Apple TV's Franklin: A Sort of Review

When Hollywood takes on a historical subject I am interested in, I greet the news with cautious joy.  If I’m lucky, I’ll get something as good as Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln.  If I’m unlucky, I’ll have to endure Ridley Scott’s Napoleon.

It was with this happy trepidation that I tuned into Apple TV+’s historical miniseries, Franklin.  The 8-part series is based on Stacy Schiff’s* book “A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America”.

* I haven’t read the book, but I have read Schiff’s excellent biographies of Cleopatra and Samuel Adams.  She is an accomplished historian who is deeply knowledgeable of the period

The show does some things very well, others less well.  And perhaps has a fatal flaw that prevents it from rising to greatness – something that was within its grasp.

Keatang’s Rules of History Movies

I have some rules for history movies or miniseries.  Or, to paraphrase Dr. Peter Venkman, they’re more guidelines than rules.  Let’s see how Franklin did:

Use a Smaller Story to Tell a Bigger Story

One might think a show titled Franklin would be a full-scale biography of one of our great Founders.  

But you won’t see him sign the Declaration of Independence or create the US Postal Service.  There are no scenes of him kite-flying in a thunderstorm or inventing bifocals.  Neither George Washington nor Thomas Jefferson, Hamilton or Madison, will grace the screen.

Franklin wisely zeroes in on an important period in Franklin’s life and the life of our country: the  near-decade he spent in France, first trying to gain France's support (military, financial, and diplomatic) for the American Revolution, then negotiating the Treaty of Paris ending that war.

This approach works.  Napoleon (a movie I will not be kind to in this piece) failed for many reasons, not least of which is that Ridley Scott tried to capture 28 history-packed years into 3 hours.  Even a filmmaker as unconcerned with historical truth as Scott can’t do that.  

Get the Period Details Right 

I have spent little to no time in pre-Revolutionary France, so maybe they didn’t get the details right.  But boy it sure it felt like they did.

Much of it was filmed at Versailles itself, and in spots throughout Paris, and it shows.  Spectacularly so.

The wardrobe and makeup seem to capture the ridiculous glamour of the Ancien Regime.

I have an admiration for historical shows that realize the world was much darker before Franklin discovered electricity (jk) and have the courage to show that, while still properly lighting the scene.

And Franklin does a masterful job of slipping back and forth between English and sub-titled French.

Finally…and this is a tricky subject…but unlike some other recent period films, there is no colorblind casting.  There are Black actors but they are playing Black characters.  There are good reasons for colorblind casting, particularly in a fictional setting.  But when a production is doing so much difficult and expensive work to make you believe you are in 18th century France, that can be undone by, say, 18th century French Ministers of Finance that look nothing like 18th century French Ministers of Finance.  

And having Black characters, rather than Black actors playing white characters, makes it possible to show period attitudes towards race.  Colorblind casting will show said Minister of Finance meeting with the King, and everyone in the room is cool with the fact that the Minister of Finance is Black.  When in actual 18th century France, I assure you, they would not be cool.  Instead, we get to see French nobility react to a louche young noble bringing an "African" actress to a ball, or see the the casual racism of John Jay compared to the more enlightened John Adams.  

The Truth is More Important Than the Facts

Novels, movies, and miniseries based on history are not documentaries.  They are fictional retellings of historical events.  And it is impossible to be completely faithful to the facts in this medium.

For example, the peace negotiations for the Treaty of Paris ran from April 1782 through its drafting in November, to its signing in September of the following year.  That’s a year and a half.

Director Tim Van Patten* had about 45 minutes of screen time to show this.  Some telescoping is necessary.

So, while what we see isn’t necessarily what happened, it is faithful to the truth of what happened.  Well done. (You’ll be shocked to hear that Napoleon got the truth and the facts wrong.)

* TVP is the half-brother of Dick Van Patten, the Dad from Eight is Enough.  His filmography is a list of the best television shows of the last two decades.  He has directed episodes of The Wire, Deadwood, Rome, The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, and more.

I'd be remiss however if I didn't object to the characterization of John Adams. Adams is used as a foil against Franklin.  Where Franklin is charming, Adams is rude and awkward.  Franklin's French is imperfect but passable; Adams' is clumsy and intelligible.  Franklin reads every person and moment perfectly; Adams blunders about cluelessly.  

Adams was a brilliant man, and Franklin knew it.  They give him a bit of a redemption at the end, but I may have to rewatch the HBO John Adams miniseries to forget this rendition.

Don’t Cast a Famous Person in the Role of a Famous Person

Even in a country as historically disinterested as America, most people have an idea of what Benjamin Franklin looks like.  Bald, paunchy, kindly, wise.  

Hollywood’s makeup artists, I’m sure, could have made Michael Douglas look more like Franklin.  Instead we get a rather svelte figure whose hairline was not retreating like the British from Lexington and Concord.

The performance was charming, the lines well-delivered, the twinkle in the eye perfect.  But not for one minute did I believe I was looking at Benjamin Franklin, American Founder.  I was always quite aware I was looking at Michael Douglas, American Movie Star*.

* As my friend Lucky pointed out, if you want a believable performance of Benjamin Franklin, check out Tom Wilkinson in the John Adams miniseries.

But hey – he was many thousands times better than whatever the heck Joaquin Phoenix was doing in Napoleon!  (damn, that movie infuriated me; I should do a review of that but I’d have to watch it again).  

*  The exception to this rule is Daniel Day-Lewis’ sublime performance in Lincoln

Thank You Apple

Whenever I review a history move/show, I feel bad because I nitpick at the edges.  In truth, I am very grateful that Apple actually greenlighted this show.  

Imagine that pitch meeting:

“So, we want to do a miniseries about Benjamin Franklin.”

“Oh, interesting!.  Declaration of Independence, all of the Founding Fathers.  Sounds great!”

“Actually, no, it will take place in France.”

“What?”

“Yeah, there’s going to be hours and hours of Franklin negotiating with French ministers, followed by hours and hours of Franklin negotiation with British officials.”

“Um…”

“Did I mention most of it will be in French?”

“Wait…”

“With sub-titles.  And half of it will be French spoken poorly by Americans.”

“I dunno…”

“What if we had Michael Douglas looking geriatrically sexy in the title role?”

“Done!”

Seriously, I’m grateful this kind of television is being made.  I know more about this history than the next guy, and probably the guy next to him.  But I still learned quite a bit from the show.  It captured well the competing interests of great nations, life in the ancien regime, and the wily charm of one of our greatest Americans.

As for Ridley Scott...just as Bonaparte himself gave us Austerlitz and Waterloo, you gave us Gladiator and Napoleon.  You win some, you lose some, right?

The Johnny Bingo Awards - The 2010s

My Favorite Books of the Decade


Authors, agents, publishers, and readers: it’s time for the 2019 Johnny Bingo Awards!

Wait, what’s that you say?  I didn’t give out the 2018 Awards?  Or 2017, 2016…jeez, when was the last time I did these things?  2009?!  Well, that’s embarrassing.  I have long mocked the Nobel Prize in Literature for their curious choices, but at least they remember to give out their awards every year (whether the winner shows up or not is another question entirely).

There’s only one option here:  claim it was my intention all along to skip ten years and hand out The Johnny Bingo Awards for the Decade!

These awards have flexible rules.  Indeed there is only one that matters (to which I will make a slight update):

“The Johnny Bingo Award(s) have one judge – me – and one rule: all eligible books must have been finished by me this year decade.   It could’ve been written by a blind Greek poet in the 8th century BC or be an unpublished galley hacked from an MFA candidate’s MacBook in a Brooklyn cafe. As long as I read the final paragraph before the calendar turns, it's eligible.”

I’m going to do this Oscar style: start with some fun awards, then get into the long weird section, and close out with the big ones.  And away we go:

Best Rock & Roll Book
The 2010s brought us a lot of books about classic rock.  I read the “The English Guitarist Memoir Trilogy” (Keith Richards’ Life, Pete Townshend’s Who I Am, and Clapton: The Autobiography).  I enjoyed Pamela Des Barres’ delightful groupie memoir, I’m With the Band.  And Stephen Hyden's Twilight of the Gods was...well, I don't know what it was exactly - part memoir, part classic rock history, but mostly hanging out with a smart and interesting guy who has thought entirely too much about classic rock and what it means to people of a certain age.

But the winner here is The Trouble Boys: The Story of the Replacements.  Bob Mehr’s chronicle of this brilliant but self-destructive band has all the sex, drugs and rock and roll the genre promises.  And it has one of my favorite components of rock books – encounters with other musicians (in particular, the members of REM, who are a steady presence as competitors, counterpoint, and comrades).

It also gave me what I was really looking for: an insight into the creative process.  Townshend’s book does that too, but in a self-consciously intellectual way.  Clapton’s music is ultimately too derivative – his inspiration is other musicians – to provide creative insight.  And Keith Richards, bless his pirate soul, seems to have no earthly idea where the music comes from.

But these drunken nuts from Minneapolis were true artists, and the journey with them was fascinating.

Best Book from a Binge Read
The 2010s brought us binge-watching, and perhaps not coincidentally I did some binge-reading this decade.  Not on authors, but on subjects.

Ben McIntyre’s A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal sent me down a Cambridge Five Spy Ring rabbit hole.  T.H. White’s Once and Future King inspired a quest to learn everything I could about King Arthur and Arthurian legend.  (Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles is a wonderful imagining of how a possibly historical medieval warlord could’ve evolved into the English legend).  And Sherlock Holmes – wow, did I go full Sherlock this decade.   I read every word Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote, and numerous non-canon Sherlock books by everyone from Michael Chabon to Caleb Carr*.

*  I highly recommend Graham Moore’s The Sherlockian.  Moore published this exceedingly clever novel in 2010, then four years later won the Academy Award for writing The Imitation Game, starring none other than Benedict Cumberbatch, my favorite on-screen Sherlock.

But my most rewarding binge was on Alexander the Great.   And the winner here is Mary Renault’s Alexander trilogy (Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy, Funeral Games).   Reading Renault's work alongside more traditional biographies (and a bit of Arrian) makes you wonder how Oliver Stone could have possibly made such a boring movie from such thrilling material.

Sidebar
I read hardcovers, eBooks on a Kindle, eBooks on an iPhone, and I listen to audiobooks.  I consider all of this to be "reading".  For example, I listened to the entire English Guitarist Memoir trilogy on audiobook, which I highly recommend.  Pete Townshend reads his own book, and he comes off as much more self-effacing and able to laugh at himself than I suspect he would in print, where his tendency to pomposity would be more obvious.  And Keith Richards' audiobook is a delightful mess: it starts with Johnny Depp, who must have gotten bored halfway through.  Then a replacement bloke with a cockney accent jumps in.  Then Keith decides, what the hell, I'm gonna read a few chapters!   It's all so...Keith.


Best Stephen King Book Not Written By Stephen King
Upon its publication in 2010, Justin Cronin’s The Passage was immediately compared to The Stand.  Followed by The Twelve and The City of Mirrors, King himself called it “a trilogy that will stand as one of the great achievements in American fantasy fiction.”


Worst Stephen King Book Written By Stephen King
I read a lot of fantasy series this decade.  A Song of Ice and Fire (which you may recognize as Game of Thrones).  All 15 books of The Wheel of Time.  Lev Grossman's The Magicians.  His Dark Materials.  The aforementioned Once and Future King*.

So I thought, hey, Stephen King is one of the great storytellers of modern times.  Let's give his fantasy series, The Dark Tower, a shot.  It must be good.

Spoiler:  It is not good.

*  Arthurian legend is the foundation story of all modern fantasy stories, from The Lord of the Rings to Star Wars to Harry Potter. And let's be clear: Star Wars is fantasy, NOT science fiction.  It has knights and swords and magic and princesses.  Obi-Wan Kenobi is Merlin and Luke is Arthur.  In the prequel trilogy Yoda is Merlin and Anakin is Arthur.  And in the new trilogy Luke is Merlin and Rey is Arthur.  Got it?  Good.  


The Book Most Likely to Make My Wife Kick Me Under the Table
There's a certain kind of book - non-fiction, well-written, a colon in the title, and a Big Idea at its heart  - that will make me talk about it for months afterwards.   Eventually, I'm out to dinner with other people and am rambling on for entirely too long about how ancient Romans used memory palaces to commit multi-hour speeches to memory and - thwack! - my wife will deliver a well-placed blow to my shin. 

Here are the nominees:

The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance
David Epstein

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
Joshua Foer

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Steven Pinker

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Won't Stop Talking
Susan Cain

Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
Reza Aslan

If you're an introvert and want to understand yourself better OR an extrovert who lives and works with introverts and wants to understand them better, read Quiet.

If you think the age you live in is the worst ever and am open to being proven dramatically wrong, read Better Angels.

And if you really want to get kicked under the table, read Moonwalking. 


Sidebar
I've kept a book log for 19 years, which is how I'm able to do this ridiculous "awards" program.  But I'm sure these awards are suffering from recency bias.  For example, I just read The Passage trilogy  so it's top of mind.  But back in 2012 I read a novel called The Art of Fielding by Chad Harbach.  I remembered loving it.  I remember it was kinda sorta about baseball and college.  I remember it was beloved by critics.  But alas, I don't remember anything else about it.

If I had just read it, it probably would have won a coveted J-B Award.  Alas, it just gets a quick mention here.

Best Books I Didn't Actually Read
Over the course of several Christmases Santa brought me The Landmark Thucydides, The Landmark Herodotus, and The Landmark Caesar.  These are beautiful books, objets d'art, that present ancient historical texts in a setting for non-scholars.

For example, The Landmark Thucydides presents a translation of  The Peloponnesian War, complete with maps and introductions and same-page footnotes.   But it also includes a dozen essays by noted scholars on everything from naval warfare in the 5th century BCE to the structures of Athenian government.

I haven't read all the ancient texts from end to end.  But they are books I pick up, read an essay, read some passages - the Athenians' disastrous invasion of Sicily, the Spartans at Thermopylae - and move on.  Perhaps in retirement I'll really dig into these things.


Best Novel
Let's be clear:  every book in this category is better than The Passage and the Replacements book and pretty much everything else.  A great novel is hypnotic - when lost in its pages you miss train stops and meals and deadlines - the world stops around you.  It makes you think and it teaches you things about humanity and philosophy and morality and history and everything that matters.

As Hilary Mantel, one of this year's nominees said, "A novel should be a book of questions, not of answers." 

The nominees are:

The Son
Phillip Meyer

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
Anthony Marra

Lincoln in the Bardo
George Saunders

A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan

Wolf Hall
Hillary Mantel

Matterhorn
Karl Marlantes

Since I have a bias for history wrapped up in literature, particularly history that I'm dreadfully ignorant of, the coveted JB Prize goes to Wolf Hall.  The first book in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, it stands alongside Robert Caro's biographies as a masterwork about how power is gained and wielded.  And it's a helluva story too.


Best History Book
Let's get right to it:

The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Volume IV
Robert Caro

Speaking of Robert Caro's biographies...

I assume there are people will read all 4000 pages of Caro's monumental biography of LBJ (he's at 4 volumes and 3000 pages now).  I doubt I'll be one of them.  

But this volume, covering his last years in the Senate through the assassination of JFK and the first tumultuous year of his Presidency, covers a fascinating period of American history told by a master historian.

Gettysburg: The Last Invasion
Allen Guelzo

What elevates this from a good battle history to a great work of history are the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of little stories he tells.   Stories of valor, tragedy, folly, humor.  Stories of generals and privates, but also of the citizens of a Pennsylvania town that was visited for 3 days by an inferno of death.

Among all these portraits and stories emerges a coherent narrative of this enormous battle. 

Paul Revere's Ride
David Hackett Fischer

Sometimes the legend is true.  Sometimes the truth is even more interesting than the legend.

Paul Revere's midnight ride achieved its legendary status thanks to Henry Wadworth Longfellow's famous poem ("Listen, my children, and you shall hear, Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.")  What followed was a century of revisionists correcting Mr. Longfellow.

But Fischer rescues the true story, and it is a damned good one.   (He did the same thing for Washington in Washington's Crossing and corrects the myth of American's "Puritan founding" in The Seeds of Albion.)

Grant
Ron Chernow

If Robert Caro isn't our finest biographer, perhaps it's Ron Chernow?

I don't expect this book to get the same Broadway musical hit treatment as his 2004 biography of Alexander Hamilton, but it may be a better book - or at least, a more interesting subject.

Grant's reputation doesn't need reviving - and yet Chernow does just that.  He makes you realize he was a greater military strategist than he is often given credit for; nothing like the butcher he is often accused of; and a far better President than historians usually accord him.

And it's a great read taking you everywhere from pre- and postwar Mexico, antebellum California, gilded age New York, a grand tour of Europe - and of course, the great battlefields of The Civil War.

The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-45.  Volume 3 of The Liberation Trilogy
Rick Atkinson

When An Army at Dawn, the first volume of Atkinson's Liberation Trilogy came out in 2002, it was clear that the Second World War had found its Bruce Catton.  Just as Catton focused on the Army of the Potomac in his great trilogy (Mr. Lincoln's Army, Glory Road, A Stillness at Appomattox), Atkinson zeroes in on the Allied triumph in Europe.

The Guns at Last Light is the concluding volume of this great work, and is the winner of the Johnny Bingo Award for History.


LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARDS
Two of my writing heroes passed away this decade.

Tom Wolfe
Tom Wolfe became my writing hero early in college. "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers" opened up my eyes to what non-fiction writing could be. Then I read "The Right Stuff", and all of the pyrotechnics from his earlier work was gone, and its absence made me realize how good the work was - indeed, how one might go about doing this. If you want to write well, forget all of the books about writing; just read "The Right Stuff" and pay attention.

And then he thought, after proving himself as possibly the greatest non-fiction writer of the century, what the hell, he'd write a novel. 500 years from now, when historians and cultural archaeologists want to know what the greatest city in the world was like before the internet changed the world, they need only read "Bonfire of the Vanities".

(If you care about the novel as an art form, read his essay, "Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast".)


Elmore Leonard
Elmore Leonard is almost certainly the writer I've been reading the longest.  I was checking out 52 Pickup and Hombre from the Farmingdale Library bookmobile as a kid.   I read nine of his books this decade - the last one, Fire in the Hole*, in 2013.

*  Hollywood has always loved Leonard.  Hombre was turned into a Western starring Paul Newman.  52 Pickup was a Roy Scheider movie.  And Fire in the Hole is a collection that includes the story that inspired the excellent FX series Justified.   My favorite movie from an Elmore Leonard book is the wildly underrated Out of Sight.

The best way to honor Elmore Leonard is to share with you his ten rules of writing.

1. Never open a book with weather.
2. Avoid prologues.
3. Never use a verb other than "said" to carry dialogue.
4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb "said"…he admonished gravely.
5. Keep your exclamation points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
6. Never use the words "suddenly" or "all hell broke loose."
7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

Well, that's it for the Johnny Bingo Awards.  See ya in 2030.  Happy Reading!

Remembering History

Why Gettysburg Matters

Two years ago, on the 150th anniversary of Fort Sumpter, I wrote a piece called Forgetting History, in which I suggested that the remembrance of history isn't all it's cracked up to be. In places like Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Middle East, long memories can lead to intractable, centuries-long problems.

I wasn't entirely serious, of course. I read far too many history books to mean what I said. But last year I visited the Gettysburg Battlefield for the first time, and this week, on the 150th anniversary of the battle I'm now fully prepared to recant that earlier piece. Gettysburg is the kind of place that makes me wish the English language could reclaim the original meaning of the word awesome - to inspire awe - and reminds us why remembering history is so important.  

For those who are a little hazy on what happened at Gettysburg, it is the largest battle fought in North America, the inspiration for the Gettysburg Address, and the battle that turned the tide of the Civil War.* After a string of successes by Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia, the Union scored a decisive victory in Southeastern Pennsylvania. It would take two more years and much more bloodshed, but the cause of the Confederacy was lost at Gettysburg.

* I've yet to read Allen Guelzo's new book, "Gettysburg: The Last Invasion", but it's been highly recommended by people I trust.  For a miniature account of Gettysburg, here's Guelzo writing in National Review this week.  

How bloody was the battle? Consider this: in three days, on a field measuring roughly 5 miles by 2 miles, nearly 8,000 men were killed. To put this in perspective, in the past decade, in Iraq and Afghanistan combined, approximately 6,600 American soldiers were killed in action.

Rising Angels

The reputations of historical figures are like stocks - over long periods of time they rise and fall, sometimes in a steady pattern and sometimes sharply. Joshua Chamberlain, one of the heroes of Gettysburg, has seen a particularly interesting pattern.

On Day 2 of Gettysburg, the 20th Maine under the command of Colonel Chamberlain held the far left of the Union line, on a hill called Little Round Top. They held off numerous attacks by the 15th Alabama regiment, until they ran out of ammunition. As the 15th came up the hill one more time, Chamberlain ordered his men to fix bayonets, and with empty guns they charged down the hill, scattering the Alabamans. (For Hollywood's excellent depiction of this moment, click here.)

Chamberlain had many laurels heaped upon him during his lifetime.  He won the Medal of Honor for his actions on Little Round Top.  He was promoted to General.  He was given the great honor of commanding the Union troops during the surrender ceremony at Appomattox.  And he served four terms as the Governor of Maine.

But it's fair to say that a century after the guns fell silent, his name was little-known to most Americans, except for Civil War scholars and buffs.  Then, in 1974 Michael Shaara wrote The Killer Angels, and placed Chamberlain at the center of his best-selling Pulitzer-Prize winning novel.  In 1990, PBS broadcast Ken Burns' documentary The Civil War, and Burns followed Shaara's interpretation.  Finally, in 1993 Hollywood filmed The Killer Angels (calling it Gettysburg), and Joshua Chamberlain was a star again.

*  by 'star', I don't mean he was nearly as popular or famous as, say, the 3rd Kardashian sister or whoever the Bachelorette is dating these days.  But he's nerd-famous, anyway.  

Thanks to Shaara's book, Burns' documentary, and Jeff Daniels' performance, crowds flocked to Gettysburg, to walk the hallowed ground of Devil's Den, the Peach Orchard, and Culp's Hill.  But mostly, they wanted to see Little Round Top, where Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine made their stand.

Which, over time, began to annoy the tour guides of Gettysburg.  They grew frustrated at visitors who were ignorant or uninterested in the rest of the battlefield.  They felt about Joshua Chamberlain the way I do about Derek Jeter - great, yes, but not worthy of all the damn attention he gets*.

*  We got one of those tour guides last year.  I made the mistake of mentioning Killer Angels, and he decided I was one of those Shaara worshippers who needed to be set straight.  In fact, in our tour he ostentatiously skipped over the section of Little Round Top held by the 20th Maine!

I understand where they're coming from.  These guides have studied the battle inside and out - they want you to know about the Railroad Cut and Cemetery Hill and the men who fought bravely and died.  

But this is where remembering history comes into play.  Gettyburg was a large, complex battle - 160,000 soldiers fought for 3 days over 10 square miles.  And the Civil War was an epic war - there were over a million casualties over 4 years in a nation with a population of 30 million.  That's the equivalent of 10 million casualties.

Michael Shaara helped us to remember Joshua Chamberlain - and focusing on a citizen soldier who fought for his country because he believed in what the United States was and could be - helps us understand who we are today, and what we could become tomorrow.

On Spielberg's LINCOLN - Part 2

[Spoiler Alert: In this post I reveal key plot points of the movie Lincoln, such as the defeat of the Confederacy, the end of slavery, and the assassination of the title charac - oops, sorry!]

As I said in Part 1, I'm less interested in doing a film review of Lincoln than I am in sharing some of my thoughts about the many choices that director Steven Spielberg and screenwriter Tony Kushner had to make.  Here are some thoughts on those choices.

Why the 13th Amendment?
Ask any student of Lincoln to nominate a storyline for a Lincoln film, I think you'd get a list like this:

• The period between the Battle of Chancellorsville (Lee's masterpiece and the high tide of the Confederacy) and the twin victories at Gettysburg and Vickburg three months later turning the tide.  The movie would end with the Gettysburg Address.

• His handling of generals from First Bull Run through his eventual appointment of Ulysses Grant.  The movie would end with the surrender at Appomattox.

• The summer of 1864, as carnage engulfed the Union army and Lincoln's cause seemed lost.  The climax would be the fall of Atlanta and Lincoln's reelection.  The movie would end with Lincoln's Second Inaugural.

• April 1865 - using Jay Winik's excellent book as a template.  The surrender at Appomattox, the passage of the 13th Amendment, and the assassination of Lincoln would be the 3 key events.

But Spielberg and Kushner chose to put the 13th Amendment in the foreground.  It's an unexpected and brilliant choice.  Remember how, in grade school, you were taught that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, even though at 12 years old it sort of seemed obvious that it was?  Well, historiography has very much moved slavery to the front and center of Civil War studies, and a film about Lincoln that aspires to greatness must have slavery front and center.

Just as important, the trend in Lincoln studies the past couple decades has been to focus on his consummate political skill.  Honest Abe didn't just tell funny stories and give eloquent speeches - he was a shrewd and wily backroom politician, who perfectly balanced the factions of his own party throughout the war.  

The movie Lincoln zeroes in perfectly on those two twin pillars of Lincoln and Civil War history.  But still...if you wanted to make a movie about the politics of ending slavery, you could have made this movie:

• From the summer of 1862, when Lincoln first considers the Emancipation Proclamation through the Battle of Antietam in September, the victory that gives him the political cover to issue it.  The movie would end with the official release of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.*  

By making the film they did, they surprised this student of Lincoln, and illuminated a corner of history I didn't know particularly well.  More importantly, they found the perfect canvas to place the end of slavery as the only thing that mattered in the Civil War, and to emphasize the role Lincoln's political genius played in ending it. 

*  If you're interested in the politics of emancipation, try William Safire's underrated novel, Freedom

The Assassination Scene
As I recounted in a post a couple years ago, Ken Burns once said he'd never been to Ford's Theater, the site of Lincoln's assassination.  He couldn't bear to go there.  The only explanation I can give for this scene is that Spielberg couldn't bear to go there*.

*  I won't describe the scene if you haven't seen it, but let's just say Spielberg films around the moment without showing it.

Or perhaps, he was striking some sort of blow at John Wilkes Booth by not memorializing his infamous act.  Booth was America's first assassin (and first idiot actor activist), and believed he would be made world-famous by his dramatic act.  Spielberg kept him offscreen, the way baseball broadcasts refuse to show the imbeciles running onto the field to disrupt play.

But still...film the damn scene!  Let us, the moviegoer, experience the shock and horror.  Insult Booth by emphasizing him tripping in his dramatic moment - make him more of a cowardly klutz than a dashing avenger.

What a lost opportunity.

The Surrender at Appomattox
The surrender of the Confederacy was central to the passage of the 13th Amendment*.  But clearly, Spielberg didn't have the time to show this famous moment in all of its solemn glory**.  Nor did he want to skip it altogether.

*  although, perhaps not as central as the movie presents it.  Spielberg and Kushner take some liberties here, though as this post at Disunion shows, the story they tell is plausible 

I'm not sure what they could have done differently here, and perhaps showing Lee mounting his horse outside the Appomattox Court House is the best they could have done.  Showing Lee as clearly defeated and not as some chivalrous knight laying down his sword, has value too.

But I didn't find the scene quite believable.  Perhaps the problem is that the actor chosen to play Grant looks more like Sherman!

**  The modest commercial success of Lincoln will perhaps inspire other historical recreations of the Civil War.  They could do much worse than a film based on Bruce Catton's A Stillness at Appomattox

Lincoln slaps his son, Robert
This is the moment that has historians most perplexed.  There is no historical record of it.  There is no evidence he slapped his son.  If he did slap his son, it doesn't have very much to do with the passage of the 13th Amendment.  Unnecessary.


Where's God?
We live in a secular age - and Hollywood is a devoutly secular place.  But it is simply impossible to deny the significance of Christianity in driving the abolitionist movement.  (And for that matter, the 20th century civil rights movement.  It's worth remembering that its leader was Reverend Martin Luther King, and he didn't give speeches, he preached sermons.)  The typical radical Republican, as personified by Tommy Lee Jones in the movie, was a devout, even fanatical Christian.

But this film does deny, or at least ignore, the significance.  And in the only mention of religion in the movie, it makes a startling change.  Late in the movie, Abraham and Mary are in a carriage, and Lincoln says that after his Presidency he'd like to visit Jerusalem, the "city of Solomon and David".  But in Mary Todd Lincoln's own account of the story, Lincoln said he wanted to "walk in the footsteps of the Savior".

Lincoln himself, as near as we can tell, was ambivalent about religion, and certainly a latecomer to a belief in abolition.  But true abolitionists in Lincoln's cabinet, like Salmon Chase and to a lesser extent William Seward, were devout Christians, and it drove their belief in the righteousness of abolition.

It seems Spielberg and Kushner intentionally excised Christianity from the film.  And, to paraphrase Seinfeld, this doesn't offend me as a Catholic, it offends me as an historian.

###

I really didn't intend to write such a nit-picking post.  I loved this movie, I really did.  Every moment Daniel Day-Lewis was on screen I was utterly captivated - I truly believed I was watching Abraham Lincoln.

Perhaps, my admiration for the film and gratitude to Steven Spielberg for making it mean my standards are impossibly high.  And I found myself wondering afterwards more about the lost opportunities than the great moments.

But still...the 13th Amendment was the right choice.  Appomattox couldn't have been done differently.  The slap only took a second.

I just wish they'd taken us to Ford's Theater.

On Spielberg's LINCOLN - Part 1

A Sort of Review

I have a long history of being disappointed by history movies.

My biggest disappointment was The Patriot.  Hollywood has given us many wonderful WWII movies and a few Civil War classics.  We've had great movies about WWI and even one damn good flick about The French and Indian War (starring this guy named Daniel Day-Lewis).

But for reasons I can't fathom a century of film making hasn't given us a single great movie about the Revolutionary War.  Indeed, Hollywood hasn't even tried very hard - there have been fewer movies about the American Revolution since 1900 than there have been vampire movies since 2000.  (I'm not kidding; look it up.)

So years ago, when I heard the screenwriter of Saving Private Ryan was hooking up with Braveheart himself to do a flick based on Revolutionary hero Francis Merion, my hopes soared.  Alas, while the film has its moments (the Yorktown scene is worth ten minutes of your time) its absurd demonization of British troops and the overacting of its star ruined it.

For several years now, I've been engaged in a similar experience of cinema anticipation.  When I first heard Steven Spielberg was planning a film about Abraham Lincoln, an historical obsession of mine, Liam Neeson was rumored to play the 16th President.  I couldn't quite see the rugged Irishman in the role but figured, hey, this Spielberg fellow might be better at this sort of thing than I am.

I lost track of the project until that magical day when the first press photo for the movie was released. My  reaction upon seeing that picture was - Whoa.

Another inhabitant of the Emerald Isle had the part, and the likeness was staggering.  At this point, I went into history geek fanboy overdrive.  When Tony Kushner was announced as screenwriter I wrinkled my brow - not much in his oeuvre suggested him as an obvious choice.   But who cares - look at that picture!

I tracked the casting with the sort of attention one usually reserves for their financial portfolio.  David Straitharn as Secretary of State William Seward?  Hmm, I can see that.  Kelly Leak from the Bad News Bears as Alexander Stevens?  Inspired.  The Sheriff from My Cousin Vinny as Edwin Stanton?!*

*  watching the film, I was surprised at how many actors from my favorite television shows appeared: Arnold Rothstein from Boardwalk Empire, Boyd Crowder from Justified, Sol Star from Deadwood

And then finally, last night, joined by the Rock Star, I saw the film.  I'm no movie critic, and you don't need another amateur telling you Day-Lewis is brilliant (he is) or that the period details are perfect (they are) or that the movie's surprisingly funny (it is).

But I'm a bit of a Lincoln buff, and am particularly interested in the ways he's depicted in fictional settings - and all history movies are essentially historical fiction.   I found myself keenly interested in the many choices the filmmakers had to make - what to show, what to skip, what to invent - and found myself alternately applauding, criticizing, and puzzling over them.

I'll save that for Part 2.  But a word before I go there:

When I'm disappointed by a history flick, it's not because I'm a stickler for the facts.  My favorite history film is Edward Zwick's Glory, which is riddled with errors, inventions, and omissions.  Historian James McPherson in a brilliant review in The New Republic points all of them out, but concludes that Glory "is the most powerful movie about that war ever made."  McPherson argues that a movie is historical fiction and has a power to present the Truth accurately, even if it must change some facts to get there.

The big invention is presenting the 54th Massachusetts as consisting of mostly former slaves while in fact it was mostly former freedman.  The filmmakers wanted to tell the larger story of black soldiers - who were mostly former slaves - fighting in the Civil War, and changed some facts about the 54th to do that.

So, Part 2 won't be a collection of gotchas or a chance to show off my Lincoln knowledge (ok, it might be a little of that).  More of an honest wondering over the difficult choices involved in packing four of history's most momentous months into a 2 hour movie.  

Go to Part 2

An Enduring Democratic Majority?

A Brief History of Game-Changing Elections

[note: this is an update/re-write/mash-up of two posts I wrote 4 years ago.  See here and here for original posts.]


In the aftermath of most elections, there is a debate about its long-term meaning.  Specifically: does the outcome of this election mean certain political and demographic forces have aligned in such a way that the victorious party has built an enduring majority and will win many more elections?

Right now, Democrats hope (and Republicans fear) that the reelection of Barack Obama - and the specific demographic conditions that made that reelection possible - are the beginning of sustainable and durable coalition.

But we’ve been here before, haven’t we?

In 2004, George W. Bush won a relatively comfortable victory (at least compared to 2000) and a library’s worth of articles poured praise on Karl Rove, who had seemingly discovered the key to lasting Republican dominance: a passionate organized base that cares about family values. But only four years later, the Republicans lost the White House, and eight years later are in disarray. So much for lasting Republican dominance.

In 1992 Bill Clinton supposedly changed the game. A sax-playing Southern baby boomer who could name all four Beatles beat an old Washington hand who’d fought in WWII, ending 12 straight years of Republicans in the White House. A new era had begun! But by the time a quite tainted but still-popular Clinton left office, the Republicans had taken the House, the Senate, the White House, and the majority of governorships. So much for new eras.

Even the Reagan Revolution wasn’t quite as revolutionary as it’s made to seem. Reagan won an astounding 49 state victory in 1984 and a now-unthinkable 525-13 electoral college victory.  You didn't have to be Nate Silver to call that election.  But 4 years after the Gipper left office the Democrats had the White House back. So much for revolutions.

Only 3 elections in American history have been truly game changing, in the sense that the victory represented a political realignment that was sustained for decades after.  You may have heard of the three gentlemen who won those elections: Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt.

Thomas Jefferson - 1800
Now that was a messy election. First of all, as brilliant as the Founders were, they hadn’t quite figured out all this electoral college stuff yet, so when Jefferson’s running mate Aaron Burr* technically had as many electoral college votes as Jefferson, he made a play for the White House. It took a while to sort out, but Jefferson eventually took the oath and went on to create a sustainable majority that lasted for decades.

* While in office, VP Burr killed the former Treasury Secretary, attempted to crown himself emperor of Mexico, and got arrested for treason.  And people think Biden's a loose cannon!

Jefferson’s Republicans (not the same as today’s) had so thoroughly destroyed their political competitors, the Federalists, that his hand-picked successors (Madison and Monroe) took the White House for 16 more years, and by the time John Quincy Adams, the son of the last Federalist President, took office, even he was a Republican. The Federalist Party was dead.

That was a sea change election.

Abraham Lincoln - 1860
The remarkable thing about this election is that Lincoln's party, the Republicans (this one is the same as today), was fairly new.  It grew out of the ashes of the Whig party and ran its first Presidential candidate in 1856.  They won their first Presidential election - barely - in 1860.  By the summer of 1864 Lincoln's reelection looked unlikely, and the idea of lasting Republican dominance - or even a lasting Republican party - seemed improbable.

But Atlanta fell in early September, assuring Lincoln's reelection.  And then what a run the GOP went on.  From 1860 to 1932 the White House was virtually the sole property of the Republican Party, as Grover Cleveland* was the only Democrat to win a head-to-head election against a Republican.

*  And he did it twice; Cleveland was an outstanding politician, winning the popular vote 3 times despite being named Grover

Can you imagine that today?  A new party is formed, takes the White House in less than a decade, and holds it for nearly a century?

Franklin Roosevelt - 1932
Democrats looking for signs of a long fruitful electoral run should start here.  FDR came into office much as Barack Obama did: a long period of Republican domination ended with a Wall Street calamity, thrusting a Democrat with profound faith in government action into office.  The Democrat is reelected 4 years later, after the passage of huge federal programs and despite a still struggling economy.

In FDR's case, the Democrats went on to win 7 of the next 9 elections (losing only to war hero Eisenhower).  It took LBJ's Vietnam catastrophe to end this run.


Is Obama’s Win Sustainable?
Have the Democrats won that kind of election?

When analyzing whether an election has created genuine political realignment, you need to see if the conditions are easy to duplicate. And certain demographic trends, particularly the growing importance of the Hispanic vote, suggest it is possible.

And, as I hope to explore in a later post, the Republicans are out of step with the majority on social issues like gay marriage and abortion, and this situation will only worsen.  If the Republicans don't learn how to move to the center on social issues, they are going to have a hard time getting my kids' vote.

But several other conditions will be nearly impossible to duplicate in future elections.

The first is Obama’s charismatic hold on the electorate. He's not quite the rock star he was in 2008, but remains enormously popular, particularly with African-Americans and 18-35 year-olds.  That kind of star power comes along very rarely. Reagan had it. Kennedy had it. Its a wonderful thing for a particular candidate to possess, but it is not a quality to build a sustainable majority on.

Can Joe Biden duplicate that in 2016? Hillary Clinton? If you’re thinking Al Gore, remember that while he was briefly the world’s most improbable movie star and the winner of the increasingly ridiculous Nobel Peace Prize, he’s already failed in the role of filling the shoes of a charismatic predecessor.

The second thing the Dems won’t be able to duplicate is the Blame Dubya tactic.  A majority of voters in exit polls still blame George W. Bush for our current economic woes.  By 2016, the Democrats will own the economy.

And finally, there is this interesting trivial fact:  all but 2 reelected Presidents in U.S. history have seen their popular vote percentage increase on reelection.  The first, Andrew Jackson, only declined because a 3rd party candidacy won 8% of the vote.

And the second, of course, is Barack Obama.  Put differently, it was the weakest reelection win in U.S. history, suggesting voters were saying, "Okay, we'll give you 4 more years.  But if things haven't improved by 2016..."

And that the key, isn't it?

It is a very rare thing to build a sustainable majority and it cannot be built on personality.  His administrations have to govern with  performance.

That's how lasting majorities are built.

The Second Term Blues

This seems a good time to ask: how have modern Presidents fared in their second term?

As it happens, we have a lot of recent history on the subject.  With Barack Obama's reelection this week, we have reelected 3 Presidents - Clinton, Bush, and Obama - to consecutive terms for the first time since a trio of Virginians 200 years ago.

From 1800 to 1824 Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe each won and served 2 full terms in office. In fact, 5 of our first 7 Presidents won reelection and had the full 8-year run.*

* To the embarrassment of the Adams family, the only two who lost reelection were John and John Quincy.

A pattern had formed, right? Nope. The next 100 years was a long sad history of lost elections, assassinations, and natural deaths. From 1836 to 1933 only U.S. Grant and Woodrow Wilson served two full consecutive terms in office. Then FDR showed up and went on a DiMaggio-like run, winning 4 Presidential elections (and yes, the Yankee Clipper had his hit streak right smack in the middle of FDR's Presidency).

But once again, Incumbent Power seems to be back in vogue.  Which is curious, because second terms have been rough sledding for the past half century.

1964: LBJ & Vietnam

When Lyndon Baines Johnson easily won reelection in 1964, the tiny country in Southeast Asia called Vietnam wasn't a big election issue.  By 1968, casualties were soaring, the Democratic Party had splintered into factions, and Johnson bowed out of the race (he was eligible to run again, since his first time was the completion of JFK's term).



1972: Nixon & Watergate

It's hard to imagine now, but in 1968 Richard Nixon won the electoral college vote 520 - 17!  He carried 49 states.  This was one popular, successful President.

But the seeds of his destruction had been sown - the break-in of the Watergate Hotel occurred 5 months before the election.  In 1975, Nixon resigned in disgrace.


1984: Reagan & Iran-Contra
Reagan, too, won reelection in a massive landslide.  Like Nixon, he won 49 states and over 500 electoral votes *.  His second term is a little harder to judge.  He left office still popular, his Vice-President easily won election as his successor, and the Soviet Union's downfall, arguably hastened by Reagan's policies, was only 3 years away.

But the Iran-Contra scandal hobbled this term.  The curious part of Reagan's role in this is that his defense - that he wasn't aware of the actions taken by the Defense Department and the National Security Council - was in some ways worse than being guilty.  It suggested a level of detachment that possibly presaged the Alzheimer's that was to overtake him later.

*  This week, many stupid articles are being written about an 'Emerging Democratic Majority'.  As I wrote in 2008, only 3 elections in U.S. history have created enduring majorities (Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR).  Nixon and Reagan won much much more decisive reelections than Obama, but their party was unable to sustain the momentum, and there is good reason to suspect the Dems won't either

1996: Clinton & Impeachment

We're now fully into subjects where partisan fevers still run high, so I won't rehash the whole Monica scandal. But I think we can all agree that a term that includes only the second Presidential Impeachment in U.S. history wasn't an unmitigated success.

2004: Bush & Iraq/Economic Meltdown
You remember that one, right?


So, now Barack Obama starts his second term.  Excited?  Many Republicans believe they already know what will make his term a failure.  Massive deficits, 8% unemployment, the pending economic impact of Obamacare, Iran's quest for nuclear power, etc.

But second terms tend to have quite unexpected problems.  Most voters had never heard of Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, Monica Lewinsky, or housing bubbles when they signed up for a second term.

Who knows what this term will bring?

There Goes Robert E. Lee

An Obscure Lyric Debate, Resolved

So I went to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland recently.

There is much to quibble with about the Hall. The layout of the galleries is uninspired and doesn’t live up to the promise of I.M. Pei’s architecture. Favorite acts of mine (and I assume anyone who visits) are short-changed or ignored (Van Morrison, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Tom Petty). And unless you’re a guitar buff, once you’ve seen the first few dozen guitars, they all begin to look alike.

But there is some incredibly cool stuff. John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper outfit, and his handwritten lyrics for “In My Life”. A letter from Pete Townsend circa 1975, talking about this new kid Eddie Van Halen (“He plays very fast, and what a grin. With a grin like that you don’t need taste”). And Mick Jagger’s tongue-in-cheek permission to Jann Wenner, allowing him to name his new magazine Rolling Stone, in return for favorable press coverage in the years to come.

Bottom line: if you’re in Cleveland, love rock & roll, and have appropriately low expectations, you’ll enjoy it.

But my purpose here is not to do a museum review. My purpose is to share with you the resolution of an incredibly arcane, but meaningful to me, lyric debate. A few years back, I wrote a blog post about how rarely and poorly rock & roll lyrics invoke history, and made a friendly swipe at The Band.

Specifically, I wrote:

Think of "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" by the Band. A great song (especially the live version) but historically inaccurate:

"Back with my wife in Tennessee,
When one day she called to me,
'Virgil, quick, come and see, there goes Robert E. Lee.'"

I thought, those silly Canadians, Robert E. Lee wasn’t in Tennessee during the Civil War.

Several readers wrote in to correct me, and I carried on a correspondence with one of them afterwards. Virgil isn’t claiming to see Robert E. Lee, they informed me, but the Robert E. Lee, a steamship that worked the Mississippi immediately after the war.

Internet research on the subject was inconclusive, with differing accounts. A close listen to the song is equally inconclusively, as Levon Helm appears to sing “there goes a Robert E. Lee”. That vowel between goes and Robert could be singer’s shorthand for the, or just a bridge sound.

Well, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, has the answer. Robbie Robertson’s handwritten lyrics are there, and it quite plainly says:

There goes Robert E. Lee

Robbie Robertson, who wrote the song, beautifully evokes the closing days of the Civil War. And he deserves points for surely being the only rock and roller to mention Union cavalry General George Stoneman. But he wasn't talking about a boat.

His character, Virgil Caine, claimed to see Robert E. Lee, the General himself, in the state of Tennessee. And that is simply not possible.

* Hey, I did warn you this post was about an obscure dispute, didn’t I? I was with a colleague from work when I saw the lyrics, and excitedly explained the implications to him. He was smiling at me like I was a lunatic, and trying to convey to the other museum-goers he wasn't with me...

Forgetting History

Dunker Church, Battle of Antietam, 1862

150 years ago this week, General P.G.T. Beauregard of the newly formed Confederate States of America gave orders to fire on Fort Sumpter, starting the Civil War.

I don’t consider myself a Civil War ‘buff’, but I am a student of the war. What’s the difference between a buff and a student? A student knows that the 20th Maine under the command of Colonel Joshua Chamberlain held the left flank on Little Round Top at Gettysburg.  A buff knows what weapons they carried, how many rounds they shot, what Confederate regiment they faced, and what Union regiment was on their right.

I’d add that buffs are interested mostly in the military aspects of the war. I am keenly interested in the military history of the war, particularly the major battles and commanders, but am as keenly interested in the political history.

From the debates over slavery in the Constitutional Convention through the vicious Congressional battles in the early 19th century; from the Mexican War through the Abolitionist movement; from the rise of Lincoln to the politics of Emancipation – it is the richest, most complex political story in American history. It is the story that gave birth to who we are today – the better and the darker angels of our nature - as much as the Declaration of Independence and the waves of immigration that followed the Civil War.

But I had a contrary thought this anniversary season. Maybe the remembrance of history isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

A Long Memory
Americans are often, and justly, criticized for our lack of historical knowledge. One recent survey showed that more Americans knew that Michael Jackson was the composer of “Beat It” than knew that the Bill of Rights was a set of amendments to the Constitution. More than half the respondents to that same survey thought the War of 1812 or the Civil War occurred before the American Revolution.

* when I was in college, I read one of these articles about how ignorant American high school students are about their country. I refused to believe the results and began ambushing my sister’s friends, quizzing them. In one instance, I asked “Who is Walt Whitman?” One of her friends got all excited, saying “I know this one! I know this one! He built shopping malls!” (This is funnier if you know we lived near the Walt Whitman Mall.)

Naturally, our collective national ignorance bothers me. But then I remember who is really good at remembering.

The Irish, for example, have long memories. More Irish, I'm sure, could tell you who* won the Battle of Kinsale in 1602, than Americans could tell you who won Gettysburg.

* The bloody English, that’s who!

They have long memories in the Balkans as well. The Battle of Kosovo, fought in 1389, remains on the minds of many in the Balkans. In fact, Slobodan Milosevic, future war criminal, cited it in an important speech in his rise to power.

And then there is the Middle East. Ask an Arab who the Muslim hero of the Crusades is, and he could probably give you a brief lecture on the life of Saladin. Ask an American who the Christian hero of the Crusades is, and his best guess might be Robin Hood.

And finally, there are the descendants of the Confederacy. The Confederate States of America existed as a country for all of four years. It spent the entirety of those four years fighting a war it lost, a war fought for an ignoble cause, a war that devastated their lands, their economy, and their way of life. The decision of the Southern states to secede from the Union and fight a war that caused the deaths of 600,000 of their countrymen was, by any measure, a catastrophe.

And yet, 150 years later, Confederate flags fly. Confederate leaders are revered – Lee especially, but also Stuart and Stonewall and Forrest. Taken to its comic extreme, you'll occasionally see bumper stickers in the South that say "Hell No - We Ain't Forgettin'!"

And I mutter to myself, maybe you should. Maybe some historical amnesia wouldn’t be the worst thing. In the South, in the Balkans, in Ireland, and especially in the Middle East – it might be time to let the past go and think about the future.

Recommendations: If you don't plan on flying Confederate flags, but want to read one book about the Civil War, that book is James McPherson's Battle Cry of Freedom. On the internet you could do worse than spend some time at Disunion, the Civil War blog at the New York Times. Hat tip to Bamstutz.

Photo credit: The extraordinary photographs from the Battle of Antietam are usually credited to Matthew Brady, the famous Civil War photographer. They were in fact taken by Alexander Gardner, who was in Brady's employ. These photos were shocking to many Americans who were removed from the horror of war, and remain a landmark in the history of photography

Misunderestimation

The reputations of historical figures are not static things; sometimes they rise and fall, long after that person has exited the world stage.

Thomas Jefferson was revered for a century and a half after his death – he was considered the most brilliant of the Founders, an ideal for all Americans to live by. In 1962, John Kennedy, addressing a roomful of Nobel Prize winners in the White House, said that “This is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

But in the past twenty years his stock has taken a beating. Numerous scholarly and popular works of history have compared Jefferson’s contribution in the American Revolution to that of John Adams, and found that perhaps the Sage of Monticello had received too much credit and the Duke of Braintree too little. More devastatingly, the DNA test showing Jefferson did in fact impregnate his slave Sally Hemings was a blow from which his historical reputation may never fully recover.

Harry Truman, on the other hand, has seen his reputation soar. Truman left office in 1953 with staggeringly low approval ratings - his low of 22% "beats" the lowest of Nixon (24%) and Bush (25%). He was seen as something of a folksy bumbler, a nice enough man in over his head. But now, he is widely considered to have been the ideal steward of America’s foreign policy in a post-war world. The twin achievements of the Marshall Plan and NATO helped ease in a half century of (mostly) peace and prosperity. In polls of Presidential historians, Truman ranks as high as fifth, behind Washington, Lincoln, and the Roosevelts.

(The historian David McCullough played a prominent role in both of these shifting reputations, through his biographies of Truman and Adams. He’s the E.F. Hutton of American historians.)

I bring all this up because George W. Bush has returned to our lives. The publication of his memoirs, the continuing measured success in Iraq, and the troubles of his successor has some wondering: can George W. Bush enjoy a Trumanesque revival?

It’s too early to tell, of course, and regular readers of this space know I am loath to make predictions. But I can, perhaps, give you a hint of what conditions will be necessary for a latter-day McCullough, writing in the year 2053, to write a book that will revive Bush’s reputation.

For that hint, we’ll turn to another President – one whose reputation as a great American has held steady: Dwight Eisenhower. In 1946 General Eisenhower was in command of the Allied occupation of Berlin, following the end of the Second World War. Ike was asked by a reporter, how we would know if the Occupation was a success?

Eisenhower said, “The success of this occupation can only be judged fifty years from now. If the Germans at that time have a stable, prosperous democracy, than we shall have succeeded.”

West Germany, of course, was a stable and prosperous democracy within 25 years. In 1990, West and East Germany reunified. By 1996 – fifty years after Eisenhower’s statement, Germany was indisputably a stable and prosperous democracy.

In the early days of the Iraq War, there is no question that the Bush Administration declared Mission: Accomplished too soon. But in the darkest days of the war, around 2005, the war’s detractors claimed defeat too quickly.

Will, in fifty years, Iraq be a stable and prosperous democracy? Forty years? If that democracy is an important part of the antidote to the sickness of radical Islam that infects the Muslim world; if, indeed, the scourge of Bin Laden and terrorism ends up in history’s dustbin along with Hitler and Nazism, will Bush enjoy a Trumanesque revival?

Stay tuned. For a really long time.

Update (6/12/13):  This doesn't mean much in the long run, but Dubya may have started his comeback already.  According to Gallup, his approval ratings today - 4 and a 1/2 years after leaving office, are at 49%.  As the article points out, former Presidents often do better after they go away a while.  But worth noting...

Old Buck and the Justice

How 1850s Presidents are like 21st Century Supreme Court Justices

When James Buchanan was elected President in 1856, his previous twelve years of job experience looked like this:

1845 – 1849: Secretary of State
1849 – 1853: Did not hold public office
1853 – 1856: Ambassador to England

Why is this interesting? Because in 1856 the political issues roiling America were entirely domestic. The fiery debates over slavery, which had sparked after the Mexican War in 1848 and would explode into Civil War in 1861, were burning brightly in 1856. And so the American people elected a man who…had lived in England the previous four years? A man who had not held a job connected to domestic politics in 12 years? A man who had expressed few public opinions on the major issues of his day?

And remember, when Old Buck was Ambassador (then called Minister to the Court of St. James), it’s not like he was zipping back and forth to Washington on the Concorde, reading the New York Times online, watching CNN over satellite, or exchanging emails via Blackberry with his friends in the Senate. Despite receiving numerous and eloquent letters from informed friends, he lived a life – and held a job – that was largely removed from the domestic political scenes.

So how did he become President? Well, as software engineers like to say, his remoteness from domestic politics wasn’t a bug, it was a feature. You see, since Buchanan didn’t have to win Senate elections or make domestic policy or vote on laws during this bumptious time, he didn’t have to express his opinion very often on the critical issues of the day. Which made him a bit of a blank slate – and being a blank slate was a good thing if you were running for President in the decade before the Civil War. His two predecessors – Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce – were similar blank slates. Both were former generals whose politics were a bit of a mystery – sort of the Dwight Eisenhower and Colin Powell of their day.

Blank slates were good because the political fevers ran so hot in the 1850’s that politicians found it difficult to hem and haw and dart and dodge and bob and weave; they had to commit to positions– for or against the expansion of slavery – that made them unpalatable as a candidate for national office.

Indeed, in 1860 the country would elect as President an inexperienced politician who was on record as strongly opposing slavery. The South’s response was secession, followed by a civil war that killed 600,000 Americans.

The Blankest Slate

Why do I bring this all up? Because, from what I can tell, there isn’t a person on earth who truly knows what Elena Kagan believes about a single important issue of our times. As Dahlia Lithwick, the liberal court-watcher at Slate put it “Kagan has mastered the fine art of nearly perfect ideological inscrutability.”

How big a mystery is Kagan? Jeffrey Toobin, author of The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, met Elena Kagan at Harvard Law School. He is an expert on the Supreme Court and has known her both personally and professionally for 27 years – and he doesn’t know what her views are. Here’s Toobin:

Judgment, values, and politics are what matters on the Court. And here I am somewhat at a loss. Clearly, she’s a Democrat. She was a highly regarded member of the White House staff during the Clinton years, but her own views were and are something of a mystery. She has written relatively little, and nothing of great consequence. 

Her academic writings reveal little. Her decision to bar ROTC recruiters from Harvard Law School’s campus* isn’t as big a deal as the right will make it out to be (the full story is here; the short story is she mostly kept in place a reasonable compromise she inherited). She seems to believe in shareholder rights and executive power. But really – nobody knows.

* a word about the ROTC thing. Many colleges banned military recruiters from their campuses due to “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell”; they considered it a discriminatory law and therefore barred the “employer”, in this case the United States Military, from recruiting. Putting aside for the moment that the military consists of men and women who are willing to die for our country, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” wasn’t Pentagon policy; it was a law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic President, Bill Clinton. They should have barred them from campus.

This level of inscrutability has been de rigueur for Supreme Court appointees since the destruction of Robert Bork in 1987. Presidents want Justices who won’t be destroyed by the opposition and the easiest way to do that is to nominate someone with an impressive resume and a nonexistent paper trail.

But Kagan’s nomination takes it to a new level because she’s never even been a judge before. Judges generally have to rule on things and reveal a little about how they think about things. No such luck with Kagan.

Now I have no problem with non-judges ascending to the highest court in the land. The very first Chief Justice, John Jay, had no judicial experience, and the most consequential Chief Justice since World War II, Earl Warren, donned his first robes when he joined the court. But these were men deeply involved in the hurly-burly of politics - not academic cloisters like Kagan.

Elena Kagan is, by every account, a deeply intelligent and accomplished woman. And given her background from the Upper West Side, through the Ivy League and the Clinton White House, back to Harvard and ultimately in the Obama Administration - nobody will be surprised if she’s a true liberal.

But Presidents have been surprised before at the judicial picks. The aforementioned Eisenhower called his selection of the aforementioned Warren as the “biggest damned-fool mistake I ever made”. And Ike is the guy who let Monty launch Market Garden.

As for Elena Kagan, I guess we’ll find out. It just may take a few decades.

The Enduring Attraction of the Civil War

I recently watched Gods and Generals, a 2003 Civil War movie based on the novel by Jeff Shaara. It attempts, in the span of 3 hours and 45 minutes, to cover the two years of fighting in Northern Virginia between April 1861 and April 1863.

It is an impossible task and the filmmakers fail. Impossible because those two years include First Bull Run, Second Bull Run, The Valley campaign, the 7 Days battle, Antietam, Fredericksburg, and Chancellorsville. These are some of the largest, most important battles in American history.  And oh, by the way, these two years saw some of the most momentous political events in American history, like the election of Abraham Lincoln, secession, and the Emancipation Proclamation.

Maybe – maybe – you can capture the sweep of this period with a long miniseries, a la Band of Brothers*. But it is impossible in a theatrically-released film, even one as interminably long as Gods and Generals, to cover the period without unforgivable omissions. For example, the filmmakers simply pretend that George McClellan, the most important Union general of the period, and the battles he was in, simply didn’t exist.

* The mini-series is a highly underrated art form. In fact, two of my favorite “movies” of all time, Band of Brothers and Lonesome Dove, are miniseries. Miniseries are the only way to fully present a book on screen in all its richness. Also, to be fair, the filmmakers behind Gods & Generals also made Gettysburg, a fine Civil War film.

But still…I watched the whole damn thing. Yeah, some of it was painful, particularly the scenes that had, you know, dialogue. (in fact, some of the worst dialogue is uttered by Stonewall Jackson, played by the fine actor Stephen Lang, who you probably saw as Colonel Quaritch in a little flick called Avatar.)

But the battle scenes –it’s impossible to take your eyes away from the battle scenes, particularly if you’ve ever been captivated by the Civil War. The first clash at Bull Run. The Northern waves rolling up Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. And most compellingly, the Confederates under Robert Rodes stealthily emerging from the woods to hit O.O. Howard’s troops at Chancellorsville, the high mark of the Confederacy.

The Civil War is the American Iliad, and seeing these scenes brought to life as realistically as it’s ever been done is extraordinary. And it’s a reminder of the enduring attraction of the Civil War.

A Dramatic Climax
Ken Burns, the brilliant documentarian who made The Civil War and many other extraordinary documentaries about America, recounted a conversation he had with Shelby Foote, the historian who became an unlikely star in Burns’ masterpiece. Burns mentioned that he had never been to Ford’s Theater, the site of Lincoln’s assassination, because he found the idea of being there too emotionally painful.

Foote exclaimed, “But Lincoln’s assassination was the best part of the Civil War!” (Or something to that effect; I’m going from memory on the quote).

Burns was shocked. He knew Foote to be a great admirer of Lincoln; in fact Foote believed Lincoln and Nathan Bedford Forrest* to be the two authentic geniuses produced by The Civil War.

* Forrest is a fascinating individual, in many ways the epitome of the best and worst of America. He was a poor man who made a fortune, but the fortune was made at least in part as a slave trader. He was a brilliant, self-taught cavalry commander; a born genius on the battlefield, he was the only individual to enlist as a private and finish the war as a lieutenant general. He was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan, but in 1875 gave a speech that recommended what was, for the time, an enlightened and radically aggressive agenda of equality for black Americans. The curious contradictory nature of Forrest made him a touchstone for many writers, notably Faulkner. Today he is mostly known as the guy who gave Mr. Gump his first name. It must pain the ghost of N.B. Forrest, one of the most aggressive military leaders in American history, that his name is most famously associated with the expression “Run, Forrest, run!!”

But Burns slowly realized what Foote meant. Shelby Foote was a novelist by training and a historian by accident. And as a novelist the assassination of Abraham Lincoln – days after Appomattox but before the final surrender of the South – was a dramatic climax to the story of the Civil War, a perfect finish to a beautifully constructed plot. (Burns, on the other hand, is the classic sensitive artist type, hence his reluctance to enter Ford’s).

That story stayed with me, and the more I thought about it the more I realized that Americans’ enduring interest in the Civil War can be partly explained by the unusually dramatic arc of the war. In fact, it all plays out rather nicely as a 3-act play.

Act I
The first act centers on the run-up to and start of the war.

It can start in many places – as early as the first slaves arriving in Virginia, or the compromises built into the Constitution, or the end of the Mexican War, which added new states to the Union and new controversy over whether those states would be free or not.

But I’d start it on May 22, 1856, when South Carolina Senator Preston Brooks beat Massachussets Senator Charles Sumner with a wooden cane on the floor of the Senate, in response to an anti-slavery speech made Sumner three days earlier. The beating was so savage that Sumner couldn’t return to the Senate for 3 years. *

* And people get worked up about Joe Wilson – also of South Carolina - shouting “You Lie!” during President Obama’s healthcare speech, or Rahm Emmanuel's bullying. Anyone who thinks Washington DC used to be more civil should get thee to a library.

From there we’d follow the story through Bleeding Kansas, the Lincoln-Douglas debates, Lincoln’s election, Secession, and the Fort Sumter crisis. We’d be introduced to characters who’d become important later – like Robert E. Lee, a colonel in the United States Army, who ends John Brown’s siege of Harper’s Ferry.

Act I ends with the bombardment of Fort Sumter and the beginning of the Civil War.

Act II
The story of Act II is the story of the underdog Confederacy. They are outnumbered, out gunned, out-allied, out-everything – and yet they win battle after battle. Robert E. Lee is the star of Act II, and a succession of bumbling Union generals provide the pathos and the comedy. But others rise too – the flamboyant Confederate cavalryman Jeb Stuart, an eloquent but unsure Abraham Lincoln learning his job, and just offstage, a stoic Union general named U.S. Grant providing foreshadowing out West.

Act II has no shortage of political drama, as Lincoln balances the demands of Radical Republicans who want abolition and Copperhead Democrats who want to let the South go. He demonstrates his political shrewdness through the timing and military justification for the Emancipation Proclamation.

Act II ends with the Southern invasion of Pennsylvania and the dramatic victory by the Union at Gettysburg, coupled with Grant’s victory at Vicksburg. With the end of the act, the tide has turned.

Act III
Here’s where Foote’s observation about Ford’s Theater comes into play. Act III would be a fairly boring act – a grinding series of battles between Lee and Grant leading to the inevitable Union victory. There is no drama and little poetry during the brutal final 9 months of the war. Then – pow! – John Wilkes Booth, who fittingly happens to be an accomplished dramatic actor*, kills Lincoln, leaps onto the stage and runs out of the theater. A despicable act, but as Foote says, from a dramatic standpoint the highlight of the war, and the one that destined Lincoln for the pantheon.

* Again...people who think actors and their political views are annoying now should recall the past...

Of course a great play requires more than just compelling characters and a well-structured plot. It needs dialogue, and boy does the CW deliver dialogue. Quotes from Lincoln alone fill books, but many other quotes from "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" to "War is hell" derive from the War Between the States.


One can argue, certainly, that the American Revolution is a more important war. The Revolution created America, whereas the Civil War merely maintained it. And we have been, since at least 1994's Saving Private Ryan, obsessed with the Second World War.

But the Civil War endures, and I suspect it will for a long time. The walls of Troy were stormed some 3000 years ago (or maybe not; who knows?) and many of us are still familiar with the feats of Achilles, Hector, and Odysseus.

Will the same be true of the American Civil War? I suspect so, and like the Iliad, it will be in part because of its dramatic structure.

The GOP's Run

The Spanish philosopher and poet George Santayana famously said, “Those who cannot remember history are condemned to repeat it.” I would add that those who cannot remember history are condemned to be baffled by current events.

Take the Presidential election. There is a lot of hand-wringing among Democrats these days. They are mystified – utterly mystified – that the Republican candidate for President is even remotely competitive in this race, despite the widespread belief that the Bush Presidency has been disastrous. They are like Jets fans who can’t understand why, even after Tom Brady got hurt and the Patriots went with some near-sighted high school kid at quarterback, they still lost. (I could probably push this metaphor with a Favre/Obama comparison, but I don’t want to lose my international readers…)

When asked to explain why this race remains competitive, most Democrats have theories that range from the inherent racism of America to the treachery of Republican party operatives. I don’t quite buy into either of these theories but that is a subject for another day.
I will, however, explain why the Obama coronation has been delayed.

If you’re a regular reader of FreeTime, you've guessed my theory will be historical and statistical in nature. It’s really quite simple: in Presidential politics, the United States is Republican.

I was born in 1966, and there have been 10 Presidential elections in my lifetime. The Republican party has dominated those elections, even more than people realize. Here are the stats:

+ Republicans are 7-3.

+ Two of the Republican victories were huge landslides – Nixon in ‘72 and Reagan in ‘84.

+ Two others were near landslides – Reagan in ‘80 and Bush 41 in ’88. In each of these elections the Republican candidate received more than 400 electoral college votes.

+ Democrats, meanwhile, are 3-7.

+ None of those wins were landslides, or near-landslides. The most electoral votes won by a Democrat in my lifetime is 379 (Clinton ’96).

+ In two of those wins – the Clinton elections – the Democrat failed to win 50% of the vote. In fact, if Ross Perot doesn’t win 18% of the vote in ’92, George H.W. Bush likely wins reelection.

+ And in only one of those wins – Jimmy Carter in 1976 – did a Democrat win 50% of the vote. In 1975 Republican Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace, a catastrophe for the Republican party. Still, Democrat Jimmy Carter only barely managed to eke out 50.1% of the vote and a 297-240 electoral college vote.
To sum up: Republicans win every Presidential election, sometimes by wide margins, unless some fluke event (Perot, Watergate) tips it to the Democrats.
The Lesson of ‘32
Of course, things change. From 1860, when Lincoln became the first Republican President until 1932, when FDR took office, the White House was nearly the sole property of the Republican party. During that 72 year period, Grover Cleveland was the only Democrat who won a head to head election against a Republican*. 72 years! That's as long as John McCain has been alive!

How did this extraordinary electoral run end? Calamity struck Wall Street, Democrats took the White House, and held it for 7 of the next 9 elections.
Hmmm...what was it that Santayana guy said?
* A little detail here...Lincoln, a Republican, chose Andrew Johnson, a Border State War Democrat, as his VP in 1864, to prepare for the healing with the South. Upon Lincoln's assassination, Johnson became President. In 1912, Theodore Roosevelt ran a 3rd party campaign against his former VP, William Taft, which lifted Democrat Woodrow Wilson to the White House. Wilson won reelection in 1916. Republicans won the other 12 elections. All of which makes Grover Cleveland's accomplishment one of the great electoral victories in American history.
Update (9/25): I've gotten a few emails about the 2000 election, in which Al Gore out-polled George Bush in the popular vote. The score was 50,999,897 (48.4%) to 50,445,002 (48.4%), but Bush won the electoral vote.
But here's the thing about 2000. Putting aside the Florida debacle and the Supreme Court, the election was essentially a tie. But it shouldn't have been. The Democrats had an outgoing popular President. The country was at peace and seemingly prosperous. The Democratic nominee had an impressive record of public service from the military to the Senate, and was unencumbered by his predecessor's scandal; in fact, he was arguably the most effective Veep in history. The Republican nominee was the formerly ne'er-do-well son of a former President who had only recently entered public office.
The Dems should have won easily, as easily as Reagan's Veep won in '88. Instead, they lost on a questionable call in the bottom of the 16th inning.