Stephen Ambrose: Americans at War

When I opened this book and saw the first essay concerned the Civil War, I wasn't sure I wanted to read it.

But Stephen Ambrose being Stephen Ambrose, and me being a stubborn reader who doesn't like to give up on books, I read. And read. And kept on reading.

Ambrose, in 252 pages, takes the reader from the U.S. Civil War to today's world, accurately predicting pilotless aircraft and conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and shedding light on the events and figures in America's wars from the mid-1800s into the future.

I enjoyed his profiles of Douglas MacArthur and George Patton as a World War II buff.

But his essays on the homefront and later on the My Lai massacre were the best parts of the book.

Ambrose, in only a few dozen pages, took me beyond the rah-rah of a nation united into a nation I vaguely remember reading about in some of the history books we had a home: Fighting a racist war against Japan while maintaining a segregated army and putting Japanese-Americans into prisons for the duration. He took us from Franklin Delano Roosevelt hoping to avoid as many civilian casualties as possible to advocating for firebombing cities in the hopes it would end the war sooner.

Mistakes sown there led to similar mistakes in Vietnam, where racism continued to bubble and mixed signals really fuddled the mission of the US in that nation.

Ambrose, of course, has the advantage of looking back at history to see the rights and wrongs, but also reminds us that we have no control over the past and that the only control we have on the future is remaining aware of what's going on now. He mentioned this quote from humorist James Thurber, and it's really stuck with me:

That's something I'm going to try to remember myself.

A University of Idaho Connection in Idaho Falls

This week I've really enjoyed reading Connie B. Otteson's "Unsung Heroes and Settlers of Bonneville County, Idaho," a local history book published in 2005.

It was a lucky find at a local thrift store, where I've found a good number of local history books. Now around here, we don't have a lot of history at least for whitey, going back if we're lucky only about 150 years.

Today's reading started out with a familiar story of the city's Village Improvement Society (which still exists, I found out) and a drive to import hardwood trees from back east and plant them all over town, notably on the numbered streets and in a park that would come to be known as Kate Curley Park, after one of the VIS' prominent boosters who was really tired of dragging the hems of her dresses in mud and horse doots.

While the VIS imported the trees from Iowa and Illinois, they wanted to find a more local expert to help them arrange and plant things, particularly in the park.

They found Charles Huston Shattuck, late of the University of Idaho's College of Forestry, where he was dean, and where he'd laid the groundwork for the tree cover and landscaping at that campus, including the Shattuck Arboretum, which of course bears his name.

I went to the university of Idaho and spent some time wandering through the arboretum, as it was between my first residence hall (the building in the lower right corner of the photo above) and the campus. It was crisscrossed with trails. Honestly, I thought it was just a bit of forest that the campus had preserved, it looked so natural. Come to find out it was just a weedy patch of bare ground before Shattuck started his work on it.

As much as I don't want to live on the numbered streets in Idaho Falls, I do love that the VIS had the foresight to bring in hardwoods and take the effort to plant trees in what was otherwise a sandy, wind-blown desert. And I'm glad they found an expert who produced the prettiest university campus in the state to help with the effort.

We came close when I was a kid at living in a house kitty-corner to Kate Curley Park, but it never came to fruition. I don't know why. But it's certainly a pretty neighborhood.

I Want My Spandex Jacket

As I finish reading Peter Stark’s “Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire,” I’m impressed to make a few comparisons to our day.

Astor was, of course, a businessman. A businessman with an expansive vision, which pushed his enterprise, with some support from the United States government, into untractable wilds in search of wealth for one and a cultural and political foothold in rich, disputed territory for another.

It’s difficult not to compare him to Elon Musk who, with his dabblings and vision (I’m not going to discuss the “rightness” of either his or Astor’s vision here) embarks on similar enterprises today.

As Astor looked to the Pacific Ocean for wealth, Musk looks to Mars – lately, the Moon – with similar ambitions. In both cases, there appears to be tacit approval by government, but, as Astor found out, not a lot of material support behind that approval. Maybe Musk is finding differently, at least in government contracts. In Astor’s time, the fledgling United States government, led by Thomas Jefferson at the onset of Astor’s adventure, then by a more cautious James Madison at the end, was too young and immature to do much of anything but look at the maps and dream.

Today’s government, with vastly greater resources, seems limited not by resource, but by resolve and is distracted by a thousand banalities to the point even life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seems more limited in scope than in the past.

There was, of course, great risk in establishing “empire” on the Pacific Coast. Lewis and Clark had only completed their initial journey from the East to Fort Clatsop and back a few years prior, and left enough acrimony among those along the way that those who followed had to take even greater risks to make the same accomplishments.

At the end, Astor managed only to plant a seed – his fort, successfully established at Astoria, sold under duress to the British during the War of 1812. But by mid-century, Americans were on a steady flow to Oregon overland, and political disputes were settled in 1846 with England ceding the southern portion of Oregon Country to the United States.

Whether Musk is planting any Moon- or Mars-bound seeds is open to conjecture and likely years in the offing, if at all, as government-supported exploration of anything beyond Earth orbit by manned spaceflight has evaporated since the 1970s. (Yes, Artemis did a Moon flyby in 2026 with a manned landing mission planned afterward, but whether anything will come of those efforts is also lost to the vaporous attention of government and man, Musk included, as his own SpaceX is now boasted as 93% an artificial intelligence company.

As a kid, I fully expected the option to work and live on the Moon as an adult. As an adult now, I can see that’s not likely to happen to the common schlub within my lifetime, nor likely within the lifetime of my own children, as even the greatest adventurers and entrepreneurs and governments seem bent on recreating the same stupid mistakes made in the past rather than looking united toward a better future.

On that train of graphite and glitter,

Undersea by rail.

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris,

By ’76, we’ll be A-OK . . .

Dreams of utopia from the 1950s, it seems, are as far away now as they were then. And the little government and little businessmen with little visions aren’t likely to carry us there anytime soon.

I want my spandex jacket.

The Corps of Discovery: They *Don't* Teach This in School

This review could easily devolve into the old Boomer trope: "Why don't they teach this at school?" Well, frankly, there's just too much. Too much to learn, too much to read. Too much to absorb.

In Idaho, we get this history obviously as part of "Idaho History," which was required of fourth and eleventh graders when I was of school age.

I'll admit here I don't remember much of what I learned, partly because it's so long ago and partly because I've read a lot of such history, writ small and writ large, since then, and it's all become muddled in my brain.

It's clear even with Stephen E. Ambrose in his book "Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West" (finally we get to the subject of this review). It's an excellent book, full of detail, told in a splendid voice often in the written words (and creative spelling) of Meriwether Lewis. Highly recommended; I have yet to read an Ambrose book that's a stinker.

I did learn a lot of stuff I didn't know about the Corps of Discovery; mainly that it was splendidly led by insightful, hardy, and lucky people who treated some people with too much deference and others who deserved better treatment with some disdain and cruelty, particularly the Nez Perce of Idaho.

Also: Did not know that after the voyage was over Lewis was slow as tar in getting any organization going in their collected journals while he fought petty battles with other members of the corps that wanted to publish or did publish their own writings and ended up killing himself in Kentucky as a result of what may have been a lifelong battle with depression and other mental illness or a combination of that with addictions to morphine, opium, and alcohol. Or it might have been syphilus. That's not the kind of things they tell fourth graders.

Anyway, highly recommended reading. I'll be passing the book on to my wife. And I enjoyed the little bits of trivia I encountered in the book.

"Risking National Bankruptcy to Buy A Desert"

From Stephen E. Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage," which focuses on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, offered as a balm in this, the stupidest timeline:

When [John] Adams wrote that the [Louisiana] Purchase "gave a new face to politics," he meant that it signified the end of the Federalist Party, which was so shortsighted and partisan that many of its representatives criticized the act. Alexander Hamilton was wise to content himself with remakring that Jefferson had just been lucky. The Purchase, he said, resulted from "the kind interpositions of an overruling Providence." But a Boston Federalist newspaper did not like the dea at all: it called Louisiana "a great waste, a wilderness unpeopled with any beings except wolves and wandering Indians. We are to give money of which was have too little for land of which we already have too much." Jefferson was risking national bankruptcy to buy a desert.

Angry partisanship was the order of the day. Senator John Quincy Adams complained in his diary, "The country is so totally given up to the spirit of party, that not to follow blindfold the one or the other is an inexpiable offence." But the New England Federalists were putting themselves on the wrong side of history to poopse the Purchase. One denounced it as "a great curse," and another feared that the Purchase "threatens, at no very distant day, the subversion of our Union."

Of course we're seeing the same kind of crap today. The "other side" can do nothing right, wile "our side" can do no wrong.

And sometimes I participate in it. I need to stop.

History Lessons

It’s fitting, I think, to look for contemporary application for the things we read in history. I know that’s not a news flash – because those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it and other clichés.

But this stood out in a contemporary sense in Joseph E. Persico’s “Nuremberg: Infamy on Trial.”

The racial clashes bothered Gustav Gilbert [one of a handful of psychologists working the German war crimes suspects] as he tried to piece together his analysis of sanctioned mass murder. He had already concluded that, beyond an obedient people, the next requirement for this kind of crime was a belief in the inferiority of one’s victims. He had had a discussion on this point recently with Goring. Goring had asked him about the black officers occasionally seen in the visitors’ gallery. Gould they command troops in combat? Goring wanted to know. Could they ride in the same buses as whites? Gilbert had just spent three days in court watching Robert Jackson prosecute Goring for crimes against humanity, specifically for issuing anti-Semitic edicts. Jim Crow and the Nuremberg Laws – was it not just a difference of degree?

There’s also this:

Rudolf Hoess [Commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp] was “outwardly normal, but lacked something essential to normality, the quality of empathy, the capacity to feel with our fellow man,” [wrote Gilbert]. Hoess had described the millions at Auschwitz not as people, but as “shadows passing before me.” Combine unthinking obedience, racism, and a disconnection from the kinship of mankind, and you could produce an Auschwitz commandant.

His arriving at a solution that satisfied the mind served only to depress Gilbert’s spirits. Every society had its authority-ridden personalities. Bigots exist all over. And schizoids, dead to normal feelings, walk the streets every day. The latent ingredients could be found everywhere. The distinction in Nazi Germany had been that these people had not functioned on the margins of society. They had run it.

We’re not there yet. But as I watch, we stand on the slope. We walk on the edge of a knife, as was said at another pivotal (yet fictional) time.

Hope remains when the company is true.

Do not fear. Be true.

That Ol' Empty Chair

From the “Just In Case You Didn’t Know” Department . . .

Remember this?

He wasn’t the first . . . 

From “The Teapot Dome Scandal,” by Laton McCartney, page 247:

In the national campaign, the Democrats as well as the newly formed Progressive Party, which put forth La Follette and Walsh’s protégé Burton Wheeler as its presidential and vice-presidential candidates, respectively, hammered away at Teapot and the Republicans without much effect. Davis, Al Smith, Walsh, and others (the showman Wheeler debated an empty chair on which he asked his audience to imagine President Coolidge was seated) tried to get Coolidge to respond to charges about the scandal, but “Silent Cal” remained entirely mum, refusing to take the bait.

The Republicans won the election, just so ya’know. Coolidge took 382 electoral votes and the popular vote, of 15.7 million. Democrat John Davis of West Virginia got 136 electoral votes on a popular vote of 8.3 million, while Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who ran on the Progressive Party (Teddy Roosevelt Progressives of the Republican variety) earned 13 electoral votes on a popular vote of 4.8 million.

This stunt alone inspires me to read more about America’s “Progressive Era,” where the likes of Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson (presidents all) were joined by authors like Upton Sinclair, industrialists like Andrew Carnegie (!) and Thomas Alva Edison, members of the Womens’ Suffrage movement (Susan B. Anthony) to combat problems stemming from industrialization, urbanization, immigration, and corruption in government. Sound like familiar troubles, eh?

I’m already a fan of Sinclair Lewis, who wrote of these times.