WEBVTT NOTE Anti-Interventionism in American Literature 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:06.360 The author is John Greenleaf Whittier, the militant Quaker from Massachusetts, 2 00:00:06.360 --> 00:00:11.760 the barefoot boy with the cheek of tan, kissed by strawberries on the hill, 3 00:00:11.760 --> 00:00:16.240 an odd eulogist, or maybe not. 4 00:00:16.240 --> 00:00:25.720 Randolph Whittier, poetized, was too honest or too proud to feign a love he never cherished. 5 00:00:25.720 --> 00:00:30.320 Beyond Virginia's borderline, his patriotism perished. 6 00:00:30.320 --> 00:00:35.620 While others hailed in distant skies, our eagle's dusky pinion. 7 00:00:35.620 --> 00:00:41.020 He only saw the mountain bird stoop over his old dominion. 8 00:00:41.020 --> 00:00:47.620 Whittier was of Puritan stock. He came to Boston to edit a Henry Clay newspaper. 9 00:00:47.620 --> 00:00:52.020 He was ardent for temperance, the tariff, and later abolition, 10 00:00:52.020 --> 00:00:56.580 The cause to which he devoted much of his antebellum poetry. 11 00:00:56.580 --> 00:01:01.100 He even cast an electoral vote for Abraham Lincoln. 12 00:01:01.100 --> 00:01:04.700 And yet, in the winter of 1860-61, 13 00:01:04.700 --> 00:01:09.260 Whittier urged his countrymen to bid the South good riddance. 14 00:01:09.260 --> 00:01:10.900 He wrote, 15 00:01:10.900 --> 00:01:13.260 They break the links of union. 16 00:01:13.260 --> 00:01:20.460 Shall we light the fires of hell to weld anew the chain on that red anvil where each blow is pain? 17 00:01:20.460 --> 00:01:26.420 Let us press the golden cluster on our brave old flag in closer union, and, if numbering 18 00:01:26.420 --> 00:01:33.380 less, brighter shall shine the stars which still remain. 19 00:01:33.380 --> 00:01:39.380 Just as it is an utterly forgotten fact that numerous American poets and novelists were 20 00:01:39.380 --> 00:01:45.980 isolationist and anti-war as late as 1941, so too does it surprise us how many of our 21 00:01:45.980 --> 00:01:52.360 Our finest Northern writers wanted to let the South go. They were rock-ribbed wigs 22 00:01:52.360 --> 00:02:00.000 and dough-faced Democrats, among them Emerson, Melville, Lowell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, 23 00:02:00.000 --> 00:02:05.340 who opined, We never were one people and never really had a country since the Constitution 24 00:02:05.340 --> 00:02:12.320 was founded. In opposing Northern conquest, they were part of a long and proud American 25 00:02:12.320 --> 00:02:29.320 I identify four common sources of this dissent. First is localism, the passionate attachment 26 00:02:29.320 --> 00:02:38.400 to one's own postage stamp of ground, a la John Randolph. As G.K. Chesterton understood, 27 00:02:38.400 --> 00:02:45.400 The supreme psychological fact about patriotism is that the patriot never under any circumstances 28 00:02:45.560 --> 00:02:51.720 boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness 29 00:02:51.720 --> 00:02:56.840 of it. Second is the antediluvian American belief 30 00:02:56.840 --> 00:03:03.840 in the principles of limited government, philosophical libertarianism, or even anarchism. The Concord 31 00:03:03.840 --> 00:03:11.840 The Concord epigramitist Ralph Waldo Emerson told a Kansas relief meeting in Cambridge in 1856, 32 00:03:11.840 --> 00:03:16.840 I'm glad to see that the terror, disunion and anarchy is disappearing. 33 00:03:16.840 --> 00:03:21.840 Massachusetts in its heroic day had no government, was an anarchy. 34 00:03:21.840 --> 00:03:30.840 Every man stood on his own feet, was his own governor, and there was no breach of peace from Cape Cod to Mt. Husak. 35 00:03:30.840 --> 00:03:42.840 The Third Wellspring is the proprietary patriotism, often, but not exclusively, evinced by the New England Brahminate and the Hudson Valley patronage. 36 00:03:42.840 --> 00:03:53.840 The sense that this country is theirs, that their ancestors paid for it in blood, in toil, and they will not have the Johnny-come-lately sullying this bequest. 37 00:03:53.840 --> 00:04:02.840 This grounds the two great literary isolationists of post-Republic America, Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal. 38 00:04:02.840 --> 00:04:11.840 The fourth reason so many writers have opposed our adventures in empire was expressed by Sherwood Anderson in 1939. 39 00:04:11.840 --> 00:04:20.840 I suppose I am an isolationist. In a time of war, any man working in the arts is sunk, his lamps are out. 40 00:04:20.840 --> 00:04:28.840 A new and strange ugliness comes into everyone about him. It is, for him, a time of death. 41 00:04:28.840 --> 00:04:43.840 Certainly fine novels have come from veterans of modern warfare, but I rather doubt that 400,000 American corpses are worth one naked in the dead. 42 00:04:43.840 --> 00:04:50.840 John Greenleaf Whittier, our improbable chaperone in this room full of confederates and libertarians, 43 00:04:50.840 --> 00:04:55.840 understood the Mexican war to be the granddaddy of our current multicultural mess. 44 00:04:55.840 --> 00:05:03.840 In the crisis, he saw great spaces yet untraveled, great lakes whose mystic shores 45 00:05:03.840 --> 00:05:11.840 the Saxon rifle never heard, nor dip of Saxon oars. All these, he say, are ours? 46 00:05:11.840 --> 00:05:23.840 As early as March 1844, Emerson saw the annexation of Texas. Indeed, U.S. dominion from ocean 47 00:05:23.840 --> 00:05:28.960 to ocean is inevitable. Yet he deplored the distension of America. 48 00:05:28.960 --> 00:05:34.920 It is quite necessary and true to our New England character, he wrote, that we should 49 00:05:34.920 --> 00:05:40.440 consider the question in its local and temporary bearings and resist the annexation with tooth 50 00:05:40.440 --> 00:05:48.800 He predicted that the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallows 51 00:05:48.800 --> 00:05:57.000 the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us. This is an uncanny 52 00:05:57.000 --> 00:06:04.000 prefiguration of a later New England prophet of individualism, William Graham Sumner, who 53 00:06:04.000 --> 00:06:10.000 We titled his most famous anti-imperialist speech, The Conquest of the United States by Spain. 54 00:06:10.000 --> 00:06:21.000 Significantly, one American poet who gloried in our war against Mexico was a Loco-Foco editor who signed his name Walter Whitman. 55 00:06:21.000 --> 00:06:27.000 Mexico must be thoroughly chastised, he declared to readers of the Brooklyn Eagle. 56 00:06:27.000 --> 00:06:31.000 America knows how to crush as well as how to expand. 57 00:06:31.000 --> 00:06:43.000 We pant to see our country and its rule far-reaching, only inasmuch as it will take off the shackles that prevent men the even chance of being happy and good. 58 00:06:43.000 --> 00:06:51.000 This aggrandizing bombast is difficult to reconcile with Whitman's general preference for a minimal government. 59 00:06:51.000 --> 00:06:55.960 But young Walt was certainly not the last libertarian whose embrace of the 60 00:06:55.960 --> 00:07:01.880 where liberty dwells there is my country. Willow the Wisp led him to rhapsodize over mass slaughter. 61 00:07:03.320 --> 00:07:12.120 Actually Whitman was kind of prescient as well in an 1856 tract titled The Eighteenth Presidency 62 00:07:12.120 --> 00:07:19.000 which was not published for another century or so. Whitman imagined some heroic, shrewd, 63 00:07:19.000 --> 00:07:24.900 the fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman 64 00:07:24.900 --> 00:07:30.040 come down from the West, across the Alleghenies, and walk into the presidency, dressed in a 65 00:07:30.040 --> 00:07:35.840 clean suit of working attire, and with a tan all over his face, breast and arms. 66 00:07:35.840 --> 00:07:42.520 And then, of course, along came Abe Lincoln, and Walt had all the gangrenous and amputated 67 00:07:42.520 --> 00:07:45.400 limbs a male nurse could ever hope for. 68 00:07:45.400 --> 00:07:55.300 I tease Whitman, whom I perhaps alone among the speakers admire, but the disabling flaw 69 00:07:55.300 --> 00:08:02.260 of his Transcendentalism was captured by the Harvard class poet of 1838, James Russell 70 00:08:02.260 --> 00:08:08.700 Lowell, who in his class poem poked fun at those of his countrymen who, having made a 71 00:08:08.700 --> 00:08:14.940 universal soul, forget their own in thinking of the whole. 72 00:08:14.940 --> 00:08:20.660 Lowell, a lawyer by training and a confrere of the literary nationalists of the Young 73 00:08:20.660 --> 00:08:28.220 America School, composed the Bigelow Papers, one of the few lasting works of political 74 00:08:28.220 --> 00:08:34.600 poetry in the American language. This dialect satire presents the thoughts of a cracker 75 00:08:34.600 --> 00:08:41.660 barrel Yankee philosopher named Jose of Bigelow, who has no truck with the Mexican war. As 76 00:08:41.660 --> 00:08:47.140 As for war, I call it murder. There you have it plain and flat. I don't want to go no 77 00:08:47.140 --> 00:08:55.100 further than my testament for that. Lowell supported Seward in 1860, though in that critical 78 00:08:55.100 --> 00:09:00.400 winter he wrote, even if succeeding states should be conquered back again, they would 79 00:09:00.400 --> 00:09:10.020 not be worth the conquest. A decent man with a capacious heart, Lowell despised Reconstruction. 80 00:09:10.020 --> 00:09:17.300 He became the mudwump par excellence, a protester against confiscatory taxes, high tariffs, 81 00:09:17.300 --> 00:09:22.100 and the corruption embodied by his bet noir, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from 82 00:09:22.100 --> 00:09:23.900 the state of Maine. 83 00:09:23.900 --> 00:09:31.100 Office, Lowell rhymed, means a kind of patent drill, to force an entrance to the nation's 84 00:09:31.100 --> 00:09:32.100 till. 85 00:09:32.100 --> 00:09:41.340 In 1876, he was an elector for Rutherford B. Hayes, or as we New York partisans of Samuel 86 00:09:41.340 --> 00:09:47.740 Tilden call him, rather, Fraud Hayes, and the rumor spread that in a towering act of 87 00:09:47.740 --> 00:09:55.300 mugwump conscience and New England rectitude, the poet was going to cast his decisive 185th 88 00:09:55.300 --> 00:09:59.820 electoral vote for someone other than Hayes or Tilden. 89 00:09:59.820 --> 00:10:06.100 But the family must be fed, after all, and James Russell Lowell put Rutherford and Lemonade 90 00:10:06.100 --> 00:10:09.320 Lucy Hayes in the White House. 91 00:10:09.320 --> 00:10:15.460 After an indecorously short interval, Lowell was appointed minister to Spain, where he 92 00:10:15.460 --> 00:10:24.780 continued to compose witty verse deploring political corruption. 93 00:10:24.780 --> 00:10:33.780 Howell's ministerial post was engineered by his young and impossibly well-connected friend, William Dean Howells, a Hayes in-law. 94 00:10:33.780 --> 00:10:41.780 Howells was the son of an Ohio editor. He was always proud of his father's polemics against the Mexican War. 95 00:10:41.780 --> 00:10:51.780 In his early twenties, Howells wrote a campaign biography of candidate Abraham Lincoln, though he conveniently obtained a consulship in Venice 96 00:10:51.780 --> 00:10:59.340 When the terrible swift fury of Fr. Abraham's sword hacked other sons of the Buckeye State to bits, 97 00:10:59.340 --> 00:11:04.020 Howells, by virtue of his editor's easy chair at Harper's Magazine, 98 00:11:04.020 --> 00:11:09.140 became ringleader of the literary anti-imperialist during the Spanish-American War, 99 00:11:09.140 --> 00:11:17.740 which he deemed the most stupid and causeless war that was ever imagined by a kindly and sensible nation. 100 00:11:17.740 --> 00:11:24.660 The year 1898 is a great landmark in the history of the United States, wrote William Graham Sumner, 101 00:11:24.660 --> 00:11:31.420 and virtually every American novelist or poet who thought about such matters concurred. 102 00:11:31.420 --> 00:11:38.620 Howells worried that the Spanish-American War has brutalized the popular mind and spoiled the taste, 103 00:11:38.620 --> 00:11:44.820 but he buoyed himself with the thought that we still have a republic and not yet an empire of letters, 104 00:11:44.820 --> 00:11:49.300 and no one is obliged to read silly books. 105 00:11:49.300 --> 00:11:55.500 Mark Twain, despite his initial enthusiasm for kicking the Spanish out of Cuba, 106 00:11:55.500 --> 00:11:59.500 I have never enjoyed a war as I am enjoying this one, he confessed, 107 00:11:59.500 --> 00:12:03.340 came to share his friend Howell's sentiments. 108 00:12:03.340 --> 00:12:08.260 I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land, he said, 109 00:12:08.260 --> 00:12:14.860 and he began to speak, balefully and bitterly, of our dying republic. 110 00:12:14.860 --> 00:12:23.220 American writers flocked to the anti-imperialist cause, Democrat, Republican, populist, socialist, 111 00:12:23.220 --> 00:12:32.140 high Brahmin, low pro, from the roughest frontier humorists to the rarefied Henrys, Adams and James. 112 00:12:32.140 --> 00:12:37.540 Opponents of the Spanish-American war were not hailed before paying the root courts or beheaded, 113 00:12:37.540 --> 00:12:43.380 But then as the Ole Miss lawyer said in Easy Rider, this used to be a free country, and 114 00:12:43.380 --> 00:12:48.780 a Mark Twain could vilipend his nation's political class and not be read out of the 115 00:12:48.780 --> 00:12:53.980 community of enlightened discourse or whatever the camp phrase is. 116 00:12:53.980 --> 00:13:00.060 The fever swamps, as Twain knew, are America. 117 00:13:00.060 --> 00:13:04.700 Sherwood Anderson's belief that American participation in foreign wars damped the creative 118 00:13:04.700 --> 00:13:34.700 Fires, was anticipated by Henry Blake Fuller, a Mayflower descendant and son of prominent Chicagoans, whose life, sojourn in Europe, the supercilious dismissal of his acquisitive forebears, the dalliance with Bohemia, and the eventual understanding that he was indissolubly an American, a Chicagoan, a Fuller, traced a familiar arc. Henry was basically apolitical, but his patriotism flared when it became clear that in our splendid little war, 119 00:13:34.700 --> 00:13:59.700 In 1899, he became a vice president of the Chicago Anti-Imperialist League, and he published, at his own expense, The New Flag, 60 pages of poetic poison darts aimed at McKinley, Dewey, Teddy Roosevelt, whom he memorably dubbed Megaphone of Mars, and the other shoulderers of the white man's burden. 120 00:13:59.700 --> 00:14:05.460 He proposed that we trade in the stars and stripes for the skull and crossbones, a suggestion 121 00:14:05.460 --> 00:14:08.020 later adopted by Mark Twain and Ernest Crosby. 122 00:14:08.020 --> 00:14:13.200 In his 1899 address, Art in America, Fuller argued that imperialism would prevent the 123 00:14:13.200 --> 00:14:17.500 development of a robust and Native American literature. 124 00:14:17.500 --> 00:14:22.020 We see ourselves, whether too flatteringly or not, as a race of rulers and administrators, 125 00:14:22.020 --> 00:14:24.140 the Romans of the modern world. 126 00:14:24.140 --> 00:14:30.060 Our places on the dais are under the canopy, and art, as practiced by other, inferior races, 127 00:14:30.060 --> 00:14:34.500 may amuse our leisure and adore our festivities. The Greeks were privileged to do as much for 128 00:14:34.500 --> 00:14:38.740 the Romans of the Empire, but the French, the Germans and the Italians do as much for 129 00:14:38.740 --> 00:14:44.220 us. The hallmark of the artist absolute is his wish, as an individual personality, to 130 00:14:44.220 --> 00:14:49.220 do and be the thing that is an entirety. He desires neither to direct or to be directed 131 00:14:49.220 --> 00:14:54.060 in turn. This feeling is, of course, in opposition to the whole trend of modern American civilization. 132 00:14:54.060 --> 00:15:02.700 Imperialism was working on less subtle alteration on American civilization. In the Senate, this 133 00:15:02.700 --> 00:15:15.620 alloying was foreseen by Missouri's redoubtable Champ Clark. How can we endure our shame when 134 00:15:15.620 --> 00:15:21.580 a Chinese senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back, with his pagan jaws 135 00:15:21.580 --> 00:15:48.940 American poets had a field day skewering their jingle brethren. 136 00:15:48.940 --> 00:15:55.660 A favorite of mine is Expansion by James T Dubois. In his dialect poem, the narrator relates 137 00:15:55.660 --> 00:16:02.580 his encounters with a variety of exotic persons, fellers, I should say, wearing tropic garments, 138 00:16:02.580 --> 00:16:09.820 a sombrero, and speaking in foreign lingo. As to where they're from, these aliens reply, 139 00:16:09.820 --> 00:16:21.500 Puerto Rico, USA, Santiago, USA, Manila, USA, and so on till finally our narrator is exasperated. 140 00:16:21.500 --> 00:16:26.700 Holly gee says I, I never heard of these here cannibals before. 141 00:16:26.700 --> 00:16:31.740 Are these heathens here all voters? Will we stand for any more? 142 00:16:31.740 --> 00:16:35.980 Next you know you'll ask a feller, where he's from he'll up and say, 143 00:16:35.980 --> 00:16:45.980 With a lordly kind of flourish, all creation, U.S.A. 144 00:16:45.980 --> 00:16:52.540 Betrayal is a frequent theme. Corporal John Malkese in the trenches reads the part, 145 00:16:52.540 --> 00:16:57.740 Facing death in rice fields which are shambles, for yellow men who are fighting to be free, 146 00:16:57.740 --> 00:17:02.620 Pyramid, the cactus and the brambles, old glory seems ashamed across the sea, 147 00:17:02.620 --> 00:17:07.980 Dying here before the malarial breezes that swamp across the campground in the bay, 148 00:17:07.980 --> 00:17:13.900 bringing here the fever that seizes and lays the strong man low within a day, this is empire. 149 00:17:15.180 --> 00:17:19.820 Fighting niggers who themselves are fighting for the same cause our fathers fought to save, 150 00:17:20.780 --> 00:17:24.700 fighting in a way that is forever blighting the first heritage our fathers gave, 151 00:17:25.820 --> 00:17:30.140 fighting in a cause that is forever grabbing the cause that is the old-time robbers still, 152 00:17:30.140 --> 00:17:49.140 Signing a similar note was William Vaughan Moody, who is an ode in the time of hesitation is, with Mark Twain's The War Prayer, the only anti-imperialist literary work still read today. 153 00:17:49.140 --> 00:17:55.140 Moody was an Indiana boy, a poet and dramatist who taught English at Harvard and the University of Chicago. 154 00:17:55.140 --> 00:18:03.140 Like Fuller, he abjured political action. Preferring, he said, to give the world not a syllogism, but a song. 155 00:18:03.140 --> 00:18:07.140 Our refusal to turn the Philippines over to the Filipinos disgusted him. 156 00:18:07.140 --> 00:18:11.140 We have changed our birthright for a gourd, he wrote in the ode. 157 00:18:11.140 --> 00:18:19.140 In On a Soldier Fallen in the Philippines, he urges us never to let the deceased know of the rotten cause for which he gave his life. 158 00:18:19.140 --> 00:18:26.540 Toll, let the great bells toll, till the clashing air is dim. 159 00:18:26.540 --> 00:18:28.620 Did we wrong this parted soul? 160 00:18:28.620 --> 00:18:30.620 We will make it up to him. 161 00:18:30.620 --> 00:18:34.140 Toll, let him never guess what work we sent him to. 162 00:18:34.140 --> 00:18:37.380 Laurel, Laurel, yes, he did what we bade him do. 163 00:18:37.380 --> 00:18:42.020 Praise, and never a whispered hint, but the fight he fought was good. 164 00:18:42.020 --> 00:18:46.300 Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own heart's blood. 165 00:18:46.300 --> 00:19:16.300 A flag for the soldier's beard who dies that his land may live, Oh banners, banners here, that he doubt not nor misgive, That he heed not from the tomb the evil days draw near, When the nation robed in gloom with its faithless past shall strive, Let it never dream that his bullet-scream went wide of its island mark, Home to the heart of his darling land, where she stumbled and sinned in the dark. 166 00:19:16.300 --> 00:19:19.660 positions of laissez-faire government and non-intervention. 167 00:19:19.660 --> 00:19:24.700 He rang the death knell for his beloved country when the megaphone of Mars, Theodore Roosevelt, 168 00:19:24.700 --> 00:19:27.820 won the presidential election of 1904. 169 00:19:27.820 --> 00:19:29.660 Moody wrote despairingly that, 170 00:19:29.660 --> 00:19:34.540 The vision in the light of which our country was created and has grown great will soon 171 00:19:34.540 --> 00:19:39.700 fade, and one more world dream will have been found impossible to live out. 172 00:19:39.700 --> 00:19:43.780 Our different destiny may be greater, but the America that we have known and passionately 173 00:19:43.780 --> 00:20:03.780 These awareness work perhaps its greatest miracle on Thomas Bailey Aldrich, the stalwart Republican editor of the Gilded Age Atlantic Monthly, who said in 1899 that he'd not vote for McKinley again, I would sooner vote for Bryan. To be ruined financially is not so bad as to be ruined morally. 174 00:20:03.780 --> 00:20:13.780 I've dwelt on New England writers to some extent because I'm so deeply ambivalent about that region, so blessed and also so blind. 175 00:20:13.780 --> 00:20:19.780 She in the Midwest applied the passion and wit and brawn and style of the republic's defense, 176 00:20:19.780 --> 00:20:24.780 yet her sons were capable of asking, as one poet did, what would Lincoln say? 177 00:20:24.780 --> 00:20:31.780 What indeed would Abraham Lincoln say of a large industrial nation's suppression of a smaller country's independence movement? 178 00:20:31.780 --> 00:20:39.980 Some of the most biting anti-war verse was penned by the prolific Ernest Crosby. Born 179 00:20:39.980 --> 00:20:45.300 into a socially prominent New York City family, Crosby was a young lawyer who in 1887 succeeded 180 00:20:45.300 --> 00:20:51.020 to the state assembly seat vacated by Theodore Roosevelt. He became a Tolstoyan anarchist, 181 00:20:51.020 --> 00:20:57.060 spiked with a healthy dose of Henry George. Crosby's novel Captain Jinx, Hero, is a very 182 00:20:57.060 --> 00:21:02.060 is a very broad satire on the expansionist fever that was invaliding the American Republic. 183 00:21:02.060 --> 00:21:07.060 The novel follows its Myrmidon namesake from East Point, the U.S. Military Academy, to 184 00:21:07.060 --> 00:21:12.660 the Cubapine Islands, where Jinx's exploits, burning native temples, censoring Spanish 185 00:21:12.660 --> 00:21:18.620 translations of the Declaration of Independence, learning, as one monopolist explains, that 186 00:21:18.620 --> 00:21:23.700 the best way to civilize the Cubapines is to tax them, are gilded by yellow journalists 187 00:21:23.700 --> 00:21:38.700 Captain Jin's hero isn't exactly funny. Crosby was a zealous Tolstoyan, after all, and however congenial we may find those mystical anarchists, we must admit that they are strangers in the House of Murph. 188 00:21:38.700 --> 00:21:57.700 There is a relaxed certitude, though, in Crosby. He understands that imperialism is a barbaric thing. It doesn't fit America. And once we come to our senses, say by 1905, we'll repair to the old standards of liberty and non-interference in the quarrels of other nations. 189 00:21:57.700 --> 00:22:10.700 This is in contrast to the desperation, the panicky realization that the game is up, that our America is destroyed and made over, which one finds in much of the anti-war writing of the 1940s. 190 00:22:10.700 --> 00:22:18.700 I've dealt elsewhere with those American writers who in the period up to December 7, 1941, stood on the tracks and yelled, stop! 191 00:22:18.700 --> 00:22:25.700 At the runaway train carrying American blood and dollars to the European war and American ideals to the boneyard. 192 00:22:25.700 --> 00:22:31.700 Suffice here to say that there were many, they were distinguished, they were honorable and they were crushed. 193 00:22:31.700 --> 00:22:42.700 Their names include E. E. Cummings, Sinclair Lewis, Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, William Saroy and Theodore Dreiser, Henry W. Clune. 194 00:22:42.700 --> 00:22:49.700 Henry actually is a 104 year old friend of mine who introduced me to the delights of the martini. 195 00:22:49.700 --> 00:23:03.700 He is a very fine novelist in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and he has the distinction, as far as I know, of being the only American writer to have opposed U.S. entrance into the First World War, the Second World War in Vietnam. 196 00:23:03.700 --> 00:23:16.700 He tells me that when he was eight years old, he wore, remember, the main pin, so I guess he was hawkish on the Spanish-American War, but we can forgive him that youthful indiscretion. 197 00:23:16.700 --> 00:23:42.700 Other writers include Edgar Lee Masters mentioned yesterday, Kathleen Norris, Samuel Hopkins Adams, and the poet Robinson Jeffers, who dared dream of a better world in which FDR and Woodrow Wilson would meet in hell, and bombers might drop wreaths of roses upon a shining city whose boys hang Hitler and Roosevelt in one tree, painlessly in effigy. 198 00:23:42.700 --> 00:23:50.700 Everything before the war is out, says a distraught lady in John P. Marquand's novel of the American metamorphicist B.F.'s daughter. 199 00:23:50.700 --> 00:23:54.700 The world turned topsy-turvy and all the stuffing fell out of our country. 200 00:23:54.700 --> 00:24:02.700 The attacked Republican Jack Kerouac noticed that America was invested with wild, self-believing individuality, 201 00:24:02.700 --> 00:24:07.700 and this had begun to disappear around the end of World War II, as so many great guys did. 202 00:24:07.700 --> 00:24:17.700 As Robinson Jeffers prophesied, the spirit of 76 took to the hills and hinterlands. The beliefs our forefathers held were now identified with remoteness. 203 00:24:17.700 --> 00:24:30.700 Listen to how the iconoclastic editor of the journal Politics, Dwight MacDonald, whose isolationism somehow bloomed in the New York Trotskyite hothouse, was attacked in 1946 by his erstwhile allies at partisan review. 204 00:24:30.700 --> 00:24:40.700 For its crackerbox bluster, wide-eyed idealism and ingenue dogmatism, politics might just as well be put out at some tiny whistle-stop in Oklahoma. 205 00:24:40.700 --> 00:24:52.700 Exactly. In a more than metaphorical sense, American politics has been for 60 years about the steady triumph of partisan review over 10,000 tiny whistle-stops in Oklahoma. 206 00:24:52.700 --> 00:24:57.800 Sayeth the cynical newsman in John Ford's elegiac western, The Man Who Shot Liberty 207 00:24:57.800 --> 00:25:02.300 Valance, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend. 208 00:25:02.300 --> 00:25:08.140 Fifty years of smears have so blackened the reputations of the courageous men who fought 209 00:25:08.140 --> 00:25:13.460 to preserve the republic that today no libel is too preposterous. 210 00:25:13.460 --> 00:25:18.060 One of the only contemporary novels written about the great debate of 1940-41 is Secret 211 00:25:18.060 --> 00:25:24.480 Anniversaries by Scott Spencer, best known for the Brooke Shields vehicle, Endless Love. 212 00:25:24.480 --> 00:25:29.920 In Spencer's fantasy, a Hudson Valley debutante takes a job with a barely disguised Congressman 213 00:25:29.920 --> 00:25:36.880 Hamilton Fish, and her apple-cheeked heroine descends into the clammy isolationist netherworld. 214 00:25:36.880 --> 00:25:42.280 America firsters were hags and creeps, you know, hideous harpies and monsters like Lillian 215 00:25:42.280 --> 00:25:44.380 Gish, Charles Lindbergh. 216 00:25:44.380 --> 00:25:55.780 Anyway, Ardell falls under the spell of Fisch's Adjutant, an insatiable pro-Nazi lesbian. 217 00:25:55.780 --> 00:26:00.220 The Nazi dyke routine was done much better in the porn classic Ilse, She-Wolf of the 218 00:26:00.220 --> 00:26:06.900 SS. 219 00:26:06.900 --> 00:26:11.580 But Secret Anniversaries is more than just macabre camp, it is in Spencer's conceit 220 00:26:11.580 --> 00:26:27.760 A rigorously researched historical novel. But this is America and there will always 221 00:26:27.760 --> 00:26:33.020 be men who can track in the dark. Contemporaneous with secret anniversaries was Edward Abbey's 222 00:26:33.020 --> 00:26:37.900 penultimate novel, The Fool's Progress, which gave us the Lightcap family of Stubb Creek, 223 00:26:37.900 --> 00:26:44.620 Paul, Joe Lightcap, thought he was the only wobbly east of the Mississippi River, the only 224 00:26:44.620 --> 00:26:50.860 free thinker in West Virginia, the only isolationist left in Shawnee County. He's a village crank 225 00:26:50.860 --> 00:26:56.500 of the kind who keeps this country turning. When his son, Will, enlists in Roosevelt's 226 00:26:56.500 --> 00:27:01.380 war, Joe is furious. You're going to go get your head blown off for that damned old windbag 227 00:27:01.380 --> 00:27:07.820 Winston Churchill? Will said nothing. For that scheming old sneaky son of a bitch, Roosevelt? 228 00:27:07.820 --> 00:27:14.720 will remain silent. For that bloody old communist tyrant, Joe Stalin? Will did not reply. 229 00:27:14.720 --> 00:27:21.220 I'm disgusted, Paul said, absolutely disgusted, that any son of mine would go fight in that rich man's war. 230 00:27:21.220 --> 00:27:28.220 Would risk his neck for, he put on his fake Groton-Harvard accent, for the bloody British Empire. 231 00:27:28.220 --> 00:27:34.220 Paul later takes enormous pride in Will's soldierly feats, all the while hating the war. 232 00:27:34.220 --> 00:27:41.220 Scott Spencer, by his own account, lived for years via an I.D. hooked up to the government welfare culture machine. 233 00:27:41.220 --> 00:27:45.220 Edward Abbey, by contrast, was one of the last of the independents. 234 00:27:45.220 --> 00:27:53.220 When in 1987 the American Academy of Arts and Letters got around to honoring him, he refused the award and instead ran a river in Idaho. 235 00:27:53.220 --> 00:28:03.220 This reminds me of our preeminent America first, Gour Vidal, whose senatorial grandfather was a Brionite foe of U.S. entrance into the First World War. 236 00:28:03.220 --> 00:28:13.220 The great Senator Thomas P. Gore also compiled the second most consistent anti-FDR voting record in the Senate before FDR and his henchmen engineered his defeat. 237 00:28:13.220 --> 00:28:18.220 As a boy, Vidal himself was a leader of the America First Committee at Exeter. 238 00:28:18.220 --> 00:28:29.220 In 1976, Vidal was extended with usual pomp and absurd solemnity, an invitation to join the 200 immortals of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. 239 00:28:29.220 --> 00:28:34.220 He forever earned their enmity by declining the invitation, wiring them, 240 00:28:34.220 --> 00:28:44.220 I cannot accept this election as I already belong to the diners club. 241 00:28:44.220 --> 00:28:50.220 The Mexican war provoked Ralph Waldo Emerson to call democracy a government of bullies tempered by editors. 242 00:28:50.220 --> 00:28:53.220 And what do we do when the editors grow fangs? 243 00:28:53.220 --> 00:29:00.220 When Thomas Bailey Eldritch and Dwight MacDonald vanish and were left with William F. Buckley Jr. and Abe Rosenthal. 244 00:29:00.220 --> 00:29:08.220 When William Dean Howells and the Anti-Imperialist League give way to Susan Sontag and a belligerent legion of writers in residence. 245 00:29:08.220 --> 00:29:18.220 The Bread Loaf Brigade giving public readings demanding that boys from Fargo and Batavia and Atlanta and Harlem be sent to die in Sarajevo. 246 00:29:18.220 --> 00:29:28.220 Wittier was wiser than Lincoln and Moody McKinley, and even today it is men of letters, not men of state, who know the way back home. 247 00:29:28.220 --> 00:29:34.220 Consider two quotes, one from a leading organ of the establishment right, the other from a poet. 248 00:29:34.220 --> 00:29:42.220 A couple of years ago, the Wall Street Journal editorial page instructed us that patriotism is fundamentally about defense policy. 249 00:29:42.220 --> 00:29:48.300 Policy. This is in the context of the age of the Nicaraguan Contras. It can be measured 250 00:29:48.300 --> 00:29:54.820 in dollars and megatons of fuel ratios. This obscenity requires no elaboration other than 251 00:29:54.820 --> 00:29:59.620 to restate Tom Fleming's observation that official conservatives seem eager to watch 252 00:29:59.620 --> 00:30:04.380 on CNN as American boys in blue helmets die on foreign sands in order to make the world 253 00:30:04.380 --> 00:30:11.700 safe for the Fortune 500. Now, in an American accent, listen to the Kentucky poet-farmer 254 00:30:11.700 --> 00:30:18.220 tobacco farmer no less, Wendell Berry. At the raucous wake held for Edward Abbey, Mr. 255 00:30:18.220 --> 00:30:23.780 Berry saluted his friend as a true patriot, remarking, patriotism is not the love of air 256 00:30:23.780 --> 00:30:28.780 conditioning or the interstate highway system or the government or the flag or money or 257 00:30:28.780 --> 00:30:35.860 munitions, it is the love of country. Don't yelp with the pack, William James told his 258 00:30:35.860 --> 00:30:53.860 by the Students in 1898, Brahmin or Confederate, Quaker or village atheist, these American writers have exhibited the cussed, ornery, independence and willingness to stray that are among our noblest traditions. Whatever else may be said of them, they have loved their country. 259 00:30:53.860 --> 00:31:02.860 I'll end with an epilogue, an appropriate one for this gathering, I think. It's from a poem by Ernest Crosby titled The State. 260 00:31:02.860 --> 00:31:14.860 They talked much of the state, the state. I'd never seen the state, and I asked them to picture it to me, as my gross mind could not follow their subtle language when they spake of it. 261 00:31:14.860 --> 00:31:26.860 Then they told me to think of it as of a beautiful goddess, enthroned and sceptered, benignly caring for her children. But for some reason I was not satisfied. 262 00:31:26.860 --> 00:31:33.860 And once upon a time, an aunt's arm hung, limp and motionless, a shadowy, empty noose. 263 00:31:33.860 --> 00:31:39.860 And a voice whispered in my ear, behold the state, incarnate. 264 00:31:39.860 --> 00:31:41.860 Thanks for listening.