Tag: Dwight Eisenhower

A Sense Of Balance: Getting To Like Ike

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Too many people don’t care what happens so long as it doesn’t happen to them. —William Howard Taft, former President and Chief Justice

Some may belittle politics, but we know, who are engaged in it, that it is where people stand tall. —Tony Blair, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Somewhere between those two statements, made by two exceptionally accomplished and intelligent men, is a truth. Somewhere there is a fulcrum. There has to be.

Portrait of Dwight D. Eisenhower, by James Anthony Wills, 1967. White House Historical Association/White House Collection.

Where? If you think about it, contemporary politics is often just a sorting mechanism. We voters pick a team, we align our views with that team, and we tighten our bond to that team through ideologically similar traditional and social media. In doing so, we become so consumed with pursuing our own interests that we often lose our capacity for empathy. To Taft’s point, we don’t care what happens as long as it doesn’t happen to us. We don’t care who pays for it, so long as we get it.

What about politicians? Do they “stand tall”? Do they stand for everyone? We know they often don’t. To rise in the party, and/or to keep their jobs, the pols needs to hew ever closer to whatever idea (or person) exercises the strongest gravimetric force. The distillation process continues until most individuality disappears, not just in the ambitious (or worried) pol who learns to squawk in lockstep, but also in the vast majority of rank-and-file voters. Both groups look past, or even take up positions that, in calmer times they might have thought disqualifying as a matter of principle—or even manifestly against their own interests.

Nothing said here is particularly new—even more so now, as both major political parties have become less ideologically diverse over the last several decades. There’s an acute imbalance right now because Trump is such an accelerant, but if we ever get past the Trump Era with our traditional basic values intact, we are going to need to find a sense of balance again. To quote Lincoln, we must “disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country.”

Just how do we disenthrall ourselves? Read more »

Monday, June 17, 2024

Order Of The Day: Eisenhower And D-Day

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Soldiers, Sailors, and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hope and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other Fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.

—Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Allied Commander, June 6, 1944

We had to storm the beaches at Normandy. There was no other way. None, at least, to loosen Hitler’s death-grip on Western Europe. One by one, proud peoples saw their countries’ armies overwhelmed by Blitzkrieg conducted with a speed and agility that astonished.

General Dwight D. Eisenhower addresses American paratroopers prior to D-Day. U.S. Army photograph.

First Poland, with Germany’s partner of convenience, the Russians, which then rampaged through Eastern Europe, gobbling up prizes. Then, after a pause for the so-called “Phony War,” the Germans moved on to Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg. May 13, 1940, they pivoted, sent their troops over the River Meuse, blasted and danced past the supposedly impenetrable Maginot Line, and induced the mass evacuation at Dunkirk. The French Army, it could be said the French country, was in full physical and moral retreat. By June 22, it was over. The French were forced into a humiliating armistice in the very railcar in which Germany had accepted defeat in World War I. Hitler literally danced a jig.

Germany occupied roughly three-fifths of European French territory, including the entire coastline across from the English Channel and the Atlantic. Britain had survived the desperate Battle of Britain but stood alone.  The Italians joined the Axis to grab some of the spoils for themselves, and, in early 1941, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania followed. In April of that year, the Germans crushed Greece and Yugoslavia. 

“Fortress Europe,” essentially a massive buffer zone for the Germans, ending in a fortified Atlantic coastline, became a reality. The Nazis built the Atlantic Wall, a 2,400-mile line of obstacles, including 6.5 million mines, thousands of concrete bunkers and pillboxes bristling with artillery, and countless tank traps. Where there wasn’t a wall, there were cliffs looking over the beaches where Allied forces were expected to land, and, from those cliffs, German soldiers were prepared to rain down fire.   Read more »

Monday, December 19, 2011

Occupy and History: Are We Near the End and What Will it Mean?

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Bonus Army encampmentWe may now be gazing upon the fading days of the Occupy movement as an actual episode in which numerous, large scale occupations are taking place and having immediate impact. Then again, maybe not. But if so, it is perhaps time to begin reflecting upon the movement and how we might measure it.

Elsewhere I have written about Occupy within the contest of two earlier American social protest movements against poverty: Coxey’s Army of unemployed men looking for work in 1894, and the Bonus Marchers of impoverished World War I veterans in 1932.

During the depression of 1893-98, the second worst in U.S. history, many Americans began to agitate for a federally-funded public works project to build and improve roads across the country. In addition to building up the infrastructure, such projects could also put men to work during an era when unemployment was in the teens and there was no goverment welfare safety net to speak of. Coxey's Army, led by an Ohio millionaire named Jacob Coxey, was the largest of many protest movements advocating this approach. Thousands of men marched to the nation's capital in support of the plan.

Later on, the Bonus Marchers were a collection of homeless and unemployed World War I veterans who sought government action during the darkest depths of the Great Depression. During the roaring `20s the government had promised to award them a one time bonus of $1,000 in gratitude for their wartime service, payable in 1945. However, unemployed vets, many of them homeless, sought early payment of the bonus in 1932. They too crossed the country in caravans, arriving in the nation's capital.

Despite their numbers, organization, and commitment, neither group was able to achieve its immediate goal. Congress did not create a public works job program as Coxey requested, nor did it award early payment of the cash bonus promised to war veterans as the Bonus Marchers requested. In both cases, the press and political opponents smeared peaceful and patriotic protestors as criminals and revolutionaries. And after arriving in Washington, D.C., both groups suffered state violence from police and even the military. Indeed, in 1932 one of America's lowest moments came when future WWII heroes Douglas MacArthur, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Patton all played a direct role in leading military forces against their former fellow servicemen, who had assembled peaceably

As we now witness what may very well be the decline of the Occupy movement, in the face of similar smears and violence, it is worth considering the following questions:

How do Historians look back upon Coxey’s Army and the Bonus Marchers; how do they measure their political significance; and what might that portend for the way history comes to view the Occupy movement should it soon fade from the scene as did its predecessors?

Read more »