A Summer Sunday's Thoughts Drift South

I'm cutting and pasting passages from the Guttenberg Project site's Personal Memoirs, Vol. 1, by Ulysses S. Grant, to avoid the vision-bustiong drudgery of re-typing all of this text into my own document. It still needs a lot of format editing though, to conform to manuscript submission standards. It's work, particularly for somebody as visually-impaired as I am.

I switch off from Grant to a lighter interest, vampires. Meyer's 4thTwilight book published on the stroke of midnight Friday night, has been big weekend entertainment news. The forthcoming HBO series, True Blood, based on Charlaine Harris's series, also has been big news this weekend. Meyer's books are set in the Pacific Northwest, while Harris's are set in small town northern Louisiana. An interesting cultural contrast there, kind of like Dark Shadows vs. Buffy The Vampire Slayer, in terms of economic class, social acceptance and the place of violence in a society.

The radio's playing the "Tennessee Border" show. This Sunday's program is all songs about cheating on your partner or being cheated on by your partner, or your partner cheating on his / her partner, and how you feel about that. This is the South too. Do the writers of this music live in a milieu where infidelity was more common than in others? But the fans who make this music so popular are religious and concerned with doing right and care about what people think about them. Grant is easier to understand because he knew what he thought about everything and why he thought it.

I have another hero to stand with George Washington now. Grant too was a general, who became POTUS. Unlike Washington, Grant's press has been bad -- part of the historical propaganda strategy by the former Confederacy and sympathizers to discredit the Union and Reconstruction.

This article in Newsweek,"The Mind of the South," says that studying Grant this summer is about the most contemporary thing I could be working on:

[ For many of the hobbyists the delight is in the details, right down to the paper cartridges in their muzzle-loading rifles and handmade buttons on their hot woolen uniforms. "We all know slavery was wrong," says Donald Davidson, whose day job is with the water department in Nashville. "War is not a nice thing. Hopefully we can show we can live together by reliving history like this."

But the subtext of old prejudices keeps creeping in even among the very young. Walking down to The Point one morning, a 12-year-old "private" in this particular Confederate unit told me what he'd heard tell in school about the elections. Next to nothing about McCain. But Obama? "There are too many chances we would take if he became president, you know what I mean?" I said I wasn't sure I did. "I don't know if it's a myth or it's true," said the boy, "but they say that they caught him trying to sneak Iraqi soldiers into the United States."

I remember all the things I heard tell in elementary school in Atlanta during the civil-rights movement of the 1960s, when the schoolyard talk was about a Roman Catholic running for president, and the threat that he'd be putting nigras (which is what you said if you were halfway polite) in Atlanta schools. Certainly much of the similar talk you hear now comes from the obvious suspects, people like Dent Myers, a relic collector and self-caricaturing bigot in Kennesaw, Ga., north of Atlanta. (His shop, Wildman's, is full of the crazy literature of the unreconstructed South, as well as guns, swords, Ku Klux Klan hoods and scurrilous bumper stickers.) Dent argues that when Southerners criticize Obama, "They say, 'He's a Muslim, he's a mulatto Muslim, or quadroon Muslim … [only because] they don't want to use the old N word." ]

The conditions of the 19th century, from the Mexican American War and the Second Great Awakening, the Southern slave-owning determination to go to war to expand slavery, through Reconstruction, in comparison and contrast with what this nation's been experiencing since Reagan, throws a light that illuminates better both the past and the present.

I take consolation from history.

The White Man's Burden

Concerning the Perry book again: he quotes a response to Kipling's 1899, "White Man's Burden," by Robert Underwood Johnson (editor of the Century magazine, which plays such a role in Grant's life,) as the author attempts to penetrate the confusion about slavery and emancipation that grips both Grant and Twain -- and the nation, even today. (Johnson wasn't confused -- he was an abolitionist early on, and a dedicated anti-imperialist):

What is the White Man's Burden

That weighs upon his sleep?

To the hear the hundreds dying!

To see the thousands weep?

Oh, wanton war that haunts him!

Oh seed that he must reap!"

Twain, Grant and Racism

From pp. 217-218 of Mark Perry's Grant and Twain:

[ Later, in looking back on his life, Twain admitted what he had discovered about himself in India: that the central and singular fact that had shaped his time and shaped him was the question of slavery -- that "bald, grotesque and unwarrantable ursurpation" of human freedom that "stupified humanity." And at the heart of slavery was the question of race, of racism -- which is what made slavery possible. Race was present, for Twain, everywhere he turned: in this Missouri childhood, in his recollections of "Uncle Dan'l," in the face of Tom Lewis at Quarry Farm, in the strange behavior of his next-door neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe, and in his own writing. It was this, the question of race, that so attracted Twain to Grant. In Grant's struggles Twain saw his own. Like Twain, Grant turned the question of slavery, and race, over and over in his own mind and faced with it each and every day. Raised by an abolitionist, he employed his father-in-law's slaves, remained silent when his wife defended the institution, and assiduously ignored the calls for racial equality when he was president. Grant condemned slavery and fought against it, and he abhorred racism. But he could not overcome it. Like Twain he believed the nation's soul was infected by racism, but not his. Why?

Why was it that after the loss of more than six hundred thousand Americans in a catastrophic civil conflict, men like Twain and Grant could not complete the victory sealed at Appomattox? Why, deep into their own century, could they not stay the hand of southern (and American) injustice, which freed the slaves to be citizens but then denied them their rights? Books, theses, and endless monographs would be written on the subject in the decades following the passing of Twain's generation, but the simplest answer might well have been uttered by Sam Grant as a commander in Tennessee. One day, observing the lines of the thousands of former slaves following the army, he turned to John Rawlins, one of his closest aides. "I don't know these people," he said. ]

Grant and Twain

Subtitled, of course, because all non-fiction subtitles include these key words now: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America. Which friendship did not change America, but certainly had an influence on the fortunes of both men involved, and their families. By Mark Perry.

I stayed up way too late reading this book last night, and I'm still not finished. The book is fascinating, and deceptively longer than it appears.

It's also a bit of an odd read, since the author works so very hard to establish his new! individual! brilliant! insights about The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and its composition, that no one's ever thought of before, and which depend upon a certain twistyness in the description of the relationship between the two men.

I'm not declaring Perry's wrong in his new individual brilliant insights, but maybe, they are not all that brilliant? Or not all that important? Or even a solution to the eternal mystery that is Huckleberry Finn?

The book is filled with period description and detail, gracefully provided to the reader. Both men are brilliant, fascinating people. Until recently I knew nothing about Grant the man, or Grant the general, for that matter. Perry's book is a perfect introduction to Grant's Memoirs, since this book is about how he came to write his Memoirs, the process of that writing, and the publication thereof -- which Twain snatched for his company at the very moment of the signing of the contract with a different publisher. Any writer and historian will consider long and deeply that Grant wrote both volumes while dying of a very painful throat cancer, in the face of financial destitution, due to the failure his son's bank, and keenly feeling the shame of that in his sense of honor. Writing his Memoirs provided Grant comfort on all fronts, particularly as he was assured their publication would ensure a comfortable financial future for his family, which it did do.

The author of the Grant volume in the American Presidents series drew greatly on this book. I presume though, from a get-acquainted first pass through The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, that this author and Perry both drew those parts from Grant himself.

It's too bad that the Forge / Tor edition of Grant's Memoirs could publish only Grant's Civil War volume. (I'm reading The Modern Library War Series edition.) Anyone who wants to understand the history of the U.S. will need Grant's recollections of that far too little known and considered event in national history we call the Mexican - American War. But most of us know nothing about it, other than it was the training and proving ground for so many of the officers and commanders on both sides of the Civil War conflict. Maybe many nationalists don't like that in this volume Grant clearly calls it an unjust war pushed upon Mexico by the U.S. for reason of territory grab -- this was Manifest Destiny time -- and that this was criminal. However, he followed orders and did his best, because that is what the army and its officers do.

This is exactly what he continued to do as Commander in Chief of the Union armies, under Lincoln, and why he continued to follow Lincoln's orders of Reconstruction -- meaning the full integration of the emancipated population into the national body politic, when POTUS himself. Those were Lincoln's orders and he continued to believe himself bound to fulfill those orders. He also believed, as he believed Lincoln did, that this was the only way to heal the nation.

Alas, that even still, today, there are so many who continue to fight with every claw and fang they can muster to make it not be so.

The 1840's were an interesting period in the U.S. I first began thinking of them while doing my Samuel Ward (who ended his extremely long and varied and full life known as "King of the Lobby") project in the NYPL Humanities Papers and Mss. archives.

Grant's Memoirs are instructive as history, and as a model of historical writing. Perry's Grant and Twain is instructive in the process of writing history. Any historian needs all three parts as the tool kit for successful historical work: 1) knowledge of the material -- research and / or recollection, as in Grant's case; 2) possession of a method, a process; 3) capacity to write clearly to communicate what the historian learned / knows. Perry's book shows us Grant actively wielding all three parts of that tool kit.

Dead Presidents & Dead Ladies

A while back we finished the James Buchanan volume in The American Presidents series from Time / Henry Holt. What an evil little prick Buchanan was! No wonder he's held the title of the Worst President until the present OhOh resident knocked him down to second place. He has all the worst traits of a combination of every rotten national stage politician you can think o -- such as Lieberman, Bush, Thurman, Calhoun -- without a single redeeming value. This little lawyer punk (who, alas for gays, was also clearly a submissive gay male) luuuuuuuuuuuuved the big Southern plantation slaveholders, and fought against his own party at every turn to give the slaveholders, against every law and treaty, what they wanted. He was the reason for Bloody Kansas, and by the end of his term, the Civil War. Yes, he was also corrupt, as well as a pontificating blowhard. Even his own state hated him, during his tenure in the OhOh.

Last week we started the Ulysses S. Grant volume. Since this series' focus is upon the presidencies, Grant's career as the Commander General of the Armies for the Union, and how he came to fill that position, is sketched in, with few details. We've reached the point where Lee has surrendered, the war is finished, Lincoln assassinated (the Boothe plot evidently included Grant and other key figures, but only the Lincoln assassination was successful) and Johnson is about to undergo impeachment, because his own party, like Buchanan's did, hate him so much -- because he was 1) a rabid hater of the former slaves and tried to block every move to help them move into a non-slave life, and he was an equal hater of the former big plantation owners of slaves and wanted them stripped of everything, whereas his opponents wanted to move on and be one big happy national family again, kumbya ya all. In the meantime, Grant is doing his best to carry out Lincoln's mandates, which include bringing the former slaves into the fold of voting citizenship. Grant believes it is his duty, a duty he owes still to the man who was his Commander-in-Chief. I appreciate that the author includes the telling detail that Grant was such a splendid horseman that at West Point he was number one, outriding even the vaunted scions of the Southern slaveholding aristocracy.

These books are excellent introductions to the individual each one covers, and to the period in which that individual acted upon the national stage. They're particularly good for president you know nothing about, like, in our case, Buchanan. Once you've read about a president in this series, you are prepped to do more reading because you've received the broad outline. They are also easy reading, written in popular, narrative style, not academic. They are excellent to read aloud, or to listen to if they were / are ? available as audio books.

I haven't been watching much television, meaning in my case, dvds, lately, though last night I did see the unique Marlowe noir, The Lady in the Lake, directed by and starring as Marlowe, Robert Montgomery. It's a good addition to your list of unexpected Christmas movies. Its cinemagraphic manner is unusual -- it's that 'subjective' camera style. You hardly ever see Marlowe / Montgomery on screen, except as a shadow, or in the mirror, or when he addresses you, the audience, directly as a -- writer of hardboiled detective fiction. Marlowe's narration alternates with long addresses by other characters or with mannered dialog with the unseen Marlowe. In contrast to the more modernist cinematography of the subjective camera, the sound of the movie is like a radio play. The women run through series of poses and projections that are from theater stage eras that are much earlier than the year of 1946 when this movie was released. It's a peculiar mixture of periods and techniques and forms then, which provides interest to what already in 1946 had become a generic staple.