Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America. Bill Kauffman
Wilson’s title, taken from “Maryland, My Maryland”—“The despot’s heel is on thy shore. . . . Avenge the patriotic gore that flecked the streets of Baltimore”—promised something other than Bruce Catton.
Patriotic Gore is best known for two things: Wilson’s witticism that “the cruelest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg” and the book’s twenty-four-page introduction, a bracingly (and brazenly) dyspeptic essay that compares national governments to “sea slugs” in their mindless aggression—though unlike the slugs, nations have publicists who weave elaborate moral defenses of their violence and voracity. Wilson assesses every American war since James K. Polk’s Mexican adventure and tallies the cumulative cost: “staggering taxes,” the “persecution of non-conformist political opinion,” an “extensive secret police,” and “huge government bureaucracies.”
Wilson groups Lincoln with Bismarck and Lenin as “uncompromising dictator[s]” who “established a strong central government over hitherto loosely coordinated peoples.” Yet Wilson, who recognizes Lincoln’s “magnanimity” and acute intelligence, is no Confederate apologist. As a good Yorker from the cradle of abolitionism, he understands that “what [the South] fought for was really slavery” and that too many Southern Democrats were expansionists who would have annexed half the Western Hemisphere if given the chance.
His favorite Confederate is Vice President Alexander Stephens, the indomitable invalid Georgian whose opposition to conscription and defense of habeas corpus vexed the centralizers of the CSA.
Wilson explained to his friend and admirer Robert Penn Warren that the introduction was his attempt to “remove [the war] from the old melodramatic plane and consider it from the point of view of an anti-war morality.” But “anti-war morality” had been driven into a Mennonite-radical Catholic ghetto in the age of Robert McNamara.
Wilson’s introduction is one of the great libertarian statements in American letters, which is why the minie balls flew upon publication. The editors of the ironically named Life denounced Wilson for his “crotchety hogwash.” American Heritage refused to run a favorable notice by Daniel Aaron. No wonder, for the introduction expressed “the disillusion of a populist radical . . . the scorn of a Tory anarchist and aristocrat of the mind for the rainbow slogans of American foreign policy,” in George Steiner’s estimation.
Arthur Schlesinger tried to talk Wilson into junking the introduction, which he attributed to Wilson’s “inbred, robust isolationism.” (How robust? Asked why he disliked the British, Wilson replied, “Because of the American Revolution.” Forget, hell.)
“The disaffection of [Upstate] New York toward the Civil War . . . is behind my own attitude,” explained Wilson. He was a proprietary patriot. The country belonged to him—he was an American, dammit, and he would not be bullied by hall monitors or lectured by jingoes.
Wilson followed Patriotic Gore with the saturnine polemic The Cold War and the Income Tax. (He was against both.) These books, along with Apologies to the Iroquois and Upstate, mark the magnificent roar of a patriot of the old republic protesting the ruin of his beloved country. Thematically, they are of a piece. For instance, he compares Secretary of State Seward to the satanic Robert Moses, enemy of the Iroquois, who repellently boasted, “I can take your house away from you and arrest you for trespassing if you try to go back to it.” Sick simpering tyrants indeed.
Edmund Wilson ended The Cold War and the Income Tax with a plangent confession: “I have finally come to feel that this country, whether or not I continue to live in it, is no longer any place for me.” The nation’s most distinguished literary critic was a stranger at home because, as a good American, he detested militarism and cant.
“Whenever we engage in a war or move in on some other country, it is always to liberate somebody,” wrote Edmund Wilson fifty years ago. He could have written it yesterday.
J. Evetts Haley: The Texan Who Saw Through Lyndon
The American Enterprise, 2000
J. Evetts Haley was raised in Midland, Texas, and worked his family’s ranch along the Pecos River, punching cows instead of a time clock. As a young man he had an epiphany: “History was right here at home”; so he would spend his lifetime recording the story of his Texas Plains. He also composed one of the best-selling—if now wholly forgotten—political biographies ever written.
After graduating from West Texas State, Haley roamed the plains, amassing a vast collection of cattle-related Texana. His Charles Goodnight: Cowman and Plainsman (1936), which has been called the finest biography of a frontiersman, tells us how to skirmish with Comanches, treat rattlesnake bites, and pull an arrow out of a man’s neck. Through a “flow of tobacco juice and profanity,” Goodnight, who was born three days after Texas declared independence, explained the code of the panhandle to his bookish young landsman, and for the rest of his life Haley would live by that code in an often uncomprehending world.
Haley was fired from the University of Texas in 1936 when he denounced President Roosevelt and assumed leadership of the “Jeffersonian Democrats of Texas.” The obstreperous Haley remarked after taking his stand, “it’s going to mean I’ll get fired, but my folks never started for San Jacinto and then turned back.” He added, “I will welcome being fired and go back to my old job of punching steers—those that escaped Henry Wallace’s cow killers.”
The poetical rancher would write the lives of cowboys and oilmen, store-keepers and outlaws, bank robbers and patrolmen, but his most notorious work (and the book for which he was virtually crucified) was an act of atonement “for the shameful part Texas has played in foisting” on Americans an “evil genius”: Lyndon Baines Johnson.
A Texan Looks at Lyndon: A Study in Illegitimate Power (1964) is one of the great stories in self-publishing. Even small houses shied from a book that followed, with Texas Ranger doggedness, the trail of theft, defalcation, and vulgarity left by the President of the United States. As Bill Modisett relates in his biography of Haley, when a publisher asked the author if his lawyer had vetted the book for libel, Haley replied, “Hell, he says there’s libel on every page, that’s what he says. But I’m a historian. . . . [M]y obligation is to tell the truth. . . . When it comes to lawyers, I’ll talk to them about a matter of policy. But when it comes to history, I don’t ask them, I tell them!”
So Haley published the book himself, with the proceeds from a cattle sale. In samizdat fashion, Americans unsatisfied with the sonorous officialisms of Walter Cronkite and Hugh Sidey bought an astonishing five and a half million paperback copies.
Reading the book today, one is struck by the eerie parallels to a later tactile southern Democratic President and maudlin cracker with the hots for every woman not his wife. The habitual lying, the craving of power for its own sake, the blistering of subordinates too cowardly to tell the Great Man to take a flying leap: LBJ comes off as a slightly less unctuous Bill Clinton.
Haley depicts Lady Bird Johnson as a “Lady Macbeth,” cold and calculating, caring “more about her husband’s career than her husband”—although Lady Bird had the grace to disappear into Texas once their time was up.
In one sense, the book has aged poorly: The reader cringes when the segregationist Haley huffs and puffs over LBJ dancing with the wives of African American congressmen. But his essential thesis—that Johnson was a power-mad liar and crook of Texas-sized proportions—has been validated by the first two volumes of Robert Caro’s definitive biography.
Haley was “fully aware of the terrible recriminations of illegitimate power that may, with certainty, be expected to follow” the book’s publication; the IRS, FBI, and even postal inspectors paid their disrespects to the Plains’ Tom Paine. The lapdog press was sicced on Haley; overnight, the distinguished historian was diagnosed as being “a case of unhospitalized paranoia.” Imagine: He claimed that Johnson had stolen the 1948 Senate election and had become a millionaire many times over by virtue of talents other than shrewd market calculations!
J. Evetts Haley lived ninety-four years, though his cow-punching days ended at age