A Wake-up Call
Happy Independence Day, and may the piece below prove as inspiring to you as it does to me.The Anxiety of Influence How well does today's America measure up to its past?
BY JOSIAH BUNTING III Tuesday, July 4, 2006 12:01 a.m. EDT
More than 40 years ago the historian Henry Steele Commager asked how it was that the British colonies in North America could have produced such a galaxy of leaders: a generation that made a revolution and established a new and enduring nation. In talent, he argued, the leadership rivaled that of the Athens of Pericles and the England of Elizabeth I, a florescence of wisdom, character, virtue and vision that has not since been equaled. The question has never been--and never will be--satisfactorily answered; each generation is obliged to engage it in its own way.
Commager adduced several reasons, most of them familiar: "New occasions teach new duties," as James Russell Lowell wrote. Great challenge evokes mighty response. The places of honor, of ambition realized, were almost all to be found in the ranks of those preparing the Revolution or fighting in the continental army or designing, and making, a new government. There were few fortunes to be made, few industries, universities, institutions of culture to lead. And talent seemed much less divisible than in 20th-century America; that is, of necessity a new beau ideal of leadership had come into being: The patriot saw no necessary tension between being a scholar, soldier, writer, legislator, leader.
Like the heroes of the early Roman Republic and ancient Greece (Rome more than Greece) whom they emulated, these Americans discharged their obligations, as they understood them, by answering multiple vocations and duties, all serving a common end. They did not particularly count the cost. They were not concerned to lay up fortunes for themselves. They had small conception of what our own age calls (and is obsessed by) "stress." They were educated in the classics of ancient literature, history particularly, and in the philosophical literature of 17th- and 18th-century Europe--Locke, Sidney, Montesquieu, Hume. Many did not attend college: There were only nine universities and colleges by the end of 1776.
Yet they wrote with a grace and lucidity we cannot match. Their minds seemed clearer than ours. And they had also what was imputed to a great general of a later generation: the imaginations of engineers. They knew how to transform ideas into action, into policies and institutions.
When they were young, these leaders of the revolutionary generation accustomed themselves, under the supervision of demanding adults, to long periods of solitary study. Their English near-contemporary, William Wordsworth, remembered a statue of Isaac Newton in the courtyard of his Cambridge college: "the marbled index of a mind voyaging forever, through strange seas of thought, alone." As young people, they were not often praised or rewarded. The satisfactions of learning, they were taught, were in the learning, and in how that learning--like the unconscious predisposition to emulate certain heroes--might somehow be transmuted into examples and lessons that would influence their own conduct later on. Like Pericles' men of Athens, they would thereafter "be ashamed to fall below a certain standard."
The English historian Paul Johnson wrote that the generation of American leaders of the 1940s was our ablest since that of the Founding. No one imputes to this second generation the creative genius of the first. Several of its tribunes were professional soldiers and naval officers--men ideally (according to Clausewitz) of a searching rather than a creative intellect. One has the impression, studying their lives as youngsters, that they were not "brilliant" at school.
They were born between 1875 and 1890: they included FDR, Douglas MacArthur, George Marshall, Ernest King, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Harry S. Truman, Omar Bradley, William Halsey, Chester Nimitz. With the exceptions of MacArthur and Roosevelt, they were children of the American heartland, all born into modest, even hardscrabble circumstances. The service academies were literally their way out of Dodge.
For the military men, Marshall and MacArthur in particular, enormous responsibility was given them as lieutenants in their early 20s in the Philippines. Self-reliance is usually the consequence, and so is what David Riesman called, in 1950, "inner-directedness": the predisposition to act on judgment and conscience rather than calculations of external approval. Thus Harry Truman, almost blind without glasses, insisted on leading his artillery battery in the most severe, and final, campaign of the Great War--the Meuse Argonne offensive (in which American casualties were 126,000, including 26,000 killed, in six weeks). More than 20 years later, Truman, then a U.S. senator, sought service again, but George Marshall turned him down: Truman was then in his mid-50s.
Nimitz, Bradley, Eisenhower--towers of moral strength, settled wisdom, common sense of an elemental, singularly American kind: and all, like the 16 millions who served in World War II (more than 10% of the country's 1945 population) with the innate modesty which remains above all others the quality which draws Americans of 2006 to this Greatest Generation. Such people embodied the virtues, including the un-self-conscious nobility the founding generation admired in their ancient models.
In a phrase that recurs so often that it has almost become a cliché, we read that Bradley, or Ike, or Halsey, "was a mediocre student at the Academy." Yet, in a confluence of character, conscience and mind that we cannot disentangle, they considered problems of enormous complexity, took counsel of those they admired, attained wise and useful decisions, and inspired and led huge numbers of servicemen--and women--to complete their missions. In our time of crisis will another generation bring forward men and women of the same métier as those of the Revolutionary and Second World Wars?
The answer expected is a red-blooded Of Course We Will! To suggest anything less is to invite the imputation of cynicism. But the culture of palliatives--in which virtually all minor encumbrances of imperfect health, physical and psychological, can be erased by drugs, in which most avenues of advancement rely less on the actions of self-reliance than upon the legions of aids (human and material) that are gathered to smooth their way, and in which the ends to be pursued and the ambitions to be gratified are usually (though not always) those that exclude useful service to the nation--this is not a culture that cultivates the qualities most needed.
Consider the character of George Marshall, leader of the American Army from 1939 to 1945, whose name, President Truman insisted, be given the Plan for European Recovery in 1947. A small episode, early in Marshall's final retirement, is illustrative. He was offered very large sums of money to write his memoirs. He declined instantly. It would not do to call attention to himself. His country, he said, had already compensated him for his service--and besides, what he would be obliged to write, writing truthfully and accurately, might cause pain to people who had done their best, and who deserved well of their country.
Gen. Bunting, a former superintendent of the Virginia Military Institute, is president of the H.F. Guggenheim Foundation.
posted by JM @ 10:11 AM
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