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Wars of Blood and Faith
Ralph Peters

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Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
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FROM THE PHONE BOOTH: The Smallest Space in  Hollywood

	FINEFROCK

Secularism in ‘26
Leonidas at The Point
by Steve Finefrock - Hollywood Forum [scriptwriter] 12/28/07

Mandatory chapel was mere study hall and other distractions for future officers attending West Point. “Among the cadets the prevailing attitude ranged from religious indifference to outright hostility. It was an era when the conflict between science and religion was becoming steadily more acute,…” writes historian Thomas Fleming in his 1969 history of our nation’s first academic institution for military officers.  “…and West Point was the first school in America to have a curriculum dominated by science.”
 
No kneeling, or prayer, during those early years. Until one student was overwhelmed by a family tragedy and sought solace with the Point’s new, enthusiastic chaplain, Dr. Charles Pettit McIlvaine.  The good chaplain gave the disturbed cadet a tract on Christianity, which found its way to class leader Leonidas Polk – intrigued and urged to know more, he researched to find another treatment, “Evidences of Christianity” written by Olinthus Gregory, a faculty member of England’s Royal Military Academy at Woolwich.

This turning point came the same season as a riotous drunken Christmas cadets’ celebration initiated by that mouth of the South, Jefferson Davis – giving hint to his later behavior.  Avoiding participation in this loutish levity was classmate Robert E. Lee – showing the South had more than mouth, even if political choices in the coming Confederacy were at least as idiotic as those of the North.
 
The year: 1826.  “Leonidas was well-named” judges Fleming.  On a critical Sunday, “cadets trooped into chapel as always, to sit there, arms folded, staring into space or reading their textbooks while McIlvaine preached on for the better part of an hour.” Behind him, a transactional event: “Quietly, deliberately, Leonidas Polk assumed a kneeling position” and went further by conducting discussions and leading others to the chaplain’s services.
 
Sound eerily familiar?
 
Again, the year: 1826!
 
This moment came after McIlvaine had spent a year without giving personal consultation to a single cadet.  Not even with Robert E. Lee, known affectionately as the “Marble Model” of sufficiency, without a single demerit in his four years.  This when demerits were the proud standard for so many cadets, as Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer strove to make the Point what it finally evolved into being.
 
“There’s nothing new under the sun” goes one pearl of wisdom.  So proven again in reading Fleming, who will be forever tainted with the left for his more recent tome, “The New Dealers’ War” in which he defenestrates the shining papal perfection of FDR’s lefty schemes.  In tandem with this year’s revision of that history by economist Amity Shlaes in “The Forgotten Man” we have a pair of outcasts from any academic institution dominated by the left.
 
Fleming’s “West Point” is nearly forty years old, giving a chuckle with its photo of a ‘computer class’ workbench occupied by a cadet working with a vacuum-tube contraption that would make a Mac user today retch in revulsion.  Though inclined toward Navy lore, by my father’s WW2 combat against the Japs [they were not then the “Japanese” – not after the Rape of Nanking, et al], this tome on Army officers’ history fascinates, and illuminates.  But learning of the army’s history came first from a chat with an academy grad when living in Alexandria, Virginia, who told me useful bits of plebe lore which found its way into my first terrorism script. Thus my receptivity to Fleming.
 
After all, everything’s “MFR”: More Franken Research. And, Gold is where you find it.  Such gleaming bits we don’t find it in the classic, standard texts or typical collegiate coursework.  Such tidbits show again – and as again and again beforehand so often, too too often – that the travails of today go so far back we can’t grasp how difficult, and longterm, this battle for the culture is to be.  Will forever be. Did the battle with secularism begin with the Supreme Court’s idiocy in the ‘50s?  Maybe – the 1850s, if you know the ‘living constitution’ concepts of Chief Justice Roger Taney in his war-triggering Dredd Scott decision.
 
Then as now, the “intent of the lawgiver is the law” from Lincoln escaped many in the learned legions of professors of law and political science.  The bulk of cadets at the Point in those early decades were privileged brats, accustomed to special rules for their class of fools, causing endless grief to the Thayer’s efforts to establish ethical standards.  He initiated what came to be the Code of Conduct, based on the honor system.  Fighting him were such loutish leaders as Jeff Davis, their preening parents interfering with Point procedures, some going so far as triggering Congressional hearings and mandates in law and micromanaging memo to the Superintendent.
 
A Leonidas at the Point in 1826! Who knew, as about “300” students comprised the cadet corps in that early decade.  He was the first to step out and kneel – wonder what the ACLU had to say about it?  But wait, they didn’t yet exist.  Yet, there were our “best and brightest” material as future military leaders, primarily engineers [originally West Point came under jurisdiction of the commander of the Army Corps of Engineers] engaged in rowdy riots – one entire barrack’s interior was virtually destroyed by the Christmas violence triggered by Davis’ celebratory spirits – and off-post drunken escapades.  None seeking religion’s solace, in 1826!
 
Our nostalgia for what wasn’t quite what we think it was goes backward much further than 1950’s TV fare, such as “Father Knows Best” – it errs also in our view that these battles are new to our generation, that religious fervor and righteous behavior was well-established in such bastions of our hearts’ hopefulness as West Point from its very beginnings.
 
Nope.  It’s Déjà Vu All Over Again, and again, and again.  Ad infinitum ad nauseum. Did anyone say the cultural combat would be easy?  Or ever end? ExileStreet

copyright 2007 Steve Finefrock

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