William Faulkner: The De Gaulle Story. Volume III of Faulkner: A Comprehensive Guide to the Brodsky Collection. Edited by Louis Daniel Brodsky and Robert W. Hamblin. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1984).

Originally published in Interpretation: A Journal of Political Philosophy. Volume 17, Number 3, Spring 1990.

 

In Hollywood, William Faulkner wrote a screenplay about Charles de Gaulle. A surprising nexus: the General can be located plausibly in neither Yoknapatawpha nor Los Angeles County. Nor, in a way, can Faulkner. Yoknapatahpha is the fictional version of Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner lived among but not with “all my relations and fellow townsmen, including the borrowers and frank spongers,” who “all prophesied I’d never be more than a bum.” (A modern novelist, they might have replied, is still worse.) As for 1940s Hollywood, self-fictionalizing, its citizenry had suspicions, too. The head of Warner Brothers’ steno pool recalled, “We heard that he was coming. When we saw this little man, quiet and grey, who was sweet and kind and soft-spoken, we said, ‘This is a talent?'”

But some of these appearances deceive. History and culture do bind France with Faulkner’s part of the American South. In 1682, La Salle claimed for France what became Mississippi, and Lafayette County’s name commemorates the French marquis better known to Americans than to the French. By 1817, when Mississippi entered the Union, Southerners already admired the chevaliers of the Middle Ages; such novels as Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, which appeared five years later, enjoyed considerable popularity there. Gothicism entails a nostalgic defiance of modernity, yielding, among other things, natural and imitation aristocrats who lack the material and technical power to win the wars they courageously fight.

Edgar Allan Poe, the parodist from Virginia, understood Gothicism as well as did any American. His sardonic aestheticism (Gothicism’s anti-matter) anticipated Baudelaire’s independent reaction by two decades. (“Do you know why I so patiently translated Poe [beginning in 1846]? Because he resembled me.”) The fascination with death; l’art pour l’art; the mockery of heroes—all these went well with defeat, both its anticipation and its aftermath, in the South (1865) and in France (1871). A new generation of British poets tasted the French concoction (at age 25 Swinburne reviewed Les Fleurs du Mal in The Spectator) before decadents of both countries came into vogue at the beginning of the twentieth century among literary American Southerners. Faulkner (born 1897) drank deep. Hugh Kenner locates him precisely; “Faulkner’s miscalled Mississippi Gothic is more nearly a Mississippi estheticism.” One should add only that ironist aesthetes reacted to the straight-faced aesthetic of Gothicism, so their project makes little sense without its rival. Aesthetes consider this cross-fertilization. Others (for example, those who prefer to win wars) might consider it cross-sterilization.

Mule-stubborn Bill Faulkner came from a prolific line of businessmen, politicians, and drunkards. Drunkenness, predating both Gothicism and aestheticism as a means of escape, of course does not exclude those latter-day strategies; as Faulkner’s biographer Joseph Blotner ruefully jokes, many of the prominent Décadents were alcoholics, and Faulkner rejected neither his familial nor his artistic heritage in this regard. As an escape-method, lying predates even drunkenness, and Faulkner could combine those, as well. (“After a few drinks, he would tell people anything,” his wife noted.) While there may be some truth in wine, there aren’t many facts—and besides, Faulkner drank bourbon. Toward his life’s end, he amiably told undergraduates, “I don’t have much patience with facts, and any writer is a congenital liar to begin with or he wouldn’t take up writing.” He called the people in one of his novels partly real, partly fictional; “thus I improved on God, who, dramatic though He be, has no sense, no feeling, for theatre.”

This proud theatricality—of history, of culture, and of character—better suited Faulkner to Hollywood, and Hollywood to Faulkner, than either cared to admit. He first worked there in 1932, for MGM, where Irving Thalberg collected literary reputations. For the next thirteen years Faulkner wrote screenplays in Hollywood and novels in Mississippi. The movie work supported him and his family. He did it conscientiously, working on 48 film projects, of which eighteen were produced. At the not-rare times Hollywood began to wear, he would take sick leave and dose himself with Old Grand Dad.

Faulkner came to work for Warner Brothers after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his attempts to enlist in the Air Force and the Navy politely turned aside. Hollywood too was war duty. Jack Warner placed his studio at the service of his friend, President Roosevelt. (“I virtually commuted to the White House,” Warner recalled. “Court jester I was, and proud of it….”) Roosevelt wanted, and Warner ordered, a movie dramatizing General Charles de Gaulle, exiled in London since June 1940 when he became the only member of the French cabinet to publicly oppose the armistice with Nazi Germany.

De Gaulle interested Faulkner, who read the early biography done by Philippe Barrès. “This man bore none of the marks of our epoch,” Barrès wrote after his first interview with the General. “There is something elemental which gave him force, the expression of a soldier and a peasant.” De Gaulle was a pre-décadence Frenchman, a sort of virtuous Southerner, if you will. He was also an unusually realistic one, no Gothicist. Unlike Heidegger, who fetched his nostalgia from even farther back in history than Gothicists did, imagining the “inner truth and greatness” of Nazism to inhere in an anti-technological vision, as early as 1934 de Gaulle saw Hitler’s massive arsenal of tanks and airplanes and supposed they were meant for use. In his first radio speech to the French after arriving in London, de Gaulle said, “Crushed today by a mechanical force, we can vanquish in the future by a superior mechanical force. The future of the world is there.” De Gaulle partook of classical virtue while appreciating the power of modernity; this tension defined his life. As one brought up on stories of Souther chivalrists defeated by Yankee materièl—one, moreover, who invented stories of aristocratic Sartorises retreating before the vulgar tribe of Snopes—Faulkner surely saw some of this.

He gave “The De Gaulle Story” two foci. One was de Gaulle himself, the other a pair of fictional brothers, Georges and Jean. Faulkner explained that Georges “represents the French individual as de Gaulle represents the abstract idea of Free France.” Georges possesses “all the French middle-class virtues,” especially patriotism and humaneness. Although the bourgeoisie is “that class which by tradition is democratic, which is the backbone of any democracy,” Faulkner also included other “representative individuals”—a peasant, a priest, a music teacher, a factory worker—enough to symbolize “all France.”

Home on leave during the days before the Nazi blitzkrieg, Georges plans to marry the daughter of the village mayor. The young man’s spiritedness leads to acrimonious debate with his future father-in-law concerning the utility of the Maginot Line. Colonel de Gaulle, commander of the tank school where Georges trained, wrote a book (Vers l’armée de métier, 1934) advocating mechanized counteroffensive as the indispensable complement to fortification. The mayor dismisses Georges’ Gaullist criticisms of French strategy as impudent subversion, and temporarily cancels the wedding. Faulkner cannot resist contriving a messenger to interrupt their second argument with news of the Nazi invasion of Holland—the beginning of the flanking maneuver which rendered the Maginot Line useless.

The real statesman in the village is not the mayor but the priest. Faulkner introduces him at church, delivering a sermon with the tantalizing first line, “In the beginning was the earth.” Omitting such phrases as “God created” and “the heavens” gives the sentence a decidedly secular tone; while this very republican cleric does go on to deplore the blessing of guns “in the name of ultimate peace,” and attributes this sacrilege to the fact that “We have deposed Him,” he concludes with an appeal to French patriotism. Later, after Georges kills a Nazi officer, the priest counsels him to seek absolution “where all Frenchmen must, and find it where all Frenchmen will: in the freeing of France.”

As the priest is a statesman, so de Gaulle’s statesmanship is a priesthood. Faulkner shows de Gaulle urging the last cabinet of the Third Republic to resist Nazi tyranny, then welcoming the first Free French recruits in the name of liberty. As he review his troops, we hear that the name “De Gaulle” does better than raise the dead in France; “it raises the living.” Later, a soldier who heeded a Vichyite’s appeal to return to France comes back to de Gaulle; we are given to understand that a politically dead man has returned to life. De Gaulle’s final speech in the screenplay predicts the liberation of the French from “the enemies of France.” Faulkner’s de Gaulle, is prophet, priest, and “Chief of all Frenchmen who want to be free.” Political salvation is Faulkner’s theme. It also would be one of de Gaulle’s themes in his Mémoires de guerre, whose third volume is titled Le Salut.

De Gaulle himself disappears almost entirely in the screenplay’s second half, as French salvation requires that Gaullist spirit animate the French. We see this in the conversion of Georges’ older brother, Jean, a navy officer who begins by collaborating with the Nazis, in a limited way, out of fidelity to the military command structure. Jean finally aids the Resistants after he sees their martyrs’ courage; one of them saves Jean’s life before sacrificing his own. Jean “save[s] his soul,” as one Resistant says, by as it were becoming Georges; he substitutes himself for his brother (now a confidant of de Gaulle and key man in the Underground) in a Nazi jail cell. One might say that the re-founding of the city, France, requires both an Abel who resists and a Cain who sacrifices himself.

Returned to his village, Georges needs one more act of charity to complete his physical salvation. The priest ships him out in a coffin, enabling Georges’ later resurrection. The Nazis expose the priest, murdering him after he spits in one of their faces—a gesture disregarding traditional pieties about turning the other cheek. Having metamorphosed the Old Testament story of Cain and Able, Faulkner metamorphoses the New Testament story of Jesus and Lazarus.

In the screenplay’s penultimate scene, Georges hears the good news that his wife has borne their child. The priest had insisted on Georges’ marriage during the war, in order to moderate his spiritedness—to make him serve life, not merely risk it. The birth demonstrates the priest’s posthumous success. Faulkner himself would arrange a wartime union or marriage between statesmanship and Christianity. In his final scene he shows the Resistants setting fires all across France, lighting the way for Allied bombers. The Christian imagery of an obscure childbirth thus anticipates the Christian imagery of apocalypse. The coming and second coming of a savior are clearly indicated.

Warner Brothers never produced “The De Gaulle Story.” Editors Brodsky and Hamblin, following Joseph Blotner, propose several reasons: De Gaulle quarreled with Churchill, whose “attitudes were communicated to Roosevelt,” who communicated them to Warner, who canceled the project; producer Robert Buckner despaired of finding an actor to play de Gaulle; Fighting France representatives in the U. S. criticized the script; another script, “Mission to Moscow,” received higher priority.

Roosevelt’s apparent veto must have decided the matter. FDR hardly needed Churchill to make him distrust de Gaulle. Churchill more or less kept faith with the French from the beginning to the end of the war. But Roosevelt and his State Department quickly turned away, preferring to deal with Vichy and a series of dubious pretenders. In November of 1943, when Faulkner’s work was halted, the Allies invaded North Africa; de Gaulle was excluded from the operation at Roosevelt’s insistence, over Churchill’s cautious objections. De Gaulle had anticipated this. In October he wrote an eloquent letter to Roosevelt, warning that “If France, when liberated by the victory of the democracies, will drive her to submitting to other influences. You know which ones.” Roosevelt never replied. Neither he nor the State Department personnel who read the letter worried much about postwar Communism.

The film Mission to Moscow confirms this. In his memoirs, Jack Warner extends warm self-congratulations on his studio’s wartime efforts. “We had taken on Hitler, Mussolini, Hirohito, Tojo, and the rest of the totalitarian mob in one gutty picture after another.” Unfortunately, there was more than one totalitarian mob in those days, as Brodksy and Hamblin observe: “Ostensibly a documentary based on [Joseph E.] Davies experiences in Russia in 1936, Mission to Moscow was designed by Davies and Warner Brothers, with the encouragement and full support of President Roosevelt and the Office of War Information, to sell the American public on the idea that Joseph Stalin would be an acceptable ally in the struggle against Adolf Hitler. To accomplish this purpose, however, the makers of the film played fast and loose with important historical facts, most notably by justifying both the Soviet purge trials of the 1930s and the Soviet invasion of Finland in 1941 as appropriate and necessary responses to the threat of Nazism. Judging by Stalin’s willingness to allow Mission to Moscow to be shown in the Soviet Union, the film apparently succeeded….” Whether or not Moscow actually displaced “De Gaulle” at Warner Brothers, film history does parallel diplomatic history, here.

Buckner exclaimed of the character de Gaulle in “De Gaulle,” “What a casting problem!” True enough: Claude Rains, though good at imitating Frenchmen, would not suffice, although Buckner did suggest making de Gaulle an invisible man in the film (“Why show de Gaulle? Why not just talk about him?”). The French questioned de Gaulle’s role in another way: Faulkner had made it too small to justify the use of the General’s name in the title. However trivial and contradictory, these objections to suggest that, somehow, Faulkner’s characterization of de Gaulle is the central problem with “The De Gaulle Story.” The fault is simple and fundamental. Faulkner’s conception of statesmanship cannot quite account for de Gaulle. De Gaulle must disappear from the film, given this conception.

One Resistant has a speech on the subject: “All [the Nazis] have to threaten us with is death. And little people are not afraid to die. The little people, and the very great. Because there is something of the little people in the very great: as if all the little people who had been trodden and crushed had condensed into one great one who knew and remembered all their suffering.” After enduring too many French criticisms of his work, Faulkner wrote to Buckner, “Let’s dispense with General de Gaulle as a living character in the story,” thus ridding Warner Brothers of the need for the Gaullists’ imprimatur. “Any historical hero, angel or villain, is no more than the figurehead of his time. He is only the sum of his acts, only the sum of the little people whom he slew or raised, enslaved or made free.” One should note that Faulkner’s democratic/historicist assessment of “historical” heroes did not apply to artists. His daughter, whom he cherished, once tried to talk him out of starting a drinking bout. “Think of me,” she pleaded (he usually could be depended upon to do so). Faulkner was still sober enough, and perhaps just drunk enough, to deliver an unanswerable reply: “Nobody remembers Shakespeare’s children.”

Although a statesman likely takes popular opinion more seriously than an artist must, de Gaulle exceeded “his time,” the sum of “the people.” Faulkner saw materials testifying to that. Barrès recalls, “I left General de Gaulle, not carried away—he’s too cold to produce that impression—but convinced that I had just seen a man.” The coldness of de Gaulle’s manliness suggests something more than spiritedness in his soul. It suggests moderation and prudence. In Barrès’ best chapter, de Gaulle gives a concise, masterly overview of wartime geopolitics. Speaking in November of 1940, de Gaulle tells Barrès that Hitler “knows perfectly well the war he has unleashed is a world war and that it can end only in a total victory for him, [or] for us.” Hitler also knows “it is the United States which holds the balance of power.” Hitler’s designs on Africa thus aim at South and Central America. With the Panama Canal closed by Axis troops, the United States could not quickly transfer ships between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; German and Japanese forces then would bring a devastating two-front war to North America. “This war is a struggle for strategic bases,” de Gaulle concluded. Barrès adds that “the democracies, governed by untrained masses and by rather shortsighted businessmen and politicians, have been incapable of comprehending the fantastic breadth of view and the cynical ambition of the group of ruthless men who govern totalitarian Germany.” Many of de Gaulle’s contemporary speeches sound the same themes.

Given these sources, Faulkner should have appreciated the statesman’s capacity to comprehend the tyrant’s comprehension. Faulkner did not. He therefore could not assume the statesmanlike artist’s responsibility to present both comprehensions. Faulkner’s mind did not calculate efficiently (he once enrolled in a college math course as an antidote to fuzzy thinking, but quickly dropped out). He knew petty calculators—Snopes—well enough. But great calculators were beyond him.

One doubly regrets this because “The De Gaulle Story” remains a brilliant screenplay, reflecting the remarkable specimen of human nature who wrote it. Like so many drunks, Southerners, and Frenchmen, Faulkner combined sentimentality with cynicism, orotundity with debunking wit. But Faulkner also had a strength of character that bent in the wind but never broke in a gale. When his firstborn daughter died in infancy, when his young brother died in an airplane crash, Faulkner did what needed doing, without bourbon. He could endure major comic adversities, too—staying sober at his second daughter’s wedding, a dispiriting event in the life of any man. And on public matters, in his last ten years he said things worth heeding about Americans and our relations with the Soviet Union, criticizing his countrymen from the perspective of a moral strength that had nothing to do with moralism. [1]

Gothicism, the romance of ruined Christianity, and Decadence, the romance of ruined Satanism, provoked the literary ‘modernists’ (we need a better word) to “make it new,” to rebuild or rediscover the foundations of human life. The question of the extent to which this enterprise requires a builder’s ingenuity or a discoverer’s intelligence, is a question familiar to careful students of politics. But not one of the English-speaking ‘modernists’ succeeded politically. Not one adequately integrated politics into his recreation or imitation of the world. None of them got far enough beyond the Gothic and Décadent denigration of politics. This denigration went with the denigration of prudence.

As he grew older, Faulkner may have glimpsed this. He envisioned another life for himself: “I’d want to come back a buzzard. Nothing hates him or envies him or wants him or needs him. He is never bothered or in danger, and he can eat anything.” The sharp-eyed buzzard, unblinking toward death, who both rises to an overview and descends to the particulars, who excites little comment in either Mississippi or California, and who doesn’t work hard for a living—he, more than the dog, is the philosophic animal. Faulkner was on to something, there. He needed only a more calculating mind to realize it.

 

NOTE

1. After some West Point cadets were expelled for cheating, Faulkner said, “They are victims of that whole generation of their fathers, teachers, governors, who promulgated and put on public record the postulate of national fear of our national character: that Americans as individuals or in the mass are incapable of independence, courage, endurance, sacrifice; that in time of trouble we will not hold together since our character is not in the brain nor in the heart, but in the appetites, the entrails; incapable of independence, so we have made charity a national institution; incapable of decision and discipline and government, so we have transferred control of the individual’s slightest action into federal bureaus….” Faulkner declined a State Department request to tour the Soviet Union on the grounds that the Russia which produced Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gogol… is no longer there.” “If I who have had freedom all my life in which to write truth exactly as I saw it, visited Russia, the fact of even the outward appearance of condoning the condition in which the present Russian government has established, would be a betrayal, not of the giants: nothing can harm them, but of their spiritual heirs who rik their lives with every page they write; and a lie in that it would condone the shame of them who might have been their heirs who have lost more than life: who have had their souls destroyed for the privilege of writing in public.” In a fittingly less lofty tone, he replied to Khruschev’s prediction, “We will bury you”: “That funeral will occur about ten minutes after the police bury gambling.”

 

Robert Nisbet: Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Partnership. Washington: Regnery Gateway, 1988.

Originally published in The Washington Times, March 20, 1989.

 

Erstwhile Republican Party presidential candidate Wendell Willkie visited Stalin during World War II. “Stalin likes a pretty heavy turnover of young people in his immediate entourage,” Willkie perceived. “It is his way, I think, of keeping his ear to the ground.”

To smile at such ineffable naivete smacks somewhat of Oscar Wilde laughing at the death of Little Nell: It is an altogether better response to a work of fiction than to events in the real world. Too-Olympian gaiety may land one in jail, or bring on some other severe test of good humor. Although Socrates triumphed at this, purchasing a sort of intellectual immortality at the cost of his physical demise, moderns (like Wilde) typically bring fewer spiritual resources to the test, ending pitiably.

In political extremities, laughter makes sense only for philosophers and tyrants. Stalin understood this, and held up the tyrants’ end. When American First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy met Charles de Gaulle at the French embassy in Washington, she asked, “General, of all the great men you have met, which one had the best sense of humor?” “Stalin, madame,” the General intoned. Willkie found that out, too: “Once I was telling him of the Soviet schools and libraries I had seen—how good they had seemed to me. And I added, ‘But if you continue to educate the Russian people, Mr. Stalin, the first thing you know you’ll educate yourself out of a job.’ He threw back his head and laughed. Nothing I said to him, or heard anyone else say to him, through two long evenings, seemed to amuse him so much.”

Still, there were limits even to Stalinist mirth. De Gaulle remembered, “Stalin said only one serious thing to me: ‘In the end, death is the only winner.'” Like any serious political man, Stalin wanted to win, so he made himself into an angel of death, a transfiguration that may account for the turnover of young people in his immediate entourage.

“Stalin was an unnatural man,” Winston Churchill said. Why did Churchill and de Gaulle see this, while Franklin Delano Roosevelt did not? ‘American innocence,’ Europeans will answer, forgetting that Stalin (and Hitler) duped more Europeans than Americans, and as a result killed more of them, too.

Name one 18th- or 19th-century American statesman who would not have recognized Stalin for what he was. The old republicans suspected political power, jealously guarded themselves against usurpations of their rights. Many 20th-century democrats trust, almost worship state power. They fawn over tyrants, not merely hoping to overcome the will-to-death with the will-to-love (Christian hope centers on that possibility) not only hoping (much less plausibly) to make Christian love politically successful, but actually mistaking the tyrannical will-to-death for a vigorous program of social improvement.

Noted conservative author Robert Nisbet brings out this tragicomic theme of unrequited love, calling Roosevelt’s policy toward Stalin a “failed courtship.” Why was it even attempted?

Nisbet narrates the matter concisely. “The Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939,” Nisbet writes, “was a jolt to the White House and the liberal mind in America.” Peace between the world’s arch-‘reactionary’ regime and the Fatherland of the Revolution, at the expense of European democracy, was supposed to have been the stuff of red-baiters hallucinations.

Less than two years later Hitler ended the embarrassment by betraying Stalin (who, like all con artists, couldn’t believe anyone would make a sucker out of him). This caused a new dilemma, one more amenable to a purely rhetorical solution. “The war,” Nisbet writes, “could no longer be called one of ‘democracy’ vs. totalitarianism.'” It was decided to call Leftist totalitarianism protodemocracy. FDR’s most trusted advisor, Harry Hopkins, “regretted that the Soviet Union tended toward totalitarianism, but he was hopeful for its future, given its egalitarian philosophy.” So was Roosevelt.

After fulsomely welcoming Stalin to the alliance, Roosevelt “fought hard to offset, to root out, American—especially religious—dislike of the Soviets.” At one memorable press conference, he cited Article 124 of the “Constitution of Russia” (as he called it), which guaranteed “freedom of religion.” Nisbet rightly identifies this as a deliberate lie by a rhetorician who assumed the American people would never fight unless they imagined some stark contrast between Nazis and Communists. Predictably, it didn’t take too long for the rhetorician to start listening to himself. After the notorious Yalta Conference in February 1945, Roosevelt baptized Stalin (who had studied for the priesthood) as something of a “Christian gentleman” in behavior if not conviction.

Many conservatives have denounced Yalta as the place where Roosevelt sacrificed Eastern Europe; Nisbet sees that substantial concessions had already occurred in Teheran in November 1943, where, “in less than an hour the President had given [Stalin] what he wanted in Poland and the Baltic States.” In return, Roosevelt demanded a “plebiscite” in those countries to determine their rulers; Stalin quickly agreed, stipulation that elections would be held “in accordance with the Soviet constitution.” The two men further agreed in disliking France generally, de Gaulle in particular, and the British Empire—all bulwarks against any future Soviet expansion, not so incidentally. Yalta performed the different yet “invaluable service of giving moral legitimation to what Stalin had acquired by sheer force,” compelling East Europeans to abandon democracy and sovereignty in the name of democracy and sovereignty. “Of one thing I am certain,” FDR concluded. “Stalin is not an imperialist.”

Churchill was an imperialist. Imperialism was ‘reactionary.’ Therefore, FDR deduced, Soviet communism must offer a greater potential for democracy than the British Empire. Churchill replied, “British imperialism has spread, and is spreading democracy more widely than any other system of government since the beginning of time.” FDR failed to see things that way, telling his son (in an incident Nisbet does not mention) that the end of British and French imperialism would bring unheard-of wealth to the United States and the democracies generally.

Nisbet finds the “intellectual roots” of Rooseveltian illusions regarding Leftist totalitarianism in the thought of Woodrow Wilson, whom FDR had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War. “Making the world safe for democracy” meant making it safe from the old empires whose ambitions had ignited that war. “It never occurred to Roosevelt to see the structure of Soviet society as being close to that of Nazi Germany, as, in other words, totalitarian in both cases.” The new liberalism of Wilson and Roosevelt was a boneless liberalism. It admired not stability under prudently designed institutions but forward flow, resolute ‘progress,’ a secular equivalent of the Holy Spirit called ‘History.’

Without the resistance of stable institutions or individuals who claim unalienable, natural rights, progressivism seeks discipline from ‘leaders.’ For the new statesmen, leadership replaces governing. Nisbet remarks that FDR’s unconstitutional “National Recovery Act” would have further empowered the president. When the Supreme Court struck it down, Roosevelt made one of his few unpopular domestic moves, trying to add to the number of justices in order to pack the Court with progressives. FDR wanted constitutions, American or ‘Russian,’ to mean what he said they meant, the better to lead Americans where he wanted them to go.

De Gaulle considered Roosevelt a man whose idealism cloaked ambition, first of all from Roosevelt’s own eyes. Roosevelt never saw the dangers of Marxist ideology because his own ideology resembled it. Marxism and progressivist liberalism share a genealogy—not simply “socialism, populism, nationalism, and the whole idea of ‘redemptive revolution,'” as Nisbet writes, and not only a dreamed-of egalitarian society, but an underlying commitment to the Left-Hegelian current of German historicism. In the highest sense, Germany had already conquered Russia’s and America’s ‘Left’ elites before a shot was fired—in World War I, let alone World War II.

Hegel had responded philosophically to the Christian critique of both classical and modern rationalism. Reason—thought animated by the principle of non-contradiction—appears too rigid, in Hegel’s view, to account for the Holy Spirit that blows where it listeth, giving eternal life as surely as the breath of God animated clay on the sixth day of Creation. Replacing the Holy Spirit of the providential, Creator-God who rules the course of events from a position ‘above’ it, with the ‘Absolute Spirit’ he held to be immanent in all things, Hegel invents a logic that eschews the principle of non-contradiction in the classical sense. ‘History’ becomes the dialectical unfolding of the Absolute Spirit. In Hegelian or ‘historical’ logic, contradictory forces and things at first clash but then combine or ‘synthesize’ to produce new and higher forms of life, including human beliefs, thoughts, customs, and institutions. The stable structure or forms of nature as conceived by previous philosophers give way to movement, fluidity, a series of historical changes that will eventuate in the ‘end of history,’ the culmination of all previous events into one coherent and stable whole.

It seems paradoxical to find that this attempt to do justice to life would itself ‘evolve’ into the most malignant, death-dealing political ‘movements,’ Nazism and communism. This happened because what gives human life its movement is usually not reason but passion. In becoming ‘dialectical’ in the evolutionary, Hegelian way, thinking became impassioned. In politics, where the spirited passions of indignation, ambition, and rage predominate, this can easily lead to death, and on a mass scale. The spirited passions blinded and used the reasoning powers which might have corrected them. Reason in effect blinded itself by imitating passions, by denying itself the very power of abstraction which enables human beings to detach themselves from their passions and to judge. This is why historicists of all varieties denounce ‘abstraction,’ make a fetish of ‘concrete’ thinking and, even more resolute action guided only be ‘concrete,’ i.e., immanent thought. In the end, death is the only winner. With neither a Creator-God nor rational human minds capable of rising above the course of events to judge them, whatever ‘is’ is right.

Under the aegis of certain forms of historicism, fatality animated modern tyranny or totalitarianism. I mean by this fatality both in the sense of something held to be inevitable, irresistible, and something that ends in death. Churchill and de Gaulle knew this, or at least sensed it, and they resisted it, in both its Leftist and Rightist forms. In alliance with Roosevelt, they defeated the Rightist form. They lacked the power to block Roosevelt’s immediate designs in misjudged alliance with the Leftist form. They did succeed in delaying those designs and in limiting their effects. Today we live on the political and strategic margin provided by statesmen who understood totalitarianism better than progressives can. Statesmen can widen that margin only if they attend to the lasting structures of regimes, to whether and how those structures actually secure the rights of individual human beings.

Alf J. Mapp: Thomas Jefferson: A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity. Lanham: Madison Books, 1987.

Originally published in the New York City Tribune, January 13, 1988.

 

In Professor Mapp’s estimation, contemporary liberals have too easily appropriated Thomas Jefferson as one of their own. They “begin with the assumption that Jefferson was a liberal and then either… exclude from consideration or treat as an anomaly at of his words and actions inconsistent with the liberal image.” Mapp calls this error, not mendacity: After all, “most biographies of Jefferson in recent years have come from either academe or journalism at a time when the bias of both professions has been distinctly liberal.”

It is a generous and probably accurate judgment by a generous and scrupulous historian. Mapp’s generosity comes as the overflow of a sort of filial affection, a love of ‘his own.’ A Virginian to the bone, he honors the Old Dominion’s most celebrated son. If this love occasionally makes him too generous to Jefferson (“America’s philosopher-king”), it also animates his research—undertaken with diligence and presented with warmth.

Mapp tells Jefferson’s story up to his election to the presidency in 1800, with a few glances ahead at his term in office. At William and Mary College, his anti-clerical mathematics professor, William Small, “enlisted Jefferson in the Enlightenment,” introducing him to the writings of Bacon, Newton, and Locke. Jefferson in his maturity would call these the three greatest men in the history of the world. That includes Moses (Mapp imagines Jefferson’s classification of the Old Testament under “ancient history” as a sign of piety) and Jesus (whom Jefferson regarded as human, simply). Throughout his life, Jefferson remained “extremely reticent in matters of faith even when… his silence cost him politically,” perhaps because speech would have cost him more. In swearing eternal opposition “to every form of tyranny over the mind of man,” Jefferson very much had religion in mind.

On morality and politics, Jefferson was not reticent at all. Mapp successfully defends his man against the standard charges. Yes, Jefferson opposed slavery while holding slaves. But no major Virginia landowner of the day could sustain himself, along with an uncorrupt political career, without them, given the economic conditions of that time and place. Jefferson advocated not immediate but gradual abolition, the only kind that might have been enacted. In his early career he consistently charged that the king of England had foiled attempts by Virginia to outlaw importation of slaves, and he tried to insert an antislavery clause into the Declaration of Independence. Congress later defeated his proposal to bar slavery from new states after 1800, a law that probably would have averted the Civil War.

Somewhat less plausibly, Mapp tries to reconcile Jefferson’s preference for ‘strict construction’ of the United States Constitution with the Louisiana Purchase, a move that document doesn’t explicitly permit, and one that Jefferson himself admitted, in private correspondence, to have been beyond the letter of the law. Here Mapp cites what he calls Jefferson’s “pragmatic idealism”; “though preferring strict construction,” Jefferson “had been unwilling to let it stand in the way of important opportunities for his country” before the Purchase, and would continue to think that way thereafter. Jefferson was no ideologue, despite some tendencies in that direction. One might say that the Sage of Monticello required strict construction most consistently of his enemies, the Federalists, whom he sincerely suspected of oligarchic and even monarchic ambitions. For himself and his political friends, he unbent a little, and the republic was better (undeniably bigger) for his prudent (if somewhat self-indulgent and partisan) flexibility.

On education, Jefferson most assuredly practiced what he recommended to others. His daughter Patsy received an education equivalent to that of a young gentleman, thanks to her father’s shrewd application of Lockean liberalism: “The chance that in marriage she will draw a blockhead I calculate about fourteen to one,” he wrote to a friend, “and of course [I conclude] that the education of her family will probably rest on her own ideas and direction without assistance.” It would be interesting to know the basis of that Jeffersonian estimate—whether, for instance, he was surveying the population of eligible young men in his neighborhood, his state, his country, or the world at large. No dogmatic egalitarian he, no matter what population sample he had in mind.

Perhaps to improve the odds for his prospective granddaughters, Jefferson worked to educate his countrymen, as well. While Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War, he wrote his Notes on the State of Virginia, a pioneering work on New World biology, linguistics, and anthropology. Mapp rightly associates such activities with Jefferson’s commitment to religious toleration, which he considered conducive to unhindered scientific studies.

This notwithstanding, Mapp emphasizes Jefferson’s ‘romantic’ side, writing extensively and well on Jefferson’s sensitivity to art and nature, and his susceptibility to intelligent women. In the Dialogue Between the Head and the Heart, Jefferson’s farewell love letter to Maria Cosway, the Heart wins, even as it relinquishes its beloved. Mapp mistakes this for divergence from the Enlightenment, overlooking the strong moral sentimentalism of that movement, from which Romanticism came, after rejecting rationalism. Mapp’s own romantic streak gets the better of him here, and his prose turns lush in describing Jefferson’s last hour with Mrs. Cosway as “encapsulated in the awareness of impending frustration, and made the sweeter for it like grapes nestled in their sour skins.” There’s a lot of “must have” speculation about Jefferson’s feelings and thoughts in the book; added to Mapp’s weakness for merely decorative literary quotations and allusions, the thing flirts with melodrama and occasionally succumbs.

Does it all make the portrait of a man as conservative as he was liberal? Not really: But Mapp does portray an undeniably great liberal, never quite too doctrinaire to forget that liberty is about liberty as much as equality, and to defend liberty against tyrants with an aristocrat’s spirit. This is what our contemporary progressives, calling themselves liberals, seldom think or do any longer.