Historically Speaking: When Generals Run the State

Military leaders have been rulers since ancient times, but the U.S. has managed to keep them from becoming kings or dictators.

The Wall Street Journal

April 29, 2022

History has been kind to General Ulysses S. Grant, less so to President Grant. The hero of Appomattox, born 200 years ago this month, oversaw an administration beset by scandal. In his farewell address to Congress in 1876, Grant insisted lamely that his “failures have been errors of judgment, not of intent.”

Yet Grant’s presidency could as well be remembered for confirming the strength of American democracy at a perilous time. Emerging from the trauma of the Civil War, Americans sent a former general to the White House without fear of precipitating a military dictatorship. As with the separation of church and state, civilian control of the military is one of democracy’s hard-won successes.

In ancient times, the earliest kings were generals by definition. The Sumerian word for leader was “Lugal,” meaning “Big Man.” Initially, a Lugal was a temporary leader of a city-state during wartime. But by the 24th century B.C., Lugal had become synonymous with governor. The title wasn’t enough for Sargon the Great, c. 2334—2279 B.C., who called himself “Sharrukin,” or “True King,” in celebration of his subjugation of all Sumer’s city-states. Sargon’s empire lasted for three more generations.

In subsequent ancient societies, military and political power intertwined. The Athenians elected their generals, who could also be political leaders, as was the case for Pericles. Sparta was the opposite: The top Spartan generals inherited their positions. The Greek philosopher Aristotle described the Spartan monarchy—shared by two kings from two royal families—as a “kind of unlimited and perpetual generalship,” subject to some civic oversight by a 30-member council of elders.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

By contrast, ancient Rome was first a traditional monarchy whose kings were expected to fight with their armies, then a republic that prohibited actively serving generals from bringing their armies back from newly conquered territories into Italy, and finally a militarized autocracy led by a succession of generals-cum-emperors.

In later periods, boundaries between civil and military leadership blurred in much of the world. At the most extreme end, Japan’s warlords seized power in 1192, establishing the Shogunate, essentially a military dictatorship, and reducing the emperor to a mere figurehead until the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Napoleon trod a well-worn route in his trajectory from general to first consul, to first consul for life and finally emperor.

After defeating the British, General George Washington might have gone on to govern the new American republic in the manner of Rome’s Julius Caesar or England’s Oliver Cromwell. Instead, Washington chose to govern as a civilian and step down at the end of two terms, ensuring the transition to a new administration without military intervention. Astonished that a man would cling to his ideals rather than to power, King George III declared if Washington stayed true to his word, “he will be the greatest man in the world.”

The trust Americans have in their army is reflected in the tally of 12 former generals who have been U.S. presidents, from George Washington to Dwight D Eisenhower. President Grant may not have fulfilled the hopes of the people, but he kept the promise of the republic.

Historically Speaking: Water Has Long Eluded Human Mastery

From ancient Mesopotamia to the California desert, people have struggled to bend earth’s most plentiful resource to their will

The Wall Street Journal

January 21, 2022

In “Chinatown,” Roman Polanski’s classic 1974 film noir, loosely based on the events surrounding the diversion of water from the Owens Valley to Los Angeles in 1913, an ex-politician warns: “Beneath this building, beneath every street, there’s a desert. Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we’d never existed!”

The words resonate as California, indeed the entire American West, now enters the third decade of what scientists are terming a “mega-drought.” Water levels at Lake Mead in Nevada, the nation’s largest reservoir, and Lake Powell in Arizona, the second-largest, have dropped to historic lows. Earlier this month, the first ever federal water restrictions on the Colorado River system came into effect.

Since the earliest civilizations emerged in the Fertile Crescent in the Middle East, humankind has tried to master water resources, only to be brought low by its own hubris and nature’s resistance to control.

The Sumerians of Mesopotamia, builders of the first cities, created canals and irrigation systems to ensure that their crops could withstand the region’s frequent droughts. Competition between cities resulted in wars and conflicts—leading, around 2550 B.C., to history’s first recorded treaty: an agreement between the cities of Lagash and Umma to respect each other’s access to the water supply. Unfortunately, the Sumerians didn’t know that irrigation must be carefully managed to avoid pollution and excessive salinization of the land. They literally sowed their earth with salt, ruining the soil and ultimately contributing to their civilization’s demise.

Water became a potent weapon in the ancient world. Invaders and defenders regularly poisoned water or blocked it from reaching their foes. When Julius Caesar was under siege in Alexandria in 47 B.C., Ptolemy XIII contaminated the local water supply in an effort to force the Romans to withdraw. But the Romans managed to dig two deep wells for fresh water within the territory they held.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

Desiccated ruins of once-great cities can be found on almost every continent. The last emperors of the Classic Maya civilization on the Yucatán Peninsula, 250-950 A.D., couldn’t overcome a crippling drought that started around 750 and continued intermittently until 1025. As the water dried up, Mayan society entered a death spiral of wars, famine and internal conflicts. Their cities in the southern lowlands were eventually reclaimed by the jungle.

In Southeast Asia during the 14th and 15th centuries, one of the most sophisticated hydraulic systems of its time couldn’t save Angkor Wat, capital of the Khmer Empire, from the double onslaught of droughts and floods. The city is now a haunting ruin in the Cambodian jungle.

Modern technology, from desalination plants to hydroelectric dams, have enabled humans to stay one step ahead of nature’s vagaries, until now. According U.N. and World Bank experts in 2018, some 40% of the world’s population struggles with water scarcity. Water conflicts are proliferating, including in the U.S. In California, Chinatown-type skullduggery may be a thing of the past, but tensions remain. Extreme drought in the Klamath Basin along the California-Oregon border has pitted communities against one another for decades, with no solution in sight.

In 1962, President John F Kennedy declared: “Anyone who can solve the problems of water will be worthy of two Nobel Prizes—one for peace and one for science.” We are still waiting for that person.

Historically Speaking: The Power of Telling Stories in Pictures

‘Peanuts’ turns 70 this month, but the origins of narrative art go back to ancient Sumeria more than 4,000 years ago.

The Wall Street Journal

October 8, 2020

Good grief! It’s Snoopy’s 70th birthday. Charles M. Schulz’s ‘Peanuts’ comic strip made its debut on Oct. 2, 1950, and though it ended with Schulz’s death in 2000, Snoopy, Charlie Brown, Lucy and their friends are still beloved today. Their longevity is a testament to the power of the comic strip—a form of storytelling that has been around for thousands of years.

The Sumerians were the first to integrate words and pictures to tell an individual’s story. The earliest example is the Stele of the Vultures, created around 2450 B.C., which depicts King Eannatum of Lagash’s crushing victory over the kingdom of Umma. The form, known as narrative sequential art, spread across the ancient world, reaching its apogee under the Roman emperor Trajan. A 126-foot high column in Rome, completed in 113 A.D., recounts his successful campaign against the Dacians in 155 intricately carved scenes.

A detail from the Bayeux Tapestry.
PHOTO: PRINT COLLECTOR/GETTY IMAGES

Rather more humbly, though no less eloquently, a 1st-century tomb depicts the founding of the Roman city Capitolias, in what is now Jordan, through a series of wall paintings. One scene shows a stonemason at work. In the equivalent of a speech bubble, he says “I am cutting stone.” Another figure says, “Alas for me! I am dead!”

Narrative sequential art developed independently in Asia as well as pre-Columbian America. Buildings in the Mayan city of Yaxchilan, now in Mexico, had carved stone lintels depicting scenes that associated the monarchy with divine rule. Lintel 24, made around 725 and now in the British Museum, shows King Shield Jaguar II and his wife Lady K’abal Xook undergoing painful blood rituals to prove their fitness to rule. Lady Xook pulls a thorn-encrusted rope through her tongue.

Royal and religious purposes were also served by the Bayeux Tapestry, made in the 11th century, which depicts the events leading up to the Norman conquest of England in 1066. Its original audience would have understood its more than 70 scenes as a drawn-out morality tale about the consequences of sin: England was invaded because King Harold broke his oath of loyalty to the Normans.

In the age of print, graphic narratives could reach much wider audiences. The English artist William Hogarth managed to make sin look sexy in “The Rake’s Progress,” a series of eight paintings that were turned into popular engravings in 1735.

But the comic strip as we know it today was invented in the 1830s, almost by chance, by the Swiss artist and caricaturist Rodolphe Topffer. The comical cartoon sequences he drew for his friends attracted the admiration of Goethe, becoming so popular that publication was inevitable. His “Histoire de M. Vieux Bois” inspired hundreds of American imitators when it was published in the U.S. in 1842 as “The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck.”

The real golden age of American comic strips began in 1929, with Hal Foster’s adaptation of Tarzan into a continuous-action adventure strip. Marvel and DC Comics later turned Foster’s genius into a lucrative formula. Nearly a century later, the genre is still reaching new heights: In 2016, the late Congressman John Lewis’s memoir “March: Book Three” became the first graphic novel to win a National Book award.