Hipsters of the Civil War: Essays in American History and Culture

By Paul Reidinger

An American writer examines the story of his country and the story of himself and finds an unexpected braid between the two. Various sacred cows, including Lincoln and Shakespeare, are unsparingly considered, and a fresh interpretation of the constitutional realm, from the Declaration of Independence through the Civil War amendments, is offered.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Reidinger
• Release date: Jun 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301687435

Paul Reidinger

Paul Reidinger is the author of several novels, including The Best Man, Good Boys, The City Kid, and The Bad American. His other books include a memoir, Lions in the Garden, a collection of essays and criticism Patchwork, and The Federalist Regained, an essay on the Constitution. He grew up in Wisconsin, was educated at Stanford University and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and lives in San Francisco.

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HIPSTERS OF THE CIVIL WAR:

Essays in American history and culture

BY PAUL REIDINGER

Published by Paul Reidinger at Smashwords

Copyright 2013 by Paul Reidinger

As you see, I live as if I were already dead. -- George Santayana

Table of Contents

Introduction

Or, Confessions of an INTP

Bicycle Days

A decade with the painters Paul Wonner and Bill Brown

Notes on the State of Hamiltonia

Or, I Hate New York, and Why

Better Read

A general theory of democracy, literacy and participation in America

Brainiacs in Ecstasy

Can intellectuals write fiction?

Hipsters of the Civil War

The meaning of memory in a culture of forgetfulness

The Federalist Regained

Introduction

Or, Confessions of an INTP

Many if not most essay collections by writers of fiction are compendia of previously published journalism, and I should know, since my own essay collection from a few years back, Patchwork, was exactly that. If there is value in such a collection, it would be akin to that of keeping a diary: an account across time of what one had noticed and thought, with the arc of the discussion becoming, perhaps, a tale of growth and evolution, though not necessarily.

This collection, whatever else it might be, is not one of those collections. It isn’t a diary. It isn’t a grab bag or a collage or a retrospective. The pieces that make it up were written in a tight window, from March 2012 to January 2013, and, like the original thirteen American colonies I mention from time to time, they are thus both discrete entities and aspects of a larger whole. They can be read separately with profit – I hope – but they can also be read together with – I hope – even greater profit. They were not offered to, nor did they appear in, newspapers, magazines, journals or other periodicals, not even a ratty alt-weekly. They are untouched by hands not my own; they belong entirely to me. That is a small bit of what they have in common. But it is possible that they have more in common, and more value, than that. Value is a large theme here; values too.

The first of the lot to be written was The Federalist Regained, which for me was a kind of afterbirth that attended the composition of my novel The Bad American. The novel dealt with certain ideas about America that still sparkled in my head after I’d finished writing it, and my first thought was to set them down as a kind of non-fiction postscript, a succinct restatement of the ideas that lay at the heart of the fictive undertaking.

But even before I’d finished writing the Federalist, other ideas for other pieces began suggesting themselves to me. All seemed to concern themselves in one way or another with the meaning of America and of being American, and with the fate of America and Americans in the world and in history. As I wrote them out, too, I noticed that I was building a bridge of sorts between The Bad American and a large project about my own family I’d been contemplating for a number of years. Some of the pieces in this collection do give an early sense of that project.

It occurred to me, as I wrote these essays, that my personality type according to the Myers Briggs inventory deeply informs them. I am an INTP: introverted, intuitive, tending to demonstrate intellection more than than emotion and more comfortable with ambiguity, provisionality and revelation than demanding of closure or certainty. I don’t imagine that many INTPs are imaginative writers, nor do I suppose that many imaginative writers are INTPs. The INTP imaginative writer has misfit written all over him.

It occurred to me, too, that the basic personality of America is pretty nearly the opposite of my own. America is a land of extroverts, of data generators, harvesters and interpreters, of belief in national myth (a form of emotional experience packaged in narrative) and of diversity and – o dread word – tolerance.

(There is tale yet to be told in how we have come to embrace the word tolerance instead of acceptance. Tolerance implies an unpleasantness and undesirability in the phenomenon being tolerated. We tolerate nasty odors or a rough flight. Tolerance suggests a certain hard-nosed martyrdom in the tolerator. It is a term of oblique self-approval. The tolerator, by enduring without complaint the malfeasance and tastelessness of others, demonstrates his moral superiority. Tolerance also implies a power relation: I tolerate you, because I am in the position of power. I make the call. It’s possible that acceptance implies elements of equality, fatalism and resignation our domination-minded warrior culture regards as ... intolerable. Fatalism is un-American, a French vice, and acceptance is a kind of defeat. Americans strive for mastery of fate and do not accept defeat. Defeat is not an option.)

If Uncle Sam could take the Myers Briggs, I think he would turn out to be an ESFP: bluff, loud, friendly (and sometimes too friendly), somewhat touchy-feely in the manner of a good pickpocket, more interested in making rules than in following them, slightly sloppy, more than a little aggressive, keen to be the center of attention, not particularly sensitive or reflective, and suspicious of intellectuals. The ESFP personality is sometimes described as the performer. Bingo.

That I should turn out to be a misfit not only in the cozy congeries of imaginative writers but also at the great American personality festival does not come as news to me. Nor is it discouraging, since it’s a misalignment I’ve long been aware of and accounted for. I’ve priced it in, as financial analysts, our bards of money, like to say nowadays. But it did dawn on me, as I worked, that essays on American culture and history written by an American whose cast of mind is essentially intuitive and epiphanic might have an unusual sort of value in and to a data-driven culture, a culture of fact-gathering scholars and number crunchers, although, in a delicious irony, such a culture would be unlikely to take notice of such pieces or their author, let alone see them or him as worthy.

I do not mean to derogate data and scholarship. They have their places, no doubt. Data does represent a certain kind of knowledge. But knowledge is not the same as understanding or wisdom. It is possible to know a great deal and understand nothing at all; this is a sophisticated, and common, form of foolishness. Sophistication and idiocy are far from incompatible. There is a place, too – or there should be – for the pattern seeker, for the noticer of the small and overlooked detail that turns out to be the key to important truths, and for the teller of those truths. Important truths are often difficult if not downright unpleasant, and the person reckless or ill-mannered enough to report them is unlikely to win plaudits for doing so.

We aren’t especially careful to distinguish between messenger and message. The distinction does not interest us. This is one of the less admirable characteristics of our species. Just as we kill luckless messengers who bring us tidings we don’t care for, so too we ignore or reject messages when we don’t like the look of the person who carries them. A message regarded as uncomfortable or unwelcome will cast a shadow on its bearer, just as a message handed to us by a bearer we see as odd or unattractive will immediately seem suspect. No wonder so many messengers lie slain at the gates of the great city, their messages stomped and shredded beside their corpses. Inside those gates, meanwhile, laissez les bon temps rouler!

Intuitive people, whose minds move quickly along high and unseen wires, are fated to have a rough time being heard or taken seriously in a mechanistic, exhibitionistic culture like ours. There is an old graffiti joke in which a schoolboy Albert Einstein, my fellow INTP, hands in a paper declaring that e = mc² and the teacher returns it to him with a middling grade (of C+), a pale compliment (very nice, Albert) and an admonition that next time he must show his work. Einstein, of course, was European, and Americans don’t trust Europeans. America is practical, materialist and in love with its many gadgets and the information they provide. Gadgets give us our sense of self-worth and of what little magic we allow ourselves to believe in. In gadgets we trust, and in the gadgeteers that create them, and in the spreadsheets they produce.

Our parallel faith in credentials and grand titles (to say nothing of celebrity) is touchingly absolute and unexamined. We live in an information age, but our ideas about information are a little crimped, I would say. The very word credential suggests belief, not skepticism; if someone holds a credential, we tend to honor him and to go on honoring him no matter how stupid or inadequate he shows himself to be. Exhibit A: George W. Bush, who for some years held the rather prominent credential known as being president of the United States. But then, America is a culture of belief, a culture held together, however tenuously, by the beliefs of true believers, and by credentials, a form of gospel and, like gospel, unchallengeable.

For better or worse, the pieces that follow do offer a picture of America as that broad land has been experienced and understood by a native son, a homegrown INTP, a black sheep grazing in the feedlots of the homeland. The essays reflect, I imagine, that sheep-son’s eclectic reading and give many of the details of his escape from the clutches of Academe and cultural orthodoxy in its varied (and sometimes camouflaged) forms. They are the work, and represent the point of view, of an outsider. Being outside, like being inside, offers both advantages and disadvantages, but because there are far more insiders than outsiders, by a vast multiple, and because the vast majority of persons I’ve ever known aspire to be inside – to belong -- I have written on the assumption and in the hope that an outsider’s perspective, for all its shortcomings, limitations and weaknesses, is valuable simply for its being given at all.

I write, too, as a Protestant, though in a deeply cultural rather than a religious or creedal sense – as a child of the culture of Protestantism. There is much to deplore in the Protestant tradition, much of it visible in contemporary American culture, which seems to have produced, on the one hand, far more than its share of narcissists heedless of the rights and claims – and too often now the very lives -- of their fellow Americans and, on the other, a great many hell-and-brimstone televangelists with Southern accents and a habit of financial predation on the vulnerable.

Yet at the very heart of the Protestant Reformation we find the imperishable idea that the individual can have a direct relationship with God, without the need for ecclesiastical brokerage by popes, bishops or other such meddlesome (often Roman) grandees. All that is necessary is that the individual be able to read the word of God as given in the Bible, and so the individual must be able to read, and so he must be educated to be able to read. He must be made literate.

Protestantism, as I see it, thus fundamentally favors literacy and education. This is its true and enduring value. To the extent that movies began as entertainments for illiterate people, the movie industry amounts to a latter-day Counterreformation, and a successful one. Movies are the very antithesis of the Protestant literacy project. This does not fill one’s heart with love for movies, as I explain in Better Read.

The Protestant tradition tilts, furthermore, in favor of the individual as against the claims of various groups and tribes – especially those that have arranged themselves into unaccountable brokerages and oligarchies in distant capitals. The Protestant impulse is for power to the people, not to brokers, oligarchs, elites, tribal elders and autarchs. In this important if often messy respect, it has probably been the greatest force for democracy and human freedom over the last thousand years.

For all the dangers and failings of our Protestant-tinctured individualism, the fact remains that the individual is of unique significance in human affairs. The individual is the irreducible unit of all things human. In particular, only individuals can think. Groups cannot and do not think. Groupthink is an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. If human beings are still evolving, as I believe must be the case – if we are still evolving as moral actors, as I very much hope is the case – then I believe we must be evolving toward greater self-realization as individuals and away, however slowly, from the ancient tribal loyalties that are part of our heritage as pack animals.

In a Darwinian world, tribal feeling conduces to survival. We do live in a Darwinian world, but the world now is more than Darwinian. It is also post-Darwinian. It is both. Imperatives have emerged beyond those of simple survival, and they are ascendant. They will carry us to a new place, if we do not destroy ourselves first.

Americans from other cultural traditions, I have noticed – and modern America is a bouquet of cultural traditions -- often sound a communitarian note: We are all in this together, we must help one another, we mustn’t be selfish or self-absorbed, we must sacrifice for the greater good. One hears this kind of rhetoric coming from the political left in particular. We are We the People and only we the people.

Recently I saw the playwright Tony Kushner (writer of the screenplay for Steven Spielberg’s hagiographic movie Lincoln) tell the television interviewer Bill Moyers that government is good. Time stopped for me at that moment; the clocks froze, the sun itself paused in the sky. I thought: No, government is not good. Government can do good, but it can also do evil and must be kept an eye on. Government consists of people, and power corrupts people. Power is the universal solvent of human virtue. Lord Acton gave us a splendidly epigrammatic warning on this subject some years ago, and that was well before such notables as Hitler, Stalin and Mao came along to prove the point.

Yet communitarian music is immensely appealing because it tells people that they are not alone, and being alone is life’s greatest fear for any social animal. It tells people that they do belong or how they can come to belong. It tells people that the group will look out for them. It tells them, too, by implication and sometimes outright, that the individual is nothing without the group. Only groups really matter, in the communitarian model, and the individual thus only has meaning to the extent that he belongs to this or that group.

Certainly I would agree with the communitarians that the individual is virtually nothing as against the power of the group. The individual is always the little guy and always the underdog, and for that reason alone, the cause of the individual deserves to be championed. Groups have a way of looking out for their own interests. Any group is, at its core, a power arrangement, and power’s first task is always self-perpetuation. But just as only individuals can think, so too only individuals can be citizens in the true sense. A citizen must be able to think and must be autonomous; he will have many group and tribal attachments, but he will be more than the sum of those attachments. He will have a soul that is his own. And if an American must and can be anything, he must be a citizen.

Until September 11, 2001, my view of my native land was largely the view that had been inculcated in me since early childhood, when I was taught to face the flag, place my hand over my heart, recite the Pledge of Allegiance from memory and then sing The Star-Spangled Banner. My sense of America rose in response to various emotional cues: the waving flags, the stirring nationalist hymns and John Philip Souza marches, the mythical tales of battles and heroes, of Washington crossing the icy Delaware, the rockets’ red glare at Fort McHenry and Lincoln speaking at the hallowed ground of Gettysburg.

But in the wake of the terror attacks, I became aware that the emotional symbols of national identity were being manipulated for dark purposes. I became aware that American national identity was in fact more emotional rather than rational, and I began to suppose that this was so because it was easier to manipulate people through emotion than reasoned argument. If the people were permitted or encouraged to think rationally about their country and its political arrangements, they might come to see the need for serious change in those arrangements, and to work for such change.

But that wouldn’t do, of course. The powers that be wanted Americans to feel threatened and righteous so we would unthinkingly rally to the flag and vote for brave, chest-thumping politicians who would harvest the electorate’s tax dollars and feed them into the massive defense industry, and that is what apparently happened to many, although not to me.

The opposite happened to me. It irritated me, for instance, to be told that we had to have a new federal agency actually to defend the country – the Department of Homeland Security – because the so-called Department of Defense was too busy waging resource wars in faraway lands to be bothered with the drudgery of protecting these shores. Defense had become a euphemism worthy of Orwell, but no one said a word about it. Which was worse, I wondered, the euphemism or the silence with which it was accepted or not even noticed for what it was?

I found myself thinking harder than ever about America. What was it, exactly? What was I a part of? I disliked the crude emotional chain-yankings, all the televised hummings of The Battle-Hymn of the Republic, and I resolved to resist them. I found myself drawing an ever-sharper distinction in my mind between America – the land, its peoples and cultures, its customs and histories – and the United States of America, a political construct set up to meet certain needs and to be judged rationally and impartially as to whether or not it served the needs of its people, its citizens, or whether it had come to serve other and shadier masters.

America and the United States of America, I came to see, were not the same thing. I might love the land that was my birthplace and my home, but I did not love its government, and I began to dislike that government for its demands (sometimes its threatening demands) to be loved – a form of emotional abuse, really -- not to mention the blatant conflation of its identity with that of the land itself. The enormous propaganda campaign to convince the people that the U.S. government was America struck me as a kind of colossal and brazen identity theft. Government is not a thing to be loved any more than it is a thing to be hated. It is merely an implement, like a nail gun, and is, at its best, useful. Even at its best, its usefulness is limited; government is an instrument of coercion and a clumsy one. If that instrument is not useful, if it no longer serves the ends for which it was constituted, or actually comes to disserve those ends, it should be changed or replaced.

The European Union does not seem to be taken too seriously in the United States or for that matter in many quarters of Europe these days as an exemplary exercise in power and government, but whatever its structural and operational shortcomings, the lack of passion it excites among those who live within its jurisdiction is to my mind entirely commendable. No one will ever go to war to save the EU. States are permitted to come and go from the EU according to their own interests and preferences.

The EU is a rationally constituted and run entity, no more and no less. In this important sense it is a far superior model for the future than is our own United States of America, which is held together by fiery passions, including a good deal of that most radioactive of passions, fear.

Of course, the Europeans have learned some hard lessons in the recent past about the dangers of tribal passion and nationalist fervor, and the nature of the EU reflects that learning. We learned quite a different set of lessons from our own Civil War, and our own federal government reflects that learning. I think, to say the least, we have learned far less than the Europeans. Of course, there is still a long way to go, if we are lucky.

•••

The Civil War is at the heart of my treatise The Federalist Regained, which I offer here in a form somewhat modified from its first appearance as a free-standing e-tract. Despite the centrality of the Civil War to the argument presented in the Federalist, the text has almost nothing to say about the question at the heart of the war, that Great American Question – the constitutionality of secession – though in a long-ago essay (reproduced in Patchwork in 2010) I did make the rash claim that that matter had never been adjudicated. I repeated the claim in a few comments on the website of the Economist magazine in 2012, and the magazine obliquely replied a week or two later by mentioning the 1869 case of Texas v. White, whose ruling, the magazine claimed, made secession illegal.

Texas v. White is indeed an interesting case for any number of reasons, not least of which is that it is seldom referred to in the American public square or even in American legal circles. It was not once mentioned in the several courses in constitutional law I took as a law student. When a case on such an important subject is not often mentioned, it is reasonable to wonder whether the law it purports to state has, with time, been found wanting.

The secession question arises in White as a jurisdictional matter. The Supreme Court, to reach the merits of the case – pertaining to Texas’s transfer of federal bonds during the Civil War – first had to decide whether Texas remained a state of the Union throughout the Civil War, since the Court’s original jurisdiction (as given in Article III, Section 2 of the Constitution) is limited to, inter alia, controversies ... between a State and citizens of another State. If the Court concluded that Texas, by virtue of its secession from the Union in March 1861, was not in fact a state when the bonds in question changed hands early in 1865, then the Court would have no jurisdiction to decide the merits of the case.

It is notable that the Court’s view of secession is very much ex post facto – in other words, given well after the fact. When the Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederacy in the early months of 1861, there was no Supreme Court opinion, or any language in the Constitution itself, suggesting that a state lacked the authority to leave the Union. It is notable, too, that the Court’s opinion does not contend that secession violates or is inconsistent with any specific language or provision of the Constitution.

The opinion in White was written by Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase, who had served as treasury secretary in Lincoln’s war cabinet and was appointed to the Court by Lincoln in 1864. Chase’s close association with Lincoln is by itself enough to tell us that his view of secession was a foregone conclusion. In fact, it is the same view Lincoln gave in his first inaugural address in March 1861, right down the importance of the word perpetual.

Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address doesn’t get quite the attention it deserves. Despite some lovely phrasing at the end, it is not taken to be a rhetorical masterpiece the way the Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg addresses are. Yet, unlike those two later compositions, it is rich in substance. It lays out Lincoln’s policy views on the pressing matters of slavery and secession. It explains much.

As I point out in The Federalist Regained, the Union had originally been described as perpetual in the Articles of Confederation (the country’s first constitution, adopted in 1781), but that word does not appear in the present Constitution, which replaced the Articles in 1787. Chief Justice Chase claimed that the more perfect union language in the Constitution’s preamble must incorporate the Articles’ idea of perpetual union because, as he apparently saw it, making the Union other than perpetual would be to introduce an imperfection and would therefore amount to a regression. Lincoln had laid down the template for this argument in the First Inaugural.

No doubt both Lincoln and Chase believed that this was so, that the Constitution’s more perfect union must be no less perpetual than that of the Articles, but there is no logic to the view. We could as easily suppose otherwise: that a non-perpetual union would be more flexible and thus more adaptable to changing and unforeseeable circumstances in the future.

It is more reasonable to suppose that perpetual was intentionally omitted from the 1787 Constitution. The evidence at hand tells us that the drafters of these two charters (which are separated in time by less than a decade) could not have simply forgotten to say whether the union of the states was meant to be perpetual under the new constitution as it had been under the old. The evidence suggests instead that that word was in their minds when they drew up the Articles but was withdrawn when the Constitution was drafted soon after. It would have been easy enough to carry the word over, after all. It is hard to explain its absence in any other way than that they meant to drop it.

The further fact that the Constitution nowhere forbids secession strongly implies (to me, at least) that secession was to be allowed, though not encouraged. It could be argued that the Tenth Amendment, which sweepingly reserves to the states powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, was meant to, and does, include the most important power of all, the power to leave the Union, to dissolve the marriage. Texas v. White says not a word about the Tenth Amendment.

Lincoln contended, in his First Inaugural, that even if the Constitution were to be understood as nothing more than a kind of contract among the states, it would nonetheless be impermissible for a state simply to leave on its own. In the true spirit of the small-town contracts lawyer he had long been, he argued that such a departure would amount to breach of contract, since only by the consent of all concerned parties could a contract be lawfully rescinded. For a state to get out of the union, in other words, it would have to obtain the consent of the other states as well as the United States