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Affected
On Becoming Undone
and Potentiation
 Affected

“Reading this book takes the reader on a journey through a thoughtscape that
starts on an individual level and takes us all the way ‘up’ to the entirety of
contemporary life. In this journey, Rick Iedema shows with a profound analyt-
ical precision the existential strength of ‘being moved’, being affected. Departing
from a life being shattered, the books exposes with the help of Spinoza, Sloter-
dijk, and others, the many layers and forms of ‘becoming’. While written during
the COVID-19 crisis and extreme bushfires literally next door the book is not
only a plea for new ‘structures of feeling’, but also for a new way of doing social
science research, as today’s complexity and pace of change are too intense to be
adequately captured and controlled by ponderous forms of analysis. Although
Iedema refuses (rightly so) to offer an alternative research model of how to
understand life and the world we live in, he does not leave us empty-handed.
His discussion at the end of the book about potentiation and anthropotech-
nics shows us the way towards personal and intellectual courage: one that allows
uncertainty and nurtures emergent kinds of sense and intelligence.”
—Jessica Mesman, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands
 Rick Iedema

Affected
On Becoming Undone and Potentiation
Rick Iedema
Health Faculities
King’s College London
London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-62735-5 ISBN 978-3-030-62736-2 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2

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 Preamble---Affected: On Becoming
(Undone)

Origin of This Book

This book was written not from the beginnings of an idea or an argument,
but from a growing sense that “to ‘philosophise’ about being shattered is
separated by a chasm from a thinking that is shattered” (Heidegger, 2000
[1946]). This sense of chasm remained my principal guide. I went back
to it when I was left wondering while writing, where next with this? For
the purpose of the present book, I flesh this sense out by including the
odd vignette recounting a person’s experience of becoming undone and
loss. The person in question shall remain anonymous.
Perhaps my sense of this chasm between discourse and distress had
been widening for a while. Since 2008 I had become interested in organ-
isational failure and harm caused to service users. Over a period of several
years, my investigation of organisational ‘incidents’ in health care made
me worry about staff and patients whose harm was ignored to protect the
reputation of the service, its management, the bureaucracy and politicians.
Wanting to go beyond interviews and focus groups, I immersed myself in
what people in those organisations were doing and experiencing. Having
videoed care work for some years (Iedema, Long, Forsyth, & Lee, 2006),
and sitting down with them to hear what the footage now enabled them
to say and ask (Iedema, 2020b), I involved people in videoed interviews
as a way of making the portrayal of their distress more tangible, and more
immediate for my audiences. I also turned to theatre (Iedema, 2020a) to

v
vi PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE)

engender still more energy among people to come to grips with the expe-
rience of distress and harm, and to discuss otherwise unspeakable things
and unremembered feelings.
If I had an aim and a procedure, these were no longer to do with
where I started in academia: analysing and generalising about social-
organisational life. Rather, my aim and procedure became increasingly
focused on wanting to move people by engaging them with what had
moved (harmed) others. Increasingly, all I wanted to do was to enable
if not to oblige people to confront hitherto hidden things and get them
to say new and different things about their own otherwise taken-as-given
ways of being, doing and saying. If anything characterised my research it
was a hollowing out, a depletion of knowledge and expertise, in favour of
questioning, moving and wondering. This was also because I moved more
and more towards handing problems, deliberations, decisions and conclu-
sions over to research participants whose ways of addressing these difficult
things were so often interesting and surprising. Their energy made me
move away from the rigidities of social science (‘this finding is validated’;
‘my relations with participants are pre-determined’; ‘my researcher iden-
tity and my research practice are defined by these theories and methods’;
‘this critique is justified by this evidence’), and invent different ways of
doing social science.
Important milestones for me were Still & Costall’s wonderful (1991)
collection Beyond Cognitivism which I read in the 1990s. The papers in
this volume relieved me of any remaining psychologistic misapprehen-
sions: action is not the effect of thought; thought does not rule us. I
also read John Law’s (2001) After Method in the early 2000’s. I carried
that book in my back pocket ever since to remind me it was fine to
question and withdraw from the assumptions, procedures and method-
ologies that continued to define the direction of social science and the
context of my career. These books steered me on to all kinds of other
amazing writers that questioned methodological, theoretical and inter-
pretive dogmas (e.g. Shapiro, 2005). Perhaps they led me to my academic
fall-from-grace, my disciplinary exodus, my degeneracy. Mind you, degen-
eracy may sound bad, but, as I explain later in the book, degeneracy is a
kind of strategic-tactical opportunism that plays a critical role in individual
survival (Virno, 2004) and species evolution (Edelman, 2006). Degen-
eracy makes possible the shedding of non-critical practices, unwarranted
rules and ineffective assumptions. Degeneracy risks going without rather
than hang on to non-critical things. It reminds me of James’ definition of
 PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE) vii

the ‘radical pragmatist’. According to him, “[a] radical pragmatist … is a

happy-go-lucky anarchistic sort of creature” (James, 1907: 256).
In the midst of this descent into personal-professional degeneracy
Katherine Carroll and I put together an article from my readings of
Peter Sloterdijk’s Spheres (Sloterdijk, 1998, 1999, 2004). I read Spheres
when I was beginning to disconnect from my disciplinary bearings and
academic moorings. My mood chimed with Sloterdijk’s rampage across
disciplines, theories, ambitions and divisions, shamelessly energising if not
steroidising (among other things) philosophy, anthropology, communi-
cation theory, sociology and (art) history. While his endless stream of
thick books may appear to just inflate the stock of knowledge, his work in
fact constitutes an extended exercise in acrobatic thinking. Sloterdijk takes
you places you suspect you’ve been before, but never consciously, making
the most distant and untravelled regions of existence recognisable, think-
able and discussable in a language so agile it feels futuristic and other-
wordly. Reading him, I could readjust my uncertainties and confusions
with increasing intellectual courage and flexibility.
Steeped in Sloterdijk, the article I just mentioned turns research on
its head: instead of approaching the world with a question, a method for
answering it, and the goal of knowing more, it argued we should approach
the world as a spatial-relational (‘spherical’) dynamic—or as a tangle of
people in space-specific relationships and ever-evolving (and, in this day
and age, increasingly fast-changing) ‘co-immunities’, a Sloterdijk concept.
Co-immunities: more or less temporary collections of spatially or tech-
nologically connected people constantly refreshing and resourcing their
communally constructed immunity. Sloterdijk’s co-immunisation high-
lights not so much the deliberative and moral aspects of contemporary
co-existence, as its anthropotechnics according to which techniques and
technologies are harnessed to realise the aim of communal security1 and
the pressure of creating advantage.
Studying or understanding the dynamics of human spheres, the
article argued, should mean (among other things) participating in and
contributing to their spherical becoming. Such becoming was inevitably
contingent on engendering relations of safety and trust. This is the
meaning of the article’s title: ‘spherogenics’, the engendering of spheres

1 The word security derives from securis (Latin: axe) and secõ (Latin: to cut). Security
thus derives from the proto-technological act of ‘cutting off from’.
viii PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE)

of co-immunity. For me, this concept defines research as the endeavour to

bring about and account for the becoming of social-organisational real-
ities. Without wanting to dismiss critique and formal knowledge, I now
regard my research as less in the business of knowledge production than
of nurturing emergent kinds of intelligence from a (re)energised human
sociality (Iedema & Carroll, 2015). Nurturing these things is contin-
gent on being moved by and being able to move those in whom we are
interested. Being moved is what this book is about.

A Note on Method
I leap across literatures and enjoy the creativity of the ideas and thoughts
I find there. This involves not necessarily following the rules of conven-
tional scholarship. For philosophers, the route to a reappreciation of the
present is through delving into the intentions of and relations among
philosophers’ writings: How should this or that be understood? What
evidence is there for believing that statement X means Y, or that author A
meant B? What do these things say and what don’t they say? My approach
in contrast is more one of going through philosophical corners and navi-
gating conceptual intersections at high speeds, if not recklessly ignoring
the existing road network altogether.
For their part, social scientists scavenge data in all kinds of formats,
personal accounts, audio/video recordings, large databases or any other
information in any other medium. They hold that data up as guarantor
for the legitimacy of their claims about recognisable and tangible forms
of life, using their analytical tools and discursive procedures to produce
findings and conclusions about the state of the present or the past, and
to make predictions about the future. The social sciences capture our
beings, doings and sayings. My work abandons much of this, other than
by drawing on brief vignettes that specify one person’s experience of
becoming undone. In doing so I scale the prevailing expectations of
science back and slow science down (Stengers, 2018). This gives me time
to engender more defensible and responsive ways of going on.
The humanities are now steeped in posthuman scholarship whose
(grand) narrative fixes on what exceeds human and ordinary life. Its prin-
cipal concern is to adjust the lenses through which we apprehend life
away from our personal crises and towards global crises, from human life
towards pan-organic and inorganic life. Posthumanities erase the personal
on account of its misapprehension that experience matters at all in a
 PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE) ix

world where becoming means that humans are an evolutionary blip in

the grander scheme of inscrutable things and events, and that what we
experience as ‘the present’ is no more than what we cease to be:

… the present therefore produces a multi-faceted effect: on the one hand

the sharp awareness of what we are ceasing to be (the end of the actual) and
on the other the perception – in different degrees of clarity – of what we
are in the process of becoming (the actualization of the virtual). (Braidotti,
2019: 36)

Given my invocation of a single person’s experience of becoming undone,

I fail here too. My approach and style of writing will therefore exasperate
proponents of each of these endeavours. My defence is that my intention
in this book is to come to terms with ‘becoming undone’ and ‘becoming
different’, and to clarify my fascination with this idea of Spinoza’s: our
power to be affected enhances our power to act. My exploration of this
idea results in an account of a journey into realising that “there is no crisis
here, just a huge vitality of inspiration” (Braidotti, 2017: 15). Finally, keep
in mind while reading this, that, really, …

We shouldn’t be producing books—unified totalities that reflect a well-

ordered world, we should be producing texts that are assemblages—unex-
pected, disparate and productive connections that create new ways of
thinking and living. (Colebrook, 2002: 76)

References
Braidotti, R. (2017). Posthuman critical theory. Journal of Posthuman Studies,
1(1), 9–25.
Braidotti, R. (2019). A theoretical framework for the critical posthumanities.
Theory, Culture & Society, 36(6), 31–61. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327
6418771486.
Colebrook, C. (2002). Gilles Deleuze. London: Routledge.
Edelman, G. (2006). Second nature: Brain science and human knowledge. New
Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Heidegger, M. (2000 [1946]). Über den Humanismus [Letter on humanism].
Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.
Iedema, R. (2020a). Hear me: Intervention theatre. In P. Crawford, B. Brown,
& A. Charise (Eds.), Companion for health humanities (pp. 239–243).
Abingdon: Taylor & Francis.
x PREAMBLE—AFFECTED: ON BECOMING (UNDONE)

Iedema, R. (2020b). Video-reflexive ethnography as potentiation technology:

What about investigative quality? Qualitative Research in Psychology. https://
doi.org/10.1080/14780887.2020.1794087.
Iedema, R., & Carroll, K. (2015). Research as affect-sphere: Towards sphero-
genics. Emotion Review, 7 (1), 1–7.
Iedema, R., Long, D., Forsyth, R., & Lee, B. B. (2006). Visibilizing clinical work:
Video ethnography in the contemporary hospital. Health Sociology Review,
15(2), 156–168.
James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking.
New York and London: Longmans, Green & Co.
Law, J. (2001). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge.
Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. London: Routledge.
Shapiro, I. (2005). Flight from reality in the human sciences. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Sloterdijk, P. (1998). Sphären I: Blasen—Mikrosphärologie. Frankfurt Am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Sloterdijk, P. (1999). Sphären II: Globen—Makrosphärologie. Frankfurt Am Main:
Suhrkamp.
Sloterdijk, P. (2004). Sphären III: Schäume. Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp.
Stengers, I. (2018). Another science is possible: A manifesto for slow science (S.
Muecke, Trans.). Oxford: Polity Press.
Still, A., & Costall, A. (1991). Against cognitivism: Alternative foundations for
cognitive psychology. Hemel Hampstead, UK.: Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Virno, P. (2004). The grammar of the multitude. New York: Semiotext(e).
 Contents

1 Transgressions 1
Descent into Greed 2
Child Sexual Abuse 3
Digital Surveillance 5
Academic Misconduct 6
Research Integrity 8
Clinical Incidents 10
Loss of World 12
The Monstrous 15
References 19

2 Affects 25
Affect as Practice 25
Vitalism—Active/Passive 31
Sense Modulates (or Exceeds) Meaning 39
Conclusion 41
References 41

3 Undoings 45
Undoing 46
Loss of Meaning 48
Effacing Self 60
Passivity 63

xi
xii CONTENTS

Conclusion 65
References 66

4 Prosociality 69
Introduction 69
Prosociality 72
Empathy 74
The Power to Be Affected 84
Being Moved as Sociopolitical Priority 86
Conclusion 90
References 91

5 Potentiation 97
Introduction 97
Being Moved: A Proximity that Requires Distance 99
The Ecstasy of Standing Outside 104
A Becoming of Becoming: Potentiation 109
What Keeps Us: The Ingenium 115
References 118

6 Conclusion 121
Looking Back and Looking Forward 121
Reprise 126
References 127

Index 129
 CHAPTER 1

Transgressions

Abstract This first chapter starts with a description of organisational

transgression and dysfunction that affected many people and that became
publicised through a number of governmental inquiries, research into
organisational ‘incidents’, media reports of scandals, and the like. The
chapter then shifts gear to question whether framing these dysfunc-
tions as individuals’ or groups’ transgressions of particular moral codes
does justice to what is at issue here. Does the morality that trades in
judgements of (dys)functionality still apply to what some now refer to
as a ‘third modernity’ where rules are becoming more contested (de
Vulpian in Towards a third modernity: How ordinary people are trans-
forming the world. Triarchy Press, Axminster, UK, 2008)? In attempting
to answer this question, the chapter refracts the problem of organisational
dysfunction through the prism of affect and the notion ‘monstrosity’.

Keywords Institutional transgression · Dehumanisation · Monstrosity ·

(positive/negative) affect

© The Author(s) 2021 1

R. Iedema, Affected,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62736-2_1
2 R. IEDEMA

Descent into Greed

First, in almost every case, the conduct in issue was driven not only by
the relevant entity’s pursuit of profit but also by individuals’ pursuit of
gain, whether in the form of remuneration for the individual or profit for
the individual’s business. Providing a service to customers was relegated to
second place. Sales became all important. Those who dealt with customers
became sellers. And this confusion of roles extended well beyond front line
service staff. Advisers became sellers and sellers became advisers. (Hayne,
2019)

The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking and Insurance

Industry concluded in February 2019 with the publication of its Final
Report (Hayne, 2019). The findings of the Royal Commission were
scathing about the practices in the Australian banking industry: contin-
uing to charge customers after their death; denying customers insurance
payouts; hoodwinking the public into paying for services that did not
exist and taking up mortgages they would not be able to afford, and
so on, and so on (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-04/banking-
royal-commission-report-at-a-glance/10777188).
While none of the major banks escaped condemnation, the Commis-
sion regarded the National Australia Bank (appropriately abbreviated as
‘NAB’) as an outlier. This bank’s leadership persisted in downplaying and
denying the seriousness of NAB’s transgressions right through the inquiry
(Bartholomeusz, 2019). The normalisation of deceit in this organisation
in particular had rendered employees at all levels immune to the damage
and distress they caused service users, including account holders, mort-
gagees and insurees. The size of the scandal was of such magnitude that
it was reported on internationally (cf. the reports compiled in the June
2019 issue of The New Yorker: The New Yorker, 2019).
NAB’s most recent website is populated by two moderately happy,
semi-smiling customers, advertising information about ‘community part-
ners’ and ‘people who make a better Australia’ (https://www.nab.
com.au/). Here, the media portrayal serves to background (if not bury)
the more sinister dimensions of banking uncovered in the Royal Commis-
sion Inquiry. The contrast between the media portrayal and the inquiry
findings could not be more stark. Their relation is not merely one of
contradiction, perhaps, but also one of cancellation: smiles and domestic
happiness are made to dominate over disconcerting legal facts. (A closer
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 3

look at the NAB website page reveals a pervasive dull grey and author-
itarian font on the left-hand side of the image1 with the kitchen scene
squashed into the right-hand side of the picture, an awkward distance
between the man and the woman, dour black and grey jumpers and a
tense and trite symbolisation of ‘togetherness’. It’s not all good, yet.)
Organisations will portray their operations and aims as ethical and
professional, and as upholding these standards for everyone who works
in them and with them. Only in some circumstances will organisations
subject conflicts of interest and the affective dynamics that drive them to
scrutiny and confront them using the standards and principles inscribed
into their codes and policies. Oversight bodies tend to err on the side
of condoning rather than confronting questionable and transgressive
practices (The New Yorker, 2019). Thus, the Australian Securities and
Investments Commission (ASIC), a government body called into being
to monitor banking and finance industries, was found to have condoned
unacceptable banking and insurance practices and to have ignored a large
number of consumer complaints over several years (Hayne, 2019).
The Royal Commission into the Australian Banking Industry was
pushed through parliament against the will of the (then Turnbull-liberal)
government in power, thanks to the opposition party teaming up with
independent members of parliament. The Commission’s findings have
stunned even those who were convinced that there was a need for an
inquiry into banking practices.

Child Sexual Abuse

In 2017, two years before the Royal Commission into the Australian
Banking and Insurance Industry, Australia conducted the Royal Inquiry
into Institutions’ Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. The focus of this inquiry
was on sexual abuse acts committed by institutions’ (staff) members,
on protection given to these people by other people employed by the
institution, and on the general culture within these institutions towards
accountability for illegal behaviour: “The Royal Commission into Insti-
tutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse was established in response
to allegations of sexual abuse of children in institutional contexts that

1 In western forms of visual depiction, the left-hand side of the visual tends to portray
what is or was (the ‘given’), whereas the right-hand side portrays what will be or should
be (the ‘new’) (Kress & van Leeuwen, 1996).
4 R. IEDEMA

had been emerging in Australia for many years” (Royal Commission into
Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017). The reference to
‘many years’ may remind the reader that this inquiry followed on from
the 1997 Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal
and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families (‘Bringing them
home’) which outlined allegations of institutional sexual abuse of Aborig-
inal and Torres Strait Islander children (Wilson, 1997), a 2004 inquiry
whose report was titled Forgotten Australians: A report on Australians
who experienced institutional or out-of -home care as children, and a 2005
inquiry whose report was titled Protecting vulnerable children: A national
challenge.
Collectively, these reports make clear that child abuse in Australia was
and perhaps still is institutionalised. It took decades and decades for the
nation to confront this systemic destruction of children and take on the
pervasive mutual protection by and of perpetrators high up in these (often
prominent) institutions. The latest and most widely reported conviction
to come out of these inquiries was that of Cardinal George Pell in 2018
for acts committed several years earlier. At the time of his conviction, Pell
was officially employed at the Vatican. The Vatican.
The 2017 report’s Executive Summary starts with a section titled “A
National Tragedy”:

Tens of thousands of children have been sexually abused in many Australian

institutions. We will never know the true number. Whatever the number, it
is a national tragedy, perpetrated over generations within many of our most
trusted institutions. The sexual abuse of children has occurred in almost
every type of institution where children reside or attend for educational,
recreational, sporting, religious or cultural activities. Some institutions have
had multiple abusers who sexually abused multiple children. It is not a case
of a few ‘rotten apples’. Society’s major institutions have seriously failed.
(Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse,
2017)

These reports, put together, detail individuals’ and their organisations’

moral disengagement, or what Bandura and colleagues refer to as dehu-
manisation (Bandura, Caprara, & Zsolnai, 2000). This moral disengage-
ment and dehumanisation took place, and possibly still takes place, in
organisations that we regard as emblematic of society’s highest norms
and standards: churches, schools, sports clubs. This conclusion upends
our commonsense understanding of the sources of crime, injustice and
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 5

dysfunction as emerging from (organised groups of) rather brutish indi-

viduals, from their personality deficits and upbringing deficiencies, lower-
class accents, and generally deviant behaviours. This is a ‘commonsense’
that is consistently endorsed by much of contemporary cinema (Spina,
2017): it is individuals (however well-organised) deviating from the social
norm who are responsible for far-reaching wrongdoing and ruthless
exploitation of others. But the scale of institutionalised dehumanisation
reported in Australia puts paid to such stereotyped portrayals.
True, citizens’ faith in political and commercial institutions has a long
and chequered history (Eatwell & Goodwin, 2018). Yet the notion that
civic institutions may be engaged in systemic wrongdoing, exploitation
and destruction of people challenges all but the most jaundiced. And if
institutionalised dehumanisation is rampant in banking, schooling, reli-
gions and sports, what is the chance that it also permeates institutions
that have not yet been hauled through the wringer of a public enquiry?

Digital Surveillance
Shoshanna Zuboff in her latest book The age of surveillance capitalism
(Zuboff, 2019) describes the exploitation of ordinary citizens by big
data companies such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These
companies exploit what Zuboff calls people’s ‘behavioural surplus’: the
human features and conducts made available to these companies for
analysis and algorithmic computation through people’s use of phones,
search engines, social media and related technologies (Zuboff, 2019).
Zuboff likens this digitised data surveillance and extraction trend to early
twentieth-century totalitarianism. She warns us against its ultimate effect:
the hive, where humans are ruled by dysfunctional organisations who have
assumed full control of human nature and human future, and subjected
these to their capitalist priorities under the aegis of anodyne claims about
‘connecting people to friends and information’.
Zuboff’s verdict on the technologification and datafication of everyday
life is scathing. It is not OK, she writes, “to have our best instincts for
connection, empathy and information exploited by a draconian quid pro
quo that holds these goods hostage to a pervasive strip search of our lives.
It is not OK for every move, emotion, utterance, and desire to be cata-
logued, manipulated, and then used to surreptitiously herd us through
the future tense for the sake of someone else’s profit” (Zuboff, 2019: loc
6 R. IEDEMA

9404). Zuboff’s 800-page book exposes the dehumanisation of organ-

isations whose big data operations extract from us ‘our human nature’
and deny us our future by seeking to narrow the window that looks
out on existential uncertainty and complexity. Seething with anger at the
unconscious practices she uncovered through years of research into their
practices, Zuboff compares those running Google, Facebook, Twitter and
so forth to early twentieth-century totalitarian dictators such as Stalin,
because for them too there were no limits to what they did to people to
further their power and interests. While not routinely abusing or killing
people, she claims that contemporary data organisations are in the busi-
ness of extracting humanness for capitalisation, and thereby creating a
‘division of learning’ that will yield immeasurable power over the future
and human nature to data owners. It will relegate the larger and poorer
part of humanity into increasingly automatised and datafied subjugation.

Academic Misconduct
The above accounts shine a light on how perversity may become deeply
institutionalised, officially sanctioned, and widely protected, even by
people outside the organisation in question. Misconduct is no longer the
preserve of the lone wolf. It colonises a whole ecology of willing players
and enabling resources. It is less particular individuals than that whole
ecology of transgression and subjection that defeats those at the receiving
end, even before they are pushed so hard that they might think of chal-
lenging it. If the accounts above describe extremes of institutionalised
wrongdoing, there are also all kinds of rather less visible transgression
that equally affect people’s lives and well-being. Academia is one such
site: one where learned subtlety manifests not just in elegant conclusions
and powerful discoveries, but also in advanced forms of wrongdoing and
harm.
Academia is in some respects like the church: an institution whose lofty
function and altruistic aims make it near enough impossible for a person
to contemplate its involvement in institutionalised wrongdoing and harm.
There are signs however that institutionalised dehumanisation in academia
may be more prevalent than is commonly known or admitted. Consider
this recent article published in The Guardian in 2019:
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 7

“UK universities pay out £90 m on staff ‘gagging orders’ in

past two years: Fears that confidentiality clauses are being used
to silence victims of misconduct”
“UK universities have spent nearly £90m on payoffs to staff that
come with “gagging orders” in two years, raising fears that victims
of misconduct at higher education institutions are being silenced.
As many as 4,000 settlements, some of which are thought to
relate to allegations of bullying, discrimination and sexual miscon-
duct, have been made with non-disclosure agreements (NDAs)
attached since 2017.
The figures, uncovered by the BBC, have prompted allega-
tions that universities are deliberately using gagging orders to stop
grievances becoming public. Dozens of academics told the corpo-
ration they were made to sign NDAs after being “harassed” out of
their jobs following the raising of complaints” (Murphy, 2019).

The reporter of the article goes on to note that “It is not clear how
many of the payouts relate to allegations of bullying, harassment or
sexual misconduct as many of the institutions were unable to disclose
why the NDAs were signed” (Murphy, 2019). We thus do not have a
view of the actual scale of wrongdoing in academia. To investigate this
lack of insight into institutionalised wrongdoing in academia, I wrote a
research grant in 2014 which aimed to explore academics’ experiences
with academic misconduct and universities’ handling of that misconduct.
My focus was not principally on sexual harassment and bullying but on
academic misconduct per se: plagiarism and falsifying of track records.
I was particularly interested in what Garfinkel called ‘degradation cere-
monies’ (Garfinkel, 1956): the subtler forms of ‘scientific’ intimidation
(the practices of belittling and/or marginalising others’ work), and ‘sci-
entific’ appropriation (the practice of not citing those who should be
cited and crediting others or oneself instead). To inject this grant with
additional muscle, I sought involvement from national academies, the
overarching national body representing universities, and from my own
university’s senior leadership. All declined. I binned the proposal, having
concluded that academia’s Lance Armstrong2 moment was yet to come.

2 Lance Armstrong won the Tour de France 7 times. He was suspected of using
performance-enhancing drugs for much of his career, but denied this all through his
8 R. IEDEMA

Research Integrity
People’s views about what is appropriate research rarely align, but you
would think that research activity generally and more or less adheres to
the few ground rules that typify the scientific vocation: honesty, respect,
accuracy, openness and precision. These ground rules apply across the
board, whatever science you practise, and whether you’re interested
in history, linguistics, psychology, engineering, medicine, accounting,
biochemistry or dentistry. People engage in research on the assumption
that colleagues will not move goalposts past the wrong side of these
academic ground rules. Generally, people engaged in academic research
are so busy thinking of research ideas, writing proposals, managing
projects and people, analysing and interpreting data, writing up research
and thinking of the next proposal, and so many of these things have to
run the gauntlet of colleague-scrutiny, that one would assume spending
time on finding out how to stretch these values and bend the rules would
seem like a waste of time at best and an absolute folly at worst.
But what if research integrity is not at all as self-evident as is gener-
ally assumed among researchers (Anderson, Shaw, Steneck, Konkle, &
Kamata, 2013)? What if the pressures on academics are producing off-
limits behaviours to meet their faculties’ expectations of 10 journal articles
and around the equivalent of their academic salary in income every year
(Hil, 2012)? In the light of the rising floor of these expectations being
about to hit the sinking ceiling of limited and more thinly spread funding
and shrinking career opportunities, should we not ask questions about
whether people’s research integrity might be tested, or perhaps even
compromised at times? Hil finds that “performance checkers now run
universities, meaning that the ever-diminishing chances of doing worth-
while research have been increasingly sidelined by the drudgery of having
to make money” (Hil, 2012: 132). This situation raises questions, surely,
about how long it will be until we arrive at the point now attained
by competitive sport, where pressure and ‘performance enhancement’
produced not just victories and glory, but also drug testing and athletes’

career and during an investigation mounted against him by the international doping
agency USADA. A 2012 USADA arbitration that established he had engaged in doping
ended Armstrong’s cycling career. He never contested the arbitration while continuing to
deny ever using drugs. Then, in a 2013 Oprah Winfrey interview, he confessed to always
having used doping because ‘he was a guy who wanted and expected to get everything’
(Macur, 2014).
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 9

fall from grace. Lance Armstrong’s fall took down much more than just
the man himself, to the point where now we suspect many athletes to
partake in doping when we hear of their extraordinary achievements and
frequent early deaths.
Like competitive sport, academic research has witnessed transgressions
of the code of research integrity and professional conduct, but these
academic transgressions have not yet reached public consciousness beyond
attention being drawn to the odd ‘bad apple’ (Faneli, 2009). Strategically,
academic research organisations where these ‘bad apples’ are employed
have not yet had to recuse themselves from the investigation of university-
internal academic misconduct given the risk of conflict of interest. At
present, it is not uncommon for notifiers of academic misconduct to be
sacrificed (Murphy, 2019), no amount of carefully crafted whistle-blower
protection and legislation notwithstanding (Lewis, Brown, & Moberley,
2014).
No doubt due to notifications of research irregularities via channels
other than those internal to universities, journal article retractions and
research ethics transgressions are on the rise globally (Corbyn, 2009,
August 20). To be sure, this rise in notifications and retractions has
motivated researchers from around the world to meet and negotiate
principles for governing research practice and conducting misconduct
investigations (e.g. http://wcri2019.org/). Individual nations now also
have their own agencies for monitoring research integrity: the US Office
for Research Integrity, the Australian Research Integrity Committee,
the Danish Committee on Scientific Dishonesty and the UK Research
Integrity Office. Few cases tend to be reported however to these agencies
(Anderson et al., 2013).
If research inaccuracy and falsification cases are reported, it is through
the public media targeting scandals (Sovacool, 2008). Only isolated
reports have appeared with evidence that research inaccuracy and falsi-
fication constitute a rather more pervasive or systemic problem (van
Kolfschooten, 2012). This situation where suspicion cannot be converted
into investigation let alone confirmation may be due to the fact that a clear
conflict of interest attaches to universities (where the researchers accused
of misconduct are employed) investigating internal misconduct. Not least,
this conflict is evident from the time it takes them to act on the notifica-
tions in question, and the manner in which such cases are ‘resolved’ (van
Kolfschooten, 2012). It is not in universities’ interest to advertise staff
transgressions to the world as this reflects negatively on the institution
10 R. IEDEMA

and the departments involved. This situation renders the whistle-blower

doubly vulnerable, as she/he is exposed not just to those who are the
subject of and may challenge the grounds of a misconduct accusation,
but they are also exposed to the power (and wrath) of those in charge of
upholding the university’s reputation and standing in the public eye.

Clinical Incidents
This ‘academic’ tension between honesty and standing is apparent also in
another sphere of life: health care—yet another domain not commonly
associated with but frequently involved in inconceivable transgressions
against patients and families.
During the 1970s, Ivan Illich published a series of diatribes against
what he regarded as the institutionalisation of immorality. He targeted
the institutions of schooling (Illich, 1970) and medicine (Illich, 1976)
among others, which he saw as ‘conspiracies against the laity’ (Shaw,
1906). With regard to medicine, Illich wrote in the opening paragraph
of Medical Nemesis, that medical practice “has become a major threat
to health” (Illich, 1976: 1). Illich coined the term ‘iatrogenic’ to refer
to harm caused by or during medical intervention. Since then, the term
‘iatrogenic’ has been overtaken by more anglophone but no less sterile
expressions to refer to healthcare-caused harm, including ‘clinical inci-
dents’, ‘adverse events’, ‘sentinel events’, and, most non-descriptive of
all: ‘never events’.3
How often do clinical incidents happen, and how serious are they?
From April to June 2018 (3 months), England-based services (or at
least those clinical practitioners willing and prepared to do so) reported
a total of over 500,000 incidents into the NHS’s National Reporting
& Learning System (NRLS). From October 2016 to September 2017
(12 months), the NRLS clocked 434,562 incidents that caused a low level
of harm (according to the reporting clinicians), 52,536 incidents causing
moderate harm, 5,525 incidents causing severe harm and 4,449 incidents

3 An incident that through luck or insight missed harming a patient is referred to as a

‘near miss’. It is not called a ‘near hit’, even though what would have been ‘near’ (and
for that reason a critical consideration) was the hitting or harming of the patient. To say
that an incident almost missed a patient does not make sense: the incident either misses
the patient; it misses them by this much, or it does not miss them. You can say though
that you almost missed the bus but that you just caught it in time. If you say the bus
almost missed me, you were expecting it to notice you or run you over.
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 11

that resulted in the death of the patient (NHS Improvement, 2019).

These figures are high, but need to read in the context of the almost
24 million patients who attend NHS England Accident & Emergency
services every 12 month period (in this case, 2017–2018).4
Incident reporting was made mandatory in health care following
several high-level scandals and high-profile inquiries revealing the ecolog-
ical (i.e. networked, widespread) nature of harm perpetrated on and kept
secret from patients (Hindle, Braithwaite, Travaglia, & Iedema, 2005).
In the early 1990 s, a whistle-blower (Stephen Bolsin) reported what he
regarded as sub-standard heart surgery at the UK’s Bristol Royal Infir-
mary (Bolsin, 1998): babies were dying at higher rates than elsewhere in
the UK and the world. It took several years for Bolsin’s complaint to be
investigated by the hospital and by the UK’s General Medical Council
(GMC), and this occurred only after Bolsin finally went to the public
media because he was met with indifference and even hostility from his
hospital’s management and from the GMC (Bolsin, 1998). It took several
more years for an Inquiry to investigate Bolsin’s complaint and publish
protracted responses to it. Published in 2001, ten years after Bolsin raised
the alarm, the inquiry report stated:

The NHS is still failing to learn from the things that go wrong and has no
system to put this right. This must change. Even today, it is not possible
to say, categorically, that events similar to those which happened at Bristol
could not happen again in the UK—indeed, are not happening at this
moment. (Kennedy, 2001)

I became interested in healthcare organisational responses to internal

problems and wrongs during my study of ‘clinical incidents’: care gone
wrong for patients, either because of individual clinicians’ errors, persis-
tent service problems setting clinicians up to fail, equipment failures,
management cutbacks, or just ‘snafus’.5 Since 2007, we have interviewed
hundreds of clinicians and patients involved in ‘unexpected events and
outcomes’ (Iedema, 2018; Iedema et al., 2008). Over the years, we found
that healthcare organisations that openly acknowledge care failures to the
patients that were harmed as a result are as yet rare (Iedema & Allen,

4 https://digital.nhs.uk/data-and-information/publications/statistical/hospital-acc
ident--emergency-activity/2017-18.
5 Snafu: ‘situation normal – all fucked up’.
12 R. IEDEMA

2012). Those managers and clinicians who in charge of these patients’

care and that did speak openly about incidents and harm had to put aside
reputational concerns, manage internal politics and allegiance networks,
grit their teeth in the face of legal risks and payout fears, and confront
uncertainty about the emotional fall-out following their admission of
responsibility. They were in the minority however (Iedema et al., 2011).
Openness to patients about care gone wrong has become increas-
ingly prominent in policy in recent years (National Patient Safety Agency,
2009). The UK Government signed off on the Duty of Candour Act
in 2015 which renders non-disclosure of internal failures to patients
resulting in their harm an offence. One important reason for govern-
ments and insurers to be talking about honesty and incident disclosure
to patients about health service-caused harm is that openness about fail-
ures reduces these patients’ inclination to sue (Berlinger, 2003): patients
tend to forgive clinicians and services if they feel they have been treated
respectfully (Iedema & Allen, 2012).
Incident disclosure is the practice of the service managers and/or the
clinicians telling the patients openly what went wrong. Complicating the
practice of incident disclosure however is that patients often disagree
with healthcare professionals about what warrants being disclosed as
failure or wrongdoing (Gallagher, 2009). If the failure or wrongdoing
is acknowledged, this is often done in ways that those harmed experience
as underestimating the impact and severity of the harm or the wrong
(Iedema et al., 2008), few of those who experience incidents are openly
told what happened (Iedema et al., 2011), and still fewer are invited to
come to an agreement with the service about (or ‘co-construct a perspec-
tive on’) what went wrong (Iedema & Allen, 2012). Adding insult to
injury, the emotional cost of not just the clinical incidents themselves,
but of their non-disclosure, has now been found to be inordinately high
(Bell et al., 2018; Iedema, 2018).

Loss of World
Let me change gears. I want to switch from discussing dysfunctional and
transgressive organisations to articulating what it feels like to become
caught up in organisational dysfunctionality and transgression. But I don’t
simply want to ask, What happens to people who get caught in the cross-
fire between upholding rules and offending powerful factions? Or, What
happens to people who insist on “speaking truth to power” (Wildawsky,
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 13

1979)? Rather, I want to ask, What defines the interests of those who
participate in the kinds of conflicts and transgression discussed above?
And, on a broader front, Do moral judgements of (dys)functionality and
attributions of transgression still apply given our contemporary circum-
stances have mutated out of “an explosion of complexity in the 20th
century” and a vanishing “capacity of hierarchy [and authority] to simplify
things” (de Vulpian, 2008: 14)? At the same time, I want to ask, To what
extent do these contemporary circumstances call for an alternative logic,
a different relatio-rationality, one that I now feel only becomes feasible
and tangible, paradoxically, through a ‘loss of world’ and a ‘becoming
undone’, on the part of those harmed (Grosz, 2011)?
Let me acknowledge first off that, having researched incident
(non)disclosure in health care for several years, I had thought that
services’ reluctance to disclose incidents was an effect that grew from
excessive power, moral weakness, complicitness, small-minded priorities
and negative expectations about the fall-out of transparency, inclusion and
openness. All these things were very easy to project onto both others and
The Other (i.e. the arrogant nurse; the disinterested doctor; the squirmy
manager). It was only when I became aware of the (non)disclosure of an
incident in my own organisation that I was confronted with a much more
complicated array of motivations for protecting and continuing ‘busi-
ness as is’ and defeating its challengers. These motivations defined and
animated a whole ecology of being, an impalpable, surreptitious network
of relationships, subtly-negotiated and invisibly-maintained commitments,
unquantifiable acts and untraceable decisions. Collectively, these revealed,
through their targeted destruction of what came in their path, their
unfathomable operations, their obduracy, their expediency.

2012: John discovers that a senior colleague (SC from here on)
fudged their track record to obtain project funding. Not once: more
than once. Not in a minor way. A major way. Books that didn’t exist.
Names that were changed around on books and articles to ensure
SC’s name came first and thus ‘looked better on paper’.
He reports this to management and hands over evidence of grant
proposals that were compromised by falsification. He thinks that for
him this is the end of the matter. He’s done his bit, now the rest
will be automatic. But what happens next is anything but automatic.
14 R. IEDEMA

Management informs John that they have invited SC to respond

to the charges of falsifying their track record. Hmmm. Ok. Surely
the answer can’t be much other than ‘sorry, my mistake’, or ‘won’t
happen again’, or even ‘I’m so ashamed’. But no. The SC’s answer,
besides a flat denial and tortuous justification, becomes an all-out
attack on John.
SC proceeds to mobilise a whole network of allies through circu-
lating rumours and counter claims. SC turns out to have surprisingly
easy access to the university’s upper management (UM from here
on, which refers to about 3 or 4 people). SC persuades UM that it
is not he, but John who is guilty of misconduct; namely, bullying,
intimidating staff, even, SC alleges, him attempting to break into
SC’s office.
While this is going on, other strange things start to happen.
John finds his car tires punctured, twice and in quick succession,
by nails inserted at straight angles into the rubber, in the office
carpark (where the SC also parks their car). Posters advertising
John’s latest book launch disappear from the university’s corridors
and walls. Charts appear the size of walls advertising SC’s claimed
international network with photos of ‘colleagues’ dotted around on
a map of the world, as if to advertise their legitimacy, importance
and trustworthiness.
John initially rejects all these developments as just signs of
distress, but SC’s strategy gains momentum. Bolstered by multiple
statements from friends (never revealed or shown to John, it should
be said; always just hinted at by UM), an alternative problem to that
of academic track record falsification begins to crystallise in UM’s
language: not SC but John has a behaviour problem.
John’s demands for closer scrutiny of academics’ approach to
compiling and submitting track records to funding agencies are seen
as evidence of misguided concern and as meddling with a domain
that falls under UM’s remit. John’s impassioned defence of academic
integrity is now construed as a ‘worrying obsession’. John now
understands that UM’s diffidence and reluctance to report back to
him about how they’ve investigated the matter means they have
chosen SC’s side. Other colleagues—the few he trusted with this
matter—begin to show reluctance to engage with John’s dilemma,
let alone share in his outrage and give him support. How could he
get them to listen? The whole place was now lost to reason. It was
now becoming monstrous.
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 15

The Monstrous
Always able to become different from itself, life has always been
monstrous. For this reason, Tarde saw “the normal” as “the degree zero
of monstrosity” (cited in Osborne, 2016: 195). Efforts to replicate the
normal as status quo in the face of monstrosity are equally monstrous.
In “seeking to fight evil, do good and protect the moral order, you
disrupt the boundaries of the very same moral order that you seek to
protect”, and “[f]ighting evil, you enact the very violence that makes
you evil” (Thanem, 2011: 4). We have all “been drawn into a sort
of complicity with … the monstrous” (Sloterdijk, 2016: 237). Think
of worldwide industrialisation and environmental destruction (Latour,
2018) or the datafication of human sociality (Zuboff, 2019) which are
effecting a “redistribution of subjectivity among humans and things”
(Sloterdijk, 2016: 243). At the levels of evolution, organisation and
sociation, everyone of us now participates in monstrous forms of life.

To be modern, one must be touched by the awareness that, beside the

inevitable fact of being a witness, one has been drawn into a sort of
complicity with the newer form of the monstrous. If one asks a modern
person, ‘Where were you at the time of the crime?’ the answer is: ‘I
was at the scene of the crime’—that is to say, within that totality of the
monstrous which, as a complex of modern criminal circumstances, encom-
passes its accomplices and accessories. Modernity means dispensing with
the possibility of having an alibi. (Sloterdijk, 2016: 237)

Modernity “transposes the monstrous into everyday life” (Duclos, 2018:

50). This growth of the monstrous in daily practices, presences and
experiences happen not so much because our community-protecting or
co-immunological practices and resources are weakening or breaking
down allowing monstrous alterity to take over. Monstrous modernity is
not merely about technology, violence, deviation, and permissiveness, nor
about a loss of hierarchy and authority. Instead, it is about complexity
that increasingly permeates modern life through its relentless pursuit of
change and novelty: “the monstrous rises to the surface as transformative
and differentiating unveiling” (Duclos, 2018: 51).
16 R. IEDEMA

Over a period of two to three years, John’s institution grew from

a nurturing cocoon into a place filled with monstrosities. He soon
realised he was not just up against SC, but a whole bunch of people,
including managers and upper managers, human resource people,
and SC-allies who didn’t even work in the place but somehow were
given a say in the matter. Then there were the colleagues who previ-
ously wanted a piece of him and who now turned into a wall of
fence-sitters, cold-shoulderers, and heads-in-the-sand.
People who had been friendly to him in the past now acted
strangely and stand-off-ish. This made him wonder if there was a
bandwidth of disparaging gossip somewhere he was unable to pick
up. But even if there was such a thing, he had no idea about where
and how to begin to tune into it.
Taking on academic falsification seemed such an obvious, natural,
and easy thing to do from a position of status and strength. But now
this mess began to reveal capacities and forces that he had never had
to contend with, never even considered possible. The whole thing
was turning monstrous. By the time he came to see that he was
entangled in this mess much more deeply than he’d ever realised,
his academic cocoon had fully disintegrated.

A 1940 article on organised criminality posits a link between institu-

tionalised misconduct and the close relationships among perpetrators.
Sutherland saw institutional misconduct as “determined largely by the
comparative frequency and intimacy” of contact among perpetrators
amidst communities that are “not organised solidly against” misconduct
(Sutherland, 1940: 11). Sutherland’s work ensured institutional miscon-
duct was put on the agenda under the label of ‘white-collar crime’
(Simpson, 2019), and his ‘intimacy of contact’ thesis is echoed in the
‘social cocoon’ metaphor that was coined in this context some 40 years
later. The image of the ‘social cocoon’ captures in graphic form the
monstrous affordances of close bonding if harnessed to enact and protect
institutionalised misconduct (Ashforth & Anand, 2016; Greil & Rudy,
1984).
These two notions—monstrosity, cocoon—both carry an affective
charge. They both talk about shelter: the one destroys shelter and the
other ensures shelter. Monstrosity carries a negative affective charge;
 1 TRANSGRESSIONS 17

cocooning a positive one. Shelter means positive affect; the destruction

of shelter can be monstrous.
Affect has been increasingly foregrounded in twenty-first-century theo-
rising, perhaps as an attempt to re-enchant our world with monsters and
castles, and to rescue life from the relentless urge to critique, analyse,
produce evidence. The interest in affect perhaps counters a rising sense of
anomie by posing questions (again) that science has eschewed for decades:

How was it that certain fashions, fads and trends seemed to spread
throughout populations with a rapidity that seemed to defy the action of
logic or rationality? How did certain fears and forms of hysteria, mania
and emotion spread such that they appeared to bypass rationality and
reason? What caused individuals in groups to behave in ways that might
perplex, bemuse or undermine their sense of themselves as subjects in other
contexts? What enabled certain individuals to command the obedience,
compliance, love and adoration of others, such that they would be exalted
and revered as charismatic leaders? (Blackman, 2013: 23)

Affect does not submit to straightforward data gathering and to pre-

determined scientific procedure. Affect eludes and transgresses. From
the mid-1990s on, affect theory started to bring some of these tropes
together (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Ticineto-Clough, 2008). It defined
affect as “becomings that go beyond those [who] live through them”
(Smith, 1998: xxx). But affect as a concept may refer to different
phenomena. On the one hand, it concerns our “ability to affect and
be affected” (Massumi, 1987: xvi), which is derived from Spinoza’s
term affectus . Massumi, one of the original proponents of affect theory,
saw this aspect of affect as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to
the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and
implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act”
(Massumi, 1987: xvi). On the other hand, affect manifests as affec-
tion (Spinoza’s affectio) or “each such state considered as an encounter
between the affected body and a second, affecting, body (with body
taken in its broadest possible sense to include “mental” or ideal bodies)”
(Massumi, 1987: xvi).6 Whereas conventional psychology may be said to
have focused on individuals’ states of affection (joy, confidence; anxiety,

6 Steinberg cautions that Spinoza himself was “not always especially careful to distinguish
‘affects’ from ‘affections’” (Steinberg, 2018: loc 37).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 It is unnecessary to review in detail the Revolution. Let us pass to
the social position of the two Georges in after-life.
On the 2d of August, 1786, as the king was alighting from his
carriage at the gate of St. James, an attempt was made on his life by
a woman named Margaret Nicholson, who, under pretense of
presenting a petition, endeavored to stab him with a knife which was
concealed in the paper. The weapon was an old one, and so rusty
that, on striking the vest of the king, it bent double, and thus
preserved his life. On the 29th of October, 1795, whilst his majesty
was proceeding to the House of Lords, a ball passed through both
windows of the carriage. On his return to St. James the mob threw
stones into the carriage, several of which struck the king, and one
lodged in the cuff of his coat. The state carriage was completely
demolished by the mob. But it was on the 15th of May, 1800, that
George the Third made his narrowest escapes. In the morning of
that day, whilst attending the field exercise of a battalion of guards,
one of the soldiers loaded his piece with a bullet and discharged it at
the king. The ball fortunately missed its aim, and lodged in the thigh
of a gentleman who was standing in the rear. In the evening of the
same day a more alarming circumstance occurred at the Drury Lane
Theater. At the moment when the king entered the royal box, a man
in the pit, on the right-hand side of the orchestra, suddenly stood up
and discharged a large horse-pistol at him. The hand of the would-be
assassin was thrown up by a by-stander, and the ball entered the
box just above the head of the king.
Such were the public manifestations of affection for this royal
tyrant. He was finally attacked by an enemy that could not be
thwarted, and on the 20th of December, 1810, he became a
confirmed lunatic. In this dreadful condition he lingered until January,
1820, when he died, having been the most unpopular, unwise and
obstinate sovereign that ever disgraced the English throne. He was
forgotten as soon as life left his body, and was hurriedly buried with
that empty pomp which but too often attends a despot to the grave.
The mind, in passing from the unhonored grave of the prince to
the last resting-place of the peasant boy, leaps from a kingdom of
darkness to one of light.
 Let us now return to the career of Washington. Throughout the
Revolutionary War he carried in his hand, like Atropos, the destinies
of millions; he bore on his shoulders, like Atlas, the weight of a world.
It is unnecessary to follow him throughout his subsequent career.
Honored again and again by the people of the land he had
redeemed from thraldom, he has taken his place in death by the side
of the wisest and best of the world’s benefactors. Assassins did not
unglory him in life, nor has oblivion drawn her mantle over him in
death. The names of his great battlefields have become nursery
words, and his principles have imbedded themselves forever in the
national character. Every pulsation of our hearts beats true to his
memory. His mementoes are everywhere around and about us.
Distant as we are from the green fields of his native Westmoreland,
the circle of his renown has spread far beyond our borders. In climes
where the torch of science was never kindled; on shores still buried
in primeval bloom; amongst barbarians where the face of liberty was
never seen, the Christian missionary of America, roused perhaps
from his holy duties by the distant echo of the national salute, this
day thundering amidst the billows of every sea, or dazzled by the
gleam of his country’s banner, this day floating in every wind of
heaven, pauses over his task as a Christian, and whilst memory
kindles in his bosom the fires of patriotism, pronounces in the ear of
the enslaved pagan the venerated name of Washington.
Wherever tyranny shall lift its Medusan head, wherever treason
shall plot its hellish schemes, wherever disunion shall unfurl its
tattered ensign, there, oh there, sow his deeds in the hearts of
patriots and republicans. For from these there shall spring, as from
the dragon’s teeth sown by Cadmus of old on the plains of Heber,
vast armies of invincible heroes, sworn upon the altar and tomb at
Mount Vernon, to live as freemen, or as such to die!

THE LESSONS OF THE TRAGEDY

(The Murder of President McKinley)
By David Starr Jordan
 We meet to-day under the sway of a number of different emotions.
We would express our sorrow at the untimely death of a good man.
We would show our regret that our nation has lost the Chief
Magistrate of its choice. We would express our sympathy with the
gentle woman who has been suddenly bereft of the kindest and most
considerate of husbands. We are filled with shame that in our
Republic, the land where all men are free and equal wherever they
behave themselves as men, the land which has no rulers save the
public servants of its own choosing, a deed like this should be
possible. We would express our detestation of that kind of political
and social agitation which finds no method of working reform save
through intimidation and killing. We would wish to find the true
lessons of this event and would not let even the least of them fall on
our ears unheeded.
And one plain lesson in this: Under democracy all violence is
treason. Whosoever throws a stone at a scab teamster, whosoever
fires a shot at the President of the United States, is an enemy of the
Republic. He is guilty of high treason in his heart, and treason in
thought works itself out in lawlessness of action.
The central fact of all democracy is agreement with law. It is our
law; we have made it. If it is wrong we can change it, but the
compact of democracy is that we change it in peace. “The sole
source of power under God is the consent of the governed.” This
was written by Cromwell across the statute books of Parliament. This
our fathers wrote in other words in our own Constitution. The will of
the people is the sole source of any statute you or I may be called on
to obey. It is the decree of no army, the dictum of no president. It is
the work of no aristocracy; not of blood nor of wealth. It is simply our
own understanding that we have to do right, shall behave justly, shall
live and let our neighbor live. If our law is tyrannous, it is our
ignorance which has made it so. Let it pinch a little and we shall find
out what hurts us. Then it will be time to change. Laws are made
through the ballot, and through the ballot we can unmake them.
There is no other honest way, no other way that is safe, and no other
way that is effective. To break the peace is to invite tyranny.
Lawlessness is the expression of weakness, of ignorance, of
unpatriotism. If tyranny provokes anarchy, so does anarchy
necessitate tyranny. Confusion brings the man on horseback. It was
to keep away both anarchy and tyranny that the public school was
established in America.
Three times has our nation been called upon to pass into the
shadow of humiliation, and each time in the past it has learned its
severe lesson. When Lincoln fell, slavery perished. To the American
of to-day human slavery in a land of civilization is almost an
impossible conception, yet many of us who think ourselves still
young can remember when half of this land held other men in
bondage and the dearest hope of freedom was that such things
should not go on forever. I can remember when we looked forward to
the time when “at least the present form of slavery should be no
more.” For democracy and slavery could not subsist together. The
Union could not stand—half slave, half free.
The last words of Garfield were these: Strangulatus pro Republica.
(Slain for the Republic.) The feudal tyranny of the spoils system
which had made republican administration a farce, has not had,
since Garfield’s time, a public defender. It has not vanished from our
politics, but its place is where it belongs—among the petty wrongs of
maladministration.
Again a president is slain for the Republic—and the lesson is the
homely one of peace and order, patience and justice, respect for
ourselves through respect for the law, for public welfare, and for
public right.
For this country is passing through a time of storm and stress, a
flurry of lawless sensationalism. The irresponsible journalism, the
industrial wars, the display of hastily-gotten wealth, the grasping
monopoly, the walking delegate, the vulgar cartoon, the foul-
mouthed agitator, the sympathetic strike, the unsympathetic lockout,
are all symptoms of a single disease—the loss of patriotism, the
decay of the sense of justice. As in other cases, the symptoms feed
the disease, as well as indicate it. The deed of violence breeds more
deeds of violence; anarchy provokes hysteria, and hysteria makes
anarchy. The unfounded scandal sets a hundred tongues to
wagging, and the seepage from the gutter reaches a thousand
homes.
The journal for the weak-minded and debased makes heroes of
those of its class who carry folly over into crime. The half-crazy
egotist imagines himself a regicide, and his neighbor with the clean
shirt is his oppressor and therefore his natural victim. Usually his
heart fails him, and his madness spends itself in foul words.
Sometimes it does not, and the world stands aghast. But it is not
alone against the Chief Magistrate that these thoughts and deeds
are directed. There are usually others within closer range. There is
scarcely a man in our country, prominent in any way, statesman,
banker, merchant, railway manager, clergyman, teacher even, that
has not, somewhere, his would-be Nemesis, some lunatic, with a
sensational newspaper and a pistol, prepared to take his life.
The gospel of discontent has no place within our Republic. It is
true, as has often been said, that discontent is the cause of human
progress. It is truer still, as Mr. John P. Irish has lately pointed out,
that discontent may be good or bad, according to its relation to the
individual man. There is a noble discontent which a man turns
against himself. It leads the man who fails to examine his own
weaknesses, to make the needed repairs in himself, then to take up
the struggle again. There is a cowardly discontent which leads a
man to blame all failure on his prosperous neighbor or on society at
large, as if a social system existed apart from the men who make it.
This is the sort of discontent to which the agitator appeals, that finds
its stimulus in sensational journalism. It is that which feeds the frenzy
of the assassin who would work revenge on society by destroying its
accepted head.
It is not theoretical anarchism or socialism or any other “ism” which
is responsible for this. Many of the gentlest spirits in the world today
call themselves anarchists, because they look forward to the time
when personal meekness shall take the place of all statutes. The
gentle anarchism of the optimistic philosopher is not that which
confronts us to-day. It is the anarchy of destruction, the hatred of
class for class; a hatred that rests only on distorted imagination, for,
after all is said, there are no classes in America. It is the hatred
imported from the Old World, excited by walking delegates whose
purpose it is to carry a torch through society; a hatred fanned by
agitators of whatever sort, unpractical dreamers or conscienceless
scoundrels, exploited in the newspapers, abetted by so-called high
society with its display of shoddy and greed, and intensified by the
cold, hard selfishness that underlies the power of the trust. All these
people, monopolists, social leaders, walking delegates, agitators,
sensationalists, dreamers, are alien to our ways, outside the scope
of our democracy, and enemies to good citizenship.
The real Americans, trying to live their lives in their own way,
saving a little of their earnings and turning the rest into education
and enjoyment, have many grievances in these days of grasping
trusts and lawless unions. But of such free Americans our country is
made. They are the people, not the trusts or the unions, nor their
sensational go-betweens. This is their government, and the
government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall
not perish from the earth. This is the people’s President—our
President—who was killed, and it is ours to avenge him.
Not by lynch law on a large or small scale may we do it; not by
anarchy or despotism; not by the destruction of all that call
themselves anarchists, not by abridging freedom of the press nor by
checking freedom of speech. Those who would wreak lawless
vengeance on the anarchists are themselves anarchists and makers
of anarchists.
We have laws enough already without making more for men to
break. Let us get a little closer to the higher law. Let us respect our
own rights and those of our neighbor a little better. Let us cease to
tolerate sensational falsehood about our neighbor, or vulgar abuse of
those in power. If we have bad rulers, let us change them peacefully.
Let us put an end to every form of intimidation, wherever practiced.
The cause that depends upon hurling bricks or epithets, or upon
clubbing teamsters or derailing trains, cannot be a good cause. Even
if originally in the right, the act of violence puts the partisans of such
a cause in the wrong. No freeman ever needs to do such things as
these. For the final meaning of democracy is peace on earth, good-
will towards men. When we stand for justice among ourselves we
can demand justice of the monopolistic trust. When we attack it with
clear vision and cool speech we shall find the problem of
combination for monopoly not greater than any other. And large or
small, there is but one way for us to meet any problem: to choose
wise men, clean men, cool men, the best we can secure through our
method of the ballot, and then to trust the rest in their hands. The
murder of the President has no direct connection with industrial war.
Yet there is this connection, that all war, industrial or other, loosens
the bonds of order, destroys mutual respect and trust, gives
inspiration to anarchy, pushes a foul thought on to a foul word, a foul
word on to a foul deed.
We trust now that the worst has come, the foulest deed has been
committed, that our civil wars may stop, not through the victory of
one side over the other, the trusts or the unions now set off against
each other, but in the victory over both of the American people, of
the great body of men and women who must pay for all, and who are
the real sufferers in every phase of the struggle.
Strangulatus pro Republica—slain for the republic. The lesson is
plain. It is for us to take it into our daily lives. It is the lesson of peace
and good-will, the lesson of manliness and godliness. Let us take it
to ourselves, and our neighbors will take it from us.
All civilized countries are ruled by public opinion. If there be a
lapse in our civic duties, it is due to a lapse in our keenness of vision,
our devotion to justice. This means a weakening of the individual
man, the loss of the man himself in the movements of the mass.
Perhaps the marvelous material development of our age, the
achievements of huge coöperation which science has made
possible, has overshadowed the importance of the individual man. If
so, we have only to reassert ourselves. It is of men, individual men,
clear-thinking, God-fearing, sound-acting men, and of these alone,
that great nations can be made.—From “The Voice of the Scholar,”
by kind permission of author and publishers, Paul Elder & Co., San
Francisco.

WHAT IS TO BE THE DESTINY OF THIS REPUBLIC

 By Judge Story
When we reflect on what has been and what is, how is it possible
not to feel a profound sense of the responsibilities of this republic to
all future ages! What vast motives press upon us for lofty efforts!
What brilliant prospects invite our enthusiasm! What solemn
warnings at once demand our vigilance and moderate our
confidence!
The old world has already revealed to us, in its unsealed books,
the beginning and end of all its marvelous struggles in the cause of
liberty.
Greece! lovely Greece! “the land of scholars and the nurse of
arms,” where sister republics, in fair processions, chanted the praise
of liberty and the good—where and what is she? For two thousand
years the oppressors have bound her to the earth. Her arts are no
more. The last sad relics of her temples are but the barracks of a
ruthless soldiery; the fragments of her columns and her palaces are
in the dust, yet beautiful in ruin. She fell not when the mighty were
upon her. Her sons were united at Thermopylæ and Marathon; and
the tide of her triumph rolled back upon the Hellespont. She was
conquered by her own factions. She fell by the hands of her own
people. The man of Macedonia did not the work of destruction. It
was already done by her own corruptions, banishments, and
dissensions.
Rome! republican Rome! whose eagles glanced in the rising and
setting sun,—where and what is she? The eternal city yet remains,
proud even in her desolation, noble in her decline, venerable in the
majesty of religion, and calm as in the composure of death. The
malaria has traveled in the parts won by the destroyers. More than
eighteen centuries have mourned over the loss of the empire. A
mortal disease was upon her before Cæsar had crossed the
Rubicon; and Brutus did not restore her health by the deep probings
of the senate-chamber. The Goths, and Vandals, and Huns, the
swarms of the north, completed only what was begun at home.
Romans betrayed Rome. The legions were bought and sold, but the
people offered the tribute-money.
 And where are the republics of modern times, which cluster
around immortal Italy? Venice and Genoa exist but in name. The
Alps, indeed, look down upon the brave and peaceful Swiss, in their
native fastnesses; but, the guarantee of their freedom is in their
weakness, and not in their strength. The mountains are not easily
crossed, and the valleys are not easily retained. When the invader
comes, he moves like an avalanche, carrying destruction in his path.
The peasantry sink before him. The country, too, is too poor for
plunder, and too rough for a valuable conquest. Nature presents her
eternal barrier on every side, to check the wantonness of ambition.
And Switzerland remains, with her simple institutions, a military road
to climates scarcely worth a permanent possession, and protected
by the jealousy of her neighbors.
We stand the latest, and, if we fall, probably the last experiment of
self-government by the people. We have begun it under
circumstances of the most auspicious nature. We are in the vigor of
youth. Our growth has never been checked by the oppression of
tyranny. Our constitutions never have been enfeebled by the vice or
the luxuries of the world. Such as we are, we have been from the
beginning, simple, hardy, intelligent, accustomed to self-government
and self-respect. The Atlantic rolls between us and a formidable foe.
Within our own territory, stretching through many degrees of latitude,
we have the choice of many products, and many means of
independence. The government is mild. The press is free. Religion is
free. Knowledge reaches or may reach every home. What fairer
prospects of success could be presented? What means more
adequate to accomplish the sublime end? What more is necessary
than for the people to preserve what they themselves have created?
Already has the age caught the spirit of our institutions. It has
already ascended the Andes, and snuffed the breezes of both
oceans. It has infused itself into the life-blood of Europe, and
warmed the sunny plains of France and the lowlands of Holland. It
has touched the philosophy of the north, and, moving onward to the
south, has opened to Greece the lesson of her better days.
Can it be, that America, under such circumstances, can betray
herself? That she is to be added to the catalogue of republics, the
inscription upon whose ruin is: “They were, but they are not!” Forbid
it, my countrymen: forbid it, Heaven!
I call upon you, fathers, by the shades of your ancestors, by the
dear ashes which repose in this precious soil, by all you are, and all
you hope to be, resist every project of disunion; resist every attempt
to fetter your consciences, or smother your public schools, or
extinguish your system of public instruction.
I call upon you, mothers, by that which never fails in woman, the
love of your offspring, to teach them, as they climb your knees, or
lean on your bosoms, the blessings of liberty. Swear them at the
altar, as with their baptismal vows, to be true to their country, and
never forsake her.
I call upon you, young men, to remember whose sons you are—
whose inheritance you possess. Life can never be too short, which
brings nothing but disgrace and oppression. Death never comes too
soon, if necessary in defense of the liberties of our country.

MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS

(An oration delivered in San Francisco, May 30, 1901.)
By Samuel M. Shortridge
This day is consecrate to the nation’s dead and living soldiers.
Uncovered beside the hallowed graves of those who fought and fell
in the sacred cause of Union and Liberty, a people of brave men and
loyal women stand with hearts oppressed with gratitude, and listen to
the story of their heroes’ deeds and death. We come in thankfulness
—matron and maid, sire and lad—to scatter fragrant flowers on the
honored dust, and for the martyrs who sleep unknown but not
unwept. We come to grasp the hands of the surviving heroes who
responded to their country’s cry of anguish when the temple of liberty
was assailed and her sacred altars desecrated; who endured the
long, weary march, the cruel deprivations of the camp, the fevered
heat of noon and the chilling cold at night; who stormed the frowning
heights where treason was intrenched, and met upon an hundred
fields the brave but misguided hosts that in madness and folly
sought to destroy the edifice dedicated with the prayers and
consecrated by the valor and blood of the patriot fathers; who carried
the tattered but dear flag of their country through fire and flood and
the “valley and shadow of death,” and paused not until it waved
victorious in every state and was respected on every sea. We come
to shed proud and happy tears for those who gladly gave up all for
their imperiled country, in order to preserve the precious fruits of the
Revolutionary struggle and to keep the flag of Washington
triumphant in the sky. We come to welcome and to dower with our
love the loyal and self-sacrificing men who left the plow, the forge,
the desk, to rescue from the jaws of death the greatest, best, and
truest republic that ever blessed the earth.
A common thought pervades all hearts. This is not a day for
vainglorious boasting, but for gratitude and praise. We come in
sorrow, not in anger, and our hearts are filled with sadness, not
revenge. We are not here to upbraid, to accuse, to exult over the
defeat of brethren and brave men, to denounce what is no more, to
open wounds by the healing touch of Time made whole. No, no;
Heaven forbid that this sacred day should stir our hearts to other
than feelings of forgiveness, of gratitude, of pride, and of love.
Rather let it be said we come to—

Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,

Raze out the written troubles of the brain.

For those who died to save the republic, I have tears and eulogy; for
those who died to overthrow it, I have tears and silence.
Not as citizens of a torn and discordant Union, not as blinded
partisans, but as children of a common and reunited country, we
gather to give expression of our gratitude to those who by their
sacrifices and their martyrdom made this land the home of freedom,
and the banner of the stars the symbol of one people, one
constitution, and one destiny.
We are gathered here—the multitude has put on a suit of woe and
stands beside the graves where heroes sleep—not to revive bitter
memories, not to cause heartaches or awaken animosities, dead, let
us fervently hope, forever, but for a better, worthier, and more
patriotic purpose: to teach the rising generation that the dead fell not
in vain; to impress upon their youthful hearts that America does not
forget the travail through which, by the inscrutable wisdom of
Heaven, she has passed, that she loves her loyal sons and
daughters with more than Cornelian affection, and treasures them
now, and will treasure them forever, as her unfading glory.
And so, my countrymen, we come to sorrow and to rejoice,—to
sorrow over the loved and lost, to rejoice over their magnificent
achievements and a Union saved and disenthralled by their
devotion. As in the Roman days the wives and mothers went out
upon the Appian Way to meet the home-returning legions,—some to
fall upon the bosoms of husbands, fathers, or sons, and shed tears
of joy, and some to search in vain for dear ones amid the broken,
decimated ranks, but wept not, because they had died bravely in
defense of Rome, her altars, and her fires,—so we welcome to-day
the scarred and wounded, the remnant of hard-fought fields; we
stretch forth our arms to embrace them; we cover them with garlands
emblematic of our love, and scatter flowers in their way to tread
upon.
But for the ones who answer not, who sleep the dreamless sleep
of death, who died with the face of mother near their hearts, the
name of country on their lips, what shall we say? They cannot hear
our words nor see the offering of our hands; they are past all battles,
all marches, all victories, all defeats; “on Fame’s eternal camping-
ground their silent tents are spread,” and the troubled drum disturbs
their sleep no more. And yet, O sacred shades of the unreplying
dead, we feel your presence now. We hear the shot of Sumter that
wakened all the land; we see you coming down from the mountains,
up from the plains, and marching away to battle, leaving behind,
alas; forever, faithful wife, loving children, aged mother, venerable
father; we see you by the campfires dimly burning; we see you in the
cannon-smoke and hurricane of war; we hear the command to
charge, which you obey, how bravely, with bosom bared and
parched, thirsty lips; we see you wounded and bleeding; we see you
in the hospitals of fever and pain; we see you again with your
regiment, with courage undaunted, your love of home and flag
intensified; we see your comrades fall around you like flowers of
spring cut down; we see you captured and hurried away; we see you
wasting in awful dungeons, languishing in prison-pens; we catch the
faint accent of your tongues as you murmur a prayer for your country
and for the loved ones that come to you in your dreams; we see you
encounter death in the gaunt and hideous form of starvation and
quail not; we see you die! Die for what? Die for whom? Die for Union
and Liberty. Die for us and generations yet to be.
Dead and living soldiers of the Grand Army of the Republic, you,
you engaged in the holiest cause that ever received the approving
smile of Heaven; you preserved the Union, “One and inseparable,”
with all its blessed memories, with all its priceless benefits, with all its
exalted and encouraging hopes. You carried the banner of your
country, full high advanced through the darkest hour and wildest
storm that ever overwhelmed a nation, until the returning and radiant
morn of victory and peace blessed and hallowed it. Moved by the
loftiest purposes, inspired by the sublimest sentiments, faithful unto
death, you went forth, not to subjugate, not to enslave, not to tear
down, but to rescue, to uplift, and to make the name of that liberty for
which Warren died and to preserve which Lincoln gave the full
measure of his devotion; in the name of all we are and hope to be,—
the glorious present and the grander future,—we bow to-day and pay
you the poor tribute of our love and tears.
All hail to the saviors of this beloved land! Humbly we lay our
offerings on the dead. Reverently we invoke the blessing of Almighty
God on the declining years of the living. Long may their eyes be
gladdened by the flag they saved; long may their hearts be consoled
by the assurance that, while the monuments reared to haughty pride
and selfish ambition sink beneath the despoiling hand of time, the
soldier’s humble grave, though unadorned by costly urn or marble
shaft, will forever be his country’s hallowed ground, where future
patriots shall come to rekindle the fires of their devotion and to renew
and reaffirm their allegiance to the land by his sacrifices made truly,
grandly free. And so we bow before the heroes who saved our
country; we stand uncovered beside the graves of the martyrs who
died in her sacred cause. Peace and honor to the living; honor and
peace to the dead.
The Civil War, of the sad ravages and awful agony of which we are
this day reminded, was the inevitable result of the “irrepressible
conflict between opposing and enduring forces,”—between freedom
and slavery.
Removed sufficiently from those troublous days to look at facts
calmly and to speak of them without anger, let us be just, let us be
truthful. The courts had exalted slavery, had hedged it round by law,
and nationalized it. In that most august tribunal—in that high place
immortalized by the transcendent greatness of a Marshall and the
unfathomed learning of a Story, which had witnessed the marvelous
displays of oratory of Pinckney, Webster and Choate—in the
Supreme Court of the United States—slavery met and vanquished
freedom. The Dred Scott decision gave up this nation to bondage,
and made it possible, under the law, to sell wives and babes in
Faneuil Hall and to call the roll of slaves on the sacred spot where
Warren fell! Thenceforth Congress could not interfere with slavery;
states were powerless to prevent it. And thus it came to pass that in
the land of Washington, Franklin, and Wayne, in the land of Adams,
Henry, and Sherman, in the land whose sons died for liberty on a
hundred fields—who stormed the walls of Quebec and left their
blood on the snow at Valley Forge—in this our beloved land—in this
republic—slavery was king. The time to gather the bitter fruit of the
accursed upas tree planted at Jamestown in 1620 was near at hand.
An awful storm, pregnant with death and woe, was gathering, and
the people sought a leader. They were sore distressed with a
multitude of counsel, and they cried:

God give us men! A time like this demands

Strong minds, great hearts, true faith, and willing hands;
Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
Men who possess opinions and a will;
Men who have honor; men who will not lie;
Men who can stand before a demagogue,
And damn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
Tall men, sun-crowned, who live above the fog,
In public duty and in private thinking!
For while the tricksters, with their thumb-worn creeds,
Their large professions, and their little deeds,
Mingle in selfish strife, lo! Freedom weeps!
Wrong rules the land, and waiting Justice sleeps!

In the midst of mingled doubts and fears, when weak and timid
politicians masquerading under the name of statesmen hesitated to
grapple with the monstrous evil that threatened to advance upon and
overwhelm the last remaining bulwarks of freedom, when the right
and true path was well nigh lost sight of, and lovers of liberty were
ranged under different banners, waiting for a Moses who should lead
them out of Egyptian bondage, the Great Captain came. He came,
and thenceforth all seemed clear. Simple in speech, plain in manner,
straightforward in action, tender as a child, bold as a lion, fearless as
a hero, at once courageous and humble, lofty and lowly, he came to
speak and to act. Born of Southern parents who had witnessed the
depressing and blighting effects of slavery, and reared in the broad
prairies of the West, whose very winds sang Liberty, he realized the
curse of bondage and the blessing of freedom. From the unfelled
forest, from the log cabin and the country store, from humble forum
and obscure dwelling, from out the ranks of the people, the Leader
came. He came, and statesmen bowed before him; he spoke, and a
nation hearkened to his counsel. Devoted to truth and the right,
opposed to falsehood and the wrong, scorning the tricks and
subterfuges of the self-seeking, and abhorring with his whole heart
and soul the mean and base, loving his country with a devotion that
made him forgetful of all else save the preservation of the Union, the
incomparable Leader rose. In judicial tribunal and halls of state, in
capital and village, in mansion and log cabin, in crowded cities, and
out on the boundless prairies of the West, men listened to his words,
and saw, as they had never seen before, the darkness, the light, the
path,—the wrong, the right, and the remedy. “You must be either all
slave or all free.” These were his prophetic words. Who was this man
that came unheralded out of the West? Who was this man that rose
above the great statesmen of his day—who was as earnest as
Phillips, as gifted as Baker, who was more profound than Seward,
more learned than Chase, more logical than Douglas, more eloquent
than Everett? Who was he that combined in one soul the simplicity of
a child, the wisdom of a sage, and the foresight of a prophet? Need I
utter his sacred name? Wheresoever among men there is a love for
disinterested patriotism and sublime attachment to duty,
wheresoever liberty is worshiped and loyalty exalted, his name and
deeds are known. His image is in all hearts, his name to-day is on all
lips. That grand and lofty man was the rail-splitter of Illinois,—
beloved, sainted, immortal Abraham Lincoln, statesman, philosopher,
and patriot, the greatest, noblest, purest soul that ever was
enwrapped in clay, to walk the earth,—Abraham Lincoln, the
emancipator of a race; the savior of the Union!
Strangely enough, the election of the Presidency of this great and
good and just man was the signal for revolt. “In your hands,” said he
in his first inaugural address,—“In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow-
countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of civil war.
You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors.
You have no oath registered in heaven to destroy the Government,
while I shall have the most solemn one to ‘preserve, protect, and
defend’ it.”
But the blow was struck,—the blow that was ultimately to destroy
slavery, and make our country free indeed,—“a land without a serf, a
servant, or a slave.”
The war to preserve the integrity of the nation was marked by
great battles, weary marches, long sieges, and splendid deeds of
daring. Brave men met brave men, and gallant soldiers stormed forts
and heights by gallant soldiers defended. If America wept for the folly
and madness of some, yet was she proud of the courage of all her
sons. We think to-night of the mighty struggle that ended with
Appomattox’s cloudless day; of all the fields where saber flashed,
and cannon roared, and patriot sons sealed their devotion with their
blood. The world knows the result. Freedom triumphed. The Union
was saved, Liberty survived, slavery perished and is dead upon our
soil forevermore,—dead by the sword of immortal Grant, “dead by
the hand of Abraham Lincoln, dead by the justice of Almighty God.”
Rejoice, O human hearts and human lips, that Liberty survived.
Rejoice, O men of the North, that slavery is dead. Rejoice, O men of
the South, that slavery is dead. Rejoice, O sons of the Republic, that
the crown was restored to the brow of liberty, that, reunited and
reconciled, loyal and true, we stand to-day, hand in hand, heart
beating with heart, under the blessed and ever-triumphant banner of
the Union.
And thus may we ever stand,—one people, one nation,—no North,
no South, no East; no West,—one altar, one love, one hope.
And thus may we ever stand,—brothers in peace, brothers in war,
—and “highly resolved that government of the people, by the people,
and for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
And thus may we ever stand,—a Union of hearts and of states,
and “teach men that Liberty is not a mockery, and a republic is not
another name for feebleness and anarchy.”
And standing thus, the world cannot prevail against us in war or in
peace.
Fellow-citizens, in this hour of mourning we may without
impropriety indulge ourselves in feelings of pride over the glorious
deeds of our heroes dead and living. Pittsburgh Landing,
Chattanooga, and Vicksburg; Lookout Mountain, Gettysburg, and
Antietam; the Wilderness, Atlanta, and Richmond,—all are eternal
witnesses to the deathless valor and sublime courage of those upon
whose graves we have tenderly laid our flowers and upon whose
brows we have lovingly placed the laurel wreath of victory and
peace. No poor words of mine can tell them of our love or add unto
their fame; the one is unspeakable, the other as broad and all-
comprehensive as the earth, as high and spotless as the stars.
Upon the hearts of many heroes who made our country free—who
with their blood washed away the ebon blot on our country’s shield—
inexorable death has laid his hand, and the high and the low, the
mighty general and the humble private, repose alike in the equal
grave. All-conquering “time, the tomb-builder,” is day by day
mustering out the noble army that went forth to save, to make and to
preserve us a nation. Halleck, Thomas, Meade, McClellan, Hancock,
McDowell, Garfield, Logan, Sheridan, Sherman, Harrison, Porter,
McKinley,—all have been gathered to their fathers, gone to grasp the
hands of their comrades on the peaceful shores of Eternal Rest.
But of him, the simple, silent, steadfast man; of him that marshaled
order out of chaos, gave direction to mighty armies and led them to
final victory; of him who made the Emancipation Proclamation of
Abraham Lincoln a glorious reality, and eternal fact which broke the
chains that held a race in bondage; of him who bore his great honors
so modestly and meekly in war and peace; of him who by his genius
added to our arms a luster as imperishable as his fame, and left his
countrymen the priceless legacy of an untarnished and immortal
name; of him who was ambitious, not as a Cæsar, not as a
Napoleon, but as a Washington, with no higher aim, no loftier
purpose, than to serve his country, not to wear a crown; of him who
stood before uncovered kings and was saluted by the emperors of
the earth, but never forgot his humble origin nor lost his sympathy for
the poor and lowly; of him whose deeds, from duty and necessity,
not from choice, were war, but whose heart ever yearned, whose
voice ever pleaded, for peace,—what human tongue can speak of
the spotless, peerless General Grant? His mighty work is done, his
triumphal march is ended, his name is for all time. Reverently and
tenderly we lay our flowers upon his tomb to-day; gratefully and
lovingly we breathe his sacred name. Calm, cool, and undaunted,
victorious in war, magnanimous in peace,—

Nothing can cover his high fame, but Heaven;

No pyramids set off his memories,
But tie eternal substance of his greatness;
To which I leave him.

But of the rank and file, of the unknown dead, what can be said?
Sleep on, O humble soldier boy, sleep on! No more shall the
midnight attack, the fierce charge, or the bugle-call to arms rouse
thee from thy rest. Sleep on in thy lowly sepulcher, guarded by thy
country’s tenderest love and pillowed on her grateful heart. Whether
it be beneath polished marble and sculptured alabaster reared by the
hands of affection, or beneath the green sod watered by tears of
love; whether it be beneath rich, fragrant flowers blooming in
perennial freshness and cared for by dear ones left behind, or in the
lonely, pathless woods where in darkness and thick gloom you laid
down your life; whether it be in fertile valley where your life blood
reddened the grass of the meadow, or in the intrenchment of death,
facing the pitiless storm of shot and shell; whether it be in the prison-
pen, where your heart-throbs grew faint, but your undying love for
the Stars and Stripes could not be seduced into deserting your
country, or in sultry mountain-passes where you wearied of the
march, and, fever-stricken, fell down to die,—wheresoever it be, on
land or in ocean depth, O humble soldier boy, sleep on! Thy cause
was liberty; thy purpose, Union; thy object, a nation purged and
purified of slavery. Thy great deeds are thy eternal monument.
Written on the nation’s heart and in the everlasting Book of Life thy
name shall live forevermore, fadeless to eternity.

Oh, the victory, the victory

Belongs to thee!
God ever keeps the brightest crown for such as thou.
He gives it now to thee.
Oh, young and brave, and early and thrice blest!
Thrice, thrice, thrice blest!
Thy country turns once more to kiss thy youthful brow,
And takes thee gently, gently to her breast,
And whispers lovingly, ‘God bless thee—bless thee now,
My darling, thou shalt rest!’

My countrymen, one and all,—if enemies in the dark days of

estrangement, brothers now and forever,—let us rejoice that under
God we have a reunited country, that the Union was preserved, that
Liberty, crowned and sceptered, sits enthroned in the constitution;
and with our eyes fixed on the one and only banner of the loyal
heart, let us reverently resolve to show ourselves in some measure
worthy of our ancestors and our brethren who fought and died to
make this blessed land the home of freedom, free lips and free
hands, forever.
The dead soldiers of the republic, the heroes of the Revolution, the
heroes of 1812, the heroes of 1848, the heroes of 1861, the heroes
of 1898,—they sleep in glory. But what of the living? O soldiers of the
republic, wheresoe’er you are to-night, on land or sea, in frigid north
or torrid south, on frontier guarding the outposts of civilization, or in
far Luzon defending with sleepless vigilance the flag of our hearts,
God bless you and keep you. Be of good cheer. Your country
believes in you and loves you. If you return, she will clasp you close
to her heart and bestow on you the rewards of peace; if you fall
fighting her battles, she will be mother to your children and treasure
you as she treasures those who preserved the flag you have lifted
and hold on high.
My countrymen, the heroes of every battlefield of the republic—
from Bunker Hill to Santiago—look down to-night from their portals of
eternal light and beseech us to be true to the principles in vindication
of which they died. Nay, more: from every land made sacred by
heroism, from every dungeon of agony and death where truth has
suffered on the rack for conscience’ sake, from Marathon and
Thermopylæ, from Runnymede and Bannockburn, from the graves
of Kosciusko and Hampden, from the scaffolds of Sidney and
Emmet, comes a voice beseeching us to be faithful to our mission, to
guard jealously the citadel of Liberty, and to vindicate by our wisdom
and righteousness and justice the holy cause of Freedom.
Oh! can we stand unmoved when thus addressed? Let us heed
these warning voices and hearken to these solemn admonitions, and
here and now, on this Memorial Day, with all the memories and
lessons of the past fresh in our hearts, let us renew our devotion and
reaffirm our allegiance to the cause of Liberty and Union, let us
rededicate and reconsecrate ourselves to the service of our Country.
How shall we fittingly commemorate the honored dead? When
Greece was threatened by the Persian army, Athens sent out a
handful of her bravest sons to meet the myriad hosts of Darius. Oh!
the intrepid courage, the sublime patriotism, of that Grecian band as