The traitor who triggered a passion

I was sitting at my desk the other Sunday afternoon with my fingers on the keyboard, and I looked out at the bright green leaves in Central Park, felt the vodka from my second bloody Caesar running through my veins, and found life good. After a long winter, summer's coming.

The foliage outside reminds me of a day trip with my Aunt Judy some 40 years ago when she gave my parents a brief rest from the burden of raising me. This was when I was seven or eight?the vodka's stimulating my memory but not its accuracy?just before my father's career took him away from the Capital District, the cities of Albany, Schenectady and Troy, out to the real appleknocker country in the upper Mohawk Valley.

The Capital District is somewhat history-heavy with colonial settlements, Indian massacres, Revolutionary battlefields, Greek Revival farmhouses and museums of all kinds. For some reason, Judy and I ended up that day at the estate of Martin Van Buren in Kinderhook, NY. In his successful 1836 campaign for the presidency, Van Buren made his hometown immortal, in a way: The expression "O.K." refers to "Old Kinderhook." Not even "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too," the slogan of General William Henry Harrison, the victor of the Battle of Tippecanoe, who defeated Van Buren in 1840, has entered the language in quite the same way. All this is mere historical detritus enduring long after Van Buren, the most skillful pol of his day?a man they called the Little Magician?had lost his last election. If nothing else, it illustrates how strongly our forebears took their politics: "All the Way with LBJ" or "Nixon's the One" haven't quite made the same impression. I remember nothing of our visit except that it was late in the spring, with the trees a brilliant emerald and their damp trunks a sooty black. We walked up a driveway, one of those underused dirt roads of two cindery ruts divided by lush grass, toward a carriage house adjacent the main residence. It was whitewashed, the big double doors were open, and the roses wound up the trellises on each side of the doorway. I hoped they had been there in Little Van's time.

That particular response was sensual and esthetic and is typical of my initial response to history. It's also emotional. I admit a Pavlovian response to some things: Polished marble, lofty ceilings and reverent hush move me, whether I'm in the lobby of the Woolworth Building or the rotunda of Grant's Tomb. Bombast alone doesn't do it for me: St. Patrick's Cathedral, even for solemn ceremonial events, is always just a little too loud.

I remember quite clearly the moment when I fell hopelessly, passionately in love with history. A couple of years before I saw Van Buren's roses, probably in August of 1960, my parents hauled my brother Michael and me up to the battlefield at Saratoga, NY. There, they tell us, the Revolution was won. Sir John Burgoyne's surrender to Horatio Gates persuaded the French that we might just be able to pull it off with a little support: money, arms and men. Once we became part of the ongoing rivalry between the two great European powers, the rest was endgame.

I saw a weathered log blockhouse (actually a modern construction, used as the National Parks Service's office. I guess in Eisenhower days everyone expected historic sites to have blockhouses). Brass smoothbore field guns were scattered across the rolling meadows, marking the lines of battle. Even at that age, I read fairly well and, having read all the maps, brochures and signs, I was a little bored. I walked just ahead of my parents as obnoxious children do, down a wooded path into a glade. Nearly 200 years before, this had been Breymann's Redoubt: an entrenchment built and held by a Hessian mercenary regiment in British service, named for the regiment's commander, and it had been taken through brazen audacity by an insubordinate American officer who, though relieved of command, had ridden back into battle and seized the victory, sword in hand.

Now it was quiet amid the August heat. In two centuries, the grass had done its work and covered all. One might never have known a battle had been fought here save that the nation had chosen to remember it. At the path's end stood a small monument, perhaps about five feet tall. It had been erected by one John Van Wert. Its sculpted obverse showed a cannon barrel, standing upright. On this was a cavalryman's boot with a two-starred epaulette across its mouth. On the reverse was carved: "In Memory of the most brilliant soldier of the Continental Army who was desperately wounded on this spot, the sally port of BURGOYNES GREAT WESTERN REDOUBT 7th October 1777 winning for his countrymen the Decisive Battle of the American Revolution and for himself the rank of major general."

The unnamed hero, my mother told me, was Benedict Arnold.

What followed, as I sat on a bench looking at the monument, was a surge of confusing emotion. It may seem odd for a five-year-old, but then I was an odd five-year-old, more interested in the past than the unpleasant present. Over the next few minutes, my feelings resolved themselves into commonplaces. After all, even the most sophisticated five-year-old is still only five years old. The monument, I concluded, was somehow wonderful, because I knew that men and women were both good and bad, even as I was, sometimes, and that the better human qualities, like valor, were worth honoring for themselves, even when the people who had them were not. Hence, the man who had raised this stone had understood that Arnold's courage had to be, must be remembered as something far nobler than Arnold himself, who was unworthy of being named on his own monument.

Later that day, we drove a few miles to Schuylerville to see the Saratoga Monument. The battle may be named Saratoga, but Burgoyne surrendered in Schuylerville. The monument (which, to add to the confusion, is located just outside Schuylerville proper, in the appropriately named village of Victory, NY), stands more than 150 feet high. It was begun as a citizens' initiative on the centennial of Burgoyne's surrender, October 17, 1877, but patriotism costs money, and after the citizens stopped their voluntary contributions, it stood derelict until it was "given" to New York State in 1890. Twenty-two years after that, the monument was finally dedicated. Then the state neglected it, too; finally, the National Park Service received it in 1980, only to close it for "renovation" for most of the next 15 years.

Such renovations remind me of the so-called Arch of Constantine, in Rome. In 1938, Prime Minister Mussolini ordered its renovation for the World's Fair of 1942. Scaffolding and tarpaulins went up with aphoristic efficiency. Then the work stopped. Of course, there was no World's Fair in 1942. Mussolini fell, the monarchy fell, some fifty different republican governments fell. Pope Pius XI was succeeded by Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul I and John Paul II. The Arch remained under renovation for more than half a century, underneath rusty scaffolds and flapping tarps. Only when the Roman Catholic Church desired the Eternal City's massive cleanup for the celebration of the second millennium of the birth of Jesus of Nazareth was the Arch finally restored.

But back to Victory, NY. In the monument's base were four niches; three of which contained statues of American officers who had fought at Saratoga: General Philip Schuyler, General Horatio Gates and Colonel Daniel Morgan. The fourth niche was empty ?no statue had ever been placed there. My mother did not need to tell me whose statue it would have been. This, too, was wonderfully romantic. After all, the monument had been raised a century after Arnold's treason, yet a place of honor had been made for him and left vacant. The final touch was a brief visit to the United States Military Academy at West Point, NY. It stands at the site of the fortress Arnold sought to betray to the British, amidst the grandeur of aged cliffs towering above the Hudson like a Wagnerian vision of the Rhine. With its statues, monuments and memorials, the lines of artillery taken as trophy in war and its windswept plain, it is no place for a pacifist. The Old Cadet Chapel, a charmingly eclectic bit of Georgian/Federalist brick and marble, is lined with 36 black marble shields inscribed with the names, ranks and dates of birth and death for each general officer of the Revolutionary army. As one might expect by now, one shield is different. Where the name and date of death appear on each of the others, here the sculptor carved them away. All that appears are the words, "Major General. Born 1740."

Maya Ying Lin's nobly beautiful memorial for the Vietnam War succeeds at least in part by doing one of the historian's first duties: the recitation of names. Every monument to those lost in war begs us to remember. Yet the objects I've described above?a stone marker, an heroic obelisk, a marble shield on a wall?are by their reticence strangely moving acts of memory. Their creators remembered so passionately that naming the name was unnecessary. I fear we've lost this. Today, we would condemn Arnold with every evocation of his image.

Monuments also remind us of basic things. Everything happens in context, usually defined for us by the dominant culture. The past shapes both present and future. Indeed, as Faulkner observed, the past is never past at all. Ignorance of history creates a nation of dupes, ever ready to be swindled by politicians through some cheap appeal to emotion. Yet too much awareness of the past, with nothing more to leaven it, leads to a neverending settling of accounts, a ceaseless tribal warfare over everything from affirmative action to ethnic cleansing to reparations for slavery.

I thought of the ongoing controversy over the display of the Confederate battle flag in Southern state capitols (successfully distracting public attention from real issues, far more effectively than fighting to compel the admission of wealthy women to elite private country clubs). Here and there, some folks avoid such problems. The State of Alabama, for example, avoids any disagreement over teaching about the War Between the States by avoiding the subject: Its high school American history curriculum begins in 1877, after the end of Reconstruction.

Maybe it's just easier to avoid such things. Yet how impoverished my life would have been if John Van Wert had done so.