Lexicographers — the people who make dictionaries — divide into two camps. These are the prescriptivists and the descriptivists. The former tell their readers how words are supposed to be used. The latter tell readers how words are actually used. In an earlier time the prescriptivists held sway. Lately most lexicographers identify as descriptivists.

In social science a similar divide exists between normative and positive approaches to understanding human behavior. The normativists assert how things ought to be. The positivists settle for explaining how things are. The normativists have often been construed as idealists. The positivists call themselves realists.

The natural sciences acknowledge nothing comparable to the prescriptivists or the positivists. There has been no “ought” in physics or chemistry or biology since the natural sciences separated themselves from philosophy and religion. There is only description, the more realistic the better.

History is a social science that aspires to literature, or the reverse. In their efforts to discover and explain past human actions, historians are akin to anthropologists. In crafting their explanations into narratives, historians borrow from the tool kits of novelists and poets.

Occasionally historians propose laws of history. These attempt to summarize durable patterns of human behavior. Karl Marx, a historian as well as an economist, boiled all of human history down to the class struggle. His contemporary Thomas Carlyle said history was nothing but the biography of great men.

I myself have dabbled in the field of historical laws. Faithful readers of this column might recall some of my thoughts on the subject. An additional one, more sweeping than most of my original ten, is given in the title of this installment. It describes how different peoples have related to their neighbors and the lands they live on.

“Take what you can and hold it till you can't.”

The reader can rest assured that this is offered in the spirit of description rather than prescription. It seems to me a succinct description of how territory has changed hands over millennia of human existence.

We humans are a territorial species and a social species. Before agriculture, we depended on hunting and gathering grounds. Even when the human population was small compared to the size of the earth, some grounds were more productive than others. Bands and tribes sought the best grounds and in the name of self-preservation grabbed what they could. They held them until a stronger band or tribe came along and wrested the grounds away.

On the steppes of Asia and the plains of America the contest for hunting grounds lasted far into the age of written history. Toward the end, hunters faced herders, as in Texas where ranchers, preceded by buffalo hunters, forced the Comanches onto reservations and populated the plains with their cattle.

Elsewhere the contest had become a fight for control of the most productive farmlands. The “fertile crescent” from the Nile valley to Mesopotamia witnessed the rise and fall of empires.

The takers of land dressed their conquests in the language of religion or other higher purpose. The descendants of Abraham asserted that God ordered them to conquer Canaan. “Manifest destiny" rationalized the westward expansion of the United States.

One might have thought the territorial imperative would diminish with the industrial revolution. Land per se was no longer so vital to daily existence. In some places the contest over territory did indeed diminish. In North America, the last campaign for mastery of land ended with the surrender of Geronimo in 1886.

But fighting continued elsewhere. The scramble of European colonialists for Africa engendered distrust that resulted in World War I. Adolf Hitler’s demand for "living space" motivated World War II in Europe. In Asia, Japan seized Manchuria from China as a first step toward creating an empire intended to reach to the borders of India.

The territorial imperative persists today. The heirs of Abraham are still fighting over Canaan. Russia seized Crimea and eastern Ukraine in a war that hasn't ended. China insists that Taiwan is Chinese and is building an army and navy to effect a takeover. Donald Trump has spoken possessively of Greenland, Canada and Panama.

As in the past, so today do the acquisitive parties claim moral high ground in their campaigns for actual ground. Their opponents claim their own moral purposes. How to sort the claims and counterclaims? How to adjudicate between them? What underlying principle provides the common thread?

It is humans’ attachment to land — their own land always, their neighbors’ land often. Adjudication occurs in the court of combat. For this law of history, the court is always in session.

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” wrote Charles Dickens at the start of A Tale of Two Cities. He continued the sentence in his run-on way, through several more clauses to the conclusion that “we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way—in short, the period was so far like the present period that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.”

Dickens was writing about the eighteenth century from the mid-nineteenth. But his insight about the two periods perceiving themselves in the superlative might have been written about any age. Infants inhabit the center of their universes, as far as they know. Everything exists to serve their needs. If it didn’t for the most part, they wouldn’t survive. When it doesn’t, they don’t. As children they discover that a world exists beyond their needs. Their parents don't always come the moment they cry. Most manage this decentering without psychological trauma. Those parents who do continue to cater to their children’s demands do the young ones no favor. The parents won’t be there forever. The world won’t be so solicitous.

Generations face the same decentering struggle. Each generation tends to see itself as the object of history’s unfolding. Every culture has an origin story, and the story usually culminates in the present, whenever that present happens to be. Certain origin stories of a religious bent  allow for an extension into the future, often ending in apocalypse. But the present generation is always on the main road to that end.

Charles Darwin supplied a secular origin story, which likewise allowed for continuation into the future. Yet most of the interpreters and consumers of Darwin’s theory confined their attention to how evolution had produced the present. Everyone wanted to know who or what were our prehuman ancestors, not who or what would be our posthuman descendants.

The social Darwinists, the ones who applied evolution most directly, if tendentiously, to history, explained how competition among cultures and races had led to the triumph of the friends and kin of those doing the explaining. They acknowledged that the struggle continued, but they scarcely entertained the idea that they might be displaced from the pinnacle of the pyramid—unless society ignored the stern lessons of evolutionary science.

Keepers of morality rarely consider themselves Darwinists, at least not on morality. Yet they often operate on the same principle. Each generation acts as though its moral code is the best there ever was. They sometimes forgive the sins of previous generations, contending that those generations knew no better. Often they don’t, instead ungraciously casting condemnation from their peak of perfection down upon those who helped them get to the summit.

There can be a performative, prophylactic aspect to this. I must be the quickest to condemn lest I be accused myself. It’s an old, sad story. Henry Ward Beecher zealously defended Christian teaching on the family while sleeping with the wives of members of his Brooklyn congregation. Some of the most vocal homophobes have been closeted gay people.

Yet much is sincere. People gravitate toward those who share their values. Surrounded by the like-minded, they convince themselves that they are the right-minded. Looking back in history and discovering people who had different values, they judge them wrong-minded.

Some of the judgments are silly and inconsequential. We roll our eyes at fashions in clothing that have gone out of style. Our taste, of course, will prove timeless.

Part of the phenomenon can be ascribed to simple narcissism. Dickens's formula encompasses the bad as well as the good. In America, partisanship is said to be worse today than at any previous time in the country's history. Individual Americans imagine they are more stressed than their parents and grandparents.

Not so. Partisanship is no worse today than it was in the 1790s, and less deadly than it became in the 1850s and early 1860s. Our parents were fully as stressed as we are. It's just that we were kids then and didn't notice. 

Part of the myopia is more significant. America fought seven wars since 1917 in the name of democracy. During that time, American officials have taken the position that democracy is the last word in political organization, the end toward which all other forms ought to gravitate—or be made to gravitate, if necessary.

For a time, history seemed to cooperate. Democracy spread slowly in the nineteenth century, a bit faster in the first half of the twentieth century, and then rapidly in the second half. But the twenty-first century has been a period of democratic disillusionment. Russia reverted from budding democracy to raging autocracy. India, the bellwether of democracy in the developing world, has developed antidemocratic features. China resisted democratizing all together. In America many people have less faith in democracy than they used to.

Likewise on personal rights. In the 1960s the spread of individual rights appeared unstoppable in America. Many people who campaigned successfully for civil rights assumed that an equal rights amendment for women would be a slam dunk. But just before a proposed amendment attained the support of the necessary three-quarters of the states, a backlash developed and stopped it. Today the chances that such an amendment could even get out of Congress are minimal. In the early 1970s the Supreme Court discovered in the Constitution a right of privacy that entailed a right to abortion. Fifty years later the court changed its mind.

Even on its face, the notion that we somehow sit at the apex of history is far-fetched. We are approximately the ten-thousandth generation of Homo sapiens. We stand in a long line—and not at the end of the line but in the middle. There will be many generations after us. Doomsayers who contend otherwise fall straight into the superlative trap. We alone, they say, of all the generations of humans have the ability to destroy our species.

No, we don't. A major nuclear war might kill hundreds of millions. But that would leave several billion living, and they would be resourceful enough to survive the aftermath. Climate change might become very disruptive, and it will certainly cause the extinction of less resilient species than ourselves. But H. sapiens will muddle through.

In the end, we're just another generation. Better in some ways than previous generations. Worse in others. Not the best. Not the worst.

Take that, Chuck.

See the other laws of history at https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history-165

In the autumn of 2015 a group of students at Princeton University calling themselves the Black Justice League led protests against the university’s use of the name “Woodrow Wilson” on its school of public and international affairs and on one of its residential colleges. Wilson, the protesters said, was a racist and, as America’s twenty-eighth president, was responsible for expanding segregation in the federal workforce. Though Wilson had been president of Princeton before entering politics and for that reason might deserve recognition, the protesters allowed, the prominence of his name at the university was an affront to students of color and a deterrent to their inclusion and success there. The public affairs school and the college must be renamed.

In response, the university appointed a special committee of the board of trustees to examine the question. The committee consulted students, faculty, staff, alumni, historians and others, and solicited opinions on a website created for the purpose. After months of meetings, the committee decided not to change the names of the college and the school. “The challenge presented by Wilson’s legacy is that some of his views and actions clearly contradict the values we hold today about fair treatment for all individuals, and our aspirations for Princeton to be a diverse, inclusive, and welcoming community,” the committee explained in its final report. “On the other hand, many of his views and actions—as faculty member and president of this University, as governor of New Jersey and a two-term President of the United States, and as an international leader whose name and legacy are still revered in many parts of the world—speak directly to our values and aspirations for our school of public and international affairs and for the first of our residential colleges.”

The committee chose to defer to their predecessors who decades earlier had attached the Wilson name to the school and the college, and also to a university award. “We believe there is and should be a presumption that names adopted by the trustees after full and thoughtful deliberation, as happened in both of these cases and in the naming of the Woodrow Wilson Award, will remain in place, especially when the original reasons for adopting the names remain valid. There is considerable consensus that Wilson was a transformative and visionary figure in the area of public and international affairs; that he did press for the kinds of living and learning arrangements that are represented today in Princeton’s residential colleges; and that as a strong proponent of education for use, he believed Princeton should prepare its students for lives in the nation’s service. These were the reasons Wilson’s name was associated with the school, the college, and the award.” And they remained causes the university endorsed.

All the same, the committee recommended measures to publicize what they agreed were Wilson’s failings. “Contextualization is imperative. Princeton must openly and candidly recognize that Wilson, like other historical figures, leaves behind a complex legacy with both positive and negative repercussions, and that the use of his name implies no endorsement of views and actions that conflict with the values and aspirations of our times. We have said that in this report, and the University must say it in the settings that bear his name.”

The Princeton exercise in reevaluating a figure from the past made news not so much from the care that went into the assessment, although it was unusually thorough, but from the outcome. It left Wilson standing, so to speak, at a time when other figures from the past, similarly haled into the court of reconsideration, were falling fast.

Cities, counties and states across the country had been weighing the merits of historical figures for some time, often focusing on racial questions. But the scrutiny intensified after the murder of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist in 2015, and again after the killing of a counter-demonstrator at a rally of white nationalists and neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017. Not least because the white nationalists wrapped themselves, figuratively and sometimes literally, in the flag and other iconography of the Confederate States of America, demand quickly spread to remove such symbols from public places. In the three years after the Charleston massacre, more than 100 Confederate statues, flags, place names and other public links to the Confederacy were removed or changed, according to the South Poverty Law Center.

Woodrow Wilson had nothing to do with the Civil War besides surviving it as a small boy in a preacher’s family in Georgia. But his attitudes toward race and his policy on segregation pulled him into the new debate. In at least one case he was essentially collateral damage. At the University of Texas at Austin, a statue of Wilson stood opposite a statue of Jefferson Davis at the head of the university’s South Mall. The university administration decided to remove Davis for his ties to the Confederacy, and took out Wilson for reasons of symmetry. At that time Wilson hadn’t become controversial in Austin.

The Texas case revealed a tendency critics of the iconoclasm had raised from the start. Jefferson Davis was the preeminent symbol of the Confederacy, the first on anyone’s list of Confederate removals. For others on the list, the indictment wasn’t so strong. On the sides of the South Mall at UT stood four additional statues of men connected to the Confederacy, including Robert E. Lee. These were spared in the initial purge. “James Stephen Hogg, Albert Sidney Johnston, and John Reagan had deep ties to Texas,” said UT president Gregory Fenves. Jefferson Davis had no such ties. As for Lee, he had spent time in Texas before the Civil War, which mitigated his historical guilt. “Robert E. Lee’s complicated legacy to Texas and the nation should not be reduced to his role in the Civil War,” said Fenves.

But the reprieve was temporary. Two years later, after the Charlottesville killing, Fenves announced the removal of the rest of the statues. “The historical and cultural significance of the Confederate statues on our campus—and the connections that individuals have with them—are severely compromised by what they symbolize. Erected during the period of Jim Crow laws and segregation, the statues represent the subjugation of African Americans. That remains true today for white supremacists who use them to symbolize hatred and bigotry.” Fenves granted that the University of Texas had a duty to preserve and study history. “But our duty also compels us to acknowledge that those parts of our history that run counter to the university’s core values, the values of our state and the enduring values of our nation do not belong on pedestals in the heart of the Forty Acres”—a nickname for the UT campus. “We do not choose our history, but we choose what we honor and celebrate on our campus.”

#

This last sentence of Fenves reflected a sentiment common among those who wanted the statues down. They pointed out that the UT statues dated not from the era of the Civil War but from the early twentieth century, when white Southerners, emboldened by the Supreme Court’s endorsement of segregation in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case, and heartened by the presidency of Woodrow Wilson and the concomitant revival of the Ku Klux Klan, often celebrated the Confederate “Lost Cause” in statuary. Fenves and those who agreed with him contended that tolerating the statues constituted a continuing celebration of those white-supremacist values.  

But did it? The defenders of the status quo—of leaving the statues in place—said they celebrated values other than white supremacy, or at any rate in addition to white supremacy. They celebrated courage, loyalty, devotion to the public interest. Echoing Fenves’s comments at the time he left Lee standing, the leavers asserted that the historic role of individuals shouldn’t be reduced to a single issue.

What went largely unasked in the statuary debate was whether a figure erected a century ago celebrates anything today. Is an old statue any more indicative of current political values than an old building is indicative of current architectural tastes? 

I work at UT, teaching history, and while statue matter was pending, I offered unsolicited advice to President Fenves. I suggested leaving the statues in place, with one slight modification. At the base of each statue should be affixed a small plaque identifying the year in which the statue had been erected.

My argument was that this would distance the current and future generations from responsibility for the statues. Viewers would learn that a certain previous generation had seen fit to celebrate Jefferson Davis and the other Confederates. This was important, for it was part of the history of the university. But viewers today would not be led to conclude that the present generation was celebrating them.

I suggested doing this for all the statues on the UT campus. In 1999 the university unveiled a statue of Martin Luther King; in 2007 a statue of Cesar Chavez; in 2009 a statue of Barbara Jordan. Public art is an aspect of public education, especially on a university campus, and a walking tour of a campus can show how the values of the university have changed over time.

President Fenves declined my advice. Of the seven statues on the South Mall, only one remains there: of George Washington. At the present moment Washington’s place seems secure. At least no one is demanding that he come down. But Washington owned hundreds of slaves; in this regard his sins against human rights and equality were among the greatest in American history. And he had no Texas connections. How long could his presence continue to be tolerated, if mere presence was taken to signal celebration?

#

At the heart of the matter was the notion, often inchoate, that the present is somehow responsible for standing in judgment on the past, and that people of good will have the right, indeed the obligation, to remedy those parts of the past that don’t accord with present values. Of course, they can’t actually go backward in time and keep unsatisfactory things from happening. But they can, and they must, eliminate public symbols suggesting even long-dead  approval for those unsatisfactory things.

The temptation isn’t new. In times past it was typically associated with illiberal regimes and movements. After the Romans conquered Jerusalem in the year 70 they destroyed the Jewish temple there. The apparatchiks of Soviet Russia airbrushed from official photographs commissars who had fallen from favor and been dispatched to the gulag or an early grave. When the Taliban of Afghanistan blew up the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the action provoked an international uproar.

What is new, in America, is that the concept has been embraced by those calling themselves liberals. They do so with laudable motivation, typically framed as sparing emotional harm to persons who wish not to be informed or reminded of certain bad things that happened in the past. In 2016 Yale University fired an employee who deliberately broke a stained-glass window in (John C.) Calhoun College depicting slaves harvesting cotton. The employee called the image on the window “racist, very degrading,” and declared, “No employee should be subject to coming to work and seeing slave portraits on a daily basis.” The university subsequently changed its mind, reinstating the employee, replacing the window with one without the image, and renaming the college.

There is something to be said for the principle that offense is in the eye of the offended. But the principle is unworkable as a matter of general policy, for it has no predictive value. Even if an image today doesn’t give offense, who is to say it never will? Frederick Douglass spoke at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington in 1876. A former slave himself, Douglass told his audience of Washington freedmen, who had raised the funds for the monument, that they should be proud. “We have done a good work for our race today,” Douglass said. “In doing honor to the memory of our friend and liberator”—Abraham Lincoln—“we have been doing highest honors to ourselves and those who come after us.” But times and attitudes changed. By the late twentieth century the monument, which shows a standing Lincoln and a crouching freedman, his chains newly broken, was often seen as an embarrassment to the black community, or worse. “The monument is not really about emancipation but about its opposite—domination,” said one critic.

#

The same desire to repair the past gives rise to the campaign for paying reparations to descendants of American slaves. Again, the motives of the advocates are understandable, indeed noble. A great wrong was visited upon Africans and their descendants compelled to toil as slaves in the United States. Violence, rape and degradation were essential parts of slavery as an institution. Even when emancipation came, the former slaves were typically left with nothing but the clothes on their backs. They received no compensation for their stolen labor and their suffering; they were turned loose into a world that largely despised them and continued to oppress them. They should have received compensation at the moment of their freedom, the argument of the reparations campaign goes, if only the “forty acres and a mule” they were sometimes promised; because they didn’t, their descendants should receive compensation now. In other words, what past generations got wrong, the present generation should fix.

If only it were that simple. A difficulty with most schemes to fix the past is that they create more problems than they resolve. The advocates of reparations are frequently vague about the form reparations should take, and they disagree among themselves. Yet at the heart of the reparations idea is some sort of payment to descendants of slaves. And as soon as anyone starts talking about payment, the questions arise: Who pays? Who receives? How much?

Obviously, there are no former slaveholders still alive, and no former slaves. So there is no one who directly stole the labor from someone else, and no one whose labor was directly stolen. We are, in most cases, several generations removed from slavery. Many descendants of slaves are also the descendants of non-slaves; into which category do they fall: the payers or the payees? Should there be proportional payments in cases of mixed ancestry? Should descendants of slaves be required to prove they are descendants of slaves, and not, say, of immigrants who arrived in America after the end of slavery? And not the descendants of the small but not insignificant group of black slaveowners? On the paying side, should the descendants of immigrants who arrived after the end of slavery—of Chinese contract laborers imported to build railroads, for example, or Jews fleeing pogroms in Russia—be required to pay?

The questions are distasteful merely to pose. And they will get worse the closer reparations come to reality. An essential premise of the reparations movement is that the descendants of slaves would have been better off had their ancestors not been enslaved. Some will question whether this is so. If there had been no slavery in the United States, there would have been little emigration from West Africa to the United States. Most of those who are now descendants of American slaves would be living in West Africa, if living at all. The per capita income in Ghana today is about a sixth that of African Americans in the United States. By this reckoning, the descendants of slaves came out ahead as a result of slavery.

The outrageousness of this exercise is its point. Would anyone really make such an argument?

Almost certainly yes. And more like it. The greatest liability of the reparations movement is that it would generate a backlash that would overshadow any good it might accomplish. It is probably fair to say that most of those who favor reparations didn’t vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Much of the support for Trump came from white voters who believed that the political system had tilted against them. Affirmative action was often cited as evidence. Yet affirmative action touched only a modest number of people, typically those who applied for government jobs or for admission to selective colleges. Reparations, if financed by taxes, would touch nearly everyone.

Polls demonstrate that reparations are broadly unpopular, garnering the support of fewer than a third of Americans. Until this changes, there’s not much chance of a reparations policy becoming law. But if it did, it could set back race relations in America for decades—to the Jim Crow era, the last time racial distinctions were enshrined in America law. Some reparations supporters say: Tough luck; the law was written against black people for centuries; now it’s time for payback. But whatever the payback in monetary terms, the cost to hopes of racial tolerance and equality before the law would be far greater.

#

The desire to fix the past arises from a belief that we of the present are more enlightened than the generations that came before us, and that this enlightenment gives us a right to stand in judgment on them.

Are we more enlightened? Do we have that right?

It is certainly tempting to say we are more enlightened, at least on some topics. We don’t tolerate slavery (out in the open, that is; there are almost certainly more unfree laborers today, in the shadowy sectors of the world economy, than there were legal slaves in the nineteenth century). We allow women to vote and work outside the home (although in America we haven’t approved an equal rights amendment). We let consenting adults marry whom they wish (yet only one at a time; polygamy remains forbidden).

But we have our own faults. It’s just that they’re not so obvious to us as our grandparents’ faults are. And not so obvious as our faults will be to our grandchildren.

The point is not to absolve our grandparents for their failings, nor even to ignore those failings. The very fact that we can see where they fell short is evidence that we humans are making progress. We’re not perfect. We never will be. But we improve.

Rather than look back and feel morally superior to our ancestors, we should look forward and ask how we can produce a better world for our heirs. Prosecuting the past might make us feel righteous, but it can’t undo the past’s failures, and the effort tends to blind us to our own.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” says Jesus in the gospel of Matthew. He’s telling his listeners not to worry too much about the future. It’s good advice about the past, too.

See the other laws of history at https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history-165

Does the end justify the means?

Sometimes, surely. If a newspaper had leaked the D-Day landings ahead of time, few people would have faulted Franklin Roosevelt for denying the reports. His denial would have been a lie. But it would have been a lie in the service of saving many lives.

Open the door to such reasoning, though, and there's no telling where it will lead. Torturing prisoners is rightly condemned. But if waterboarding a captured terrorist might prevent another 9/11-style attack, what intelligence director would say no? If dropping atom bombs on Japanese cities could substantially shorten a brutal war, what American president wouldn't give the order?

Harry Truman wasn't a monster. But he did something many people have deemed monstrous. By his own telling he didn't lose sleep after deciding to use the atom bomb. One might wish he had. Killing 150,000 noncombatants is a horrible thing. But nearly all Americans at the time were glad he gave the order.

How about bigger monsters? Did Hitler lose sleep over his heinous crimes? Did Stalin? Did Mao?

Hitler lost sleep over something. His insomnia was chronic and often debilitating. He took a devil's brew of drugs to get him to sleep.

It would be reassuring to think a troubled conscience was the cause. But there's no evidence for this. If anything, the evidence indicates that Hitler felt as righteous as Truman did. The “master race” he envisioned would rule a world rid of the weakness that had held back humanity for ages. 

The concept strikes us as odious, thank God. So does the strategy of Stalin to build socialism by starving the kulaks. And Mao’s Great Leap Forward, which killed even more people in the name of collective progress.

But be careful when vilifying. Hitler, Stalin and Mao are extreme cases, yet their thinking wouldn't have been unrecognizable to the proponents of the "white man’s burden,” the "mission civilisatrice,” and "manifest destiny”—concepts that underwrote British, French and American imperialism. We must advance humanity, even if lots of humans have to die in the process.

This is not to assert a moral equivalence between Nazi Germany and nineteenth-century America, for example. But it is to observe that we humans are remarkably adept at rationalizing our actions. ”So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do," wrote Benjamin Franklin.

The observation is easy to apply to others. It's more importantly applied to ourselves. Most of us admit to occasional mistakes. But we generally think we're doing the right thing. We couldn't live with ourselves if we didn't. We find fault with others much more frequently. 

As a matter of simple arithmetic, this doesn't add up any better than the data from Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon, where "all the children are above average.”

The inescapable conclusion is that we're wrong more often than we think. A clear conscience and sound sleep are no guarantee of righteousness.

Again, there really are monsters in the world. But don't expect them to admit it. Don't expect them even to realize it. While you're sleeping, they are too.

For more on my laws of history: https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history-165

A questioner asked Charles Beard what history had taught him. The famous American historian replied,  “First, whom the gods would destroy they first make mad. Second, the mills of the gods grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small. Third, the bee fertilizes the flowers that it robs.” The questioner went away satisfied. But Beard was still thinking, and when he encountered his interlocutor a few days later, he added a fourth lesson. “When it gets dark enough you can see the stars.”

           Georges Clemenceau, the French premier during World War I, was informed that Woodrow Wilson, the American president, had issued a plan for peace, in fourteen points. Clemenceau, no fan of Wilson, reportedly observed that God had confined himself to ten commandments. And humans had broken all of those, Clemenceau added.

            In four decades of teaching, writing and thinking about history, I’ve inferred more lessons than Beard and fewer points than Wilson. Here I call them laws of history, but the first law—“There are no laws of history”—tips my hand that these laws are more suggestive than definitive. The subtitle of this post aims to convey my acknowledgment that these laws, such as they are, are simply my interpretations of the past. I used to call these “Brands’s Laws of History,” not wishing to burden any other historians with responsibility for them. But I now have a son who practices history, and I certainly don’t presume to speak for him. He speaks quite well for himself. So I’ve abandoned the family trademark while still relying on the reader to impute to me alone any deficiencies in what follows.  

1. There are no laws of history. (History isn’t physics, but neither is it pinball)

2. History is complicated. (For simple, see myth)

3. Great leaders have limited vision. (People who look too far ahead stumble over the present)

4. Nothing is inevitable till it happens. (Surrender hindsight if you seek historical understanding)

5. Sooner or later, countries get the foreign policies they can afford. (Poor countries bend to fate; rich countries try to change it)

6. Sex makes babies; war makes heroes. (Which is why humans are so attached to both)

7. Even monsters sleep well. (The human capacity for rationalization is boundless)

8. There are no heroes. (Only people who sometimes do heroic things)

9. You can’t fix the past. (It’s not broken. It’s a work in progress)

10. It’s not about you. (Ten thousand generations have come before you; more will follow)

The laws explicated:

1. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/the-laws-of-history

2. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/its-complicated

3. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/brandss-third-law-of-history-part;

   https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/brandss-third-law-of-history-part-8b5

4. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/brandss-4th-law-nothing-is-inevitable

5. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/brandss-5th-law;

   https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/brandss-5th-law-part-2-of-3;

   https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/brandss-5th-law-part-3-of-3

6. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/sex-makes-babies-war-makes-heroes;

   https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/why-wars-are-so-common; warhttps://hwbrands.substack.com/publish/post/46258906

7. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/even-monsters-sleep-well

8. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/there-are-no-heroes-only-people-who

9. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/9th-law-you-cant-fix-the-past

10. https://hwbrands.substack.com/p/10th-law-its-not-about-you

The pattern cracked slightly with the Korean War, which started just five years after the end of World War II. But it was an exception that proved the rule. It was an undeclared war, lacking the political legitimacy that comes from an endorsement by the people’s representatives in Congress. And it was a distinctly limited war, fought for narrow purposes under the auspices of the United Nations.

After the Korean War, the Vietnam War got things back on the generational track. The Persian Gulf War of 1991 came roughly a generation after Vietnam. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq starting in 2001 and 2003 came sooner than the generational model forecast, but they were small-scale conflicts and were a response to a specific event, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

The generational aspect of America’s wars seems to reflect the fact that generations of young men have often felt a need to prove themselves, but once having done so, they don’t need to do it again. This point became clear in the arguments between Theodore Roosevelt, a child at the time of the Civil War, and McKinley, a veteran of that war and a participant in the war’s bloodiest battle, Antietam. “I’ve been through one war,” McKinley said. “I’ve seen the dead piled up, and I don’t want to see another.”

Roosevelt, after passing his test at San Juan Hill, became more like McKinley. The year before the war, Roosevelt had given a speech at the Naval War College in which he lauded the martial virtues. “All the great masterful races have been fighting races,” he said. “No triumph of peace is quite so great as the supreme triumphs of war.” But after his day of glory, which provided the springboard that landed him in the presidency, he became the opposite of a warmonger. He conspicuously avoided sending American troops into battle, elevating diplomacy above war—so successfully that he won the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of his role in mediating an end to the Russo-Japanese War.

For any student of world affairs during the last several decades, one of the most important questions that can be asked is why there has been no World War III. Plausible answers include the existence of nuclear weapons, which have made the cost of general war prohibitive; the deterrent effect of alliances like NATO, which promise swift punishment of breakers of the peace; and economic globalization, which has dramatically reduced world poverty and made partners of erstwhile enemies.

Another possibility is that World War III was simply never in the cards. Maybe humans really do learn from their mistakes. Maybe the species is becoming more peaceful. Maybe the old rallying cries have lost their purchase on the imagination. Even if the default setting of human nature didn’t used to be peace, maybe it is now.

Will we ever know? How will we know?

The empirical evidence is mounting that something has changed. Not since World War II have great powers gone to war against each other. (At the time of the Korean War, China was still far from a great power). A standard measure of war-induced deaths—battle deaths per 100,000 of world population—has declined from 300 per year in World War II to less than 1 in the twenty-first century.

There is no way of telling if the change is permanent. As noted above, at the beginning of 1914 a persuasive case could be made that war had become anachronistic. The next three decades blew that argument to smithereens. Yet alcoholics sometimes do stay on the wagon, even if they have to treat each day as presenting another risk of falling off.

But other human habits have changed, and no one worries much about their return. Human sacrifice had a long history in various cultures before disappearing, and there seems little chance of its return. Chattel slavery—the open, legal buying and selling of humans for labor—vanished more recently, and though its black-market scion, human trafficking, remains a scourge, the consensus of disapproval of slavery appears certain to keep trafficking in the shadows.

Assuming war is on the demise, one has to wonder what will take its place. Another way of asking the question is to consider what substitutes for war will keep armed conflict at bay. The American psychologist William James considered the matter a century ago in an essay titled “The Moral Equivalent of War.” James wrote against the current of militarism that had produced America’s overseas empire after the Spanish-American War. He opposed war and imperialism, but he knew he and those who thought like him had their work cut out for them. “The war against war is going to be no holiday excursion or camping party,” he said. “The military feelings are too deeply grounded to abdicate their place among our ideals until better substitutes are offered.” James had lived through the Civil War; two of his brothers had fought, while he, like his third brother, the novelist Henry James, had claimed physical disability. William James had observed the evolution of American attitudes toward the Civil War, and drawn conclusions. “There is something highly paradoxical in the modern man’s relation to war,” he said. “Ask all our millions, North and South, whether they would vote now (were such a thing possible) to have our War for the Union expunged from history, and the record of a peaceful transition to the present time substituted for that of its marches and battles, and probably hardly a handful of eccentrics would say yes. Those ancestors, those efforts, those memories and legends, are the most ideal part of what we now own together, a sacred spiritual possession worth more than all the blood poured out. Yet, ask those same people whether they would be willing, in cold blood, to start another civil war now, to gain a similar possession, and not one man or woman would vote for the proposition. In modern eyes, precious though wars may be, they must not be waged solely for the sake of the ideal harvest. Only when forced upon one, only when an enemy’s injustice leaves us no alternative, is a war now thought permissible.”

James admired the martial virtues of honor, efficiency and service. The question for the modern age was how to separate them from the bloodshed. He thought this would be difficult but possible. “The martial type of character can be bred without war,” he asserted. “Strenuous honor and disinterestedness abound elsewhere. Priests and medical men are in a fashion educated to it, and we should all feel some degree of it imperative if we were conscious of our work as an obligatory service to the state.” James rejected common arguments against the transition. “It would be simply preposterous if the only force that could work ideals of honor and standards of efficiency into English or American natures should be the fear of being killed by the Germans or the Japanese. Great indeed is fear; but it is not, as our military enthusiasts believe, and try to make us believe, the only stimulus known for awakening the higher ranges of men's spiritual energy.” James’s formula was simple, if not necessarily easy to follow: “The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” 

Jimmy Carter picked up on James’s idea, following four additional American wars. Carter became president the year after the Vietnam War finally ended in a defeat that took the shine off the promise of actual war. Meanwhile the oil shocks of the 1970s wreaked havoc on the American economy. Carter specified his version of a moral equivalent of war as a campaign to end America’s addiction to imported petroleum. “Many of these proposals will be unpopular,” he said in a speech from the Oval Office. “Some will cause you to put up with inconveniences and to make sacrifices.” But they were necessary. “The alternative may be a national catastrophe.” Carter called on Americans to gird up. “This difficult effort will be the ‘moral equivalent of war,’ except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not to destroy.”

Carter’s program got no traction against the defenders of America’s energy status quo, who dismissed it by the acronym MEOW. They added insult to injury when they dubbed a subsequent Carter appeal for sacrifice in the national interest the “malaise speech,” though he never uttered that word.

Which left the question of what would replace war in the national psyche, if anything at all. Sports seemed a possibility. During the same period when war was offering fewer and fewer opportunities for emotional solidarity in pursuit of a common goal, spectator sports became enormously popular. In football stadiums across America and at soccer pitches around the world, people in groups of a hundred thousand or more cheered their champions on. In smaller arenas for other sports they did the same thing. Annually as many as a billion people watched the American Super Bowl football championship. A comparable number hung on the outcome of soccer’s World Cup. For the World Cup, the Olympic Games and assorted other world championships, the athletes and teams were explicitly identified with their countries, bringing patriotism into play.

Some of this growth, at a time of decline in the practice of war, might have been merely coincidental—an artifact of the post-World War II popularization of television. But the spread of television might itself have contributed to the decline of war. Television brought the violence and destructiveness of war into homes across America and much of the rich world by the 1960s, and the visibility of war only increased with the emergence of cable television and the internet. War is easier to honor and indulge in when the victims are unseen.

Ironically—or maybe not, given the paradoxes of human nature—the bear market for war itself was accompanied in America by a bull market in the reputation of the country’s warriors. When the GIs came home at the end of World War II, they were respected but in a businesslike way: their country had called, they had answered, and now it was time to get back to regular life. Veterans of the Korean War—especially the repeaters from World War II—likewise thought of themselves as nothing special, and for the most part were treated that way. Veterans of the Vietnam War sometimes sought to hide their service, so unpopular had that conflict become by its end.

But as America’s wars got fewer and smaller, the treatment of American soldiers and veterans became more conspicuously admiring. Simple numbers had something to do with it. The 16 million veterans of World War II were so many that one met them everywhere during the few decades after the war; familiarity bred, if not contempt, then matter-of-factness. In the early twenty-first century the number of Americans under arms was less than a tenth as many, in a nation of twice as many people. America’s warriors were a more special group by the mere fact of being many fewer. (Strikingly, the World War II generation was dubbed the “greatest generation” only by their descendants, as the generation itself began to die out.)

America’s twenty-first-century warriors were also a more select group—self-selected, in fact. The end of the draft in the 1970s meant that thereafter every man and woman in the American military had volunteered to be there. And volunteering to put one’s life on the line for one’s country usually inspires greater respect than doing so to avoid prison for draft-dodging.

There was also a bit of conscience-assuaging in the treatment of every soldier as a hero. Some liberals felt badly, or politically vulnerable, for having blamed the American soldiers in Vietnam for the war policies the liberals disliked. And some conservatives were sensitive to the fact that as much as they supported the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, their own kids weren’t fighting there; it was the kids of other people.

If sports offered a substitute for war, so did politics, which increasingly resembled a blood sport. Again, the timing might have been coincidental. The modern polarization in American politics followed the embrace of civil rights reform in the 1960s by the Democratic party. Suddenly white Southern Democrats, since the Civil War the strongest single bloc within the party and the most devoted to segregation, found themselves without a home. Older Southern Democrats started voting Republican; many switched to the Republican party. Younger white Southerners joined the Republicans when they first registered to vote. The transition took a generation, but it was largely complete by the 1990s.

The Republican party made room for the newcomers, who were more conservative socially than most of the traditional party of Lincoln. Liberal Republicans of the Northeast, upper Midwest and West Coast found themselves as adrift as the Southern Democrats had been. Many of them gravitated to the Democratic party.

The result was a sifting that left each party more ideologically coherent than it had ever been. Nearly all the liberals were Democrats, and nearly all the conservatives Republicans. The bipartisan coalitions that had made possible the reforms of the Progressive era of the early twentieth century, the New Deal programs of the 1930s, the civil rights revolution and Great Society of the 1960s, and the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s were a thing of the past. Taking their place was the scorched-earth partisanship of Newt Gingrich and his counterparts and successors in both parties.

Facilitating the polarization was the rise of the new media: first, cable television news networks that let viewers choose their channels to suit their tastes, and then social media that made the cocoon still more comforting.

Cementing the new system in place was the increasing precision of partisan gerrymandering, which allowed state legislatures, with the imprimatur of the Supreme Court, to design congressional districts that were safe for one party or the other. The result was the elevation of primary elections to the status of main event in congressional races. Republican incumbents worried about challenges only from their right, Democrats only from their left. For incumbents of either party, a vote for a measure sponsored by the other party could be called a betrayal and often was, leading to the near-disappearance of any such aisle-crossing compromises.

The new dispensation triggered a flipping of the Clausewitzian principle that war was politics by other means. Now politics was war by other means. Political foes were often treated as the enemy; insufficient enthusiasm for the party cause was branded as treason.      

The bloody-mindedness of American politics had chiefly domestic roots. But there was a foreign-policy element that was absolutely essential to its burgeoning: the absence of a major war. Woodrow Wilson was said to have commented, in his days as president of Princeton University, that academic politics were so bitter because the stakes were so small. To some extent that described America as the twentieth century turned into the twenty-first. The issues over which the parties fought were hardly immaterial—tax rates, immigration, health care—but they lacked the mortal immediacy of a world war, and so produced no comparable unifying effect.

When Americans at the end of the century looked back on World War II as the “good war,” they were thinking not of the fifty million men, women and children who lost their lives in that horrendous conflict, but of the unifying effect the war had on the American nation. After a decade of the Great Depression, which produced a politics as bitter in its own way as that of the end of the century, Pearl Harbor snapped Americans into line. Republicans didn’t become Democrats, nor Democrats Republicans, but both understood that there were matters more important than which side won the next election.

The attacks of 9/11 briefly had a similar effect. The approval ratings of George W. Bush shot up; legislation designed to secure the country against terrorism sailed through Congress. Yet the effect didn’t last, mostly because al-Qaeda wasn’t Nazi Germany or imperial Japan, but rather a small gang of criminals. Iraq was a regular country with a genuine army, but Saddam Hussein was toppled within weeks. There and in Afghanistan the Bush administration took pains to keep the wars from becoming centerpieces of American attention. Americans remained edgy about terrorism, but their lives went on much as before.

Was there anything that could restore the lost unity of the World War II years? Another world war, presumably. Or even a serious tussle with China or Russia, say, that didn’t go nuclear. It wasn’t the sort of thing any responsible leader would risk deliberately, but the temptation to turn foreign affairs to domestic ends is at least as old as Shakespeare, who had his Henry IV explain that it had been his purpose “to lead out many to the Holy Land, lest rest and lying still might make them look to near unto my state.” The dying king goes on to urge his son “to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.”

Short of actual war, American leaders frequently employed war metaphorically, declaring wars on poverty, cancer and drugs. The war on terror after 9/11 was closer to the real deal, but it lacked a coherent enemy. This proved a serious problem strategically—the terrorists were hard to locate and pin down—but also psychologically. Few things are more unifying among humans than a common enemy. The enemy can be a person—the German Kaiser for Americans in World War I, Hitler in World War II. It can be a group of people unlike one’s own. Here the list is endless, in that humans have long determined who they are by declaring who they are not. Race, religion, ethnicity and political ideology are but a few of the markers by which people distinguish their own group from others, and no distinction has been so fine that it didn’t drive some to murderous effort to maintain the distinction.

Different groups can be driven together by a shared enemy. The United States allied with the Soviet Union during World War II against Nazi Germany. If somehow all the peoples on earth, or at least most of them, could be allied against a common enemy, war might fall more fully out of favor. Science-fictionists imagine an extraterrestrial invasion; science-realists—and many others—point to global problems like climate change, which threatens if not all of humanity, at least very large portions of it. Such a common threat might finally summon the moral equivalent of war.

It hadn’t done so as of the early 2020s. Neither did the covid pandemic, which produced finger-pointing between nations and lethally bizarre partisanship within them.

If climate change and covid couldn’t elicit the moral equivalent of war, one had to wonder whether even war itself would have the same effect it once had. If America suffered a modern Pearl Harbor—say, a cyberattack from China—would the country rally together? Or would the parties simply toss blame-bombs at each other? Would one or the other deny the attack had taken place?

This was strange new territory. Yet though the ground might have changed, human nature probably hadn’t. At least not enough to render people immune to the appeal of heroes. If anything, the tawdriness of politics might have made heroes—not the manufactured kind from sports or other entertainment, but the real thing—more necessary than ever. War might yet make a comeback.

Grant’s initiation came at the start of America’s war with Mexico in 1846. He heard the sound of firing ahead as his unit marched forward. “A young second-lieutenant who had never heard a hostile gun before, I felt sorry that I had enlisted,” he recalled. “A great many men, when they smell battle afar off, chafe to get into the fray. When they say so themselves they generally fail to convince their hearers that they are as anxious as they would like to make believe, and as they approach danger they become more subdued. This rule is not universal, for I have known a few men who were always aching for a fight when there was no enemy near, who were as good as their word when the battle did come. But the number of such men is small.”

As it turned out, Grant was one of that small number. The fright faded as he entered the thick of the battle. “Although the balls were whizzing thick and fast about me, I did not feel a sensation of fear until nearly the close of firing,” Grant wrote to his wife, Julia. “A ball struck close by me, killing one man instantly. It knocked Capt. Page’s under jaw entirely off and broke in the roof of his mouth, and knocked Lt. Wallen and one sergeant down besides.” Yet Grant survived, and he learned something important about himself. “There is no great sport in having bullets flying about one in every direction,” he told Julia. “But I find they have less horror when among them than when in anticipation.”

He had another fright in his first command position, early in the Civil War. Secessionists under a man named Tom Harris were rampaging about Missouri, and Grant, now a colonel, received orders to suppress them. He learned that Harris was camped on a creek between two ridges. “The hills on either side of the creek extend to a considerable height, possibly more than a hundred feet,” Grant recalled. “As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris’ camp, and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on.” At the head of his regiment he topped the hill and gazed down to where he expected Harris to be. He saw an empty camp. “My heart resumed its place,” he wrote. He realized something he hadn’t thought of. “It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards. From that event to the close of the war, I never experienced trepidation upon confronting an enemy, though I always felt more or less anxiety. I never forgot that he had as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.”

The experience described by Washington and Grant—of confronting danger and surviving it—is one of the universal themes of war, and one of the most intoxicating. Winston Churchill, writing of his experience in the Boer War of the 1890s, put it succinctly: “Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result.”

Endocrinologists and neurologists would later describe the chemistry of the sensation of danger survived, but those who felt the rush didn’t need the details to know its attraction. War isn’t the only activity that brings it on; climbing mountains, hunting large predators, jumping from airplanes and riding tall roller-coasters can have similar effects.

But war has the advantage of building a reputation at the same time. “I am more ambitious for a reputation for personal courage than anything else in the world,” Churchill wrote to his mother. In Churchill’s case war gave a chance of starting over. “Being in many ways a coward—particularly at school—there is no ambition I cherish so keenly as to gain a reputation for physical courage,” he told his brother.

Theodore Roosevelt felt the same way. Born in New York City just before the Civil War, Roosevelt watched the soldiers heading off to battle. He could hardly imagine joining them, for not only was he too young but he was constantly sick. A life of action, let alone of glory, seemed beyond all hope. But his father—a strong, hearty man who was everything his son aspired to be—challenged the boy to “make his body.” Roosevelt accepted the challenge. With the help of personal trainers and coaches, he lifted weights, learned to box and wrestle, tramped about forests, scaled mountains, and otherwise tested himself physically in every manner possible. As is often the case in such instances, Roosevelt’s challenge acquired moral overtones. To become a man required displaying strength of body and character. The ultimate test for Roosevelt, as for many young men throughout history, was war.

Among his friends Roosevelt acquired a reputation as a warmonger, wanting a war regardless of the enemy. “I should welcome almost any war, for I think this country needs one,” he declared in the mid-1890s. His sister thought he was the one who needed it. Their father, though a stout Unionist, had declined to put on the blue uniform during the Civil War, out of deference to his wife, a Georgian, who couldn’t bear the thought of her husband trying to kill her kin on the Confederate side. Roosevelt’s sister believed her brother wanted to erase that blot on the family escutcheon. He finally got his war when William McKinley bowed to the pressure Roosevelt and others war hawks had been applying over Spanish mistreatment of Cubans and asked Congress for a declaration of war against Spain.

Roosevelt immediately resigned his civilian position as assistant secretary of the navy, to put on the uniform his father had never worn, and to prove to himself that he was a man. “It was my one chance to do something for my country and for my family and my one chance to cut my little notch on the stick that stands as a measuring rod in every family,” he said later.

He organized a cavalry regiment, nicknamed the Rough Riders, and on their behalf bullied his way to the front in Cuba. In the battle for San Juan Hill, he performed as bravely as he had ever dreamed of doing. His comrades fell on his left and his right; good fortune, as much as anything else, kept him from falling with them. But when he survived, he was as proud as could be. Decades later, after accomplishments that mattered far more in the scheme of national and world history, he still cherished his chance to prove himself. “San Juan was the great day of my life,” he said.

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There is much historical evidence in favor of this view. Europe was tense in early 1914, but a century had passed since the most recent general war, and theorists and practitioners had developed persuasive explanations as to why war, if ever it had been useful, had become anachronistic. The major countries of Europe were one another’s best customers; war would kill the commercial goose that was laying golden eggs for all parties to the trade. The industrial revolution had created a working class whose interests transcended national borders; should the bourgeoisie of France declare war on the bourgeoisie of Germany, the proletariats of the two countries would refuse to fight. Modern weapons were too destructive to allow any country to win a war, when costs were measured against benefits; this adverse calculus would prevent wars from starting.

But war did come, and when it did, the obvious explanation was that the diplomats of Europe had bungled mightily. They let a minor event in a backwater region engage the fears and ambitions of the great powers until Europe was aflame and civilization itself imperiled. With hindsight, several points on the descent could be identified where if someone had shouted, “Stop!” the catastrophe might have been averted.

The blundering took a different form thirty years later, when the world suffered an even greater catastrophe. Actual malice was ascribed to Adolf Hitler as the principal cause of the war; he didn’t blunder but intended war all along. Yet everyone else blundered by not seeing him for what he was. Had the British and the French, with American complicity, not attempted to appease Hitler—had they called his bluff instead, for example at Munich in 1938—the second great war needn’t have happened.

Another thirty years brought a new set of blunders, leading the United States into the morass of Vietnam. Here the problem was the overlearning of the lessons of World War II. In their thrall to the Munich analogy, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson made mistakes of their own, confusing Ho Chi Minh with Hitler and a nationalist revolt in Vietnam with the Soviet challenge to the United States. But once again, the problem was the wrongheadedness of those in charge.

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If war is when things go wrong, one might think that sooner or later leaders would run out of mistakes, and wars would become less frequent. And so they have, in certain eras. Europe was at relative peace during the century before 1914. There has been no general war since 1945. Maybe this time we really have got it right. Maybe wars are coming to an end, and peace will reign forevermore.

But there is plenty of support for the other possibility: that war isn’t when things go wrong, but when they go right. Humanity doesn’t stumble into wars; it goes willingly, even eagerly.

From the perspective of governments, this has certainly been true at times. Polk got the war he wanted in 1846; Hitler the war he wanted in 1939. Napoleon didn’t invade Russia by accident in 1812, nor Japan China in 1937.

The more interesting question is whether war is when things go right for those who do the fighting. The Civil War took the lives of several hundred thousand soldiers; did the war go right for them?

Perhaps not for them, but quite possibly for the much larger number of combatants who escaped the bullets, bayonets and bacteria. The war was a life-changing experience for many of those for whom it wasn’t a life-ending experience. It made men out of the boys who entered the armies of North and South, teaching lessons on matters of life and death they would have required decades to learn during peacetime.

And it gave the country regiments and battalions of heroes. Ulysses Grant, the foremost of the heroes, would have lived and died in obscurity if not for the war. At the beginning of 1861 he was employed as a clerk in his family’s leather business, having failed at peacetime soldiering, farming and business. The highlight of his existence was the hours he spent playing with his children on the floor of a rented house in Galena, Illinois. He had neither prospects nor much ambition. Three years later he was the commanding general of the Union army; in another year he was the victor of the greatest war in American history. He was twice elected president. When he circled the globe on a post-presidential tour, he was feted in the leading cities of Europe and Asia, quite possibly the most famous man on earth.

Even then he sometimes scratched his head at how all this had come about. The answer, of course, was the war. The war had revealed talents in Grant that set him above his fellows. He was physically fearless, had an instinct for strategy and tactics, and possessed the nerve to give orders that would send thousands of men to their deaths. It was this last trait that most set Grant apart from the Union generals who had gone before him. “He fights,” said Lincoln simply, and gratefully.

The war worked comparable wonders for William Sherman. Sharper than Grant but also edgier, Sherman had made a similar mess of civilian life. Happening upon each other in St. Louis in the late 1850s, the two shared their sad stories. “West Point and the regular army aren’t good schools for farmers, bankers, merchants and mechanics,” Sherman observed. In early 1861 Sherman was working as a schoolmaster, in charge of a military academy in Louisiana. The war revived his fortunes by sweeping away the complications that made peacetime life a challenge for him. In war success is determined by rigid metrics: you win or lose, you live or die. Sherman never learned to curb his temper or his tongue; his pointed comments on superiors and especially politicians got him into no end of trouble. But once the fighting began, much was forgiven of one willing to carry to stern logic of war to its brutal conclusions. To Confederates, especially those who encountered him on his march from Atlanta to the sea, Sherman was the devil incarnate. To Unionists, Sherman was a hero second only to Grant. Sherman could have had the presidency for the asking, but he knew himself well enough to realize he could never suffer the fools politics would throw in his way.

The war made a hero of Robert E. Lee too. The transformation wasn’t so great in Lee’s case; life in the peacetime army had suited him well. But he would have retired a colonel without the war, and he never would have become the most hallowed figure in Southern memory. Lee’s prospects improved the moment he resigned from the U.S. Army, for he immediately became the best officer available to the Confederacy. His task as commander of the Army of Northern Virginia was enviable; fighting on familiar ground, with internal lines of communication, he merely had to keep invading Northern forces at bay. But he did better than that. Displaying gifts of command equal to Grant’s, he dealt blow after blow to his Union counterparts. One of the heaviest blows came in the 1862 battle of Fredericksburg, where the Confederates beat back a much larger Union force, inflicting three times the casualties they suffered themselves. Observing the slaughter of the enemy, Lee felt the primal thrill shared by many of those who go to war. Turning to James Longstreet he said, “It is well that this is so terrible. We would grow too fond of it.”

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Among the variations, two human practices have been central to nearly every society. One is sex, the other war. The attraction of sex is obvious: most people like to do it, and it reproduces the species. Indeed the appeal of sex is so strong that most societies have felt obliged to limit it in one fashion or another. Incest taboos keep siblings and sometimes close cousins from mating; marriage helps identify whose children are whose. The recent—by historical standards—ability of humans to separate sex from procreation has compelled societies to rethink norms and practices, but it hasn’t diminished the obsession with sex. If anything, it might have enhanced it.

The attraction of war is harder to explain. War kills and cripples people. War creates widows and orphans. War destroys what humans have spent years or decades to create. War spreads disease and destitution. War is hell, as numerous participants and victims have said in one fashion or another since time out of mind.

And yet war has loomed large in nearly every society throughout history. The historian has to ask why? What is it about war that makes it so ubiquitous?

One approach to the question is to examine the process by which societies decide to go to war. Historians and especially political scientists have studied the causes of war and produced an extensive literature on the subject, most of which focuses on the role of governments. War, as opposed to violence by individuals, requires decisions by governments to employ force in an organized manner toward some government-determined end. Wars have been fought for territory: to take or defend it. Wars have been fought for other natural resources: game, gold, oil, water. Wars have been fought for sex: to acquire women. Wars have been fought to acquire slaves. Wars have been fought to free slaves. Wars have been fought to extend or protect commerce. Wars have been fought to preserve or promote democracy, communism and other modes of political organization. Wars have been fought over religion.

In every such case, decision-makers in a society, whoever they are and by whatever means they make decisions, conclude that war is necessary, or at least preferable to the alternatives. Collectively they say: Let’s go to war.

But they rarely mean: Let’s us go to war. In ancient times kings personally led armies into battle, but those days are long past. The norm during the last several centuries has been for society’s leaders to delegate the actual waging of war to others, typically young men. In effect, the graybeards point to the young men and say: Let’s you go to war.

And off they go—again and again, generation after generation. Not every one of them goes, and not each with entire enthusiasm. They are, after all, being asked to risk their lives. But very rarely have governments declared war and the young men who were expected to fight declared a boycott. Nor has the recent inclusion of young women in some armed forces changed things.

Why do they do it? Why do the young people accept the burden of fighting and dying for their societies?

Some believe the arguments made by their elders as part of the political decision process. Many of the young Americans who enlisted in 1812 agreed with Henry Clay and James Madison that American honor required chastising Britain for repeated insults and injuries. More than a few of the American doughboys who set sail for France in 1917 and 1918 were honestly moved by Woodrow Wilson’s call to make the world safe for democracy. 

Overlapping the group of enlistees persuaded by political argument is the cadre impelled by love of country. Leaders almost always cast war as being necessary for national safety and welfare. The assertion rings truest when the country has actually been attacked. This is why Pearl Harbor was so powerful in discrediting America’s interwar isolationists. Presidents have not been above provoking attack on American soil, or on soil asserted to be American. James Polk in the 1840s determined on war against Mexico after that country, which had just been divested of Texas, refused to sell California. Polk sent U.S. troops to a disputed strip on the left bank of the Rio Grande, hoping to goad the Mexicans into attacking. For weeks the Mexicans refused, until Polk decided to go to war anyway. He drafted a request to Congress for a war declaration, haranguing Mexico for bad faith and intolerable misdeeds, and was about to deliver it, when news arrived that the clash he sought had finally occurred. Relieved, Polk rewrote his message to Congress. “American blood has been shed on the American soil,” he said. Congress gave him the declaration he wanted, and young men rallied to the cause. Fifteen years later Abraham Lincoln struggled mightily to get the South to fire the first shot in the Civil War. When it did, at Fort Sumter, he issued a call for 75,000 volunteers to “to maintain the honor, the integrity, and the existence of our National Union.” His call was quickly oversubscribed.

Strikingly—but predictably, given the history of war—what the North construed as a defensive war was similarly construed by the South. South Carolinians took the mere presence of federal forces on South Carolina soil as an offense against the integrity of the state; when Lincoln, rather than removing those forces attempted to reprovision them, the South Carolinians opened fire. Virginia awaited Lincoln’s call for volunteers. Virginians felt a particular responsibility for the Union, having furnished the author of the Declaration of Independence (Jefferson), the commander of the Continental Army (Washington), the architect of the Constitution (Madison), and eight presidents (the three mentioned plus Monroe, Harrison, Tyler and Taylor). But Lincoln’s call for an army to suppress South Carolina’s rebellion caused many Virginians to conclude that their territory was about to be invaded by Northern soldiers. Robert E. Lee, the most promising officer in the United States army, resigned his commission to go to “the defense of my native state.” Many thousands of young Virginians swiftly followed his lead.

That Lee considered his homeland to be Virginia while Lincoln thought in terms of the Union was an artifact of American history and of America’s system of federalism. But the definitional gamesmanship that made both sides in America’s Civil War think they were defending themselves had its parallels throughout history. When France declared war on Prussia in 1793 it claimed to be defending the French Revolution. When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 he said he was protecting Germany’s eastern border. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 George W. Bush argued that the invasion was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack on the United States like that of September 11, 2001, but this time with nuclear weapons.

(End of part 1. Parts 2 and 3 to follow.)

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The impression was no accident; Franklin Roosevelt had designed the system this way, to make it politically appealing. But it was a fiction. In reality, the contributions of participants were mingled with other tax revenues and spent as they came in. But it meant that cuts to Social Security would have to survive the outcry of contributors who insisted that their accounts had been pilfered. The Pentagon issued no such statements of account; cuts to military spending weren’t and wouldn’t be taken anywhere near so personally.

Meanwhile, American dominance was being challenged as never before. The Soviet Union had competed with the United States for allies during the Cold War, but it always suffered from the fact that its economy was puny compared with that of the United States. Dictatorships can carry unsustainable burdens longer than democracies can, but they can’t carry them forever, and by the 1980s the Soviet system was staggering. The collapse came in 1991.

China was a different story. China’s phenomenal growth after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 put its economy on a trajectory to surpass the American economy during the 2010s or early 2020s, depending the measure chosen. The behavior of the Chinese appeared to corroborate the principle that countries get the foreign policies they can afford. As China grew wealthier, its foreign policy became more assertive. Its navy grew, and China laid aggressive claim to the waters of the South China Sea.

China invested strategically in numerous foreign countries, securing raw materials and markets and establishing networks of dependency on China’s goodwill. In some cases the Chinese government made clear that its protégés must choose between the United States and China; increasingly they chose China. Chinese consumers became sufficiently numerous and prosperous that foreign firms were willing to make steep concessions regarding intellectual property and privacy in order to have a crack at the Chinese market.

The European Union challenged the United States from a different direction. Its cumulative GDP approached America’s, even after Brexit, and though it had no single foreign policy, it did have economic policies. Large companies often faced closer scrutiny from European regulators than from American; an EU veto of a proposed merger could scuttle a deal that would have passed muster in the United States. When Washington imposed economic sanctions against regimes it disliked—notably Russia and Iran—it required EU cooperation to make them stick. Washington could no longer dictate to the Europeans as it had in the 1940s; it had to negotiate with them.

So would the American moment pass, as the moments of Rome, Britain and other hegemons had passed? No law of history required it. But historical patterns were suggestive. By 2020 the American economy could no longer sustain the world-dominating policies that came easily in the wake of World War II. The generations of Americans who grew up during the age of American dominance took that dominance for granted, but they were passing from the scene. Younger generations would have other expectations and other priorities.

Would there be a defining moment of declension, a bookend to Pearl Harbor, an American Suez? Perhaps there already had been. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, demonstrated that America’s wealth couldn’t guarantee it the most basic objective of foreign policy: the physical safety of the American homeland. America reacted by embarking on two wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that cost trillions of dollars and did nothing measurable to enhance American security. If anything, the wars eroded the willingness of Americans to continue to support the kinds of policy that produced them.

The refusal of Barack Obama to inject the United States directly into the Syrian civil war suggested that the retrenchment was already occurring. Interventionists complained that Russia was gaining ground in Syria at America’s expense; human-rights advocates declared that America was failing in its duty to protect innocent civilians. Yet Obama, noting the absence of any grassroots demand for involvement in a war most Americans didn’t understand, kept his and America’s distance.

Donald Trump led the United States further toward the rear. With Trump it was often hard to tell what was serious intention and what mere bluster, so frequently did he contradict himself; but his warning to NATO that the United States might not spring to the defense of members who fell short on their contributions to the alliance’s military budget hinted at a return to the days before America’s conversion to collective security. His withdrawal of the United States from a painstakingly negotiated nuclear accord with Iran and several other countries cast doubt on America’s commitment to security agreements generally. His launching of tariff wars against China and even some American allies harked back to the trade wars of America’s isolationist 1930s, as did his coopting of the slogan “America First”—the name and rallying cry of the most important of the interwar isolationist groups in America.

Each of Trump’s initiatives encountered political resistance, mostly from people old enough to remember when the icons he was shattering were untouchable—that is, from people who had developed their expectations of America’s world role during the Cold War. But by 2020 most of those who remembered the Cold War from professional or even personal experience were near retirement or beyond. The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 was ancient history to the cohort who would be making American policy in the future. It went almost without saying that this cohort would produce no new Marshall Plan, no new World Bank, no new NATO.

How gracefully Americans would proceed into this new era was the question. Leftover commitments to Taiwan might drag the United States into conflict with China. Russian meddling with Baltic members of NATO could trigger a crisis with the largest successor state to the Soviet Union. The Middle East was always a wild card. 

An eleventh-hour efflorescence wasn’t out of the question. China’s economy might hit the skids; the European Union could fall to pieces after Brexit. The reign of the U.S. dollar might continue for simple lack of a credible alternative, just as the Spanish dollar, which became the basis for America’s, outlasted the golden age of the Spanish empire.

But at the best, it seemed, the United States would become the first among equals, rather than a solitary superpower. Sooner or later, America would get the foreign policy it could afford. 

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Meanwhile American diplomats rewrote the rules of the international order. The United Nations, with American leadership, replaced the U.S.-less League of Nations. The International Monetary Fund and the World Bank enshrined the dollar as the linchpin of the global financial system and the fuel of economic development. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade reflected America’s conversion to free trade and bribed or cajoled other countries to take the pledge. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization put American muscle into a promise of common defense. Similar organizations did the same for Southeast and Central Asia. The Organization of American States was a U.S.-dominated mini-United Nations for the Western Hemisphere.

What made all this possible was the might of the American economy. In 1945 America’s industrial production was equal to that of the rest of the world combined. America’s new commitments were expensive, vastly outstripping anything deemed acceptable by most Americans merely a decade before. But Americans were willing to pay the premiums on the new insurance policies because they had discovered what some unfortunate homeowners discover when their houses burn down: that being without insurance can be more expensive than paying the premiums. World War II was by far the costliest enterprise in American history, burning through nearly $5 trillion (converted to 2020 dollars) and consuming more than a third of American GDP at the time. However expensive the premiums on the postwar policies, they were cheap by comparison with what another war would cost.

Yet it wasn’t only about dollars, and it wasn’t only about the United States. American leaders were sincere when they declared that their policies aimed at promoting freedom and prosperity in other countries. And their policies did promote freedom and prosperity. The Marshall Plan stabilized democracy in Western Europe and jump-started economies there. Controlled experiments are never possible in history; uncontrollable factors always intrude. But the side-by-side cases of West Germany and East Germany provided an approximation. As with identical twins separated at birth, their differential development after 1945 could reasonably be ascribed to the different environments they experienced. West Germany became a model of a free, prosperous society; East Germany, while better off economically than other countries of the communist bloc, lagged far behind in material standing of living, besides being a notoriously intrusive police state.

All the same, American policies weren’t uniformly beneficent. Where democracy was slow to emerge, American leaders sometimes settled for anticommunism in the regimes they sponsored. Where democratic elections produced leaders whose policies Washington didn’t like—in Iran and Guatemala in the 1950s, Chile in the 1970s—American diplomats and covert operatives helped overthrow them.

Much as rich people have been known to do, the United States sometimes bought too much insurance, or the wrong policies. Presidents from Harry Truman to Richard Nixon contended that South Vietnam must be kept out of the clutches of communism lest American security be gravely jeopardized. Lyndon Johnson put it most extravagantly in explaining that if America didn’t fight the communists in Southeast Asia, it would have to fight them in California. But despite sixty thousand American lives lost and many billions of dollars expended, the effort failed, and the communists captured South Vietnam.

And not much else happened. No communist tsunami swamped Indonesia, the Philippines and Taiwan. Japan was not shaken. No hostile landing craft were spotted near Malibu. Defenders of the war effort, led by alumni of the responsible administrations, argued that the decade of intense American involvement bought time for the rest of Southeast Asia to shore itself up, but to most students of the conflict this sounded like an ex post facto rationalization.

Whether the American-led order after 1945 was called an empire or the Free World, questions arose as to its sustainability. The hope of American leaders was that the institutions and values they nurtured would take root and become permanent. Democracy and capitalism sustained themselves in the United States; why not in other countries?

One answer as to why not was that democracy and capitalism had taken more than a century to develop in the United States, and had done so without pushy neighbors and seductively competing ideologies. The world of the Cold War was a very different, less forgiving place. 

Another answer, less commonly spoken aloud, was that American leaders might not really want other countries to be as successful as America itself had been. By the 1960s West Germany and Japan were already showing signs of becoming competitors to the United States. They remained firmly in the American sphere, protected by American alliances and weapons. And they appeared committed to democracy. But their booming economies, underwritten at first by American aid, produced exports that challenged American products in international markets and even in the American home market. Was this a good thing? Was this what American policies were supposed to accomplish?

Another line of skeptical thinking was historical in nature. No previous empire or hegemon had held the top spot forever. Sooner or later the commitments outstripped the ability to cover them. Was there any reason to think America was an exception to this rule?

Yes, said some: America was exceptional. It had always been exceptional. It would always be exceptional. History was linear, not cyclical. It advanced toward human freedom, exemplified in the political sphere by democracy and in the economic sphere by capitalism. As the world became more like America, the old rules no longer applied.

Here the burden of proof was on the exceptionalists. Every previous dominant power had considered itself exceptional; most considered themselves exempt from the forces that had brought the demise of their predecessors. And each had been proven wrong.

The economic numbers worked against perpetual American hegemony. The American economy grew steadily after 1945, but the economies of other countries grew faster. By 2020 America’s share of world industrial production had fallen from half in 1945 to a fifth. Put differently, where rest of the world only just equaled the United States in 1945, in 2020 the rest of the world overbalanced the United States by four to one.

Something else was happening. Rich countries buy insurance not simply against foreign troubles but for domestic reasons as well. In America these insurance policies are called entitlements and include, most importantly, Social Security and Medicare. Ordinary Americans, for natural reasons, are more attached to policies that benefit themselves directly than they are to policies that seem to benefit foreigners first and themselves only indirectly.

For the first half-century of the American era—that is, until about 2000—the premium payments on the domestic policies rarely crowded against payments on the foreign insurance policies, and never crowded them out. Moments of retrenchment on the foreign policy side occurred: after the defeat in Vietnam and after the American victory in the Cold War. But overall defense spending remained strong. On the domestic side the trend was exclusively upward. Americans had their guns and butter both.

Yet in the early twenty-first century a pinch became apparent. The financial crisis of 2008 and the recession that followed caused the federal budget deficit to balloon just at the moment that the Baby Boomers—the numerous generation born just after World War II—were beginning to collect Social Security and Medicare. For the first time a serious prospect arose that Americans would have to choose guns or butter.

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The retreat wasn’t surprising, human nature being what it is. American leaders in the early part of the twentieth century had been born and educated during the nineteenth. Their expectations of America’s role in the world had taken shape in the era before America became an economic superpower. George Washington’s counsel about staying out of the affairs of other countries had been based on the fact that in his day the United States was a small, weak country compared with the likes of Britain and France. The United States grew larger and stronger during the decades that followed, but America’s industrial revolution came later than that of the leading countries of Europe, and until the 1890s the United States remained a laggard. Under the circumstances, a modest foreign policy was the only prudent course.

Modesty might have been shed in the early twentieth century. America could have built a navy to match Britain’s and an army to match France’s or Germany’s. But modesty lingered in the minds of Americans educated in that earlier time. Until they—or their children—saw a pressing need for a more ambitious policy, they were content to leave the world to its own devices.

The need became apparent at Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt had seen it sooner than most Americans, but his political caution held him back. After the Japanese attack in Hawaii, he was able to shed his caution and seize the opportunity for American leadership of the anti-Axis alliance.

Foreign policy is, in many ways, a country’s insurance policy. People buy insurance to protect themselves against the hazards of life: injury, illness, fire, storms, loss of employment. Poor people can’t afford much insurance; unprotected, they deal as best they can with whatever life throws at them. Poor countries are similarly placed. They have to deal with the world as it exists and hope for the best. Rich countries, like rich people, are different. They can buy more insurance. The armies, navies and air forces of rich countries defend those countries’ borders and project their power abroad. Their soldiers, assisted by their diplomats, covert operatives and money, bolster friendly foreign governments and undermine or topple unfriendly ones. All these resources ensure that if trouble develops, it happens far from the home country; if war breaks out, it is fought on foreign soil. Where poor countries take the world as it exists, rich countries try to change the world, to suit their preferences.

For millennia these world-changing efforts assumed the form of imperialism. Julius Caesar led his legions into Gaul not so much to win territory as to secure Rome’s frontiers. But once Gaul was brought into the empire, then its frontiers had to be secured, and so Caesar went to Britain. In time the Romans found themselves having to defend much of Europe, North Africa and the modern Middle East. The insurance policy produced the Pax Romana, and it lasted as long as Rome could afford to pay the premiums. But eventually the productive energies flagged, the policy lapsed and the empire fell apart.

Other empires wrote similar stories. British merchants opened trade with port cities of India; to defend that trade British soldiers and diplomats conquered and coopted the hinterlands behind the cities. Defending the Indian hinterland eventually suggested securing the whole subcontinent and crossing the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan. The approaches to India had to be protected; hence the creation of colonies and protectorates in the Middle East, including Egypt, whose defense demanded securing the Sudan and the Nile headwaters.

The mechanism was typical of empires; the larger the territory acquired, the more expensive the insurance premiums. Britain, like Rome before it, tried to make the empire pay for itself, in terms of generating revenues to cover the premiums. And like Rome it succeeded, but not forever. By the early twentieth century the cost of imperial defense strained the British imperial budget; the unexpected outlay for World War I rendered the burden that much heavier. World War II broke the back of the empire, which fell to pieces in a tenth the time required to construct it.

But it didn’t go gracefully. The British clung to their empire for decades past the time they could really afford it. Habits of foreign policy are as slow to change on the decline as on the rise. The moment of truth for Britain—the inverse for Britain of Pearl Harbor for America—was the Suez crisis of 1956. Angered by the decision of Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt to nationalize the Suez Canal Company, British leaders conspired with France and  Israel to swat him aside, as they had swatted aside pesky locals around the empire for more than a century. But this time they lacked the clout. When Dwight Eisenhower refused to stem a run on Britain’s currency, the British had to call off the nascent war. Prime minister Anthony Eden resigned in disgrace; a whole generation of British imperialists were compelled to acknowledge that their pretensions to power had become unsustainable.

(End of part 1)

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As my research continued, I encountered other evidence of Jackson’s popularity among his contemporaries. He was commonly referred to as the “Hero of New Orleans” or simply “The Hero”; many admirers spoke of him as the second George Washington.

I wanted to see if I could measure Jackson’s popularity in some quantifiable way. I knew that public-opinion polling didn’t begin until the twentieth century. I considered sampling newspaper editorials, but ruled that out on the ground that newspaper owners - who usually dictated editorial policy - weren’t representative of the American population as a whole. Newspapers in the 1930s, for instance, leaned Republican while Franklin Roosevelt and the Democrats were rolling up landslide election victories.

I decided to try another yardstick, informal but perhaps instructive. I got out a large atlas of the United States and consulted the index of place names. I counted the number of Jackson Counties, Jacksonvilles, Mount Jacksons, Lake Jacksons and the like. Then I scanned the index for other long runs of places named for single individuals. It turned out that Jackson came first, substantially ahead of Washington and Franklin, who roughly tied for second. I couldn’t be sure every place called Jackson was named for Andrew Jackson, but neither did I know that every place called Washington or Franklin was named for George or Ben. I figured the error rate would be about the same in the three cases, the names being relatively common.

The conclusion I drew from all of this was that Jackson might well have been the most popular American of the nineteenth century. I found this very interesting. I was working on the book just after the turn of the twenty-first century, and I was quite aware that Jackson’s popularity had diminished substantially by then. He was remembered for the Trail of Tears and being a slaveowner, and not much else. What was it about Americans in the nineteenth century that made them think so differently about Jackson?

It wasn’t that they knew less about Jackson than we do. Historians have not unearthed secrets that have forced a rethinking of Old Hickory’s reputation. No, the traits and actions for which Jackson was condemned in the twenty-first century were fully known by his contemporaries.

I eventually realized that it wasn’t on the debit side of Jackson’s account that things had changed, but on the credit side. Jackson was a hero to millions in his era for three accomplishments: saving America from defeat and possible dismemberment at the hands of the British during the War of 1812, confirming the ascendancy of democracy in American politics by his election in 1828, and facing down South Carolina secessionists and preserving the Union in 1832-33.

In Jackson’s day, these were huge. British forces had been battering Americans in the War of 1812 through the autumn of 1814, when they launched a campaign up the Mississippi River. With troops and ships released by the recent defeat of Napoleon, they aimed to sever the Union along the lines of the Mississippi. But Jackson, at the head of a motley army of regulars and militia, whites and blacks, Anglos and French- and Spanish-speakers, farmers and merchants and pirates, smashed the British and saved the American republic. The victory seemed a miracle to Jackon’s American contemporaries, and they never stopped thanking him for it.

Jackson’s election in 1828 brought down the curtain on the age of deference in American politics, when voters were expected to elect their betters: men like the Virginia dynasts Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Monroe, and the Harvard-educated Adamses. Jackson was first Westerner elected president, and the first president ordinary Americans could consider one of their own. He embodied the democratic revolution in American politics and life. To be sure, democracy at that time excluded most women and black people; even so, the achievement of universal adult white male suffrage was a breakthrough, and Jackson was hailed and embraced as the “people’s president.”

Jackson’s defense of the Union against South Carolinians who nullified a federal tariff and threatened to secede made him the Abraham Lincoln of his day, except that where only half the country appreciated Lincoln’s effort, which came at great cost in lives and money, nearly everyone but the South Carolinians praised Jackson’s vigorous defense of the Union, which cost nothing more than a show of force and a credible threat to personally lead an army to South Carolina and hang the secessionists himself. Indeed, in Lincoln’s day, more than a few oldtimers wished Jackson could be resurrected and reprise his handling of South Carolina.

A hundred years later, the United States had become the most powerful country in the world, a defender of global democracy, a nation securely united from sea to sea. For those born in the twentieth century, it was tempting to think of this outcome as inevitable. Small acorns grow into mighty oaks; thirteen colonies give rise to a superpower.

But this outcome only seemed inevitable. At several junctures along the way, the process might have taken a different turn. The British, following a victory at New Orleans, might have reconsidered the draft treaty negotiated at Ghent two weeks earlier, and completed their Mississippi campaign, undoing - formally or de facto - the Louisiana Purchase, with themselves taking the place of France. If Jackson had had the Napoleonic complex his critics alleged, American democracy could have gone the way of democracy in many other countries, where generals have refused to vacate the presidency. If Jackson had permitted South Carolina’s secession, there would have been no Union for Lincoln to save.

Jackson’s historical reputation became a victim of his success - and the success of the many others who helped his generation accomplish what it did. They did their work so well that later generations often saw the Jacksonian accomplishments as inevitable and therefore trivial or at least not especially praiseworthy. This misunderstanding made it easy for them to focus on Jackson’s shortcomings.

Rearview mirrors on cars sold in the United States carry a warning: “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.” The point is that the truck behind you is a bigger deal than you think. Something similar can be said of the mirror history provides on past events. Many of them seem small now but were a big deal when they occurred. Had people in the past acted differently, those events might have turned out differently. The truck might have gone off the road. And we’d be left with the wreckage.

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Henry Clay’s greatest admirer was Abraham Lincoln, a former congressman from Illinois and current Springfield attorney. A generation younger than Clay, Lincoln called Clay his “beau ideal of a statesman,” and he endorsed Clay’s pragmatic approach to slavery. Lincoln never owned slaves, although his wife’s family had, and he hoped for the day when the Southern states would choose to end slavery. But his reading of the Constitution convinced him that neither the federal government nor the other states could compel the slave states to surrender the institution until they chose to do so of their own accord. And pressing the issue too hard might provoke the Southern states to secede from the Union. The republic Lincoln and his generation had inherited from Clay’s generation, who had inherited it from the founders, might fall to ruin.

Some of the abolitionists hoped it would do just that. William Lloyd Garrison, who had been thundering against slavery for decades from his perch as publisher of The Liberator, declared the Union not worth saving if it tolerated slavery. Garrison’s conscience couldn’t abide further association with slaveholders. Calling the Constitution “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” on the Fourth of July in 1854 he burned a copy of the founding charter and declared that the only course for honorable Northerners was “a dissolution of the Union.”

Garrison’s Massachusetts audience cheered his rousing performance. But Abraham Lincoln, when he heard of it, shook his head in dismay. Not only would the course Garrison advised not free any slaves, it would jeopardize the broader progress American democracy had been making toward human equality. Lincoln understood full well that history moves by half-steps. And it moves by hard work and the willingness to compromise with those one considers wrong.

Lincoln was a serious disappointment to the abolitionists. To be sure, he occasionally said something that gave them hope. “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” he declared in 1858. “I do not believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” Yet even this statement was ambiguous. “It will either become all one thing or all the other,” Lincoln said.

More often he told the abolitionists what he could not and would not do about slavery. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” he said in his first inaugural address. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.” Even after eleven slave states seceded, and sixteen months into the Civil War, Lincoln was ambivalent. “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it,” he wrote to Horace Greeley, who had hectored him to abolish slavery as a means to end the war and save the Union. “And if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.”

Lincoln finally came to emancipation as a war measure, but even then he did so by halves. The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to the states in rebellion; it left slavery in the Border States untouched.

Of course, the proclamation set a precedent that almost certainly would extend to the Border States before long. Yet it nonetheless showed Lincoln’s unwillingness to get too far ahead of public opinion on this exceedingly controversial topic.

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One problem with vision is that you never know if it is unrealistic until you push it too far. In the half decade after the Civil War, advocates of equal rights for African Americans sought to guarantee them the vote by a constitutional amendment. Many of those advocates also sought the right to vote for women. Some wished to combine the two causes behind a single amendment forbidding abridgment of the right to vote on grounds of race or sex. Others, less bold, argued that pushing for women’s rights and black rights at the same time would doom both to failure. One thing at a time, they said.

The cautious ones had their way, and the Fifteenth Amendment, as written and ratified, dealt only with race. Another six decades would pass before women would be guaranteed the vote. If the bold voices had been heeded, and women included in the Fifteenth Amendment, would it indeed have failed? No one knows, because it was not attempted.

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Similar caution, or perhaps realism, guided Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s on the subject of a federal anti-lynching law. Many liberals, including Roosevelt’s wife, Eleanor, persuasively contended that a federal law was required to stamp out the scourge of lynching. State laws did not suffice, for the state courts were rigged against black plaintiffs and almost never convicted even the most egregious perpetrators of racial violence.

Roosevelt understood the situation. He agreed that lynching was a terrible thing. But he refused to put his weight behind the issue, fearing that doing so would alienate Southern conservatives, whose support he needed to pass his New Deal programs. One thing at a time, he explained: the New Deal today, civil rights tomorrow.

Was Roosevelt correct? Again, it’s impossible to say for certain. But the evidence is on his side. The New Deal coalition was fragile enough as things were. And it fell apart early in his second term, even without his endorsement of civil rights.

Public medical insurance is another topic on which judgments about appropriate vision have had a long history. Franklin Roosevelt considered including medical insurance in the package of guarantees that became Social Security, yet decided it was more than his coalition could bear at that time. Harry Truman included medical insurance in his proposed Fair Deal scheme, but the whole thing got sidetracked by the Korean War. Lyndon Johnson finally delivered, in part. Johnson got Congress to fund health care for the elderly and the poor, through Medicare and Medicaid. Other Americans, the great majority, remained on their own. Bill Clinton tried to extend the Medicare concept but got nowhere. Barack Obama had to work hard to get a diluted version of the Clinton program approved in 2010. And Obamacare spent the next decade fighting for its political life.

Which suggests that Roosevelt’s caution was well placed.

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Woodrow Wilson got ahead of his compatriots on the defining issue of foreign policy in his day. At the end of World War I, Wilson advocated a leading role for the United States in the new League of Nations. The war, Wilson contended, had been the result of the existing anarchic state of world affairs, in which each country was a law unto itself. The League would bring order out of the chaos and prevent such catastrophes in the future.

But Wilson failed to persuade the Senate, which rejected the League and Wilson’s vision of American leadership in world affairs. During the 1920s and 1930s, Americans retreated to isolationism, which allowed a resurgence of the anarchy Wilson had warned about. Only after Pearl Harbor demonstrated that while America might ignore the world, the world wouldn’t ignore America, did Americans belatedly acknowledge that Wilson had been right. With little debate, the United States became a sponsoring member of the United Nations, the updated version of Wilson’s League.

America’s about-face on the League idea calls into question the very principle of leadership in a democracy. Franklin Roosevelt had held a midlevel post in Wilson’s administration during World War I, and he supported the internationalist vision that guided Wilson to the League. As the vice-presidential nominee of the Democratic party in 1920 he—and presidential nominee James Cox—endorsed Wilson’s vision. But after the Democrats lost the election in a landslide, and Americans wrapped themselves in the cocoon of isolationism, Roosevelt kept his internationalist views to himself.

He continued to do so after being elected president in 1932. Even as Hitler, Mussolini and Franco destroyed democracy in their own countries and threatened it elsewhere in Europe, and Japan’s militarists brutalized China, Roosevelt hardly challenged the isolationist mood. Personally he was convinced that fascism wouldn’t be halted until the United States mobilized against it, but he mounted no crusade to make Americans agree.

The lesson Roosevelt had drawn from Wilson’s experience was that the president mustn’t get ahead of public opinion on an issue as important as war. Wilson had led America into World War I, and when the peace proved unsatisfactory, Americans blamed him. The war was derided as Wilson’s war, and Americans refused to accept Wilson’s peace.

Roosevelt refused to repeat Wilson’s mistake. He would not lead America into war; instead he insisted that America lead him into war. He put such economic pressure on Japan that the Japanese government saw no alternative to attacking American naval forces. Roosevelt expected an attack, although its location, Pearl Harbor, caught him by surprise. He knew that American casualties would be more persuasive with Congress and the American people than any speeches he could make.

And he was right. Pearl Harbor discredited isolationism and revived internationalism. World War II was never called Roosevelt’s war; it was America’s war. And after the war, Americans continued to embrace the internationalism Wilson had preached a generation before. Wilson’s vision guided American foreign policy to the end of the twentieth century and beyond. But by then it wasn’t his vision, but America’s.

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So what is the role of leadership in a democracy? The answer would seem to come in two parts. First, to have an immediate effect, a president must not be more than a half step ahead of the American people. Abraham Lincoln took care not to outrun antislavery opinion in the North during the Civil War; his cautious approach yielded the Thirteenth Amendment at war’s end. Franklin Roosevelt got Social Security through Congress in part by not burdening it with medical insurance. Barack Obama pushed the outer limit of caution by accepting passage of the Affordable Care Act of 2010 on a straight party-line vote. It was the best he could do at the time, but the lack of anything that looked like bipartisanship invited Republicans to campaign against the ACA for the next decade.

The second part of the answer goes back to the matter of vision. Woodrow Wilson articulated a vision of America’s role in the world. He didn’t live to see it enacted, yet he gave it currency, and he furnished guidance, if chiefly negative, to Franklin Roosevelt, who finally made Wilson’s vision real.

Was Wilson a great leader of American foreign policy? No, not by the standards of his contemporaries, who spurned his vision and turned their backs on him.

Instead he was a great visionary. And just as prophets are seldom honored in their own countries, visionaries can’t catch a break in their own generations.

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Liberals, of whom there are many in Portland, were especially conflicted. On most issues, Jefferson was their kind of guy. He was broad-minded, a free thinker on religion, an inquisitive intellectual, the founder of the Democratic party (called the Republicans in Jefferson’s time), a champion of the ordinary people of America, and an opponent of the cozy relationship between government and business favored by his rival Alexander Hamilton. Liberals often spoke as though they wished they could go back and fix that one flaw in Jefferson; if they could talk him into freeing his slaves, he’d be someone they could really embrace.

Which might have been an appropriate position to take if they were considering Jefferson for sainthood. But as a role model for students potentially considering public service, his very participation in the odious institution should have made him all the more valuable. Had Jefferson, a Virginian, not been a slave owner, he would never have been chosen to represent Virginia in the Continental Congress. Slaveholding per se was not a prerequisite, but perceived success was, and successful men in Virginia, typically planters, owned slaves, often scores or hundreds of them. Jefferson didn’t own his slaves free and clear; his creditors claimed them as collateral for his many debts. But even if he had owned them and been able to emancipate them, his doing so would have made him seem eccentric and unreliable to those other slaveowners whose support he needed to advance in the political world. His troubled conscience might have benefited from freeing his slaves, but his career would have suffered. And he never would have been in a position to write the words that did more for human equality than any other single sentence in American history: “All men are created equal.”

The case of Jefferson illustrates a basic principle of history. The people who have the greatest political impact on the world are people of their place and time. Effective progressives can never be more than a half-step ahead of their contemporaries. Any farther and they lose touch with those they hope to influence. This is especially true in democratic political systems, where a prerequisite to power is popularity. Unpopular candidates, including candidates preaching unpopular ideas, don’t get elected. Jefferson might have been a better man for freeing his slaves, but he wouldn’t have been the author of the Declaration of Independence, he wouldn’t have founded the party that became the home of modern American liberals, and he could never have been elected president.

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In fact, he might not have been a better man. Slavery was one issue Jefferson’s generation had to deal with, but it wasn’t the only issue, and it was rarely the preeminent issue. Jefferson, like nearly all those who founded the American republic, considered slavery a blight on the conscience of the republic, and they looked hopefully to the day it would disappear. The planters among them deemed slavery at best a necessary evil: necessary to the operation of the Southern economy, but evil nonetheless, for dehumanizing the slaves, devaluing white labor, and corrupting the morals of the petty tyrants slaveholders became.

Jefferson, in particular, condemned the British for having introduced slavery to the American colonies; in his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he castigated King George, saying, “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.”

None of the founders would have introduced slavery into America had it not already existed there. Indeed, at the Constitutional Convention they effectively set a cutoff date on the introduction of any more slaves. This, they hoped, would be the first step toward eliminating the institution entirely.

Things didn’t follow their script. Slavery became anachronistic in the North, as the economy there modernized and required a more flexible labor force than slavery allowed. As the necessary evil became less necessary, its evil grew more glaring, and it was abolished—albeit often in stages that left some slaves in bondage decades into the nineteenth century.

But in the South, slavery grew more profitable. The cotton gin eliminated the bottleneck that had kept cotton from becoming a mass-consumption item, and the opening of new territory to settlement on the Gulf Coast Plain between Georgia and Texas created demand for more slaves. With slave imports banned as of 1808, the price of slaves rose. By 1860 the value of slaves was greater than the value of any other asset class in America besides land.

What this meant was that ending slavery became much harder than the founders had ever imagined. George Washington’s will called for freeing his slaves after his death; Washington was wealthy enough to do so. (He had no children, which made his act easier.) But for most slave owners, especially as the nineteenth century wore on, freeing their slaves would have meant financial ruin. Jefferson couldn’t have freed his slaves if he wanted to; they were attached by his creditors, who would have sold them—not freed them—to pay his debts.

Any solution to the slavery problem in America required more than just good will. It required tackling core elements of the American economy. And in a democracy, it required persuading a majority of voters to take on the job. Henry Clay enlisted. As a young legislator in Kentucky he proposed a plan of gradual emancipation. Clay owned slaves himself, but he hated slavery and sought its end. He failed to win the support of most other Kentucky slaveholders, who were able to block his program. Yet Clay didn’t give up. His Lexington neighbors elected him to Congress, where he became speaker of the House of Representatives. There in 1820 he devised a legislative scheme that kept slavery out of most of the Louisiana Purchase. The Missouri Compromise didn’t please the growing number of Northern abolitionists, who condemned Clay for giving up any of the western territory to slavery. Nor did it satisfy all Southerners, many of whom complained at losing any of Louisiana. Ignoring the complaints, Clay defended the bargain as the best that could be struck, and maneuvered the package through Congress.

During the next three decades, Clay served as the model of the antislavery pragmatist. He never lost his conviction that slavery was an evil institution, nor his hope and belief that one day it would die. Yet he continued to recognize that its demise would come not through the fulminations of the abolitionists but through the workings of democracy. The final act of Clay’s political life was the Compromise of 1850, which dealt with the territory taken from Mexico at the end of America’s war with that country. California was admitted to the Union as a free state, which offended the South, in exchange for a strengthened Fugitive Slave Act, which angered the North. Once more Clay was condemned on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line; once more democracy muddled on.

(More coming)

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            And there are the simplifiers and the complicators. Isaiah Berlin, popularizing a taxonomy from the ancient Greeks, called them hedgehogs and foxes, and he divided thinkers between the two categories. “A fox knows many things, but a hedgehog one important thing,” said Berlin, quoting Archilochus.

            Had Berlin cast his net beyond intellectuals, he might have examined statesmen, soldiers, and others known for doing rather than thinking. And he might have noticed that the great doers fall on the side of simplification. Julius Caesar came, saw and conquered—simple as that. Alexander cut the Gordian knot. Napoleon streamlined a hodgepodge of feudal customs and practices into a single code of law.

            Historians are thinkers rather than doers, and they tend to line up with the complicators. Or at least they should. A first lesson of history, for anyone who takes the subject seriously, is that the past was always more complicated than it seems to the present. As events recede into memory, their complications get smoothed over. Some of this is merely a matter of abridgment. James Joyce can get away with asking readers to spend more time on Leopold Bloom’s Dublin day than Bloom himself did, but historians have to leave things out. Not every detail is as important as every other, and the historian makes choices.

            But which choices? Historians don’t agree among themselves, sometimes arguing with each other in real time, sometimes conducting the debate across generations. The arguments have less to do with history per se than with the uses to which history is put. Was the Civil War about slavery or states’ rights? Historians have taken both sides of the issue. Were the business leaders of the Gilded Age corporate statesmen or robber barons? Ditto. Was the New Deal a good deal or a bad deal? Was the Vietnam War a crime or a mistake? Was Richard Nixon a liberal or a conservative?

            The reason for the disagreement among the historians is that the answer to each of these questions is: Both. And if the question is posed in multiple-choice terms, the best answer is usually: All of the above. Either/or questions make for vigorous arguments, and no small part of what historians do is argue for argument’s sake. Arguing keeps the profession, as a profession, alive. And the historians’ arguments are deployed by people who want to put the past to use in the present. Here again, the simplified version is tempting. If the Civil War was only about slavery, Confederate statues start wobbling. If it was only about states’ rights, they stand their monumental ground. But the reality is always more complicated than the single-factor responses allow.

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The complications of history prevent it from becoming a morality tale. At this late day no one would argue that the indigenous peoples of America didn’t suffer from chronic bad faith and frequent outright violence at the hands of the U.S. government. No incident so characterizes their suffering as the “Trail of Tears”: the forced relocation of Cherokee men, women and children from Georgia to the trans-Mississippi West in the 1830s, in which several thousand died of disease and exposure. This humanitarian disaster was perhaps the worst ever inflicted by the American government on people under its control.

            Yet the story was less simple than is usually portrayed. The policy of Indian removal pitted not only whites against Indians, but whites against whites and Indians against Indians. Andrew Jackson persuaded a majority of Congress to pass the 1830 Indian Removal Act, but the law had loud critics among reformers, Easterners, and Jackson opponents. The Cherokees themselves were similarly divided. One faction of the tribe, under a chief called John Ross, determined to remain in Georgia as long as physically possible, but another faction, following John Ridge, assessed the rapid growth of the white population near the Cherokee lands and concluded that the tribe’s future lay in the West. The Ridge group accepted the government’s offer of western land and assistance in relocating, and made the move without incident. The Ross group branded the Ridge faction as traitors; Ridge himself, who predicted something like the Trail of Tears if the Ross group refused to face reality, was assassinated for his pains.

            Throughout the history of white-Indian conflict in America, almost never did the whites all line up on one side and the Indians all on the other. The French and Indian War was so called because it arrayed the French and their Indian allies against the British and their Indian allies. The Creek War of 1813-14 was a civil war among the Creeks amid the War of 1812 between the British and the Americans. When U.S. cavalry troops chased Indians across the Great Plains after the Civil War, their scouts were typically other Indians.

            All this made sense to the participants in these conflicts, who weighed their interests and acted accordingly. George Custer’s Crow scouts at the Battle of the Little Bighorn disliked the warriors in blue jackets less than they hated their ancient enemies the Sioux. When Geronimo was tracked down by U.S. troops in the mountains of northern Mexico, the ones who did the tracking were members of Geronimo’s own Apache band. But this jumbled reality makes a hash of the whites-against-Indians version preferred by those who insist on having their history simple.

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At times interested parties have tried to impose their simplified preferences on reality. Although the great majority of slaveowners in America were white, some were black, having purchased or otherwise acquired slaves. They did so for many of the same reasons white slaveowners did, and they suppressed such qualms as they harbored about owning human beings in the same way white slaveowners did. Economic advantage trumped racial solidarity. Meanwhile only a minority of whites owned slaves, with the rest prevented by economics, primarily, rather than ethics. As for the slaves, they were all black—or at least what counted as black under a regime that ascribed the status and therefore race of the mother to the child, even if the father was white, as was often the case in a system that allowed male slaveholders to force themselves upon enslaved women.

            This confusion didn’t suit the template the ruling whites wished to impose on Southern society, one that equated black skin with servitude. During the first half of the nineteenth century, free blacks in the South, whether slave-owning or not, were made more uncomfortable, and the manumission of black slaves was made more difficult. The result was that by the Civil War nearly all Southern blacks were slaves, and essentially all slaveowners were white.

            The imperatives of simplification become especially acute when a country goes to war. The American Revolution was not simply a war between Americans and British; it was also a conflict between American Whigs (or Patriots: the rebels) and American Tories (or Loyalists), between British Whigs and Tories, between American rebels and British-employed Hessians, between Patriot-leaning Indian tribes and British-leaning tribes, between Britain and France (and Spain), and between several of the permutations of the above. In the Southern theater, especially, the most savage fighting was between American Patriots and Loyalists, with each side doing its worst to compel fence-sitters to take sides.

            Something similar occurred at the time of the Civil War. Ahead of secession, Southern opponents of that fateful step were relatively free to state their case, but once the choice had been made, Union sympathizers were harassed, driven out of the South and in some cases killed. The result was that a region once ambivalent on the prudence of dismantling the Union became a solid swath of rebels.

            Except for the slaves, that is. To no one’s surprise, the enslaved men and women of the South weren’t consulted in the deliberations of the secession conventions. (Neither were the white women, for that matter.) And amid the fighting, many slaves seized opportunities to flee their bondage and take refuge behind Union lines. They weren’t always welcomed. During the first part of the war President Lincoln made clear that it wasn’t his purpose to free the slaves. When two of his generals—John Frémont and David Hunter—issued emancipation proclamations in their districts, Lincoln quickly rescinded them. Some Union generals returned the fugitive slaves to their owners, discouraging other slaves from breaking for freedom. Yet sufficient numbers of slaves persisted that the issue of the “contrabands”—the term of art for captured property in war, here applied to slaves—demanded Lincoln’s attention. After the battle of Antietam he made emancipation a war aim of the Union.

            Yet confusion still reigned. Lincoln’s proclamation dealt only with slaves in rebel regions; slaves in the Union-loyal Border States would remain slaves. And until Lincoln’s armies subdued the rebellion, most of the slaves pronounced free would remain physically as bound as ever. Many Southern slaves didn’t learn of their decreed emancipation until Union troops arrived. Texas celebrates Juneteenth—June 19—the date in 1865 when the Emancipation Proclamation was publicly read in Galveston, two and a half years after its issuance in Washington. And not until several months later were the last slaves of the Border States freed, by the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment.

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If the Thirteenth Amendment simplified things, the Fourteenth Amendment promptly complicated them again. The wordiest of the amendments, the Fourteenth is now known for making citizens of the former slaves (and anyone else born on American soil), and for promising “equal protection” and “due process” to all persons. But its origins lay in a convoluted attempt by Republicans to retain their control over the national government as the Confederate states were being readmitted to the Union.

Indeed, the Republicans had cause to fear that the South would be stronger than ever. Before the Civil War, only sixty percent of slaves were counted toward representation in the House of Representatives, under the three-fifths compromise of the Constitution. With slavery abolished, all the former slaves would count, doubling the applicable population of South Carolina, nearly doubling that of several other Southern states, and boosting the population of the South as a whole by nearly fifty percent. Southern representation in the House would increase commensurately. This would be a disaster for the Republicans, who began to wonder which side had won the war.

            To forestall the cataclysm, the Republicans sought to reimpose the three-fifths clause—and indeed to strengthen it. Under the Fourteenth Amendment, disenfranchised blacks wouldn’t count as three-fifths of a person, but zero-fifths. That is, for each black man deprived of the vote, the applicable population of the depriving state would be reduced by one.

            The Republicans could have accomplished the same result by simply enfranchising all African Americans. But many Northern whites were almost as opposed to letting black people vote as Southern whites were. And so the Fourteenth Amendment attempted to strong-arm the South into extending the vote to former slaves while letting Northern states deny the vote to blacks within their own borders.

            The ploy didn’t work. Its double standard grew unsustainable, and monitoring Southern voting practices became unmanageable. The result was the Fifteenth Amendment, which gave blacks the vote in all states. As a practical matter it mostly affected the South, where the great majority of blacks lived.

            Except that before long white Southerners had devised new ways to disfranchise African Americans. Poll taxes, literacy tests and plain violence made politics in the South almost as completely white as it had ever been. Yet because Southern blacks were now counted five-fifths toward representation, the power of Southern whites in Congress was greater than ever.

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When a simplified version of history persists over time, it congeals into myth. America views about World War II provide a telling example. During the war itself, efforts to portray the United States and its allies as the good guys and the Axis powers as the bad guys were entirely understandable. Hitler was a bad character indeed, and his Italian and Japanese accomplices weren’t much better. Besides, in every war every nation casts itself as the defender of right and justice against evil; how else for governments to ask their young to kill and die for the cause? On balance, the eventual victory of the American side certainly accomplished more for human freedom, dignity and happiness than an Axis victory would have.

            But for Americans to call World War II the “good war,” and to canonize those who fought in it as the “greatest generation,” as Americans have ever since, pushes a plausible argument into the realm of . . . well, myth. Myths are sometimes false, but more often they are incompletely true. To call a conflict that killed perhaps fifty million people a “good war” is, at best, to convey an incomplete, simplified version of the truth. The outcome might have been the lesser of available evils. But that hardly makes it good. Harry Truman doubtless would have been convicted of war crimes for ordering the use of two atom bombs against largely civilian targets, thereby killing some 150,000 mostly women, children and elderly, had the United States not had charge of the postwar tribunals.

            Nor did the end—victory over the Axis—indubitably justify the means. Hitler was a monster, but in terms of gratuitous evil inflicted on subject populations, he probably ranked third behind Joseph Stalin, a formal American ally, and Mao Zedong, a de facto ally. The victory of the American side terminated the Third Reich, but it strengthened Stalin’s rule and arguably consigned half of Europe to four decades of communist tyranny, and it positioned Mao to starve the Chinese people in the 1950s and terrorize them in the 1960s and 1970s.

            Yet the myth of the good war endures. Academic historians make a habit of challenging received wisdom; it’s what justifies each new crop of dissertations. They have questioned the motivations and outcomes of every other war in American history, from the Revolutionary War (a power grab by land speculators and tax dodgers) to the Mexican War (armed robbery by James Polk to seize California) to World War I (profiteering by bankers and merchants of death) to Vietnam (containment of communism run amok). But they have given wide berth to the Greatest Generation.

            Why? The answer, like everything else in history, is complicated. The cohort that took up arms in World War II was the largest war cohort in American history; for the rest of the twentieth century almost every family in the country counted a father, grandfather, uncle or cousin who had fought, and a sizable subset of that grouped had kinfolk who had died in the war. To challenge the war was to impugn the motives and accomplishments of relatives. Further, the discovery at the end of the war of the full enormity of the Holocaust placed Hitler and the Nazis in a circle of hell even Dante hadn’t imagined. Whatever complicated the story of the war could be construed as mitigating Hitler’s crimes. Down that slippery slope lay Holocaust denial, and no respectable person wanted to go there.

            Finally, every nation needs its myths. Some nations have origin myths, often wrapped in religious belief: We are who we are, and we live where we do, because God ordained that we should. America has no single origin myth; the Mayflower was but one of ten thousand ships that brought foreigners to this country, most by their own choice, others in chains. Americans have mythologized various parts of their history: the Revolution (as noted above), the Civil War (which spawned dueling myths), the westward movement (whose cowboy has endured longer than any other element of American mythology), the “melting pot” of immigration (which gave way to the salad bowl before being abandoned amid terminal indigestion).

The myth of the good World War II is perhaps the latest in the series. As myths go, it’s relatively harmless. And quite possibly it too will be revised when the last of that great, if not greatest, generation dies. Sometimes history becomes myth; sometimes myth becomes history.

But some people use history better than others. Restaurant critics know that chefs have good days and bad. A canny boss understands that the best applicant on paper is not always the best on the job. Seasoned investors recognize that past performance is no guarantee of future results. Voters are often gulled by appealing campaign promises. The nervous can extrapolate from genuine hazards to things that aren’t risky at all.

The difficulty of applying history to the present is that the present is like the past in some ways, but unlike the past in other ways. Using history successfully requires weighing the similarities against the differences; no one gets it right all the time.

Yet people continually look for lessons from history to use in the present. A few have gone so far as to seek laws of history: broad rules that link the past to the present and the future in some determinative way.

I have long been one of those seekers. I entered the history profession in the 1980s with the ambition of figuring out how the world worked. My raw material was history, in the way that the geologist’s raw material is the planet Earth. I imagined I would discover basic principles: laws of history perhaps comparable to the laws of plate tectonics. These would satisfy my curiosity and help my fellow citizens make decisions that would benefit our collective present and future.

The challenge was greater than I had realized. Yet over the years I compiled what I came to call “Brands’s laws of history.” I named them this not out of immodesty but from the opposite: I wished to warn any who encountered them that they were merely my idiosyncratic take on history and how it worked. Other historians were welcome to formulate their own laws, and shouldn’t be held accountable for mine.

Below and in succeeding installments, I will present Brands’s laws. The reader should bear in mind that while the subject is serious, the approach is less so. For example, my first law of history declares, in essence, that there are no laws of history. Each installment will consist of a succinct statement of the law, followed by a parenthetical caveat or disclaimer, and an explanation.

We begin:

Brands’s 1st law: History isn’t physics, but neither is it pinball

Humans have always looked to the past to see the future. Religion is as old as humanity, and religions typically include origin tales that give guidance on the world to come. The future world is often a restored Eden, a second golden age, when the evils and maladies of the present will vanish and the original harmony reappear.

            Religion lost ground to science amid the Enlightenment of the seventeenth century and after. Yet the scientists brought their own perspective on the connection between past and future. Isaac Newton’s laws of gravitation and motion extrapolated from previous configurations of the solar system to future states, predicting conjunctions of planets, eclipses of the sun and moon, and all kinds of other heavenly behavior. Pierre-Simon Laplace went further, declaring the entire future of the universe to be implicit in its past and present. “An intellect which at a certain moment would know all forces that set nature in motion, and all positions of all items of which nature is composed, if this intellect were also vast enough to submit these data to analysis, it would embrace in a single formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the tiniest atom,” Laplace asserted. “For such an intellect nothing would be uncertain and the future just like the past would be present before its eyes.” Napoleon was said to have objected that Laplace’s model of the universe left no room for God. “Sire,” Laplace blithely responded, “I had no need of that hypothesis.” Subsequent discoveries in thermodynamics and electromagnetism confirmed the idea that the universe was governed by laws that linked the past to the future.

            The success of the scientists provoked envy and emulation among historians. The laws of physics, chemistry and electricity conferred power on the physicists, chemists and electricians; historians wanted some of that. And why not? If there was value in predicting the future of atoms and planets, how much more value would there be in forecasting the fate of peoples and civilizations?

            Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gave it a try, characterizing motion in history as the result of recurrent clashes between forces, which he called thesis and antithesis, leading to a resolution, or synthesis. The new synthesis, becoming a thesis, would provoke its antithesis, and the process would repeat. Karl Marx added a materialist spin to Hegel’s dialectic, making economic classes his thesis and antithesis and subsuming the whole in the class struggle. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” Marx wrote. Marx was more specific than Hegel in projecting forward; his bourgeoisie would be challenged by the proletariat and overthrown, with the result being socialism.

            Herbert Spencer latched onto the evolutionary thinking that was inspiring Charles Darwin in biology. Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” to describe competitive selection, applied the concept to struggles among societies as well as among individuals. Regarding the latter he made the mistake of thinking that acquired characteristics were inherited; for the most part they are not. But societies do bequeath acquired values and institutions, and Social Darwinism, as the approach of Spencer and his allies was called, was seen as explaining the preeminence of British values and institutions in the competitive imperial world of the nineteenth century. Spencer made no promises that Britannia would continue to rule the waves, but he believed that the mechanisms that had put Britain on top would select the best among future generations of competitors.

            The heaviest hitters among the historical theorists were Europeans, but Americans joined the game as well. Frederick Jackson Turner explained American history in terms of an ever-advancing frontier. With each wave of westward movement, Turner said, American institutions reinvented themselves, summoning the same creative forces that had founded the first English colonies in North America. The process prevented classes from congealing in America as they had congealed in Europe; it kept democracy alive and vigorous. Yet Turner wasn’t sure the process would continue, for the conditions that had given rise to the frontier were disappearing. The empty spaces of the West were filling in. The American future might be very different from the American past, even though the guiding principles of historical development hadn’t changed.

            Brooks Adams, of the famous Adams family of American politics, put forward his own frontier theory. But Adams didn’t confine himself to North America. The bow wave of civilization had been surging west for centuries, Adams said, reaching maximum height in America around the end of the nineteenth century. The wave kept moving. It was crossing North America and would head out into the Pacific, to make landfall in Asia sometime in the twentieth century.

            The theories of history all exhibited a crucial shortcoming. They failed to make useful, reliable predictions. Where they weren’t demonstrably wrong, they were impossibly vague. Karl Marx predicted that the class struggle would climax first in one of the most industrially advanced countries: Germany, Britain or the United States. Instead the revolution arrived in Russia, one of the most backward. Herbert Spencer posited continued progress toward a higher standard of civilization, only for the First World War to wipe out decades of progress and the flower of a whole generation, while making a ghoulish joke of European claims to civilization. Brooks Adams couldn’t say, within a decade or half-century, when the vortex of modernity would exit North America and when it would arrive in Asia. 

            The problem, as critics of the historical theorists had said all along, was that history wasn’t a science. Humans weren’t planets or atoms. They had free will, or acted as though they did. They learned from what went before, as no inanimate object did. They could be cussedly contrary; told what some law of history decreed they do, they might do the opposite just to show they could.

            The historical lawgivers didn’t surrender, but they did retreat, aided by new modes of science. The probabilistic approach of quantum mechanics gave hope to those who realized that no narrowly deterministic law would ever explain human behavior. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, albeit often misunderstood, seemed well-suited to the uncertain mess of human behavior.

            In the final decades of the twentieth century a field of research called chaos theory or complexity studies promised an even better fit. One metaphor of the new field asserted that the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil could set off a typhoon in Tahiti; for historians comfortable with the concept that small influences can have large consequences—that the failure of Pickett’s charge on the third day of Gettysburg meant the difference between victory and defeat for the South in the Civil War—complexity seemed quite promising. The related concept of “emergent order” appeared apt to much of history. A common example was the “invisible hand” of Adam Smith, which put food on tables and shoes on feet without any central authority telling farmers and cobblers what to do. This was history from the ground up, but with the gloss of science.

            Yet here again the theories disappointed. The problem in this case was not that history wasn’t science; it was that the science was too much like history. The new sciences weren’t predictive in the clocklike manner of Newtonian physics; rather they were chiefly descriptive, like geology or evolutionary biology. What made complex systems complex was precisely that they couldn’t be reduced to any simple formulas or mathematical laws. Their practitioners didn’t despair of laws entirely; the difficulty was that the phenomena under observation were extremely sensitive to initial conditions—so sensitive that the observer couldn’t tell until after the fact which of the possible development paths the system would follow. At any given moment there were millions of butterflies in Brazil; which one would set off the typhoon was impossible to say in advance.

            In other words, the new sciences were essentially historical. After Napoleon seized power in France, it was possible for historians to trace his life backward and devise explanations; but to identify the next Napoleon among the schoolboys of nineteenth century France—or Prussia or Italy—was beyond them. One interpretation of quantum mechanics—the “many worlds” version—contended that the countless possible paths of atomic particles gave rise to countless different universes, each with its own future. All the universes obeyed the laws of quantum physics, but which universe a particle or person was in couldn’t be predicted in advance. It had to be experienced—just as history had to be experienced to be explained.

            This wasn’t to say that there never would be predictive laws of history. Some quantum physicists, dissatisfied with the probabilities that pervaded their work, hoped for a new model that looked more like the old theories. (Others merely grumbled, “Shut up and calculate.”) If they ever did come up with something, it might produce a predictive theory of history. Humans, after all, exist in the physical world, and any laws that govern the actions of their constituent atoms and molecules must govern them.

            But as of the third decade of the twenty-first century, such laws were unknown. Whether they were unknowable was unknown, and itself perhaps unknowable. The work of Kurt Gödel in mathematical logic, showing that in any interesting system of arithmetic there would always be assertions that were neither provable nor disprovable, didn’t offer much promise for the knowability of history.

            Meanwhile the historians would have to be content with patterns. History isn’t utterly random; the pinball of events doesn’t bounce about the playfield of life with complete unpredictability. Careful study of the past can provide, with reasonable assurance, plausible ranges of outcomes for wars, business cycles, family creation and any number of other human activities. Nearly everything in the present is like something in the past. Not exactly like it, but close enough for the historians to profess unsurprise at what follows. Wars eventually end, and the side with the greater combination of resources and determination usually wins. Financial bubbles burst, even if the historians can’t say, ahead of time, precisely when—otherwise they’d all be rich. National birthrates generally fall with rising average incomes, although how long this might persist after birthrates fall into the largely uncharted realm of below-replacement values is anybody’s guess.

            Historians are sometimes described as people who can’t predict the events of tomorrow better than anyone else, but who on the day after tomorrow will smugly explain why whatever happened was inevitable. It was part of the pattern.

            But which pattern?

(More laws coming)