In the fall of 1859, as the United States careened toward civil war, the government in Washington seemed strangely paralyzed. In a ludicrous attempt to sidestep the slavery issue that was tearing the nation apart, President James Buchanan had deliberately divided his cabinet between southerners and northerners. As a result, the secretary of War, a former governor of Virginia, was methodically emptying Federal arsenals in the North while stocking forts in the South. At the same time, a southern postmaster general was promoting a much longer southern mail route to California, at the expense of a more direct northern route.
This was no minor matter. The Gold Rush of 1849 had transformed California into the richest state in the Union, if not the world. Nearly 400,000 people had flocked there from all over the globe. Yet it took three weeks for a letter to reach California from the East Coast. California had entered the Union as a free state in 1850, but it was full of southern sympathizers, and its loyalty to the Union couldn’t be taken for granted.
Without a fast and reliable northern line of communication, it was conceivable that, as the North and South moved apart, California would cast its lot with the South, or the Pacific states might form an independent federation of their own. And without California’s wealth, the Union might have been doomed.
Yet the federal government’s only northern link with California was a struggling stagecoach line plagued by outlaws, hostile Indians, and corrupt stationmasters. It grandiloquently called itself the Central Overland, California and Pike’s Peak Express Company, but its employees said its initials actually stood for “Clean Out of Cash and Poor Pay.”
Benevolent feudal lord
In this pre-literate, pre-legal place, devoid of courts or sheriffs, the Central Overland needed a benevolent despot. Such a position would require someone who was fearless, audacious, incorruptible, perhaps a bit crazy. Yet this same post also required someone who could supervise stations, maintain horses and supplies, meet schedules and budgets, and hire and manage coach drivers and station keepers. Who on earth would take such a job?
The man they chose— a former soldier and wagon master named Joseph Alfred Slade— exceeded his employers’ wildest expectations. For the next three years— an eternity in the early West— Slade functioned as a benevolent prairie feudal lord along the Central Overland’s most dangerous 500-mile stretch through present-day Nebraska, Colorado and Wyoming. He organized mobs of unruly men and animals into efficient teams capable of defying floods, droughts, and blizzards. For his protection of settlers, stagecoach passengers, and the U.S. mail, he became known as “The Law West of Kearny” (Nebraska). Slade helped launch the fabled Pony Express, which reduced the delivery time of a transcontinental letter from three weeks to ten days. You could argue that, by securing California and its gold for the Union, Slade saved the modern world’s first fragile experiment in democracy.
(As you may have guessed, Slade is the subject of my 2008 biography, Death of a Gunfighter.)
Fighting back against Trump
Slade’s story— that of a single obscure individual who made an awesome and totally unexpected difference— is worth recalling this year, when the flaws of allegedly powerful institutions have become painfully obvious. Major corporations, leading universities, and giant law firms, when challenged by President Trump, have meekly surrendered rather than fight, presumably because they’ve got too much to lose.
Nine big law firms struck deals with Trump after he issued executive orders targeting them— offering him, among other things, nearly $1 billion worth of pro bono services to be used as he wishes. Harvard, Columbia, Penn, and Brown agreed to pay hundreds of millions in fines to restore federal research funds and get Trump off their backs. When Trump filed a baseless libel suit against the CBS News program “60 Minutes,” the network’s parent company, Paramount, settled it for $16 million because Paramount had bigger fish to fry, like its need for government approval of its merger with Skydance. When Trump told the president of Intel, “I think the United States should be given 10% of Intel,” the president of Intel readily agreed.
Yet smaller players— presumably with less to lose— have stepped forward to fill this moral void. Four small law firms fought back against Trump’s extortion efforts rather than cut deals with him, and all four firms won in court. Gregory Washington, the president of George Mason University, withstood intense bullying from Trump over his school’s diversity policies and alleged antisemitism, and kept his job (at least so far).
Don’t forget Lincoln
Throughout history, and even today, sometimes a single individual can make a big difference, if only because he or she possesses the virtue of an uncluttered mind. Gandhi, a lawyer who held no political office, essentially drove the British out of India after 190 years of occupation. Nelson Mandela brought an end to apartheid in South Africa. Lech Walesa, a shipyard electrician, and Vaclav Havel, a playwright, toppled Communism in Poland and Czechoslovakia, respectively. Alexei Navalny demonstrated that millions of Russians have no use for Putin’s imperialistic visions.
Georges Picquart, the French army’s chief intelligence officer during the Dreyfus affair, discovered evidence that Dreyfus had been framed by high-ranking generals and refused to cover it up, even when his superiors transferred him to Tunisia and then had him arrested. Liz Cheney may have been a dedicated Republican and Conservative, but she never lost sight of the larger issue: that Trump, as she put it, is “a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant.”
And don’t forget Joan of Arc, a peasant’s daughter who really did single-handedly inspire and lead a demoralized French army to raise the siege of Orleans when she was only 17.
For that matter, Abe Lincoln himself seemingly came out of nowhere. When he was elected president in 1860, Lincoln hadn’t held public office for 12 years. As late as 1854, he remarked to one of his fellow Illinois lawyers, "My wife thinks I could be president. Can you imagine a sucker like me being president?" What he had going for him (that Buchanan, among many others, lacked) was his uncluttered vision— that a house divided against itself cannot stand— and that made all the difference.
De Gaulle’s ‘treason’
And then there is Charles De Gaulle, who was a mere colonel in the French army at the start of the World War II. During the German invasion of May 1940, De Gaulle led an armored division that counterattacked the invaders. That brought him a promotion to brigadier general and appointment as undersecretary of state for defense. But when the French government sought an armistice with Hitler, De Gaulle refused to acquiesce.
On June 17, 1940, De Gaulle flew to London on a British aircraft, breaking with both his army and his government. The next day, De Gaulle broadcast a message from London to the French people, urging them to resist the Nazi occupation and continue fighting alongside the Allies. "France has lost a battle,” he said, “but France has not lost the war." By substituting his own judgment for the government’s and organizing the Free French movement, De Gaulle was branded a traitor; but today, his courageous speech is commemorated in France every year on its anniversary.
Truman as role model
I stress that many of the examples I’ve cited here make unlikely role models. De Gaulle was rigidly nationalistic and imperious in manner. Gandhi supported India’s caste system and the subordination of women. Picquart was a confirmed anti-Semite. Slade held no strong political convictions (if anything, as the son of a slaveholding native Virginian, his sympathies probably lay with the South). He shared all the harsh frontier prejudices against Indians, and no doubt against Blacks as well. He was an alcoholic who became a dangerous bully when drunk.
Yet at critical moments in history, these flawed individuals rose to the occasion when no one else would. For that, all of us should be grateful.
America’s real strength, the philosopher Eric Hoffer once observed, lies not in its Washingtons, Roosevelts, and Eisenhowers but in its Harry Trumans— that is, in the thousands of unknown men and women working in obscure cities and towns across the land who, if they awoke one morning to find themselves president of the United States, could do a decent job, and perhaps even an outstanding one.
We could use a few such individuals right now. You, perhaps?
Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s new memoir, The Education of a Journalist: My Seventy Years on the Frontiers of Free Speech. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com
From reader Michael Schefer:
You said --
"The Central Overland needed a benevolent despot. Such a position would require someone who was fearless, audacious, incorruptible, perhaps a bit crazy."
That's who Trump is. He's actually doing the same sorts of things that were done by all of those folks who you approve of— and you are aligning yourself with the folks who disapproved of what they were doing. You like the status quo of the big fat and smug institutions.
From reader Robert Zaller:
Yes, Lincoln and Gandhi made a difference, but so did Hitler and Stalin. And one must be careful what one wishes for. Indian independence cost millions of lives when the British withdrew, and our Civil War 700,000. And, yes, ordinary individuals might make decent presidents (although they might also drop atomic bombs). But what if your fellow citizens choose the worst person in the country to govern them? That seems to be the problem now.