Deeply Rooted in the American Dream

Review by Bill Doughty

Peace, justice and equality can be born from tension and conflict.  Love, compassion and understanding can prevail in the face of hatred and violence.  

Taylor Branch’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Parting the Waters - America in the King Years 1954-63 - shows how Constitutional ideals were embodied and emboldened by the civil rights movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Today marks the 48th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The march culminated with King’s I Have a Dream speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.  

Branch leads us to that watershed moment in history, one that informed a nation and showcased the movement’s strength and determination, much like the expression on the face of the new Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial.  Organizers and sponsors note that the King Memorial is aligned visually with the Jefferson and Lincoln memorials on the National Mall and in sight of the Washington Monument.

The Memorial, an expression of determination.

In his life, King aligned with the ideals of Freedom.  Like Thomas Jefferson (and, contemporaneously, like John F. Kennedy, Jr.) he didn’t always live up to the professed moral ideals in his personal life, as Branch shows.  

Like Abraham Lincoln, King championed the Constitution and used reason, diplomacy, courage and compassion to achieve his goals, always trying to understand and make peace with others, especially his rivals.

In his preface, Branch writes: “My purpose is to write a history of the civil rights movement out of the conviction from which it was made, namely that truth requires a maximum effort to see through the eyes of strangers, foreigners and enemies.”

Parting the Waters actually begins at the end of the 19th Century and gives us a fascinating look at the role of black churches and colleges and the effects of a then-new enlightened way of thinking -- a non-fundamentalist, unorthodox liberal theology.

At Crozier Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania King discovered:

There are moral laws of the universe that man can no more violate with impunity than he can violate its physical laws. -- MLK

Branch writes, “At Crozier King expressed the belief that love and reason could bring out in all people a basic goodness that was deeper than racial hatreds or personal animosities.”

Branch shows us the books and authors that inspired Dr. King.  He was influenced by thinkers like Frederick Douglass, Mahatma Gandhi, Reinhold Niebuhr, Baruch Spinoza and W. E. B. DuBois.  Books by DuBois were passed around by Sailors during WWII, according to Branch.

W. E. B. DuBois

Books helped shape his world view as a self-aware young man struggling under a strong patriarch, armed with a good classical education and dealing with discrimination and segregation in a mid-20th Century south.

Out of conflict between competing ideas came compromise and creativity and a universal world view.

Branch delves into many of the personalities of the civil rights movement.  We see Harry Belafonte’s sustained involvement, Rosa Parks’s principled inspiration and John Lewis’s key influence.

Lewis made it clear that the movement would continue until freedom for all citizens was achieved, “until the revolution of 1776 is complete.”

We also see the intransigence and meanness of characters like Bull Connor, Gov. Barnett and Gov. George Wallace.  He writes about the murders of Emmett Till and Medgar Evers and unlikely martyrdom of independent marcher William Moore, murdered in Alabama.

Nonviolent protests met with violence in Birmingham, 1963.

Branch writes about the painful anger, hatred and violence in Birmingham, Montgomery, Albany and elsewhere that seethed in 1963.  In the rising heat of that summer King stood for cool, nonviolent determination despite political in-fighting by other church leaders and a separatist movement by the Black Muslims and others.

Branch shows that the march on Washington was originally planned 70 years ago this year.  In 1941 A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, threatened publicly to lead a massive march to D.C. unless President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an order banning racial discrimination in defense industries.  

Randolph was a key planner and leader for the 1963 march, like King, committed to nonviolence.

With his unscripted and inspired "I Have a Dream...rooted in the American dream" remarks, King rose to become “a national spokesman for a significant minority of whites as well as a vast majority of Negroes,” writes Branch.  King speaks to the inalienable human rights outlined in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution of the United States.

In Parting the Waters, the author continually shows the tension and conflict that forged the nonviolent fight for civil rights. 

King persevered in the face of home and church bombings and the jailing or imprisonment of students and civil rights leaders, including himself.  He was stabbed in the chest by a would-be assassin.  

King fought on, despite wiretapping investigations and communist-sympathizer allegations by J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI.  Because of scandals, fear and Machiavellian palace intrigue, Hoover was only temporarily successful in slowing the civil rights movement through his innuendoes and allegations.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., 1963: "I have a dream."

According to Branch, “Most unforgivable was that a nation founded on Madisonian principles allowed secret police powers to accrue over forty years, until real and imagined heresies alike could be punished by methods less open to correction than the Salem witch trials.”

Conflict and tension between Dr. King and President Kennedy, called a “mysterious duel” by Branch, is a centerpiece of the latter part of Parting the Waters.

“Where the interpretations of freedom overlapped, they inspired the clear hope of the decade,” Branch writes. “Where incompatible, they produced conflict as gaping as the Vietnam War.”

Parting the Waters concludes shortly after Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and foretells the tragedy that would befall King in 1968.  In the intervening years he would become a “Pillar of Fire,” the last words of Branch’s epic study, and the title of the second book in his trilogy, Pillar of Fire, America in the King Years 1963-65. The trilogy concludes with At Canaan’s Edge, America in the King Years 1965-68.

This book was recommended by the Navy Professional Reading Program in 2011.

To the Shores of Tripoli

Review by Bill Doughty

The War of 1812, in which the young U.S. Navy defeated the British Fleet, was preceded by a war against terrorists -- Barbary pirates and their sponsor states along the northern coast of Africa in and around what is now Libya.

To the Shores of Tripoli -- The Birth of the U.S. Navy and Marines by A.B.C. Whipple, is the account of the original United States war against Arab tyrants and introduces us to colorful characters such as President Thomas Jefferson, Commodore Edward Preble, Consul William Eaton, Marine Lieutenant Presley Neville O’Bannon and Navy Captain Stephen Decatur.

These main characters are revealed with all of their strengths and weaknesses in the context of political intrigue and, quite literally, personal battles.  The book describes two duels to the death.

Duels occurred frequently in the new U.S. Navy, whose officers were overzealous about rank and “honor.”  Two thirds as many naval officers were killed in duels as by enemy action in all U.S. naval engagements from 1798 until the Civil War.

The greater "duel," of course, was between freedom of the seas and piracy.  Credit is given to Thomas Jefferson for his commitment to end the tradition of paying tribute and ransom to pirates who preyed on American shipping, capturing and imprisoning sailors in the late 1700s and early 1800s.

Jefferson saw the dangers of trading arms for hostages.  He lobbied for more and better Navy ships.

Yet, Jefferson was criticized for not waging all out naval war on the pirates and their sponsors and for settling for peace treaties.

According to Whipple:

Such criticism overlooks both Jefferson’s determination to fight rather than pay off the Barbary powers, and the fact that it was Congress that denied his requests to declare war against them.

Naval hero Stephen Decatur fights pirates in Tripoli.

Still, President Jefferson was in office when the first major interaction of the Barbary War occurred 210 years ago this month -- Aug. 1, 1801 -- when Lt. Andrew Sterett led the sloop-of-war Enterprise against the 14-gun warship Tripoli, commanded by Adm. Rais Mahomet Rous, known for raiding American and other commercial shipping.

After Rous pretended surrender and then opened fire on the Enterprise twice, Sterett and his Marines, led by Lt. Enoch Lane, used precision firepower and seafaring prowess to utterly defeat the enemy -- 30 killed, 30 injured out of a crew of 80, with not even one injury to Sterett’s men.

In several examples, the author shows the power of discipline, training and readiness over laziness and political expediency.

The heart of Whipple’s book deals with several key events: the 500-mile march across the desert to Tripoli, a courageous attack on the fort at Derna, sea battles in the Mediterranean and gunboat assaults against pirates and tyrants.

Commodore Preble, mentor to a generation of heroes.

The author shows how the Navy and Marine Corps team developed and became stronger.

He also shows the importance of books in developing leaders.  Eaton was inspired after reading Plutarch’s Lives as a young man.  Preble, a mentor to a generation of U.S. naval heroes, whose flagship was USS Constitution, had more than 100 books in his cabin.

Today, USS Preble (DDG 88) is part of the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) Carrier Strike Group.  Preble was one of the first U.S. Navy assets on the scene in Japan last March to provide rescue and relief support as part of Operation Tomodachi in the wake of the tragic earthquake and tsunami there.

After reading and enjoying Whipple’s To the Shores of Tripoli (written twenty years ago in 1991) I checked out Jefferson’s War by Joseph Wheelan (published in 2003), a book which examines the same period and, like Whipple’s work, is carefully researched and documented.

To comprehend the present and future, one should read to understand the past...