A Bronx Tale, the Civil War, and Why How We Do It Matters

Funerals are instructive and the one I attended this week was no different. It was a beautiful service for a gentle man. He excelled in his career but that wasn’t what his son and grandkids talked about in their amazing eulogies. Instead, they spoke of fishing trips and drives to the dollar store, drives extended by shortcuts that weren’t shortcuts at all simply so he could spend more time with them. They spoke of his facial expressions that could teach a thousand things without uttering a word. Eulogies often remind me that how one does it often leaves a greater impact on others than what one does.

Tip O’Neill, a Democrat, served as Speaker of the House during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. I can’t remember his policies, though I’m sure I disagreed with most. I remember only one thing from his eulogies. It’s this. He was waiting for a haircut in a Boston barber shop when he noticed holes in the bottom of the shoes of a man sitting in the barber’s chair. When the man stood to leave, Speaker O’Neill quietly asked him if those were his best shoes. The man, embarrassed, admitted they were. The Speaker sent him across the street to a shoe store, instructing him to tell the shop owner he would be over after his haircut to pay for whichever pair the man selected.

That act of kindness is what I remember about the third highest ranking official of the United States during the 1980’s.

In our nation, we often value toughness more than gentleness. We like our leaders tough. We like our athletes tough. We like our movie protagonists tough. We don’t even mind when they are flawed. Flawed is fine; we all are. But I feel we used to gravitate toward tough guys whose compass still pointed somewhere toward fairness and compassion.

One of my favorite movies is A Bronx Tale. Chazz Palminteri brilliantly portrays Sonny, a neighborhood crime boss. Robert De Niro, cast opposite him, plays a bus driver named Lorenzo. The movie follows the life of Lorenzo’s young son as Sonny gains an outsized influence over him. Watching, we forget that mob bosses kill. We forget that they earn a living by taking. Instead, we focus on the life lessons that Sonny teaches the boy. And they are great lessons, including how to tell on the first date if someone is worth marrying. Hint, it’s if she reaches over to unlock your car door after you open the passenger door for her. Okay, so that one may not work in these days of keyless entry, but you get the point. Be with someone who thinks of others.

In one scene in the movie, a biker gang wanders into Sonny’s social club. Sonny’s underlings initially refuse to serve them. When Sonny enters to ask what is going on, the leader of the gang tells him that all they want is a couple beers and then they’ll be on their way. Sonny says to the biker, “Spoken like a gentleman.” He then motions to his bartender saying, “Give them their beers; go ahead.” But once the beers are served, the bikers’ true intent to trash the place emerges. They shake their beer bottles and spray the bartenders. Sonny, seeing this, calmly walks to the front door. He locks it shut and places the key into his suitcoat pocket. The bikers’ faces drop. Sonny says to them, “Now youse can’t leave.” Mobsters pour out of the back room, beating the bikers. They throw them, bloodied, onto the sidewalk. They destroy their motorcycles. A group of young thugs from the neighborhood, would-be mobsters, single out a wounded biker to continue kicking. The scene ends with Sonny lifting the head of one of the bloodied bikers saying, “Look at me. I’m the one that did this to you. Remember me.”

Of course, I don’t condone violence. But the scene is a lesson. It begins with a lesson about treating people with respect, taking them at their word until they give you reason not to. It moves on to a lesson about never starting something, but once started not being afraid to finish it. In the actions of the young would-be mobsters, we get a lesson in how pathetic blind following, mimicry, and picking on the defenseless can be. The scene ends with one final lesson from Sonny – you did this to yourself; remember how you feel right now the next time you get the urge to bully someone you think is weaker. There’s a compass in that toughness.

Beyond loving movies, I’m also an American history buff. The Revolution, the Founding, the Civil War, our presidents…it all enthralls me. And I tend to learn from everyone, even those on the wrong side of history and even those on the wrong side of right.

This is why preserving history is important, to celebrate the right, learn from the wrong, and appreciate the different experiences of others.

The right of the Civil War won the Civil War. Slavery is so abhorrent that I cannot even begin to know how to fully fathom it. In the last presidential primary season, there was a renewed debate over whether that war was more about slavery or states’ rights. Regardless of what they were fighting for, the evil institution of slavery would have survived had the South won. The right won that war.

I visit the battlefields of that war often. The events that unfolded in those fields were also horrific. Over 600,000 lives were lost. But the stories that tend to linger with me long after I leave are those where a soldier on one side recognized the common humanity in one on the other.

I think of Gettysburg with its 50,000 casualties. But I also think of the friendship of Union General Winfield Scott Hancock and Confederate General Lewis Armistead. They served on opposite sides during Pickett’s charge. Armistead, wounded with injuries that would prove mortal, inquired after his friend, Hancock, only to learn that he too had been wounded a few hundred yards away. Each was a casualty at the hands of the other’s men.

I think of the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain with its 4,000 casualties. Fighting was intense as the Confederate positions were well entrenched. But the moment of the battle I remember is when Confederate Colonel William Martin jumped onto his earthworks to order his men to cease fire because the constant fire of his cannons had started the dried leaves and brush on fire. And in that fire, wounded Union soldiers were burning. “Boys, this is butchery,” he yelled. He waived his white handkerchief, allowing his men and the Union men to rescue the wounded before they burned to death.

President Abraham Lincoln with fanatical focus employed every means, including executive overreach and the suspension of habeas corpus, to save the Union and end slavery. While touring Richmond after the rebel withdrawal, he was asked by one of his generals how they should treat the local citizens. He responded, “Let ‘em up easy.”

General Robert E. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court House was littered with moments of humanity. When General Lee considered his options before surrendering, some on his staff urged him to disperse his army into the woods, tell them to regroup with other armies of the South or return home, but to continue fighting either way. Lee refused, believing that men without leaders or rations might turn into marauders in order to survive. “We would bring on a state of affairs it would take the country years to recover from,” he answered.

Ely Parker was a Native American who served under General Ulysses S. Grant. A colonel at the time, Parker drafted the surrender documents. General Lee originally mistook him for a black man. When he realized he was incorrect, he said to Parker, “I am glad to see one real American here.” Colonel Parker, who earned the rank of Brevet Brigadier General that same day, replied, “We are all Americans, sir.”

General Grant’s terms of surrender were lenient and he provided three days rations to the hungry Southern troops. After the signing, he and his officers walked out onto the porch of McLean House to see off Lee and his officers. They did not gloat. They did mock Lee as the worst general ever. They didn’t say Lee was nasty to us. Instead, General Grant, with his officers following his example, raised his hat to his vanquished foe. General Lee, returned the gesture and rode away. In similar fashion, General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, the Union officer who oversaw the ceremony in which the Southern troops filed by to surrender their weapons and flags, ordered his men to salute the rebel troops.

I’m not an historian. I’m simply recounting moments that struck me. I offer them, cherry-picked as they may be, as examples of men showing a limit to what their partisanship would allow. Colonel Martin’s brand of partisanship in that moment wouldn’t allow for his enemy to burn alive. General Lee’s wouldn’t allow for guerilla warfare to cast a nation further into chaos. General Grant’s, though it allowed for subjecting entire cities to siege to end a war, wouldn’t allow an enemy once defeated to starve. General Chamberlain’s and President Lincoln’s wouldn’t allow a defeated foe one more reason to feel slight. They all seemed to recognize, by these acts, that moving forward together after a contest would not be served by exacerbating injury. Just the opposite.

As we stumble through the issues of our time, trying desperately to find the right in all of them, I wonder what our partisanship will allow?

Are we so entrenched in our beliefs on taxes or entitlements or immigration or any of the myriad of issues facing us today – issues that are important, but fall well short of slavery or brother literally taking up arms against brother – that we would be willing to treat, and to speak about, fellow human beings with less respect than did these men who fought on opposite sides of the Civil War and that evil institution? Will we continue to ratchet up the divisiveness and dehumanize those who think differently than we, making it impossible to move forward together? And will we continue to reward with our votes those who deliberately sow division as a means to an end that doesn’t actually serve us?

What I’m clumsily trying to say, through analogy to funerals and movies and the Civil War, is that I hope we as a people find our way to remembering that how we do it matters just as much as what we do. How we do it matters a great deal.