Author: Andrew Sullivan

Jim Cullen considers its myth and mythos in American culture:

Today, even those who invoke the self-made man in politics almost always credential themselves as self-made in the realm of commerce (standard operating procedure for Republican politicians in particular, whose private sector credentials are often flimsy, since they have typically spent much of their careers in government service). Rare is the figure— [author Daniel Walker] Howe among them—who recognized this had not always been so. “Few expressions in our language have shriveled as badly as the term ‘self-made man,’” he noted in his chapter pairing Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln in Making the American Self. “Among intellectuals at least, it is widely regarded as the platitudinous expression of an obsolete individualism. Once upon a time, however, the self-made man represented a heroic ideal.”

Indeed, even a brief immersion in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or nineteenth-century U.S. sources suggests that the conception of the self-made man was a good deal broader than business or politics. Yes, of course, John D. Rockefeller was considered an exemplar of the self-made man. But so was Ralph Waldo Emerson. Benjamin Franklin is widely considered the patron saint of American capitalism, but he was also celebrated by his contemporaries as a self-made scientist, diplomat, and writer. Self-made men came from other realms as well, among them the military (Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, George Patton) and the arts (Walt Whitman to Walt Disney).

(Hat tip: 3QD)

Yesterday marked the 150th anniversary of the denouement to the Battle of Gettsyburg, the bloodiest battle of the Civil War and by most accounts its turning point. Reviewing Allen Guelzo’s new history of those three days in July, Gettysburg, Stu Seidel emphasizes that the battle lines began to be drawn before the armies ever met on the fields of Pennsylvania:

Long before taking readers to the battle, Guelzo details the chess pieces who will oppose one another on the first three days of July in 1863. He enumerates the underlying political and military forces at play on Lee as he planned the invasion: Lee’s desire to force a negotiated settlement to the war by invading a Northern state and the challenges Lee faced in reconfiguring command of the Army of Northern Virginia following the death of Stonewall Jackson, Lee’s trusted and accomplished field commander, in the closing hours of the Battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863. On the Union side, Guelzo sets out the political and military challenges of simply finding a suitable commander for the Army of the Potomac. Not a single corps commander at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg had held a comparable post a year earlier. In an army so politicized that Lincoln’s choices to command were limited to Democrats who sympathized more with the president’s principal nemesis, former Army of the Potomac commander Gen. George McClellan, than with the president himself.

Anne Kelly Knowles uses an awesome interactive map to shed light on Robert E. Lee’s losing hand:

Altogether, our mapping reveals that Lee never had a clear view of enemy forces; the terrain itself hid portions of the Union Army throughout the battle. In addition, Lee did not grasp – or acknowledge – just how advantageous the Union’s position was. In a reversal of the Battle of Fredericksburg, where Lee’s forces held the high ground and won a great victory, Union General George Meade held the high ground at Gettysburg. Lee’s forces were spread over an arc of seven miles, while the Union’s compact position, anchored on several hills, facilitated communication and quick troop deployment. Meade also received much better information, more quickly, from his subordinates. Realizing the limits of what Lee could see makes his decisions appear even bolder, and more likely to fail, than we knew.

Relatedly, Kate Pais lists 10 items most don’t know about the battle, including the academic past of one of its central figures:

Renowned war hero Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, who is sometimes credited as the most influential figure in the Battle of Gettysburg, wasn’t even going to enlist in the service originally; he hesitated because he was supposed to take a sabbatical from Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine to study in Europe for two years. He was struck with a pang of patriotism and instead used his sabbatical to grant leave from the school and become lieutenant colonel in the 20th Maine Infantry.

And Pete Wehner summarizes the meaning that endured beyond Gettysburg’s carnage:

[T]hese horrific losses were hardly in vain. The Civil War, after all, achieved two monumentally important things: It ended slavery and it preserved the Union, which meant it preserved and extended liberty in America and the world. George Will refers to the Battle of Gettysburg as “the hinge of American, and hence world, history.” That seems to me to be a fair judgment–and today is a good day not only to remember the annihilation that began 150 years ago but also to give thanks for the courage and purpose that was on display on the grassy hills, the consecrated ground, of Gettysburg. If the North had lost instead of won at Gettysburg, America, as we know it, would have ended. And everything would be different. Instead this nation experienced a new birth of freedom–and a government of the people, by the people and for the people did not perish from the earth.

A female reader writes:

This thread has been fascinating to read. My perspective: When I was in Basic Training, I didn’t have time to shave. I was 18 when I went in, and I got to spend nine weeks growing out the hair on my legs. BDUs are pants, of course, but our Physical Training (PT) uniforms were shorts for the first few weeks while it was still warm outside. While the men had to shave their faces every day, less suffer the consequences (having to dry-shave with a pink disposable razor in front of the battalion), women didn’t have that requirement and none of us had the time.

The day before graduation, we were released to spend with our families. I went back to the hotel room of my best friends, who had come to see me graduate, and immediately stole a friend’s razor to shave my legs.

There’s photographic evidence of this, which I will decline to share, but it’s humorous. For me, shaving that day was something I could do for myself, that military could not regulate (the only regulation on women’s hair in this regard at the time was that we could not have visible facial hair) and that I could take my time to do. I wasn’t hurried, there weren’t 59 other women trying to use the shower … I sat in the tub and shaved my legs. It was glorious.

I have never liked the feel of my legs rubbing together when they are unshaven. I spent a month in the field on a training exercise in Korea and could not shave. In the field it didn’t matter; we lived in pants and I never could feel it. But the moment we returned to the barracks, I shaved. I couldn’t sleep until I did because it was bothering me so much. I just don’t like the feel of my legs when they’re hairy. (Funny side note: during field training in areas where there are a lot of ticks or other bugs in high grass, soldiers of both genders were encouraged to shave to reduce the chance of bites, infection, and bringing something home with you.)

Also, your reader who commented on the practical reasons for shaving, including all of our messy femaleness, is dead on. Hairy areas gather sweat and other fluids. It smells, things get matted … unpleasant all around.

Those of us who favor legalization should not dismiss some of the risks associated with cannabis use. We devoted a chapter in our collection, “The Cannabis Closet” to those risks and potential harms. And one of them is the relationship between heavy marijuana use among teens and subsequent schizophrenia. The studies are small but definitely add to the case that pot-smoking should be restricted to adult use, especially if there is a family history of mental illness:

A 2007 study in the Lancet, a British medical journal, concludes that using marijuana increases the risk of young people developing a psychotic illness, such as schizophrenia. This risk is greatest—up to a 200% increase—among those who use marijuana heavily and who start using at a younger age.

There are, however, some obvious caveats. First off, do teens with psychological issues self-medicate first with pot? In other words, is the pot-use a sign of early schizophrenia rather than the other way round? Mark Kleiman takes a few steps back:

Those in pre-Boomer and early Boomer birth cohorts in the U.S. – anyone born before about 1952 – had essentially zero experience with cannabis before the age of 18. But that changed rapidly. More than 10% of the high-school seniors of 1979 – roughly speaking, the birth cohort of 1961 – were daily or near-daily pot-smokers. Then the prevalence of heavy adolescent use fell sharply for a little more than a decade, reaching its trough around 1992, and has rebounded since. Yet the rate of schizophrenia diagnosis shows no corresponding cohort-to-cohort swings. (Nor, for that matter, between high- and low-cannabis-prevalence areas within the U.S. or cross-nationally.)

Then there’s the more central question: would legalizing cannabis help or hurt this population? One way I believe that legalization can help avoid this is that under a legal regime, the drug really could be prevented from being so easy to purchase by teens. Right now, it’s easy – and there’s no way to know exactly what you’re getting. High CBD strains might be an option to minimize harm – but keeping pot away from teens may well be better achieved by legalization rather than continuing Prohibition.

But let’s say the risk increases for those kids.

It seems absurd to say that wider cannabis consumption wouldn’t have some costs. The real question is: compared with what? Kleiman again:

Note, for example, that people put in jail or prison are at risk of severe damage, especially if while inside they become victims of physical or sexual assault. Some commit suicide. So the mental-health costs of arresting 650,000 people a year, and holding 30,000 or more prisoners at any one time, for cannabis offenses – costs that would be largely, though not entirely, abolished by legalization – might easily match or exceed the mental-health costs of increased exposure to cannabis.

All substances – alcohol and cigarettes come to mind immediately – can cause harm as well as good. My own view is that more cannabis use would improve our society in many ways. But I cannot know that for sure. What we need is a sober weighing of pros and cons, rather than context-free scare stories. But fear is what sustains Prohibition, so it is unsurprising that it is a tool deployed by the once libertarian WSJ Op-Ed page.

(Photo: David McNew/Getty)