The Tragedy of American Military History

A Memorial Day meditation

Of all of this country’s civil religious holidays, I can appreciate Memorial Day the most, since it forces Americans to recognize their national story as a kind of tragedy.

Aisne-Marne Military Cemetery, final resting place of 2,289 American soldiers who fought in World War I - American Battle Monuments Commission

When I say that today is about the tragic, I don’t just mean that Memorial Day stems from the need to grieve the dead and remember the lost. Nor do I mean to deny the heroism of those we grieve and remember, since you can’t have tragedies without heroes. But I am thinking of tragedy as two Americans understood that term in the wake of World War II, a conflict that killed over 400,000 of their countrymen.

First, Arthur Miller. Writing in the New York Times in February 1949, a few weeks after Death of a Salesman debuted, that playwright both defended the tragedy in an age when fewer works of that type were written and insisted that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were.” Since “the tragic feeling is evoked in us when we are in the presence of a character who is ready to lay down his life, if need be, to secure one thing - his sense of personal dignity,” Miller thought we could recognize it Medea, Macbeth, or Willy Loman.

Or perhaps in our country. Cannot a historical nation as much as a fictional character lay down life to secure a proper sense of itself? Do not our wars reveal in the American story its “tragic flaw” — not “necessarily a weakness,” explained Miller, but the hero’s “inherent unwillingness to remain passive in the face of what he conceives to be a challenge to his dignity, his image of his rightful status”?

Or consider America’s wars its national tragedies not because all have ended in death and a few in defeat, but because they reveal the tension between what Miller called tragic right (“a condition of life, a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself”) and tragic wrong (“the condition which suppresses man, perverts the flowing out of his love and creative instinct”). Sometimes the former seems to prevail, as when Americans have died to defeat systems of dehumanizing suppression: empire, fascism, and slavery — that last one a wrong of our own making that could only be corrected by going to war with ourselves. Though it costs the life of the hero, tragedy in that sense does contain “the possibility of victory” because it points to “the perfectibility of man.”

But sometimes the hero’s destruction “posits a wrong or an evil in his environment” that is self-made. Today we don’t just remember Americans who died to defend freedom, but those who died for the preservation or expansion of American power — at the expense of others’ freedom. Some have died to uphold an “image of [America’s] rightful status” that showed us to be blind to our own hubris.

And that term brings us to a second mid-20th century writer: Reinhold Niebuhr.