"The Demon of Unrest," Erik Larson

 Any book by Erik Larson is worth reading. This one is especially appropriate for Memorial Day. Like most of you, I have read many books about Lincoln and the Civil War, starting with Carl Sandburg’s biography of Lincoln, The Prairie Years and the War Years when I was around fifteen. A quick Google search suggests that about 60,000 books have been written about the Civil War and another 16,000 about Lincoln – more than a book a day for 159 years, far more books than one could read in a lifetime.

 

Nevertheless, this is one to be read, as it concerns just the five months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration. During those early months, any bet that slavery would be abolished and the Union preserved would have been a risky proposition.

 

Enjoy Memorial Day, and think of all those who sacrificed that we might live freely. It is our day of remembrance.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Demon of Unrest, Erik Larson

May 27, 2024

 

“I began working on this book in early 2020 during the first weeks of the

COVID pandemic…Political unrest had heightened the chaos of the pandemic,

and for whatever reason I began wondering: Exactly how did the Civil War begin?”

                                                                                                                                The Demon of Unrest, 2024

                                                                                                                                “Sources and Acknowledgements”

                                                                                                                                Erik Larson (1954-)

 

In May 2020, I wrote a brief essay on Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile. I have read others of his books, but that was before I began writing these short essays of books enjoyed.

 

While Mr. Larson began writing this book in early 2020, in “A Note to the Reader,” he writes of the events of January 6, 2021: “I was appalled by the attack, but also riveted.” He notes that the “anger, anxiety and astonishment” he felt then would have been experienced by many Americans in the five months between Lincoln’s election and his inauguration. It was, but far more polarizing in 1860 than today, or in 1968.

 

More than anything, the Civil War was our nation’s “Rite of Passage.” The war tested, as Lincoln said at Gettysburg in November 1863, whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the idea that all men were equal – but in a nation in which 12.5% of the population were enslaved – could endure? With slavery integral to the south’s economy and a fixture of its social life, it could not, or not as it was. The attack by South Carolina’s militia on Fort Sumter in Charlestown Harbor provided the spark. But war was inevitable.

 

Slavery was the issue. The economy of the south was agricultural-based, while that of the north was industrial, manufacturing and commercial. Where northern merchants invested in factories and machinery, southern planters invested in land and slaves. According to the 1860 census there were four million slaves, the values of whom varied, but averaged around $400.00 each. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, cotton was the United States’s most important product in 1860. By 1900 it was seventh. 

 

Larson’s story centers around Fort Sumter, which sits at the entrance to Charleston’s harbor, and Major Robert Anderson who was in charge. Charleston had been the fifth largest city in 1800, but by 1860 it ranked 22^nd. South Carolina, the first state to withdraw from the Union upon Lincoln’s election, was home, we are told to 440 planters who owned 100 or more slaves each. Charleston, with Fort Sumter guarding its harbor, was a central hub of the domestic slave trade. Centering his story around Sumter and the other rebel-occupied forts in Charleston’s harbor, Mr. Larson provides an almost daily diary of events, as tensions increased, states debated secession, and the inevitability of war drew near. 

 

While Lincoln, William Seward, Winfield Scott, and James Buchanan play supporting roles, the main players, apart from Major Anderson and his officers, are southern planters and politicians – including the despicable James Hammond, the peripatetic Edmund Ruffin, the ambitious Mary Chestnut – and one reporter, the curious and thoughtful British journalist William Howard Russell. 

 

Lively written, with punchy sentences and short chapters, Mr. Larson quotes from letters, diaries, newspapers and histories. In answer to the question posed in the rubric, the reader learns that any similarities between today’s extremists and the South’s secessionists in 1860 are far less than their differences.

"It's a Mad, Mad. Mad, Mad World"

 Artificial Intelligence is already here, at least in primitive form. It gathers millions of pieces of data on myriad subjects – all that is available – inputs the data into a CPU and then applies algorithms to answer questions and express opinions. 

I had an interesting experience recently. Last Saturday I sent a write-up on Percival Everett’s latest book, James. Like all my essays, I posted this one on my blog, on LinkedIn and, as I do with book reviews, on Amazon. I have posted at least fifty reviews on Amazon, all of which were accepted. This one was not. An e-mail was sent me, explaining that the review did not meet their guidelines for one of the following reasons: Profanity, Harassment, Hate speech, Sexual content, Illegal activity, Private information. There was no profanity, no sexual content, no illegal activity and no private information. I don’t believe there was any hate speech or harassment; though it is possible that the line where I repeated James request to February to translate a sentence into slave dialect might be read as such. But it only could have been rejected by a machine, something that could read the words but was unable to apply context; or, at least, that is my conjecture. 

 

Artificial Intelligence has a long way to go before it can replicate the human mind and experience. But there is little question that AI will continue to change, whether for better or worse remains to be seen. It will depend on who controls the input.

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”

May 15, 2024

 

“Well, we’ve made it this far.”

                                                                                                                From a list of “probable last words.”

 

The title of this essay comes from Stanley Kramer’s 1963 mad-cap comedy. With his dying words Smiler Grogan (Jimmy Durante) mentions a stash of loot buried under the “Big W.” The movie is about a bunch of crazies’ search for the money, reminding one of today’s political scene and the race for the Presidency.

 

We are not living a Hollywood film; but an alien from another planet would be excused for laughing. The ridiculousness of what is being said and done justifies a belly laugh. Writing recently in City Journal, Heather MacDonald noted: “Student protests have always been hilariously self-dramatic, but the current outbreak is particularly maudlin, in keeping with female self-pity. ‘The university would rather see us dead than divest,’ said a member of the all-female press representatives of UCLA’s solidarity encampment on X.” Yascha Mounk, an Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins, wrote in a recent issue of The Spectator of some “absurdist moments” at Columbia. Student protesters demanded the university deliver food and drink to them: “When a surprised journalist asked why the university should have such an obligation towards people engaged in blatantly illegal activity, she insisted they had a moral right to ‘basic humanitarian aid.’”

 

Max Boot, writing in The Washington Post, quoted the Columbia University Apartheid Divest manifesto: “We believe in liberation. All systems of oppression are interlinked: The fates of the peoples of Palestine, Kurdistan, Sudan, Congo, Armenia, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Korea, Guam, Haiti, Hawaii, Kashmir, Cuba, Turtle Island, and other colonized bodies are interconnected.” Really? Do the citizens of Ireland, Puerto Rico and Hawaii know they are colonized? Who besides Haitians and Koreans have colonized Haiti and Korea in recent years? And Mr. Boot asks: “What the heck is Turtle Island? A quick internet search revealed that this was the name used by some indigenous groups for Central and North America.” Do wizards at Columbia expect descendants of settlers to abandon the farms, towns and cities they and their ancestors have now lived on and in – in some cases for 400 years – so progeny of those long dead can occupy them? 

 

More than seven million illegal (sorry, undocumented) migrants have crossed the southern border since Biden took office, roughly triple the number under President Trump. But this is not a crisis, according to the Biden White House. It is a “challenge,” said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. In other areas definitions have become confusing. Wikipedia defines a woman: “Typically, women are of the female sex.” Typically, I guess. But not always, “as their gender identity may not align with their sex assignment at birth,” Wikipedia explains. The Federal Government has threatened to withhold funds from public high schools that do not comply with new Title IX rules regarding transgender female athletes – and this is an Administration that claims to care about women’s rights! I guess they mean trans-women’s rights.

 

While officials at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities are careful to say that Social Security is not bankrupt, they add, parenthetically, that “in the unlikely event that policy makers fail to act” benefits will be cut by 25% after 2035. Congress, as we all know, is hesitant about amending this 90-year-old entitlement. Keep in mind, life expectancy in the U.S. in1935 was 62 versus 79 today. But nothing to worry about, the age for receiving benefits has risen from 65 in 1935 to 67 in 2023. However, Dan Mitchell of International Liberty predicts that Social Security’s long run shortfall is now $61.7 trillion. Even in a nation with 756 billionaires that is a lot of money. Climate Cassandras are intent on shuttering liquified natural gas exports, even as the U.S. has reduced its carbon output as a percent of GDP, largely due to natural gas replacing coal. The decision is forcing other nations to increase coal output and/or looking to enemy nations, like Russia and Iran, for their energy needs. Those like Greta Thunberg take a “let them eat cake” attitude toward third world nations who are forced to pay more for energy.

 

But what makes the times truly crazy are the choices Americans will likely have in November, when we go to the polls to elect an heir to George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan:

 

President Joe Biden – a man in early stages of dementia, a man about whom Robert Gates, Defense Secretary under President Obama, said ten years ago: “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” Proving Gate’s observation, during Biden’s first term we witnessed the chaotic and costly evacuation from Afghanistan in 2021, Russia invade Ukraine and China threaten Taiwan, and now we are abandoning Israel in their Hamas-provoked war for survival. Deficits and debt have risen. Inflation is the highest it has been in forty years. Republicans are expected to nominate former President Donald Trump, a man who reminds one of a carousel barker – a man who has perhaps never read a book, one with the morals of a Billy goat and the mouth of a stevedore. He has promised recrimination against his political rivals. Democrats, however, in their battle to “save democracy,” have helped Mr. Trump, as they use undemocratic means to keep him from office. 

 

The two other minority candidates are scarier. Robert Kennedy, Jr., a scion of Camelot, is no King Arthur. He tells us his brain was eaten by a worm, which, given his antics, feels like it is true. Jill Stein, the perennial candidate of the Green Party, was recently arrested at Washington University in St. Louis for assaulting a police officer – not a good look in a country where crime is on the rise.

 

Why has this great nation fallen so low? Why have absurdities risen so high? Despite an inclination to laugh, this is not a happy time. I don’t pretend to have answers, but I believe an emphasis on identity politics – the division of the people by race, sex, religion, gender and heritage – has played a major role. As well, categorizing people as victims or oppressors is a simplified way of making some people feel good about themselves without having to take responsibility for their actions.  

 

It is a mad world, a world without a moral compass. We wander from crisis to crisis. As the centrifugal forces of today’s culture and politics increase we are pulled to the edges – some to the left and others to the right. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” wrote William Butler Yeats in his 1919 poem, “The Second Coming.” The words lend meaning to today’s absence of civility and compromise: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.”

 

Despite the craziness, there is little that is fun about the predicament in which we find ourselves – a predicament of our own construction. I don’t know about you, but I need to catch my breath and laugh. When I finish Erik Larson’s The Demon of Unrest, the story of the five months leading to the start of the Civil War, I will take up P.G. Wodehouse’s The Adventures of Sally, a book I haven’t read for several years. As Evelyn Waugh once pointed out, Wodehouse writes of a world “that cannot become dated, because it never existed.” But it is a world in which one can lose oneself, at least temporarily, a world where one laughs with the author at characters who are creations of his brilliant and pleasant mind.

 

We have made it this far; so perhaps we will survive, as the epigraph suggests. The election will take place, but then I think of the giants who have occupied the White House, and I feel a great sorrow. Maybe I will stay home, something I have never done. Probably not, though. We still have over five months to go.

Review - "Mary Churchill's War"

 As for this review, like many Americans, I am a fan of Winston Churchill. In retrospect, it is amazing that he and Britain were successful in standing alone for a year and a half against Hitler’s Nazis – from Germany’s occupation of Paris in June 1940 until the United States entered into the War after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. That they did was largely because of the confidence instilled in them by Churchill. Mary’s diary provides an intimate portrayal of the man.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

Mary Churchill’s War: The Wartime Diaries of Churchill’s Youngest Daughter, 2022

Edited by Emma Soames, Foreword by Erik Larson

April 14, 2024

 

Sunday, 3 September, 1939 – “DECLARATION OF WAR…O God, I thought

I hoped, I prayed that our generation would never see a war and that those who

fought last time would never have to face the ordeal a second time.”

 

Monday, 7 May, 1945 – “Lovely day…At about half past six it was announced 

That Germany had surrendered unconditionally to the Allies this morning.”

 

When the diaries begin on January 1, 1939, Mary, born September 15, 1922, is 16 years-old. When they conclude, September 6, 1945, she is just shy of her 23^rd birthday. The diaries can be appreciated on three levels: One, a portrait of her father (Papa), along with her mother (Mummie), siblings, friends and members of Churchill’s cabinet, from his adoring (and adored) youngest child. Two, the effects of the War on England, as seen by the young Mary Churchill who later served as a captain in the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS). And three, a coming-of-age story of an intelligent and vivacious young woman who at the start of the War is a typical teenager, but who matures over six-and-a-half years into a thoughtful and respected officer and woman.

 

When the War began, she wrote that she is “determined that the following pages shall contain a true and consecutive record of my life…the life of a girl in her youth.” In the early entries, she is fond of exclamation points and putting important words in capital letters. She fell in love often, as she recounts in her diaries, which prompted Roosevelt’s special envoy to London Harry Hopkins to caution her, in a letter to Ambassador John Winant: “Girls as attractive as Mary should get engaged at least 3 times before marrying.”

 

Of course she was not an ordinary young Brit. Her father was Prime Minister and her mother was the daughter of Sir Henry Hozier and Lady Blanche Hozier. During the War she lived mostly at 10 Downing Street, the Annexe, with weekends at Chequers, the country home for Britain’s Prime Minister. She also traveled twice out of the country with her father, first to Quebec in August-September 1943 and two years later to Potsdam after the War in Europe was over. Consequently, she commented on the politically powerful, like this entry about President Franklin Roosevelt: “Sunday, 12 September, 1943 – To me he seems at once idealistic, cynical, warm-hearted & generous, worldly-wise, naïve, courageous, tough, thoughtful, charming, tedious, vain, sophisticated, civilized.”

 

As an 18-year-old, she enjoyed herself: “Wednesday, 8 January, 1941 – Hospital dance in the evening…Danced a great deal. Oh I do love dancing.” Two years later, the reader detects a change: “Friday, 4 June 1943 – So many thoughts occur to me continually about life. How interesting & thrilling it all is – How can people be bored – and yet I’ve been bored myself sometimes.” And after Hiroshima was bombed: “Friday, 10 August, 1945 – “It strengthens in my mind the conviction that one should expect & hope & pray for very little – except courage. Courage to face & accept & wrestle with life however black & evil.”

 

More than her other siblings, whose lives were disrupted by divorce and cut short by death, Mary Churchill Soames, who died at 91 in 2014, was her father’s (and her mother’s) daughter. And her daughter’s editing of the diaries provides the reader a treat.

"The Splendid and the Vile," by Erik Larson

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

Burrowing into Books

“The Splendid and the Vile,” Erik Larson

May 10, 2020

“Only he had the power to make the nation believe it could win.”

                                                                                                Edward Bridges (1892-1969)

                                                                                                War Cabinet Secretary

                                                                                                As quoted by Erik Larson

                                                                                                The Splendid and the Vile

Eighty years ago, on Friday evening, May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was summoned to Buckingham Palace where George VI asked him to form a government. The King, who had had a close relationship with Neville Chamberlain, was dubious about Churchill being the man for the job, given his reputation as an unconventional war monger. “I cannot yet think of Winston as P.M.,” King George wrote in his diary that May. Within a few weeks, he had changed his mind.

Erik Larson provides a fascinating and up-close look at Churchill, his family, close advisors and his relationship with the Roosevelt Administration. The story begins with end of the “Phony War” and evacuation from Dunkirk and ends a month before the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union.

Why another book on Churchill? More than a hundred biographies have been published. His histories of World War I and II comprise a dozen volumes. His speeches make up at least that many. Mr. Larson provides one explanation: “…it is in frivolity that Churchill often revealed himself.” John Colville, one of Churchill’s private secretaries, writes of an early Sunday morning in June that Churchill looked “… just like a rather nice pig, clad in a silk vest.” Churchill once quipped of his wife Clementine, when she was perturbed by a guest: “Clemmie dropped on him like a jaguar out of a tree.”

Larson makes wide use of letters and diaries, particularly those of Colville, his youngest child Mary, who was seventeen when the story begins, his daughter-in-law Pamela and, in Germany, the diaries and papers of Joseph Goebbels and Hermann Göring. We learn of Mary’s loves, of Randolph’s gambling and drinking, and of Pamela’s growing disillusionment with Randolph and of her affair with Averill Harriman. And we learn that the speech on August 20, 1940, in which he used the words, “Never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few,” were first spoken to 1^St Baron (Pug) Ismay, his chief military assistant, in a car driving back from a visit to the RAF operations room at Uxbridge five days earlier.

Churchill’s person and character made him beloved of the British people. He was short, round and bore a beatific smile. In speeches, he roused their patriotism, and in mingling with them, following a night of bombing, they heard words of revenge and saw tears of sympathy. In Bristol, in April 1941, after a particularly brutal attack, Churchill spoke: “…I see the damage done by the enemy attacks; but I also see …the spirit of an unconquerable people.” They saw strength in his bravery, as he watched bombing raids from the roof of 10 Downing Street, and they knew he would be by their side ‘til victory.

From the time Churchill became Prime Minister until the attack on Pearl Harbor nineteen months later, Britain fought alone. Hitler had conquered more of Europe than anyone since Napoleon. Until Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, an invasion of England seemed imminent. Churchill pinned his hopes on Roosevelt. Larson quotes from Harold Nicholson’s diary in April 1941, referring to Churchill: “His peroration implies that we are done without American help.” About the same time Averill Harriman, FDR’s “defense expeditor,” wrote his boss after listening to Churchill speak in Parliament: He (Harriman) marveled at “…the extent to which the faith and hope for the future of the people here are bound up in America and in you personally.” One weekend at Ditchley, with American emissary Harry Hopkins present, Churchill launched into one of his grandiose monologues about war aims of Britain. When he finished, he turned to Hopkins: “What will the president say to all that?” Moments passed. Then Hopkins replied: “Well, Mr. Prime Minister, I don’t think the President will give a dam’ for all that.” A deafening silence ensued: “You see, we’re only interested in seeing that Goddam sonofabitch Hitler gets licked.” Churchill smiled.

The bombing of England intensified. Hitler was convinced that once America entered the War, Churchill and Roosevelt would seek an alliance with Stalin. That would create, Hitler said, “a very difficult situation for Germany.” He was right. Nevertheless, by April Joseph Goebbels was feeling content with how the War was going. “His dairy,” Larson writes, “crackled with enthusiasm for the war and for life: ‘What a glorious spring day outside! How beautiful the world can be!’” A month later, Goebbels was more subdued: “England’s will to resist is still intact.”

There were personal moments, weekends at Chequers and Ditchley House in Oxfordshire. Marriage was often on Churchill’s mind. He was unhappy with daughter Sarah’s marriage to actor Vic Oliver. Randolph and Pamela’s marriage unraveled. Mary, at eighteen, had been proposed to by Eric Duncannon, an engagement that upset Clementine. “Churchill,” Erik Larson writes, “believed marriage to be a simple thing and sought to dispel its mysteries through a series of aphorisms, like: ‘All you need to be married are champagne, a box of cigars and a double bed.’”

Churchill enjoyed life, but he was singularly focused on victory. By the end of his first year, Erik Larson writes: “Against all odds, Britain stood firm, its citizens more emboldened than cowed. Somehow through it all, Churchill had managed to teach them the art of being fearless.” As to the claim he had given the people courage, Churchill demurred, “I never gave them courage. I was able to focus them.” As he himself was focused.

Erik Larson has given us a readable, literate and knowledgeable look at an important piece of history that began eighty years ago today. His title captures perfectly the difference between those who would defend western civilization and those who would destroy it.