By Joel Thurtell
I have my old friend Barbara Stanton O’Hair to thank for my current reading program. Barb is the longtime sparkplug and mainstay of Bookies, a book club of mostly former Detroit Free Press writers who meet episodically either at her house in Detroit or at the home of retired Free Press business writer Barry Rohan in the Pointes.
Agreeing on the next book to read is one of the Bookies group’s weak points. We can jawbone for hours and still not decide which title to invest a few hours of reading time.
I’m not sure what our next assignment is, officially. The last book we read was TRUE GRIT
, by Charles Portis. Great book, by the way. Led me to read Portis’ book about American expats in Mexico, GRINGOS
. Another fine book, which prompted me to order the other three Portis novels.
But let me get back on track. Barb sent an e-mail suggesting we read Bruce Catton’s THE COMING FURY
Today is the 150th anniversary of the opening shots of the Civil War at Fort Sumter. Good time to be reading about the Civil War.
It had been some time since I opened a Civil War book, but it’s a topic I enjoy. I sporadically re-visit those turbulent times through a disorganized approach to reading that is mainly propelled by whimsy.
I went online and ordered the Catton book in hardback for less than four bucks, including postage. THE COMING FURY was published in 1961, the centennial year for the beginning of the Civil War. I thought the history might be a bit old-fashioned, but I’d read other Catton books, always found him engaging.
The book duly arrived, and I duly began reading it. I wish I could say I’ve finished it, but as of last night, before I fell asleep on the sofa, I’d read nearly 80 pages. Enough to realize that the intransigence of congressional radicals that we’re witnessing today in the Republican-owned House of Representatives has its parallel in the pre-Civil War Congress where conservative Southerners protective of their “peculiar” institution of slavery were plotting secession before and during the nominating conventions of 1860.
Catton was writing thirty-some years before the GOP’s “Contract with America” and 50 years before our current Republican obsession with throttling down government and selling the whole country to the Koch brothers. Had Catton possessed a crystal ball and known about the kind of gridlock that would dominate national politics in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, he might not have agreed with the statement he made early in THE COMING FURY:
“The truth of the matter was that the American political system, which can survive almost any storm because of its admirable flexibility, was in 1860 breaking down because it had been allowed to become rigiid.”
That statement doesn’t make sense to me. “It had been allowed to become rigid.” No, the system operating in 1860 was essentially what was embodied in the Constitution. It was not ALLOWED to become rigid. It WAS rigid, if we’re talking about the so-called “checks and balances” that in theory prevent radical things from happening by “balancing” deliberations between two representative assemblies, an executive and a judiciary.
A century and a half later, we can see both merits and demerits in the system. It’s difficult for an executive to get things done, yet a radical House of Representatives stands a chance of having its hotheaded urges denied by a Senate or a presidential veto.
What I did not know about the opening months to the Civil War was that the beginnings of the military conflict occurred in a series of Democratic conventions where the party split wide open between factions openly advocating secession of the South and northern Democrats who found slavery less appealing. Lincoln would be elected because there were actually four men running for President, including two Democratic candidates.
Pundits write and talk about the lack of civility in today’s politics. Thanks to Catton’s THE COMING FURY, I realize there’s nothing new in that.
