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H A M M E R A N D HOE
This page intentionally left blank
H A M M E R A N D HOE
ALABAMA

COMMUNISTS

DURING

THE

GREAT

DEPRESSION

ROBIN D. G. K E L L E Y

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

With a new preface by the author

T H E UNIVERSITY O F N O R T H C A R O L I N A PRESS • C H A P E L HILL

© 1990 The University of North Carolina Press

Preface to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition

©2015 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability
of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the
Council on Library Resources.

ISBN 978-1 -4696-2548-5

ISBN 978-1-4696-2549-2

The Library of Congress has cataloged the original edition of this

book as follows:

Kelley, Robin D. G.
Hammer and hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression /
by Robin D. G. Kelley.
p. cm.—(The Fred W. Morrison series in Southern studies)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Communism—Alabama—History—20th century. 2. Communists—
Alabama—History—20th century. 3. Depressions—1929—Alabama.
I. Title. II. Series.
HX9I.A2K45 1990
324.2761 '075'09042—dc20 90-50018
CIP

THIS BOOK W A S DIGITALLY PRINTED.

Dedicated to the young people of Ferguson, St. Louis,
Baltimore, Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago,
Oakland, Gaza and the West Bank, Sao Paulo and Rio
dejaneiro, Dakar, Cairo, Ayotzinapa and Mexico City,
Santiago, Athens, Lisbon, Madrid, and elsewhere,
fighting for justice, democracy, peace, and an end to
human misery.
This page intentionally left blank
 CONTENTS

Preface to the Twenty-Fifth

Anniversary Edition xi

Preface xxvii

Acknowledgments xxxiii

Abbreviations xxxvii

Prologue. Radical Genesis:

Birmingham, 1870-1930 1

P A R T I. T H E U N D E R G R O U N D , 1929-1935

ONE An Invisible Army: Jobs, Relief, and the Birth

of a Movement 13

TWO In Egyptland: The Share Croppers' Union 34

THREE Organize or Starve!: Communists, Labor, and

Antiradical Violence 57

FOUR In the Heart of the Trouble: Race, Sex, and

the ILD 78

FIVE Negroes Ain' Black—But Red!: Black

Communists and the Culture of Opposition 92

PART I I . UP FROM BOLSHEVISM, 1935-1939

SIX The Road to Legality: The Popular Front in

Birmingham, 1935-1937 119

SEVEN The CIO's in Dixie! 138

EIGHT Old Slaves, New Deal: Communists and the

WPA 152

NINE The Popular Front in Rural Alabama 159

TEN The Democratic Front 176

viii • CONTENTS

P A R T I I I . B A C K TO THE TRENCHES, 1939-1941

ELEVEN The March of Southern Youth! 195

Epilogue. Fade to Black: The Invisible Army in

War, Revolution, and Beyond 220

Notes 233

Bibliography 301

Index 335
ILLUSTRATIONS

Black convict laborers, Banner Mine, Alabama 6

Al Murphy 24

Hosea Hudson 26

Sharecropping family, near Eutaw, Alabama 35

Lemon Johnson, SCU secretary of Hope Hull, Alabama,

local 45

Company suburb 58

Clyde Johnson 62

"Meat for the Buzzards!" 66

Anti-Communist handbill distributed by the

Ku Klux Klan 75

"Fight Lynch Terror!" 97

"Smash the Barriers!" 98

District 17 secretary Robert Fowler Hall 127

Sit-down strike, American Casting Company,

Birmingham, 1937 145

Share Croppers' Union membership card 162

Eugene "Bull" Connor, Birmingham city

commissioner 187

League of Young Southerners 198

Ethel Lee Goodman 204

Segregated audience in Montgomery awaits Henry

Wallace, 1948 229
This page intentionally left blank
 PREFACE TO THE T W E N T Y -
FIFTH A N N I V E R S A R Y EDITION
T h e Strange C a r e e r o f H a m m e r and Hoe

H ow is this for timing: the post-Cold War and the publi­

cation of Hammer and Hoe are both twenty-five years
old. Or to put it another way, I published an entire book about the trials,
tribulations, and virtues of a Communist movement in the U.S. South just as
Communism—in its Soviet variety, at least—took its last breath. The demise
of the USSR should have no bearing on the historical value of Communism,
but in the early 1990s, few conservative or liberal critics saw any reason to
revisit Communist movements besides performing an autopsy. Given how
obsessed with the present our culture is, once Communists ceased to be our
greatest existential threat, they became, at best, relics of the past and, at
worst, the twentieth century's biggest losers.
Yet I'd be lying if I said Hammer and Hoe was conceived as a purely
academic contribution, unburdened by presentist concerns. The book's gen­
esis cannot be understood absent an understanding of the political and per­
sonal context in which it was written. I felt a fierce urgency to study black
working-class radicalism, not because the old Soviet states were crumbling
in the face of revolt, but because the apartheid state of South Africa was
succumbing to a massive multiracial movement—a movement in which
Left trade unions and the South African Communist Party played leading
roles. Far more than the fall of the Berlin Wall, Nelson Mandela's release
from prison and Namibian independence, both in 1990, best represented
the politics behind this book. Even the title was inspired by events in Af­
rica. In 1970, the People's Republic of the Congo, a self-declared "Marxist-
Leninist socialist state," adopted the symbol of a crossed hammer and hoe
for its flag. (Coincidentally, the regime and its flag were replaced in 1992—
1

another Cold War casualty.) I had entered UCLA's graduate program in 1983
as an Africanist. Modern South Africa was my chosen field, and the ways
in which black workers struggled under regimes of racial capitalism—how
they resisted exploitation, what they fought for, how they came to define
political liberation—was my primary obsession. For my doctorate, I planned
to write a social history of black radical politics in South Africa that would
be attentive to the culture and ideas of ordinary people.
There was little indication that the 1980s would be the last decade of
the Cold War. This was the era of Reaganism and Thatcherism, new imperi-
xii • P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N

alist wars, and new revolutions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America; of capital
flight, the erosion of the welfare state, neoliberal privatization schemes, the
weakening of antidiscrimination laws and policies; of a wave of police and
vigilante killings that struck our communities with the force of a cluster
bomb. The decade, in fact, opened with police killings and nonlethal acts of
police brutality emerging as a central political issue, resulting in a massive
urban insurrection in Liberty City, Florida, in May 1980. The 1980s also
witnessed genuine efforts by radicals to build multiracial solidarity in the
unlikely realm of electoral politics. The election of Mayor Harold Washing­
ton in Chicago in 1983, along with Jesse Jackson's 1984 presidential bid,
held the radical promise of Rainbow Coalition politics.
At the same time, like many of my fellow students in the early to mid-
1980s, I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement. By the time I set foot
on UCLA's campus in the fall of 1983, the boycott and divestment move­
ment against South Africa was in full swing. I was active in a sectarian party
pursuing dreams of socialist revolution, elected president of UCLA's Afri­
can Activists Association, and chaired the Ad Hoc Committee to Keep South
Africa Out of the Olympics, which were held in Los Angeles in the sum­
mer of 1984. We were part of a broad coalition of students calling on the
2

University of California to divest its holdings from South Africa. We built

makeshift shantytowns on campus, sat in at the South African Consulate,
educated our community, built momentum, and by the summer of 1986 per­
suaded the U.C. Regents to divest their $3.1 billion worth of holdings from
South Africa and Namibia. While we won that battle, none of my comrades
believed divestment alone would topple apartheid and birth a new demo­
cratic state founded on the principles of the Freedom Charter. We knew that
the struggle inside of South Africa mattered most. And given the experiences
of Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Namibia, we knew it would be
bloody. The United Democratic Front, the African National Congress, and
the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) demonstrated the
power of massive popular resistance, strikes, civil disobedience—the power
of people to stop South Africa's racial regime from functioning.
Though it may seem hard to believe now, these were revolutionary
times, politically and theoretically. In the fog of negotiating movement work
and school work, I embraced a group of radical thinkers who believed an­
other world was possible. C. L. R. James, W. E. B. Du Bois, Walter Rodney,
Amilcar Cabral, Manning Marable, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Ngugi wa
Thiong'o, Angela Davis, Chinweizu, Vincent Harding, Cornel West, Bar­
bara Smith, Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Samir Amin, among others, wrote
about the ravages of racial capitalism, the violence of patriarchy, the futil­
ity of parochial politics in the face of global imperialism, and the absolute
necessity to resist. But resistance to what end? I began to think about the
3

persistent failure of socialist and Communist movements to mobilize black

people. And then I encountered Cedric Robinson's extraordinary book, Black
 P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N • xili

Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983), which exposed
a fundamental fallacy in the way I framed the problem. It was never about 4

a failing in the "Left's" ability to mobilize black people but our conceptual
failure to recognize a black radical tradition critical of, and illegible to, a
Euro-American Left formed by the logic of Western civilization. When this
tradition found its way into Left movements—in Africa, Latin America,
even the United States—it brought its own unique vision, historical sensibil­
ity, and set of resistance strategies to the Communist movement; in doing so,
it altered the Party. In other words, whereas most scholars set out to prove
just how alien Communism was to black people, Robinson compelled me to
ask what black people—in this case, black South Africans—brought to the
Left to make it their own. The presumed objects of Communist machina­
tions became subjects and agents in making their own history.
Taking my cue from Cedric Robinson, I published an essay in our grad­
uate student-run journal, Ufahamu, on the Communist Party of South Africa
(CPSA), arguing that a black radical tradition—rooted in earlier notions of
African redemption, rural opposition to land dispossession, and expressions
of working-class and petit bourgeois African nationalism—had produced
a demand for self-determination before the Communist International was
formed. Unable to recognize African radicalism, white South African Com­
munists initially oriented their work toward the white working class. Imag­
ine a Communist Party anywhere backing striking miners under the banner,
"Workers of the World Unite and Fight for a W H I T E S O U T H A F R I C A ! " When
African trade unionists, as well as officials of the Communist International
(Comintern) in Moscow, criticized Party leaders for their uncritical support
of the all-white Rand Revolt in 1922 to the exclusion of the more numerous
African miners' struggles, white South African Communists made the ab­
surd argument that the "advanced" white proletariat must win the fight for
socialism first in order to free the entire working class. 5

Predictably, the Comintern directed the CPSA to redirect its work "to­
ward the African masses." African and "Coloured" Communists, who now
constituted the Party's majority, understood the directive to mean waging
a mass struggle for African self-determination, sovereignty, massive land
reform, and majority rule. White Communists, on the other hand, interpreted
the Comintern's resolution as a mandate to educate the "backwards" Afri­
can working class to support a white-led proletarian revolution. The idea
of a white-led proletarian revolution in South Africa was doomed from the
start, as the 1922 Rand Revolt demonstrated, and the African, Coloured, and
Indian comrades knew it. But since whites still held the reins of the CPSA,
non-white Communists depended on the Comintern to lay down the law,
as it were. Although I had concluded that the Comintern played a key role
in enforcing the demand for African self-determination, the essay's central
contribution, I think, was to turn the usual claim that the Communists had
infiltrated the African nationalist movement on its head. Rather, the national-
xiv • P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N

ists infiltrated the Communist Party, adopted a radical vision of self-determi­

nation that recognized South Africa as a settler colonial state, and demanded
the return of land and black majority rule, expressed as an "independent
native South African Republic with full equal rights for all races."

T his article, despite its overly rigid formulations and archival limitations,
planted the seeds for Hammer and Hoe. I extended my proposed thesis
to include the U.S. South, hoping to produce a comparative study of black
radicalism and the Communist Left in two global industrial cities—Johan­
nesburg and Birmingham, Alabama. Without going into the messy details,
let me just say that the project was always untenable since I had no pros­
pect of getting into South Africa and therefore no access to the necessary
archives. In 1985, the year my dissertation prospectus was approved, Presi­
dent P. W. Botha declared a state of emergency, making travel to South Af­
rica all but impossible. And my participation in protests at the South African
Consulate in Beverly Hills did not bode well for my visa application. I ended
up dropping the South African component, switching to U.S. history, and
focusing my research entirely on Alabama. The rest, as they say, is history.
Nothing—neither Nell Irvin Painter's magnificent The Narrative of
Hosea Hudson: His Life as a Negro Communist in the South (1979) nor
Black Marxism—fully prepared me for what I encountered in Alabama. The
testimonies and memories, the archives, the very landscape constituted liv­
ing proof that a political culture distinct from the Euro-American Left and
rooted in older Afro-Christian and black folk traditions dominated the Com­
munist Party in Alabama. The overwhelming, startling evidence compelled
me to leave a lot of my assumptions about Marxist-Leninist movement cul­
ture behind. Relying on police records, the local and national Communist
press, leaflets and handbills, oral histories, photographs, even a marked-up
Bible, I found some dramatic episodes of armed sharecroppers fighting cops
and landlords, interracial demonstrations in downtown Birmingham, and le­
gal cases that transformed local injustices into international scandals. But I
also found lots of small stories of how black Communists made themselves
and their movement visible when their lives depended on invisibility: by
leaving their mark in wet concrete; by placing leaflets in trees, releasing
them on the ground for the wind to distribute, hiding them in the laundry
baskets of domestic workers going into their white comrades' homes; by
sending unsigned penny postcards to social workers and city relief agencies
to demand more assistance and better treatment; by restoring a neighbor's
electricity using jumper cables when he or she could not pay the bill; by
playing the role of "Sambo" before a judge in order to escape a jail sentence.
I wasn't prepared for characters such as Lemon Johnson, a former
member of the Communist-led Share Croppers Union. In December 1986,1
visited Johnson at his home in rural Montgomery County, which I described
 P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N • XV

in my journal as "a tiny, run-down shack with battered wooden walls, a

rusted tin roof that had begun to cave in, and a porch stocked with three
rickety chairs." He fed me a huge lunch of collard greens, beans, Wonder
6

Bread, fried chicken, and a slice of cake. We ate outside and talked for a
while; when it became unbearably cold, we moved inside. I sat on his bed as
he slouched in a wooden chair next to me. A faded picture of Dr. Martin Lu­
ther King Jr. was tacked to the wall above his head. He told stories about the
1935 cotton pickers' strike, Stalin's pledge to send troops to Mobile to help
black sharecroppers if things got out of hand, and the night a well-armed
group of women set out to avenge their comrades who had been beaten
or killed during the strike. When I asked Mr. Johnson how the union suc­
ceeded in winning some of their demands, without the slightest hesitation he
reached into the drawer of his nightstand and pulled out a dog-eared copy of
V. I. Lenin's What Is to Be Done and a box of shotgun shells, set both firmly
on the bed next to me, and said, "Right thar, theory and practice. That's how
we did it. Theory and practice." 7

I spent nearly a year "in the field," scouring archives all over the coun­
try, trying to piece together the history of a semi-underground movement
that deliberately left few traces. Alabama Communists succeeded so well,
in fact, that several southern historians did not believe there was enough
evidence to warrant a dissertation—let alone a book. (My dissertation ulti­
mately weighed in at 698 pages.) Besides, it seemed that parts of the story
had been told elsewhere. Ned Cobb eloquently recounts the story of the
Share Croppers Union in Theodore Rosengarten's 1974 oral narrative All
God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw, and Nell Irvin Painter's The Narra­
tive ofHosea Hudson captures the radical democratic vision of a grassroots
black Communist leader in Birmingham. Painter and Rosengarten were
8

able to draw out the psychic, social, and political costs of being a black rad­
ical in the Deep South. I had imagined the archetypal black Communist as
heroic and intellectually astute, delivering fiery street-corner speeches and
fighting cops as they drag evicted workers' furniture back into their homes.
But this wasn't Hudson—not exactly. After I read Painter's book and inter­
viewed him, Hudson reminded me of my grandfather from South Carolina,
from his colloquial speech, his superstitions, and love of good gospel music
to his constant refrain that he was probably right since so-and-so was dead
and he was still living. This blew my mind and made me rethink what it
meant, not just to be a Communist, but a movement person—a movement
person who was poor, black, and intelligent, despite a lack of formal edu­
cation. It profoundly shaped my view of the Communist and working-class
political culture in the South. His story was the greatest reminder that people
are constantly in motion. They always have the potential for transformation,
and participation in social movements is the prime catalyst. We see Hudson
change before our very eyes, from a quiet, unassuming child of a sharecrop-
xvi • P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N

per without much to look forward to, to a confident leader, powerful speaker,
and Marxist-Leninist to boot.
I'm indebted to Nell Painter, not only for her magnificent portrait of
Hudson but for the care she took to read and critique early drafts of Ham­
mer and Hoe. She, along with Mark D. Naison (author of Communists in
Harlem during the Depression) and Theodore and Dale Rosengarten, read
the entire manuscript and offered invaluable advice and suggestions. Dale's
1969 Radcliffe College thesis on the history of the Alabama Share Croppers
Union paved the way for all subsequent research on the movement. Another
scholar who followed in her footsteps and generously shared with me his
findings and contacts was the venerable Shinobu Uesugi, a Japanese histo­
rian who spent over a decade documenting the history of agrarian radicalism
in the Black Belt. 9

Two scholars, in particular, helped me make sense of the Alabama

Communist Party's distinctive political culture. First, by sheer coincidence,
the late George Rawick became a mentor to me in the spring of 1987. He
had accepted a visiting position at UCLA just as I returned from the field and
began writing my dissertation. Illness rendered him virtually immobile, so I
volunteered to drive him to campus. Three days a week I would guide him
to the cafd in North Campus, secure his two cinnamon rolls and coffee, and
sit with him for an hour or more. He schooled me in ways to interpret work­
ing-class movements, culture, and resistance, and introduced me to some of
his groundbreaking essays, such as "The Historical Roots of Black Libera­
tion" (1968), "Notes on the American Working Class" (1968), and "Work­
ing Class Self-Activity," (1969). By paying greater attention to Rawick's
10

concept of "self-activity," I found that Alabama's Communists opened up

another world of politics since most of the people the Party fought for did
not join insurgent organizations. They fought back as individuals or groups,
often using strategies intended to cover their tracks. Rawick also insisted
I read Class and Culture in Cold War America: "A Rainbow at Midnight"
by an incredible young historian named George Lipsitz. First published in
1981, the book offered a provocative and convincing thesis that the postwar
period was not the death of labor's struggle but one of the most active, mili­
tant periods of working-class opposition in U.S. history. Most importantly, 11

he discovered in popular culture expressions of working-class desire and

developed a whole new way to analyze the cultures of aggrieved popula­
tions. I was hooked. Just a year later, in 1988, he published A Life in the
Struggle: Ivory Perry and the Culture of Opposition, a brilliant biography of
St. Louis organizer Ivory Perry that literally forced me to rewrite large sec­
tions of what by then had become Hammer and Hoe, the book manuscript.
Lipsitz's argument that Ivory Perry was formed by and operated within a
"culture of opposition" gave me the framework I needed to understand the
local political culture and to help me see the Alabama Communists and their
supporters as organic intellectuals. Once I did that, I could see the cultural
12
 P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N • xvii

and ideological bases of their own way of seeing alternatives to the status
quo. I came to understand why the Bible was more important in challenging
the dominant ideology than, say, Marx or Lenin.
Thanks to the many readers acknowledged in the text, and my indefat­
igable team at UNC Press—notably Iris Tillman Hill, then editor-in-chief
and the project's first champion, and my tireless and patient editor Lewis
Bateman—I forged these stories into a work of which I'm still quite proud.
Garnering critical praise from historians and across disciplines, Hammer
and Hoe won a couple of noteworthy book prizes, was the subject of round-
table discussions, and has been widely taught and cited. (A passage from the
book even turned up on the Law School Admission Test!) After twenty-five
years, it is still in print. And while I've appreciated the professional recogni­
tion, I have been especially moved by the responses I've gotten from activ­
ists who read the book on their own or in study groups. Organizers from the
Labor/Community Strategy Center (Los Angeles), Project South (Atlanta),
Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement (STORM) (Bay
Area), and the Miami Workers Center, to name a few, have all conveyed
to me the valuable political lessons they took from the book. For example,
young activists who often felt that divisions of race, ethnicity, gender, and
sexuality were insurmountable, or assumed that identities determine politi­
cal choices and alliances, learned that solidarity is a dynamic, often unpre­
dictable process shaped inexorably by actual struggles in real time. Black
working-class Alabamians did not join the Communist Party out of some
economic calculation or because they were driven by narrow interest-group
politics. They were not fighting for themselves; they were fighting for each
other, and for a fairer, less oppressive world for all.

B ut the most illuminating lessons / took from the book came not from
political activists but from a playwright. A little over ten years ago,
Hammer and Hoe inspired critically acclaimed author Naomi Wallace to
write Things of Dry Hours, a powerful three-person play set in 1930s Bir­
mingham. Tice Hogan, an older, widowed, black Communist leader lives
with his daughter Cali, a domestic worker, and they suddenly find them­
selves having to give refuge to a young white "comrade" wanted by the
Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad Company's (TCI) private police. Wallace
had completely absorbed every nuance, every argument, every detail in the
book, and grasped what it meant to build a radical, interracial, working-class
movement in the heart of the Deep South. She understood that violence
and even death came with the territory. And yet she deliberately avoided
the kinds of violent confrontations and public events I always thought were
most dramatic. Instead, she brilliantly set the entire play inside Tice Hogan's
tiny shotgun house, transforming it into a secret refuge hidden in plain sight.
We don't see the violence or the protests or the actual street organizing but
xviii • P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N

we know it's there. The virtually claustrophobic setting becomes a meta­

phor for the interior lives of southern working people—black and white,
radical and reactionary. Wallace succeeded in taking three characters and
reconstructing the world I found so elusive, the complex story of how peo­
ple struggle to find life, love, meaning, and connection under the incredible
circumstances of building a revolutionary movement in the Jim Crow South.
Things of Dry Hours does not dramatize the "facts" but lays bare emotional
truths, reveals what bubbles underneath the surface: in this case, love and
desire. She revealed father-daughter love, in the context of building a new
society in their heads; comradely love across the color line; sexual agency
and terror.
As we now know, all predictions that the end of the Cold War spelled
the death of Communist history proved premature. On the contrary, research
and writing on the Communist Party U S A (CPUSA) have proliferated since
the publication of Hammer and HoeP One reason for the growing interest
has been the opening of the Russian State Archive of Social and Political
History (RGASPI)—a consequence of the end of the Cold War. The avail­
ability of the Soviet archives has opened up new windows onto both local
and international histories of Communist Parties, especially from the mid- to
late 1920s to the mid-1930s. For example, Glenda Gilmore's superb book,
14

Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950, judiciously

plumbs the Soviet archives to reveal how conversations in Moscow, N e w
York, and South Africa influenced Communist strategy in the South during
the 1930s. Randi Storch's Red Chicago: American Communism at Its
15

Grassroots, 1928-35 creatively draws on the Soviet archives to paint a rich

picture of daily work and political life among the cadre in the Windy City. 16

For this new edition of Hammer and Hoe, I considered incorporating

the Soviet archival material, but what I found would not have changed my
argument. The new material would have allowed me to flesh out certain sto­
ries, say a bit more about debates in the Soviet Union over the interpretation
of "self-determination," and quote some of the fascinating letters from Dis­
trict 17 leaders such as Ted Wellman or Nat Ross. This would have made the
book bigger while leaving the essential narrative unchanged. (I did make a
few minor corrections where appropriate.) Besides, upon rereading Hammer
and Hoe in preparation for writing this introduction, I was struck by how
much of the book focuses on the social and political history of Alabama
working people, state violence, political economy, and the impact of federal
New Deal policy. Party work was determined less by Communist internal
machinations than by the conditions on the ground.
Besides, the availability of new archives does not fully explain the cur­
rent fascination with the history of the Communist Party. Over the past five
or six years, I've gotten more requests to talk about Hammer and Hoe than
about any other book I've published. New study groups have resurrected it,
organizers are discussing it again, and I've been told that a copy showed up
 P R E F A C E TO T H E T W E N T Y - F I F T H A N N I V E R S A R Y E D I T I O N • xix

at the Occupy Wall Street People's Library in Zuccotti Park. Once again, the
political context matters. Renewed interest in Hammer and Hoe, in partic­
ular, is the result of the ravages of neoliberalism and the global economic
crisis, on the one hand, and the growth of the carceral state and the latest
wave of police killings, on the other. Anticapitalism has become cool again,
thanks to Occupy, the new hipsters and the share economy, the spectacular
movement of Wal-Mart and fast-food workers across the country, and the
recent publication of Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism
vs. the Climate (2014), which makes a compelling argument that in order to
save the earth ravaged by corporate and state violence, we must end capi­
talism. At the same time, opposition to a racist criminal justice system has
generated some of the largest, most sustained protests in years. The killing,
corralling, caging, warehousing, expelling, firing, deporting, and outright
killing of black and brown people continue unabated—ramping up, in fact,
as declarations of racism's death grow louder and more confident. In our
current moment, anticapitalism and struggles against state violence and in­
carceration tend to be separate movements. For Communists and their al­
lies—especially in the Deep South—they were inextricably bound together.
The characters in Hammer and Hoe devoted as much of their energy to
defending black people swept into a racist criminal justice system, investi­
gating and challenging lynching, and protesting police murders of unarmed
black people, as to fighting evictions, demanding relief for the unemployed,
and organizing trade unions.
Let's begin with anticapitalism: N o matter what we might think of the
Soviet Union in hindsight, or the Communist or various socialist parties, in
the 1930s Social Democracy and forms of socialism were considered legit­
imate alternatives to capitalism. Capitalism was not yet victorious, espe­
cially since radical workers' and farmers' movements of the late nineteenth
century were still part of a living national memory. Today labor unions are
portrayed as corrupt, bloated, a drain on the economy, even as the Ameri­
can worker is being promoted as the most productive in the world—not be­
cause of unions but in spite of them! In our neoliberal age, economic debates
focus not on alternatives to capitalism but on what kind of capitalism—
capitalism with a safety net for the poor or one driven by extreme free-
market liberalization? A capitalism in which the state's role is to bail out big
banks and financial institutions, or one where the state imposes (or rather
restores) greater regulation in order to avoid economic crises? In both of
these scenarios, a weakened labor movement is a given. The once-powerful
unions are doing little more than fighting to restore basic collective bargain­
ing rights and deciding how much they are going to give back. Union leaders
are struggling just to participate in crafting austerity measures. Whereas in
the New Deal era, the state's efforts to save capitalism centered on John
Maynard Keynes's ideas, leading to massive expenditures in infrastructure,
job creation, social safety nets like social security and unemployment insur-
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Title: Chess Generalship, Vol. I. Grand Reconnaissance

Author: Franklin K.‫‏‬Young

Release date: August 6, 2017 [eBook #55278]

Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHESS

GENERALSHIP, VOL. I. GRAND RECONNAISSANCE ***
 CHESS
GENERALSHIP

BY
FRANKLIN K. YOUNG

Vol. I.
GRAND RECONNAISSANCE.

“He who first devised chessplay, made a model of the Art

Militarie, representing therein all the concurrents and
contemplations of War, without omitting any.”
“Examen de Ingenios.”
Juan Huarte, 1616.

“Chess is the deepest of all games; it is constructed to

carry out the principal of a battle, and the whole theory of
Chess lies in that form of action.”
Emanuel Lasker.

BOSTON
INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING CO.
 1910

Copyright, 1910,
By Franklin K. Young.
Entered at Stationers’ Hall.
All rights reserved.

“Chess is the gymnasium for the mind—it does for the brain
what athletics does for the body.”
Henry Thomas Buckle.

George E. Crosby Co., Printers, Boston, Mass.

YOUNG’S CHESS WORKS

Minor Tactics of Chess $1.00
An eminently attractive treatment of the game of Chess.—Scientific
American.

Major Tactics of Chess 2.50

In this book one finds the principles of strategy and logistics applied
to Chess in a unique and scientific way.—Army and Navy Register.

Grand Tactics of Chess 3.50

For the student who desires to enter the broader channels of Chess,
the best books are by FRANKLIN K. YOUNG: his “Minor Tactics” and
 his more elaborate “Grand Tactics” are the most important
productions of modern Chess literature.—American Chess Magazine.

Chess Strategetics Illustrated 2.50

We know no work outside of the masterpieces of Newton, Hamilton
and Darwin, which so organizes and systematizes human thought.—
Chicago Evening Post.

“There are secrets that the children

Are not taught in public school;
If these secrets were broadcasted,
How could we the masses rule?
If they understood Religion,
Jurisprudence, Trade and War,
Would they groan and sweat and labor—
Make our bricks and furnish straw?”

Anon.

TO

The Memory
OF

EPAMINONDAS
THE INVENTOR
 OF

SCIENTIFIC WARFARE

“I leave no sons
To perpetuate my name;
But I leave two daughters—
LEUCTRA and MANTINEA
Who will transmit my fame
To remotest posterity.”

“For empire and greatness it importeth most that a people

do profess arms as their principal honor, study and
occupation.”—Sir Francis Bacon.

“There is nothing truly imposing but Military Glory.”—

Napoleon.

“The conquered in war, sinking beneath the tribute exacted

by the victor and not daring to utter their impotent hatred,
bequeath to their children miseries so extreme that the aged
have not further evil to fear in death, nor the youthful any
good to hope in life.”—Xenocles.

“War is an element established by the Deity in the order of

the World; perpetual peace upon this Earth we inhabit is a
dream.”—Von Moltke.
 PREFACE

“To become a good General one well may begin by playing

at Chess.”—Prince de Condé.

Except the theatre of actual Warfare, no spot known to man

furnishes such facilities for the practice of combined strategy,
tactics and logistics as does the surface of the Chess-board.

To those familiar with the Science of Strategetics, it needs no

proof that ability to play a good game at Chess, indicates the
possession of faculties common to all great military commanders.
At a certain point, the talent of Morphy for Chess-play and the
talent of Napoleon for Warfare become merged; and beyond this
point, their methods of thought and of action are identical.
Opportunity to display, and in most spectacular fashion, their
singular and superlative genius, was not wanting to either.
But unlike the ferocious Corsican, whose “only desire is to find
myself on the battlefield,” the greatest of all Masters at Chess, found
in the slaughter of his fellow-creatures no incentive sufficient to call
forth those unsurpassed strategetical powers, which recorded Chess-
play shows he possessed.
From this sameness of talent, common to the great Chess-player
and the great military commander, arises the practical utility of the
Royal Game.
For by means of Chess-play, one may learn and practice in their
highest interpretation, mental and physical processes of paramount
importance to the community in time of extreme peril.
From such considerations and for the further reason that in a true
Republic all avenues to greatness are open to merit, scientific Chess-
play should be intelligently and systematically taught in the public
schools. “A people desirous of liberty will entrust its defense to none
but themselves,” says the Roman maxim, and in crises, woe to that
land where the ruler is but a child in arms, and where the
disinclination of the people towards its exercise is equalled by their
unfamiliarity with the military habit.
Despite the ethics of civilization, the optimism of the “unco guid”
and the unction even of our own heart’s deep desire, there seems no
doubt but that each generation will have its wars.
“Pax perpetua,” writes Leibnitz, “exists only in God’s acre.” Here on
earth, if seems that men forever will continue to murder one another
for various reasons; all of which, in the future as in the past, will be
good and sufficient to the fellow who wins; and this by processes
differing only in neatness and despatch.
Whether this condition is commendable or not, depends upon the
point of view. Being irremediable, such phase of the subject hardly is
worth discussing. However, the following by a well-qualified
observer, is interesting and undeniably an intelligent opinion, viz.:

From the essay on “WAR,” read by Prof. John

Ruskin at Woolwich, (Eng.) Military Academy.
“All the pure and noble arts of Peace are founded on War; no
great Art ever rose on Earth, but among a nation of soldiers.
“As Peace is established or extended the Arts decline. They reach
an unparalleled pitch of costliness, but lose their life, enlist
themselves at last on the side of luxury and corruption and among
wholly tranquil nations, wither utterly away.
 “So when I tell you that War is the foundation of all the Arts, I
mean also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and
faculties of men.
“It was very strange for me to discover this and very dreadful—but
I saw it to be quite an undeniable fact.
“We talk of Peace and Learning, of Peace and Plenty, of Peace and
Civilization; but I found that those were not the words which the
Muse of History coupled together; but that on her lips the words
were—Peace and Selfishness, Peace and Sensuality, Peace and
Corruption, Peace and Death.
“I found in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of word
and strength of thought in War; that they were nourished in War
and wasted in Peace; taught by War and deceived by Peace; trained
by War and betrayed by Peace; that they were born in War and
expired in Peace.
“Creative, or foundational War, is that in which the natural
restlessness and love of contest among men, is disciplined into
modes of beautiful—though it may be fatal—play; in which the
natural ambition and love of Power is chastened into aggressive
conquest of surrounding evil; and in which the natural instincts of
self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the institutions which
they are appointed to defend.
“For such War as this all men are born; in such War as this any
man may happily die; and forth from such War as this have arisen
throughout the Ages, all the highest sanctities and virtues of
Humanity.”

That our own country may escape the common lot of nations, is
something not even to be hoped.
Defended by four almost bottomless ditches, nevertheless it is a
certainty that coming generations of Americans must stand in arms,
not only to repel foreign aggression, but to uphold even the integrity
of the Great Republic; and with the hand-writing of coming events
flaming on the wall, posterity well may heed the solemn warning of
by-gone centuries:
“As man is superior to the brute, so is a trained and educated
soldier superior to the merely brave, numerous and enthusiastic.”

“The evils to be apprehended from a standing army are

remote and in my judgment, not to be dreaded; but the
consequence of lacking one is inevitable ruin.”—Washington.
 CONTENTS
PAGE
PREFACE VII
INTRODUCTORY XIII
CHESS GENERALSHIP 3
GRAND RECONNAISSANCE 23
Military Examples 28
ORGANIZATION 45
Military Examples 59
TOPOGRAPHY 73
Military Examples 85
MOBILITY 97
Military Examples 116
NUMBERS 123
Military Examples 127
TIME 139
Military Examples 142
POSITION 147
Military Examples 158
PRIME STRATEGETIC MEANS 169
PRIME STRATEGETIC PROPOSITION 185

“The progress of Science universally is retarded, because

sufficient attention is not paid to explaining essentials in
particular and exactly to define the terms employed.”—Euclid.
 “The first care of the sage should be to discover the true
character of his pupils. By his questions he should assist them
to explain their own ideas and by his answers he should
compel them to perceive their falsities. By accurate definitions
he should gradually dispel the incongruities in their earlier
education and by his subtlety in arousing their doubts, he
should redouble their curiosity and eagerness for information;
for the art of the instructor consists in inciting his pupils to
that point at which they cannot endure their manifest
ignorance.
“Many, unable to undergo this trial and confounded by
offended self-conceit and lacking the fortitude to sustain
correction, forsake their master, who should not be eager to
recall them. Others who learn from humiliation to distrust
themselves should no longer have snares spread for their
vanity. The master should speak to them neither with the
severity of a censor nor with the haughtiness of a sophist, nor
deal in harsh reproaches nor importunate complaints; his
discourse should be the language of reason and friendship in
the mouth of experience.”—Socrates.
 INTRODUCTORY

“The test is as true of cerebral power, as if a hundred

thousand men lay dead upon the field; or a score of hulks
were swinging blackened wrecks, after a game between two
mighty admirals.”—Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes.
(Opening Address at Morphy Banquet, Boston, 1859.)

Men whose business it is to understand war and warfare often are

amused by senseless comparisons made by writers who, as
their writings show, are ignorant even of the rudiments of
military art and science. Of course a certain license in
expression of thought is not to be denied the layman; he cannot
be expected to talk with the exactness of the man who knows.
At the same time there is a limit beyond which the non-technical
man passes at his peril, and this limit is reached when he poses
as a critic and presumes to dogmatize on matters in regard to
which he is uninformed.

The fanciful conjectures of such people, well are illustrated by the

following editorial faux pas, perpetrated by a leading metropolitan
daily, viz.:
“Everyone knows now that a future war between
states having similar and substantially equal
equipments will be a different affair from any war of
the past; characterized by a different order of
generalship and a radically novel application of the
principles of strategy and tactics.”
 Many in the struggle to obtain their daily bread, are tempted to
essay the unfamiliar, and for a stipulated wage to pose as teachers
to the public.
Such always will do well to write modestly in regard to sciences
which they have not studied and of arts which they never practiced,
and especially in future comments on Military matters, such people
may profit by the appended modicum of that ancient history, which
newspaper men as a class so affect to despise, and in regard to
which, as a rule, they are universally and lamentably, ignorant.
What orders of Generalship can exist in the future, different from
those which always have existed since war was made, viz.: good
generalship and bad generalship?
Ability properly to conduct an army is a concrete thing; it does not
admit of comparison. Says Frederic the Great:
“There are only two kinds of Generals—those who know their
trade and those who do not.”
Hence, “a different order of Generalship,” suggested by the
editorial quoted, implies either a higher or a lesser degree of ability
in the “general of the future”; and as obviously, it is impossible that
he can do worse than many already have done, it is necessary to
assume that the commander of tomorrow will be an improvement
over his predecessors.
Consequently, to the military mind it becomes of paramount
interest to inquire as to the form and manner in which such
superiority will be tangibly and visibly manifested, viz.:
Will the general of the future be a better general than
Epaminondas, Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Gustavus Adolphus,
Turenne, Eugene, Frederic, Washington, Napoleon, Von Moltke?
Will he improve upon that application of the principles of strategy
and tactics to actual warfare which comes down to us of today,
stamped with the approval of these superlative military geniuses?
 Will the general of the future know a better way for making war
than acting against the enemy’s communications?
Will he devise a better method of warfare than that whose motive
is the concentration of a superior force upon the strategetic
objective?
Will the processes of his prime logistic operations be preferable to
those of men who won their victories before their battles were
fought, by combining with their troops the topography of the
country, and causing rivers and mountains to take the place of corps
d’armee?
Will the general of the future renounce as obsolete and worthless
that military organization founded centuries before the Christian Era,
by the great Theban, Epaminondas, the father of scientific warfare;
that system adopted by every captain of renown and which may be
seen in its purity in the greater military establishments from the days
of Rome to the present Imperial North German Confederation?
Will the general of the future renounce as obsolete and worthless
that system of Minor Tactics utilized by every man who has made it
his business to conquer the World? Will he propose to us something
more perfect than the primary formation of forces depicted in Plate
XIII of the Secret Strategical Instructions of Frederic II?
Will the general of the future renounce as obsolete and worthless
those intricate, but mathematically exact, evolutions of the combined
arms, which appertain to the Major Tactics of men who are
remembered to this day for the battles that they won?
Will he invent processes more destructive than those whereby
Epaminondas crushed at Leuctra and Mantinea the power of Sparta,
and the women of Lacedaemon saw the smoke of an enemy’s camp
fire for the first time in six hundred years?
Than those whereby Alexander, a youth of eighteen, won Greece
for his father at Chaeronea and the World for himself at Issus and
Arbela? Than those whereby Hannibal destroyed seriatim four
Roman armies at Trebia, Thrasymenus, Cannae and Herdonea?
 Will he find out processes more sudden and decisive than those
whereby Caesar conquered Gaul and Pompey and the son of
Mithridates, and which are fitly described only in his own language;
“Veni, vidi, vici”?
What will the general of the future substitute for the three
contiguous sides of the octagon whereby Tamerlane the Great with
his 1,400,000 veterans at the Plains of Angora, enveloped the
Emperor Bajazet and 900,000 Turks in the most gigantic battle of
record?
Will he eclipse the pursuit of these latter by Mizra, the son of
Tamerlane, who with the Hunnish light cavalry rode two hundred
and thirty miles in five days and captured the Turkish capital, the
Emperor Bajazet, his harem and the royal treasure?
Will he excel Gustavus Adolphus, who dominated Europe for
twenty years, and Turenne, the military Atlas who upheld that
magnificent civilization which embellishes the reign of Louis XIV?
Will he do better than Prince Eugene, who victoriously concluded
eighteen campaigns and drove the Turks out of Christendom?
Will he discover processes superior to those whereby Frederic the
Great with 22,000 troops destroyed at Rosbach a French army of
60,000 regulars in an hour and a half, at the cost of three hundred
men; and at Leuthern with 33,000 troops, killed, wounded or
captured 54,000 out of 93,000 Austrians, at a cost of 3,900 men?
Will he improve on those processes whereby Napoleon with
40,000 men, destroyed in a single year five Austrian armies and
captured 150,000 prisoners? Will he improve on Rivoli, Austerlitz,
Jena, Friedland, Wagram, Dresden, and Ligny?
Will the general of the future renounce as obsolete and worthless
that system of Grand Tactics, by means of which the mighty ones of
Earth have swept before them all created things?
Will his system surpass in grandeur of conception and exactness
of execution the march of Alexander to the Indus? Will he reply to
his rival’s prayers for peace and amity as did the great Macedonian;
“There can be but one Master of the World”; and to the dissuasions
of his friend; “So would I do, were I Parmenio”?
Will he do things more gigantic than Hannibal’s march across the
Alps?
Than the operation of Alesia by Caesar; where the Romans
besieging one Gallic army in a fortified city, and themselves
surrounded by a second Gallic army, single handed destroyed both?
Than the circuit of the Caspian Sea by the 200,000 light cavalry of
Tamerlane, a feat of mountain climbing which never has been
duplicated? Than that marvelous combination of the principles of
tactics and of field fortification, whereby in the position of
Bunzelwitz, Frederic the Great, with 55,000 men, successfully upheld
the last remaining prop of the Prussian nation, against 250,000
Russian and Austrian regular troops, commanded by the best
generals of the age?
Will he conceive anything more scientific and artistic than the
manoeuvre of Trenton and Princeton by Washington? Than the
capture of Burgoyne at Saratoga and Cornwallis at Yorktown? Than
the manoeuvres of Ulm, of Jena, of Landshut? Than the manoeuvres
of Napoleon in 1814? Than the manoeuvre of Charleroi in 1815,
declared by Jomini to be Napoleon’s masterpiece? Will he excel the
manoeuvres of Kutosof and Wittsengen in 1812-13 and of Blucher
on Paris in 1814 and on Waterloo in 1815; each of which annihilated
for the time being the military power of France?
Will he devise military conceptions superior to those whereby Von
Moltke overthrew Denmark in six hours, Austria in six days, and
France in six weeks?

The sapient race of quill-drivers ever has hugged to its breast

many delusions; some of which border upon the outer intellectual
darkness. One of these delusions is that most persistently
advertised, least substantial, but forever darling first favorite of timid
and inexperienced minds: “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
Explanation of the invincible ignorance of the penny-a-liner is
simple, viz.:
Of the myriad self-appointed educators to the public, few are
familiar even with the rudimentary principles of Military Science and
almost none are acquainted even with the simplest processes of
Strategetic Art. Hence, like all who discourse on matters which they
do not understand, such writers continually confound together
things which have no connection.
Ignorant of war and the use of weapons; bewildered by the
prodigious improvements in mechanical details, they immoderately
magnify the importance of such improvements, oblivious to the fact
that these latter relate exclusively to elementary tactics and in no
way affect the system of Strategy, Logistics, and the higher branches
of Tactics.
Of such people, the least that can be said and that in all charity,
is, that before essaying the role of the pedagogue, they should
endeavor to grasp that most obvious of all truths:
“A man cannot teach what he never has learned.”
Says Frederic the Great: “Improvements and new discoveries in
implements of warfare will be made continually; and generals then
alive must modify tactics to comply with these novelties. But the
Grand Art of taking advantage of topographical conditions and of the
faulty disposition of the opposing forces, ETERNALLY WILL REMAIN
UNCHANGED in the military system.”

Naturally, the student now is led to inquire:

 What then is this immutable military system? What are its text
books, where is it taught and from whom is it to be learned?
In answer it may be stated:
At the present day, private military schools make no attempt to
teach more than elementary tactics. Even the Governmental
academy curriculum aims little higher than the school of the
battalion.
Scientific Chess-play begins where these institutions leave off, and
ends at that goal which none of these institutions even attempt to
reach.
Chess teaches to conduct campaigns, to win battles, and to move
troops securely and effectively in the presence of and despite the
opposition of an equal or superior enemy.
Military schools graduate boys as second-lieutenants commanding
a platoon. Chess graduates Generals, able to mobilize Corps
d’armee, whatever their number or location; to develop these into
properly posted integers of a grand Strategic Front and to
manoeuvre and operate the army as a Strategetic Unit, in
accordance to the laws of the Strategetic art and the principles of
the Strategetic science.
By precept and by actual practice, Chess teaches what is NOT
taught in any military school—that least understood and most
misunderstood; that best guarded and most invaluable of all State
Secrets—
The profession of

GENERALSHIP.

“Books will speak plain when counsellors blanch. Therefore

it is good to be conversant with them; especially the books of
such as themselves have been actors upon the stage.”—Sir
Francis Bacon.

“At this moment, Europe, which fears neither God nor devil,
grovels in terror before a little man hardly five feet in height;
who, clad in a cocked hat and grey great-coat and mounted
upon a white horse, plods along through mud and darkness;
followed by the most enthusiastic, most devoted and most
efficient band of cut-throats and robbers, the world has ever
seen.”

“Many good soldiers are but poor generals.”—Hannibal.

“No soldier serving under a victorious commander, ever has

enough of war.”—Caesar.

“Officers always should be chosen from the nobility and

never from the lower orders of society; for the former, no
matter how dissolute, always retain a sense of honor, while
the latter, though guilty of atrocious actions, return to their
homes without compunction and are received by their families
without disapprobation.”—Frederic the Great.

At the terrible disaster of Cannae, the Patrician Consul

Aemilius Paulus and 80,000 Romans died fighting sword in
hand; while the Plebian Consul, Varro, fled early in the battle.
Upon the return of the latter to Rome, the Senate, instead of
ordering his execution, with withering sarcasm formally voted
him its thanks and the thanks of the Roman people, “that he
did not despair of the Republic.”
 “Among us we have a man of singular character—one
Phocion. He seems not to know that he lives in our modern
age and at incomparable Athens. He is poor, yet is not
humiliated by his poverty; he does good, yet never boasts of
it; and gives advice, though he is certain it will not be
followed. He possesses talent without ambition and serves
the state without regard to his own interest. At the head of
the army, he contents himself with restoring discipline and
beating the enemy. When addressing the assembly, he is
equally unmoved by the disapprobation or the applause of the
multitude.
“We laugh at his singularities and we have discovered an
admirable secret for revenging ourselves for his contempt. He
is the only general we have left—but we do not employ him;
he is the most upright and perhaps the most intelligent of our
counsellors—but we do not listen to him. It is true, we cannot
make him change his principles, but, by Heaven, neither shall
he induce us to change ours; and it never shall be said that
by the example of his superannuated virtues and the
influence of his antique teachings, Phocion was able to
correct the most polished and amiable people in the world.”—
Callimedon.
GENERALSHIP
 CHESS GENERALSHIP

“In Chess the soldiers are the men and the General is the
mind of the player.”—Emanuel Lasker.

“It is neither riches nor armies that make a nation

formidable; but the courage and genius of the Commander-
in-Chief.”—Frederic the Great.

“Ho! Ye Macedonians! Because together we have

conquered the World, think ye to give law to the blood of
Achilles and to withstand the dictates of the Son of Jupiter?
“Choose ye a new commander, draw yourselves up for
battle; I will lead against you those Persians whom ye so
despise, and if you are victorious, by Mehercule, I will do
everything that you desire.”—Alexander the Great.

“It is I and I alone, who give you your glory and your
success.”—Napoleon.

“My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways,
My ways, saith the Lord.”—Holy Bible.

By authority indisputable, the ex-cathedra dictum of the greatest of

the Great Captains, we have been informed that the higher
 processes of the military system, eternally will remain
unchanged.

As a necessary corollary, it follows that these processes always have

been and always will be comprehended and employed by every
great Captain.

Equally, it is self-evident, that capability to comprehend these higher

processes, united with ability properly to utilize them to win
battles and campaigns, constitutes genius for Warfare.

Moreover, we are further informed by the same unimpeachable

authority, that so irresistible is genius for warfare, that united to
courage, it is formidable beyond the united financial and military
resources of the State. In corroboration of this, we have the
testimony of well-qualified judges. Says the Count de Saxe:
“Unless a man is born with talent for war and this talent is brought
to perfection, it is impossible for him to be more than an indifferent
general.”

In these days, more or less degenerate from the soldierly

standpoint, the fantastic sophistries of Helvetius have vogue, and
most people believe book-learning to be all-in-all.
Many are so weak-minded, as really to believe, that because born
in the Twentieth Century, they necessarily are the repository of all
the virtues, and particularly of all the knowledge acquired by their
ancestors from remotest generations. Few seem to understand that
the child, even of ultra-modern conditions, is born just as ignorant
and often invincibly so, as were the sons of Ham, Shem and Japhet,
and most appear to be unaware, that:
 Only by intelligent reflection upon their own experience and upon
the experiences of others, can one acquire knowledge.
The triviality of crowding the memory with things that may or may
not be true, is the merest mimicry of education.
Real education is nothing more than the fruit of experience; and
he who acts in conformity to such knowledge, alone is wise. Thus to
act, implies ability to comprehend. But there are those in whom
capability is limited; hence, all may not be wise who wish to be so,
and these necessarily remain through life very much as they are
born.
The use of knowledge would be infinitely more certain, if our
understanding of its accurate application were as extensive as our
needs require. We have only a few ideas of the attributes of matter
and of the laws of mechanics, out of an infinite number of secrets
which mankind never can hope to discover. This renders our feeble
adaptations in practice of the knowledge we possess, oftimes
inadequate for the result we desire; and it seems obvious that if
Nature had intended man to attain to the superlative, she would
have endowed him with intelligence and have communicated to him
information, infinitely superior to that we possess.
The universal blunder of mankind arises from an hallucination that
all minds are created equal; and that by mere book-learning, i.e.,
simply by memorizing what somebody says are facts it is possible for
any man to attain to superior and even to superlative ability.

Such profoundly, but utterly mis-educated people, not unnaturally

may inquire, by what right speaks the eminent warrior previously
quoted. These properly may be informed in the words of Frederic
the Great:
“The Count de Saxe is the hero of the bravest action
ever done by man.” viz.,
 A great battle was raging.
Within a magnificent Pavilion in the centre of the French camp,
the King, the nobility and the high Ecclesiastics of the realm were
grouped about a plain iron cot.
Prone upon this cot, wasted by disease, lay the Count de Saxe, in
that stupor which often precedes and usually presages dissolution.
The last rites of the Church had been administered, and the
assemblage in silence and apprehension, awaited the approach of a
victorious enemy and the final gasp of a general who had never lost
a battle.
The din of strife drawing nearer, penetrated the coma which
enshrouded the soul of the great Field-Marshal.
Saxe opened his eyes. His experienced ear told him that his army,
routed and disordered, was flying before an exultant enemy.
The giant whose pastime it was to tear horseshoes in twain with
his bare hands and to twist nails into corkscrews with his fingers,
staggered to his feet, hoarsely articulating fierce and mandatory
ejaculations.
Hastily clothed, the Count de Saxe was placed in a litter and borne
out of his pavilion into that chaos of ruin and carnage which
invariably accompanies a lost battle. Around him, behind and in
front, swarmed his broken battalions and disorganized squadrons;
while in pursuit advanced majestically in solid column, the
triumphant English.
Saxe demanded his horse and armor.
Clad in iron and supported in the saddle on either hand, this
modern Achilles galloped to the front of his army; then, at the head
of the Scotch Guards, the Irish Brigade, and French Household
troops, Saxe in person, led that series of terrific hand-to-hand
onslaughts which drove the English army from the field of battle,
and gained the famous victory of Fontenoy.
 “Furthermore,” declares this illustrious Generalissimo of Louis XIV;
“It is possible to make war without trusting anything
to accident; this is the highest point of skill and
perfection within the province of a general.”
“Most men,” writes Vergetius, “imagine that strength and courage
are sufficient to secure victory. Such are ignorant that when they
exist, stratagem vanquishes strength and skill overcomes courage.”
In his celebrated work, Institutorum Rei Militaris, that source from
whence all writers derive their best knowledge of the military
methods of the ancients; and by means of which, he strove to revive
in his degenerate countrymen that intelligent valor which
distinguishes their great ancestors—the famous Roman reiterates
this solemn warning:
“Victory in war depends not on numbers, nor on
courage; skill and discipline only, can ensure it.”
The emphasis thus laid by these great warriors on genius for
warfare is still further accentuated by men whose dicta few will
dispute, viz.,
“The understanding of the Commander,” says
Frederic the Great, “has more influence on the
outcome of the battle or campaign, than has the
prowess of his troops.”
Says Napoleon:
“The general is the head, the whole of an army. It
was not the Roman army that subjugated Gaul, it was
Caesar; nor was it the Carthagenian army that made
the Republic tremble to the gates of Rome, it was
Hannibal; it was not the Macedonian army which
reached the Indus, it was Alexander; it was not the
French army which carried war to the Weser and the
 Inn, it was Turenne; it was not the Prussian army
which for seven years defended Prussia against the
three strongest powers of Europe, it was Frederic the
Great.”
From such opinions by men whose careers evince superlative
knowledge of the subject, it is clear, that:

I. There exists a system of Strategetics common to all great

commanders;
II. That understanding of this system is shown by the skillful
use of it;
III. That such skill is derived from innate capability;
IV. That those endowed by Nature with this talent, must bring
their gifts to perfection, by intelligent study.

So abstruse are the processes of this greatest of all professions,

that comprehension of it has been evidenced by eleven men only,
viz.:
Epaminondas, Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal, Gustavus Adolphus,
Turenne, Eugene, Frederic, Washington, Napoleon, Von Moltke.
Comprehension of this system can be attained, only by innate
capability brought to perfection by intelligent study of the words and
achievements of these great Captains.
For life is so short and our memories in general so defective, that
we ought to seek instruction only from the purest sources.
None but men endowed by Nature with the military mind and
trained in the school of the great Captains, are able to write
intelligently on the acts and motives of generals of the first order. All
the writings of mere literati relative to these uncommon men, no
matter how excellent such authors may be, never can rise to
anything more than elegant phraseology.
 It is of enlightened critics, such as the former, that the youthful
student always is first in need. Such will guide him along a road, in
which he who has no conductor may easily lose himself. They will
correct his blunders considerately, recollecting that should these be
ridiculed or treated with severity, talent might be stifled which might
hereafter bloom to perfection.
It is a difficult matter to form the average student, and to impart
to him that degree of intelligent audacity and confident prudence
which is requisite for the proper practice of the Art of Strategetics.
To secure proficiency, the student from the beginning must
cheerfully submit himself to a mental discipline, which properly may
be termed severe; in order to make his faculties obedient to his will.
Secondly, he must regularly exercise these faculties, in order to
make them active and to acquire the habit of implicitly conforming to
the laws of the Art; to make himself familiar with its processes, and
to establish in his mind that confidence in its practice which can
come only through experience.
The student daily should exercise his mind in the routine of
deployments, developments, evolutions, manoeuvres, and
operations, both on the offensive and on the defensive. These
exercises should be imprinted on the memory by closely reviewing
the lesson of the previous day.
Even with all this severe and constant effort, time is necessary for
practical tactics to become habitual; for the student must become so
familiar with these movements and formations that he can execute
them instantly and with precision.
To acquire this degree of perfection, much study is necessary; it is
a mistake to think otherwise. But this study is its own sufficient
reward, for the student soon will find that it has extended his ideas,
and that he is beginning to think in the GREAT.
At the same time the student should thoroughly instruct himself in
military history, topography, logic, mathematics, and the science of
fortification. With all of these the strategist must be familiar.
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