“The Place of a Knowledge of History in the Well Educated Human Person”

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Dr. Richard Ferrier
Tutor
Thomas Aquinas College
Text adapted from a TAC “Tutor Talk,” August 29, 2025

 

I’m going to start quite personally and in the present. I am writing for the Aquinas Review, a long-ish article. It’s a book review about the now dead Generalissimo, the head of Nationalist China, in the first half of the 20th century. His regime was defeated by the communists, and they went to Formosa (then Formosa, now called Taiwan), and the Taiwanese independent regime is the descendent of his forces and his political movement.

Let me tell you a story right away. On second thought, I will ask you a question.

Have you ever heard of the Xi-An incident in 1936? After I tell you what happened, I want you to think, “is it astonishing that I don’t know that? Why don’t I know that?”

1931 should be seen as an early and sporadic beginning of World War II. It flickered up with the Japanese seizure of the rich industrial province of Manchuria and setting up a puppet government; there followed for years intermittent clashes with Chinese military forces.

China wasn’t at all unified in the years before and after the Japanese aggression. Provinces were almost autonomous with their own armed forces and militia. The weak central government was headed by the Nationalist Party (KMT) of Chiang Kai-shek, in that period, and disorder, riots and even battles broke out from time to time with much loss of life. Over time, Chiang tempered his previous leftist views. It’s hard to characterize his political stance when he was the head of that movement; it changed over time. Well before Hitler’s rise to power he had thought well of the German state and society, which had an advanced social welfare system and close ties between the civilian and military establishments. From 1927 on, for a full ten years, he was advised on military matters by Max Bauer, a former chief of staff to Field Marshal Erich Ludendorff, and labored to implement the German’s plan to modernize China’s backward Army.

At first he was impressed with Lenin and the Soviet Union and included Communists in the Whampoa Military Academy. He headed Whampoa in the 1920’s. By 1930 Chiang had turned against the Communists. As he matured, he became a fierce advocate of moral reform, more or less along Confucian lines. He cared greatly about honesty and patriotism.

There was an awful lot of corruption in China. We call it corruption and turn up our noses at it. It’s kind of an inherited system of favors and bribes which – am I already a cultural relativist? Has history poisoned my mind? – which was more or less accepted. And in any event, those were the cards he had to play. At the same time that he was working towards clean government, but he was constantly in need of revenues for that very government. He had to buy off, bribe, pacify, keep in line, independent governors who had their own arms and power base. He did a pretty good job of that. And the regime was in the best condition it had ever been in in the mid-30s. That’s the time Chiang made Nanking the capital, and it was a modern, beautiful city.

China came out of the Great Depression faster than we did. In fact, almost everybody did. One of the things you might consider if you study that period in history is whether FDR and the New Deal actually prolonged the Depression or made things better. That’s a disputed question among historians. And if anything, I think the consensus is tending towards ‘he prolonged it.’

By the way, Hoover started the policies that I believe did prolong it. They tended to be insistent on high wages, not letting a recession play itself out, and other various government interventions. I can commend it as a subject to your study. Especially to the tutors – there’s only a few here, but to you all, you should look into that. And the reason is: FDR’s having gotten us out of the Depression is a great, powerful atmospheric opinion in American politics. True, it’s less important now that it was. Other issues have dominated our politics, other than the economic ones, and I think they should. I think we have deeper questions than management, capital labor problems, and it’s very antiquated to imagine, as James Carville – he was a political advisor to Bill Clinton, still active as a commenter on politics; funny looking guy, bald with a kind of narrow skull. His nickname is “Lizard-head” – he came up with the phrase “It’s the economy stupid!” to explain all of our elections. Now, there is some truth to that, but it’s much less the case now, I think.

Xi-An

The Xi-An incident is this: one of those factions that was at play in China was the Chinese Communist Party. And Chiang, as I told you, was kind of a nationalist or socialist, not a Nazi, certainly not an anti-semite, but in favor of a strong central government. You can see why he had to be, with these warlords practically ruling provinces that he couldn't get to cooperate. China was just coming into the modern age. And it did not have established democratic or republican traditions or much of the industrial infrastructure found in the West, such as railroads and paved highways, schools open to the peasants, modern hospitals or rural electrification. But it did have a long past of many kinds of greatness, marred by recent humiliation by the European Imperial powers. Think “Opium Wars” or “Boxer Rebellion.” Those things combine to produce a desire for a powerful central government – to reflect the greatness of the people and its history.

So, Chiang Kai-Shek is fighting the Communists, and winning, and I mean really, seriously winning. He’s surrounding (when the War Lords actually co-operate with the KMT) them and starving them out. Both sides are very violent; there are executions, spying, betrayals, and the dark things that happen in history. But he’s got them on the ropes. His forces outnumber them in total numbers, 20 to 1 or something like that. His forces are not unified. It’s a patchwork quilt of this Manchurian warlord and that Gang from around Canton, that sort of thing. They will not always obey the Nationalist commanders, and Chiang in particular.

The Japanese, meantime, have turned sharply militaristic. In 1934 they decide abrogate the naval treaty that had restricted the size of the world’s navies and started building a first class fleet. These include the aircraft carriers whose planes devastated our fleet at Pearl Harbor, and the torpedoes that were on those airplanes were built in this period. They’re superior to ours. Want to know where they’re built? I’m sure you do: Nagasaki.

Meanwhile, some Chinese patriots, intelligent people, perhaps naïve, want Chiang to stop finishing off Zhou Enlai, Mao Zedong and the other communists, and to get a united front against Japan. In fact, the next year, in 1937, the Japanese will initiate full-scale war with the Chinese in what is called the Battle of Shanghai. 1937 — that’s the date you can safely call the start World War II. It’s when Japan wasn’t just skirmishing on the border, but actually invaded China. I mean, they’d already taken Manchuria, but I’ll let that pass. It’s in the far Northeast; you can sort of say, “I don’t know, people have had a presence and forces in Manchuria. The Russians did, others did.” But in any event, when you hit Shanghai, then go up the Yangtze River into the heart of China, you’re at war. And in fact, the following year, after ‘37, the Japanese declared they didn’t even recognize the government of Chiang Kai-shek, and they had nobody to negotiate with. They aimed at subjugation, domination if not outright conquest.

 Chiang Kai-shek is doing the most astonishing balancing act I have ever read about a statesman doing. He has so many things to deal with. And one of them is those warlords who happened to be from Manchuria, but they’d been driven out and they’re supposedly on his side. He’s planning a final campaign against the Communists. I can’t tell you how close Communist China came to never happening. And the year is 1936, when it came close to never happening.

But these other Chinese — I won’t try to pronounce or give you the names. I’m not sure I’ll even be able to recall them — want to pressure Chiang Kai-shek into negotiating a unified front with the Communists. And on December 12th, 1936, they kill his bodyguard and kidnap him! He’s the head of the Chinese government! This is in a Chinese city! He’s gone up to have talks with people in Chinese politics. And they kidnap him! He scrambles over a wall, badly injures his back, and hides in a cave. And they come and find him. Mao got word of this; he and his associates are in their headquarters giggling about it, saying they should kill him.

Stalin, of all people, comes to his rescue. And Stalin's reason is this: Stalin is a numbers guy, besides being one of the nastiest people in world history, and he can count the numbers. A strong China will tie down Japanese troops in case the Japanese want to attack the Soviet Union. And they have joined an international pact called the anti-Comintern pact; Comintern is “communist international.” If you've ever seen Red October, they sing “The Internationale,” the anthem of the Comintern. It’s the international organization to spread Marxist-Leninism over the globe. And Italy, Japan and Germany become members of the anti-Comintern.

Stalin, when he’s looking at the cards he has to play, says, “well, you know, I don’t have anybody. Nobody’s allied with me. Besides, now I’m conducting purges of my army and destroying about half the experienced officers; and the Japanese are looking good. They’ve taken Manchuria, they’re growing. And the government is strongly militaristic. And now they’re in the Anti-Comintern pact; I need a counter-weight to Japan. And where do I look? China!”

Chiang Kai-shek has a million and a half men or so — of whom maybe 500,000 are securely loyal, in fact, he might have more than that — and anyway, Mao has almost nothing. So Stalin sends the word via his sub-thug in China to Mao and says, “shut up. Get out of my face. You’re not gonna do that.” He will in fact provide some military help for Chiang in the following years: Soviet advisors, Soviet aircraft. The aircraft in the 1930s are basically bi-planes; don’t imagine that they’re Mustang fighters or B-17s or something that advanced. But Soviet aircraft were pretty good for the times, and they had a lot of them.

So they negotiate an arrangement, because Mao has been told to shut his mouth, and the day after Christmas, Chiang is released. It’s a much more complicated story than that. It would make a great movie. And part of the deal is that the KMT will stop attacking the communist party (CCP) in China. You can date the beginning of the path of the CCP to full dictatorship and command of China to that day. Now, it’s not the only cause. There are many causes. But it’s dramatic, and it’s super important. And people in Taiwan today know about it. If you look it up — it’s called ‘the Xi-An incident’, or ‘the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek’ — you can find some really ferocious Taiwanese propaganda videos on YouTube in which they lay this out and make the case that these — they call them ‘traitors’ — abducted the head of their government and made it possible for the cancer of Maoist despotism to spread all through the Chinese nation. Here is a link to one of those videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WrmGbiu-LrE One of them actually was finally executed by the Nationalists. And the other was in a kind of internal exile, became a Christian, visited the U.S., and declared afterwards, “I made a terrible mistake. I’m a sinner.”

Now this takes, maybe, if you poke around, an hour and a half on YouTube, and I’ve already taken up too much of your time right now with it. But who can deny the importance of what has been going on in China in our times? Right now, to this day. It might be useful to know something about that. It might be instructive with respect to large power politics. I mean, think about Stalin coming out against Mao. Now he gets for Mao a reprieve, and that leads to the chance of the Communist Party to begin to grow.

The war against Japan, the real start of WW II, was carried out by the Nationalists. That’s about 90% true. The Japanese are not fighting the CCP, for the most part, but Chaing’s KMT is.

This is true from 1937 all the way to 1945, to the surrender of the Japanese. As the war goes on, the Chinese Communist party does play more of a part. But the heavy lifting is done from the beginning, by Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists. He is a fascinating man. And I recommend this biography to anyone who wants to read it: it’s called The Generalissimo by Jay Taylor.

 One of the instructive things about it is this: Taylor was an experienced diplomat and had a long career in the American State Department. And he swallowed, hook line and sinker the lie that Mao was more in line with American principles and interests as well as appealing to the Chinese, while Chiang Kai-shek was corrupt and incompetent — the story that we told ourselves at the end of World War II when we stopped supporting him.

The Chinese archives have been open since about 2010, not all of them; but many documents are available to historians now, so that they can rewrite the history of the Japanese-Chinese War. And when the best ones do, it completely explodes the standard American anti-Chiang narrative; just tears it to pieces. It doesn’t say that Chiang was perfect or prudent in all his actions; it does explode the story we have told ourselves for a half century.

So there’s a whole new understanding of what happened in China that’s available now. And the books are being written about it now. The new sources are Chinese, or Japanese, archives. Our historians need translators; most American historians don’t know those languages. It’s a long, painstaking work. But as they do accumulate it, the next layer of historians, the synthesizers who are broadly read and have their eye on the big picture, incorporate those things. This is opening up in our times.

And now I want to speak to the students, especially to YOUR generation. A vast panorama of history that we forgot in the West is coming to light. It was disputed in America right after the war, but the pro-KMT side of the story was smothered by 1964, long before your time.

I was born in 1948. Have any of you heard of Joe McCarthy? Raise your hands if you do. Not many. George Marshall? Not many. Richard Nixon? The so-called Red Scare that Senator Joe McCarthy led? You should know your own country’s history! Nixon made his career out of investigating Communist influence in the United States, While the — I’ll be gentle to them, my own father-in-law, a lovely man, was one of them — the sentimental progressives saw in the Chinese Communists friends of the people, bravely standing up against corrupt plutocrats, and generals, and fascists. In effect, they put a blanket of silence or condemnation or both over the investigations into the influence of the Stalin-led international Communist movement in the United States, in the ‘30s, ‘40s, ‘50s and the CCP variant that we fought in Korea in 1950 and into the ‘60s. Not to mention the War in Vietnam.

The Soviet archives being opened after the fall of the Soviet Union gave us a peek under that blanket.

Us? Who is ‘us’? Readers? Citizens? Historians?

Let me turn to that aspect of things, and make the talk a little more general. We will leave the Asia-Pacific War, and that’s what it ought to be called. It is not World War II in the Pacific only. That’s the California perspective. That’s my people — I’m a fifth generation Californian — that’s my people who had to put blackout curtains on their windows in the Bay Area because they were afraid we’d be bombed next after Pearl Harbor. And in fact, there were some lame attempts to drop bombs from balloons and whatnot. There was a massive display of anti-aircraft fire over Los Angeles, there was a supposed spotting of a Japanese aircraft. I don’t know what it was, a blimp, or a cloud, or something?

And so, what is the Asia Pacific to us? Now again — and I will talk to the students — what is it to you? What do you know about it? Everybody knows the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, right? I almost want to say, “then what”? Do any of these names mean anything to you? Saipan, Bataan, Tarawa, Leyte Gulf, the Coral Sea? Many Americans heard them on television in 1952-3, on a show called “Victory at Sea”, a series of documentaries about World War II. Richard Rogers, who composed fine music for many Broadway musicals wrote the themes, and they were orchestrated by Robert Russell Bennett. Most of the episodes covered the War in the Pacific.

My father, God rest his soul, was on a submarine tender, one of a vast fleet of U.S. Navy ships, in Tokyo Bay the day the Japanese surrendered. And somehow, he got a Samurai sword, a token of some kind that came his way. We had it in our basement for years and years.

You may know about the battle of Midway. The recent film on it is historically good. It’s not perfect, but it’s very good. Guadalcanal? I’m seeing some nodding ‘yes’. Perhaps you have seen the photo or newsreel of MacArthur striding through the surf at the Leyte landing; he had said, “I shall return!”, and now he returns, you know? They shot that several times to make it look good. MacArthur was the best P.R. agent in the war. He had an extraordinary talent for maximizing his accomplishments and minimizing his mistakes.

Of course, everybody knows this: we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and then one on Nagasaki. And we all are expected to feel guilty and bad about that, but fortunately, somehow, the Japanese have come to like us now.

Did you notice that this account is entirely about the Pacific War?

Do you know when the first strategic bombing of a city aimed at civilians — not a city that was close to front, where you could say, “well, they were bombing the supply lines close to the battle lines” — but long-range bombing of a city was, in World War II? It was in Asia. I didn’t know this until a few years ago: Chongqing, China. After Nanjing fell to the Japanese, Chiang executed the scorched earth ‘trade space for time’ strategy, and removed the government to Chongqing. Now Chongqing was like Nowheres-ville. It wasn’t a big city.

They did quickly have hundreds of thousands of refugees there. And the Japanese, in 1938, the Japanese bombed the city. Before the fall of France, before the invasion of Poland, before our Army Air Force had bombed anything, they terror bombed Chongqing.

Strategic bombing against cities, which we’re made to feel guilty about, (or they try to make us feel guilty about it), started by Japan in 1938. In Chongqing it went on for about a year and a half. And the number of dead, almost entirely civilians, was over 20,000. They didn’t have the same quality bombers that the air forces had later, but that’s a lot of people. At one point, I think it went on for sixty-two days straight. People suffocated in bomb shelters. It was truly horrible.

If you read the condemnation of the barbarous warfare by the then-Pope Pius XII in his Easter message of 1940 and you imagine that he’s talking about the RAF’s fire-bombing of Hamburg or Dresden, you are wrong. The barbarous behavior of the Japanese in China was on everybody’s mind first; the German bombings in Poland,1939, second. That’s a thing maybe you didn’t know. But there’s so much I didn’t know, either! I want to say, “I understand your position. I’ve been in your shoes for a long time.”

My Doctoral degree is in the History of Science. We do a moderate amount of such history in our curriculum here, too. Consider Sophomore Mathematics or Natural Science. We also read Herodotus, Livy, and Gibbon in Seminar.
 

After I graduated from St Johns. Kathy and I arranged our books on the shelves of our apartment in chronological order. We talk about the great conversation, how the authors argue with and converse with each other. That’s a kind of historical thought. So, anyway, I arranged them that way, and it was eye-opening. It made a difference to me that Bacon wrote before Descartes and Newton before Kant. Some things fell into place that hadn’t fallen into place before.

Now, I’m not saying the first thing your tutors should say at Thomas Aquinas College, or at St. John’s, “we are reading the Greeks in freshman seminar, and this one comes before this one, and that one comes before the other one, and they’re all related to Persian War or the plague at Athens or the marriage customs in Sparta in the following way, and now that you’ve understood Greek culture, you can read Homer or Plato.” That’s a wrong way to read. You want to let Homer speak to you directly. And a lot of the books will give their own context if you read them carefully. That’s harder with some than with others.

Aristotle disagrees on some matters with his teacher, Plato. Aristotle will say a little something about Plato, and you can begin to get a sense of what he wants to say, or what their disagreement was. It may be richer than that. You get the relation between a great thinker and teacher, and someone who studied with him. And it’s a beautiful relationship. That’s in the text.

Here’s a historical observation for you: we at TAC are not the child of St. John’s, but we’re sort of a step-son, or first cousin. Our Founding President was an admirer of that program, and some of our customs, such as Don Rags originated at St Johns.

There’s a very close relationship between the two colleges. We still use some of their manuals. Three of the four music tutors will be using Peter Kalkavage’s On the Measurement of Tones. Some of the better translations we give you are from people who taught at St. John’s or their friends; Allan Bloom’s “Republic”, for example. Or anything from the Green Lion Press. And you have tutors who spent time there: Mr. Coughlin taught there, Mr. Collins taught there, I was a student there, and taught there for a year. That’s a good relationship, and it should be cherished. We sometimes get fine lectures from them, too.

There’s a lecture on history by one of the great tutors at St. John’s, Jacob Klein, which is critical of the place of history in Liberal Education. It’s an interesting lecture to read. We produced a similar statement here about 20 years ago— Mr Coughlin wrote it, in which he asserts that we don’t do much history and shouldn’t either. And the argument is very similar to the one in Jacob Klein’s lecture. Well that’s not surprising; the two communities agree on some things.

But it’s a little outdated. And the reason is — you’ll find this in our readings in Nietzsche — there’s a period in which history aspires to be the architectonic science; wisdom itself. Nietzsche’s Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life attacks that view. It’s like a vaccination against it.

Fifty years ago, I was a graduate student in a History of Science Department, and there were some courses in that department that I hated with a perfect passion. When I thought they were making history explain everything, such as Greek culture explain Ptolemy, I would get really mad. So I would take out my copy of that book by Nietzsche, find one of the passages on the disadvantages, and read it out loud to my wife. It was one of the earliest forms of my later-in-life habit of ranting. Now there’s no better ranter in our tradition than Friedrich Nietzsche. I would just read her those passages. After a while, I’d blown off steam, and I could calm down and look at Ptolemy’s theory of the moon or something, get some good work done.

We don’t need that inoculation quite so much now. History has just diminished in prestige. You look at the news (I look at a lot of academic and college news), and you can see that the number of history majors is decreasing, some places are dropping it altogether; it’s not a good field to go into if you want a job with your degree. And it has also become very subjective and very ideological. People will talk about the narrative, history always dwells in the narrative, and the narratives are, not entirely, but pretty largely woke. “Here’s my newly minted PhD, How the Polyamorous Paiutes were Prevented from Becoming Prosperous by Spanish Imperialists and Roman Catholics.” I admit that’s a bit of an overstatement, but not entirely. Students and the public now think less of the field because of such folly.

History was not that central in education before the nineteenth century, either. Not in formal education. Not in university curricula. It rises into a high condition, together with some very interesting historical work in the eighteenth, and especially nineteenth centuries.

Tocqueville is one of those people. But ask yourself. Where did he teach? Nowhere. History was written by men of letters. Statesmen. Amateurs. The academic discipline didn’t really grow up, until, first in Germany, then in the rest of the world, it became something huge. As it did, the way history looks at the whole world, secular and even religious became comprehensive. Thinkers sought a whole. That is a feature of Wisdom, to the extent we ever reach it. Anyone who looks at a whole is subject to a temptation; he begins to think that maybe what he’s looking at can’t be understood except in the Way he’s looking at it. Whether it’s atoms and void, and material causation, or whatever. This is a little dangerous to say, but the workings of Divine Providence? I say that’s a little dangerous because I think there are people in this community who think that it is the way to look at history. And you might say, “St. Augustine looks at it that way.” Now, he has the advantage of working very closely with Scripture, which does endeavor to explain, but not systematically. It presents to you God at work in time, with the Chosen People and the great turn of the ages. Scripture will let you survey that, and Augustine will have that in mind. He spends a lot of time on it. It’s formative. But maybe not the only formative thing.

It’s really hard to say what Divine Providence intended until the end of times, don’t you think? Did he intend the murder of the Jews under the Nazis? In a way, I wanna say, “yeah, he intends everything.” “Shall there be evil in the city, and shall I not have done it?” is a line from Isaiah. What did he intend? Did he intend injustice? You can’t say that. What was the plan? I just heard Hank Williams sing this on my computer at home — “Farther Along”, you know that song? “Farther along, we’ll all understand it. Farther along…” Well, I won’t sing more, but we’ll know why.

There’s a certain amount of comfort, resignation to ignorance regarding Providence, isn’t there? Doesn’t it seem a little hubristic to say, “oh, yeah, I can see what happened everywhere.” Now, good people do it, but they usually tend to say “I can see what happened there.” And usually what they have in mind is there’s some extraordinary good that happened, and it’s really hard to account for by normal collection of causes, and yet, it happened. They’ll do that, I think. Benedict XVI, maybe when he was Cardinal Ratzinger, wrote that way about the encounter of Athens and Jerusalem. That the Church spreads in an Age in which the works of, and inquiries of reason, were cherished and flourishing.

By the way, a little bit of a dark cloud on that: one of the things I learned in graduate school in a course, not philosophical, but historical, which actually led to my lecture on Lucretius, in part, is that when St. Paul writes about ‘the wise of this world’ he is not thinking about the ones we study here. In the first century, when Paul is writing, the Platonic and Aristotelian schools are in the tank; the commentaries on Aristotle and Plato, the neo-Platonists and Aristotelian commentaries, are later and earlier, mostly later. The Romans think they have philosophers; what they have is babysitters, for their adolescent sons, who are trying to teach philosophy as a way of life. They’re mixing Roman firmness, courage, and martial habits with ethical philosophy and some of the maxims of the Stoics. And they produce fruit, in figures like Marcus Aurelius. But the first century A.D. is not the century of Platonism and Aristotelianism. Its thinkers are two schools of houseslaves taken from Greece who are instructing boys in maxims of the Epicureans and Stoics. Maybe some enlightened families’ girls, too. Portia. That’s a broadly painted picture, and there are exceptions. But for the most part, that is how it was.

I think it’s helpful to know that when you’re reading St. Paul. It’s helpful, among other things, because when you get to St. Augustine (and he praises Plato a lot), you might say, “well, that’s odd, because I thought St. Paul said all those guys were just sterile. That’s the wisdom of the world.” Go a little further, and there’s more than one revival of a close reliance between Philosophy and faith. Thomism and Aristotle in the 13^th Century. And Platonism and Christianity. There’s a school in England in the sixteenth century of Christian neo-Platonists. Consider St. John Paul’s Encyclical, “Fides et Ratio.”

So those things are worth knowing.

 
 I want to turn to something much simpler. I was going to title this talk — and I’ll baptize it now, it’s a late convert — “The Place of History in a Complete Education.”

Now, the well-educated human person does not come out as a finished product at the end of high school, or at the end of college, or at the end of graduate school, or professional school. The well-educated human being is never a finished product. That’s in part why we say to you (and I’m talking to the students, I hope you take it to heart) that “we’re making a good beginning here.”

So, I immediately have to distinguish the ages of man when I talk about ’the place of the knowledge of history in the well-educated human person’, right? I’ll posit just three, which is too simple: from practically when you can speak to roughly fifteen or so; and the next period is from fifteen through your formal education, let’s say, depending on the person, through about twenty-five or so; and the rest of it is the rest of your life until you get old and toothless, and can’t read, and stupid. Which is what I’m afraid of, because I have all these dental problems, and people are starting to tell me I’m kind of stupid. And I know I’m having seeing problems, and hearing problems. So that’s one reason I wanted to talk to you: I wanted to give you what I could before I disappear! Not that I feel like I’m gonna disappear tomorrow. Far from it. I’m planning my music classes for tomorrow. But I am seventy-seven, and it’s a good Christian thing to look ahead to the fact of death. It was always recommended — “Memento mori.”

So, here we go, these three ages. The child is in the stage where he’s curious, and — I’ll speak of the well-brought-up and happy child, and not the one in miserable circumstances — he should love what’s around him. He should love his place. The West-Virginians sing “Mountain Mama” along with John Denver, “almost heaven.” I should be singing “California, Here We Come”, and so on. The Michigan State motto, I forget it in Latin, but it’s something like “if you seek a pleasant peninsula, look around you.”

You should love your own. You should love your neighborhood, you should love your own school friends, you should love your own people in your parish. If you’re in a children’s choir, you should love to sing with those children. You should love that choir director. And you should love your country. And that doesn’t mean you can’t notice that the choir director gets a little snappish sometimes, or that the tenors are always hitting the wrong note. You know that joke, Sean? “The choir sounded so bad that even the tenors noticed.” That’s cause you guys get the spicier parts. At least in tonal harmony, you do.

So, what should they know? Well, they should watch Fess Parker play “Davy Crockett”, and hear him, in a solemn voice, say: “be sure you’re right, and go ahead.” They should read — was it Genevieve Foster who wrote those books? — The World of George Washington, The World of Abraham Lincoln. They’re wonderful books. They’re about eighty years old. Or sixty, because I had them as a child. It’s the world in the days of George Washington. You see the goofy hairstyles the French ladies had. There’s one of them where she had a model frigate surrounded by curls, and things like that. But they’re pious. Civic Piety. And you can have a few bad guys in there, too.

You should teach the children to sing “America the Beautiful”, and “This is my country, land of my birth!”, and various other songs, and school assemblies should do that. You should try to tell them that the Fourth of July is not only about picnics and fireworks, and so on. They’re getting the Nation’s story about itself, and it’s going to be overly sunny. But the first thing you should do is support their natural love for what is familiar. I know it’s controversial; J.D. Vance and some Catholics have been in an argument that his claim that you start with loving what’s closest, and move up. The country is close too, in its own way. “Oh my God, you don’t love people!”, say his critics or whatever. I think J.D. Vance was basically right about that, myself, and traditional. That doesn’t mean you don’t care for the stranger. In some circumstances, you even die for him.

Anyway, that’s the way it should be, I think. That’s the way I was brought up, so I know it. I weep for the children who are, early on, taught “here’s everything that’s wrong with your country.” That’s just stupid. That’s like learning caricature before you learn figure-drawing. Do I have to expand on that? You draw a decent-looking face. You don’t draw someone with disfigurement. Not first. And if you want to mock people, well, okay, you can. Listen, you can’t have the Fractured Fairy Tales (Ask your parents about Rocky and Bullwinkle Show) version of Little Red Riding Hood without having heard “Little Red Riding Hood.” It isn’t even funny, unless it’s obviously a twist. And I’m for all that stuff. I love it. It’s great stuff. But saying you want that all the time is like saying you want to eat tabasco, or cinnamon, all the time. You’re eating spices, you’re not eating food. The food should be The Billy Goats Gruff, and The Three Little Pigs, and then you can make fun of it. It’s fun.

That’s Stage One. When you begin your education, here’s the problem: history is too darn big. What do you do when you’re a parent or teacher of the young? What do you do with your fifteen-, sixteen-, seventeen-, eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-, twenty-one-year-old, young Christian citizen? What should he study? You don’t want just shallow knowledge of everything. That’s no good. Can he be a historian? That’s the third stage. I’ll talk about it in a moment. and properly speaking, an historian is the fourth stage.

Can he be a historian? Now, you get these schools that like to do projects, and they say, “investigate this, that, and the other thing.” I had a book report to do on ‘reclaiming the desert in Israel’ when I was in seventh grade, maybe. And, you know kids that age; I just took things from a Scientific American article, and cut out some pictures, and parroted whatever was in that article.

By the way, it made me love the Israelis. What they have done with that unproductive, barren (shouldn’t be barren, but was) land captures my admiration to this day. So I learned something from that, I guess. But I didn’t learn anything about the complex arguments about ‘who owns that land’, and ‘how to draw its boundaries’, and ‘are there long-term problems with the irrigation, having to do with salt in the soil’, and so on. A hundred controversies on that topic that I could’ve gone into; but I’m eleven, or twelve, or something. I'm not able to do that, and shouldn’t. Now, one of your sons wrote a very fine research paper, actually, Mr. Collins, on whether the Union or Confederate Cavalry was better in the Civil War. And he did a bit of real, historical research, a bit.

Well, you’re not doing historical research when you’re reading Gibbon. You’re not doing historical research when you’re teaching Gibbon, or even when you read the Supreme Court decisions, the Cornerstone Speech, and Lincoln’s speeches in junior seminar. Mr. Hartman selected some of those things. There’s a chronology of the controversy over Kansas. He’s, if anything, the historical author. Or, they are the characters themselves: Lincoln, Douglas, Alexander Stephens, and so on. Are you studying the buildup of political forces that led to secession in the Civil War? You think you are? You’re not. You’re reading other historians, or selections made by historically literate people. That’s what you’re doing.

Now, as you get older, there’s a fork in the road, so this will expose the fourth stage. You can major in history and learn the tools of the craft. Let’s take the area that most attracts me: military and statesmanship history, those fields. You now want to know, “why was the vote on the fourteenth amendment the way it was?” You could read some other guy who had written about that. You could read ten guys who had written about that. That’s not historical research. You’re still reading historians. You’re reading other people’s research. ‘Research’ means you go back to the little library in Dot-On-The-Map, Indiana, where one of those congressman’s papers were kept. And you find that he kept a diary, and it’s in that same library. And you dig it out, and you see the letter he wrote to his brother, John, and a couple of letters to his wife, about how he’s conflicted on the question. Then, you find out: he was a Methodist Had he been a republican before the war? What was his father’s business? What circles did he travel in? And then you do it again. And again. And again. For whatever issue it is you’re looking at.

Get a good, modern historian of, say, the debates about slavery, or even just a military campaign, and look in the back, where the bibliography is. And look at the footnotes. If you’ve got a good one, you will be disgusted, or amazed, at the number of footnotes; they’re from the diary of Jonas Q. Coldwater, who was with the forty-second Massachusetts, and this is from his description of the battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse. And if you go back to the chapter where you found that footnote, and if the author is a good writer for you (not a good researcher, although he is a good researcher too), not writing for other researchers (well, they can use his footnotes), but to help them do the same kind of thing, but for you, what you want is someone who did all that work, or had his graduate assistant do it — right, David, am I right about this? — then chooses the most informative ones, and then weaves together an account of the battle, whatever it was, and puts those in for vivacity, or maybe to correct a certain historical error some other people made; you know, was Joe Hooker drunk at Chancellorsville? Well, you look at, if you have them, the papers of his staff and supporting commanders, one thing or another. It doesn’t matter that some Confederate apologist, or some Union apologist said he was.

Well, to cut to the chase, you can learn from that author. You are good at reading history. But you are not an historian. Don’t fret about it; “Historian” in this sense is a specialist. You use them; you are not culpable for not being one. We all need a trustworthy dentist; we all should brush our teeth, but we need not all be dentists.

Now, one of the things that liberal education does is it helps you see what is trustworthy and what is not. As Aristotle says it enables you to have a fair offhand judgement of the teachings or writings of the experts. You’re not up to the level of the experts, but you can see a fake expert. You can smell a rat. And conversely, you can say, “this makes sense with other things I have read”, and so on. That’s the kind of historical reading that you will do for the rest of your life. I recommend that you do it. There are sub-fields, if you’re like me, and really love military and political history I can name some for you. For now, I name one who stands above all his contemporaries as a philosophical historian.

Tocqueville.

Think of his American book. Yeah, there’s a little about the early history of New England. Is there anything about the Revolutionary War as a war? Is there anything about the fights in the Constitutional Convention, so that you begin to get a sense of how that went? What’s the story of that series of events? No. It’s a different kind of history. You might almost call him — well, one of two things. Think of history. History of what? What story are you telling? He’s writing a diagnosis of the American people, isn’t that what he’s doing? And it has certain themes that are crucial to it: the importance of religion, in who the Americans are (that’s one); the influence of the land; the influence of what we understand to be the right relation between the sexes; the role of marriage, the role of women; how we bring up our children. So you might also say, in another way, he’s kind of a first sociological historian. He’s looking at society, and a keyword for understanding Tocqueville is ‘customs.’

Now, the French book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, is an even better example. He wants to show you that the French Revolution is almost inevitable because of the decayed state of the old feudal order. And to do that, he strings together important observations. Americans are not very good with language. And I’m not. We generally are mono-lingual, even in our reading. I can work my way through things in Greek, in German, French is just English with a bad attitude, Latin… anyway, that book is hard. Why is it hard? All the offices and taxes and laws are things that we don’t have equivalent words for in English, and we don’t have the experience of them. It’s a profoundly foreign governmental system, with magistrates and taxes whose French names mean almost nothing to us Anglo-Americans.

Anyway, Tocqueville went through endless boring reports from bureaucrats in order to form his judgements, and there’s some things in the appendices where he mentions them in more detail. Tocqueville is a researcher. He embodies the early stage of modern research history. Now, he’s also a genius, so he also has the ability to synthesize it.

To put all this together, your children should be taught to love the country they’re from. It’s their own. As they get older, they will begin to read more difficult things, and see problems, and richer things. And they’ll begin to say, “I want to understand why all this happened.” At that point, you’re concerned with causes, and that’s appropriate. You mustn’t think that your first look at the causes is the answer to everything. You can go further in your formal education studying such things. You have to be careful, because the craft, the historian’s craft, has been fragmented, poisoned by ideology, and devalued all at the same time. So it’s tough to know just how to do that. I would say go to Dallas, or Hillsdale, maybe. There are some places; even some of the Ivys still have really good teachers of history, but you have to be careful. It makes a difference who you study with, and what you study.

Then, unless God has struck you with his curse, or gift, don’t think about being a researcher. It’s a vocation. It’s a whole career. Learn, maybe, how to do something, how to figure out something, like Liam Collins’ good little piece of research on cavalry’ value to the Union or Confederate armies over the course of the war. Maybe you can handle that at an amateur level. But read, with the wisdom and discernment of an experienced person, the great historical work that is being done right now. This will be the most encouraging thing I’ll say. We are in a golden age of the writing of history; the opening of archives, the analytical tools that are available.

I’ll tell you one last story that illustrates this. It’s not about a professional historian. There’s some guy who’s struck by the curse, or blessing, of really caring about the history of the army of Northern Virginia in the Civil War, and he’s trying to find out what the numbers were, their losses. Now, there’s a particular reason he’s doing that. As the Confederacy falls apart, their records get a little spottier. So you’ve got peoples’ estimates of the size of their armies. The conclusion of his research is that Lee’s Army was bigger than people thought. And the replacements were bigger than people thought. And this maybe doesn’t diminish Lee’s reputation, but it increases Grant’s. There’s a common picture, you know: Grant the Butcher, he had a big sledgehammer, 150 thousand men, ground Lee’s plucky little army into dust by brutal head on and costly assaults, blood everywhere, end of story. That’s malarkey. It’s much more complicated than that, and the Southern armies were stronger.

How did our researcher find this out? He looked at the official records of the Confederacy, one of the first places where he found that out, and there was a gap, for this reason, in southwest Virginia. The reports are where the regiments were raised, and they were raised locally. So there’s a regiment of Harvard boys in the army of the Potomac. If you know anything about the Civil War, there’s a lot of localism involved in the recruitment and behavior of the army.

 But there’s little material about the boys from this one corner of Virginia. Now, nobody’s worried so much about spying in the Civil War. The newspapers gave casualties by name; local newspapers, little villages that don’t even exist or have a newspaper anymore. So, one place historians go is to the newspapers. But the newspaper records for this region of southwest Virginia were gone. The paper was out of existence, and nobody knew where they were.

But they have a club of these historians. Most of them are not employed in universities; they’re just crazy people who work on these questions. Is this a great country, or what? This also makes me love the human race, that there are people with that kind of weird dedication. And then they want to share it, right? So this guy gets published by Louisiana State University Press when he gets his work done, and it’s first-rate work. But it’s not coming out of the University’s history departments. One of these people at one of these get-togethers says, “you know, there’s a woman in that area who just died, and I think I heard that she had a Cedar chest with all the back-issues of that newspaper.” And the story was true, and he went down there, and filled in the gaps for those regiments in Lee’s army. Is that crazy, or what? It just tickles my fancy.

Now, could some crazy person make up that story? I guess. But, I’ve read enough of this guy’s writing to say, “no, this guy is responsible.” How do I know that? I’m not stupid, I’m seventy-seven years old, and have some experience of the world. I can tell a tire iron from an iron tire. And this guy’s good. I just can see it. He’s really fair, and careful, he writes well. This is a good one.

So, that has somewhat altered my view of Grant’s plan and the results in the so-called ‘Overland Campaign’. That’s important to Americans, because we have this poisonous myth of the “Lost Cause” of the Confederacy, how they were always outnumbered, that the Rebellion, the Civil War wasn’t really about slavery in any way. This has come to blows in recent times over the monuments; removal of the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue in Richmond. Well, the history of that is a disgruntled couple of generals starting a society, the Southern Historical Society, and glorifying Lee beyond what he deserved, partly in order to diminish Grant, and partly in order to make the Southern cause look romantic and wonderful. One of the results of that was that they put up all these Confederate statues. They did not put them up right after the war. They start in the Jim Crow period and continue well into the twentieth century. And there’s one general there, a great general, who got no monument anywhere.

He commanded the Louisiana state militia during Reconstruction after the war. They were largely black troops. There was terrorist violence by the whites in Louisiana in those days. There even was a battle, with the use of an artillery piece. The White Supremacists won that battle. The commander of the State Militia that day, who had served with distinction in the Confederate Army, had become a Republican. And there is not a single statue to him in the American South to this day.

Who was he? Old Pete. General James G. Longstreet, whom Lee called “My Old Warhorse”, who commanded the first corps in the Army of Northern Virginia. He betrayed the unrepentant — what’s the word for it, incorrigible? There’s another word for it. What do we call the Palestinians? Irredentist. ‘Will never forgive, will never forget, we were right all along’ — attitude that was a powerful strain in the history of the Civil War after the South had lost, after the Grant Administration, roughly, after the end of Reconstruction. That’s worth knowing. It’s worth knowing if you want to think about the Civil Rights Movement in the twentieth century. It’s worth knowing if you want to know why there was violence in Charlottesville and Virginia just a couple of years ago. It’s worth knowing, however you judge it. It’s a long and complex thing, and I’ve just given you the opener.

So, if you can remember anything from this talk, remember that they kidnapped Chiang Kai-shek, and no one ever made a statue of James Longstreet! Those are a couple of things you ought to know.

Thank you for your patience! I’ll understand perfectly if you have no questions and just want to head up and out for dinner. I’m at your service. And once again, thank you for your indulgence.

 

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