Comments on Healy’s The Great Dissent

Prior to our meeting to discuss The Great Dissent one of our members, Norm, distributed the following comment:

Where I really part company with The Great Dissent is in the epilogue (in general, the book seemed rather shallow, but that may be because Healy was writing about a rather shallow person).

May I delve into the personal?  (I will anyway.)   In 1952 I was teaching at the University of Dayton, a conservative bastion (run by the Society of Mary) in an even more conservative city (it even had segregated YMCAs).  Senator McCarthy “had slithered onto the scene with his infamous lists and ruthless methods” (p. 246) and they were so flakey that I decided to give a series of special lectures skewering McCarthy himself.  I was surprised that the number in attendance was three times the number of students enrolled in my class (who is monitoring, and for what reason?) but it turned out well and I was not a subject of investigation, as were faculty at nearby Antioch College where the McCarran Committee had destroyed careers a month earlier.

Several years later I was taking some law courses and came across a peculiar set of First Amendment cases, including Dennis et al. and the Ku Klux Clan cases discussed on p. 249.  So I researched further and noticed they fit a whole series of cases during the McCarthy era where proponents of liberal causes were all jailed, but equally vociferous proponents of conservative or racist causes were set free under the “judicial restraint” doctrine.  “What a neat paper this would make” I thought, so I wrote about the Supreme Court being more political than judicial.

The instructor of the course didn’t know what to think, so he send me off to the dean – who happened to be Erwin Griswold, former US solicitor general and a ferocious bear when he felt the urge (even his daughter said so).  Griswold was busy, so told me to leave the paper and return in a week.  The next week I showed up expecting to be told it was publishable, and instead encountered every arrow in his quiver including “I don’t know how you got into this school, but you won’t stay long writing dreck like this!”  I apologized profusely, and when that was of no avail I apologized more, begging forgiveness for my stupidity, and still he ranted; so finally in desperation I pointed out that I had been in Ohio for some years and as everyone knows, erudition does not cross the Alleghenies.   With this his face flushed and he stood up and started shouting, and seemed ready to come over the desk and beat me to a pulp – so I ducked out the door and ran back to my instructor.  “What did I say wrong?” I asked.   He searched for words, and then said softly: “Well . . . for starters . . . Erwin is from Cleveland.”

I mention this only to challenge Healy’s contention that while Frankfurter sided with the Court majority against Dennis and other leaders of the Communist Party, “proving little more than that the defendants had formed an organization to teach the doctrines of Marx and Lenin”, he later found the courage to resuscitate Holmes’ clear and present danger test to release a Ku Klux Klan member who advocated violence against blacks (pp. 248-9).  This belief that Frankfurter and the Court grasped the meaning of the First Amendment is true only so long as one ignores the long string of cases in which the Court used “judicial restraint” in upholding lower courts’ prosecution of liberal speech, however benign, but used the “clear and present danger” criterion to find for conservative speech, however violent.  He ends his story too soon.   The whole story doesn’t support his contention that Frankfurter or the Court opted for equal treatment – not until the Warren Court do we see that.

Holmes himself was never really open to liberal thought.  Sonia Sotomayor he was not.  He wrestled with the First Amendment all the way through the book before being persuaded to support “clear and present danger”.  I take his clear and present doctrine as an aberration, based not on his understanding of the First Amendment but on the persuasion of close friends over a long period of time.

That is the problem with basically conservative thinkers, especially those accustomed to privilege.  Note how one lines up just the “right” people to carry their buckets: people who have worked together, or taught together, or have been friends since year one, and are in high places.  Holmes was a Boston Brahmin, educated at Boston Latin School and Harvard.  His wife was “the eldest child of a respected Cambridge family” who socialized with the daughters of the Boston aristocracy and whose father ran Boston Latin School; so all of his friends tended to be of similar stock, or were on the faculty at Harvard, or residents of the toney Beverly Farms.   He enjoyed the company – or the flattery – of very bright Jews for their intellect, but not blacks; and look at how Jewish friends were extremely servile in presenting him unaccustomed ideas.  But Holmes never visited the working class, nor conversed with them, nor read about their plight, nor was sympathetic with their needs.  For all his erudition, he was a snob.  He was born into class and never really deviated from the views of his class.  Holmes’ belabored twists of logic in cases brought under the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, as serious as the constraints on First Amendment rights as the McCarthy and McCarran activities 34 years later, brought forth only a mouse of jurisprudence but ended the career of the country’s foremost socialist and a presidential contender in Debs.  Holmes “three generations of imbeciles is enough” condemned Carrie Buck to forced sterilization in Buck v. Bell (1927) although later evidence shows that she was probably of normal intelligence; her argument that sterilization of institutionalized persons violated substantive due process fell to Holmes’ belief that state interest in maintaining a pure gene pool outweighed the interest of individuals in their “body integrity”; in short, that the science of eugenics provided a reasonable basis for law, a belief that the Nazis used to justify the murders of millions of disabled persons.

Brandeis got it right when he told Frankfurter that Holmes failed to “sufficiently consider the need of others to understand or sufficiently regard the difficulties or arguments of others (p. 103).

I thought the Harvard Lampoon’s “Alone at Laski” hilarious, as well as the faux autobiography (“born at age three and completed Oxford in twenty minutes”).  It is what people expect today from Jon Stewart or Saturday Night Live. Parts of the parody are clearly over the top, however, and appear to represent the anti-Semitism of a pampered non-Jewish student body.  But why did Harvard’s board of overseers (or its president, Lowell) take it so seriously?  A rigid conformity was expected of the upper crust; a groupthink that one breached only at his peril.  “I am heartily sick of America” wrote Laski, and well he should have been: although I wonder if he was any happier in the English system of privilege, even at LSE.

It was a time when even bright scholars were vulnerable if they lacked status, and the common man constantly vulnerable.  As a child of the depression I saw many good lives squandered; the hope of World War 2 was that all of that would be over, a much more egalitarian society would emerge.  Healy’s book leads to a conclusion that it did, owing to Holmes’ conversion.   I think that it clearly did not; the Court majority is packed once again with privileged conservatives appointed by privileged conservatives, and they are promoting a class-society as never before; the main difference being that this time it is based more on money than ancestry.

A Post Meeting Addition

The following was added to the discussion by member John following the meeting:

I did not mention last night that I attended several hours of a trial in 1957 that revolved around first amendment issues. San Francisco's City Lights bookstore had published the poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg and was selling copies. The poem contains references to use of illegal drug use and gay sexual practices. The manager of the store, Shig Murao, and the owner of the store and publisher of the poem, Larry Ferlinghetti, were both arrested and charged with distributing obscene literature.

I happened to be in San Francisco and knew Ferlinghetti and Murao, without any specific plans, and dropped in on the trial for a few hours.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howl#1957_obscenity_trial

My most vivid memory was of Jake Ehrlick, the defense lawyer. He was very famous (for representing Hollywood stars and as the model for Raymond Burr's Perry Mason in the TV show). Incidentally, he was born in Montgomery County. Ehrlick stood up and walked around the courtroom while the testimony was in progress, assuring that eyes were on him and he was controlling impressions left by the testimony.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jake_Ehrlich

The result of the case was that the judge decided that the poem had "redeeming social value" and that the defendants were not guilty. The case was covered in national media, and was the subject of a book by Ehrlick and a movie.

More on The Long Shadow -- Of World War I

In November members of the club met to discuss The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds. (Here is a summary of what went on.) Norm sent us this follow up to the discussion:

I wasn’t able to articulate my thoughts very well in the last book club meeting, so I send this afterthought trivia if anyone is interested:

It is often said that WW1 interrupted a prolonged period of peace, but that would be erroneous.  There was 50 years of industrial growth undermining social growth; Victorian morality in England, with disdain for the masses and Poor Law regulations that broke up families unable to pay their debts; serfdom in a Prussia only recently incorporated into Germany.  But simultaneously there was striking tactical development of artillery: the ‘creeping barrage’ of shellfire that preceded troops in the Boer war (1899-1902); the Boer’s use of similar artillery to mow down British soldiers in shallow trenches at Spion Kop; roughly 17,000 shells from Japanese 28-cm. howitzers dropped on Port Arthur and the Russian Fleet there in 1904.  The French and Belgians depended on rings of massive fortresses around strategic towns, which – both fortresses and towns – were destroyed in a few days by Krupps’ ‘big bertha’ 42-cm. transportable howitzers.   Volunteers manned the British army, many to relieve lower class families of poverty. Wounded British officers were offered huge comfortable estates to recuperate in, but over 300 British enlistees who suffered PTSD after two or three years of constant engagement were executed to teach the others to “buck up”.

During the industrial surge of the late nineteenth century, they and other European powers had been rivals in the resource-driven colonization of Africa and Asia.  By the turn of the century, having created overlapping spheres of influence, the major European powers turned increasingly to military competition – and then created an entangling web of military alliances fashioned on the Napoleonic “balance of power” concept that they believed would prevent armed conflict.  But it was that web of alliances that escalated a minor incident of Serbian nationalism against the waning Austro-Hungarian Empire into a global conflict.

The senseless slaughter of World War I provoked a mocking, nihilistic protest among European artists.  If the most powerful and highly regarded leaders of Europe’s most advanced and cultured countries could take Europe into its most beastly war ever, they reasoned, then its society, culture, art and sophistication represented only a cover for its underlying violence and trauma.   Ergo, contemporary culture and art were worthy only of ridicule and rejection.  

Many of those artists fled to Zurich, a neutral haven for war refugees, where they published and exhibited bold assaults against war, jingoism, and conventional aesthetic values.  Hugo Ball, former stage director of the Munich Kammerspiele, and his wife Emmy Hemmings, a poet and vocalist, were magnets for the most audacious protesters.   Twenty months into the war, Ball and Hemmings rented a tiny café, which they suggestively named Cabaret Voltaire (in honor of the blasphemy in “Candide”), and opened as an artists' club, exhibition room, pub, and theater.   There they launched an abstractionist attack on the political, social and cultural institutions and leaders they saw as responsible for war.

Performances in the Cabaret Voltaire scorned and mocked conventional society with a balalaika band, bizarre masked dances, incantations of Lao Tse as well as local mystics, abstruse or “chance” art, poetic readings made by randomly assembling individual words cut from a newspaper – all reflecting dissociation with the rationalism they blamed for the war.  Richard Huelsenbeck, newly arrived from Berlin, introduced simultaneously recited “sound poems” (a technique borrowed, oddly enough, from early 20th Century Italian and Russian Futurists).  His “sound poems” were gibberish syllables untranslatable in any language, intended to deride the propagandistic babbling of Europe’s wartime elite as they sent their troops into slaughter.  You can hear Huelsenbeck reciting sound poems at: http://ubu.artmob.ca/sound/aspen/mp3/huelsenbeck.mp3.

Ball decorated Cabaret Voltaire with the works of artists now famous but little known at the time, such as Hans Arp, Paolo Buzzi, Max Oppenheimer, Francesco Cangiullo, Marcel Janco, August Macke, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso.  Three months after its opening, the group published the single issue of a periodical that Ball initially said would known as “DADA Dada Dada Dada Dada” but later titled "Cabaret Voltaire" like the café – a collection of artistic and literary contributions from vocal pacifists such as Guillaume Apollinaire, Arp, Ball, Hennings, co-founder Richard Huelsenbeck, Janco, Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, and painters Wassily Kandinsky, Modigliani, Oppenheimer, and Spanish cubists Francis Picabia and Picasso.   However, the original “Dada” label remained to identify the entire pacifist movement.

Within a year the café owner closed Cabaret Voltaire as being too weird and raucous.   Tzara and other Zurich Dadaists re-opened as "Galerie Dada" at No. 19 Bahnhofstraße.   Huelsenbeck returned to Berlin, where pacifist ferment was less anti-art than political and social; i.e., more concerned with issuing corrosive manifestos and biting satire, and forming large public demonstrations.  There Huelsenback delivered a Dada manifesto championing communism, then opened Club Dada, a much larger café-gallery than Cabaret Voltaire –  decorated on its ceiling with a life-size pig-headed puppet in German military uniform entitled Prussian Archangel, the whole effigy wrapped in a poster bearing the words of a well-known German Christmas carol – which got its creators indicted for defaming the German army.   Here too were exhibited photomontages that decried the violence of war, including George Grosz’s photographic image of then German president Friedrich Ebert (a revisionist Social Democrat) with the face disfigured by machine parts to depict mutilated bodies of soldiers – in effect, “a victim of his own mechanized aggressions”.

In Cologne, Dada painter Max Ernst also experimented with photomontage intended to reveal disturbed psyches of war makers as well as war wounded, so to memorialize the destructive and devastating capability of modern combat technology.  His 1920 photomontage Untitled, for example, bonds a photo of human arms with the fuselage and wings of a warplane, while in a corner below three humans demonstrate an arm-hold used to carry wounded soldiers.  His increasingly provocative exhibits aroused the public notoriety he craved, but resulted in Cologne police closing his show and arresting him for “obscenity”.   By 1922 Ernst had moved to France and into surrealism (The Equivocal Woman; Eve, the Only One Left to Us).   His Angel of Hearth and Home (1937) mourned the death of Republican Spain and expressed helplessness against the sweeping fascist tide.   With the Nazi occupation of France, Ernst was arrested by the Gestapo but escaped and eventually fled to New York with the help of the U.S. heiress and art patron Peggy Gugenheim.

Dada’s influence spread to other parts of Germany, and to Holland and Italy. Tzara created a particularly active postwar Dada group in Paris.   The influence of Dada extended to Italy, newly formed Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, Spain and Russia.  As early war refugees in New York, French artists Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia teamed with photographer Man Ray to become the center of radical anti-art activities in the United States.  (Another of Duchamp’s accomplaces in New York was the poverty stricken and completely outrageous Baroness Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven.)  Much of their activity centered in Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, “291”.   During this time Duchamp began exhibiting "readymades" (found objects) including the now famous Fountain, actually an upturned urinal he signed “R. Mutt” (a pun to which he gave several possible meanings).

Composer Erik Satie was another Dadaist with a wicked sense of humor.   Early into the war he published “Genuine Flabby Preludes (for a dog)", which a music critic trashed for “having no shape”; whereupon Satie wrote “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear”.   The latter caught the attention of Jean Cocteau, who persuaded Satie to reset the music to a scenario called Parade.  Léonide Massine choreographed it for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, with costumes and sets designed by Pablo Picasso.   Satie’s music was scored for typewriter, foghorn, rattles, milk bottles, and revolver shots.  A riot at its 1917 premier testified as to its success.

From 1919, Satie was in contact with Tristan Tzara, who was now leading the French Dada movement; and with Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, among others.  (On his first meeting with Man Ray, the two fabricated the artist's first ironic “readymade” – The Gift – actually a non-gift consisting of a clothes iron with thirteen nails attached to its sole.)   Satie also contributed to Tzara’s Dadaist publication 391.

In collaboration with Picabia, Satie then composed the ballet Relâche for Les Ballets Suédois, and adapted the score to René Clair’s surrealist film Entr’acte (1924, with cameo appearances by Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, composer Darius Milhaud and Satie himself).  You can see it on YouTube at: www.ubu.com/film/clair_entracte.html.

Meanwhile, Picasso carried his cubist sets from Parade into another ballet for Diaghilev, this time choreographed to an 18th Century fable and scored by Manuel de Falla to purely standard Spanish flamenco, entitled Tricorn  (The Three-Cornered Hat).  Then, Picasso and Diaghilev collaborated one last time for Le Train Bleu  (1924; scored by Darius Milhaud with costumes by Coco Chanel), a satire on post-war British aristocrats who rode a new luxury overnight express to equally luxurious Mediterranean resorts.  (A period restaurant of that name serves to this day 3-star dinners in the station in Paris where British passengers changed trains.)

Dada expired as it began, not with a whimper but with a screaming cacophony.   Its siren song (pun intended) was Ballet Méchanique, composed in 1924 by 23-year-old George Antheil from Trenton, New Jersey, resident at that time above Sylvia Beach's legendary Shakespeare & Co. bookstore on the Rue de l'Odéon, in Paris's Latin Quarter.   Ballet Méchanique was to have accompanied a Dada film of the same name created by the artist Fernand Léger with director Dudley Murphy and photographer Man Ray.*   Léger was as strong-minded as Antheil, having spent two years at the front in Argonne (and another in hospital after a German mustard gas attack at Verdun, where he painted The Card Players whose robot-like, monstrous figures reflect the ambivalence of his experience of war).   So there was no attempted coordination, resulting in a score half again longer than the film; and as neither was willing to alter his creation, they were presented separately.  The film premiered in Vienna in 1924; while the Antheil composition took on a life of its own.  Its premiere in 1926 – scored for 16 player-pianos, 2 regular pianos, 7 electric bells, 4 base drums, 3 xylophones, 3 airplane propellers, a tam-tam and a siren – caused a bare-knuckle riot in the Paris concert hall and nearby streets, a sure sign of its success. **

In its original release, the film's French title was "Charlot présente le ballet mécanique", referring to showman André Charlot who financed this film's French distribution. In France, Charlie Chaplin's Little Tramp character was also known as Charlot; the combination of the producer's name and Chaplin's screen image, represented by a Cubist-style paper puppet, is only the first of many visual puns in the film.

Trivial Post-Script: George Antheil’s patron gave up after a few years, and he became as jaded about anti-war activities as his patron had about him.  He returned to the States and a job writing film scores in Hollywood, and in composing music that bear the influence of Igor Stravinsky.  It was there he met the actress Hedy Lamarr, who found Hollywood boring and Antheil interesting. She had enjoyed an early acting career, but a disastrous marriage to Austrian munitions manufacturer Friedrich Mandl, a control freak who supplied munitions for Mussolini’s war in Ethiopia.  (Her memoire tells of lavish parties attended by Hitler and Mussolini in her home, Schloss Schwarzenau.)   Leaving him for Hollywood, she took as well his concern about torpedoes and the problem of their being sent off course by a target’s radio frequency jamming.  With World War 2 underway, she designed a method for spectrum-hopping but lacked a control method until – voila! – George Antheil dusted off his piano rolls from Ballet Méchanique sixteen years earlier.  With a piano roll in the control center shifting signals at short coded bursts to another aboard the torpedo, the target was helpless.  The frequency range of the signals was, naturally, 88 – the number of keys of a piano, so the number of channels in a piano roll.  Subsequently electromagnetic improvements spread the signal across a larger range.  The Navy was wary about using this technology until the Cuban Missile Crisis; but later it was also the basis for Bluetooth and cell phone communication.

      *    Storyline of the film:  A kaleidoscope of images set to an energetic soundtrack. A young women swings in a garden; a woman's face smiles. The rest is spinning cylinders, pistons, gears and turbines, kitchen objects in concentric circles or rows - pots, pan lids, and funnels, cars passing overhead, a spinning carnival ride.  An Art Deco cartoon figure appears, dancing.  Over and over, a heavy-set woman climbs stairs carrying a large bag on her shoulder, a 20th century Sisyphus.  It is world in motion, dominated by mechanical and repetitive images, with a few moments of solitude in a garden.

      **  An excerpt from Ballet Méchanique the film may be seen on YouTube at:

           https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5RVBIm_muc&feature=related

 A partial performance of the Antheil score at the National Gallery of Art is on

            YouTube at:

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eo0H8ztju78&feature=related 

The two are recreated artificially at:

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SgsqmQJAq0&feature=related and

            http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEBCJjQKoh0&feature=related. 

German artist Walter Trier’s “Map of Europe in 1914.”

Why did southerners feel they were citizens of their states rather than of the USA?

In our discussions of the Civil War (here, here, here and here)  it seems to me that we have not adequately addressed a fundamental question. It is the question of choice of nationality (which is also addressed in The Long Shadow that we just discussed). Why is it that in 1860 many people in the United States believed that they were citizens of their individual sovereign states while many others felt that they were citizens of the United States of America -- the true location of national sovereignty? How is it that former U.S. president John Tyler, former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis and former U.S. Army officer Robert E. Lee believed that their loyalty to their states was more compelling than that to the United States of America.

Let me begin by differentiating civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism occurs when the citizens of a state accept that citizenship because they accept a common ethnic identity. Civic nationalism exists where people choose to be citizens of the state, abiding by the country's laws and fulfilling the obligations of citizenship; citizens can have different ethnic backgrounds, be of different religions and speak different languages in their homes.

If we think of the United States of America as "a nation of immigrants" then the nation would seem to be built on civic nationalism. Thus, its citizens might be seen to conceive of the USA as a state with citizens of many ethnic backgrounds; its citizens choose to be Americans, to abide by U.S. laws and to fulfill the other obligations of U.S. citizenship (in part because of the advantages of doing so).

The decision between civic nationalism in a larger state or ethnic nationalism in a smaller ethnic state is still present in many places. We have just seen the Scots vote to accept British nationality rather than separate Scotland from the other states of Great Britain. A majority of Catalans have just voted to separate from Spain. One could point to ethnic Russians in Ukraine, Basques in Spain, or Tamils in Sri Lanka as examples of ethnic groups still debating their identities as part of larger states. The partition of India into India and Pakistan, and of Pakistan into a reduced Pakistan and Bangladesh were examples of countries breaking apart into ethnic nation states with great loss of life.

In 1776 the residents of the individual colonies rebelling to obtain freedom from the British empire clearly declared their individual colonies to be sovereign states. It is not surprising given the distances between them, the difficulties of transportation and communications of the time, and the differences in their histories (for example, the different religious histories), that the people of these colonies did not understand themselves as being a single ethnic nation. The Articles of Confederation recognized that the colonies had to form a confederation if they were to remain independent in a world dominated by European imperial powers. The Confederation was conceived as an alliance of sovereign states. I find it interesting that the Articles explicitly invited Canada (with its French speaking, Catholic population) to join, but did not so mention the British colonies in the Caribbean, nor Spanish colonies in North America.

Clearly the Constitution was written and ratified in recognition that the Articles of Confederation did not make the U.S. Government strong enough; it could not raise the money to defend itself against potential foreign enemies. The federalists sought to locate sovereignty in the federal government of the Republic. The nullification crisis during the Jackson administration seemed to affirm that a state did not have the sovereign power to decide whether or not to obey a federal law. Yet disunion frequently discussed up until the Civil War (see Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789-1859 by Elizabeth R. Varon).

Those prior to the Civil War who thought that the USA should divide into ethnic nations  might be said to include the representatives of the New England states that met in the Hartford convention during the War of 1812.  The members of the Know Nothing movement who opposed the immigration of large numbers of Irish Catholics, and those who opposed the annexation of Texas and of large areas after the Mexican War wanted the larger USA to be ethnically homogeneous. Indeed, there were many in the north and in the south who questioned whether people whose ethnicity included African ancestors and a recent history of slavery could ever be citizens of the United States of America.

Abraham Lincoln appears prototypical of those holding that the United States was a single nation, "indivisible with liberty and justice for all" and that the citizens of all the states formed a civic nation; there were millions of Americans who agreed with him in 1860.

Let me suggest that the institution of slavery was the dividing line. In the south, many people defined themselves as a nationality for which the institution of slavery was not only important, but defining; they were the people who provided the political support for the institution of chattel slavery. In the north, many abolitionists defined themselves as a nationality of people who rejected the institution of slavery. If all the people of the United States were to become a single civic nation, this fundamental difference had to be settled.

Those who defined themselves as the dominant group in a slave holding nation, also apparently believed that sovereignty was placed in their (southern) states. On secession, they formed a confederation of sovereign states, not a federal union holding sovereignty. On the other hand, those who defined themselves as of a non slave holding people also believed that sovereignty resided in the United States of America. Perhaps it was a realization in the south that only be leaving the union might they maintain the institution of slavery, and leaving the union was only morally justified if their states had the sovereign right to do so.

Was the issue settled by the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution? During the Reconstruction, the south was divided into military districts and placed under martial law. While the North never admitted that the 11 states of the Confederacy had seceded from the Union, it also did not immediately allow them to participate in elections after the war. Congress admitted members from Tennessee in 1866, and from 6 additional southern states in 1868. Four states had to wait until 1870 for readmission to Congress.

Culturally, the reintegration has taken much longer. Thus veterans organizations formed after the Civil War were composed of either Union or Confederate veterans, but not both. The Ku Klux Klan was active (albeit not just in the south) until the 20th century. "Lost Cause" ideas were common in the south long after the war.

Education: On the other hand, the idea that Americans had common civic responsibilities goes back to the foundation of the country, as does the idea that they must learn how to fulfill those responsibilities. When  schools in the United States began to be publicly funded in the 19th century, civics education began to become more available to all children. As immigrants from many nations flooded into the country later in the century and early in the 20th century, civics education became a way to promote civic nationalism.

The Pledge of Allegiance, declaring the USA to be "one nation" was not written until 1898, and was not adopted by Congress until 1942. The American Legion, created in the aftermath of World War I specifically accepted a mission of promoting "Americanism" -- essentially indoctrinating immigrants into American civic nationalism, while those immigrants retain other aspects of their national culture.

The USA remains composed of many ethnic minorities; Hispanics, Asians and Blacks are an increasing portion of the population, and the population is split among many religious denominations. Still, perhaps more than in the past, Americans also share many aspects of the same culture. Ask a foreigner how long it takes to identify whether someone comes from the USA by speech, appearance and attitudes. Perhaps this is becoming a hybrid of both civic and ethnic nationalism.

The Memory of the Great War and More

The History Book Club met on Veterans Day (chosen as a special meeting day given our book's focus on World War I) As usual we met at the Kensington Row Bookshop. The owners, who offered their usual great hospitality, have made the shop's website still more attractive and useful -- check it out.

A dozen members were present and the discussion was unusually spirited. Before we started the scheduled discussions, long time member Allen Wiener signed copies of his new book, Channeling Elvis: How Television Saved the King of Rock 'n' Roll.

The Washington Post had recently published a letter to the editor by another long time member, Dorothy Pugh. We briefly discussed it. John Tyler, her subject, while perhaps one of the least known of American presidents, she described as quite an interesting man. Married twice, he had 15 children, 8 by his first wife. After his first wife died, Tyler (at age 54) married a 24 year old woman, Julia Gardner.  We wondered why she might be interested in so old a man, but were told she really loved being the First Lady and White House hostess. Her portrait is still to be found in the White House. Tyler is also notable in that after stepping down from the presidency, he was elected to office in the Confederacy. He wanted to be elected president of the Confederacy but died before the election.

Dorothy also told us about the disastrous voyage of the USS Princeton in 1844. President Tyler and his then fiancee, Julia, were on the ship for a pleasure trip with a number of other people. The voyage was used as an opportunity to demonstrate a new, huge canon that had  been cast in the United States. Unfortunately it blew up, killing Colonel David Gardiner, Julia's father. Fortunately President Tyler and Julia were not injured.

The Ebola Epidemic and Virus Hunter

Occasionally a member will make a brief presentation of a second book at a meeting of the club. Several members had expressed an interest in reading a book that would be relevant to the current Ebola epidemic in West Africa. For that purpose, Virus Hunter: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses Around the World by C.J. Peters and Mark Olshaker was described by a member. It is the biography of Dr. Peters.

Dr. Peters is a consummate professional -- a physician, certified in internal medicine, with additional years of training in immunology and virology. That expertise was applied to study perhaps the world's most dangerous diseases, often at risk to himself, and often in the most trying of circumstances. He was the man most responsible for dealing with the outbreak of Ebola in monkeys in Reston, Virginia in 1989.

There are a handful of such experts who are the world's first line of defense against emerging diseases such as Ebola and SARS. The world is greatly indebted to them for their sacrifices.

The book, as it describes Dr. Peters' career, also provides a history of the emergence of a number of diseases new to science and medicine in recent decades. It explains the complexity of dealing with these diseases, especially the bureaucratic issues that must be resolved. It also provides some familiarity with the technology for the study of those diseases, and a view of the rapid development of that technology over the span of Dr. Peters' long career. For example, he worked in the first Bio Safety Level 4 lab in the USA -- the only lab at the time of the Reston Ebola outbreak designed to study highly infectious diseases for which there were no vaccines, no treatment, and a high probability of death following infection.

One of the members present had worked with Dr. Peters' colleague in dealing with an outbreak of Bolivian Hemorrhagic Fever in Bolivia, and described Peter's work on that occasion. Another member had planned the development of a health service delivery system in Liberia, and described the way in which that system had been damaged in the  subsequent revolutions and political turmoil in Liberia. The group went on to briefly discuss the epidemic in West Africa, and the poor way that the information on the cases in the United States was handled by the media.

After the presentation and discussion, the majority of the group voted that they wanted to read Virus Hunter. Thus, it will be the club selection for February.

The Long Shadow

The main book for discussion this month was The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great War in the Twentieth Century by David Reynolds. Indeed, the meeting was moved to 11/11 in honor of the date of the Armistice that ended the Great War on the Western Front. A book of considerable scholarship, it traces the shadow of World War I for a century, especially through the writings of historians, the works of high culture of poets and artists, and through the more popular arts of television and novels. The book also considers how the war was memorialized in public monuments.

Prior to the meeting several useful materials were circulated to members:

Streaming video of the Three Part BBC Series Long Shadow with David Reynolds

• Part 1   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ayp3XIBLYZQ
• Part 2   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WffL3P9mOxU
• Part 3   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ACa-rX4gpio

The review of the book in The Guardian. 

A brief video in which David Reynold's describes the purpose of his book; recorded last November, he is wearing a poppy.

A Facebook post on the Russian "Night Witches"; pilots of World War I.

The British set forth this display of ceramic poppies in remembrance of those who died in the war.

The discussion began with comments about how well David Reynolds writes. He captures a great deal of content in concise, clearly written chapters. It was noted, however, that he focuses more on the British experience than on that of the rest of the world, perhaps because he is a professor at Cambridge University.

The book was described as one of historiography and cultural history. Its main focus seems to be how historians have viewed World War I. However, a strong secondary focus is on the cultural history of how that war has been viewed in television. art, literature and even memorials to those who fought and died. Of course, the book describes a great deal of history as it describes how people wrote and thought about the war and its influences. An important theme of the book is how ideas about the war changed over time (and with the then current events that absorbed peoples attention at various periods). So too, the book stresses how differently the war was treated in the histories and memories of different countries, and how differently the popular conception of the war sometimes was from that emerging as the dominant historical paradigm. A member said he may never believe a history presents the "truth" again after reading this book. (The discussion here resembles that from last March.)

One member said that she found the chapter dealing with the partitioning of the Near East after the war as full of errors. A member complained about the minimal treatment of the impact of the war on art; he cited Dada as an example. He noted that Dadaist art was first made in the USA and then in Switzerland, and perhaps wasn't mentioned in the book because it had little impact in England. Another suggested that Picasso and his friends didn't start out to create "cubism", that the idea that the paintings that they made at the time constituted "a movement" was something we later imposed on a body of work that may not have been so intended by the artists.

Member: "Reminds me of the Marilyn Monroe song, My Heart Belongs to Dada."
Other member: Don't you mean My Art Belongs to Dada."

A member mentioned that there was almost no discussion of the partitioning of Africa, nor of African nor Asia views of the war and its aftermath. Another was concerned with the impact of the war on the independence movement in Africa; African troops fought in the armies of a number of European imperial armies; tens of thousands of Africans were enlisted in the German army, but were rejected eventually as a result of German prejudice against blacks. There was of course a portion of the war fought in sub-Saharan Africa. We assumed that the Africans who fought for European powers must have been affected by that experience on returning to their homelands, and that the experience must have influenced feelings about their colonial status.

Similarly, there was a large Indian contingent that fought the Ottomans in the Middle East; a member noted that his English uncle had served in the British Army in India during the war. Thus Indians were defending the empire away from home, and English were serving in India to assure that it remained a British colony. We noted that the book did not deal in any depth with the impact of the war on the Indian independence movement; only three pages were devoted to Gandhi. A member suggested that that was true of Asia in general - that the majority of the world who actually lived in Asia didn't get much play in the book.

A member mentioned that one way the war could be understood was in terms of the end of the divine right of kings as a theory of government in the West, and a considerable reduction in the trust of the aristocracy's right and ability to run government well. Thus an aftermath of the war, well described in the book, was competition among democracy, communism and fascism as political systems to replace monarchy, and competition among economic systems.

The member also commented that a way to understand the war was as a step toward the ending of multi-ethnic and colonial empires. Perhaps surprisingly, the Berlin conference in which European powers had divided up Africa was not mentioned in the book; seemingly one of the contributing factors leading up to the war was imperial territorial ambitions in Africa.

An outcome of the war was the end of the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the German Empire. Russia lost that part of its empire that existed in Central Europe. While the British and French gained territory after World War I, there was relatively rapid decolonization of Africa and Asia after World War II. With the fall of the USSR at the end of the 20th century, the Soviet empire lost much of its territory. Thus World War I could be seen as the beginning of the end of imperialism, and the start of decolonization.

Ireland was an exception, achieving independence from the British Empire soon after World War I. A member who had written a thesis on the Irish revolution described a relative's capture in Queenstown when that relative tried to join the Rebels. Another shared a photocopy of a grand-uncle's letter describing his efforts to organize branches of the Friends of Irish Independence in South Dakota in 1919; he also described the death of an Irish uncle in the British army putting down the Iraq rebellion in 1921. We noted the complexity of soldiers from Ulster coming back to Ireland feeling that they had fought for the Union, other soldiers returning to support the IRA and Irish independence.

From the letter:  "The Wilsonian League of Abominations"

We were diverted into a brief discussion of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 by Christopher Clark. Two members had recently read the book, which is longer than that which the club chooses to read. One part of the causal chain leading to World War I was the weakening of the Ottoman Empire. Thus, with the tacit approval of France (that held the western part of the Maghreb, and Britain which controlled Egypt, Italy successfully fought the Ottomans and took control of Libya.

Shortly thereafter, the Serbs and Greeks fought the Ottomans and gained control of much of the Balkans. The specific trigger of the war was related to Serbia's desire to create a state unifying the Southern Slavs -- a desire supported by Russia and leading to war with the Austro-Hungarian empire. A member mentioned that this book provided the best description of the Balkan politics that he had ever read. (Yugoslavia was created in the peace talks after World War I.)

Clark also describes the formation of the German-Austro-Hungarian Alliance and the counterbalancing triple alliance of Russia, France, and Britain. We mentioned the arms races, such as the German and British competition in building warships, and the building of railroads capable of moving troops and their equipment rapidly to the front. One member expressed surprise that such huge armies were organized, especially by the Russians and Germans. The title of the book suggests that the leaders of these empires were like sleepwalkers, unknowingly moving into a situation more dangerous than they ever recognized, and eventually plunging the world into World War (and a peace that would lead to a still greater war).

We noted the way in which German treatment of Belgium and Belgians was inflated by propaganda to justify the war. As an aside, a disingenuous statement of Churchill as First Lord of the Admiralty -- that the navy could not support the movement of troops into Belgium but could move troops into France if necessary -- was influencing national policy far beyond what would have been justified by his rank.

The term "Holocaust", used in conjunction with German atrocities in Belgium while initiating the war with France, led us to discussion of the World War II Holocaust. The latter of course dwarfed the earlier deeds. We noted that in the early years of the war, in spite of Nazi secrecy some knew of the predicament of the Jews in Germany, and Allied government officials kept the information secret. Our oldest member described having leaned of the Holocaust in 1943, and immediately trying to enlist in the army (he had only been 17 at the time, and was required to wait six months more to enlist). We concluded that the Holocaust must have become public knowledge before the end of the war and the capture of the extermination camps. Still General Eisenhower/s efforts to expose the Nazi atrocities were very important; it would be hard to deny the Holocaust later.

We discussed the anti German sentiment in the USA during the two world wars. One of our members is part German American and could speak from her personal experience. Her perception was that during the World War I, some in German communities were frankly pro-German. There was strong anti-German sentiment among most Americans in World War II. It was suggested that there may have been a difference between the east and west coast, with most anger in the east directed towards the Germans and both the Japanese and Germans subject to strong antagonistic feelings in the west. The anger at the foreign enemies spilled over onto German-American and Japanese-American ethnic groups in the USA.

We briefly discussed German sabotage during World War I, as well as mentioning the Zimmerman Telegram (in which the German government encouraged Mexico to declare war on the USA). A member mentioned that German sabotage is discussed in Dark Invasion: 1915: Germany's Secret War and the Hunt for the First Terrorist Cell in America by Howard Blum. It was suggested that it will be important to understand the background in German sabotage in reading next month's book for discussion, The Great Dissent by Thomas Healy.

Tidbits

Author Reynolds destroys the reputation of Barbara Tuchman's book, The Guns of August, in a brief but devastating section of his book. We noted that that it is our understanding that the reputation of that book has been greatly tarnished by other historians in the last decade. Still, it seems clear that the book greatly influenced John Kennedy and his key advisors during the Cuban missile crisis. Interesting that a not-so-good book could have such great and beneficial influence.

The Long Shadow is quite critical of Winston Churchill. Members who could remember his speeches, thought that they were critically important in keeping Britain fighting in the early part of the war. Someone recalled the Wall Street Journal as lauding Churchill as the finest speaker and finest writer of his time. On the other hand, a member pointed out that Churchill's reputation may well have been greater in the USA than in Britain, and that the Labor Government won the election immediately following World War II, throwing Churchill out of office.

Several of the members had long careers in government agencies. They vented! It seems that political appointees to head government agencies often arrive with little or no practical experience, and don't stay long enough to really understand the agencies, their functions, and the challenges that they face. There are so many checks and balances in government, so many complex processes that simply have to work their own way out for progress to be made, that the senior professionals in agencies may be the only people to fully understand the work of their agencies. Briefings of political appointees may often be -- necessarily or deliberately -- simplifications of reality. The real importance of the senior professional staff is often under rated. (There was reference to the British situation comedy, Yes, Minister.)

Final Comment

There was uniform agreement that this was a very good book, enjoyed by all. A good read!

Here are some comments posted by a member on books discussed:

• The Long Shadow of WWI: Nationalism and Democracy
• More on "The Long Shadow"
• The Long Shadow: Part 3 of My Comments
• Final Comment on the Long Shadow of World War I
• Dr. Peters, Virus Hunter

Recent History of the History Book Club

Starting in February of 2013 I have been writing fairly long summaries of the discussions held by the History Book Club. Here are some statistics about the club since that time.

Month     Book                                          # Attending   # Page Views
                                                                   Meeting          of Summary
2/2013   The Plundering Time                         14                   27
3/2013   God's Englishman                              16                   40
4/2013   Manias, Panics and Crashes             18                   35
5/2013   The Conquerors                                 14                   20
6/2013   Henry Wallace Bio                            12                    21
7/2013   Life in Stalinist Russia                      16                    52
8/2013   Birth of Modern Politics                   15                    37
9/2013   Eleanor of Aquitaine                         12                    14
10/2013 Brazil on the Rise                              11                    24
11/2013 The Silk Road                                    11                    15
12/2013 US Founding Documents                  10                    49
1/2014   The Reformation                               11                   135
2/2014   Ancient Alexandria                           12                    55
3/2014   Practice and Uses of History             11                   49
4/2014  Longitude                                           12                    53
5/2014  Borderland: Ukrainian History          16                   89
6/2014  The War of 1812                                 12                   54
7/2014  This Republic of Suffering                  11                   70
8/2014  Natural History of the Palette             14                   61
9/2014  Poland: A History                               17                    41

The number of people attending the discussion meetings in person has varied from 10 to 18, with no obvious pattern. The number of downloads of the discussion summaries has increased, perhaps in part as the blog is getting more traffic (the total number of page views is now over 3.800). It seems that more people may be following the book club than are attending its meetings in person.

A Common Soldier in the Civil War

copyright: Bailey Hampton

October 8th was the day of the blood moon, and eleven members of the History Book Club met at the Kensington Row Bookshop to discuss The Story of a Common Soldier of Army Life in the Civil War 1861-1865 by Leander Stillwell. The book is out of copyright and is available in many forms. For example:

• It is available for Kindle and on paper here.
• Here is the Project Gutenberg free online version of the book.
• Here is a free audio book from the Internet.

Members were also given access to Project Gutenberg's version of The Civil War Centennial Handbook by William H. Price. 

The various versions are all computer scanned versions of library copies of the original book. They may contain errors due to the quality of the 84 year old library books or to scanner errors, The Project Gutenberg digital books are proof read by volunteers and tend to have fewer typographical errors; they also have very interesting illustrations that may not be included in other editions

Leander Stillwell in 1863 and later in life

Leander Stillwell grew up in a frontier farm in western Illinois. He seems to have been a man who loved and understood nature, perhaps typical of the frontiersmen of his time and place. He certainly could find food not only in farmers fields when foraging, but also on a stroll though the forest (as a soldier he seemed often to find opportunities for such lone walks). He was used to guns, having hunted for the pot from the tie he was a young boy. He could also enthuse about the song of a bird 50 years after he heard it.

He joined the 61st Illinois Volunteer Regiment of the Union Army at age 18 in January of 1862. He served throughout the Civil War. A member of our club noted that he had been promoted rapidly to corporal, 4th sergeant, 1st sergeant of his company (a more demanding and responsible position), 2nd lieutenant, and a month later (after the Lee surrendered at Appomattox) 1st lieutenant.  After the war he went to law school in New York (with the money that his father had saved for Leander from the army pay that he had sent home) and passed the bar there. He moved to Kansas where he had a long career as a lawyer and judge. 

Stillwell began the book at the ago of 72 in 1916 at the request of his son. His original purpose was to leave his family a record of his experience in the war; however during its preparation realized that the memoir might be published and adjusted his writing accordingly. The book was published in 1920. 

There was general agreement among the book club members that Stillwell wrote very well. He used a diary he had kept for the latter part of the war as well as an extensive set of letters he had written to his parents during his service; they had saved them and he recovered them late in life. From his comments in the memoirs it is clear that he had read the major works about the war. He also seems to have read a number of the popular works of the 19th century, and quoted them in his memoir. Indeed, he writes about finding a copy of Dickens' Bleak House in 1862 and reading it in barracks. (As was the custom in the 19th century, he reports rereading the book frequently, each time recalling his dreary time in the barracks at its first reading.) We assumed that, as was common with veterans of the Civil War, he periodically met with other veterans and discussed old times. He even met with General Sherman long after  the war and had the opportunity to talk with him for several hours about the war (General Sherman was apparently fond of meeting with "his boys" and liked talking to them if they were smart and polite.)

We were impressed by the detail of his memories of the war. One member mentioned that it is not surprising when someone remembers in great detail the most important moments of even a long life. Another suggested that we all are subject to failures of memory, especially as we talk with others and read about the events we experienced. It was also mentioned that people at the time often wrote well, and that Stillwell would probably have written often and carefully in his long legal career.

Service in the Western Theater of the War

Stillwell and the 62nd Volunteer Regiment served in the western theater of war (see map at the end of this post). They were involved directly

•  in the Battle of Shiloh, 
• in the siege of Vicksburg guarding the vital railroad supply route for the Union forces, and 
• in the taking of Little Rock (by a brilliant maneuver planned by Union General Frederick Steele). 

When the battle of Nashville was taking place, Stillwell and his regiment were assigned to nearby Murfreesboro, again protecting a vital railroad; there he was involved in a night running nighttime battle -- Overall's Creek -- in which a large part of his unit was captured. He had hoped to be included in the forces used in Sherman's March to the Sea, but that did not come about. His was the luck of the draw, since an enlisted man has little to say about where he is assigned during a war.

The 62nd Illinois Volunteer Regiment had between 800 and 900 men when it was formed; 37 of them died or were mortally wounded in battle during the war. 187 died of disease. Stillwell himself reports that he was very ill and hospitalized once during his service (although he managed to leave the field hospital early). Of course, the number of men in the regiment varied widely over the course of the war, as some men left when their enlistments were completed or left for other causes, or as reinforcements were received.

There was a discussion as to whether the western theater was a less dangerous place than the eastern theater. The east saw the great battles of Antietam and Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, and the siege of Richmond. One member pointed out that the eastern Union army also went into winter quarters, and fought only occasional battles in the first years of the war; it was only when General Grant took command that battles occurred every week or two in the east. He felt that in fact the experience of the common soldier in the east was probably not too dissimilar to that of Leander Stillwell in the west.

Another member of the club was not convinced and brought our attention to a second book that she had read, The Story of Aunt Becky's Army-life (Civil War) by Sarah Palmer. Palmer, in this 1867 book, tells of her three years as a Union Army nurse serving in the eastern theater, and dealing with the almost unimaginable horror of a Civil War battle hospital.

Stillwell was fortunate in not drawing assignments that increased his danger of being captured, wounded or killed, but units in the Western theater saw plenty of action. Indeed, the Union forces in the west played a crucial role in winning the war.

The Enlisted Man's War

A couple of members who had served in the military pointed out that a soldiers life tends to be long periods of relative inaction, some drill and routine work, and very occasional battle. Stillwell may have had fewer battles than many others, but even the soldiers in the eastern theater also spent winters in quarters, and had many more days away from the combat than in combat.

Stillwell's life was hard. He states that:

the great "stand-bys" in the way of the food of the soldiers of the western armies were coffee, sow-belly, Yankee beans, and hardtack.

There were other foods, notably dried peas. The railroads allowed the Union forces in the Civil War to be better fed than the Confederates or the forces in earlier wars, but there were times when food was very scarce. However, there were also times when foraging introduced fresh foods to the diet. Stillwell describes a couple of memorable occasions when he enjoyed the hospitality of a plantation or a Soldiers Home. On the other hand, small groups of soldiers cooked their own food, and when the young men began their service they did not know how to do so and often made themselves sick.

Clothing was grabbed off of stacks of unassorted pants and jackets; the soldiers traded trying to find something that fit. Shoes were better (but they often went barefoot on long marches).

Union troops made long marches on occasion, and did so carrying heavy packs. Roads were often bad or non-existent. The soldiers often slept in tents, and sometimes in the open with a single blanket even in cold weather. Camps were lacking in rudimentary sanitation which is why there was so much sickness.

Stillwell on Soldiers in Battle

We noted that the young men who went off to war in 1862 had no idea of what they were getting into. The first experience of battle was shocking. Stillwell describes standing in line looking for someone to shoot at; his experience as a hunter was that he did not waste ammunition if he was not able to aim at a clear target. An officer yelled at him to shoot as fast and as often as he could into the smoke in the direction that he thought an enemy might be found. A club member recalled Stillwell describing a time when the smoke had cleared and Stillwell and his comrades could the trees riddled by bullets, most of the marks over the heads of where the enemies would have been.

Stillwell noted that that in battle, the work of loading and firing as fast as possible was so all consuming that there was little time for thinking of anything else. He described once firing his weapon and being knocked flat on his back -- he had put a second load in the weapon not noticing that the first had not been discharged. Reports from battles included men firing their weapons with the ram rods still  in the barrels. He also mentions that when possible, the soldiers lay down to present as small a target as they could to the enemy.

Stillwell says that he was always deeply afraid going into battle. But he apparently always performed his duty during the battle. (The respect of his peers and his rapid promotions suggest that was true.)

The boys that went to war with Stillwell were quickly turned into men; they lost their naive beliefs about the task that they were about and became serious about the dangers and hardships that they faced, and it showed in their faces.

A member wondered why Stillwell describes the artillery as so ineffectual during the Civil War, usually way off the mark, when artillery caused most battlefield deaths and wounds in the First World War. A response was that between the wars a recoil mechanism had been invented, and was included in World War I artillery pieces. In the Civil War, the recoil of a canon moved the piece some distance; the artillery men would pull it back to approximately the original spot (as marked by the bucket of water used to swab the barrel), but the aim was lost. The artillery pieces in World War I could be aimed with much greater accuracy, and with the recoil controlled could hit the same spot again and again. Given the growth in manufacturing capacity, there was probably a lot more artillery available in World War I as well as more ammunition for the guns to use. It was also mentioned that Napoleon's artillery was more lethal, perhaps because the tactics used in the Napoleonic wars were more vulnerable to artillery fire.

The Union Army

Some 2.3 million men served in the Union army in total, but the peak number serving at any one time was just over one million. Enlistments varied from a few months to the duration of the war. However, the fighting force was always less than the number on the rolls, especially because of the high rates of sickness among the soldiers.

The Centenial Handbook states:

Of the 2.3 million men enlisted in the Union Army, seventy per cent were under 23 years of age. Approximately 100,000 were 16 and an equal number 15. Three hundred lads were 13 or less, and the records show that there were 25 no older than 10 years.

The states had militias during the Civil War which remained under the authority of their governors. A member recalled the story of President Lincoln speaking to three regiments of Ohio militia. They had been on three months enlistments, assigned to help protect Washington not being needed for the defense of Ohio, and were returning home. Lincoln took the opportunity to do some electioneering for the Republicans. But the example illustrates that short term enlistments were still being used late in the war.

We wondered why the soldiers were so disproportionately young. It was suggested that in America's rural economy, the older men who had wives and children might have been needed to work to support their families. A soldier's pay might allow for someone to be hired to replace the soldier on the farm or in the shop, but the soldier's pay was unpredictable and labor was scarce. We noted that Leander Stillwell was also missed on his father's farm when he went off to war, and on furlough he was in farm cloths working the farm on the day after he got back. On the other hand, a three month enlistment in the militia might be possible for a farmer at a time when the farm workload was low.

Civil War Flags

A member, accustomed by years as a teacher to wearing clothes related to the history lesson of the day, came in a light jacket covered with stars and bars, over a tee shirt. She explained that when Lincoln was elected, there were 33 stars on the flag of the USA. Kansas was admitted to the Union in 1861 bringing the number of stars on the flag to 34. West Virginia, which seceded from Virginia during the war, was admitted to the Union as a new state in 1863 -- the 35th star. Nevada was added to the Union at the end of October 1864, bring the 36th star to the flag but most flags were not changed until after the war was over. Our member then removed her jacket with a flourish to reveal the full 35 stars on her tee shirt.

Final Comment

History is usually not written from the point of view of the common man. Leander Stillwell was clearly an impressive person, but he wrote about the Civil War as he had seen it when he was just an enlisted soldier. His was a long, uncomfortable and unhealthy war, punctuated by a few days of terrible danger. He comes across as a man of quiet heroism and stoicism.

The book was chosen as part of a two book deal. It is quite short, while the book chosen for November is longer than our usual choice. This story of a common soldier is worth your reading time.

Here are a first and second post on the book by one of our members.

Map of Western Theater of the American Civil War, Theater Overview.