The author is John Greenleaf Whittier, the militant Quaker from Massachusetts,
the barefoot boy with the cheek of tan, kissed by strawberries on the hill,
an odd eulogist, or maybe not.
Randolph Whittier, poetized, was too honest or too proud to feign a love he never cherished.
Beyond Virginia's borderline, his patriotism perished.
While others hailed in distant skies, our eagle's dusky pinion.
He only saw the mountain bird stoop over his old dominion.
Whittier was of Puritan stock. He came to Boston to edit a Henry Clay newspaper.
He was ardent for temperance, the tariff, and later abolition,
The cause to which he devoted much of his antebellum poetry.
He even cast an electoral vote for Abraham Lincoln.
And yet, in the winter of 1860-61,
Whittier urged his countrymen to bid the South good riddance.
He wrote,
They break the links of union.
Shall we light the fires of hell to weld anew the chain on that red anvil where each blow is pain?
Let us press the golden cluster on our brave old flag in closer union, and, if numbering
less, brighter shall shine the stars which still remain.
Just as it is an utterly forgotten fact that numerous American poets and novelists were
isolationist and anti-war as late as 1941, so too does it surprise us how many of our
Our finest Northern writers wanted to let the South go. They were rock-ribbed wigs
and dough-faced Democrats, among them Emerson, Melville, Lowell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne,
who opined, We never were one people and never really had a country since the Constitution
was founded. In opposing Northern conquest, they were part of a long and proud American
I identify four common sources of this dissent. First is localism, the passionate attachment
to one's own postage stamp of ground, a la John Randolph. As G.K. Chesterton understood,
The supreme psychological fact about patriotism is that the patriot never under any circumstances
boasts of the largeness of his country, but always, and of necessity, boasts of the smallness
of it. Second is the antediluvian American belief
in the principles of limited government, philosophical libertarianism, or even anarchism. The Concord
The Concord epigramitist Ralph Waldo Emerson told a Kansas relief meeting in Cambridge in 1856,
I'm glad to see that the terror, disunion and anarchy is disappearing.
Massachusetts in its heroic day had no government, was an anarchy.
Every man stood on his own feet, was his own governor, and there was no breach of peace from Cape Cod to Mt. Husak.
The Third Wellspring is the proprietary patriotism, often, but not exclusively, evinced by the New England Brahminate and the Hudson Valley patronage.
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.
This grounds the two great literary isolationists of post-Republic America, Edmund Wilson and Gore Vidal.
The fourth reason so many writers have opposed our adventures in empire was expressed by Sherwood Anderson in 1939.
I suppose I am an isolationist. In a time of war, any man working in the arts is sunk, his lamps are out.
A new and strange ugliness comes into everyone about him. It is, for him, a time of death.
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.
John Greenleaf Whittier, our improbable chaperone in this room full of confederates and libertarians,
understood the Mexican war to be the granddaddy of our current multicultural mess.
In the crisis, he saw great spaces yet untraveled, great lakes whose mystic shores
the Saxon rifle never heard, nor dip of Saxon oars. All these, he say, are ours?
As early as March 1844, Emerson saw the annexation of Texas. Indeed, U.S. dominion from ocean
to ocean is inevitable. Yet he deplored the distension of America.
It is quite necessary and true to our New England character, he wrote, that we should
consider the question in its local and temporary bearings and resist the annexation with tooth
He predicted that the United States will conquer Mexico, but it will be as the man who swallows
the arsenic, which brings him down in turn. Mexico will poison us. This is an uncanny
prefiguration of a later New England prophet of individualism, William Graham Sumner, who
We titled his most famous anti-imperialist speech, The Conquest of the United States by Spain.
Significantly, one American poet who gloried in our war against Mexico was a Loco-Foco editor who signed his name Walter Whitman.
Mexico must be thoroughly chastised, he declared to readers of the Brooklyn Eagle.
America knows how to crush as well as how to expand.
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.
This aggrandizing bombast is difficult to reconcile with Whitman's general preference for a minimal government.
But young Walt was certainly not the last libertarian whose embrace of the
where liberty dwells there is my country. Willow the Wisp led him to rhapsodize over mass slaughter.
Actually Whitman was kind of prescient as well in an 1856 tract titled The Eighteenth Presidency
which was not published for another century or so. Whitman imagined some heroic, shrewd,
the fully-informed, healthy-bodied, middle-aged, beard-faced American blacksmith or boatman
come down from the West, across the Alleghenies, and walk into the presidency, dressed in a
clean suit of working attire, and with a tan all over his face, breast and arms.
And then, of course, along came Abe Lincoln, and Walt had all the gangrenous and amputated
limbs a male nurse could ever hope for.
I tease Whitman, whom I perhaps alone among the speakers admire, but the disabling flaw
of his Transcendentalism was captured by the Harvard class poet of 1838, James Russell
Lowell, who in his class poem poked fun at those of his countrymen who, having made a
universal soul, forget their own in thinking of the whole.
Lowell, a lawyer by training and a confrere of the literary nationalists of the Young
America School, composed the Bigelow Papers, one of the few lasting works of political
poetry in the American language. This dialect satire presents the thoughts of a cracker
barrel Yankee philosopher named Jose of Bigelow, who has no truck with the Mexican war. As
As for war, I call it murder. There you have it plain and flat. I don't want to go no
further than my testament for that. Lowell supported Seward in 1860, though in that critical
winter he wrote, even if succeeding states should be conquered back again, they would
not be worth the conquest. A decent man with a capacious heart, Lowell despised Reconstruction.
He became the mudwump par excellence, a protester against confiscatory taxes, high tariffs,
and the corruption embodied by his bet noir, James G. Blaine, the continental liar from
the state of Maine.
Office, Lowell rhymed, means a kind of patent drill, to force an entrance to the nation's
till.
In 1876, he was an elector for Rutherford B. Hayes, or as we New York partisans of Samuel
Tilden call him, rather, Fraud Hayes, and the rumor spread that in a towering act of
mugwump conscience and New England rectitude, the poet was going to cast his decisive 185th
electoral vote for someone other than Hayes or Tilden.
But the family must be fed, after all, and James Russell Lowell put Rutherford and Lemonade
Lucy Hayes in the White House.
After an indecorously short interval, Lowell was appointed minister to Spain, where he
continued to compose witty verse deploring political corruption.
Howell's ministerial post was engineered by his young and impossibly well-connected friend, William Dean Howells, a Hayes in-law.
Howells was the son of an Ohio editor. He was always proud of his father's polemics against the Mexican War.
In his early twenties, Howells wrote a campaign biography of candidate Abraham Lincoln, though he conveniently obtained a consulship in Venice
When the terrible swift fury of Fr. Abraham's sword hacked other sons of the Buckeye State to bits,
Howells, by virtue of his editor's easy chair at Harper's Magazine,
became ringleader of the literary anti-imperialist during the Spanish-American War,
which he deemed the most stupid and causeless war that was ever imagined by a kindly and sensible nation.
The year 1898 is a great landmark in the history of the United States, wrote William Graham Sumner,
and virtually every American novelist or poet who thought about such matters concurred.
Howells worried that the Spanish-American War has brutalized the popular mind and spoiled the taste,
but he buoyed himself with the thought that we still have a republic and not yet an empire of letters,
and no one is obliged to read silly books.
Mark Twain, despite his initial enthusiasm for kicking the Spanish out of Cuba,
I have never enjoyed a war as I am enjoying this one, he confessed,
came to share his friend Howell's sentiments.
I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land, he said,
and he began to speak, balefully and bitterly, of our dying republic.
American writers flocked to the anti-imperialist cause, Democrat, Republican, populist, socialist,
high Brahmin, low pro, from the roughest frontier humorists to the rarefied Henrys, Adams and James.
Opponents of the Spanish-American war were not hailed before paying the root courts or beheaded,
But then as the Ole Miss lawyer said in Easy Rider, this used to be a free country, and
a Mark Twain could vilipend his nation's political class and not be read out of the
community of enlightened discourse or whatever the camp phrase is.
The fever swamps, as Twain knew, are America.
Sherwood Anderson's belief that American participation in foreign wars damped the creative
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,
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.
He proposed that we trade in the stars and stripes for the skull and crossbones, a suggestion
later adopted by Mark Twain and Ernest Crosby.
In his 1899 address, Art in America, Fuller argued that imperialism would prevent the
development of a robust and Native American literature.
We see ourselves, whether too flatteringly or not, as a race of rulers and administrators,
the Romans of the modern world.
Our places on the dais are under the canopy, and art, as practiced by other, inferior races,
may amuse our leisure and adore our festivities. The Greeks were privileged to do as much for
the Romans of the Empire, but the French, the Germans and the Italians do as much for
us. The hallmark of the artist absolute is his wish, as an individual personality, to
do and be the thing that is an entirety. He desires neither to direct or to be directed
in turn. This feeling is, of course, in opposition to the whole trend of modern American civilization.
Imperialism was working on less subtle alteration on American civilization. In the Senate, this
alloying was foreseen by Missouri's redoubtable Champ Clark. How can we endure our shame when
a Chinese senator from Hawaii, with his pigtail hanging down his back, with his pagan jaws
American poets had a field day skewering their jingle brethren.
A favorite of mine is Expansion by James T Dubois. In his dialect poem, the narrator relates
his encounters with a variety of exotic persons, fellers, I should say, wearing tropic garments,
a sombrero, and speaking in foreign lingo. As to where they're from, these aliens reply,
Puerto Rico, USA, Santiago, USA, Manila, USA, and so on till finally our narrator is exasperated.
Holly gee says I, I never heard of these here cannibals before.
Are these heathens here all voters? Will we stand for any more?
Next you know you'll ask a feller, where he's from he'll up and say,
With a lordly kind of flourish, all creation, U.S.A.
Betrayal is a frequent theme. Corporal John Malkese in the trenches reads the part,
Facing death in rice fields which are shambles, for yellow men who are fighting to be free,
Pyramid, the cactus and the brambles, old glory seems ashamed across the sea,
Dying here before the malarial breezes that swamp across the campground in the bay,
bringing here the fever that seizes and lays the strong man low within a day, this is empire.
Fighting niggers who themselves are fighting for the same cause our fathers fought to save,
fighting in a way that is forever blighting the first heritage our fathers gave,
fighting in a cause that is forever grabbing the cause that is the old-time robbers still,
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.
Moody was an Indiana boy, a poet and dramatist who taught English at Harvard and the University of Chicago.
Like Fuller, he abjured political action. Preferring, he said, to give the world not a syllogism, but a song.
Our refusal to turn the Philippines over to the Filipinos disgusted him.
We have changed our birthright for a gourd, he wrote in the ode.
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.
Toll, let the great bells toll, till the clashing air is dim.
Did we wrong this parted soul?
We will make it up to him.
Toll, let him never guess what work we sent him to.
Laurel, Laurel, yes, he did what we bade him do.
Praise, and never a whispered hint, but the fight he fought was good.
Never a word that the blood on his sword was his country's own heart's blood.
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.
positions of laissez-faire government and non-intervention.
He rang the death knell for his beloved country when the megaphone of Mars, Theodore Roosevelt,
won the presidential election of 1904.
Moody wrote despairingly that,
The vision in the light of which our country was created and has grown great will soon
fade, and one more world dream will have been found impossible to live out.
Our different destiny may be greater, but the America that we have known and passionately
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.
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.
She in the Midwest applied the passion and wit and brawn and style of the republic's defense,
yet her sons were capable of asking, as one poet did, what would Lincoln say?
What indeed would Abraham Lincoln say of a large industrial nation's suppression of a smaller country's independence movement?
Some of the most biting anti-war verse was penned by the prolific Ernest Crosby. Born
into a socially prominent New York City family, Crosby was a young lawyer who in 1887 succeeded
to the state assembly seat vacated by Theodore Roosevelt. He became a Tolstoyan anarchist,
spiked with a healthy dose of Henry George. Crosby's novel Captain Jinx, Hero, is a very
is a very broad satire on the expansionist fever that was invaliding the American Republic.
The novel follows its Myrmidon namesake from East Point, the U.S. Military Academy, to
the Cubapine Islands, where Jinx's exploits, burning native temples, censoring Spanish
translations of the Declaration of Independence, learning, as one monopolist explains, that
the best way to civilize the Cubapines is to tax them, are gilded by yellow journalists
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.
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.
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.
I've dealt elsewhere with those American writers who in the period up to December 7, 1941, stood on the tracks and yelled, stop!
At the runaway train carrying American blood and dollars to the European war and American ideals to the boneyard.
Suffice here to say that there were many, they were distinguished, they were honorable and they were crushed.
Their names include E. E. Cummings, Sinclair Lewis, Edmund Wilson, Robert Lowell, William Saroy and Theodore Dreiser, Henry W. Clune.
Henry actually is a 104 year old friend of mine who introduced me to the delights of the martini.
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.
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.
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.
Everything before the war is out, says a distraught lady in John P. Marquand's novel of the American metamorphicist B.F.'s daughter.
The world turned topsy-turvy and all the stuffing fell out of our country.
The attacked Republican Jack Kerouac noticed that America was invested with wild, self-believing individuality,
and this had begun to disappear around the end of World War II, as so many great guys did.
As Robinson Jeffers prophesied, the spirit of 76 took to the hills and hinterlands. The beliefs our forefathers held were now identified with remoteness.
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.
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.
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.
Sayeth the cynical newsman in John Ford's elegiac western, The Man Who Shot Liberty
Valance, When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
Fifty years of smears have so blackened the reputations of the courageous men who fought
to preserve the republic that today no libel is too preposterous.
One of the only contemporary novels written about the great debate of 1940-41 is Secret
Anniversaries by Scott Spencer, best known for the Brooke Shields vehicle, Endless Love.
In Spencer's fantasy, a Hudson Valley debutante takes a job with a barely disguised Congressman
Hamilton Fish, and her apple-cheeked heroine descends into the clammy isolationist netherworld.
America firsters were hags and creeps, you know, hideous harpies and monsters like Lillian
Gish, Charles Lindbergh.
Anyway, Ardell falls under the spell of Fisch's Adjutant, an insatiable pro-Nazi lesbian.
The Nazi dyke routine was done much better in the porn classic Ilse, She-Wolf of the
SS.
But Secret Anniversaries is more than just macabre camp, it is in Spencer's conceit
A rigorously researched historical novel. But this is America and there will always
be men who can track in the dark. Contemporaneous with secret anniversaries was Edward Abbey's
penultimate novel, The Fool's Progress, which gave us the Lightcap family of Stubb Creek,
Paul, Joe Lightcap, thought he was the only wobbly east of the Mississippi River, the only
free thinker in West Virginia, the only isolationist left in Shawnee County. He's a village crank
of the kind who keeps this country turning. When his son, Will, enlists in Roosevelt's
war, Joe is furious. You're going to go get your head blown off for that damned old windbag
Winston Churchill? Will said nothing. For that scheming old sneaky son of a bitch, Roosevelt?
will remain silent. For that bloody old communist tyrant, Joe Stalin? Will did not reply.
I'm disgusted, Paul said, absolutely disgusted, that any son of mine would go fight in that rich man's war.
Would risk his neck for, he put on his fake Groton-Harvard accent, for the bloody British Empire.
Paul later takes enormous pride in Will's soldierly feats, all the while hating the war.
Scott Spencer, by his own account, lived for years via an I.D. hooked up to the government welfare culture machine.
Edward Abbey, by contrast, was one of the last of the independents.
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.
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.
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.
As a boy, Vidal himself was a leader of the America First Committee at Exeter.
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.
He forever earned their enmity by declining the invitation, wiring them,
I cannot accept this election as I already belong to the diners club.
The Mexican war provoked Ralph Waldo Emerson to call democracy a government of bullies tempered by editors.
And what do we do when the editors grow fangs?
When Thomas Bailey Eldritch and Dwight MacDonald vanish and were left with William F. Buckley Jr. and Abe Rosenthal.
When William Dean Howells and the Anti-Imperialist League give way to Susan Sontag and a belligerent legion of writers in residence.
The Bread Loaf Brigade giving public readings demanding that boys from Fargo and Batavia and Atlanta and Harlem be sent to die in Sarajevo.
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.
Consider two quotes, one from a leading organ of the establishment right, the other from a poet.
A couple of years ago, the Wall Street Journal editorial page instructed us that patriotism is fundamentally about defense policy.
Policy. This is in the context of the age of the Nicaraguan Contras. It can be measured
in dollars and megatons of fuel ratios. This obscenity requires no elaboration other than
to restate Tom Fleming's observation that official conservatives seem eager to watch
on CNN as American boys in blue helmets die on foreign sands in order to make the world
safe for the Fortune 500. Now, in an American accent, listen to the Kentucky poet-farmer
tobacco farmer no less, Wendell Berry. At the raucous wake held for Edward Abbey, Mr.
Berry saluted his friend as a true patriot, remarking, patriotism is not the love of air
conditioning or the interstate highway system or the government or the flag or money or
munitions, it is the love of country. Don't yelp with the pack, William James told his
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.
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.
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.
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.
And once upon a time, an aunt's arm hung, limp and motionless, a shadowy, empty noose.
And a voice whispered in my ear, behold the state, incarnate.
Thanks for listening.