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The Stasi Poetry Circle

In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I examine Philip Oltermann's book on the curious episode in which the East German secret police established a creative writing workshop--the "Writing Circle of Chekists." Why did they do it? Excerpt:

Alongside their propaganda and surveillance missions, they had another goal: to understand poetry. Genuine collectivists, who view privacy as anathema, can never really understand poetry—at least, not lyric poetry—because it is such a direct expression of the evanescent and ineffable creative spark within the human mind, something collectivism can never truly reach. One of the best anti-communist poets, E.E. Cummings, expressed that point in his own quirky way in his classic “Jehovah buried,Satan dead,” which bitterly satirized communist states where “Souls are outlawed” and “dreamless knaves on Shadows [feed].” The result of communist regimentation, he wrote, is that

Boobs are holy,poets mad,
illustrious punks of Progress shriek;
when Souls are outlawed,Hearts are sick,
Hearts being sick,Minds nothing can:

That last phrase—“Minds nothing can”—was not only Cummings’s way of saying that a country that outlaws individual aspiration will also obliterate creativity, but also his way of expressing the essential crudity of communism, which views man as a mechanism to be manipulated, categorized, and put to labor, rather than as a unique creature of infinite potential. East Germany’s rulers, who never lifted their eyes from the dingy concrete of the police state, could hardly comprehend such potential. And that made it impossible for them to grasp, let alone counteract, the attractions of the free world’s culture.

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Abraham Lincoln's intransigence

In my latest book review for The Objective Standard, I take a look at Jon Meacham’s new biography of Abraham Lincoln, entitled And There Was Light. Excerpt:

[Lincoln’s] intransigence proved crucial in the immediate aftermath of his election to the presidency, and Meacham’s description of this episode is the best part of his book. In the months between November 1860 and the inauguration in March 1861—the so-called Secession Winter, during which South Carolina and six other states left the union—slave owners and their northern collaborators proposed myriad compromises to avoid bloodshed. The most popular was offered by Kentucky Senator John Crittenden; it would have drawn a line across North America to the Pacific Coast, guaranteeing the legality of slavery below that line by amending the Constitution. Lincoln opposed the idea, not only because of his antislavery convictions but because the slave states had repeatedly bullied the federal government since at least the 1830s, with the latter almost always conceding to southern demands under the threat of violence. To appease them yet again would only have rewarded their intimidation, effectively guaranteeing another round of extortion.

Lincoln could not actually do anything before his inauguration to block the Crittenden Compromise, except to rally members of Congress to oppose it. That he did, under pressures to which many men in his place would have bent—and Meacham rightly highlights the importance of his inflexibility at this crucial moment: “Lincoln courageously resisted compromising on slavery in an hour when such compromise was within the realm of acceptable opinion,” he writes. “In these cold and complex months, Abraham Lincoln was both statesman and moral being, choosing the difficult over the easy, the catastrophic over the convenient, the right over the wrong.”

In underscoring this, Meacham outclasses David Herbert Donald, whose 1995 book Lincoln until now had been the best one-volume biography of the sixteenth president. Donald was a superb historian but far more interested in the pragmatic, day-to-day machinations of party politics than in leaders who elevated principle above mere scheming. In his version of the story, “the chances for compromise in 1860–1861 were never great,” and Lincoln’s refusal to endorse it, while admirable, was motivated more by awareness that to do so “would disrupt the party that elected him” than by the courage of his convictions.

Yet as Meacham shows, the Crittenden proposal was a real threat—and Lincoln’s moral courage was not just right but also, and for that reason, the only truly practical plan. That’s because by 1860, slavery’s opponents were so accustomed to cowardice on the part of their leaders that Lincoln’s refusal to surrender gave them the morale boost they needed. A cynical Henry Adams, watching Crittenden’s allies negotiating the compromise proposal with Republican lobbyists, predicted that Lincoln’s party would eventually embrace “some damned nonsense or other”—but Lincoln, knowing such concessions would make his party, in his words, “a mere sucked egg, all shell and no principle in it,” said no.

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A conversation about the "Furies" with Symposium

The other day, I joined Robert Tracinski on his podcast Symposium to talk about my new book and the fascinating lives of the three women who helped rescue liberty in an age of totalitarianism and world war. You can listen here.