Bethany
College Commencement
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“Learning, Belief, and the World at War” Commencement Speech - Bethany College Richard Ekman
Good morning. I do not want to deviate from this pattern: You, members of the Class of 2003, deserve our congratulations on the completion of a rigorous course of study. Your parents have been your most loyal supporters and have reinforced your high expectations with their own. Your teachers have invested themselves in your ability to carry into the next generation all they hold dearest about the subjects they teach and their confidence that this knowledge will enable you to exercise good judgment, and make you happier, more successful, and a better citizen of your community and the world. But beyond all this, today I want to focus on one issue—namely, the fact that your generation, the generation finishing college now, has experienced within the four years of being students, first, a violent, wholly unanticipated attack by terrorists on the mainland of the United States, in New York City on September 11, 2001 and, in the period since then, U.S. military intervention by the United States in Afghanistan and in Iraq, with the goal of defeating regimes that supported our attackers. Not since the Second World War has a generation of Americans witnessed both an attack on American territory by an enemy force and sustained U.S. military action elsewhere—in the case of the Second World War, four long years of fighting in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and North Africa. All of us here today hope and pray that American military action in Afghanistan and Iraq does not lead to four or more additional years of conflict. As an historian, I am intrigued by the parallels of our experience today,
as each of us wrestles with the decision to support or oppose these recent
wars, with the experiences of earlier generations. I promise not to give
you a full-fledged history lesson—but I do think you’ll find
surprising how similar the dilemmas were of our earlier leaders, including
those here on your campus. You may know that there was a good deal of reluctance on the part of Americans to enter World War II, right through the 1930s until that day in 1941 when the Japanese bombed the U.S. fleet in Pearl Harbor, destroying half of it. Particularly in the Midwest, where many Americans of German ancestry resided, hesitation about going to war against Germany was strong as was hope for a peaceful resolution of Germany’s conflict with its European neighbors. It may seem unusual that Congressman Shannon chose to invoke Alexander Campbell. Campbell was deeply opposed to American involvement in the Mexican War, a war that took place fully 90 years before Shannon cited Campbell’s address. Even so, my guess is that, even after 90 years, Shannon viewed Alexander Campbell as about as good a mainstream American authority for anti-war sentiment as he could cite. We should ask what made Campbell’s words still so resilient over 90 years. In the address, Campbell began by posing the question: Has one Christian
nation a right to wage war against another Christian nation? And then,
for 16, single-spaced pages or—at normal, oral delivery speed—for
the length of two hours, Campbell went on to argue that “the spirit
of Christianity…is essentially pacific”. Analyzing 286 wars
from the time of Constantine the Great until the Mexican War of the 1840s,
Campbell argued that not a single one of these was for defense alone.
Most were for extension of territory, civil wars, contested titles or
crowns, religious wars, retaliation, or disputes over boundaries. By the
way, Campbell argued that not only should Christian nations not fight
against one another, but they ought not to fight against non-Christians
either. Nor were the Disciples alone in their anti-war sentiment. In New England, at about the same time, James Russell Lowell, who was later to serve as editor of The Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review during the period of the Civil War, and then as American minister to Spain and ambassador to England, in 1845 as a young man, was writing a poem that quickly became popular and we now know as the hymn, “Once to Every Man and Nation”. You know the lines:
Lowell wrote these words to protest the U.S. war with Mexico. The “evil side” was the war with Mexico, a main purpose of which was to expand the territory of the slaveholding South; “truth” was to be found in opposing that war. It is the closing stanza of the poem, less well known today than the first, that gained significance as the Civil War approached:
It is almost impossible for us to comprehend now, 158 years later, that throughout the 1850s, most Americans, Northerners and Southerners alike, hoped for a peaceful solution to the dispute over slavery, a solution that would allow the South to retain slavery while the North prohibited it, and that would avoid military conflict. Subsequent events, as we know now, proved neither peaceful nor tolerant of slavery. Where did Bethany College and Alexander Campbell stand during the period following the Mexican War and into the Civil War period? As many people in the Bethany family may already know, in December 1857 a fire destroyed College Hall and President Campbell spent much of his time over the next several years, touring the country, attempting to raise money for rebuilding. In Washington, D.C., he spoke at the Baptist church and President James Buchanan was in attendance. These itinerations continued into 1861. After the outbreak of war at Fort Sumter, Campbell found it difficult to interest audiences in contributing to the college campaign but continued to look to the long-term education of the future adult citizens of our country as the most important use of his energies. There is an illuminating parallel with another institution founded by members of the Christian Church, Disciples of Christ—Hiram College in Ohio. Its president from 1857 to 1860 was James A. Garfield, who later became President of the United States. Garfield. Garfield did not support the Mexican War, and he served as a Union Army officer during the Civil War. Garfield never lost his warm affection for the two colleges with which he was affiliated, Williams College in Massachusetts, where he was a student, and Hiram College, where he served as a member of the faculty and as president. Garfield did not become President of the United States on the basis of his reputation as a war hero—as Zachary Taylor did after the Mexican War, as Ulysses S. Grant did after the Civil War, and as Dwight Eisenhower did after World War II—but his post-war career in national politics was certainly advanced by his military reputation. Here then, is one important divide between leaders of two colleges with the same religious heritage and who once both opposed the Mexican War. Campbell stuck to his pacifist views, was distraught when the Civil War began, and remained focused on the college he loved. Garfield—the man from the other Disciples college, the man, it was said, who could simultaneously write Latin with his left hand and Greek with his right hand, who went on to become a prominent reform politician—became an active Union Army officer. Meanwhile, James Russell Lowell, the author of the anti-war poem I cited, which, set to music was sung by thousands of people every Sunday, also spoke out strongly in favor of the Union cause in the Civil War. How can we explain the divergent views at the time of the Civil War of Garfield and Campbell, both educated and raised in the Disciples tradition, both professors and college presidents, both once opponents of the Mexican War? And how do we explain the divergent views of two intellectuals, Campbell and Lowell, both opponents of the Mexican War, when issues of slavery, war, and the preservation of the Union loomed large? The answer to both these questions is that we cannot fully explain them. Each person in each generation must make his or her own choices. In our own era, the early days of the 21st century, I’m certain many, if not all of you, have engaged in earnest discussions about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Author Neil Howe, who has written so much in the past few years about the differences among generations, has commented that the graduates of the Class of 2003, seated here today, are members of a generation that he calls the “Millenials,” and he notes that the “Millenials” are very different from their older brothers and sisters who are members of “Generation X”. Howe makes a number of predictions about the way in which the “Millenials” will lead their lives. He points out, for example, that you have much in common with the generation of World War II veterans—your grandparents—who did so much upon returning home in 1945 to rebuild America in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. These are the members of the generation who were about college-age at the time that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and either attended college in an accelerated wartime program before enlisting, or, more often, started college after returning home from the war, and completed their college degrees as quickly as possible. American higher education saw enormous expansion in those years—all made possible by the generous terms of the GI Bill, which gave opportunities for a college education to many, and a sense that they were fulfilling the patriotic purpose of restoring the normal American way of life by making the personal decision to go to college. Every graduating senior who is fortunate enough still to have living grandparents should talk with them about their views in 1941, and in 1945. You will learn much from these conversations. So here you are today, graduates of the Class of 2003. You have benefited from a solid liberal arts education at an institution with a long and distinguished tradition (of which Alexander Campbell is certainly the exemplar). What you have learned here and what you believe as a matter of personal faith will both shape your views of the world beyond Bethany, West Virginia. You will forever-after interpret current events in both the Western, Judeo-Christian world and in the rest of the world, particularly the Islamic world, based on what you have learned during these four years. We live in complicated times for America, and you are extremely well prepared for what lies ahead. But nothing is inevitable. Like Garfield and Lowell, whose attitudes about war changed over time, what you believe now is likely to change, as you encounter situations in the world and in your lives that require you not simply to recall what you learned in college, but to apply it to new circumstances. It is both the adaptability and the durability of what you have learned that are of greatest value in a changing world. At many colleges, you are trained well for your first job. At Bethany, you have been prepared exceptionally well also for your second, third, and fourth jobs. In closing, let me return to James A. Garfield who served (unfortunately) as the nation’s President for only a brief period in 1881. Shortly before he was assassinated, Garfield spoke at the dedication of a newly constructed railroad locomotive factory in Buffalo, New York. Toward the end of his speech, extolling, in a rising crescendo, the virtues of steam power and the extraordinary potential it had for the future industrial development of the United States—much as we talked about computers a few years ago—Garfield peaked with a rhetorical flourish by exhorting his audience to—and I quote his words exactly—“ask not what the locomotive can do for you, but what you can do for the locomotive.” Thus we come full circle, not only in recognition that the uses of our education in the arts and sciences and the traditions of faith can point in more than one direction, notably in our attitudes toward war; even in the echo we hear of rhetoric across 50 years, from James A. Garfield to John F. Kennedy—Kennedy, who asked your parents, my generation, when they were your age to “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” if not to the present day; not only in our recognition that each generation faces unique circumstances in history; but also in our awareness that we learn from the generations that precede our own, and sometimes unwittingly, repeat, for better or worse, the actions and words of our parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. Today, we celebrate the hopeful future that awaits all of us as you graduate from Bethany College, a future that is grounded in the history we already share. Thank you, and congratulations, again, to the Class of 2003.
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