War and another benefit of slack
James J. Lippard (Lippard@BCO-MULTICS.ARPA)
Sun, 10 Jul 88 12:54 MST
War naturally sucks in those who can be most profitably spared, and lets
go most of those whose talents are really useful. One hears, now and
then, of promising young men cut down too soon, but the science of
statistics scarcely justifies the accompanying mourning. Let us turn,
for example, to the Civil War. In the Union Army, during the four years
of the war, there were 2,666,999 men who reached the field, and of this
number 110,070 were killed in battle or died of wounds, 199,720 died of
disease, and 40,154 perished otherwise--murdered, killed by accident, or
done to death in prisons. Of those who were murdered or died of
accident or disease, probably 100,000 would have died anyhow. Deducting
that number, the total net loss comes to about 250,000. How many men
were wounded is not certain, but probably the number ran to at least
1,000,000.
We don't know, of course, what the dead men would have done if they
had lived, but we may reach some approximation to it by examining the
wounded who survived. How many of them, after the war, contributed
anything that was genuinely interesting to civilization? Searching the
record for weary days and nights I can find but three names: those of
Major Ambrose Bierse, Captain Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., and Private
George Westinghouse. The typical eminentissimo who survived the Civil
War was not of this company; he was the shallow political plug,
McKinley. All the really important men of the post-Civil War era, all
the men who developed and fecundated such culture as we now have, from
John D. Rockefeller to Walt Whitman, from Grover Cleveland to William
James, from Mark Twain to Cyrus Field, from Andy Carnegie to Mark Hanna,
from William Dean Howells to Bronson Howard, from John Fiske to James
Russell Lowell, and from Willard Gibbs to Brigham Young--all these men
were slackers, and leaped not to the cannon's roar. The three
exceptions that research reveals I have listed. Apply the ratio to
those who perished, and it appears that the Civil War cost American
Kultur exactly three-fourths of a really valuable man. Call Fitz-James
O'Brien, who died of his wounds, the other fourth--and the net loss
comes to one man.
-- H.L. Mencken, "War". In _A Mencken Chrestomathy_ (Vintage, 1982),
pp. 216-217. Originally published in the American Mercury,
September 1929, pp. 23-24.
