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Sacrifice and service: From Civil War to the financial crisis
August 25, 2009, Tuesday
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WHEN Barack Obama delivered his victory speech on a mild Chicago night last November, he reminded his supporters that the election was not the endpoint.
"This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were," he said. "It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice."
It was not the first time Obama had evoked the concept of sacrifice - nor was it to be the last. The language of sacrifice and service was central to his campaign, and it has been a key aspect of the tone he has set ever since.
Obama casts the spirit of sacrifice as new - so new, in fact, that it doesn't exist yet. In his formulation, as in those of Paterson and Culver, it exists in the future as a psychology we need to invent if the United States is to survive as a nation.
But when it comes to American history, sacrifice has long been a unifying ideal in times of crisis - and it has also long been a concept that government has used to enlarge its scope. Indeed, the story of how the once-lean federal government has grown - and grown and grown - is closely connected to the story of how sacrifice was anointed as the ultimate form of national service.
That story is the subject of "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," the thought-provoking National Book Award finalist from Drew Gilpin Faust.
Currently president of Harvard University, Faust is a historian of the American 19th century, specializing in the South and the Civil War. During the Civil War, Faust argues: "Sacrifice and the state became inextricably intertwined."
Death
The 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War form the subject of her book, which explains not only how officers and troops faced death, but how families - and eventually the government - responded to the increasingly unfathomable carnage brought about by a war defined by modern weaponry, epidemic disease and unanticipated length.
More Americans died in the Civil War, Faust notes, "than in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined."
At once unusually brutal and staggeringly mundane, death was a unifying experience during an otherwise intensely divisive and destructive war.
No family escaped from the war's toll; while it divided the country politically and geographically, it nevertheless brought people together through the shared experience of loss.
Faust tells moving stories of how civilians and soldiers alike cooperated across enemy lines to help families locate missing relatives, writing letters and even placing ads in newspapers.
Rhetoric
Faust notes that "the rhetoric of service rationalized the violence of this devastating war by casting it as the instrument of both nationalist and Christian imperative."
She also notes that when it was all over, the sheer symbolic weight of the dead posed a unique set of obligations for a state that had leveraged that service - and the sacrifice it entailed - in the name of human rights.
As we watch elected officials wield the language of sacrifice and service while spending hundreds of billions trying to bail out businesses and stimulate the economy, we can reflect on the long history of our present moment.
After all, reflection is free. Unfortunately, lack of historical perspective is not.
In the year since "This Republic of Suffering" was published, the book has acquired a sharply contemporary resonance.
Faust shows us how the Civil War facilitated the rise of big government via a state-sponsored ethic of sacrificial service.
Today, the language of sacrifice and service is making a comeback - and is doing so right alongside one of the biggest governmental expansions in US history.
As the government mortgages children's futures to pay for its own massive enlargement, we might well wonder who is sacrificing for whom - and what end that sacrifice will ultimately serve.
(Reproduced with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, http://knowledgeatwharton.com.cn. All rights reserved.)
"This victory alone is not the change we seek. It is only the chance for us to make that change. And that cannot happen if we go back to the way things were," he said. "It can't happen without you, without a new spirit of service, a new spirit of sacrifice."
It was not the first time Obama had evoked the concept of sacrifice - nor was it to be the last. The language of sacrifice and service was central to his campaign, and it has been a key aspect of the tone he has set ever since.
Obama casts the spirit of sacrifice as new - so new, in fact, that it doesn't exist yet. In his formulation, as in those of Paterson and Culver, it exists in the future as a psychology we need to invent if the United States is to survive as a nation.
But when it comes to American history, sacrifice has long been a unifying ideal in times of crisis - and it has also long been a concept that government has used to enlarge its scope. Indeed, the story of how the once-lean federal government has grown - and grown and grown - is closely connected to the story of how sacrifice was anointed as the ultimate form of national service.
That story is the subject of "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War," the thought-provoking National Book Award finalist from Drew Gilpin Faust.
Currently president of Harvard University, Faust is a historian of the American 19th century, specializing in the South and the Civil War. During the Civil War, Faust argues: "Sacrifice and the state became inextricably intertwined."
Death
The 620,000 soldiers who died during the Civil War form the subject of her book, which explains not only how officers and troops faced death, but how families - and eventually the government - responded to the increasingly unfathomable carnage brought about by a war defined by modern weaponry, epidemic disease and unanticipated length.
More Americans died in the Civil War, Faust notes, "than in the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined."
At once unusually brutal and staggeringly mundane, death was a unifying experience during an otherwise intensely divisive and destructive war.
No family escaped from the war's toll; while it divided the country politically and geographically, it nevertheless brought people together through the shared experience of loss.
Faust tells moving stories of how civilians and soldiers alike cooperated across enemy lines to help families locate missing relatives, writing letters and even placing ads in newspapers.
Rhetoric
Faust notes that "the rhetoric of service rationalized the violence of this devastating war by casting it as the instrument of both nationalist and Christian imperative."
She also notes that when it was all over, the sheer symbolic weight of the dead posed a unique set of obligations for a state that had leveraged that service - and the sacrifice it entailed - in the name of human rights.
As we watch elected officials wield the language of sacrifice and service while spending hundreds of billions trying to bail out businesses and stimulate the economy, we can reflect on the long history of our present moment.
After all, reflection is free. Unfortunately, lack of historical perspective is not.
In the year since "This Republic of Suffering" was published, the book has acquired a sharply contemporary resonance.
Faust shows us how the Civil War facilitated the rise of big government via a state-sponsored ethic of sacrificial service.
Today, the language of sacrifice and service is making a comeback - and is doing so right alongside one of the biggest governmental expansions in US history.
As the government mortgages children's futures to pay for its own massive enlargement, we might well wonder who is sacrificing for whom - and what end that sacrifice will ultimately serve.
(Reproduced with permission from Knowledge@Wharton, http://knowledgeatwharton.com.cn. All rights reserved.)
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