What Does Arya Say to the God of Death? Anything She Damn Well Wants To

In the aftermath of the Battle of Winterfell, how fared our heroes?

THEY ALL DIED NOOOOOOO.

Okay, I kid. Only 99 percent of the Dothraki and maybe half the Unsullied and about 20 percent of the Wildlings and about 85 percent of everybody's vision because if your flat-screen TV wasn't set to the highest Brightness setting you couldn't see a DAMN thing.

As I figured, Beric and Theon were toast. Lost Edd, likely the final Lord Commander of the Night's Watch (since the Wall is gone and the White Walkers are dead). I didn't want Lady Lyanna Mormont to die (NOOOOO) but at least she killed a giant wight before she passed on. Her cousin Jorah Mormont was marked for doom as the perpetual Friendzoned bodyguard of his Khaleesi, but I had hoped he'd survive... nope. But he went out defending his queen and Daenerys really really felt bad about it so there's that. Almost lost Sandor but Beric slapped some sense into him before he bit the ballista. Completely forgot about the Red Woman Melisandre but she showed up at the last minute and used her firebending to defend the castle before quitting this world like a boss.

Every other major and secondary character survived, which means they're now faced with the priorities of taking on a well-rested and fully-powered Cersei at King's Landing. But they can all thank one character for finishing up this part of the epic storyline by wiping out the zombie apocalypse.

Yay Arya.

Sheesh. You'd think she'd won a Super Bowl or something.

Well, okay, so a lot of people were really impressed that she...

Okay, so everyone's completely freaking out over Arya...

Look, to any of the assholes out there calling Arya a "Mary Sue," you have no fooking clue. She's a badass. End of story. Well, not really ended because GEORGE RR MARTIN NEEDS TO WRITE THE DAMN END. Ahem.

Valar Morghulis

Anniversary: Battle of Gettysburg at Little Round Top

Fighting would continue for the remainder of the day, but Little Round Top held. The bayonet charge saved the Union flank, and in its own way the Union itself.

Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine received the Medal of Honor.

Follow-Up to Obama's 2015 State of the Union

While I didn't completely get what I wanted from Obama's address - although he DID push for an economic and tax agenda I can support - I did get to bear witness to one of the epic smackdowns in American History:

During his scripted speech, Obama claimed his position as "I have no more campaigns to run."

This prompted a round of applause from the Republican Congresscritters seemingly celebrating that Obama's unable to run for re-election.

Obama then ad-libbed "I know... because I won both of them."

Boom.

Burn.

Dunk.

Mic Drop.

Linkage to some Twitter reactions - usually the go-to source for the immediate OMG pulse of the moment - here and here and a few others if you look for them.

It was sweet.

If I ever have kids, I will tell them of this moment.

Presidential Character: Week Thirty-Three, Serving Crow Since 1948

A statesman is a politician who's been dead for ten years. - Harry S. Truman

To flashback to earlier Presidential Character reviews, I've often lamented the failings of how the party candidates screw up their selecting Vice Presidents to balance out an election ticket.  Ever since the ticket system was designed - 1800 election with Jefferson / Burr - it's been more headache than solution.

Part of the problem has been - remains - the need to literally balance the ticket between the winning Presidential candidate representing the party with someone who represents one of the losing factions that needed placating.  As a result you'd get a Veep who would not only be philosophically opposed to the President but most likely psychologically opposed as well.  You'd start off with an administration behaving in one way following the President's Active/Passive - Positive/Negative habits... and then if something bad happened to that President you'd get an administration suddenly following different traits, sometimes for the worse.

More often than not - Harrison to Tyler, Taylor to Fillmore, Lincoln to Johnson, Harding to Coolidge - you'd get a radical shift of personalities that ruined the political dynamics of the era.  There's been a few transitions where the incoming Vice President - Chester A. Arthur, Theodore Roosevelt - proved to be a boon rather than a bust, but when it comes down to it the parties ought to do a better job of selecting their Vice President candidates with an eye towards a risky future.

The first time - in some respects the only time - a serious effort to line up a candidate for the Vice Presidency was in 1944 for Franklin D. Roosevelt's fourth campaign.  It was pretty much a given that FDR was going to win: the nation was full into World War II, things were going well on the home front and the front lines, and FDR had remained popular with voters.  There was no need to "change horse in midstream," the standard argument against voting out an incumbent during wartime.

However, everyone within FDR's circle knew Roosevelt was dying (himself included).  In 1940 Roosevelt had campaigned with an extreme liberal Henry Wallace to shore up the far left faction of the Democrats on the eve of World War II, but Wallace's soft stance on Communism (the Soviet kind) made the party worry by 1944: while the Allies had teamed up with Josef Stalin and the Soviet Union to defeat the common enemy of Hitler's Axis, Stalin was still a devil and having someone like Wallace eagerly dealing with him as President was a horrifying thought.

The party leadership - the backroom dealers and FDR's inner circle - began searching for a suitable replacement.  One name kept coming up: Harry S. Truman, Senator out of Missouri.

Truman wasn't the first choice, though: James Byrnes out of South Carolina was.  Byrnes had served in a variety of state and federal offices, and was one of FDR's closest advisors.  But where Wallace was too liberal, Byrnes was too conservative, and Truman quickly became the kind of compromise candidate a party chooses for the top half of the ticket.

It wasn't hard to see why Truman's name raced to the top of the list.  He'd been a solid and loyal party member since before World War I, someone who may have come from a corrupt political machine but was himself honest and incorruptible, and a major Senatorial player supporting the New Deal from the get-go.  Truman served in the first world war, earning the rank of captain and showing his stripes as a battlefield leader.  Really making his reputation was his stellar work on an oversight committee during the first years of the War Effort that clamped down on waste and war profiteering (on a budget of $360,000 Truman saved the nation around $15 billion from waste and fraud).

But there had to have been another factor at play here, and James David Barber makes note of it during his review of Truman's style:

Truman's style in decision making had two large elements. One was the close attention to detail, the studious homework he drew out of his early reading, his experience in detailed jobs, and his successful canteen management and personal reconnaissance in the Army.  Truman as President could and did study hard... The other element was the decisiveness - the habit of nearly impulsive assertion of definite answers - that was the bring him such difficulties as he "shot from the hip"...  In a world of uncertain people, Harry's style of deciding - yes or no, on the spot, right now - could be impressive, could bring him a reputation for leadership. (p.313)

Barber had Truman in the Active-Positive category, partly because of that decision-making (pure Active) but also because Truman was a hard political campaigner: working in the rough world of state-level politics - especially southern politics with its racial issues and populist anger - taught Truman to fight hard for the offices he campaigned for.  While not a practiced or well-known orator, Truman was a font of quips and one-liners, a Deadpan Snarker who disdained puffery and went after what he saw was the truth (and because of that attention to detail Barber noted, it was truth based on researched fact).  A-Ps in Barber's evaluation were tireless campaigners, enjoying not so much the fight but the chance to get in front of the issues, make a case, confront a problem.

Roosevelt himself was an Active-Positive, and one thing A-Ps love are fellow A-Ps (the other Roosevelt thought he found a fellow Active-Positive in Taft which was why Taft got tabbed as his successor... when Taft proved Passive-Positive Teddy came to regret that move).  Roosevelt saw in Truman a dedicated New Dealer, someone who would carry the banner of the cause on his own terms but still one that FDR would recognize; a tireless worker whose fraud-busting efforts showed a commitment to honest government.

Ironically, Truman didn't want the Vice Presidency - he was convinced Byrnes would be the choice, and even kept a nominating speech for Byrnes with him during the early stages of the convention - and had to be pressed into taking the nomination during a staged phone call between FDR and a room full of party leaders.  Truman knew to some extent of FDR's frail health, but wasn't entirely in the know, and so in most respects he was genuinely stunned when 82 days into the fourth term FDR died and Truman became President.

While Truman didn't want the job, the A-P trait of being Self-Confident became the defining trait of his administration.  Truman's Presidency desk famously displayed a message: The Buck Stops Here.  And Truman meant it: when he made a decision he followed through, owned up to it, made his arguments, did his best to accept the criticisms of his allies and did even better shooting down the criticisms of his enemies.

The clearest example of Truman's decision-making was his earliest decision: making the call on using atomic weapons on key Japanese targets.  Having only been told of the Manhattan Project right after ascending to the Oval Office, and facing in mid-summer the sobering possibility of a massive invasion of a fortified Japan.  Confronted with the projected losses following the fierce and bloody Battle of Okinawa - both military and civilian lives lost on the Japanese mainland into the hundreds of thousands - and also confronted with weapons that could fell a single city with a single bomb, Truman made the decision to use the bombs our nation had to press Japan into surrender before a mass invasion was needed.

The decision has been debated since the moment it was made.  Proponents siding with Truman noting that Japan's martial culture would have guaranteed a massive and bloody defense against any landings; opponents arguing that the use of such weapons - more lethal to civilians than military targets - were tantamount to war crimes.  In hindsight an argument could have been made that diplomacy could have worked: but it would have taken months or years with no guarantee of peaceful resolution, and the Japanese Army was adamantly against any surrender.

If the estimated casualties of Operation Downfall were correct even at the most conservative - about 23,000 during the first 90 days - it would have been bloody but far less than the total death count of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (150,000).  If the larger calculations throwing in a civilian uprising were right, it would have gotten into 1.7 million American casualties and 5 million Japanese, and those death tolls for the atomic bombs would have been a more acceptable - but still painful - alternative.

Truman owned up to the decision of dropping the bombs - he insisted on military targets only - but wasn't aware at the time of how destructive such a weapon could be.  When it came out how the devastation wiped out civilians as much as military bases, Truman had to have learned from that... because the next time the use of atomic weapons came up - the Korean War, and China's intervention into it - he flat-out opposed it.

Past that, Truman's Active-Positive traits carried him through his first term.  He carried on the War Effort towards victory in Europe and in Japan.  He presided over the formation of a United Nations, an attempt to improve on the failed League of Nations, this time with an active United States backing it up.  Remembering his own experiences of post-war economic downturn after World War I, Truman did what he could to keep the post-war economy churning through price controls.  When unions struck, Truman used the power of the office to "draft" the unions and nationalize the affected industries to keep them working.

When Stalin openly reneged on his promises and seized control of Soviet-held nations in 1947, Truman issued his Doctrine of supporting "all free peoples who are resisting subjugation."  This went towards keeping Greece and Turkey from falling under Soviet domination (albeit at the cost of rather messy civil wars).  This was followed up with the Marshall Plan, an ambitious foreign aid program to rebuild war-torn Western Europe before the Stalin-backed Communist factions could use the economic malaise to their advantage.  And part of all this was the Berlin Airlift, Truman's solution to a Soviet blockade of West Berlin (Germany and Berlin had been divided up into allied-controlled sections, with West Berlin a sore point in Stalin's control of East Germany).  Rather than press a military confrontation on the ground, Truman coordinated flights into West Berlin daring Stalin to shoot down the planes performing publicly recognized humanitarian supply efforts.  Pretty much the best display of Truman's Adaptive skill, it worked: Stalin wouldn't cross that line and the blockade was lifted.

All of these were actions an Active-Positive President would preside over: the use of government power not for the personal gain but for the gains of others.  He didn't display the A-P trait of Adaptive, but instead showed the willingness to be Confident in the use of executive power to get done what needed doing.  But wait, there's more.

Harry S. Truman was the first President since Reconstruction to make serious gains in ensuring civil rights for Blacks.  He had followed the struggles of Black soldiers during efforts at integration during World War II and had been sickened by the reports of lynchings that occurred during and after the war.  By 1948 he issued an executive order desegregating the armed forces, the first major blow for civil rights since the 15th Amendment.

Truman also became the first global leader in 1948 to recognize Israel's right to exist as a nation.  Warned it would upset Arab nations and cut off American access to much-needed oil, Truman couldn't ignore the fact that the Nazis had just attempted a Final Solution to wipe out Jews altogether, and that the Jewish people required a homeland to ensure their survival.

In these, Truman was using the A-P initiative of getting ahead on civil rights issues and sticking to it.  He pursued these points even in the face of political opposition, especially as 1948 was an election year.

By 1948 Truman and the Democratic Party was facing long odds indeed.  Despite the successful conclusion to the war, there was the struggle to rebuild Europe and Asia and the home front, there had come a kind of political fatigue to the whole thing.  Democrats had been in charge of things since 1933, a full decade had passed and then some, and the strain of a prolonged rule was showing.  The failures of the Republicans leading up to the Great Depression had almost been forgotten.  Truman's popularity wasn't all that great, and the Democratic Party had developed serious internal factions during FDR's prolonged tenure.

Henry Wallace was pretty bitter about getting booted out of the Veep spot for being too liberal, and like all wingnuts (leftist and rightist both) was truly convinced of his liberal platform.  He broke off and formed his own Progressive campaign.  When the Democratic platform at the convention came out with a strong civil rights policy that Truman publicly adopted, the Southern Democrats (Dixiecrats) walked out of the convention.  And when Truman signed that executive order desegregating the armed forces two weeks later, South Carolina's (yeah, them again) governor Strom Thurmond announced his own campaign for the Presidency on a racist "States Rights" platform.  The Democratic Party had basically disintegrated into three parts, where the Electoral system favored two parties (Democrat and Republican).  The Republican Party - nominee Thomas Dewey as their candidate - could pretty much lean back and coast to victory.

Except for the fact that the Republicans and Dixiecrats and Progressives were all up against Active-Positive Harry S. Truman.  A-Ps love the fight not for the sake of the fight but for getting something accomplished.  And Truman was up for this.

Truman's campaign was aggressive from the start.  He went after the Republicans in Congress for their conservative attempts at culling back the New Deal and at the gains workers - and an increasing middle class - had made.  Calling them "Do-Nothing", Truman made a show of calling for a special session of Congress to pass economic legislation.  Considering it a trap of sorts, the Republicans showed up but did little, inadvertently playing into Truman's accusations.  Truman effectively ignored both Wallace and Thurmond, since they were both in effect single-issue candidates lacking genuine broad appeal.  And Truman went on a whirlwind railroad tour of the nation, derisively called "whistle-stops" by Republican-backing newspapers but in fact hosting turnouts in the hundreds of thousands of supporters.

The national media didn't even seem to notice.  Mostly owned by conservatives or following "conventional wisdom", the newspapers failed to keep up with any polling past September and failed to notice Truman's public support.  It had become "conventional wisdom" that Truman was unliked and that it was due time for Republicans to return to the White House.  Assurances of Dewey's victory in November were rampant.  Right up until Election Night itself.

From the National Archives.  There's a reason Truman is smiling, and it involves being a badass.

That photo is arguably one of the most famous in American history.  One of the great reminders that "it ain't over until it's over," and that Truman had the political skill of the Active-Positive driving him to success (also it was another reminder that the geniuses inside the Beltway aren't as smart or as informed as they think they are).

The second term of office proved much tougher (history proves us that, regardless of the success or skill of any President): above all, Stalin encouraged his North Korean allies to invade South Korea, setting off the Korean War and the first major test of Truman's containment policy.

It was Truman's Confident trait that caused half the problems he faced going into this fight: he pursued an international coalition through the newly formed UN as both an effort to boost the UN's prestige and to avoid getting a declaration of war out of Congress that he felt wasn't necessary.  Both moves hurt him stateside.

The other half of the problem was dealing with Douglas MacArthur.  One of the most quixotic generals in American history, MacArthur could be a strategic genius and a tactical moron.  At the same time.  Having blundered through the first half of the Second World War and then regaining prestige and popularity towards the end of it, MacArthur was the general placed in charge of the Korean War efforts.  Pulling off one of the best military maneuvers in history at Inchon - making an amphibious assault under harsh conditions - MacArthur proceeded to overplay the UN's agenda by pursuing the North Korean forces right up to China's borders well enough for China to worry about invasion.  Despite Truman's warnings not to provoke the Chinese, MacArthur did so... and drew the Chinese 2 million strong into what was supposed to be a small-scale police action.

When the tide of fighting turned to stalemate, MacArthur pressed for the use of nuclear weapons, and worked under the belief that he had control of the arsenal - and ultimately the Army - and not Truman.  This was a critical moment in American history.  While there had been differences between Presidents and Generals before, tradition had developed that the civilian leadership controlled the military, that the President was Commander-in-Chief and that it kept the military in check.  MacArthur believed in Total Victory regardless of the objectives: Truman believed in containing Communism but avoiding perpetual warfare. Worse, MacArthur was privately and publicly undercutting Truman's authority as President.

Truman fired the son-of-a-bitch.

One other thing to note about Active-Positive Presidents: they do not do things because they are popular.  They do things because they are hard, and worth doing.  Firing MacArthur was political suicide in 1951: calls for impeachment were rampant and MacArthur returned a hero.  As the months passed and as Congress investigated Truman's decision, a lot of MacArthur's bullheaded actions were made public, and the decision Truman made became reasonable.  But the damage was done.  And Truman took the heat for it.

By 1952 the Korean War was a stalemated mess.  America got hit with a recession, and Truman's popularity was right around 22 percent, one of the lowest ratings in the history of polling such data.  When Truman's early forays into primaries for re-election went sour, he saw the writing on the wall and made the decision to not run again (he was exempt from the passage of the 22nd Amendment capping Presidential terms).  Truman did not leave office on the best of terms, but he left them on his terms and took his retirement to heart.

When historians speak of Truman's legacy, the first thing they'll note is that Truman is one of the first Presidents to have his reputation improve dramatically within years of leaving office.  It helped that a lot of what Truman believed in - keeping the New Deal agenda strong, avoiding full war in Korea/China, avoiding further use of nuclear weapons - turned out to have been the right calls.  Whenever a President drops significantly in the polls nowadays, they'll point straight to Truman and use him as an example of being unpopular but correct (despite how incorrect such a failing President might be).  Truman tends to appear in the Top Ten of any Presidential list ever since such lists were made, and if he's not he's usually slipped to Number 11.

Can't end this Truman fest without posting one of his best known quips: My choice early in life was either to be a piano-player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth there's hardly any difference.

I motherfucking love this guy (except for the whole "Nuking Japan" thing, and even then I'll grant that was a tough call to make).  I'm glad I share a birthday with him.

Next Up: Everybody Likes Ike... Despite His Traits

Presidential Character: Week Twenty-Six, The President As Superhero

"To me, the key to understanding the character is that Bruce Wayne is Teddy Roosevelt." - Christopher Nolan

In my review of Andrew Jackson, I despaired of the fact that while Jackson was an asshole, he was also a Badass which meant by American standards he was and will always be admired.  The problem is that a Badass isn't always what we consider Good or Lawful (character alignment!), a Badass can be Chaotic or Evil as well.

If Andrew Jackson was Badass Evil, we can at least take comfort that another President served as Badass Good: Theodore Roosevelt.


Did we mention he had asthma growing up? He did, and after he beat asthma to death, he ate asthma's raw flesh and ran 100 straight miles off the energy it gave him. - Cracked.com article on badass Presidents (guess who topped the list).

Roosevelt comes to this review with one of the more impressive resumes a President could have (maybe Garfield comes closest): state representative, cowboy, Wild West sheriff, entrepreneur, New York City Police Commissioner (not only is he the template for Batman, he's also the template for Commissioner Gordon), adventurer/explorer, author, historian, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, volunteer cavalryman (the Rough Riders), New York Governor, and then Vice President under McKinley.  This last bit needs explaining: nearly everything Roosevelt did was as a progressive-minded reformer, a True Believer in the exceptional potential of the United States.  An upper-class socialite who took noblesse oblige seriously.  He went after corruption at all levels in nearly every form: he went after injustice.  And he did it with nerves of steel, total determination, and a willingness to get the job done with his own hands if need be.  And it pissed the hell out of his fellow corrupt politicians...

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat. - Theodore Roosevelt's "Man In The Arena" paragraph from his Citizenship in a Republic Speech, 1910.  This is Roosevelt basically daring every living soul to be badass.

Roosevelt became Vice President for McKinley's second term because enough political bosses in his own party - Republicans - were sick of his meddling while serving as New York's governor.  The reasoning was that the Veep's office was where political careers went to die: Roosevelt would have no true power there (save as tie-breaking vote in the Senate), and almost nobody who served as Vice President went on to do anything else as a career.  Only one machine boss was against it - Mark Hanna out of Ohio - who knew that while the Vice President was powerless, all it would take is something happening to McKinley to make "that goddamn cowboy" the most powerful man in the political arena.  It had, after all, happened before.  And in three out of the four times, it led to disaster for both the party and the nation.

While it was sad for McKinley when he was assassinated, Roosevelt becoming President proved a good thing for the nation.

"Why spoil the beauty of the thing with legality?" - attributed to Attorney General Philander Knox, reportedly after Roosevelt spent another lecture defending his actions over Panama's independence from Colombia, which helped secure the Panama Canal deal.

Every adjective to describe an Active-Positive President could apply to Theodore Roosevelt: confident, self-controlled, Adaptive, optimistic, creative, and enjoyed the use of power not for himself but for the benefit of others.  In another way to describe him: Roosevelt was the MOST ACTIVE President we've ever had.

He pushed a Progressive platform, seeking reforms across the board from the political to the business world to education to everything.  Trust-Buster: he went after J.P. Morgan's railroad interests, he went after the sugar monopoly, he went after Big Steel, he started after Standard Oil before he left office.  The Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act.  He put regulations in place to ensure public safety and health.  He backed the efforts to establish a constitutional amendment to establish a progressive-scaled income tax.  He pushed for natural conservation as the industrialization spreading westward that threatened to over-consume everything (preserving wildlife and the natural beauty of the nation were beneficial side-effects).

In foreign policy, he put the United States at the forefront of international politics.  He settled an international crisis with Venezuela vs. European powers.  He negotiated a peace treaty between Russia and Japan, becoming the first President to win the Nobel Peace Prize.  He threatened an invasion of Morocco over the Perdicaris Incident but made shrewd diplomatic efforts to defuse the crisis.  If there was any bellicosity during his administration, it was his getting involved in a Panama uprising against Colombia in order to get a Pacific-Atlantic canal finalized that would open up global shipping trade (and military naval routes, although navy ships soon got to be too big for the Panama Canal later on).

The entire nation seemed to hum with energy and vigor while he sat in office.  The SOB - and I mean that in a good, awe-inspiring way - was powered by Pure Awesome (and a ton of coffee: he was a heavy coffee drinker for the day, which helped popularize the habit across America).

Politically, he gave a face and personality to the reformers in the Republican ranks, quickly identified (and still to this day) as Progressives.  Previous "accidental" Presidents - Tyler, Fillmore, Johnson, Arthur - never had a chance to build up a power base or take control of a party that didn't want them: Roosevelt - through sheer force of personality, intelligence, and willpower - became the first succeeding President to win a Presidential term in his own right.

Roosevelt left office at the height of his power and tenure: of the Presidents to serve more than one term, his second round in office is remarkably free of scandal - all the scandals were in the business circles - and he could have easily run again for a third.  But he took the idea of two-terms seriously, even if one was just a half-term, and decided to move on, allowing a hand-picked friend to succeed him into the White House. When his friend (more on him later) proved more, well, timid in pursuing a Progressive agenda, Roosevelt went and formed his own political party - Progressive/Bull Moose - to win back the White House and resume his reformer's agenda.  Well, it didn't work out, but he did dare greatly...

After Roosevelt left the White House, he went on explorations across the globe.  He made one trip up the Amazon rainforest in search of a waterway known as the River of Doubt.  When he was done, it was re-named THE RIVER OF UNQUESTIONABLE CERTAINTY - quote generally attributed to everyone who read up on everything Roosevelt did and came away stunned that such a person existed in real life.  The river actually got renamed Roosevelt River.

Roosevelt had personal energy the likes of which we've rarely seen in other historical figures, and most likely never will again.  Of the great Presidents at the top of the list, Roosevelt was the most Badass (and we're talking a list that includes Washington and Lincoln, no slouches in the Badass department).

The Last Thing Death Sees Before a Brutal Ass-Kicking:

It's the stunned look on Death's face that sells it.

Next Week: All In All He'd Much Preferred The Judgeship.

Anniversaries: Gettysburg Day Two

This happened 150 years ago today:

That sound you hear is Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine codifying the Badass Bookworm trope for American history buffs.

A Serious Reason to Celebrate Cinco De Mayo

Here in the states we gringos* get our Mexi-CAN attitude up during May 5th for all things Mexican... mostly Mexican food (TACOS), Mexican drinks ('RITAS), and terrible attempts to speak like Speedy Gonzales.

But there's a good reason to celebrate this day of Cinco De Mayo, in honor of the Battle of Puebla, not only a positive moment for Mexico but for the hemisphere as well.

You see, back in 1862 the nation of Mexico was a huge mess.  The aftermath of the Mexican-American War left the government divided and the people's spirits broken.  From 1857 to 1861 they suffered a civil war (see? another one) that wrecked their finances and made it difficult to pay off their debts to overseas creditors... which happened to be France, Spain, and England.

Around this time France had fallen under yet another would-be dictator in Napoleon's nephew who declared himself Napoleon III (there really wasn't a II, but III needed to include his dad into the equation for his claim to stick).  Itching for an overseas empire of his own, and wary of the United States - even in the middle of its own civil war - growing into a global power if it ran unchecked across the western hemisphere, Napoleon III used the default to convince the Spanish and British governments to jointly send troops to Mexico and force the Mexican government to capitulate and pay off those debts.

When the overseas force reached the shores of Mexico the Mexican President Benito Juarez had sent envoys to negotiate a deal to pay off the debts at a prolonged period with favorable rates to the creditor nations.  Thankfully, neither Spain nor the UK wanted to start a fight - they were also pissed to find out this was an excuse by Napoleon III to invade, not reclaim debts - and accepted the terms.  Napoleon's forces, however, were ordered to march in and take over no matter what.

Into this mix came Ignacio Zaragoza.  Growing up to become a priest, during the civil war unrest of the 1850s he quit seminary studies and offered to join any army supporting the struggling republic.  At first unqualified for officer rank - he was from the peasantry - and then barred from signing up for foot soldier duty, Zaragoza was able to join a ragtag team of misfits and proved himself with them, working his way into the regular ranks.  By 1855 Zaragoza was the officer in charge of the military that ousted Santa Anna - where Zaragoza should be considered Mexico's greatest military hero, Santa Anna should be considered the worst - and helped establish the Liberal Party's control of Mexico.

Zaragoza was serving in Juarez's cabinet as War Secretary when the armies landed in 1862.  He promptly resigned his post and took charge of the eastern defenses.  As the French moved inland towards Mexico City, Zaragoza's early forays convinced him to pull back to a fortified position and get the French to do something stupid (being the French army he was facing, this was doable).  That meant tearing up the fields in a scorched earth policy and pulling back to the city of Puebla, where two forts were already built and all Zaragoza needed to do was carve out a horse path between the two for his cavalry to maneuver.

I just noted that the best way to defeat the French was to let them do something stupid, which seemed a common occurrence   It was.  While the French troops themselves are as good and hardened as any other army on a battlefield, the French leadership leaves a bit to be desired more often than not.  The general in charge of the invading French force for example - Comte de Lorencez - had been told (and believed) to expect the Mexican citizenry to welcome his forces as liberators (gee, sounds familiar) and so expected any Mexican opposition to get turned over by their own people the second French troops paraded nearby.  He also wasn't too familiar with weather conditions in that part of the world and so didn't think to get his fighting done before the afternoon thunderstorms would roll in.

Lorencez started his artillery barrage just before lunch and didn't send his ground troops to attack the forts until right after lunch.  Zaragoza kept his troops on the defensive, using the terrain and patience to keep his troops fresh and ready, forcing the French to keep charging uphill into a swarm of machete-wielding - yes this part is real - Mexicans.  When the French started their third wave, they were low on ammo, their artillery was useless, and the weather turned wet (hello, afternoon rainstorms!) and the terrain muddy.  During their pullback from the third failed assault, the French forces were confronted by Zaragoza's meager cavalry and a concealed flanking contingent that turned the pullback into a retreat.  Lorencez retreated from the battlefield, and spent the next few days trying to get Zaragoza to chase after him (hoping to get Zaragoza's smaller force into an open field for easier stompage).  Zaragoza wouldn't bite, forcing Lorencez to retreat all the way back to the Gulf of Mexico and call for reinforcements.

Zaragoza sent word back to Mexico City: Las armas nacionales se han cubierto de gloria.  The national arms have been covered in glory.  After the massive humiliations suffered by the Mexican-American War, the Mexicans had won a battle against a foreign army.

Sadly, they didn't stop the war.  Napoleon III wanted his overseas empire and so sent more troops expecting a bigger fight.  By 1863 they had seized control of Mexico City and inserted a puppet "emperor" Maximilian (some guy from the Austrian Hapsburg dynasty).  As to why Zaragoza wasn't there to stop them... well by September 1862 Zaragoza died of typhoid fever, leaving a vacuum of military leadership and skill.

But Zaragoza's victory was a big one: for both Mexico and the United States.  It gave Mexico a year to organize and prepare for further hostilities, which became the resistance fighting that continued the war into 1867.  It gave time for the United States to finish up their civil war by 1865 to give the Republic forces much-needed weapons and a 50,000 strong veteran army led by Philip Sheridan - think Patton on a horse, about 3 inches shorter and 3 times more blood-thirsty - that hampered French resources.  By 1867 Napoleon III's dream of empire was over and he abandoned Maximilian (who foolishly stayed behind thinking he could appeal to the Mexican people) to his fate.

Mexico retained its national identity and its honor.  The United States no longer had a hostile European-backed empire in its backyard.  The Western Hemisphere was no longer under threat of hostile takeover by France or any other European nation with imperial ambitions like Belgium or the emerging nation-states like Germany or Italy (sadly, the Central and South American republics still had - and have - to contend with a meddling US government instead...).

And that, kids, is why we raise a drink in honor of General Zaragoza.  A toast... on this Cinco De Mayo!

* Mexican for "Crazy White Tourists".  I'm not kidding.

Presidential Character: Week Seven, With All Apologies to Bill Brasky

All of this leads to a rather troublesome dilemma:  Is a badass still a badass if he doesn't always do the right thing? - Badass of the Week guy (aka "Amazing Ben Johnson")

Pardon my Swedish, but Andrew Jackson was a sunofabeech (I'll be more clear about the sentiment towards the end).

Just take all of the crazy things done by Bill Brasky (even hunting down the Banana Splits), trade in Andrew Jackson's name, and you've pretty much got an idea of what Andrew Jackson's done.

The nicest things I can say about Jackson are 1) he dearly loved his wife and 2) he taught his parrot how to swear in two different languages.  I'd throw in that he stared down an even bigger SOB in John C. Calhoun during the Nullification Crisis, but that's like choosing between having someone hit your head with a frying pan over having someone hit your head with a heavier frying pan.

So what kind of Presidential character did Jackson possess?

Jackson more neatly fits the Active-Negative traits of a President far better than his predecessor John Quincy Adams.  Jackson as Compulsive is easy to note when you look at what he did as President.  Note above all Jackson's habits toward being Uncompromising and having anger management issues.

The anger management issues were pretty noticeable even to his followers: Jackson's entire backstory is one big fight after another.  A child solider of the Revolution, he was captured by the British and roughly treated, himself slashed at the head and arm by a British officer who tried to get Jackson to polish his boots.  That his brothers died (one in battle, one to illness in captivity) as well as his mother (who pledged to work as a nurse for the British to free her sons, and then died while treating a cholera outbreak) pretty much made Jackson hate the Brits for life.  Orphaned, he moved to the then-frontier of Tennessee carving out a career as a landowner, farmer (which grew into slave-owning)  and backwoods lawyer (back then formal training and a degree was hard to come by).  He got involved in the border wars against various Indian tribes rising up against expanding settlers, gaining battlefield experience and military rank up to General by the War of 1812 and his famous defense of New Orleans at war's end.  By then he'd developed some hatred towards the Natives as well.

Another sign of Jackson's anger was the numerous duels, of challenges offered and received.  He's close to owning the record number of duels in American history (the number varies between thirteen and somewhere in the hundreds) and is the only President to have killed a man in a duel.  Legend has it Jackson got so bored during a Cabinet meeting he dug out a dueling bullet from his arm and mailed it back to the guy who put it there writing "I believe this is yours."

His blunt and candid nature was something that made him less than popular among the political elite of the nation, but made him a favorite of the common people.  So when 1824 rolled around and he ran for the President - with his background as state judge, Congressman, General and War Hero, Senator, and all-around badass - he won a solid majority of voters and states.  But not enough to win the Electoral vote, throwing the results into the House of Representatives where to Jackson's ire the victory went to John Quincy Adams.

Jackson became the first man to openly campaign for the presidency a full four years before the following election (Screw Protocol was one of his mottoes).  It turned 1828 into one of the nastiest personal mud-fights for the office in electoral history.  It didn't help that Jackson's marriage to his beloved wife Rachel decades earlier happened when the couple thought her abusive then-husband had finalized a divorce: He hadn't, and had convinced a friend to trick the couple into thinking that.  Once the couple married, the first husband leveled the charge of bigamy at Jackson - who by that time was a growing political figure in Tennessee - and created the first political burr under Jackson's saddle.  By 1828 that bigamy accusation - while already known to most and already considered resolved when Rachel made her own divorce proceedings (the first in Tennessee's history) - was used as a sledgehammer against Jackson by Adams' supporters.  Jackson still won in a landslide - the number of eligible voters between 1824 and 1828 had expanded from propertied men to all non-slave men, and Jackson was hugely popular with the masses - but the stress of the mudslinging drove poor Rachel to illness and death.  Jackson grieved and swore to never forgive his enemies.

Jackson's presidency was one of political conflict, especially as Jackson came into office as a Populist figure and derisive of the egalitarian leadership that had forged Washington political circles.  Jackson's compulsive nature led him to push for what were radical changes to how government was operating up til then.  He imposed a Spoils system of granting federal jobs to party loyalists, arguing that to the victorious go the spoils.  He pushed against the federalist-themed American System of Henry Clay's - his enemy from 1824 and 28 elections - by opposing any federally-backed roads or canals programs that didn't involve multi-state involvement.  And he broke the Banking system of the United States - the one based on Hamilton's economic planning and backed even by anti-banking figures such as Thomas Jefferson - by ending the National Bank and replacing it with state-level banks operating by different rules.

In each case Jackson's actions were relatively pro-active and could have labeled him as an Active-Positive because like an A-P type he never realized the consequences of those actions.  The Spoils system quickly broke down into a corrupt mess with incompetent party hacks getting cushy jobs.  And while breaking the Bank created an economic boom of sorts with increasing speculation and credit for business expansion, Jackson's follow-up move to force those banks to deal with specie - gold and silver coinage only, aka Hard currency - caused those state banks to fail, creating the nation's first Depression via the Panic of 1837.

What keeps Jackson in the A-N ranks was the compulsive nature behind each of those moves.  Whereas the A-Ps are cheerfully causing reforms in a current system in the belief that good things will follow, the A-N reform efforts are done solely out of the belief that the current system is bad and any changes need to happen no matter what: the changes Jackson pushed were reactions, not actions.

Two more things that harks to Jackson's compulsive and uncompromising nature: his handling of the Nullification Crisis, and the Indian Removal Act.

During John Quincy Adams' tenure he had succeeded in passing a high tariff that Southern states found too stifling and protective of northern interests.  It was hoped that Jackson's election in 1828 would end it, but Jackson and his backers didn't focus too much on it, fighting other battles such as breaking the National Bank.  By 1832 this became a crisis: Calhoun - serving at the time as Jackson's Veep as Jackson needed his power base to win the 1828 election - resigned his office so he could run as a Senate candidate to push his Nullification beliefs.  Jackson, seeing the growing woes and knowing how much of a bastard Calhoun was, finally got around to getting a reduced tariff voted in.  It wasn't enough for Calhoun and his state, and so South Carolina held a state convention that deemed both tariffs unconstitutional.

Jackson for all of his States' Rights ways was still an ardent Unionist and knew the nullification movement was an attempt at disunion.  He retaliated in three ways: he got passed a Force Act that gave him impunity in dealing with any state trying to ignore the federal government's authority to tax and regulate.  And then he sent ships to South Carolinian ports to back it up.  And he privately threatened to hang every nullification backer (hint: Calhoun) from the highest trees he could find.

A compromised tariff - backed by Clay, one of the politicos who lived to make deals - was reached relatively quickly and both sides cooled off.  But there's a reason why Jackson openly left the presidency with two regrets: "That I have not shot Henry Clay or hanged John C. Calhoun."

The Force Act and other responses by Jackson were clear signs of his A-N nature: A-Ns lean towards imposing force to get what they want for both good or ill.  But the Indian Removal Act and the fallout from that were even more obvious signs.

From the start of Jackson's tenure he had pushed for the removal of native tribes from the eastern states - especially the southeastern states from land slave-owners and farmers coveted - towards the more sparse western territories where settlers had yet to reach.  While in theory such removals were to be "voluntary", in fact and practice the removals were enforced through bullying and in some cases outright fraud.  The state of Georgia in particular passed a series of laws making it harder for the resident Cherokee to stay there.  The Supreme Court ruled against one of the harsher laws in Worcester v. Georgia but in the end little could be done to stop what Jackson started (Jackson apocryphally said "Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it", but in truth the ruling never involved Jackson).  A lot of solid Jacksonians - notably Davy Crockett - were against the removals, but Jackson himself really didn't seem to care one whit.  To him it was a removal of troublesome forces - he had dealt harshly with the Natives of the southeastern states during his military years - and more land for white Americans to buy up.

What he sired was the Trail of Tears: one of the United States' more blighted spots of infamy in history, equal to the internment of Japanese-American civilians during World War II and second only to America's tragedy of race-based slavery.  That quote above from the Badass of the Week site manger Ben Johnson is drawn straight from this infamy: thousands of Natives died during their long march out to the Midwest, and Jackson didn't care.

It doesn't change the fact that Andrew Jackson was a badass - of the Presidents, only Theodore Roosevelt can claim greater badassery - but it does explain why I view Jackson as a sonofabitch.  And I wasn't the only one: an entire political party - the Whigs - formed based on simple pure hatred of Jackson the person and President.

There have been worse Presidents, some more destructive than what Jackson had done.  And Jackson did stand for the nation's unity in the face of southern nullification efforts.  But very few have been as complete a son-of-a-bitch as this guy.