About Donald Rumsfeld's Comparison of Iraq and the Civil War
I've been reading a book about the Civil War and Ulysses S. Grant-and I'm not going to compare the two, don't get me wrong, don't anybody rush off and say he doesn't get the difference between Iraq and the Civil War. The fact of the matter is, the casualties were high, the same kinds of concerns that we're expressing here were expressed then. [The people then] were despairing, they were hopeful, they were concerned, they were combative…the carnage was horrendous, and it was worth it.
Powerful words, to be sure, but the sentiment will not appear new to those familiar with Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s famous October 1949 Partisan Review article, "The Causes of the Civil War: A Note on Historical Sentimentalism," or readers of his recent autobiography, A Life in the 20th Century: Innocent Beginnings, 1917-1950 (2000), in which he recalls the intellectual climate that prompted him to write the piece.
Charles and Mary Beard had downplayed slavery as the cause of the Civil War in The Rise of American Civilization (1927), one of many works by historians in the post-World War I years that compared the First Great War with America's own bitter fratricidal conflict, viewing both as events the nation should have avoided. The Beards had largely blamed the war on the rise of industrial capitalism, while most Civil War revisionists more commonly blamed the irrational excesses of hotheaded abolitionists in the North and proslavery spokesmen in the South. Avery Craven made such an argument in his The Repressible Conflict (1939), and in the mid-1940s James G. Randall joined Craven in downplaying slavery as the key factor behind the war.
Schlesinger, however, joined historian, literary critic, and novelist Bernard DeVoto on the other side of a quite bitter war of words. De Voto's stinging criticisms of the Civil War revisionists appeared in his Harper's Easy Chair editorials in February and March 1946. Schlesinger's 1949 article was an even more thorough indictment of the revisionists and included the memorable lines (which Schlesinger quotes in his autobiography):
To say there 'should' have been no abolitionists in America before the Civil War is about as sensible as to say that there 'should' have been no anti-Nazis in the nineteen-thirties or that there 'should' be no anti-Communists today.
Rather more eloquent than the current secretary of defense, to be sure (though Rumsefeld's remarks were extemporaneous, while Schlesinger, Jr.'s were carefully crafted), the sentiment is remarkably similar. And Schlesinger's recent recounting of the historiographical skimish of more than half a century ago further fleshes out the parallel with Rumsfeld: Schelsinger writes: "The Civil War seemed to present almost as stark a clash of irreconcilable ideologies as the war against Nazism."
Historians of American thought will recognize in the historiographical debate the much discussed shift in American thought from moral relativism to moral absolutism in the period from the end of World War I to the late 1940s, a shift that owed no small debt to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr's "rediscovery of sin" in his books Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), The Nature and Destiny of Man (2 vols., 1941 and 1943) and The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944), and, of course, to the horrors of Nazi genocide and the rise of totalitarianism. The Civil War increasingly came to be viewed not as an avoidable tragedy but as a vital crusade against evil. Fascism, and later Communism, in the late 1940s, were paralleled with slavery; all three systems came to be viewed as cancer growths that had to be rooted out for the good of humanity.
A moral high ground was established through the parallel, and this is the same hallowed playing field that Rumsfeld invoked in his closing remarks. Whether one accepts that invocation of a moral high ground will depend a good deal on both one's proclivity for moral absolutes and one's feelings about the current administration. For supporters of Bush, Rumsfeld, and the War on Terror, the Iraq situation might indeed be equated with the Civil War and deemed a tragic conflict that has to be fought and won for the greater good, for the safety of America, and for the survival of democracy and the liberation of Iraqis and other oppressed peoples. Critics of the administration might underscore the interesting fact that Rumsfeld was reading a biography not of Lincoln, a war president, but of Grant, a war general and peacetime president, whose administration was mired in charges of corruption. Tragically, the pictures chronicling the abuse of Iraqi prisoners muddy the moral high ground and complicate even further the parallel with the Civil War; though it should be remembered that prisoner abuse scandals are part of the history of that conflict too. Andersonville became an infamous place in the minds of Southerners and some Northern observers, just as Abu Ghraib has become for Iraqis and for many American observers.
For students of history, the historical and historiographical parallels are fascinating. And surely Rumsfeld would have done better to read a biography of Lincoln, rather than one of Grant, or even better one with detailed coverage of Woodrow Wilson's handling of World War I (and the many civil liberties issues on the homefront) or FDR's handling of World War II, or Lyndon Johnson's, or Richard Nixon's handling of Vietnam. The Civil War has clearly been a moral lodestone for the ages since, but the nation's presidents and their oft-embattled cabinet members have fought numerous wars, large and small, on the homefront and abroad, in the last century and a third. The lessons to be drawn from those conflicts will, as they always have, depend in no small part on the purposes, intellectual, moral, or political, of the historians and politicians who understand the power of a usable past. Whether Rumsfeld's invocation of the powerful memory of the Civil War will serve his purposes remains to be seen.