American Labyrinth

Intellectual History for Complicated Times

Raymond Haberski, Andrew Hartman, Raymond Haberski, Andrew Hartman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781501730238
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Essays in Politik & Internationale Beziehungen

American Labyrinth contains a stimulating and useful collection of essays by historians reflecting on American intellectual history.... As a whole, the book convinces the reader that the field of intellectual history is enjoying a renaissance. The book will be especially prized by intellectual historians, but historians of many different persuasions will find these essays rewarding too. ? Choice

Intellectual history has never been more relevant and more important to public life in the United States. In complicated and confounding times, people look for the principles that drive action and the foundations that support national ideals. American Labyrinth demonstrates the power of intellectual history to illuminate our public life and examine our ideological assumptions.

This volume of essays brings together 19 influential intellectual historians to contribute original thoughts on topics of widespread interest. Raymond Haberski Jr. and Andrew Hartman asked a group of nimble, sharp scholars to respond to a simple question: How might the resources of intellectual history help shed light on contemporary issues with historical resonance? The answers—all rigorous, original, and challenging—are as eclectic in approach and temperament as the authors are different in their interests and methods. Taken together, the essays of American Labyrinth illustrate how intellectual historians, operating in many different registers at once and ranging from the theoretical to the political, can provide telling insights for understanding a public sphere fraught with conflict.

In order to understand why people are ready to fight over cultural symbols and political positions we must have insight into how ideas organize, enliven, and define our lives. Ultimately, as Haberski and Hartman show in this volume, the best route through our contemporary American labyrinth is the path that traces our practical and lived ideas.

Section IV

CONTESTED IDEAS

12

WAR AND AMERICAN THOUGHT

Finding a Nation through Killing and Dying

Raymond Haberski Jr.

“I believe in your story… and I believe in the good it can do for our country. It’s a story of courage, hope, optimism, love of freedom, all the convictions that motivated you young men to do what you did, and I think this film will go a long way toward reinvigorating our commitment to the war.”¹ So gushes a character named Norm Oglesby in Ben Fountain’s award-winning novel about contemporary American war culture, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012). Oglesby is the fictional owner of the Dallas Cowboys and has invited a group of American soldiers from Bravo Company to the traditional Thanksgiving Day game at Texas Stadium. The event is the last stop on a national tour before these men return to fighting, killing, and dying in Iraq; it is also an opportunity for Oglesby to get the movie rights to a story that made these men heroes. Feted by Oglesby as combination cash cows and patriotic saviors, the men of Bravo Company become known properties because of a firefight captured by a Fox News team imbedded with the American military—keeping with media conventions, their skirmish even earned a marquee-appropriate title, “the battle of Al-Ansakar Canal.”

In the novel, Oglesby’s character shows how easy it is to turn wars and the soldiers who fight them into consumer products and marketing strategies. Whereas Bravo Company exists in one reality—as confused, heroic, real, violent, and drunk—Oglesby creates another reality—through his wealth, power, the movies, and ultimately interpretation. But the contrast between the soldiers and the salesman also captures a deeper intellectual dualism of war—war is nasty and violent, but also romantic and vital; people die without ceremony, but nations celebrate those who give their lives in war; no people want to admit that they are a product of war, yet war undoubtedly shapes the identity of a people, including (or perhaps especially) Americans. Oglesby shows his solidarity with Billy Lynn and his fellow soldiers by explaining that he too has a patriotic duty in times of war, a cause to which his wealth and single-minded ambition can be deployed like real weapons. In his theater of action, the home front, his mission is to sell the war: “They forget why we went there in the first place—why are we fighting?” Oglesby laments about his fellow Americans. “They forget some things are actually worth fighting for, and that’s where your story comes in, the Bravo story. And if the Hollywood crowd won’t step up to the plate, well, I’m happy to pinch-hit, more than happy. This is an obligation I willingly assume.”²

Fountain dwells on an irony central to so many war stories—wars don’t belong to those who fight them; they barely belong to those who die in them.³

Oglesby’s pitch, then, to turn tragedy into a feel-good movie reflects a dangerous truth about war: transforming war into an idea is often more important than the consequences of fighting, killing, and dying. “This is about a lot more than just money,” Oglesby says in response to the skepticism and cynicism of the soldiers of Bravo Company. “Our country needs this movie, needs it badly,” he pleads. “I really don’t think you want to be the guys who keep this movie from being made, not with so much at stake. I sure wouldn’t want to be that guy.”⁴

Oglesby plays with the universal “we” in narratives about war: we need war, we see war as a narrative, we find war significant to understanding our identity as a people. As a national, trans-generational narrative, war functions like the other blanket ideas, such as religion and democracy: America is a Christian nation, and Americans are a free people. In war, Americans fight, kill, and die for good reasons. Even when a war fails, such as the Confederacy’s war against the United States or the American war in Vietnam (and perhaps Iraq and Afghanistan), the nation does not, has not, reimagined the standard narrative about war. We have told ourselves a simple story about war since Puritans decimated the Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and other native peoples in the seventeenth century’s King Philip’s War. But the ubiquity of the tale has also made it a target for criticism, and Fountain’s book fits into a tradition of critiquing the story we tell ourselves about war. This interplay between a dominant narrative about war and the often eloquent, biting challenges to it reveals the significance of American thought about war in ways similar to how Americans like to debate national assumptions about religion and freedom. Broadly speaking, the American story of war has three acts.

In the first act, the nation was made sacred through war. Americans from the Puritans to Progressives told themselves that people kill and die for reasons that go beyond the immediate circumstances of violence and death. The American Civil War serves as the pivot for this section of the story, conflating God and war to affirm the meaning of the nation. Mark Twain challenged this interpretation: while he did not deny the pivotal role played by the Civil War, he parodied the way it made possible the sanctification of all wars in American history.

In the second act, the power of the state is remade through two world wars and the Cold War. During the First World War, Randolph Bourne, a former student of John Dewey’s and a prolific pragmatist intellectual, bemoaned the attraction many American intellectuals had to the power of war. So where Twain pointed out the irony of using war to sanctify the nation, Bourne identified the irony of intellectuals using war to reform the state.

The final act starts in the wake of the Vietnam War, in a time when the critiques of Twain and Bourne had seemingly been confirmed by the tragedy of that war. End of the story, right? Not quite. The failure of Vietnam as a war did not undermine the meaning of war as an idea in America. In the wake of Vietnam, “just war” theory rose to prominence as a way to address a very basic question: when is war moral? Thus, just war theory added a sense of moral evaluation, offering a way to determine what kind of wars were right and good. Into an atmosphere of anxiety about the nation’s moral health created by the moral disaster of Vietnam, the political theorist Michael Walzer emerged as a contrarian advocate for a moral defense of war, arguing that just war theory made war a universal action, not an expression of American exceptionalism. Walzer’s twist shares similarities to those of Twain and Bourne—he contended that soldiers in war, no matter what side they fought for, share essential elements that unite them personally, politically, and culturally. In this sense, war is indeed an idea, but not one safe for popular consumption.

It might seem odd to use critics of American wars to talk about significant strands of American thought about war, but it is through such criticism that I think we see these traditions most clearly. In short, Twain, Bourne, and Walzer wouldn’t have written about the power of narratives about war if they didn’t find those stories significant and perhaps even dangerous to their nation.

The Power of War

From the first European settlers to the present day, stories of war—and the remaking of war into an idea—have played a crucial role in the formation of America. What gives the idea of war such power? First, sacrifices made in war create tremendous momentum for interpretation. People kill and die for reasons that the living hope will go beyond the immediate circumstances of violence and death. Second, comprehending such sacrifices produces another aspect of war’s power: unlike almost any other human action, war galvanizes people who would otherwise have little reason to unify. And finally, the stories of unity generated by war produce narratives that operate with universal appeal—so universal that they can cut across generations, faiths, genders, and ethnicities, and become useful tools for those who run the nation. In the American experience it is not too much to say that without war, America as we know it today would not exist. War helped give the nation purpose, it provided a narrative that helped the state galvanize the allegiance of the people, and it offered a seamless interpretation of heroic action that stretched back to the origins of the nation and forward to imperial projects of the modern day.

In American letters, no other statement about war in American life is more profound and more often cited than the address President Abraham Lincoln gave at the Gettysburg battlefield. In his historically brief speech, Lincoln made plain how war could transcend its immediate context (beyond Confederate and Union war aims and war dead), to become timeless and nation defining. It was the abstract quality of the speech that made the difference, allowing interpretations that served an endless variety of needs. Indeed, the abstract nature of the speech established it as the dominant interpretation of war in American thought. Michael Sherry observes that the Civil War capped a particular kind of American history with war: “A nation born in war, threatened by invasion, expanded through conquest, and finally reconceived in civil war, owed much to Mars.”⁵

In his address at the Gettysburg Cemetery, Lincoln offered a moral reckoning for the carnage of the Civil War. Looking out at the freshly dug graves of thousands of soldiers from both sides of the war, Lincoln proposed that the only suitable testament to such sacrifice was to make a solemn pledge: “It is rather for us, the living to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion—that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”⁶ The war was not an end in itself; Lincoln wanted his audience and future generations to accept that the tragedy of his war and perhaps any war could be redeemed if Americans rededicated themselves to the founding principles of their nation. However, Lincoln’s intellectual reckoning carried a terrible dilemma, that the nation might use war to find redemption for its political failings.

For that reason, the Gettysburg Address remains among the most significant statements about the nation made by any president. For President Lincoln and his successors, the tragedy of war carries within it the founding promise of their nation. Practically speaking, the Civil War forced Lincoln to confront a paradox that all presidents face when they send Americans into war: that his nation, though pledged to peace, found its identity through death. The fact that Lincoln’s interpretation of the Civil War did not require squaring this obvious contradiction fed the power of war as an idea in American history. Historian and president of Harvard University Drew Gilpin Faust relates how the scale of death gave Lincoln and his political heirs a powerful intellectual tool: “In the address the dead themselves become the agents of political meaning and devotion; they act even in their silence and anonymity.” While similar views of war had resounded earlier in American history, Lincoln’s interpretation of the Civil War consolidated what had yet to become a tradition. Faust asserts that it was the Civil War that provided “narratives of patriotic sacrifice that imbued war deaths with transcendent meaning.”⁷ The drift of history as well as the shock of the moment made it possible for Lincoln’s address to reveal how much Americans needed war to know themselves. He told Americans then and for all time what they already wanted to believe.⁸

Lincoln’s address offered both a rhetorical and intellectual script, one that literally could be adapted to any war that demanded sacrifice, and one that was useful to justify sacrifices made for the nation. A mark of a rich idea is that it travels well, and Lincoln developed an idea about war and the nation that has proved to be context-resistant—his argument has consistently appeared from his time to ours. The historian Jared Peatman writes in The Long Shadow of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “From 1914 to 1918 and 1939 to 1945, the Gettysburg Address was invoked more often and for greater purposes than ever before.”⁹ Its effect continues into the twenty-first century: in an editorial for the Washington Post in 2013, Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, spoke about drawing inspiration from Lincoln’s address when meeting the families of fallen soldiers. When they ask “Was it worth it? Did his death mean anything?” Mullen tells them “It mattered…. Regardless of the terms of the treaty, the surrender, the withdrawal, the defeat or the victory, no American who sheds blood to preserve that which his ancestors fought to establish can ever be said to have made that sacrifice without meaning. No one who dies in the service of country dies in vain.”¹⁰ Mullen has it about right—at its core, the Gettysburg Address abstracted the particularities of battle to create a singular, unified notion about a nation at war.¹¹

Perhaps less obvious, though, is the physical manifestation of Lincoln’s address— how the abstraction of war was made tangible and visible in front of Lincoln. The historian Mark S. Schantz reminds us that the Gettysburg Address was most immediately a dedication ceremony to a new cemetery. He explains that William Saunders, its architect, designed the layout of the graves to impose a certain kind of intellectual order on those buried there. “The dead at Gettysburg belonged fully to the American nation,” Schantz states, “not to their families, not to their friends, and not even, in the end, to themselves.”¹² In death, the soldiers of Gettysburg became equal and equally abstract. The structure of the cemetery was, Schantz points out, “relentlessly egalitarian…. There would be no discrimination in… [the] cemetery or distinctions made among individuals. Families of wealth and taste would be powerless to adorn individual graves or to embellish them with tombs or crypts or more extensive monuments. By insisting on the regularity and the uniformity of the graves, Saunders’s design simultaneously sent a strong message of national unity.”¹³ And Lincoln heartily endorsed that message through his address.

The Gettysburg Address was far from the only statement of its kind, but it resonated with special force because, better than all others, it expressed an American theology that joined the aspirations of the nation with massive sacrifice made in the war. The ...