The Culturalist: Great Leaders in History

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Welcome to the Victor Davis-Hansen show, The Culturalist, with the namesake of that show, Victor Davis-Hansen, who is the Martin and Ely Anderson Senior Fellow in Classics and Military History at the Hoover Institution, and the Wayne and Marcia Busk Distinguished Fellow in History at Hillsdale College.

The Culturalist is a podcast dedicated to a lot of things, but today we are gonna look at one of our themes, which is individualism.

And we mean that in the Renaissance sense, in the sense of the value of the individual in this life, in the here and now.

We may at some point get to the Enlightenment sense of the protected rights of individuals and those types of things that we're used to today in the United States.

But today we're looking at two individuals, the Theban general of the fourth century at Pamanondas and our own William Tecumseh Sherman, both men who encountered slave societies and freed slaves in those societies.

But I wanted to say a few things first, if you don't mind, Victor, about individualism in our culture right now or the state of it, because it strikes me that we've lost that in history.

And I just wanted to talk to the audience a little bit that this what struck me actually in an earlier podcast that Victor did where he said Marx was guilty of having fathered one of two evil ideas in the 19th century and that idea was class struggle and in fact as Marxism took hold in the historians craft the academies started to turn to and I think the French academy the Annales school was the first one this idea of the longue durée and that things in in the course of history was vast and dramatic and involved lots of people and it was economic and social history and social trends.

And many of those historians were Marxists and that lasted all the way up through the 1970s and the 1980s.

And I think it's filtered down into our ordinary culture in the sense that we see people like our own President Obama who says to shopkeepers, you didn't build that, right?

So we have this idea that these things that happen on this earth are from these long trends.

And so we've lost the individual.

And so that's why in the cultural list, we're turning back to looking at the importance of these individuals.

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We also heard in the common parlance a woman just the other day giving a speech to poor young high school graduates that that said we're guilty not just of the usual left tropes of sexism and racism but also extreme individualism and extreme capitalism and those things struck me i was wondering victor if you have something to say on that subject yes well remember history is the just the word for that Herodotus used for inquiry.

And you were going to learn about the past.

And it was the view of the founders of history and Thucydides in particular, but also Herodotus that great men made history.

So, when you read Thucydides' history, it's an encomium in the second book, Pericles, for example.

Without Pericles, a lot of the things that Athens did are inexplicable, or with his absence, they become explicable.

And that was true of Xenophon and his Score of Hellenica.

That was the story, really, of Agesilaus.

And it's the story of Herodotus.

He focuses on people like Themistocles or Miltiades or Darius or Xerxes as individuals that make a difference.

And that was pretty much when Plutarch wrote his great lives of illustrious men and comparative lives at the end, Greek and Roman.

It was that idea that individuals that are extraordinary, not in the sense of better, but have more clout, more influence.

And that was pretty much the reigning idea.

I guess the epitome of that was Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish historian that wrote about the heroes of history.

And then Marx came along and people said, no, real point is class struggle and equity and equality and these are mass, mass movements.

And the individual then sort of was shunned aside because he was unimportant.

And it was not just a way of reducing history to themes or movements, but it was also predetermining it.

that these mass waves made it impossible for one individual to, as William Buckley said, stand athwart history and say, stop.

You couldn't do it anymore.

And that really permeated the Annales school in France, but also every type of history that

when I was trained was influenced or corrupted by it, environmental history or agricultural history or military.

It was all about technology.

It was predetermined.

And so you would see people write the most ridiculous things.

They'd say, well, we're in fourth dimension warfare now and it's computers and robots and it just changed the way.

And then you'd say, well, wait a minute.

Why wouldn't they still think about balance of power or deterrence?

It reminded me of my grandfather, Rhys Davis.

I brought this up a lot of times, but when I was irrigating, he flipped on the 15-horse and there was a thousand gallons a minute.

He was laughing and he said, does that look any different to you than the pump out, the hand pump in the yard that pumps two gallons a minute?

And what he was saying is, don't think that farming is any different because of technology.

It can produce more food.

It can do it more quickly, more safely,

but the principles of hard work and discipline and understanding nature remain constant.

And so I think that's an important point.

And I think we're kind of getting sick of predetermined mass movement history.

And especially now that it's environmental, I should say that racism now has replaced climate change history.

So we go back and we look at the Civil War and we don't look at great battles or we don't care what Stonewall Jackson did at Chancellorsville or we don't really worry about could have anybody else other than Sherman had the march to the sea.

We predicate and adjudicate a general's efficacy on whether he said or did or thought things that were considered politically correct on race or not.

Not that race is not an important element of history, but if you take World War II, was World War II about race?

Well, maybe, but it wasn't about race in the way that the intersectional critical race theory people say.

They would say, who cares about Normandy Beach?

It was just a bunch of German or Ukrainian impressed workers killing a bunch, and they were white, killing a bunch of white people.

And if you said, well, okay, race had an element in World War II, it was about Japanese racialists intersectionally butchering 15 million Chinese, fellow Asians, or so-called white Germans butchering 6 million so-called white Jews and 20 million Ukrainians and Russians on the bogus idea they were not Aryan, but then critical race theory couldn't handle that version.

And it wouldn't be accurate anyway.

There were so many more things going on in World War II just about the racial hatred.

And so that's the problem with all this stuff when you destroy the individual's role in history.

Yeah.

So then let's go ahead and turn to Epaminondas.

And you usually look at things as essentially flawed and essentially heroic

life.

And could you give us an account of that?

Yeah, well, I

was

in my 1819, and as I was studying Greek and Latin, I noticed that this individual kept popping up.

And Cicero, for example, said he was the most important man, Princeps Greciae, the foremost man of Greece.

And yet when you look at the history, he doesn't get his due.

And I was always wondering that.

And that finally led me to write some journal articles when I was a classicist about his tactics at the Battle of Leuctra that destroyed the Spartan.

battlefield supremacy, killed the king Cleombratos in 371 BC, or the Great March.

I wrote about that in the Soul Battle, a history of the Great March of 370, 69 in the winter, where he marshaled, according to Plutarch, 60,000 to 70,000 liberators and went down and almost broke into Sparta and then crossed the mountains of the pass at Mount Athomi and founded the fortified huge city of Messenium when he freed the Helots.

So much for this critical race theory that said that the Greeks were all racist or white people or some or white racists or supremacists.

This is the greatest man of Greece and he's known for what?

Liberating Helot indentured servants from the Spartans.

So I was always curious about him.

And one of the problems we have about him is that for a variety of reasons, the aristocratic classes, not that it was conspiratorial, it was more ad hoc, were uneasy with him.

He was a Theban, and the Thebans, remember, had a bad rap because they Medized in 4 AD and joined the Persians after Thermopylae.

And the Athenians, remember, always sort of caricature Thebes as a place of crazy people, whether it's Antigone or Oedipus or Seven Against Thebes in their tragedies.

So they have prejudiced against Thebans.

And then second, he was a Pythagorean, so he never married.

He didn't produce children.

He said his two children were, the daughters were Leuctra and the victory at Leuctra and Mantinea, or, you know, people had said that.

He was killed at the end of...

Mantinea.

And then it was kind of a religious sect.

It wasn't quite like Scientology or Mormonism, but it was considered on the fringe of traditional, it wasn't traditional Greek religion, but it was also a little bit avant-garde for most Greeks.

So all, and what did that mean?

It meant that the historian Xenophon didn't mention him by name at the Battle of Leuctra, the greatest, I think, one of the greatest battles in the history of Greek civilization where the Thebans then sort of institutionalized the idea of constitutional or agrarian democracy and defeated Sparta and that changed the

trajectory of Greek history itself.

And then what we do know about him comes from later sources, Diodorus, Plutarch, and one of the great tragedies was Plutarch's life of Apaminondas is lost.

And it was lost, I think, in the Middle Ages.

So what I'm getting at is had we been alive in 350 BC, in 350 AD, in 700 AD, in 1000 AD, and we were reading, we would have probably thought that he had a position among Greeks of his time analogous to Pericles or Themistocles, and yet we don't have that image.

I spent most of my life, scholarly life, in the other Greeks.

I praised Theban democracy

of the fourth century in some ways as superior to Athenian democracy.

I wrote a novel called The End of Sparta about the great march to liberate the Hellots.

And I actually, you know, it's more of a history.

Every single thing in that novel was based on historical incident.

I translated the conversations from Greek.

I wrote them in Greek first and translated them into English to make it look authentic.

It's kind of a stiff novel, I suppose, but it was a story of Epaminondas.

I wrote articles about him.

He's the subject of solar battle.

So, and then we had a makers of ancient strategy Princeton University Press book that I edited.

And I wrote about Epaminondas and the doctrine of preemption.

He did go into the Peloponnese four times before he died.

So I was kind of obsessed with him, to tell you the truth.

My whole life, I've been obsessed with him.

Can I ask you something then while you're on this?

I don't know if you can answer this because, as you said, the sources are kind of scarce, but what is it in your opinion that made Epaminondas the man that he was?

I always think of it as sort of the master of his own fate, but or the man that was going to turn things around in the Peloponnese and in Nicene.

I think we have that answer because we still have something called Plutarch's Moralia.

And these are sort of the adages and sayings of great people or people or anecdotes about them.

And we have some about Epaminondas.

And they have, even though Plutarch wrote about 100 AD, they have a history that date back to contemporary incidents during Epaminondas' life.

So what do they say about him?

Or what did he say that people of antiquity, not us, but people of antiquity thought made him a great man?

Or what were the ingredients of his character that allowed these illustrious achievements?

And first of all, he was very modest.

And I mean that in the ancient sense.

He didn't just not talk about himself, but he dressed very non-ostentatiously.

He didn't have purple cloaks.

He wore rough wool.

He didn't have fancy shoes.

He wore sandals.

He ate, and this is very important in the ancient world.

We kind of laugh at it, I guess, until the health movement, but the idea that you didn't gain weight and you ate sparsely and you didn't sleep a lot or you slept on the ground if you were out on campaign.

So six to seven hours of sleep, no more.

You didn't drink to excess.

So he was considered moderate in his appetites, in his personal behavior, and then he didn't care.

That's a very important element of Epaminonis in particular and the Greek idea of what are the ingredients for success.

So when they put him on trial for extending his command, his answer was, I plead guilty to killing a Spartan king in battle, destroying the Spartan army, marching for the first time in the Vale of Laconia, where no foreigner had dared enter in 700 years, freeing the Messenian helots, founding the city,

and then founding the great bastions at Mantinea, Megalopolis, and Messenia, the fetters that kept in Sparta.

If you want to put me on trial for that, go ahead.

I care less.

That's essentially what he said.

So modesty, restriction of the appetites, and a sense that if you're going to do anything great in the world, you're going to have to be an individual.

And you're going to be hated for that.

And you want to be hated for that.

And you could care less what people say about you, as long as you don't provoke them insidiously or unnecessarily.

But you just should expect that hatred.

And it's kind of a New Testament prefiguring the New Testament.

He is sort of a divine-like figure, at least in the ancient mind, he was.

And then you get that in the Gospels so often that what Jesus says to people is the pretext of it, or I should say the subtext of it is that I don't expect you to want to hear this.

I don't expect you to like me for saying it.

You're human, but I don't.

I'm trying to do this for your own good.

And I know that because I'm trying to do it for your own good, you're not going to like it.

It reminds me of, I have a neighbor from India.

And one time we were talking about a farmer who had done so many nice things for so many people, and so many people disliked him.

And he said to me, Well, of course, what did he say?

Does this happen to you?

And I said, Yeah, once in a while I've done a favor and a guy didn't like it.

And he said, Yeah, what we just say, if he hates you, it's because you've done something good for him lately.

It's that kind of attitude.

Yeah, it sounds like a paminandis really has to believe in himself.

And it's kind of interesting to ask the question, there's a lot of people who believe in themselves, but sometimes they're on the wrong path.

And it seems to me, how do you know you're on the right path?

I mean, a Pamanandas seems to have been on the right path, at least.

Yeah, I think that's an important point.

And I think when people, what separates a person from a messianic, narcissistic, and dangerous Hitlerian division versus someone who you can say Teddy Roosevelt was a representative of progressive movement and he was audited and checked and analyzed and cross-examined and that's the difference.

So Apaminondas was not a person in isolation.

At least even Xenophon, but especially the tradition that may be lost from the lost historians of Ephorus and Callisnes that appear in Plutarch and Diodorus, you get the impression that along with Pelopidas and others, they had staged a democratic coup of the Theban aristocracy that was back, they were puppets of Sparta, and they kicked out the Spartan garrison.

And then they had a grand vision of what Thebes should be.

It should no longer be an aristocratic, limited, narrow oligarchy with foreign interference, be that Athens or Sparta.

It was going to be a nationalistic populace.

Those are kind of words we don't want to speak today because they are associated with Trump.

I'm not trying to suggest there's any.

tie at all, but they thought they could create a broad-based land property qualification, lower it down so that half the population, male population, would be voting.

What I'm getting at is that he was a, he was the first among many, and he had a loyal support of reformers that were, and they were all tended to be quite skilled militarily, and they trained.

And there's at least four or five passages in ancient literature scattered about that the Theban army was physical and they were strong.

And when they got into the phalanx, it wasn't just brilliant tactics or grand strategy that beat the Spartan army, that they were physically beating up this professional war machine.

And that was sort of part of the Pythagorean idea that we're going to live modestly, we're going to train, and mind and body are going to be honed without contamination of luxury or decadence.

Yeah, I would continue with that because it's interesting that Epaminonda seems sort of like he has the Spartan idea of how to live.

But I think we need to move on to Sherman.

And I wanted to start by reading something from your Savior Generals that you wrote that I found an interesting statement on Sherman.

It says, or you wrote, as he went into Georgia in May 1864, Sherman still remained an utter paradox, both an insider with valuable political connections and an outsider who had met only professional failure before the war.

Can you explain what the paradox was of Sherman and really connect him too to Epaminondas?

His family, the Shermans, were, his father was a Supreme Court judge and been a senator, actually, but he died and his mother had 11 children and they were absolutely poor and they were farmed out and they were all very brilliant.

I mean, John Sherman was a senator from Ohio, his younger brother, Sherman Antruska.

And he was adopted by their neighbor, the Ewings, and they were one of the most prominent families in Ohio.

And they were connected.

His stepfather then became Secretary of the Interior.

And by the time that this Ewing family had prepped the Shermans that they adopted, he had married his stepsister.

I shouldn't say adopted sister, I should say, not stepsister.

And he went to West Point and he was known as brilliant, merciless, didn't follow the rules.

But what I'm getting at is that he had people have said today, some of his biographers, that he's bipolar or he was manic depressive, whatever term you use.

I don't think he was, but he had terrible asthma, he had physical problems.

He searched for a career and he left the military and he he tried to float it around.

He went to San Francisco and he was very honest, representative of an Eastern Bank.

It went broke.

He went back to investigate.

He went back again.

He tried to honor the debts in a way that nobody else would have.

He went back to Ohio.

By the time the man was in his late 30s, he had a family

and his in-laws were very wealthy and prominent, and yet he was considered a failure.

And then he went down to what later became Louisiana State.

And right at the outbreak of the Civil War, he became successful.

He was a brilliant, it turned out that one thing he was was an organizer and an administrator.

And then the war broke out.

And he was, he loved the South.

He loved the agrarian traditions.

He was very distrustful of New England Yankee, self-righteous, puritanical industrialism.

And yet he was loyal to the Union.

And so he told them all and blunt, he's a very blunt guy.

I remember he's like a Panama.

You were going to lose this Civil War and you deserve to lose.

And I'm leaving.

And then he went, saw Lincoln, unimpressed with Lincoln, but he did get a commission as a colonel at Bull Run, and he performed very well.

And he was given a huge command in the West, Kentucky, Ohio area.

And he said something he shouldn't have.

He said, this war is going to go on for years.

It's going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

And I don't know if we don't get up, get with it, we're going to lose.

And this was right after just one battle or two.

And he was declared insane and he quit.

And everybody said he was over.

And then it kind of shaped up.

His wife's family intervened.

So he was connected.

His brother brother was a sinner.

And then he met another failure, Ulysses S.

Grant, who was from Galena, Illinois, who'd been a grocer's son.

Same thing, little younger, could not work in peace.

All of the attributes that these two men had in peace were negative.

All the ones they had in war were positive, where war is sort of the utmost touchstone, where all pretense, rhetoric disappears, and it's just achievement and merit because people's lives are.

And then at Fort Henry and Fort Donaldson, he performed, both of them performed well.

And then their moment came in April 1862 at Shiloh, where this huge Southern army almost broke through the Union Army of Grant.

It would have gone into Cincinnati.

And Albert Sidney Johnson, at the moment of his success, was killed, Southern general.

And Sherman's flank was overwhelmed, but he stood wounded three times, although slightly, stood there, saved it.

And the papers the next day said Sherman saved second day.

Grant may have been drunk.

Grant got rattled.

And guess what?

Sherman was loyal to Grant.

And he said, no, no, no.

This man gave me a chance.

He's a wonderful guy.

Halleck tried to remove Grant and he attached his loyalty to Grant.

And that was the story of his entire career, that in some ways he was a grand strategist.

He understood the economic, social, political, cultural life of the South in a way that Grant was a Klauswitzian.

Grant believed that if you destroy the Army of Northern Virginia and those 65,000 superb fighters of Robert E.

Lee.

And if you have

more money and more men than he does, you can destroy him and then you win the battle.

Kill the army, the country dies on the vine.

Sherman said, no, no, no, this is a political war.

If you go down there to Richmond and you don't take Richmond and you have that terrible summer of 1864,

places, you know, like the wilderness and you lose 100,000 casualties and you've got an election coming up in November, the Copperheads and the Democrats in the North are going to get rid of you.

You've got to come up with something different.

And he came up with, I'm going to invade Tennessee, and then I'm going to go right down into Georgia and take Atlanta.

I'm going to do it before the election.

So he took Atlanta on September 2nd, and then I'm going to cut all my supply lines.

I'm going to send back everybody who's ill, and I'm going to make a 50-mile swath to the heart of Georgia.

We're going to march.

These people are from Ohio.

They're from Michigan.

They're Indiana.

They're Iowa.

They're the best troops in the world.

They've never been given a free reign.

And I'm going to march them all the way to Savannah, to the coast, the march to the sea.

I'm not going to kill poor whites.

I'm not going to burn their homes.

I'm not going to go after, I'm going to liberate slaves.

I'm going to burn plantations.

I'm going to burn and destroy Confederate public property.

He killed very few people, and he lost very few people.

When that army pulled in in December to Savannah, the people were tanned in the late fall.

They were well-fed.

They had 30 to 40,000 slaves behind them.

A person who, who, if you take quotes out of context, it seems erased today, as many people at this time were.

He gave islands off the Carolina coast to blacks, and then everybody thought he was done.

And this was in November, December.

And guess what?

He said when he went to Atlanta on September 2nd, Atlanta is ours.

It's fairly won.

He got to Savannah.

I give it to you, President Lincoln, as a Christmas present.

But the point was, Lincoln in November in between was easily re-elected because of Sherman.

And the candidate of George, candidacy of George McClellan just faded.

The Copperheads faded.

Everybody faded because this man had gone into the heart of the South and humiliated.

And he said, if the southern Chevalier class and the cavalry class and the plantation want to meet me, here I am.

And then he turned around.

Grant said, Let's take this army up to help me outside Richmond.

He said, No, I'm going to go right through the Carolinas all the way from Savannah and I'm going to pull up when I get down in Virginia right behind Robert E.

Lee.

And Grant said, Well, you can't, nobody can go through the Carolinas.

It's swampy.

It's cold.

And he did.

He made Corduroy Roads and he went right through the Carolinas.

The same thing.

He fought one battle at Bentonville.

But the point is that you can make the argument that one of the reasons that Robert E.

Lee surrendered at Appomattox, because remember, Grant had been on the road and was in the south and was not well supplied and had lost a lot of men.

And Lee was retreating and he might have been able to retreat south of Richmond and join up with Joe Johnson, but Joe Johnson basically said to Robert E.

Lee, be careful.

I've got an army of 65,000 soldiers and these are not New Englanders.

I'm not making, I'm not disparaging the Army of the Potomac.

This was, that was a revolving door army.

People joined.

They went down to Virginia in the summer of 1864 and they got killed or wounded or captured or missing or sick.

And the Army of the West under Sherman was not a revolving army.

And when they came up to the Carolinas, Joe Johnson said, this is a monster.

And it's going to devour me and then it's going to devour you.

And that was one of the reasons Robert E.

Lee surrendered.

and then Joe Johnson did two weeks later.

And yet, he was blasted.

Person who attacked.

But the point I'm making is that he envisioned the war as that the army would die in the vine if the culture lost its confidence and economically it was cut in two and it was shattered.

And you had to, to do that, you had to humiliate the plantation class.

And that's what he did.

Very different than Grant.

Both of them were great generals, just very different views.

And when people started to praise Sherman, that he got results at half or third or tenth of the cost, he never, ever criticized Grant.

He said, Grant was in the kitchen fighting the fire.

I was in the living room tearing it down.

Grant, he said, Grant grabbed him by the throat, being the Confederate Army, and I came around and kicked him in the butt.

So he tried to contextualize what he was doing in a way that enhanced Grant.

And he could have been president.

Remember, he said, I shall not run if nominated and elected.

I shall not serve.

He's a very strange guy.

And I think he's getting back to our topic today of individual party.

Could I ask you something?

Yeah.

Once again,

I read about that in your Savior Generals, for example, and I'm thinking, wow, you've got a guy who's got months and months ahead of him of, as you called it, the long slog into the South.

And I just...

think to myself, well, what gave that man the wherewithal to stick it, you know, stick to it?

Because at any moment you could see him going, oh, this is not going to work.

I think all of us, I think it's important, and and the listeners should remember this, that all of us have these experiences in our lifetime.

And if they don't result in prestigious titles or jobs or careers or money,

the society calls us failure.

But it may be that at some point in your life, you're going to have that rare occasion.

And all of those things that were called failures were actually requisites for success.

And so Sherman didn't know it, but when he went out to San Francisco, he was running an entire bank.

And that was a sophisticated financial organization.

And he was honest.

He didn't know it, but when they had utter chaos during the gold rush and the vigilante movement, he organized a militia and kept the order.

When he came back and he,

he failed at being a lawyer.

He failed in business.

He failed in everything.

But each time he failed, it was only by the mark.

of society or maybe his in-laws.

He was actually doing a great job, but he wasn't being compensated or esteemed accordingly.

So when he finally went down into Georgia, what I'm getting at in this windy excursus is he said to himself, organize 65,000 men.

figure out the logistics, know something about farming, know something about the crops, know something about the South hell.

I was in Louisiana.

I ran a southern university.

I know the mind of these people.

Fight a war, a battle.

I've been at Bull Run, the first battle there was.

Panic under, you know, the panic of a mass hysteria.

I was at Shiloh.

So it turned out that before he went into Georgia and Tennessee, Georgia, and the Carolinas, he knew that if he was given this opportunity, his whole life had been preparing him for this moment.

And that had not been true of people like McClellan or Halleck, who were widely esteemed and had been company military men.

It's really important for us to understand that, that when we get these eccentric, kind of obnoxious, outspoken people that have had so many experiences, and then they get that moment where they culminate, You don't want to lose them.

Curtis LeMay is another example.

George S.

Patton is another example.

And they were in the soul battle too.

So once you read about Sherman's life and understand his mind and how well-educated he was, then it makes sense that the South had no idea what they were up against.

In their newspapers in Macon and places, they were saying, oh, he's going to be Napoleon and we're going to be the Cossacks that cut him to pieces as he flees back to, you know, Germany, i.e., the North.

They had no idea what they were dealing with.

And he was a Midwesterner.

That's very important.

Remember one thing, that war was won by Midwesterners.

That when you had people like McClellan, who was a good general in the sense of organizational skills, or Burnside, or Rosecrant, all of those guys, Hooker, you didn't have people who grew up in the rural Ohio, Illinois corridor.

And these were very different people, and the people they knew were very different.

And once Lincoln turned the war over to Grant in the West, and then Sherman, and once Sherman took over from Grant, why Grant went to the East, then you had the two greatest military minds in the United States running the Union effort.

And then when they added people like Thomas and Sheridan, you had the four greatest military minds.

And remember, just the opposite was tragically true of the South.

They had three minds that were capable, Robert E.

Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and James Longstreet.

And that was about it.

And once they lost Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville, the A.P.

Powell and Ewell were just pathetic compared.

And that was the end of Lee as a successful offensive tactician.

And once they got Longstreet wounded, or they didn't listen to him, or he went and had to solve problems in the West, they lost him as well for a while.

And they didn't have any other talent.

Usually in a war, there's about three or four people that are distilled to be successful.

And you've got to take care of them and listen to them.

Same thing, well, that's in World War II.

A lot of those people in war seem to be mathematicians for some reason.

Wasn't Longstreet and Sherman?

And you just said

Epaminondas was a Pythagorean, which is a mathematician of sorts, given the nature of that quasi-religion.

They were engineers, too.

I mean,

when you went to West Point in those days, the most coveted focus and almost the only focus was engineering.

So Lee was an engineer, and Sherman was an engineer.

And they did have a, and the Pythagoreans were obsessed, as you know, with numbers and felt that these indivisible or prime numbers were windows into a divinity, that there was a reason you couldn't divide, you know, three or seven and that was a window into the divine plan for us all and Sherman was calculated he knew exactly how many miles 35 miles a day he might be how many bushels of wheat how much pork bellies he would need who would which person was good at this which is that and then he what did he do he created a very natural persona just like a paminantis that was why i picked them and the same thing with patton they they had this idea of a persona and he was very he became just as a Pamanonis, became the great liberator and wore very modest clothing and rough looking and slept on the ground.

So Sherman did the same thing.

He was Uncle Billy, even though he was 41, 42, and he dressed as a private almost, and he was filthy, dirty almost.

So when people came in at the camp and said, I want to see Major General W.T.

Sherman, they said, there he is.

And they had walked right by him.

And then when reporters were lying about him and sending telegrams, Sherman lost, Sherman loses Army, Sherman insane again, Sherman will have to be, he just said, put those guys in chains.

And he hated, he hated the media and he said he didn't.

So Donald Trump was not the only one, huh?

No, he wasn't.

I'll just end with one final anecdote.

When they had the grand march of victory in Washington, the Army of the Potomac, of course, had all the funding and Grant was the head of the Army's.

wonderful person.

And Grant was kind of uncomfortable with that role, but they had brand new uniform, 65,000.

And they marched through Washington and all of Lincoln's cabinet, Lincoln being dead, but the cabinet was there and everybody was kind of oppressed.

They had foreign military advisors there too.

And then the Army of the West came and everybody let out a sigh when they didn't know whether it was to cheer or to run because these guys were like five, ten, six feet.

They were tan.

And he deliberately did not give them new uniforms.

They were walking with rags and they were fully armed.

And they had these pioneers with them.

These are the people who were building bridges and corduroying roads.

And then he had African-American people he liberated.

And it was run by General Sherman.

And I think the German attaché said something like, this army could run through any place they wanted in Europe.

And people were actually saying, if Sherman wants to take over the country with that army, he...

nobody could stop him.

And of course, then he didn't shake Stanton's hand, Secretary of War.

And people were, he just tried to increase the tempo.

And then when it was everybody, right at the breaking point, what is Sherman going to do?

He kind of smiled and said, I present this army to President Johnson and to General Grant.

And then he crossed over to the Potomac and let them all go home.

And it was, he was trying to make a point that this is how you win a war.

And these are the people who won the war.

And you should, and the future of the country is not in New England.

It's in the West.

It's a very powerful thing to say.

Well, we're coming to the end of our time here.

So I want to thank you, Victor Davis-Hanson, for those memories or thoughts on our heroes, both flawed and talented and skilled and movers of men, actually.

So thank you very much.

Okay, thank you Sammy.

See you next week.

Okay and for the listeners please don't forget you can find Victor at his website VictorHanson.com.

You can find him on Twitter at

V D Hansen.

You can find him on Facebook at V D Hansen's Morning Cup or there is also a Victor Davis Hansen fan club on Facebook.

And finally also we are on Parlor and it's V D Hansen as well.

So please follow Victor Davis Hansen.

And we are Victor Davis-Hanson and Sammy Wink signing off.

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