TOM: So let’s talk about the Civil War. Obviously, we’ve read some stuff together. It seemed to me that there was more of a sense of certainly brothers, but also fathers and sons in the tragedy of the war. How do you think about that?
DAD: It comes up with isolated but real incidents of father vs. son, brother vs. brother actual combat, a stand-in for the terrible violence and tragedy of the war—the relentless grinding machine of the war, which in the end kills and maims so many fathers, husbands, sons. It’s hard to get your mind around that.
There’s also the emergence of Lincoln as a father of the country: that iconic role was born of in some sense out of the deep pain and loss and desolation of the war itself, a figure of leadership and wisdom and even caring seemed essential. It was partly created out of the felt need the war produced. I suppose you could say Robert E. Lee—certainly not Jefferson Davis—had a somewhat similar role in the South, but he was a combat leader and skillful, brilliant at that. But not someone who had, I think, the same quality of nurturing and of solace and grief that Lincoln clearly was able to provide with his public speeches.
TOM: Did you read that piece about the end of slavery in The New York Times? It was actually making an argument against what you’re saying—in terms of how long it took Lincoln to get to the Emancipation Proclamation and what his motivations really were.
DAD: He was a very political leader. He was obviously an amateur, leading a major war organized in the military, but he came through remarkably well on that score and I think it’s partly his sudden death, just as the war was coming to victory, that enshrined him in Whitman’s poetry and in the public mind as the father of the country who was suddenly snatched away when the crisis was just about over. Perhaps it’s a retrospective characteristic of seeing him as the parent who could protect and care and compensate some way for the incredible loss and just the total sheer pain of how many people got killed and maimed. The president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, in her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, This Nation of Suffering, works through the many forms in which the trauma of that war lay on the land, particularly on the South, of course—powerfully, deeply and in a prolonged way—certainly shaped Southern politics well into the 20th century.
TOM: I’ve been to Selma, Alabama, with one of my friends—you’d think the Civil War happened yesterday.
DAD: It’s still alive. Faulkner said the past is not dead. It’s not even past. It’s still there.
TOM: As a Quaker pacifist, why are you so interested in the Civil War?
DAD: I’ve watched myself being that interested and I still am. It’s something to do with the challenge of men in combat situations, which are not situations I could imagine myself being in, not willingly certainly and not with any sense of the values I would bring to such a situation—but it is seeing men, mostly, in conditions of extremity, of challenge to the best of who they are, sometimes engaging in the most bloodthirsty behaviors, lethal behaviors. There’s a fascination about that, whether it’s a kind of compensation for my own value set in which I simply wouldn’t willingly go in to that role, but I have to have some admiration for those who are willing to do it. In the Civil War army and some of the later armies that have fought wars for the United States, some kind of conscript draftee army; it’s ordinary guys and suddenly they come into those situations of a cauldron of violence and kill-or-be-killed circumstances, and sometimes they show extraordinary bravery and response to it.
Ken Burns in his TV series on the Civil War takes particular places to track through the war. Deer Isle, Maine, is one of the places. He just keeps track of how many men left Deer Isle to go into the military for the North, how many died in combat, how many died of disease, how many came home amputated—such a terrible story. Half the men who left that island to go to the Union army did not return—sons, husbands, fathers. They were gone.
Next: Robert Bly and Grandad
Photo Credit: Sphilp
Hi, Tom-
I took a couple of courses with your dad at Cornell in spring and fall of 1970 (so he was not at U Mass then). He was a wonderful lecturer and one of the teachers I admired most at Cornell. He definitely influenced my views on race. He was also a tough grader, which did not help my GPA at all, but it was worth it. I was interested and pleased to hear of the direction his life took and that he is alive and well in beautiful Rockport, Maine.
Tom, It took me a couple year’s after my Father Passed away in September of 1999, to understand who he was but more importantly The man I thought I had to be… I think our Fathers, seem so Hero like as children in our eye’s! As we age and mature, They have exspectation’s and we tend to think or believe what they want for us, is Not in our plan’s. So we fighnt it every step along the way. Tom, My Dad many times through out my childhood made me feel WEAK and Unexcepted! Growing up My eye’s saw his… Read more »
What an interesting guy your dad is, Tom!.
One of the striking things that comes through this conversation is that despite your returning to the father/son theme over and over, in so many instances that you and your dad address the fathers were not present, or the men were not in family situations etc. Makes it clear how major a shift your generation is in the midst of, and how timely your focus is!
Thanks for showing open interest in your son’s cause, Jean Matlack, in your comment here and your own interview in May. Discovering his TGMP work is one of the best things that’s happened for me in the past few months. It does my heart good to see Tom honoring his father and mother while finding his own way!
Excellent interview, Tom. I am very glad that you were able to sit down and connect with your father like this. As much as we think we know our dads at times, there is always more to the story—small (or in your case, large) details that would have gone otherwise untold unless you spend quality talk time.
I enjoyed this. You both are good men.