child and sustainer at once.” He declined to accept a major's rank in the regiment of black volunteers that would eventually be celebrated in the movie
Glory.
But he kept fighting, through the horrific Wilderness campaign, because he had concluded that the right thing was to do one's job right, whatever the consequences. He held rigorously to that belief throughout a long postwar legal career. His opinions as a U. S. Supreme Court justice were crucial in bolstering and expanding application of the First Amendment—but he grounded his thinking not in divinely endowed rights or the brotherhood of man but rather in his procedural judgment, based on the Constitution and experience, that society is strongest when everyone can speak out.
Like the “Nothin ” man, he was uneffusive. (Henry James, who grew up with Holmes Jr., likened his demeanor to “a full glass carried without spilling a drop.”) He eschewed church, was skeptical of every absolute value, and saw that his father's broidery was but loosely wound into the woof of reality. He came to believe that we can never know for sure what is true, all we can do is bet on what will most likely work. ThisBrahmin learned a lot from getting shot at, and hit, by what might be thought of at Rutgers as good ol’ boys just trying to do their jobs right.
You Hate Me Because I'm Southern
I n his power-building years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson figured that “he himself would likely never reach the presidency,” writes Marshall Frady, “owing to the Southern odor on him.” The political sensorium has changed since then, of course, but—I don't know about you—I still stink a little. I like to roll in it, some. But I can't entirely get over the apprehension that people smell me the wrong way.
See, I live in Massachusetts, among people who regard being liberal as perfectly natural, whereas it is in some ways a stretch for me, which is why I like it. I feel like a naked person in a nudist colony. A couple of winters ago I was wandering around my house wearing six or seven sweaters and muttering about the confluence of two things:
One: Senator Trent Lott's nostalgic tribute to the segregationist heyday of Strom Thurmond. If Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, “we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years,” said Lott with a twinkle in his eye. Here is a man from the same part of the same state as my mama, and he was born almost the same week I was, and he hasn't managed to inherit or acquire any better sense than that? Works for me professionally, of course. Enables me, on the radio, to thank the cowpaddy-coifed Lott for showing that there is, after all, a limit to how far a Republican can ride the wave of neo-peckerwood regressivism, and for proceeding, in apology after apology, to give new meaning to the formerly racist expression “world's sorriest white man.” But the whole thing is so retro it makes me feel tired.
Two: The attempt—which, thank heaven, I managed to squelch—by the publisher of my forthcoming biography of Robert E. Lee to assert, in marketing copy, that the book will appeal to “proud Southerners.” If, say, Italo Calvino had written a biography of, say, Columbus, would they have advertised it as appealing to “proud Italians”? If Joan Didion did Hillary Clinton, would they pitch it to “proud white ladies”? And can it be that they believe, or even would like to believe, that I home in on people whoregard themselves as
proud
…? I am not an ashamed, not even a sheepish, Southerner. But …I feel tired.
So I turn on the TV and what comes boiling out at me? That moment in
Raintree County
when Elizabeth Taylor, voluptuously abed, hollers at Montgomery Clift, her long-suffering husband:
“You don't love me! You never did love me! You hate me because I'm Southern!”
And I think to myself, Yes! Why not! Why can't I have the option of going about in the world as a
maligned
Southerner, an object
Glory.
But he kept fighting, through the horrific Wilderness campaign, because he had concluded that the right thing was to do one's job right, whatever the consequences. He held rigorously to that belief throughout a long postwar legal career. His opinions as a U. S. Supreme Court justice were crucial in bolstering and expanding application of the First Amendment—but he grounded his thinking not in divinely endowed rights or the brotherhood of man but rather in his procedural judgment, based on the Constitution and experience, that society is strongest when everyone can speak out.
Like the “Nothin ” man, he was uneffusive. (Henry James, who grew up with Holmes Jr., likened his demeanor to “a full glass carried without spilling a drop.”) He eschewed church, was skeptical of every absolute value, and saw that his father's broidery was but loosely wound into the woof of reality. He came to believe that we can never know for sure what is true, all we can do is bet on what will most likely work. ThisBrahmin learned a lot from getting shot at, and hit, by what might be thought of at Rutgers as good ol’ boys just trying to do their jobs right.
You Hate Me Because I'm Southern
I n his power-building years in the Senate, Lyndon Johnson figured that “he himself would likely never reach the presidency,” writes Marshall Frady, “owing to the Southern odor on him.” The political sensorium has changed since then, of course, but—I don't know about you—I still stink a little. I like to roll in it, some. But I can't entirely get over the apprehension that people smell me the wrong way.
See, I live in Massachusetts, among people who regard being liberal as perfectly natural, whereas it is in some ways a stretch for me, which is why I like it. I feel like a naked person in a nudist colony. A couple of winters ago I was wandering around my house wearing six or seven sweaters and muttering about the confluence of two things:
One: Senator Trent Lott's nostalgic tribute to the segregationist heyday of Strom Thurmond. If Thurmond had been elected president in 1948, “we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years,” said Lott with a twinkle in his eye. Here is a man from the same part of the same state as my mama, and he was born almost the same week I was, and he hasn't managed to inherit or acquire any better sense than that? Works for me professionally, of course. Enables me, on the radio, to thank the cowpaddy-coifed Lott for showing that there is, after all, a limit to how far a Republican can ride the wave of neo-peckerwood regressivism, and for proceeding, in apology after apology, to give new meaning to the formerly racist expression “world's sorriest white man.” But the whole thing is so retro it makes me feel tired.
Two: The attempt—which, thank heaven, I managed to squelch—by the publisher of my forthcoming biography of Robert E. Lee to assert, in marketing copy, that the book will appeal to “proud Southerners.” If, say, Italo Calvino had written a biography of, say, Columbus, would they have advertised it as appealing to “proud Italians”? If Joan Didion did Hillary Clinton, would they pitch it to “proud white ladies”? And can it be that they believe, or even would like to believe, that I home in on people whoregard themselves as
proud
…? I am not an ashamed, not even a sheepish, Southerner. But …I feel tired.
So I turn on the TV and what comes boiling out at me? That moment in
Raintree County
when Elizabeth Taylor, voluptuously abed, hollers at Montgomery Clift, her long-suffering husband:
“You don't love me! You never did love me! You hate me because I'm Southern!”
And I think to myself, Yes! Why not! Why can't I have the option of going about in the world as a
maligned
Southerner, an object
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