Author Archives: admin

By Michael F. Duggan

One hundred thirty eight years ago last Sunday, 25-year-old New York Assemblyman, Theodore Roosevelt, received a telegram at the Statehouse in Albany.  It said that his wife, Alice Hathaway Lee Roosevelt, had given birth to a baby girl the night before, and that both were doing well.  It was February 13, 1884.  A number of hours later another telegram arrived urging him home to his brownstone on 57^th Street in Manhattan as soon as possible. 

As David McCullough writes, “There has been no sign of sun in days… The Times that morning called it suicide weather.  It covered most of the Northeast—rain, unending fog, rivers over their bank.  In New York, traffic barely moved on the rivers.”¹  Roosevelt’s train took longer than usual to make the 140-odd miles between Albany and New York City.

Before he arrived, his sister Corinne and her husband, Douglas Robinson, Jr., had returned from Baltimore.  They were greeted at the door by her and Theodore’s brother, Elliott.  “There is a curse on this house,” he told them.  “Mother is dying and Alice is dying too.”  Martha “Mittie” Bulloch Roosevelt had typhoid fever; Alice was dying of Bright’s disease, a 19^th century term for nephritis (kidney disease).  Theodore arrived about an hour later around 11:30 PM. 

McCullough continues, “Mittie died at three o’clock the morning of February 14, her four children at her bedside.  Alice lingered on another eleven hours.  Alice died at two that afternoon, Theodore still holding her.”  The child, also named Alice, would survive.

The events of that day nearly destroyed Roosevelt.  He marked his diary for February 14 with a large black X and the caption, “The light has gone out of my life.”²  Roosevelt finished out his term in the New York Assembly before going to the North Dakota Bad Lands to collect himself as a rancher.  His sister, Anna (“Bamie”) would take care of baby Alice. Roosevelt, the youngest assemblyman to ever sit in Albany, had already made a name for himself as a reformer. But there was still something of a dilettante about him. As historians have observed, the legendary Theodore Roosevelt that we all know is the transformed man who returns toughened by the Bad Lands.

Roosevelt is supposed to have never mentioned his first wife again, not even to his daughter.  His autobiography makes no mention of her.  He would marry again, this time to his childhood friend and sweetheart, Edith Kermit Carow.  Together they would have five children.  But his relationship with his oldest daughter would always be fraught.  “I can either run the country,” he said as president, “or control Alice, not both.”  She would become the headstrong and occasionally shocking first daughter—“Princess Alice”—and eventually the granddame and meanly quotable, holy terror of the Washington social scene (she famously quipped “If you don’t have anything nice to say, come sit by me”).  She would outlive all of her younger half-siblings.  Alice Roosevelt Longworth died on February 20, 1980, 96 years and six days after the death of her mother.

Notes

1. David McCullough, Mornings on Horseback (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981) 291.  All McCullough quotes are taken from pages 291-292.
2. Edward P. Kohn, ed., A Most Glorious Ride, the Diaries of Theodore Roosevelt 1877-1886 (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2015) 228.

By Michael F. Duggan

The current Ukrainian crisis appears to be driven by four dynamics.  The first is the sphere of influence muscle-flexing by the Russians in response to the generation-long eastward expansion of NATO, and, in a more proximate sense, Western support for the anti-Russian fores in Ukraine.  As Ambassador Kennan observed in 1997: “The deep commitment of our government to press the expansion of NATO right up to the Russian border is the greatest mistake of the entire post-Cold War period,” and “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.”¹  The Russian military buildup on its border with Ukraine and naval maneuvers off of Ireland are meant to tell the West: see, this is how it feels.   

As a friend of mine recently observed, the second dynamic is the Biden administration’s desire to look tough in foreign affairs in the wake of the withdrawal from Afghanistan.  This has led them to overreact to the Russian military buildup, thus setting up a situation that feels like the Cuban Missile Crisis.  If things go well, Biden becomes JFK and the prospects for the 2022 midterms will be better for the Democrats and by extension the president’s domestic agenda.  

The third dynamic is the strongly pro-Ukrainian stance of the United States which has been further bolstered by lobbying.² American support for Ukraine is also a means of opposing Russia on the assumption that any nation that rejects economic globalization with the U.S. as its guardian hegemon must be actively opposed.  All of this is made worse by a Secretary of State who appears to be committed to the conventionalist clichés of the foreign policy Blob and a desire to humble Russia.

The fourth and overarching dynamic is the implications of Russian gas and petroleum sales to Western Europe and its increasing economic dependence on Russia and China generally (these observations take some of the wind out of the sails out of the argument that Putin is a would-be Hitlerian maniac bent on invading Europe). Thus, as one observer has noted, tough actions by the U.S. might be aimed more at keeping Europe in the Western sphere rather than keeping Russia and China out of it. ³    

It is difficult to understand why Americans and Europeans just don’t get it: as long as there are large nations, there will be spheres of interest in which the security concerns of the local hegemon trump those of outsiders. Russia has been invaded a number of times from the west.  In essence a large land empire, it is preoccupied with protecting its borders with buffer zones—a sphere of influence that has been reduced to virtually nothing since the end of the Cold War.  If you search “NATO enlargement” online and look at the map of its expansion since 1990, you will quickly understand why Russians feel as if their Cold War rivals are encroaching upon them.   

To understand Russia’s concerns over the expansion of NATO, one need only reverse the situation.  Suppose that the Soviet Union had triumphed in the Cold War and that a revitalized Warsaw Pact was now in Canada or backing anti-U.S. forces in a civil war there after supporting the overthrow of a democratically-elected, pro-U.S. government.  How would the United States feel about having a hostile pact on its northern border?  How would it react?  This characterization is a close equal-but-opposite scenario to the situation in Eastern Europe in recent years and the prospect of Ukrainian membership in NATO.  As the Quincy Institute has suggested, some strategic empathy on the part of Western policymakers would serve them well.⁴

Those who think that the Russians are intent on invading and occupying Ukraine would do well to ask what would be the benefit of such an ill-considered action. With a landmass greater than either France, Germany, or Spain, Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe after Russia. How would Russia, or any nation, invade, conquer, and occupy a hostile country of more than 44 million people—many of them strongly anti-Russian—with a force of fewer than 150,000 troops? If invasion is their true intention, it could be to secure the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Although the U.S. and NATO member states appear to be acting in a well-choreographed way, the situation is dangerous: a tense standoff between nuclear powers in which a hot-headed lieutenant or some extremists on either side could spark a wider conflict.  Given this, the overall situation may not be as well in hand as we would like to think.  As JFK famously observed during the Cuban Missile Crisis, “There is always some son-of-a-bitch who doesn’t get the word.” It is the chaos of these S.O.B.s that could thwart the efforts of those seeking to control events.

The other danger is one well-known to anyone who has studied the Cold War: that of a rapidly-evolving crisis in which ratcheting-up tensions may result in a situation that may not be so easily ratcheted-down again.  If this high-stakes game of chicken reaches a point where one side or the other cannot deescalate without losing face, then war becomes a possibility.  Biden must not paint himself into a corner or force the Russians into one.

Diplomacy at this point should be dedicated entirely to the lessening of tensions (in contrast to the shrill whipping-up of the crisis by American and British media over the past month).  In October 1962, President Kennedy knew that he had to give Khrushchev something that he could show his team.  It is a fundamental rule of great powers crisis management: unless war is your goal, you must allow your opponent cover to save face.  This is not appeasement—nations with thousands of nuclear warheads can bargain from a position of strength until the nukes themselves become the enemy—it is crisis diplomacy.⁵  

The media must take the pressure off of Biden to act tough by giving him credit for a good first year.  In addition to returning balance and sanity to the presidency, he got 200 million shots in American arms in his first 100 days, as promised.⁶  In spite of uniform opposition by the GOP he passed the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, and, with modest Republican cooperation, the $1 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.  These are monumental accomplishments. He has also nominated candidates to fill 82 federal judgeships, 46 of whom have been confirmed.⁷  

Critics say that President Biden has not brought unity to the government and the country.  To these people, I would ask: how do you make amends with an opposition party openly flirting with fascism and, with a handful of exceptions, is rigidly against you?  On a related note, the Build Back Better Bill was not “stalled” in the Senate; it was obstructed by an entire party, an in-house representative of Big Coal, and a baffling turncoat from Arizona.

Biden’s first year was one of impressive domestic achievements.  If the Build Back Better Bill and the John Lewis Voting Rights Bill have to wait, so be it.  They represent issues that the Democrats can run on in the 2022 midterm races while standing on solid accomplishments.  Biden also got the U.S. out of the fruitless twenty-year war in Afghanistan.  Simply put, there was no graceful way to do it, so he did it decisively, which shows that he has more guts than all of this three predecessors.  He needs no vindication, and pundits who had forgotten about the war years ago need to put down their false indignation now that it is over.  They should be ashamed of themselves for this and for their hysterical lockstep reporting of a dangerously escalating situation in Eastern Europe.  If the corporate media recognizes President Biden’s important achievements, perhaps his administration will not feel the need to embrace brinksmanship in foreign policy.

In the meantime, President Biden should give Mr. Putin a private assurance that the U.S. will halt NATO expansion at its current limits on the condition of an immediate and permanent de-escalation of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border. He should also offer to initiate talks about ending the civil war in Ukraine. The Western media and U.S. officials should immediately tone down their provocative rhetoric and start talking in terms of resolving the long term and proximate causes of this crisis.  

Notes

1. See George Kennan, The Kennan Diaries, Frank Costigiola, ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2014) 656 and John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan, an American Life (New York: The Penguin Press, 2011) 681.
2. https://theintercept.com/2022/02/11/ukraine-lobby-congress-russia/?utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=theintercept&utm_medium=social&fbclid=IwAR0JBQsduhhFXed83ojznFn6L_HTvOho-hjHwfNe1hW-avXgEy36lHqTD0M
3. https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/02/11/americas-real-adversaries-are-its-european-and-other-allies/
4. https://quincyinst.org/event/u-s-russia-relations-can-strategic-empathy-be-a-way-forward/
5. Andrew Bacevich has called Kennedy’s handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis “‘Appeasement’ by almost any definition of the term,” but he agrees that it was successful.  I prefer to think of Kennedy’s handling as crisis diplomacy against a strongly ideological, but ultimately rational counterpart.  See Bacevich, The Washington Rules (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2010) 87.
6. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/apr/21/us-vaccinations-200m-100-days-biden
7. https://ballotpedia.org/Federal_judges_nominated_by_Joe_Biden

By Michael F. Duggan

The growing concern over global climate change, the shocking loss of habitat and biodiversity in recent years, and other issues of the environment (deforestation, the dying off of the world’s reefs, the overharvesting of fisheries, the plastics crisis, pollution generally, various water issues, refugee issues, etc.) is a good thing. The enabler of these crises, the great overarching crisis of our time and of all times is human overpopulation. All of these other issues would be manageable or nonexistent if the population was one-tenth of what it is today. By some estimates, a global population no larger than .5 billion to one billion people would be sustainable (or about the world population between 1600 and 1820, when there were no modern plastics).¹ By other estimates, we surpassed the Earth’s carrying capacity around 1978. ²

Overpopulation is the basis or enabler of the existential threats now facing us. And yet when was the last time you heard a politician mention the issue? How much attention did overpopulation and related issues of economic growth get at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26)? Are the solutions (such as they are) too difficult, too draconian, too unpopular to even mention? How would the world reduce its current 7.9 billion people to a billion or fewer in a century or less? Could it be done by liberal democratic means? Is the problem of overpopulation too far advanced to be the basis for political discourse? Are we already doomed and nobody in public office has the guts to tell us? How come this is never story on the evening news?

It may or may not be too late to solve the problems that face us. But if there are solutions, we will have to first discuss the problems.

Notes

1. John Gray, Straw Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002) 11.
2. Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002) 27.

By Michael F. Duggan

Peter Bogdanovich is gone.

A master technical director who was equally an artist, he was a part of the “New Hollywood” generation of filmmakers that includes Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Francis Ford Coppola, Milos Forman, Terrence Malick, Mike Nichols, Sam Peckinpah, George Roy Hill, Arthur Penn, Sidney Pollock, Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg. He had a good historical sense and knew how to set the feel for a period with music and material culture as well as anybody (few filmmakers knew the 20th century American Songbook better). He had the courage and insight to make artistic, commercially successful, black and white films in the early 1970s (The Last Picture Show, Paper Moon). He was also a master of the screwball comedy (What’s Up Doc?) and even 1910s-20s slapstick (Nickelodeon).

Paper Moon is wonderful (shot in stark monochrome with red and green filters for definition and in wide angel for universal depth of focus). Seldom has an eight-and-a-half-year-old so powerfully upstaged pretty much everybody else in a film (except for Madeline Kahn), and a lot of that was the result of good directing (and amazing father-daughter screen chemistry). The final scene and ending credits are among my all-time favorites.

If the criteria for being a great director is to have made at least one great film, then he makes the cut (The Last Picture Show).

By Michael F. Duggan

Why should petty convicts have all the fun? 

It became a preoccupation with me a few years before COVID hit: whenever walking—from my car to a store, through the neighborhood, on longer hikes—I would (within reason) pick up any plastic I came across.  During my morning and evening commutes, I even began picking up plastic between Washington’s Union Station and my office the better part of a mile away.  It soon became a mostly plastics-free route.

Years ago I read about how scientists using a drag net in the Pacific Ocean had turned up seven pounds of dissolved plastics for every pound of plankton.  Some commonly-used plastics break down to the molecule fairly quickly, but no further for something like 1,100 years.  Whether or not we can see it, it is out there and working its way up the food chain.  Some of it has arrived and who knows what the health effects will be as we increasingly ingest foods with plastics in them (autism and some cancers have been linked to chemicals found in plastics).  After issues of human overpopulation, carbon generation, and loss of biodiversity/habitat, it is likely the most serious prong of the unfolding environmental crises.

If I am on a routine errand, I will pick up any small plastic I see: bottles and other containers, paper cup tops and straws, plastic six pack rings (always cut the rings before recycling), plastic ropes and cords, and all manner of other molded plastics.  Sometimes, when going on longer hikes, I will bring garbage bags with me. A number of years ago, a single 200-yard stretch of the flood plain woods between the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal and the Potomac River yielded two large garbage bags of recent and weathered plastic; I had grown tired of seeing discarded bottles and containers among the profusion of blue cowslip that grows there in the spring and decided to do something about it (an even shorter stretch along the border of a local shopping center yielded a similar haul).  Thus began my obsession. 

Picking up plastic quickly becomes a matter of pride and you soon come regret not being able to stop your car in traffic on seeing a particularly egregious piece of polymer-based refuse along the roadside.  At the height of COVID, I was forced by circumstances to drive to work two or three days per week for ten months. During this period, I stopped a number of times along highways and a parkway to pick up pieces of plastic wreckage after accidents were not sufficiently cleaned up by whatever regulatory authorities are responsible for doing so (these pieces of bumpers and car panels I cut up and put out with my recycling; the guys who picked it up every week probably thought I was running some kind of illegal chop shop in my basement).  Stopping on a highway is dangerous, and I probably should not have done this. I urge the proper departments to keep our highways clean (railroad properties alongside the tracks appear to be among the worst-policed places for discarded plastics, so are shopping centers).

If you choose to pick up plastic, please remember that the point is to never be conspicuous, much less righteous about it.  Act naturally and as if nobody else was around (unless of course someone thanks you or gives an approving gesture).  And make no mistake about it, people will notice you.  Along a roadside—and assuming that you are not wearing a fluorescent orange or yellow Department of Corrections vest—you might get an occasional approving honk or a passing thumbs-up out the window.  If you are on a trail carrying out a garbage bag full of plastic, people you meet will stop and thank you (people are friendlier on trails and boats).  Hopefully your actions will inspire others, but the important part is getting the plastic out of the environment even—and especially—when no one sees you do it.  It is an intrinsically good thing to do and its own reward.  Just remember that even good things have their risks, and you should always where heavy-duty work gloves when picking up plastic (a pickup stick also comes in handy).

To date, no one has ever made a negative comment to me while I was picking up plastic. But if anybody ever asks why I do it, I will likely say “Because others do not” or “If you and I don’t, who will?” Of course, the short answer is “self-respect.” On a darker note, if good people ask this question, then what hope is there for the planet?  

I have no illusions that the few pounds of refuse that I pick up will ever make a dent in the local surfeit of discarded plastics, much less the billions of tons now in the world environment (almost all of the plastic ever made is still in existence).  But I believe in the Butterfly Effect, that hurricanes may begin as ripples in a pond.  If you like this idea, please start picking up plastics at your convenience; the area of your everyday activity is your world, police it.  I also hope that the few people who read this article will share it with others.

Even more disheartening than the small scale of a personal effort is that fact that “recycled” plastics are often sent to other nations who sometimes just dump it. Plastic garbage has turned up in the Marianas Trench, literally the most remote place on the planet.  Because of this, we can only hope that the plastic we pull out of the environment does not just end up in a different place.

The United States should implement a world class national and international effort for addressing plastics in the environment.  If I was suddenly transformed into the chief executive of this country, I would appoint a “Plastics Czar” whose department would be to approach this problem on a scale similar to the industrial mobilization of the Second World War, and to organize—mobilize—an army of citizens into local chapters who would engage in competitive plastic pickups and related activities. 

By Michael F. Duggan

The First World War was the most seminal event of modern history.  To this day it pays dividends.

The Russian Revolution and Civil War (and thus the rise of Marxist-Leninism), the rise of fascism—and thus the Spanish Civil War and Italian adventures in Africa in the 1930s, and a far more destructive Second World War (and Holocaust) ending with the use of atomic weapons—the Cold War with all of its brushfire wars, and the Islamic Revolution are all the spawn of the Great War.  To understand the far-reaching influence of the war, one need only consider that the borders of modern Iraq, Lebanon, and Syria were drawn at Versailles—drawn with little or no sensitivity to ethnic or religious distinctions in the region.  There was also a delegation from French Indochina that petitioned for the rights of the Vietnamese people at Versailles.  The young man who presented the petition would later call himself Hồ Chí Minh.  He was roundly snubbed by Wilson and by the other leaders of the great Western powers. 

Before the onset of the pandemic, I bought a used copy Witness to a Century, the memoir of George Seldes, a remarkable American journalists whose life spanned the 20^th century.  Born in Pennsylvania in 1890, he lived to be 104. He covered Theodore Roosevelt’s visit to Pittsburgh in 1910. He published his memoir in 1987.

Seldes was thrown out of the Soviet Union by Lenin, thrown out of Italy by Mussolini, and thrown out of a hotel room by William Jennings Bryan, who he had caught wearing long underwear (complete with a flap in the back) while trying to get an interview as a cub reporter.  He knew or met virtually everybody and the index of his book is like a Who’s Who of the 20^th century.  Like a good reporter, he seemed to be everywhere at the right time. He was with Lincoln Steffens in a bar during the Genoa Conference of April 1922 (a follow-up to Versailles), where they taught a young Ernest Hemingway an abbreviated style of writing for the wire services called “cablese.”¹  Even if his name is unfamiliar to you, you might have caught a fleeting glimpse of him as one of the witnesses in the 1981 movie Reds. One of his few lines is near the beginning of the film: “Jack [Reed]… Well, I wouldn’t call him a playboy, but some people did.”

Recently I picked up his book again and found him to be a lively, amusing, and insightful writer.  I would like to think that he never reported to the Kremlin—he sometimes spoke out against the American Communist Party. But who knows what a progressive journalist might have done as a young man.

Seldes tells an amazing story about how he crossed the lines on the Western Front at the end of WWI, went to Kassel and conducted an exclusive interview the German Chief of Staff, Field Marshall Paul von Hindenburg.  During the interview, Hindenburg is supposed to have said that, militarily speaking, it was the American infantry in the Argonne that had been the decisive factor in Germany’s defeat. After that the general broke down in tears.

When Seldes crossed back to the Allied side, Pershing and his censors detained him and would not let him send the story or even write about the incident.  Of this he writes:

“If the Hindenburg confession had been passed by Pershing’s (stupid) censors at that time, it would have been headlined in every country civilized enough to have newspapers, and undoubtedly would have made a lasting impression on millions of people and become an important page in history; and I believe it would have destroyed the main planks of the platform on which Hitler rose to power, it would have prevented World War II, the greatest and worst war in all history, and it would have changed the future of all mankind.”²

Would Hindenburg’s admission of the defeat of the Imperial German Army in the field have stopped the “stab in the back” narrative in its tracks? Hard to say.  To his eternal dishonor, Hindenburg never publicly repeated his admission, and in fact was a progenitor of the stab in the back myth.

Seldes might have been naïve in thinking that a single news story, even an important one, would have detailed a major current of history and prevented the rise of the Third Reich.  Hitler and his thugs would have still issued their false narrative and would have called his story a lie (Seldes was Jewish, so a denial of the story would have fit in with Hitler’s phobic view of the world and would have found a ready audience in those who followed him).

We will never know if Seldes’s Story of the Century would have guided that century in a more peaceful direction.  At the very least, we can say that the world would have probably been a better place if it had know that the German Chief of Staff knew that his armies had been defeated militarily and not stabbed in the back on the home front. And it might have prevented the largest war in history.

Notes

1. George Seldes, Witness to a Century, Encounters with the Noted, the Notorious, and the Three SOBs (New York: Ballantine Books 1987) 311-313.  Denis Brian, The True Gen, an Intimate Portrait of Hemingway by Those Who knew Him (New York: Grove Press 1988) 37.
2. Seldes, Witness to a Century, 100.

By Michael F. Duggan

A great man of science is gone.

A gentle man of large ambition and focus and a world-historical intellect, Wilson was one of the great minds of the late 20th-early 21st century and likely the greatest biologist of his time. He wrote about 50 books (many over the age of 80) and contributed parts to about 100 more. He was a wonderful stylist and for the past 25 years, he was one of my favorite writers and his Pulitzer Prize-winning On Human Nature is one of my favorite books. Widely considered to be the father of modern sociobiology, he was “Darwin’s natural heir” for our time. He died on December 26.

Wilson was the world authority on ants. Because the behavior of most ants is instinctive—hardwired—Wilson decided to address questions on the sociobiological basis for human behavior. It became the second great prong of his professional career.

Over the next half-century, sociobiology/evolutionary psychology became a counterbalance to a purely social science approach to questions related to nature and nurture in human life. For this he was pilloried and was actually assaulted by social science advocates for merely suggesting that the underlying behavior of human beings was in part the result of hundreds of thousands of years of natural sculpting and trial-and-error. As he wrote in his 2012 book The Social Conquest of Earth, “History makes no sense without prehistory, and prehistory makes no sense without biology.” He never said that his view was the final word (for me his 1998 book, Consilience is likely a bridge too far in its universality on the unity of knowledge), and taken together, sociobiology and the social sciences explain a lot more than either does by itself. If you do not know what we are as an animal, then you have little understanding of yourself or your kind.

I met him once at a lecture he gave at the National Academy of Science years ago, and he seriously entertained a question I asked (“does the pheromone communication of ants have an equivalent to the deep grammar of human generative language?” I was being the precocious recently-minted Ph.D.).

There are many evolutionary biologists I have read and admired over the years—Niles Eldridge, Stephen J. Gould, Ernst Mayr, Lynn Margulis, James A. Shapiro—but Wilson was a singular Napoleonic figure who towered above them all. He was also a tireless champion of the environment (a third prong) and wrote wonderfully and with admonishment on biodiversity and even provided a basis—the minimum requirements—for saving the planet (Half-Earth, 2016).

If you are in need of a suggestion for a charitable donation this year, you could do worse than investigate the E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation. https://eowilsonfoundation.org/

As when Stephen Hawking died in 2018, I feel as if a calm, rational, and wise presence has left an increasingly chaotic world when he and his kind are needed the most. A two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, he was 92.

By Michael F. Duggan

T223. Regret to inform you that Lieut. R.A. Leighton 7th Worcesters died of wounds December 23rd. Lord Kitchener sends his sympathy.
Colonel of Territorial Forces, Records, Warwick.

One hundred six years ago today (December 26, 1915), Lt. Roland Leighton, age 20, of the 7th Battalion, Worcestershire Regiment, was buried at the British military cemetery in Louvencourt, France. He had been shot while leaving a trench to inspect barbed wire in need of repair in front of the British positions on the moonlit night of December 22. Hit in the lower abdomen, Leighton died late the following day. He had been scheduled to go home for Christmas leave on December 24.

His fiance, Vera Brittain, would live until 1970 and would write Testament of Youth (along with 28 other books), one of the most important memoirs of the First World War. She would also lose her only sibling, Edward, and friends Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow—essentially all of her male circle of friends (Edward, Roland, and Victor were her “Three Musketeers”)—in the war. Edward, Roland, and Vera had all been accepted at Oxford, but she would go alone (she left Oxford to serve as a VAD nurse in France and Malta, but would return after the war).

In 2014 Testament of Youth was made into a feature film with Alicia Vikander (Laura Croft: Tomb Raider) and Kit Harington (Game of Thrones). Even with historical inaccuracies and omissions, it is a hard-hitting movie about human promise squandered in war. Brittain’s wartime diaries were published as Chronicle of Youth in 1981. Her correspondences were issued in 1998 as Letters from a Lost Generation.

Roland also had literary ambitions. On April 25, 1915, he wrote the poem Violets, which he showed to Vera while on leave that August. On the day he wrote the poem, he had enclosed violets in a letter to her. Nascent, but showing real potential, it rings of the Georgian Poets like Rupert Brooke, but gently anticipates Graves, Owen, and Sassoon.

Violets from Plug Street wood, Sweet, I send you oversea. (It is strange they should be blue, Blue, when his soaked blood was red, For they grew around his head: It is strange they should be blue.) Violets from Plug Street Wood, Think what they have meant to me— Life and hope and love and you. (And you did not see them grow, where his mangled body lay, Hiding horror from the day; Sweetest it was better so) Violets from oversea, To your dear, far, forgetting land, These I send in memory, Knowing you will understand

By Michael F. Duggan

In his World War II memoir, Doing Battle: the Making of a Skeptic, Paul Fussell observes:

“Wasn’t the ground war, for the United States, an unintended form of eugenics, clearing the population of the dumbest, the least skilled, the least promising of all American males?  Killed off in their tens of thousands, their disappearance from the pool of future fathers had the effect, welcomed or not, of improving the breed.  Their fate constituted an unintended but inescapable holocaust.”  

When I first read this stark observation, I didn’t want to believe it.  It seemed cynical, illiberal, a paragraph designed to grab the attention.  Wasn’t the U.S. fighting against an ideology that embraced eugenics (and “improving the breed” sounds like the language of Nazism or at least animal husbandry)?¹ 

I wrote it off as the bitter remembrance of a combat infantry officer who, like Robert Graves before him, disliked the men with whom he trained, “men whose company, in many cases, I would have run miles to avoid.”²  Any “war buffs” taken in by the élan and esprit de corps of Band of Brothers and other books about elite units, should read this book if they want to know what life was like for a 20-year-old officer in an ordinary leg infantry unit in the Vosges Mountains in 1944-45.  It is a wonderful tonic to balance out the uncritical solemnity that infuses myths of the “Good War” (they should also read Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed).  Although I never accepted Greatest Generation heliographies uncritically, Fussell’s point seemed to go too far.   

But leaving aside such promising individuals as George H.W. Bush, John and Joseph Kennedy, Jr., Lewis Nixon, Eugene Sledge, John Paul Stevens, Byron White, and Fussell himself—all of whom were from the educated middle and upper classes—I now think that he has a point: policy may consciously or unconsciously push unspoken trends and attitudes that are reprehensible when said aloud.  After all, the various U.S. wars in the Middle East provided convenient venues to test new weapons under real world conditions, but we would never say so.   

Today, an unspoken justification for some bad behavior and policy—the flouting of vaccines and vaccine mandates—is the view that a large majority of those who die are no longer of much importance to the community, economy, and the gene pool.  If anything, these people are a burden.  Like Fussell’s de facto eugenics of military service, this result may not be intended, but it is real, and some people don’t care enough to use personal responsibility to prevent thousands of deaths in what is now the deadliest single event in U.S. history.

People won’t tell you this, but beloved grandmothers, grandfathers, and the odd special needs child aside, most of those dying of COVID-19 are nameless, faceless numbers of the aged, infirm, and weak.  Don’t let some anti-vaxxer tell you that they are bravely advocating greater “freedom.”  What they are advocating is a vulgar, primitive understanding of natural selection for the purpose of social improvement, that is akin to the obtuse nineteenth-century construction of evolution as “survival of the fittest.”  Clearly they do not understand more nuanced parts of evolution, like group selection. 

About 75% of those dying of COVID-19 in the United States are over 65.  Those with mental disabilities are also at much greater risk of dying from the disease than the general population.  In the eyes of some anti-vaxxers (and in the hearts of those who whip them up), these are people would have died soon anyway or are otherwise costly to society.

Flouting masks and vaccines has nothing to do with courage, Jesus, manhood, patriotism, or “rights.”  It is all about callousness to the point of criminality.  The result has been a mostly preventable holocaust, a “thinning of the herd” by culling the weak from the herd through the sickness of those healthy enough to endure it.  How can this be anything but eugenics?  It certainly isn’t Christian.      

Although the number of their fatalities is not as great, we should remember that natural selection cuts both ways, and hospital wards and cemeteries are also filling up with younger anti-vaxxers as well as the old and infirm, about whom many couldn’t care less. How would they feel if people began writing off their lives as instances of self-inflicted natural selection that improved the gene pool?     

Notes

1. Paul Fussell, Doing Battle (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1996) 171-72.
2. Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, quoted by Fussell in Doing Battle, 77.

By Michael F. Duggan

We live in a time when 760,000 American deaths is considered to be an acceptable operating cost in dealing with a mostly preventable disease. That is almost 100,000 more than the total number of all United States combat deaths from all of our wars combined (look it up if you don’t believe me). It is now the deadliest episode of our history. Considering that there are three safe and highly effective free vaccines available on request, this number becomes especially baffling. And now with COVID-19 cases on the rise again in many states, we appear to be on the cusp of the fourth surge. Or is it the fifth? The question is whether the disease will go from pandemic to endemic and if it might have been eradicated.

Except for avoidable mistakes made during 2020, the problem does not appear to be at the Federal level; the vaccines were underwritten by the United States Government, and the current administration got 200 million vaccinations out in its first 100 days. The failure as it persists today is in the fabric of the nation, the uneven patchwork of jurisdictions that make up the United States. Anybody who believes in delegating power to the states ought to write a ground-up history on the COVID-19 crisis.

The United States is also a nation in which flirting with fascism and the use of violent imagery in political speech have become ubiquitous in parts of the electorate (history is watching their leaders and will remember their names). Some of these people embrace empirically disprovable delusions and some believe that they have a right to act violently on the basis of these fevered dreams and other irrational impulses.

Recently, hundreds of people attended an event at Dealey Plaza to welcome John F. Kennedy, Jr., back to the political fight (on top of the patent absurdity of such an expectation is the fact that John-John’s political view were nothing remotely like those of today’s conspiracy followers). It is unclear whether this kind of behavior is mass psychosis or, as others have suggested, something more like a propaganda-driven cult (as Justice Holmes reminds us, “[w]hen the ignorant are taught to doubt, they do not know what they might safely believe,” at which point they might fall for anything). Those on the extremity of the other side of the political spectrum are only marginally less extreme in some of their acts and prescriptions (e.g. the taking down of statutes of Grant and Lincoln). Taken together, the country is a pressurized bottle on a high gas flame. Throw in the five looming and mostly unaddressed crises of the environment—human overpopulation, carbon generation/climate change, deforestation/habitat destruction/loss of biodiversity, water issues, and the plastics crisis—and you get a fair idea of the lay of the land.

With many Americans hurting as the predictable result of the economic disruption of the pandemic, government spending is a necessity but also inflationary (the primary cause of inflation are the shortages caused by the back up in supply lines and networks around the world). The American Relief Plan Act, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, and the incredible, shrinking Build Back Better Act are all necessary for the general welfare. Even though the Infrastructure Act is a long term in scope, programs that flush the economy with ready cash can keep prices high, at least in the short term. There appears to be no immediate remedy for inflation, which is a global phenomenon.

The administration’s legislative agenda, the mass distribution of vaccines, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the creation of 500,000 new jobs are all notable accomplishments. And yet these achievements are not registering with many Americans. Some commentators have observed that inflation has hit the red states harder, which might explain the discontent among conservative independents. The administration has less than 12 months to get things moving again, to get the word out about its successes, and to tamp down the anger behind the divisions. If it doesn’t, then what? If Biden succeeds, he will be the president who turned things around. If not he will be a tragic figure of history, his agenda a noble effort to save a nation that did not meet him halfway.

I do not know what will be coming after the 2022 midterm elections and especially after 2024, but it might be unrecognizable relative to what we have come to know in this country. What happens if the losers in close political races do not concede defeat? What if voter suppression and other undemocratic measures allow political minorities to dominate? How will the U.S. military react if violence breaks out in parts of the country, or if extremest groups assert themselves with political violence? If you have a plausible claim to citizenship in a more rational, less volatile country, you might want to beat the rush and start the application process now.