly Golightly, New York seemed lurid and jumpy. As the thermometer climbed into the nineties, sidewalkers slowed to a gasping shuffle as they made their way to or from Grand Central, dripping into their poplin. The city was gamely attempting to put on its welcome face as a World’s Fair opened on Flushing Meadows. Modernist pavilions, steel and pine, celebrated the Achievements of General Electric or the dawning of the jet age. Much of it was free. Investigate the Charms of Norway, and a braided blonde would greet you hospitably proffering brisling on rye. Takk, Solveig. In the Ford Pavilion the brand-new, dangerously sexy Mustang was being unveiled by peppy young men in blazers. But out in swelterland, N.Y., the Long Island Expressway was a parking lot and drivers were aggravating their ulcers, leaning on their horns and getting testy with the kids.
The unsurprising truth was that although JFK had gone to his grave at Arlington, the wound that had ripped open the body politic on that merciless day the previous November obstinately refused to heal or even scar over. Robbed of the boyo Kennedy grin that somehow promised all would be well in America, much evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, the body politic had a lesion that had gone bad. The America that had loved Kennedy (and much of it had not) was doing its best to become reconciled to Lyndon Johnson, but it was having a hard time. Some of this was just East Coast nose-holding, an incredulousness that Camelot had fallen to a Texan from the banks of the Pedernales with horse shit on his shoes. In the Century and the Knickbocker clubs, members didn’t expect to see Pablo Casals showing up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue again anytime soon.
More serious were the apprehensions of black America. When Kennedy had gone down, their leaders initially thought that his civil-rights agenda had fallen with him; that that must have been the reason why he had been taken out. But although there was no love lost between Lyndon Johnson and Bobby Kennedy, for the time being still attorney general, the president had taken up the civil rights cause as if it had been his own crusade in the first place. He had even (between gritted teeth) helped launch Kennedy’s Senate campaign in New York, introducing the man he detested as “dynamic,” “compassionate” and “liberal.” In the Senate, Kennedy figured to be less of a thorn in Johnson’s side than in the Department of Justice. Leaning on whomever had to be leaned on in Congress, Johnson pushed through legislation that outlawed segregation in education and any public spaces: no more separate lunch counters, soda fountains, or schoolrooms. The Civil Rights Act became law on 2 July 1964. The story goes that as he signed the bill, Johnson said that the South would be lost to the Democrats for a generation.
Starting when, exactly? Not, Johnson hoped, in the upcoming election, in which he would be running against the conservative firebrand from Arizona, Barry Goldwater, who had been singing just the kind of music that yellow dog southern Democrats wanted to hear: that civil-rights legislation violated the sanctity of “states rights”—since the Civil War a euphemism for institutionalized racism. So although the president talked a good talk about “ending poverty and racial injustice in America,” it was uncertain just how far Johnson would go to enforce the new legislation. And there was an immediate issue not addressed by the provisions of the Civil Rights Act: black voter registration. The Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1870, had prohibited any obstruction to the right of citizens’ voting based on race or color. (The Fourteenth Amendment had already made anyone born in the United States, or naturalized, a citizen.) And for a while, in the states of the defeated South, more blacks exercised their right to vote than whites. But all this changed with the election of 1876, in which the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won fewer popular votes than his Democratic opponent Samuel Tilden, but managed nonetheless to secure the electoral college. There was, however, a price to pay for President Hayes, namely the end of enforcing the Fifteenth Amendment. On his inauguration in 1877 Hayes shamelessly promised to protect black civil rights while knowing that he had agreed to withdraw all federal troops from the South. It would take almost a century for that betrayal to be reversed. In the meantime, blacks in the South, apart from suffering every kind of discrimination in the workplace and public places, had been kept off the voter rolls by spuriously complicated questionnaires designed to test their knowledge of the state constitutions with questions few whites could have answered. In Mississippi in 1963, just 7,000 blacks were registered out of an eligible voting population of 450,000. A supplementary Voting Rights Act had been promised, but black leaders less trusting than Martin Luther King weren’t confident that the president would be willing to alienate what was left of his southern base by pressing too hard for the measure. Thus was born a campaign of practical action, the Mississippi Summer Project, known to those who became pa
rt of it as the “Freedom Summer”: a thousand volunteers, from North and South, black and white, working in a climate of violent hostility, to get African Americans registered in Mississippi and to test the power of the Civil Rights Act. In the third week of June, three of those volunteers—James Chaney, black and Mississippian; Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both Jewish and white from New York—were arrested in Neshoba County for speeding. Held briefly in jail in a small town called Philadelphia, and given a supper of spoonbread, peas, and potatoes, they were released and told to leave the county. Heading to Meridian, they never arrived. Two carloads of Ku Klux Klansmen caught up with them, shot the two Jews in the heart, beat Chaney to a pulp, and then shot him in the head.
