David Shribman
As the year slouched to an end, no one mourned its passing, none among us hesitated to turn the calendar page. What lies ahead is more misery in the Middle East, a dispiriting presidential campaign between two old men the country would rather not see compete again, and more debate about what constitutes hate in a country that once liked to use the phrase “good neighbor.”
We columnists, like our neighbors, look to a new year as a blank slate. Over the past several months, I’ve been accumulating notes — scratchings on little shards of paper, typed reminders in my computer files — with material that might someday provide the basis of a column. It’s illuminating to look back and see what never became an essay. Here are some oddments, revealing in their messages, that I never got to use.
- I thought I might write a column suggesting that our era, with our complaints about national leadership, is not unique, and use as evidence a 1778 letter to Gov. George Clinton of New York in which Alexander Hamilton bemoaned, “America once had a representation that would do honor to any age or nation. The present falling off is very alarming and dangerous.”
If Hamilton could complain about the “falling off” of leadership only two years after the Declaration of Independence, then we surely have the right to complain 246 years later. The young people of the Revolutionary age — James Monroe was 18, Nathan Hale and Hamilton were 21, Betsy Ross 24 and Thomas Jefferson 33 at the moment of independence — would be astonished that our presidential candidates are more than three-quarters of a century old, worn out and alienating to all but their most ardent adherents.
- I squirreled away this quote said former Republican Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker, who died this year. It was in reaction to the 1973 revelation that Richard Nixon had kept an “enemies list”: “Let me make it clear, because I have got to have my partisan moment. Republicans do not cover up; Republicans do not go ahead and threaten: Republicans do not go ahead and commit illegal acts; and, God knows, Republicans don’t view their fellow Americans as enemies to be harassed.”
It’s a pity I never got to use this one. The reigning Republican calls Biden “Sleepy Joe,” labeled his challenger Nikki Haley “Birdbrain,” former Secretary of State James Mattis “the world’s most overrated general,” Barack Obama a “criminal” and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “crazy.”
- I still think there’s a good column in historian John William Ward’s characterization of the seventh president in his classic 1955 “Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age”: “The age was not his. He was the age’s.”
Ward, the former president of Amherst College, died 38 years ago, long before the great reevaluation of Jackson, a slaveholder and battler of Indigenous peoples. The description also applies to Donald Trump, who believes he’s the avatar of our age but who is instead a skilled reader of the temper of our times. Virtually alone among American figures, Trump understands the great divides in the country even though he resides on the privileged side of those divides.
- I worry that the historian Margaret Leech was speaking not only of the atmosphere as the Civil War approached but also of our own time when she wrote, in her marvelous 1941 “Reveille in Washington”, “The country was sleeping on a volcano that was ready to burst.”
No one reads Leech, who died in 1974, anymore, but she won two Pulitzer Prizes — the first woman to win a single one in history — and her observations are trenchant and, often, terrifyingly relevant. This year, the term “civil war” became part of contemporary commentary rather than historical reflection — a measure of the parlous nature of our politics and the polarization of our polity.
One more thing: I reserve the right to use these themes, and these quotes, if circumstances justify their use. Happy new year.
David M. Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. His commentary is distributed by Universal Features Syndicate. Send comments to [email protected].
