George Washington is perhaps the most familiar figure in American history. But most people really only know the image of him they see in marble statues and patriotic paintings. Behind those symbols was a real man: ambitious, self-taught, intensely concerned with honor, and constantly wrestling with the immense responsibilities history placed on his shoulders.

In celebration of America’s 250th birthday, we’re taking an extended look at the life of the man more responsible than anyone else for the nation’s founding. Here to unpack that life for us is H.W. Brands, a historian and the author of a new biography of Washington, American Patriarch. Brands traces Washington’s journey from a young Virginia surveyor to military commander, founding father, and first president. Along the way, we discuss how Washington’s upbringing shaped his character, why he became a surprisingly effective military leader despite losing more battles than he won, how he held together a fragile revolutionary army, how he shaped the presidency through the precedents he set, and whether a leader like Washington could still succeed today.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• H.W.’s previous appearances on the AoM podcast:
  • Episode #696: Theodore Roosevelt, The Last Romantic
  • Episode #908: Would You Have Been a Patriot or a Loyalist?
• AoM Podcast #223: George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and Valiant Ambition
• AoM Podcast #366: Teach Yourself Like George Washington
• AoM Podcast #719: The Surprising Pessimism of America’s Founding Fathers
• AoM Article: George Washington’s Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation

Connect With H.W. Brands

• H.W. on Substack
• H.W.’s faculty page

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This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

America’s Founding Fathers have become larger-than-life figures. Their faces stare out from currency, their words are quoted in political speeches, and their accomplishments have been polished into legend. It’s easy to think of them as marble statues instead of flesh-and-blood men.

But the more closely you examine their lives, the more interesting they become. They wrestled with self-doubt, rivalries, failures, and moral shortcomings. They changed their minds, made costly mistakes, and faced problems for which there were no obvious answers. Yet they also possessed an uncommon sense of duty, ambition, curiosity, and conviction that enabled them to accomplish something extraordinary: creating and sustaining a new republic against long odds.

Over the years, we’ve had the privilege of speaking with some of the country’s leading historians and biographers about the Founding generation and the Revolutionary era. Below are the six best of these conversations to enjoy as America turns 250. They explore everything from the Founders’ philosophy of virtue to why they chose to become revolutionaries to the lessons their lives still offer today. Whether you’re just beginning to explore this period of history or are already a devoted student of the founding, these Art of Manliness podcast episodes will deepen your understanding of the remarkable men who shaped the American experiment.

Books, Routines, and Habits — The Founders’ Guide to Self-Improvement

The Founding Fathers believed that happiness wasn’t about feeling good but about becoming good. Jeffrey Rosen explains how they came to equate happiness with virtue and self-mastery, and why they believed personal self-government — a.k.a. self-improvement — was the foundation of political self-government. He explores the books that shaped the Founders’ thinking, along with the routines, self-examination practices, and habits they used to cultivate character. It’s a fascinating look at the moral philosophy that guided some of America’s most influential statesmen.

The Surprising Pessimism of America’s Founding Fathers

We often imagine the Founding Fathers as unwaveringly confident in the republic they created. But Dennis C. Rasmussen argues that many of them grew deeply anxious about whether the American experiment would survive. He explores why George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson feared the nation’s future (while James Madison remained hopeful). Their concerns ranged from growing partisanship to a decline in civic virtue among the American people. The conversation offers a surprisingly timely perspective on the challenges of preserving a free republic.

Would You Have Been a Patriot or a Loyalist?

Looking back, the American Revolution can seem inevitable. But for many colonists — including several of the Founding Fathers — the decision to side with the Patriots or remain loyal to Britain was anything but clear-cut. H. W. Brands explores the personal ambitions, relationships, and principles that shaped these choices. He explains why George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were unlikely revolutionaries, why Franklin’s son remained a Loyalist, and what led Benedict Arnold to switch sides. The episode offers a nuanced look at the complicated human decisions behind America’s founding.

The Fascinating Life of America’s Forgotten Founding Father

Benjamin Rush signed the Declaration of Independence, helped shape American medicine, and counted nearly every major Founder among his closest friends — yet today he’s largely forgotten. Stephen Fried explains why Rush’s remarkable legacy faded and traces his extraordinary life, from his role in the Revolution to his efforts to reconcile Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Along the way, he reveals how Rush’s journals and correspondence preserved an intimate portrait of the nation’s founders that remained hidden for generations. It’s a fascinating introduction to one of the most influential and overlooked figures of the American founding.

American Honor — Creating the Nation’s Ideals During the Revolution

We often think the American Revolution was driven primarily by taxes (“No taxation without representation!”) and political philosophy. But Craig Bruce Smith argues that honor was the deeper force motivating the Founding generation. He explains how changing ideas about personal and collective honor shaped the push for independence, influenced the choices of the Founding Fathers, and even played a role in Benedict Arnold‘s treason. The conversation also explores how America’s understanding of honor continued to evolve after the Revolution. It’s a fresh perspective on the ideals that helped forge a nation.

George Washington, Benedict Arnold, and Valiant Ambition

Today, George Washington is remembered as the hero of the American Revolution, while Benedict Arnold is synonymous with treason. But early in the war, their reputations were almost the opposite. Nathaniel Philbrick explains how Washington grew into an exceptional military and political leader while Arnold’s extraordinary talent was undone by pride, resentment, and ambition. Their intertwined stories reveal that character — not just ability — ultimately determines a person’s legacy. It’s one of the most compelling studies of leadership to emerge from the Revolutionary era.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Memorial Day is coming up. For most folks that means a day off, grilling in the backyard, and getting 30% off at their favorite online retailer.

Nothing wrong with that. I’m looking forward to eating a burger this weekend myself.

But Memorial Day was established for a graver and loftier purpose — one that’s worth putting yourself in touch with each time it comes around.

Memorial Day started in 1868 as Decoration Day. After the Civil War (which killed more Americans than any war before or since), people in towns across the country walked to local cemeteries in late May to lay flowers on the graves of the men who didn’t come home.

That’s what the day is supposed to be about. Remembering the men who answered the call and didn’t make it back, honoring those who paid the ultimate price for our freedoms and the life we enjoy today.

If you desire to put the memorial back in Memorial Day, here are four ways to do so:

Read a War Memoir

One way to turn your thoughts to the sacrifices made by those who fought for our country is to immerse yourself in their world by reading a war memoir. They’ll give you the perspective of the man on the frontlines. You get the story of those who survived — and, inevitably, of the comrades who didn’t.

You could just start a war memoir over the long weekend, but if you really want to challenge yourself, try to finish it within those three days. If you read one that’s around 300 pages long, that means reading around 2.5 hours a day.

Here are a few to consider picking up this weekend:

• With the Old Breed by Eugene Sledge. Visceral, honest, and morally serious, Sledge captures not just the brutality of WWII’s Pacific campaign, but what prolonged combat does to the human soul. For some inside details on the book, listen to our podcast with Eugene’s son.
• Helmet for My Pillow by Robert Leckie. More literary and philosophical than Sledge, but equally memorable. Leckie has a novelist’s eye for character and atmosphere while still conveying the exhaustion, terror, and absurdity of the Pacific War.
• Company Commander by Charles B. MacDonald. A compelling account from WWII’s European theater. MacDonald was a 21-year-old infantry officer during the Battle of the Bulge and offers his experience with humility, clarity, and emotional honesty.
• Chickenhawk by Robert Mason. One of the best American Vietnam memoirs ever written. Mason was a Huey helicopter pilot, and the book captures both the adrenaline and the psychological attrition of the war with an unsentimental, deeply human, immersive immediacy that makes you feel like you’re there.

Do the Murph

Working out is one of the only ways modern citizens experience even a tiny bit of the pains and exertions experienced by soldiers in combat. One way to pay tribute to them, then, is ramping up the strenuosity and performing a workout with a specifically in memoriam purpose.

Enter the Murph Challenge. Named after Lt. Michael Murphy, a Navy SEAL killed in Afghanistan during Operation Red Wings (the mission Lone Survivor is based on), the workout is based on his favorite personal training session while deployed and at home. The workout consists of:

• 1-mile run
• 100 pull-ups
• 200 push-ups
• 300 air squats
• 1-mile run

The exercises are all done while wearing a 20-pound vest or body armor.

The workout is intentionally difficult, as suffering is part of the point. The grind becomes a small symbolic act of remembrance: voluntarily embracing discomfort, exhaustion, and discipline in recognition of those who endured far more.

Watch Band of Brothers or The Pacific

Back when we had cable, I’d usually end up landing on Band of Brothers or The Pacific during my Memorial Day weekend channel surfing. AMC and The History Channel ran marathons of these WWII miniseries all weekend long.

Despite having seen them multiple times, I’d sit there and watch for hours every time I landed on one. When the marathon ended, I always felt the same three things: sad, grateful, and inspired to be a better man.

We don’t have cable anymore, so I haven’t stumbled into one of these marathons in several years. But I’ve missed them. This Memorial Day weekend, I’ve decided to queue one of them up to watch.

What I love about both miniseries is that they follow real units of regular guys through the worst combat of World War II. The cameras don’t dwell on the generals. They stay with the guys on the front lines who, before being thrown into the brutalities of war, worked at the hardware store or attended a state college.

You can’t watch these shows and not think about what was paid for the freedoms you take for granted while you’re eating a burger and drinking a beer.

Volunteer to Put Flags on Soldiers’ Gravestones

The original Decoration Day was about walking to local cemeteries and laying flowers on the graves of fallen soldiers. The tradition continues today, mostly in the form of small American flags placed in front of veterans’ headstones in the lead-up to Memorial Day.

Local American Legion and VFW posts, along with Boy Scout troops and community groups, organize flag-placing details at veterans’ cemeteries every year. They’re almost always looking for volunteers.

To find a detail near you, call your local American Legion or VFW post, or contact the nearest national or state veterans cemetery.

And don’t forget to put out your flag at home.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sledge, a Marine who fought with the 1st Division — the old breed — in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu and Okinawa, the book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly written that you can practically feel the heat, mud, exhaustion, and terror coming off the page.

But Sledge wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor who started jotting notes on scraps of paper tucked inside the New Testament he carried in his breast pocket. He wrote the book decades later, partly to process his own trauma, partly to leave a record for his sons.

One of those sons is my guest today. Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father’s legacy forward, and he’s written his own book — The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed — that pairs his father’s combat experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene’s son. Today on the show, Henry and I talk about why his dad wrote With the Old Breed, what made fighting in the Pacific uniquely hellish, and how Eugene managed to come home and live a full, honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the rest of his days.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• China Marine: An Infantryman’s Life After World War II by E.B. Sledge
• HBO series The Pacific
• Ken Burns’ The War
• AoM Article: Eugene B. Sledge Puts Your Problems Into Perspective
• AoM Article: Are You Missing the Forbidden City?

Connect With Henry Sledge

• Henry on IG
• Henry on FB

Thanks to this Episode’s Sponsor!

• Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/MANLINESS

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. With the Old Breed is widely considered one of the greatest war memoirs ever written. Penned by Eugene Sludge, a Marine who fought with the first division, the old breed, in the Pacific campaigns of Peleliu in Okinawa. The book is unflinching, deeply human, and so vividly written that you can practically feel the heat, mud, exhaustion, and terror coming off the page.

But Sledge wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor who started jotting notes on scraps of paper tucked inside the New Testament he carried in his breast pocket. He wrote the book decades later, partly to process his own trauma, partly to leave a record for his sons. One of those sons is my guest today. Henry Sledge has spent years carrying his father’s legacy forward, and he’s written his own book, The Old Breed, The Complete Story Revealed that pairs his father’s combat experience with previously unpublished material and his own perspective as Eugene’s son. Today on the show, Henry and I talked about why his dad wrote With the Old Breed, what made fighting the Pacific uniquely hellish and how Eugene managed to come home and live a full honorable life despite carrying the war with him for the rest of his days. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/OldBreed. All right, Henry Sledge, welcome to the show.

Henry Sledge:

Thank you. Great to be here, Brett. I appreciate that.

Brett McKay:

So your father was Eugene “Sledgehammer” Sledge, who was a marine infantryman who fought in the Pacific campaign of World War II. He’s also the author of what many consider one of the greatest war memoirs ever written, and it’s called With the Old Breed. I’m sure a lot of our listeners have read this. Why did your dad write the book originally? Was this something he had planned right after the war? 

Henry Sledge:

There really was no orchestrated plan to write a book. I think it began as a cathartic process on his part to deal with some of the PTSD, the emotional trauma, just the trying to assimilate to civilian life as he began to put the war behind him. I think that was part of it. And the other component to it was I think there was a desire on his part to have a written record of his experience for my brother and me. I remember him telling me that.

Brett McKay:

And the thing too is he had extensive notes to write this thing. Where did those notes come from? How did he keep them when he was fighting?

Henry Sledge:

Well, so the Marines were not allowed to keep diaries for obvious security reasons. If you saw The Pacific miniseries…?

Brett McKay:

I did.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah. So Rami Malik playing Snafu has that classic line, gives the Japs valuable intel, they find it, but that really was the crux of it. I mean, Marines were not supposed to keep diaries for security reasons, and he began to keep surreptitious notes on little pieces of paper that he kept tucked into his pocket New Testament Bible that he carried in the breast pocket of his jacket. And he also wrote some cursory notes in the first few pages of that Bible just on weather conditions and basic outline of where they were and that kind of thing. But most of the note taking was going to be on pieces of paper that he kept tucked into the Bible. And then when he got home, he took those pieces of paper and wrote down on a piece of legal paper, an outline, fleshing everything out, and then from there began to write on his legal pads with his pencil

Brett McKay:

When he started to write. How long after did it take for him to finish it?

Henry Sledge:

He started writing, I would say early seventies. I mean, my earliest memories of it are just when I was just a few years old and that process, and probably a few years after he began that he asked my mother to begin typing the manuscript. So she started typing it. He would write at night and then she would type in the days that followed. I mean, that went on through most of the mid to late seventies. It probably wasn’t until the late seventies that she talked him into like, “Hey, this is a pretty powerful story. We should look at trying to get this published.” And I think that process, and I remember it really well. I mean, I remember the day that we got the letter from Presidio saying that they would publish it, and that was around 1980 because it actually came out in 1981.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, it was about a 10-year process.

Henry Sledge:

And the thing is, Brett, I mean, he would work on it furiously for several days at a time at night, and then he’d take a break and may not touch it for a month or two months. And I mean, as my brother and I got older and as a family, we’re doing things because at that time, he’s in his early fifties or mid to late forties and just life gets in the way of everything. So I mean, he’s being a husband, being a dad, he was very involved in our lives on a day-to-day basis. We had a close relationship. And so we would hit stretches where he wouldn’t even work on it for months at a time and then pick it back up and dive back into it.

Brett McKay:

Your dad’s writing is really good, it’s really compelling. But he wasn’t a professional writer. He was a biology professor, and his writing wasn’t flowery. It was more matter of fact. How would you describe your dad’s writing style?

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, I would agree. I mean, his writing, I would term it like this. He was a scientist. He had PhD biology, biochemistry. He wrote like a scientist, no flowery, elegant prose, nothing pedantic. I mean, it was straight ahead, unblinking factual.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you can tell that he’s got this scientific biological mind when he writes, because the way he describes things, it’s almost like you’re reading a field report from a field biologist. I mean, there was one, here’s a quote he’s talking about. He’s just seen the dead bodies on Peleliu. Yeah, he said this, “it was gruesome to see the stages of decay proceed from just killed to bloated, to maggot infested rotting to partially exposed bones like some biological clock marking the inexorable passage of time.” And then he’d also, when he described dead bodies, he would compare them. Well, it looks like the intestines of a squirrel that I would hunt as a boy.

Henry Sledge:

Yes, that’s exactly right. And I literally turned as you were reading that, I mean, I know that book so intimately. Well, I got pretty much right here to the part where you were reading from. But not only that, he talks about cans of C rations and K ration boxes open and unopened, lay around our gun pit along with discarded grenade and mortar shell canisters scattered about the area or discarded us helmets, packs, ponchos, jackets, web cartridge belts, leggings, boondockers ammo, boxes of every type and crates the discarded articles of clothing and the inevitable bottle of blood plasma bore mute testimony that a marine had been hit there. And what I was saying about that was that writing is just knowing my father. . . . he’s not just seeing this and observing these things. He feels the anguish of seeing the blood of fellow Marines.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, that’s one thing I noticed throughout the book is he doesn’t flinch away from the brutality of war. And he describes it in great detail, but at the same time, he brings his humanity to it and he talks about the moral and spiritual damage that it’s doing to the men who are in these battles.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, always. There was always that angle of it to him because I mean, look, that was one of the extraordinary things about the kind of guy that my father was. I mean, honestly, he was a very peaceable guy who wanted to enjoy his life and go to college and do the things that a young man would be doing. And fighting on some more torn island in the middle of the Pacific was not what he wanted to be doing, but he wanted to enlist in the Marine Corps. He wanted to be a part of that. He knew that everybody was going to have to go fight somewhere, and he wanted to be with what he thought was the finest outfit out there, which was the Marines and all of those things. Just that bear testimony to his character,

Brett McKay:

And as you said, the process of writing this book, it seemed like it helped him process that trauma that a lot of soldiers came home with.

Henry Sledge:

I do think it was a cathartic process for him. I really do. I remember when With the Old Breed came out and we got our first copies, and I remember reading it, of course, I had read some of the typewritten pages that my mother had typed in the years leading up to its publication, but I remember really well, I remember reading where in the introduction, I think it was in the introduction or some of the early parts of it, he said, the nightmares no longer wake me in the middle of the night with a pounding heart and in a cold sweat. But I’ll tell you this, I recall very well when my brother and I were young, my mother sat us down and she said, listen, if you boys need us in the middle of the night, come to my side of the bed. Don’t go to your father’s side of the bed and whatever you do, don’t touch him.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, because he was still dealing with it.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah. I mean, he was still dealing with it. I mean, look, man, that’s heavy stuff. I mean, this is a guy we’re talking in the mid 1970s here. This is a guy who’s in his fifties at this point with a couple of boys and being a husband and a dad and trying to put all this behind him.

Brett McKay:

And his war experience had happened in his early twenties.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, well, I mean, he was 20 years old in Peleliu. He turned 21 on Peleliu. And he was 22 in Okinawa.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. There was another antidote you put in your book about your experience with your dad’s dealing with that trauma, that PTSD of the war. I think you were a kid and you got a toy Tommy gun.

Henry Sledge:

Oh yeah, the plastic Tommy gun. I know right where you were going. Growing up in the seventies, my brother and I would go down to the dime store and we’d get the little plastic army helmets, and I was fascinated by the Thompson sub machine gun. I just loved that weapon as a kid when I would see it on movies and things like that. And I remember buying one just the cheap little plastic Tommy gun, and it had the little clacker in it. When you pull the trigger, it would clack like that, man. I would run around with that thing out in the woods and pretend I’d watch Hogan’s Heroes in the afternoon and then run around with that thing after that. Pretend like we were playing World War II or something. I mean, I was just a kid, and I think I was like eight or nine, maybe 10 years old, and I got the not so bright idea to hide in our cupboard in the kitchen. 

We had a pantry cupboard. It was really tall. It was about five feet tall and eight, nine years old, I was a really small kid, and I got the idea to get in that thing and hide and close the door and jump out and scare him when he walked in the kitchen. And so I did one night and I heard him coming down the hall kind of whistling to himself. He always did. And he walked through the kitchen and as he did, I pushed open the door and jumped out at that thing and was squeezing a little trigger on it. And he spun around and I don’t know that he ever said a word. He did not lose his temper. He did not lose his cool. But he spun around and looked at me like he’d never looked at me before.

And he picked me up as the Marines used to say, grab me by the stack and swivel, which is where you grab somebody by the collar. And he grabbed me and my dad was not a big man, 5’ 9”, 155 pounds or so. But he grabbed me and he picked me up and pushed me against that cupboard door. And then he let me down and he took me into the bedroom and took his belt off and gave me a whipping. And people would be horrified at that now. But I mean, that was not an uncommon thing for those of us growing up back in those days. But the interesting thing about it was like he did not lose control. He did not lose his cool. That was a very calculated response to what I had done, and he was trying to instill in me, don’t ever do that to a combat veteran.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And what’s interesting though, besides being startled at night and being freaked out by his 8-year-old son who jumps out with a toy Tommy gun, you describe your dad. You never got the impression, you say this, that you were living with someone who was mentally ill or just disturbed. He was like you said, a very controlled, calm guy.

Henry Sledge:

Absolutely. I mean, he would stress out about things. You could see that. But look, this goes to the heart of, I mean, this is a great point you bring up, Brett, because a big part of why I do what I do is people who’ve read With the Old Breed, people who’ve seen The Pacific, people who maybe saw the Ken Burns The War in 2007. You watch those things and you see this young man come home from this crucible of savagery, which was his experience on Peleliu and Okinawa, and you see this guy come home and you see him have the nightmares, and you get a sense of him struggling to assimilate back into civilian life. One thing I felt like they did not, the war was excellent by Ken Burns, but my mother and I talked about it afterward. And one thing that they didn’t do there, and they didn’t do it in the Pacific either, because there just wasn’t time.

They really didn’t convey the point adequately that okay, yeah, he struggled when he came home, but he struggled successfully. And so I feel like I can bear testimony to the fact that he was a classic All-American father. He would never forget the Marines he served with. He would never forget his time in the Marine Corps. He would never forget his pride in the Marine Corps or his pride in our country for that matter. But at the same time, he deplored the idea of sending young men into combat, but he waged whatever struggles he had internally, he waged them successfully because I mean, look, he and my mother had, they were married almost 50 years by the time he passed away, and they had a fantastic marriage. Not to say that it was perfect, no marriage is, but they had a very strong, we had a great family life.

It wasn’t perfect, nothing is, but I never felt like, well, I’ll say it like this. My father did a great job of compartmentalizing the angst, and he was determined to be a productive, cheerful member of society. And he was, I’ve got to know many of his students in later years, some of whom were young Marines and soldiers coming home from Vietnam. And I mean, his students called him Uncle Eugene. I mean, so he was a very light, he had a fantastic sense of humor, a very lively sense of humor. And he was very highly thought of professionally, very highly thought of in Montevallo in our town growing up where I grew up. And so yeah, Sledgehammer may have had his struggles, but he did it right.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk more about your dad and his history and how he ended up as a Marine. So your dad’s family had a military tradition. His father served in World War I when the war broke out. Your father was at a military school? Military institute. Was it Marion Military Institute?

Henry Sledge:

Yes, Marion Military Institute.

Brett McKay:

And so, I mean, he was on track. He could have been an officer. His family was nudging him to be an officer, but your dad decided not to do that. Can you tell us the story of why he chose to intentionally flunk out of the officer candidate program and enlist as a private in the Marines?

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, I mean, I can answer the question very easily. The impetuousness of youth, he and a very large portion of the detachment in his officer training and the V12 program that he was enrolled in at Georgia Tech after the war broke out. They were scared that the war was going to be over before they got into it. And he didn’t want to live with that feeling of, I almost got there, but I just didn’t quite get there and do what I was meant to do. And you know what bears pointing out? I mean, this is a really powerful thing. I think it’s a very significant thing about when you talk about Eugene Sledge and the kind of guy that he was. I mean, look, my grandfather was a very influential man in mobile back in the 1930s. He was very well thought of, and he had a certain amount of influence.

And other marines that my dad served with pointed this out to me. I mean, a lot of these guys came from hard scrabble backgrounds. They came from, I mean, I’m just going to say dirt poor backgrounds, lacking a lot of formal education. I mean, that was a fact with a lot of those guys back then. And that wasn’t the case with my father. I mean, he actually had some college behind him, and he came from a family that you could say in certain ways was well to do and to absolutely purposefully insert himself into the world. He inserted himself in the Marine Corps. I think it’s a powerful thing. And I mean, one of his fellow marines told me, I went to visit this guy years ago, and he said, that was one thing I always admired about your dad. We all knew he probably could have escaped the path that he chose, but there he was shoulder to shoulder with us and he was a damn good Marine. He did everything he was ever asked or told to do.

Brett McKay:

So you’d say it was just useful impetuosity, just sort of that thumos that drive to see action.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, absolutely. And as he said, I mean, if we only knew what I mean, he talks about in the troop train, clacking along the rails to headed to San Diego because he actually went through basic in San Diego, not at Paris Island, which was not the usual thing for a young man east of the Mississippi. But he did go to San Diego and he talks about how all these guys are on the troop train headed west, and they’re all singing songs and jousting with each other and cutting up. And he said, we were like boys headed off to a summer camp. And he said, God, if we had only known what lay ahead, I’m reminded of All Quiet on the Western Front because that young man, this young German kid and his school buddies, I mean, they can’t wait to enlist and get into the fight. And then you see well into the book, what a horrible thing it is. And they understand that then.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, your dad in the beginning of the book, spends a good deal of time talking about his bootcamp training as an infantryman. What was that like?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the training, he felt like the instructors were all very thorough and professional and did a good job and tried to do the best they could to prepare these guys for what lay ahead now to speak on a more personal level. The training was rigorous. It was hard. Nothing about it was easy. Their drill instructor was Corporal Dougherty, and Corporal Dougherty was not a big man. My father described him as probably five 10, not an ounce of fat on him, absolute rock, hard physique, and phenomenal shape, just these mean green eyes, the way he would look at you, very intimidating guy, even though he wasn’t that big. But the man obviously was a professional at what he did, and that was taking these guys and stealing them into guys who were going to take positions and rifle companies across the Pacific. And I think that my father had a really mature attitude about the training they were going through because he understood.

Well, he really reflected on, and it was some great material that got edited out with the old breed that I was so thankful to be able to use in my book, because he talked about when they got back on Pavuvu after Peleliu, he reflected, he had some brilliant writing about the very thing you asked about and talking about how the Marine Corps training was tough. It was brutal, but it had to be because what they were going to experience was brutal. And he had just come off that at Peleliu, and he understood that he probably could not have survived that experience had it not been for their training.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I thought that was interesting, those unpublished parts of the manuscript that you put in your book where he talked about that a lot. He was grateful for the training. A lot of the Marines, they carped about it, but he realized no part of the reason why I’m still alive when luck is a big part of it. But the training was also a big part.

Henry Sledge:

And I mean, he writes that very articulately and no small wonder that the Marine Corps views his book with such high regard.

Brett McKay:

Let’s talk about your dad’s combat experience in the Pacific. His first assignment we’ve been talking about this was to help secure the island of Peleliu. I imagine a lot of people listening right now have probably never heard of this island. They might’ve heard about Iwo Jima or Midway. Why is Peleliu often overlooked by Americans?

Henry Sledge:

Well, Peleliu was a tiny, tiny little aol, two miles by six miles on the western edge of the Pacific. And the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked? Is because it could have been bypassed. And at the time, MacArthur was proceeding along a southwesterly axis to get back to the Philippines, and then Chester Nimitz and the US Navy and Marines were driving through the Central Pacific. So we had this two tiered approach in subjugating Japanese forces. It was determined originally that Peleliu was needed to neutralize the airfield there so that Japanese air assets, Japanese air power could not threaten MacArthur’s, right? Flank is he proceeded towards the Philippines. As it turned out, they didn’t need to do that because all Japanese air power had been knocked out by US Navy carrier Task force raids in early 1944, and Peleliu wasn’t invaded until September, 1944.

Now, Admiral Halsey had a foretelling of this because as his task force pilots are coming back, as those Hellcat pilots are coming back from their strikes throughout the Palau Islands, his pilots are telling him, look, we’re not encountering any aerial opposition. It’s all been done away with, and we’re destroying a lot of airplanes on the ground. And so he sat down and thought about it. He met with other officers, and he went to Nimitz and said, I fear another Toro. I don’t think that we need to hit Lou. My guys are not seeing any aerial resistance, and I think this is going to be a lot worse than we think it could be. Chester Nimitz, for reasons he never really disclosed because he passed away in 1965, chose to not stop the invasion armada and to proceed with invading Peleliu. But the short answer to your question, why is it overlooked us?

Because it could have been bypassed. And that was such a tragedy because going into it, general Puris, who was the first marine division commander, had this inexplicably optimistic view of the coming battle that, look, it’s going to be rough but fast. It’s going to be like Tarawa three days, maybe four. It might only take two. Every time I think about that, it just makes my blood run cold because you realize what they got into with the challenging topography, not to mention the heat and humidity. I mean, that was going to be part of every battle in the Pacific. But the absolute meat grinder that it turned into that they did not originally think it would be. I mean, a lot of the news correspondents didn’t even go ashore at Peal Lu because they thought, well, there’s no point. I mean, it’s going to be over in a day and a half or two days or three. And so you only had a handful of correspondents who actually won ashore. So it was an amalgamation of several things as to why Pew wasn’t so well known. That caused a lot of bitterness for my father and a lot of the guys who were there and lost good buddies there. I remember in the 1970s, pew was frequently referred to as the forgotten battle. I will say this, I don’t think Peleliu is quite so forgotten anymore.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So I think thanks to movies like Saving Private Ryan Band of Brothers, I think a lot of people are familiar with what fighting was like in Europe. All wars, brutal. We’ve had Alex Kershaw on the podcast, the World War II historian. Yeah, absolutely. He talked about, he says, the battles in Europe or the war in Europe, it was brutal, but there was a certain romanticism about it because soldiers are fighting amongst these old cathedrals in rural European farms with stone fences fighting the Pacific was not like that at all. And your father did an excellent job capturing the hellishness of war fighting in the Pacific. What was Peleliu like? Give us a look into what it was like fighting there.

Henry Sledge:

Well, Peleliu, the northern part of the island was called the . . . known colloquially to the Marines who had to fight there as bloody nose ridge. And in fact, it was a series of ridges. The coral high ground was obfuscated by vegetation before it had all been blasted off by our pre landing naval and aerial bombardment, but it was very topographically challenging terrain. You had a complex system of ridges and ravines and box canyons and blind canyons, and all of that was pockmarked with caves. I mean, I’ve seen the number of 500 caves that pockmarked like Swiss cheese. The Japanese were absolute masters of using every aspect of their terrain to their advantage as a force multiplier, if you will. And Peleliu offered some tragic opportunities for that. But the parts of the island that weren’t just complete coral were jungle scrub growth, but it was terribly hot seven degrees off the equator on D-Day. It was 115 degrees in the shade. And so you had that aspect of it. 

Brett McKay:

I want to talk about the coral, cause I think a lot of people think, oh, Pacific Islands, it’s going to be like Tahiti with these edenic beaches, but these beaches were just mostly coral. What made fighting on coral so brutal?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the northern landing beach, and I’ve walked that entire landing beach at Peal Loop where my father went as shore on Orange Beach too, which was a southern sector of the approximately 2200 yard long beach. It actually was pretty flat and sandy, it had a gentle slope to it, but once you got inland, you were in the scrub growth. But then they quickly got into the coral now up on what they call White Beach, which was where the first marine regimen, my father was in the Fifth Marine regimen, but the first marine regiment landed on White Beach, which was a little bit north of where my father landed. I walked to that area, and I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, Brett. It was sharp coral outcroppings all the way out into the water. There is no sandy beach on White Beach. And so for the first Marines, the first marine regiment, when I say first Marines, I’m referring to them as soon as they debarked from their landing craft, as soon as they got out of their amphibious tractors, they’re immediately getting cut by this coral if they have to die for cover, which they did because the Japanese had heavily impregnated that or heavily fortified that part of the landing beach.

But I remember my dad telling me they had entrenching tools, but he said it almost felt like there was no point in it because really on Peleliu, you really couldn’t dig in unquote dig in and dig a nice deep hole in soft earth like you could on Okinawa in 1945 plu. He said, there were so many times on PLU we couldn’t dig in. I mean, we might could take shelter in a shell crater, but half the time you just pile logs and rocks around you for any kind of protection, any sort of protection from flying fragments. But digging in was just almost an impossibility because of that hard coral.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. And then your dad talks about the coral, it made fighting hard and it made digging foxholes hard, but it also made field sanitation pretty much impossible.

Henry Sledge:

Correct, because he talked about when a man had to defecate, usually he just did it in like an ammo can or a C ration can. There was nowhere to bury it, so they just threw it off into some underbrush or something like that. And imagine after 15, 20, 30 days of that, not to mention the dead and rotting enemy bodies, and of course the marines tried to pull their guys out and get ’em back to a secure area as quickly as they could, but still, you had this unbelievable proliferation of human waste. I mean, it’s disgusting to talk about, but look, these were things that my dad wrote about and talked about so much because to him, you have to understand this, and this is a lot of what drove him to write with the old breeded. He wanted people to understand. You’ve seen war movies and you think combat is something glorious and something romantic. And he said there’s nothing romantic or glorious about it. It’s dealing with blowflies that have become engorged on human blood. It’s dealing with rotting corpses. It’s the smell of unburied human waste. I mean, that’s what a battlefield was to him.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I mean, the environment was just completely so. It was hot, humid, he talked about it just smelled all the time. That was a challenge dealing with that. You’re dealing with not only the blowflies, there’s maggots, and he describes the maggots and the festering bodies. The land crabs were another thing you had to deal with all the time.

Henry Sledge:

Absolutely. I mean, he talked about how at night you could just hear the land crabs crawling around in the undergrowth. Of course, it sounded like Japanese soldiers crawling around, which they did. They infiltrated their lines at night to great effect. They did it every night and they were really good at it. And of course, in addition to everything that you just said, you deal with the fact of lack of clean drinking water and the inability to get a good night’s sleep because the Japanese were infiltrating every night to purposefully keep the Marines awake and the soldiers, because the army was there too, of course, to purposefully keep these guys awake, to keep them from getting any sleep. And of course, that just compounds everything to an exponential degree.

Brett McKay:

Okay. I mean, the environment itself, that was an enemy. It was a brutal enemy, but we haven’t talked about the human enemy or not that much, that your father and the other Marines were sent to fight on Peleliu, and that was the Japanese. What were the Japanese like to fight?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the Japanese were fiercely brave, dedicated and horrifically effective and brutal soldiers. They were absolute masters at exploiting their terrain. As I’ve already said, at a place like Peleliu, they had untold opportunities to do that. My father always thought it was ironic, I would say funny, but he didn’t think it was funny. But I remember in the seventies, people had this perception that anything made in Japan was cheap. I remember him telling me that. He said, we didn’t think of their weapons as cheap. They felt pretty effective to us. Their 70 mountain, 70 millimeter fuel gun that they used was horrifically effective. Their mortars were horrifically effective, and the Japanese exercised superb fire discipline. They would purposefully wait for a marine to be wounded. They employed snipers to horrific effect. A sniper might fire around to wound a marine knowing full well that two other Marines are going to come out and try to drag him back in, and then they would open fire on those guys.

I remember my father saying, I can hear him say it. I’m going to say Japanese. That’s not the way he put it, but he said The Japanese opened up on stretcher teams absolutely without mercy, and that was something that he said it would just make you weep in fury to see a wounded marine and four of his buddies going out, or two of his buddies going out to try to bring him back in. And then those guys getting cut down, and he said It would make you absolutely weep to see that and make you hate your enemy. And so you had this fierce preternatural hatred between the Americans and the Japanese just as much on their part as our part. It was completely mutual, but they were certainly a skilled enemy and an enemy to be feared.

Brett McKay:

How did fighting the Japanese compare to fighting the Germans?

Henry Sledge:

I remember my father telling me in the seventies and eighties as I was growing up, and we would have our conversations about all this, the Germans were very professional, and he said, I would’ve hated to fight ’em. But most of the time they would bed down at night and get their sleep. He said the Japanese would not do that. They would attack all day and fight all night through infiltration. And then the other angle to this is there were many cases where the Germans surrendered when they realized that they had to the Japanese, I’m not going to say that they never surrendered because obviously by the time Okinawa rolled around, it did happen. But very rarely, it was very rare that the Japanese would surrender. And on Peleliu they had to fight to the last man pretty much Okinawa. They did begin to surrender, but even that was not a codified course of action that was going to be a more piecemeal ad hoc type situation where individual Japanese has realized that the jig is up. There’s no point in continuing this, and they would give themselves up. But even then, that was rare. And so you have this human conflict that is just the absolute depths of human savagery, and it just was an absolute war of bitter hatred. And my father spoke of it. He thought of it, he wrote of it because to him it was just such a component of what they were dealing with.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I mean, let’s talk about that. I mean, what sorts of savagery did your father see and write about?

Henry Sledge:

Well, I mean, so he saw many cases where the Japanese had defiled marine corpses, and I won’t say how, I don’t want to put the listeners through the grotesque descriptions that you can read it in his book. There was a good bit of that. And so of course, Marines always tried to remove their dead because they knew the Japanese would just do terrible things to the bodies, and even worse to a man if they captured him, they knew that to be captured was absolutely not an option. On Guadal Canal, you had an incident called the Get Gee patrol, which is where a couple of Japanese were taken prisoner by the Marines in the early stages of the battle. And these guys said that some of their buddies were down the river and wanted to surrender, and that if the Marines would go out and send out a rescue party, they would surrender.

And so our intelligence officers always wanted to pick up surrender Japanese if that was an option, because it was a source of intel. It was a source of knowledge and factual data. And so the Marines sent out a patrol under the command of Colonel Frank gge to bring these guys in, and they ended up being ambushed and killed to the last minute. I can’t remember. I’m not a Gua Canal expert. I’ve read a lot about it, but I have buddies who that’s their area of specialty, but the get gee patrol was slaughtered. Well, I think one guy survived and he was able to swim back along the beach and get out of there and get back to the marine lines. But when he came back and began to get the word back to his guys of what happened, then we began to understand this is going to be a different kind war.

This is not a war where you can hold your hands up and surrender and say, that’s it. I’m done. Not to mention, we haven’t even talked about the Philippines. We haven’t even talked about what was going on to our army, to the soldiers in the Army divisions who’d surrendered in the Philippines being marched north via the Batan death march up to Camp O’Donnell and the starvation and the torture that they were encountering. And so these were things that we were not prepared to deal with, but we learned very quickly that they were going to be things that we had to face. And when my father was going through his initial training on Pavuvu, when he first got out to the Pacific Theater, he talks about how he was on a working party one day loading coconuts, and he and the buddies he’s working with, and the guys he was working with had been at Cape Gloucester.

They were combat veterans, and they had not just gotten out into the theater of war like he had, and they come across another Marine who was working in an area close to them, and they start talking. And this guy was the survivor of the Get Gee patrol. And the guy says goodbye to his buddies, and he walks off, and my dad’s like, who was that guy? And his buddies tell him, he’s a lucky son of a bitch. That’s what he is. He was on that Get Gee patrol. And they proceed to tell my father the story of it. And news travels fast, man. People talk. And I mean, these marines were speaking to each other and getting the word out that, look, you cannot surrender. That is not an option.

Brett McKay:

And what’s interesting, your father describes how when these marines were seeing the brutality with which the Japanese soldiers were treating the corpses of the Marines, there was this temptation from the Marines to do the same to retaliate and do the same thing. And your father even describes, he had moments where he was like, yeah, I want to maybe do something to this Japanese dead body. I’m just so angry at them. But he didn’t, he was able to kind of resist that pull. How do you think your father was able to do that and other marines?

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, so one of the things you’re referring to is a lot of Japanese soldiers in World War II had gold teeth, and it became a practice among a lot of Marines to, if they saw a Japanese corpse that had gold teeth, they would take those gold teeth. And it was commonly done. Of course, the Japanese were doing even worse things to the bodies of our guys when they could get to ’em. But yeah, that actually is a pretty powerful passage where he starts to do that one day. And Doc Caswell, who’s the corpsman and K company of my dad’s unit, puts his hand on my dad’s shoulder and says, sledgehammer, what are you doing? What are you getting ready to do? And my dad says, well, I just saw this J’s got gold teeth. I thought I might try to take one or two of ’em.

And Doc, because I always call the corpsman doc, he says, you don’t want to do that, don’t do that. And my father says, well, okay. I mean why? And Doc says, well, think of the germs. Think of the germs. What would your old man think about that? My dad said, well, my old man’s a doctor. He might think it’s kind of interesting, but Doc Cael says, you don’t want to do that. And so my father said, okay, well, how about I just cut off his collar insignia instead? And so he did that. But my dad was a very intelligent young man, and he reflected on it, and he said, I realized Doc Cael was not concerned about me being exposed to germs. He just didn’t want to see me lose that last vestige of civility.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, lose that last part of his humanity. I mean, for some Marines, it even got worse. Your father described, I mean, there’s one story. One guy took a hand from a dead.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah, that was at the end of Peleliu. And that guy was almost ostracized by the other Marines because their NC was like, get rid of that thing. I’m going to write you. I’ll put you on report if you don’t.

Brett McKay:

But it just goes to show this type of fighting they were doing, the environment they were in, I mean, it could cause significant spiritual and emotional damage to these guys.

Henry Sledge:

It causes this complete degradation and breakdown of decency. And that was something that my father wanted to make people understand is that the guys doing this, these are nice young, these are nice kids.

Brett McKay:

And they were kids. Some of them were literally kids. They were 17 years old,

Henry Sledge:

17, 18. These are nice kids, but they have been dehumanized. And if I can find it, Brett, man, they’re such a powerful passage. Basically, it’s a paragraph where he just really sums up the awfulness of an experience like Peleliu. In the last line in that paragraph, he says, Peleliu eroded the veneer of civilization and made savages of us all. And that is such a powerful line right there.

Brett McKay:

And your dad did such a great job describing that while on Peleliu, I mean, just complete brutality, harsh fighting conditions. But your dad and a lot of the other Marines lost a mentor, captain AK Haldane on Peleliu, and this really hit your dad hard, and it was sort of a turning point for him in his well experience. How did AK die and how did his loss of leadership change the way your father viewed the rest of the war?

Henry Sledge:

Well, yeah. Captain Halane, his codename, ak, they called him ak. He was such a well thought of officer. He was their company commander. He was K company’s commander. He was killed on October 7th, 1944 by a sniper on Hill one 40 on Pew. And my father said it was the worst grief I suffered during the entire war. AK Captain Halane represented stability and security in a world gone mad. I mean, that’s exactly the way he says it, because even though Captain Halane was like 27 years old, he had been at Guac Canal, he’d been at Cape Gloucester. He was incredibly well thought of and just a very cool headed, excellent company commander. And his men loved him and would’ve done anything for him. And the thought of him that he would be killed like that, my father wrote about how that never occurred to us that we could lose him. And it enraged them all that he was killed by a sniper, but that is how he died. And yeah, captain Halane was just so well thought of, and to lose him, it just was he represented, like I said, stability and security, and they never conceived that he would be killed.

Brett McKay:

Did it change what your dad thought his chances of survival were? It’s like, well, if this guy could go, I could go just as easily.

Henry Sledge:

Absolutely. And I mean, certainly by the time they get to Okinawa, he’s seen so many good Marines get hit or killed. And he said, the arithmetic of chance, I mean, you felt like every day you were running out of even more luck if you had any left at all.

Brett McKay:

So even though the brass thought Peleliu could be taken in a few days, the first Marine Division fought on the island for about a month, a little over a month. They suffered over 6,500 casualties, including 1000 deaths. And as you mentioned, Peleliu could have been bypassed. Correct. Which your father had some bitterness about. After Peleliu, he fought on Okinawa for 82 days, on and off the front lines, mostly on the front lines. And Okinawa had its own nightmares conditions, constant rain, mud, maggots, everything was moldering. He called it Hell’s own cesspool. Sledge, despite being in the thick of two of the worst battles in history, never received a high level valor award like the Silver Star. Why is that? And what was the culture in his battalion regarding medals? Well,

Henry Sledge:

I remember him telling me about a conversation that he had with Captain Stanley many years after, because he and Stumpy got to know each other well and had many conversations when he was riding with the old breed in the late seventies before it got published in 1981. And he asked Stuy that. He asked Captain Stanley that he’s like, why is it that you never recommended anybody for a valor award, bronze star, silver star? And he said that Stumpy told him, he said, because sledgehammer, I didn’t want to pick one guy out and recommend him for a bronze star or silver star, a medal of honor because I felt like every one of you guys deserve something.

Brett McKay:

And then your dad recast the story where he had a fellow Marine just tell him, Hey, you know what sledge you did? And that to him represented the highest honor that he could get.

Henry Sledge:

Yeah. So that was when it’s after Peleliu, they’ve gotten back to Pavuvu, which is where they were in the Russell Islands where the first Marine Division rested, refitted and trained and staged out for both Peleliu and later Okinawa. And he describes this scene where it’s late one afternoon, kind of twilight, and he and his bunkmates, he and his tent mates, I should say, are in their tent. One guy’s over in the corner and on his rack, snoozing away very softly, can hear him snoozing after the day’s training. And my dad’s lying there in the twilight, and he is starting to get sleepy, and he is resting his head on his arm on the pillow of his rack. And then he hears the other Marine say, you know something sledgehammer, my dad says what? And he says, I really had my eye on you coming into the unit before pew.

I had my doubts about you being a doctor’s kid and coming from a rich family and having been to college and all that. And he said, I got to tell you, man, I kept my eye on you on pew, and you did okay by God. You did okay. And my dad wrote about how his chest literally burst with pride, he said, and he said, many men were awarded silver stars and bronze stars deservedly, but he said those words from a veteran who had been at Cape Gloucester and Guadalcanal, those words meant more to me. That seal of approval from a fellow Marine meant more to him than any medal he could have ever been awarded.

Brett McKay:

When Eugene returned home in 1946, he like hundreds of thousands of American men, brought the abyss of war home with him. What was his transition to civilian life like?

Henry Sledge:

Well, it was a painful process. He writes about that in great detail in his second book, China Marine. I explore it quite a bit from, obviously I wasn’t born until 20 years later, 19 years later. But I know from having talked to my mother and hearing family stories, it was a slow process. He dealt with a lot of nightmares he dealt with. I remember asking him when I was a kid, I said, dad, when you came home from World War ii after surviving that, I would think you would’ve just felt like you could conquer anything. And he said, to be honest with you, I did a lot of sitting around staring at the wall, just trying to mentally put my head back together. My grandfather was, and I write about this in my forthcoming second book. I talk about my grandfather a little bit, and what an intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful man that he was.

And my father credited my grandfather with really being a bridge back to sanity because he said, pop. That was what everybody in the family called my grandfather. He said, pop was an incredibly well thought of one of the finest physicians in the state of Alabama and professionally very well thought of and accomplished. But he just understood because he had treated shellshock victims in World War I, and he understood what these young men had been through, and he was a shield for my dad because my grandmother didn’t understand it. And she would come in, they show this in the last episode of the Pacific. They show it really well when they show the kid play on my dad sitting under a tree and the lady playing, my grandmother comes out and says, oh, Eugene, you look like a gangster with those glasses on. And she hands ’em a glass of iced tea and then starts talking about, Eugene, you have to get a plan for the future.

You need to be doing something. And they film that scene exactly the way we told them. Those conversations went. And my father said in those instances to my grandmother, my plan is to do nothing for a while. And then my grandfather would come out and just like he did in the Pacific in that last episode, and he comes out and he says, Mary Frank, what are you doing? Leave the boy alone. You have no idea what men like him have been through. Go on, leave him alone. And that is exactly the way that happened. And I remember us talking to the producers about that and how my grandfather would do that and shoo her away, and she’d start grumbling and mumbling and muttering and walk away in a huff. And then my grandfather would just tell my father, you have nothing to prove to anybody in this world.

Brett McKay:

When someone reads your dad’s book, what lessons do you hope they walk away with? When they’re finished,

Henry Sledge:

They learn something about what it really means to send young men into combat. I mean, look, I’ve always said this, Brett. I mean, I’m passionate about World War II history, and so I enjoy reading about everything concerning every battle across the Pacific. And not only that, but in Europe as well. And I enjoy reading about the tanks, the weapons, the airplanes, all of those things, the hardware, the logistics, all of it, the strategic planning, all of those things interest me greatly. But to really understand what it’s all about, you have to go beneath the rim of the helmet, and you have to understand what goes through a young man’s head when he is under heavy fire and experiencing prolonged close combat and the emotional toll that that takes on a human being. And with my Father’s book, it helps you understand that. It helps you understand that beneath the rim of the helmet perspective, and I mean, my book explores that as well. I mean, because it has not only my perspective of seeing how as a father, and of course, I was born in 1965, so I’m growing up in the 1970s and eighties, how his marine experience, how his World War II experience informed the choices he made as a husband to my mom and then as a father to my brother and me.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What do you think people listening to this show can learn from how your father carried himself after the war?

Henry Sledge:

Well, the last thing he says in With the Old Breed, the last thing he says, if the country is good enough to live in it’s worth fighting for, is the troops used to say with privilege goes responsibility. Certainly, he delved deeply into the whole matter of Peleliu was tragic, unrelenting, horror and suffering and waste, unnecessary waste. Okinawa was its own hell. He saw so many good friends maimed and killed. Everybody suffered in their own way. Even the ones who came home physically intact as he did suffered, they bore that cost for the rest of their lives. But he regarded having been a Marine and having served the way he did as a great honor, and he carried that with him, I think, for the rest of his life. I mean, I remember the leather belt that he wore every day, okay. With his ll being corduroys, if he was wearing blue jeans, he wore the same damn leather belt every day. It had an EGA on it, which of course is the Marine Eagle Globe and Anchor. It was a really small, it was one of his collar EGAs, and he had that through one of the holes in his belt.

Brett McKay:

One of the lessons I took away after reading your dad’s book is just gratitude for the comfort and privilege that I have. I mean, he talks about when he is in Okinawa, he had marched two straight weeks with sore slimy feet trapped in wet socks. Then when he finally had a chance to dry out, remove them, pieces of dead skin were peeling off with his socks. And he says it was the kind of experience that would make a man sincerely grateful for the rest of his life, for clean dry socks, a simple condition as dry socks seemed a luxury. And he talked about too, that he hopes people in America who read this book would be grateful for the things they have. And he talked about he struggled to comprehend people who griped because America wasn’t perfect or their coffee wasn’t hot enough. Or they had to stand in line and wait for a train or a bus. And I’m living here in the 2026 and I can get things delivered to my doorstep from Amazon the next day, and I get upset because, oh, I asked for next day delivery and it’s going to be two days. It’s just like, man, when I’m thinking of that, I got to think about Eugene’s Sledge and just how lucky I am and quit complaining about all the inconveniences. So it’s just gratitude. And I’m wondering if we can end this. If you can read a passage in the preface of the book where he talks about why he published With the Old Breed.

Henry Sledge:

“In writing. I’m fulfilling an obligation. I have long felt to my comrades in the first Marine Division, all of whom suffered so much for our country, none came out unscathed. Many gave their lives many of their health and sown their sanity. All who survived will long remember the horror. They would rather forget, but they suffered and they did their duty. So a sheltered homeland can enjoy the peace that was purchased at such a high cost. We owe those Marines a profound debt of gratitude.”

Brett McKay:

Yeah. When I finished this book, I felt that gratitude.

Henry Sledge:

Exactly. I mean, as he said to me, Brett, I, and I heard that when I was a kid, I complained, of course I did like every kid, and he would say, I’m just happy I got dry socks. But he also, when we would have deeper conversations about all this, and we did that many times, he said to me, he said, people who have not been under shell fire cannot imagine what that is like.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, Henry, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your father, his book and your book and the work you’re doing around your dad’s legacy?

Henry Sledge:

Well, I speak a lot about my dad. I go to a lot of historical events. I don’t have a website. I’m on Facebook, William Henry Sledge. I’m on Instagram, I think I’m at HSledgehammer on Instagram. I don’t do a lot of posting on there. Both his book With the Old Breed and then my book, The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed in the subtitle of my book as a father, a son, and how World War II and the Pacific shaped their lives. Both of those books are on Amazon, and of course any bookstore is going to have his book and my book, his second book was called China Marine. It was about his time in China and then coming home, it dealt with that. And then I’m working on, my second book will release in November and it’s going to be called The Things That Remain: The Artifacts of Eugene B Sledge, and it will be a coffee table photo book of a lot of the artifacts of uniform items and things like that of my dad’s that I have.

And some of those things are in museums as well. His Bible that he kept notes in that form the basis of his book with Reed, that Bible, it’s currently at the World War II Museum in New Orleans, but it is going to be in the Library of Congress in Washington DC. They have asked for it, so it will be there. But I do everything I can to perpetuate my father’s legacy. I mean, I just feel a passion for, it’s not just that I feel a passionate interest in World War II history, but it’s, I know how people Marines especially, but really combat veterans of all stripes. I know what my dad’s writing has meant to them because I’ve met so many of them who’ve told me that. And that just drives me forward to do what I do. I mean, look, I’ve been to my dad’s gravestone in Mobile, Alabama.

Brett and my wife and I were just down there back in March and a local veterans unit did a 25th anniversary or commemoration of his passing. And his gravestone is forever covered with challenge coins and tokens of respect. And I mean, Marines have gone and left their medals there. I’ve seen little toy airplanes left by children there. I mean, the tokens of respect, it’s overwhelming really to stand there and look at that. And when I see that, I mean, here’s a guy who died in 2001 and people from all over the world traveled to pay their respects to his growth. I mean, I look at that and that just tells me there’s a guy who did it. 

Brett McKay:

Well, Henry Sledge, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Henry Sledge:

It’s been an honor to be here, Brett. Thank you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Henry Sledge. He’s the son of Eugene Sledge who wrote With the Old Breed. Henry’s got his own book out called The Old Breed: The Complete Story Revealed. It’s available on amazon.com. And make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is/OldBreed. Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When people think of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, they often picture tweedy Oxford professors and beloved fantasy authors. But their writing wasn’t drawn only from their bucolic days teaching at Oxford and walking in the English countryside; it had a darker, deeper backdrop: the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of World War II. Lewis and Tolkien weren’t just fantasy writers — they were war veterans, cultural critics, and men with firsthand knowledge of evil, heroism, and sacrifice.

In today’s episode, I’m joined by Joseph Loconte, returning to the show to discuss his latest book, The War for Middle Earth. We explore how both world wars shaped the perspectives of Tolkien and Lewis, found their way into works like The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia, and infused their literary masterpieces with moral weight, spiritual depth, and timeless themes of resistance, friendship, and redemption. We also talk about the legendary friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, the creation of the Inklings, and how the men demonstrated the countercultural power of imaginative storytelling.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Related AoM podcasts:
  • #178: The Inklings Mastermind Group
  • #272: Lewis, Tolkien, and the Myth of Progress (Loconte’s first appearance on the AoM podcast)
  • #430: Why You Need to Join the Great Conversation About the Great Books
  • #499: A Fascinating Primer on Norse Mythology 
  • #594: How Churchill (and London) Survived the Blitz of 1940
  • #723: Men Without Chests
  • #765: C.S. Lewis on Building Men With Chests
  • #951: The Hobbit Virtues

• Related AoM articles
  • The Power of Conversation: A Lesson from CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien 
  • Lessons in Manliness from Viking Mythology 
  • Lessons in Manliness: The Hobbit
  • Men Without Chests
  • “Blood, Sweat, and Tears” speech by Winston Churchill
  • 4 Classic Chapter Books to Read Aloud With Your Kids

• Related outside articles:
  • Tolkien’s Deadly Dragons 
  • Munich Agreement
  • Owen Barfield

• Tolkien books mentioned:
  • The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien 
  • Beowulf translated by Tolkien
  • The Hobbit 
  • The Lord of the Rings 
  • Beren and Luthien 
  • Letters from Father Christmas 

• Lewis books mentioned:
  • The Letters of C.S. Lewis 
  • The Collected Poems of C.S. Lewis 
  • The Pilgrim’s Regress
  • The Chronicles of Narnia
  • The Great Divorce
  • The Screwtape Letters 
  • The Space Trilogy 
  • The Four Loves
  • Mere Christianity 
  • The Reading Life 

• Related books by other authors:
  • Tolkien and the Great War by John Garth
  • The Somme by Martin Gilbert
  • The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
  • The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
  • The Aeneid by Virgil
  • Phantastes by George MacDonald
  • The Vinland Sagas
  • The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
  • The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
  • Le Morte d’Arthur by Thomas Malory

Connect With Joseph Loconte

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you picture a gunfighter, you probably think of a Hollywood cowboy — spurs jangling, six-shooter on his hip, squaring off at high noon in a dusty frontier town. But gunfighters weren’t just products of Hollywood. They were real men who lived and died by a code: one rooted in a particular sense of honor.

My guest today is Bryan Burrough, author of The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. We dig into the true story behind America’s gunfighting era — how it grew out of the South’s dueling culture, was intensified by the violence of post–Civil War Texas, and spread across the frontier via the cattle drive. We explore why so many gunfights had less to do with crime and more to do with reputation, why the Colt revolver transformed personal conflict into deadly spectacle, and how young men came to see violence as a rite of manhood. Along the way, Bryan also explores how gunfighters went from frontier figures to pop culture icons — and which films, in his view, captured their essence best.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Johnny Ringo
• John Wesley Hardin
• Wild Bill Hickok
• Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
• Fight scene in Gangs of New York
• AoM Article: The Best Western Movies Ever Made
• AoM Article: 21 Western Novels Every Man Should Read
• AoM series on honor, including What Is Honor? and Honor in the American South
• AoM Article: The Rough and Tumble

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. When you picture a gunfighter, you probably think of a Hollywood cowboy. Spurs jangling, six-shooter on his hip, squaring off at high noon in a dusty frontier town. But gunfighters weren’t just products of Hollywood. They were real men who lived and died by a code, one rooted in a particular sense of honor. My guest today is Bryan Burrough, author of The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. We dig into the true story behind America’s gunfighting era, how it grew out of the South’s dueling culture, was intensified by the violence of post-Civil War Texas, and spread across the frontier via the cattle drive. We explore why so many gunfights had less to do with crime and more to do with reputation, why the Colt Revolver transformed personal conflict into deadly spectacle, and how young men came to see violence as a right of manhood. Along the way, Brian also explores how gunfighters went from frontier figures to pop culture icons, and which films, in his view, captured their essence best. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/gunfighters. All right, Bryan Burrough, welcome to the show.

Bryan Burrough: My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Brett McKay: So you recently published a book called The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild, and this is all about the Old West gunfighter that you see in Old Westerns and TV shows. I’m curious, why did you do a deep dive into the gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Because I felt like the time was right. This was a field of study, if you want to call it that, that was probably at its high-water mark 50, 60 years ago in the ’60s and ’70s. And while there had been books on individual gunfighters, in fact, there’s a new Jesse James book pretty much every year, a new Billy the Kid every two or three years, I kind of felt like it had been quite a while since anyone had come in and really taken a fresh look at the entire subject, the entire field, and tried to tell the whole story of this gunfighter era that took place in America on the frontier after the Civil War. And I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to say new, but I just felt like it was time to freshen up the canon and that I could take a big… I thought I could swing for the fences on this one, and so I kind of did. It kind of went out over my skis a little bit to badly mix my metaphors. And the reception, as you know, has been very generous and very surprising.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I think what you do in this book, I really appreciated this, is you provide the context of why there was this period in American history where you had guys shooting at each other. Let’s talk about this. What makes a gunfight a gunfight? And what makes a gunfighter a gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Well, typically the way you would differentiate is a gunfighter is anyone, I think, widely defined, as anyone who had an exchange of gunfire on the American frontier that did not involve the military, so not a soldier or Native Americans. So this is exclusively civilian gun violence. It could be a sheriff versus a bad guy. It could be two feudists. It could be two drunken cattlemen. It was civilian gun violence. But having said that, it comes in every way, shape, and form. I guess the one thing that makes a gunfight a gunfight is if there is an exchange of gunfire as opposed to, you know, for instance, Jesse James, most of the people he killed he just executed. So there is a difference between a murderer and a gunfighter, and I think generally that’s pretty clear. If you think about the classic gunfight, what most of us know about this from movies, and the classic one that came up in Westerns in the middle of the last century was, you know, two men standing alone in the middle of a sandy street in a small town, and then they draw and they shoot. And while that’s not unknown, I can maybe point to 10 or 15 actually like that.

In fact, Old West gunfights are not typically different in style from any gunfight today. I can point to you gunfights on horseback, gunfights where one guy was laying down and the other was standing up. I got one where one guy shot another while he was down in a well. I mean, it just happened in every way, shape, or form. But the rarest was probably that classic two men squaring off, although ironically, the one that I opened the book with and the first nationally recognized gunfight, what really began to make the gunfighter a thing, was very much that type of classic cliche gunfight, two men in the street. In this case, it involved the famous gunfighter Wild Bill Hickok in his first nationally recognized gunfight in July of ’65 in Springfield, Missouri. And it was very much in the style of an old duel like from the Old South, where they came together in the middle of the square in Springfield, Missouri. The fight was over a gambling dispute with townspeople lined up on both sides, and then they draw simultaneously. And of course, Hickok is the victor. 

And shortly thereafter, an Eastern rider for a big magazine found out about this, wrote about it, and it was really the first moment where Americans became aware, oh, not only are there people shooting each other out on the frontier, but that this is, it somehow struck a chord, something in the American character that really, you know, at a time where people were shooting each other on the streets of Boston and Baltimore every night, nobody cared other than it being a crime. This seemed to be something different. And the gunfight, the frontier gunfight, has fascinated Americans really for 160 years ever since. I mean, we’re still talking about this stuff 160 years later.

Brett McKay: How do you demarcate the gunfighter era? When did it begin and when did it end?

Bryan Burrough: Well, one big challenge for me going into this, of course, is that how do you write a book about gunfighters when they’re all over the place? This goes on for, you know, decades. And most of these, you know, Jesse James has nothing to do with Billy the Kid, who has nothing to do with John Wesley Hardin. And so the first thing I did was demarcate my time. So I grandly called what I dubbed the gunfighter era from July of 1865 until 1901 when Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid famously got on that freighter for South America. The ending of the last brand name outlaw seemed like an appropriate place to end it. And so then the question became, how do you tell that all as a single story? And I think I found a way that I could actually hold it all together as one story.

Brett McKay: And how many gunfights were there during that era, you think?

Bryan Burrough: It would all depend on how you define gunfights. I honestly have no idea. Clearly, it’s in the hundreds. I know Bill O’Neill, a well-known Texas historian. In fact, I believe he was the state historian for a while. I want to say he came up with like 580 what he called significant gunfights. And again, very difficult to explain to you what significant is, but in large part, they’re the ones that made the newspapers and thus the history books, and typically more than one newspaper suggesting some public interest. So certainly things like the gunfight beside the O.K. Corral starring Wyatt Earp, certainly anything involving Billy the Kid, John Winsley Hardin. In general, the notable gunfights, what I call marquee gunfights, are those that made more than one newspaper at the time.

Brett McKay: Gotcha. Okay, so you mentioned that all these gunfights, they happened all over the place. They seemed like they weren’t connected. So your challenge was trying to figure out, okay, what is the connection? And your connection that you found was Texas, where you live, your home state. And what I took away from the book, Texas contributed several factors that gave rise to the gunfighter. And a big part of that is cultural. So tell me about this cultural component of the gunfighter. You talk about how they’re developed after the Civil War, or even before the Civil War, this idea of Texan honor that developed out of Southern honor. So tell us about that. Tell us about the Southern honor code, and then how did that develop into the Texan honor code? And then we can talk about how that led to the gunfighter.

Bryan Burrough: Sure. When you’re looking at a way to explain why all this happened, the only thing that I could figure out to do was to understand why it happened, why it happened there, and what were the factors that caused all these gunfights. And I remember one of the first times it really hit me was in reading accounts of that first Hickok gunfight in 1865. And they were ostensibly fighting over the other guy took Bill Hickok’s watch as a gambling debt, and Hickok wanted his watch back. And later somebody said, why on earth would you kill a man over a watch? And he said, I’m not killing a man over a watch. This was about my honor. This was a challenge to my honor. I’d read stuff like that before in Western literature. And I happened to be from the South and happened to be from Texas. And that struck a real chord to me. And just immediately I realized, well, when was the only time in American history before the gunfighters after the Civil War that a group of civilian men were famous for shooting each other? And it was in the dueling culture in the antebellum South from the 1790s or so into the 1840s. Duels were a very big thing in the South.

And what mattered to me was less the formal structure of the duel, because obviously we didn’t have a ton of duels in the Old West, but rather the factors that caused it. There’s this thing that historians write an awful lot about in the antebellum South, and it’s the male honor culture. And that is, you know, it calls for things that you might expect, you know, to be brave and kind to women and kind to horses and such. But the part that matters for our story is that any time that a Southern male in that time period was challenged, if he was told that he was ugly or his wife was ugly or his horse was ugly, you know, he had an opportunity and in many cases an obligation to respond with force, even deadly force. And that’s what led to these duels. And what you find as you follow that culture as it moves west with the South into Texas, Texas became another Southern state, but Texas was different. It was the only Southern state that had not one but two violent frontiers, the Mexican border, of course, but also we forget the Native American, the Comanche frontier, which split the state in half on a diagonal into the 1870s.

It made the Texan particularly adept. It was a martial culture. They were adept from the beginning with guns. It was the Texans, the Texas Rangers, to be sure, who initially discovered and popularized the first Colt revolvers. You know, it was Texans who made it a thing, but it really wasn’t until the 10 years after the Civil War, when Texas was engulfed with rebellion against the federal government, that that type of hyper-violent ethos really rose to the fore, where it was just Texas was, during Reconstruction, I think just about every academic study puts it this way, by far the most violent of the Southern states. You can find academic analyses that will say that the decade of civilian violence in Texas after the war may have been the bloodiest period of civilian violence in American history. And what I posit is that it made the Texan a little bit of a different animal. If you go and look at the marquee gunfights out there, Brett, I’m saying 60, 70% of them involve a Texan in some way. And what I had not understood, what confused me initially is, well, what were Texans doing having gunfights in Arizona, in New Mexico, in Wyoming, in Nebraska?

And that’s when I discovered the thing that spread Texas culture and this Texas kind of hyper-violence across the frontier was the open ranged cattle industry. It was a business that began in Texas and that thrived in Texas after the war. Texans pretty much had a monopoly on beef cattle for a few years. And what began to spread Texas cattle and Texas cattlemen, Texas cowboys across the frontier, of course, was the need to get to Northern markets when they began driving these cattle up the cattle trails, up the Chisholm Trail, most famously, into Kansas, which really became kind of the beginning of this gunfighter era when gunfighters began to get national attention.

Brett McKay: Yeah, there’s a lot to unpack there, but honing in on this honor idea, I think this is very foreign for a lot of modern listeners because, I mean, this idea of honor that these guys had in the South, and you see it somewhat in the North, not as much, but it really took hold in the South. It was all about protecting your reputation. I mean, that’s what it was. It was all about your reputation as a man. And if your reputation was somehow called into question, you had to defend it with violence. And there’s a theory that the reason why the South has a particularly strong notion of honor, I think, was it Richard Nisbet, his book, The Culture of Honor?

Bryan Burrough: Yeah.

Brett McKay: Talked about how a lot of people in the South, they came from these shepherding cultures in Scotland. 

Bryan Burrough: Scotland and Ireland, especially. 

Brett McKay: Yeah.

Bryan Burrough: Those who work around livestock, it’s always been violent cultures, in part, the need to dissuade thieves. And for whatever reasons, much of it becomes wrapped up in honor. You can read so many explanations of why Southerners became obsessed with honor. A lot of historians seem to believe it has to have something with slavery. You can read people that say it has something to do with the heat. I come down with the feeling that it basically arose from the planters’ class, the wealthiest class in the South, where we had something in the South that we never had in America, which was the idle rich, an entire class of idle rich for whom Black people, slaves, did most, if not all, of their work. And so in a need to kind of differentiate themselves from those below them who worked, they modeled themselves after the aristocrats of Europe, for whom honor had been sacrosanct for hundreds of years. And that’s kind of my feeling on how Southerners became obsessed with honor. And it filtered down through the classes. If you wanted to move up, you needed to have honor.

And this happened in a world where not a lot of people had college degrees or educations that they could talk about or financial statements. And in a world where everybody kind of looked the same, honor became the way you measured people, the way you measured men. And as silly as it may sound to our ears today, if someone went up to you in New Orleans in 1844 and pinched your nose or called you ugly or made a remark about your children, you were expected to lash back in some way, shape, or form. And I think it was the development of that culture that migrated into something different, something even more violent via Texas on the old West frontier.

Brett McKay: Yeah, my take on it was the honor code in the South. And again, you saw it somewhat in the North, but it was really pronounced in the South. The way you protected your honor differed amongst classes. So amongst the upper class in the South, you would follow the codice duello, like the dueling code.

And it was designed basically to prevent violence. Like there’s all these different protocols you went through. You had a second, you try to do some negotiation. And then oftentimes you just show up and like shoot your pistol in the air. And you called it good. The lower class, they tended to just like, they didn’t use weapons. They didn’t follow the formal dueling code. They would just oftentimes engage in like, they called it the rough and tumble.

Bryan Burrough: I mean, I’m telling you, fist fighting and wrestling back in those days was a different thing. I mean, you’re talking about gouging out eyes and ripping people’s mouths. I mean, several states had to pass laws against eye gouging, if you can imagine. Anyway, this whole honor thing seems to have come out of the Revolutionary War when American officers kind of got close and personal with their British and French counterparts for whom honor was a very big deal. But it stopped in the North, as you point out, and most people believe that was about the Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton duel in Weehawken, New Jersey in 1803. After that, duels all but disappear from the North. And yet, they not only don’t disappear in the South, they’re all but embraced. I mean, you can point to any number of known people, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Abraham Lincoln, who all either involved in duels, you know, shot people in duels, or in Lincoln’s case, he managed to talk himself out of one. Duels were not, like, I think we look back now and think, oh, that’s kind of a lunatic fringe type of deal.

But if you look at the people who are engaged in duels, who, you know, put out public notices, they were often politicians and people involved in public life for whom an assault on their honor was kind of widely known. If you were an up-and-coming congressman in St. Louis, and somebody, you know, talked bad about you, I mean, you were challenging them to duel. Missouri was, Missouri and St. Louis was kind of the northern boundary of all this.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And for our listeners, if you want to see an example of like a lower-class notion of honor, like the rough and tumble that we were talking about, that wrestling, like no-holds-barred wrestling, there’s a great scene in the Gangs of New York where the DiCaprio character, who’s from Ireland, he first meets Bill the Butcher, and there’s like some other, one of Bill the Butcher’s heavies is there, and there’s some sort of insult or slight, and then they just immediately take off their coats and they start punching each other, but then there’s some like fish hooking and things like that. I’m like, that’s an old-school Civil War notion of honor amongst the working class.

Bryan Burrough: Yeah, I had forgotten about that. That was a very good example of it, yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Okay, so, and then this notion of honor, it moved to Texas, and I think what happened in Texas, in the sort of notion of Texan honor, it got democratized, I think, significantly. It wasn’t just like the aristocrats who were protecting their honor, it was these guys who had herds who felt like they needed to maintain their reputation for violence so people would just not mess with them. And then you see this introduction of, you mentioned earlier, the Colt revolver. So there’s a technological component to the gunfighter. Tell us about that. How did the Colt revolver change the game in the Old West? 

Bryan Burrough: There is no gunfighter. There is no gunfighter age without a revolver. If you think of it, back in Antebellum days, when they would have duels, typically it would be with single-shot pistols. So bang, the other guy goes bang, and then everybody takes 15 seconds to reload. You can’t exactly kill a lot of people in that way, but when you had a six-shot revolver, you could do an awful lot of damage. We sometimes forget that when Colt was kind of a nobody, a rich kid out of Massachusetts who was fascinated with tinkering and thought he could make a revolving gun. But when it was introduced for the first time in, I want to say 1837, it was a complete flop. In fact, five years later, Colt is out of business and no one’s using revolvers. And then out of nowhere, a young officer named Jack Hayes in the Texas Rangers, who spends much of his time on the Comanche frontier fighting Native Americans, stumbles on a shipment of them that was basically sitting in a warehouse. It had initially been sent, I love this, to the Texas Navy back when Texas had a Navy as an independent nation.

Jack Hayes took these revolvers, showed his men how to use them, and famously in 1844 at the Battle of Waller Creek, northwest of San Antonio, he was engaged with his crew of, I want to say 23, 24 guys against a group of Comanche that was said to number around 100. And for the first time, the Rangers charged into the Comanche firing the revolvers. And in the ensuing fight, 23, 24 Comanche were killed and only one Ranger. And the great takeaway quote afterwards, years later, the chief who had been involved there said, I shall never fight Jack Hayes again, for he has a bullet for every finger on his hand.

Brett McKay: And then how did the Colt change the game for gunfighters?

Bryan Burrough: Well, first off, you don’t notice a huge difference immediately countrywide until the years after the Civil War when you can talk about how the war influenced gunfighters and these people doing this violence to each other out on the frontier. And common sense tells you the war must have had something to do with it. It’s often been speculated that many of these gunfighters must have been suffering from something like PTSD, which is compelling and probably correct, but it still has to remain speculative because we don’t have anybody at the time, you know, blaming, I’m sorry I killed those four guys, I had a bad day at Gettysburg. But what you can point to about the war influencing violence is that in 1865, 1866, something on the order of 1.3 million handguns were auctioned or given away by the federal government after the war. And so for the first time, what we call today as open carry, while not unheard of before the war, you can find memoirs in which people say, oh, I saw a man wearing a gun on his hip in Georgia in 1815. It happened. But what becomes clear is that after the war in the 1860s, it becomes commonplace, such that people are just kind of stunned that men across the South, across the frontier, are wearing pistols with no more thought than the way they used to wear a necktie or their glasses.

And one of my favorite memoirists out of Missouri, in a reference to that rough and tumble type of style, says that type of problem resolution is gone now. People here handle such things with a pistol in a much quicker and more efficient fashion. And that’s really the dawn of the gunfighter era.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. Okay, so you had this notion of honor instead of a duel with these elaborate procedures and rituals. You just had guys who were like, let’s just take care of it now. And they were all heavily armed. They’re all carrying pistols. Some guys had two pistols on them. It’s just everyone was armed in Texas and in the frontier. Pretty much. Another aspect or another way technology contributed to the rise of the gunfighter was the telegraph and mass media. Tell us about that.

Bryan Burrough: It’s funny. I think most people that look at this think that gunfighting and gunfighters were somehow a creation of the media, a creation of dime novels and pulp fiction. In fact, the gunfighters type violence that I’m writing about here and that we see in movies was very real. I think what telegraphs and the media allowed is for the fascination with this phenomena, which, by the way, did not begin in the East. It begins in the communities where these things happen. You can read it in the local newspapers. All the pulp fiction and dime novel writers did was pick up on something that was initially very popular in the West. You can read one of my favorite stories about this is from very early in the game when Mark Twain, as a young writer, went out to Nevada during the Civil War to become a journalist. And on the way on these stagecoaches, all anybody ever wanted to talk about was a certain gunfighter, a guy named Jack Slade, who was a local legend.

And that was months, if not years, before anybody uttered his name back East. So I think that the media, and we see this especially with Hickok’s creation, you know, the media broadcast this legend, but they don’t create it. I think that’s where a lot of cynics want to say they created it. And I would argue, no, this was a genuine organic phenomena that they picked up because it fascinated Americans. For some reason, and we can speculate why, you know, this type of behavior really struck a chord with Americans. So there would still have been gunfighters, but I’m not sure they would have become the American archetypes they did if not for media.

Brett McKay: Why do you think it struck a chord with Americans at the time?

Bryan Burrough: I think it has to do with the fact that the American West really became the American origin story. You know, we can tell all the tales we want about George Washington and men in powdered wigs beating the British, and that’s clearly the actual origin story. But stylistically and in terms of values and behaviors that we might want to emulate, I’m not sure there was that many that people look to the the Revolutionary War to find. Instead, I think when people think about American values, when they think about the American dream, the American dream, as I define it, would be the idea that any person, certainly any man in America, can rise from humble beginnings and chart his own way. And nowhere was that more evident than on the frontier, where thousands of Americans went out, you know, and pitched a dent on a patch of dirt and tried to make something of themselves. 

And it made the frontier, I think, kind of a cradle for the American worship of individualism, the idea that anyone can do it. And there’s something about the gunfighter who’s kind of the ultimate individual, isn’t he? You know, what’s more, what is more of an equalizer than a gun, where a man who’s 4’11 could kill a man who’s 7′ tall and a wrestler? The gunfighter became kind of a symbol, one of many probably, but a symbol, an abiding symbol of American individualism and of the American dream. That’s my theory, at least.

Brett McKay: So these gunfights are happening organically. Back East, they picked up on it, started writing about them in the paperbacks and the dime novels and the National Police Gazette was a big place where all these stories were published. I’m curious, I’ve heard that, kind of fast-forwarding and looking at another area of American history related to crime and violence, The Godfather, the movie The Godfather, I’m going a completely different stream here, but I’m going somewhere with this.

Bryan Burrough: I’m with you.

Brett McKay: Some people speculate that the movie The Godfather influenced the mob, the actual mob. Like these mobsters, they watched The Godfather, and they’re like, well, we got to act this way because that’s what it says in The Godfather. Did you come across anything like that where you see that with the gunfighter? Like there’s young men who are reading these dime novels, and they’re like, well, I got to carry my gun this way, or I got to do this so I can be like the gunfighters that I read about on the National Police Gazette.

Bryan Burrough: I know way too much about The Godfather, and you’re exactly right. I mean, the woods are so full of mafia guys, you know, back in the ’80s, ’90s, who talked about how, yeah, they needed to live that way. And you see exactly the same thing in the Old West. I can think of individual moments. For instance, Butch Cassidy in his second robbery in Utah, and I want to say 1896, which was very late in the game on the frontier. He had a partner named Elzy Lay. And I can remember in the middle of this robbery when one of the guys that they were robbing tried to make a move,Elzy Lay said to him something like, don’t pick up that gun or I’ll fill your belly full of hot lead. Like, who talks like that? The fact is nobody talks like that. It’s so clear that he got that from Pulp Fiction. He got that from a dime novel. But you also see that from the very beginning with the Texas cowboys who spread across the frontier, first to Kansas, but then to New Mexico and beyond. You can find memoirs. I’m thinking of Teddy Blue Abbott’s famous cowboy memoir.

And he talks about how he was yearning to get to Kansas so he could shoot someone, so he could prove his honor, so he could prove his manhood. You know, being involved in a gunfight was not something in that time, in that place, among those people that was something to be shied away from. It was something, in fact, that a lot of young men attempting to prove who they were yearned for and sought. And it’s one way that, you know, when you look at the behavior of Texas cowboys in the 1870s especially, I mean, there’s so many things where you’re like, really? They shot him over that? They shot him because he got jostled in a bar? They shot him because somebody, you know, beat him at go fish? They’re just silly things that caused gunfights. But if you take into this the context that many young men wanted to prove their manhood with guns, some of those silly gunfights make much more sense.

Brett McKay: Well, speaking of the cowboys, that was another factor that contributed to the rise of the gunfighter. It was an economic factor. You see the rise of the Texas cowboy and the Texas longhorn, the steer. How did the cattle boom from Texas contribute to the gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Well, the cattle boom took a southern honor culture that had been already, you know, pumped up to pretty new heights in Texas and added kind of the final block to the wall, if you will. And that is the Texas cattle business, especially as expanded into new areas in the 1860s and ’70s. So moved from South Texas into much of the rest of Texas, especially Central Texas, was legendarily violent because this was open range cattle ranching. So no barbed wire fence. The cattle range free. You put a brand on them and when it was time to go to market, you went and rounded them up. Well, obviously that made this industry especially prone to thievery, to theft of livestock. And so that’s the reason why Texas cattlemen, like generations of cattlemen before them, resorted to violence so readily. You know, often it was hanging. And this, by the way, played out in a dozen of kind of feuds across Texas in the decade after the Civil War, all of which dwarfed the body count of a feud like Hatfield and McCoy. This was probably eight of the 10 worst feuds in American history were around the cattle industry in Texas. And a lot of the violence was hanging, but much of it was also gunfights.

And especially as those behaviors spread across the West, that’s how you explain Texas cattlemen in gunfights pretty much everywhere you want to look in the West.

Brett McKay: And this is why you say, you know, Texas made the West wild. The cattle industry spread through what was an Indian territory up to Kansas, Abilene, Dodge City. And that’s why we had that famous gunfight in Arizona, the O.K. Corral. I mean, that was basically…

Bryan Burrough: I mean, Texans practically colonized New Mexico, Texas cattlemen. When you look at Arizona, I think Arizona went from, I want to say, 3,000 cattle in 1870 to 5 million in 1890, and all those were brought in by Texans. It’s funny, when you look at the outlaw gang that Wyatt Earp fought against in Tombstone that led to the famous gunfight beside the O.K. Corral, they were known as the Cowboys, usually spelled Cal hyphen boys, except from below the border where they stole many of their cattle, Mexican ranchers called them the Tejanos because so many of them were from Texas.

Brett McKay: All right, so the rise of the gunfighter, we’ve got the honor culture that morphed into Texan honor culture, the rise of the Colt Revolver, and then the cattle boom spread this violence across the American West. Something else I was struck by in your book, a lot of the gunfighters you highlight were gamblers. What was the connection? Why were so many gunfighters gamblers?

Bryan Burrough: Well, first off, almost everybody in the Old West was a gambler because there wasn’t much else to do. Keep in mind, no TV, no internet, no radio, nothing much to do but sit around and talk and drink and, oh yeah, play cards. So almost every main gunfighter I can think of, other than maybe Jesse James, who is not really a gunfighter, but that’s a story for another day, engaged in gambling as a pastime and occasionally as their profession. And there you could cite Doc Holliday, you could cite the Texan Ben Thompson and the Texan Luke Short as being kind of the three great gambler gunfighters. But you raise a question that perplexed me at the beginning, which is if you start to look at these marquee gunfights, you see a disturbing number of them involve arguments over gambling, which just didn’t make much sense to me. If you and I are sitting there playing five-card draw, Brett, and I throw out two fives and you throw out two fours, well, it’s pretty obvious I won. What is there to argue about? And then I started reading the histories on gambling, and it turns out that gambling on the frontier was a little bit different today.

And the reason it was so violent, I came to believe, is that, well, two things. One, Americans finally figured out that most gambling, certainly card-based gambling, was fixed, that people who did it professionally or did it often knew how to cheat. This was thanks to a riverboat gambler who in the 1840s came out and wrote a book about all the ways that gamblers could cheat and did. So everybody on the frontier was on the lookout for cheating, and cheating was endemic. And certainly any challenge of cheating, and that’s what an awful lot of the gambling-based arguments were about, was you cheated. Prove it. Well, here’s a gun. But if you were challenged to cheating, that was an acute challenge to your honor, and that led to a lot of gunfights, an awful lot of them. I mean, maybe, I don’t know, maybe 30%, 40% of the gunfights that I write about seem to have something to do with gambling.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think it’s called giving someone the lie. It’s like when you accuse someone of lying.

Bryan Burrough: Ooh, I wish I’d known that. That’s a good line.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Let’s talk about some particular gunfighters that stood out to you. So a lot of these gunfighters, thanks to the dime novels, the pulp newspapers, they had a lot of hype around them. Like, well, this guy killed 30 men and this guy killed 50. If you look at the actual numbers, most of them maybe killed one or two guys. Some of them got up to maybe five. Out of all the gunfighters you researched and wrote about, which one actually lived up to the hype that they had?

Bryan Burrough: John Wesley Hardin of Texas, who of what I call the big five gunfighters, meaning the most famous, those would be Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickok, Billy the Kid, Jesse James, and the least known is John Wesley Hardin , who very much is a transition figure from kind of exclusively Texas violence to violence out on the frontier. He was just another kid in rural Texas until he killed a black man in 1868 when he was 15, an argument over a wrestling match, at which point he was obliged to become a fugitive. And Hardin , very much like Jesse James and many of the earliest gunfighters, was a diehard rebel who felt like the South was being unjustly occupied and dominated by Northern troops. And so Hardin embarked on a career for six years where he kind of wandered Texas killing people. And generally not for reasons he expected, almost always because of arguments and things that went round. Hardin was the type of guy, if you said something wrong about Texas, he would shoot you. I mean, he was literally a serial killer, and he was almost certainly, by the dictionary definition, a psychopath.

He also embodies this spread of Texas violence because after killing, and he is credited between 24 and 42 killings. By the time he was 21, most before he was 18. And of course, his most famous jaunt was the single cattle drive he took up the Chisholm Trail to Abilene in 1871, where he came face to face but did not shoot while Bill Hickok, who silkily kind of disarmed him before gunplay. But in the four months that Hardin was in the Abilene area, I think I tied it up that he killed, believably, eight men, five at once in a big gunfight out on the prairie with his cousins. And the most famous of Hardin ‘s gunfights, which really was not a gunfight, was the one where supposedly it was always said that he killed a man for snoring. And of course, for 150 years, people have kind of rolled their eyes and said, oh, that’s just a Texas myth. But the facts are he was asleep or drunk in his hotel room there in Abilene at four in the morning, and he shot a man in the next room through the wall with four gunshots. And they probably didn’t get into an argument since they were in separate rooms and couldn’t see each other.

I think, why else would you shoot somebody through a hotel room wall than if they were snoring? So I’m prepared to believe it.

Brett McKay: Who was the most overrated gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Johnny Ringo. He was very famous up until, let’s say, the last 50 years. Like, there were Johnny Ringo television series in the ’50s. There were Johnny Ringo movies during the ’60s. He was kind of a second-tier gunman in Tombstone, best known as a gunfighter who had a particular animosity for Doc Holliday. But beginning in the ’70s, a series of researchers basically realized that not only was he not a gunfighter, he had never been in a gunfight of any type. The only time we ever understand that he actually fired a gun in anything like Anger was once in a drunken argument with a miner in which I think the miner was winged. And the only other gunfight he was ever in, he was probably the one that killed him. In fact, we believe he committed suicide, found dead against a tree in the middle of nowhere. Wyatt Earp, famously years later, decades later, bragged that he did it, but he didn’t. And we now know that Johnny Ringo, and none of this was Johnny Ringo’s fault, the Old West kind of disappeared from American conscience for about 30 years, from the 1890s into the 1920s, when it was rediscovered, famously by a magazine article in which the writer’s lead was, who remembers Billy the Kid, which ignited this interest in gunfighters and all manner of Western things.

And that was really the beginning and in some ways the peak of Ringo’s fame. I mean, there were people that wrote in books that he was not only the greatest of American gunfighters, but that he was a college man known for spouting stories in Latin, all of which is purely made up by modern writers or writers from the 1920s. Poor Johnny Ringo was not responsible for any of it. The runner up though was probably Wild Bill Hickok, who, while he became a gunfighter of note, when he first got all the attention as a result of that opening gunfight there in Springfield, Missouri in 1869, the writer wrote with a straight face in Harper’s Weekly, you know, a notable magazine that he had no doubt that Hickok had killed over 100 white men. And by my count, the exact number at that point would appear to be two, although two men that he wounded in one of them died, but they were killed by other people, so technicality. But even that is a long way from 100. So that type of thing, you know, you see in three or four of these careers.

On the other hand, Brett, there’s any number of gunfighters whose stories are even better than we remember. You know, Hardin is probably underappreciated solely as a source of, you know, gunfighter mayhem.

Brett McKay: This is probably a morbid question, but after all your research, which gunfight was the most impressive, for lack of a better word?

Bryan Burrough: Well, you know, I mean, I hate to go to the one everybody knows, but O.K. Corral is amazing. Eight men, which was initially 10, and several of them backed away. And so it was four Earps versus three bad guys. So seven guys shooting from ranges from five to 15 feet. And a gunfight that lasts 30 seconds. Three guys end up getting killed. That was pretty impressed. The other two crazy ones were one from California, of all places, during the gold rush, before the actual gunfighter era, but in kind of a manic prelude, in which one guy on a mountain trail with his sack of gold powder was ambushed by a bunch of bandits. And he killed 11 of them by himself with a gun and then with a knife. But hands down, the craziest gunfight of all, I think, and I got to give you the short version of this because the long is too great, was a group, a young Hispanic deputy in New Mexico in 1884, in what’s today the town of Reserve, way out on the Arizona border up at altitude, had the temerity to arrest a drunken Texan for shooting his gun in the air.

The next morning, after he processed him through the courthouse, he came out and there was a crowd of 80, eight zero Texas cowboys who worked at the ranches outside town, who chased him down. He took refuge in an adobe hut and they kept him under gunfire under siege for the next 36 hours. He ended up killing four of them. He walked out unhurt in part because everyone only learned afterwards that this little adobe hut had a false bottom and he was able to lay flat about 18 inch below ground level. And these cowboys just kept shooting and shooting and shooting and every single shot went over his head. And the young man’s name was El Fago Baca and he went on to be tried and found innocent twice of murder and went on to a long career in New Mexico as a politician and a sheriff of note.

Brett McKay: So we’ve talked about the gunfighter era. When did it start drawing to a close?

Bryan Burrough: You know, after the early 1880s, that’s pretty much the peak of the gunfighter era. You certainly see gun violence for another 20 years, but a lot of the craziest stuff from the early days begins to pass and gunfights in the 1880s and 1890s tend to be much more about something, typically about fights over the division of resources, whether it’s cattlemen, you know, fighting farmers or fighting sheep farmers. It more often becomes about something in those later years.

Brett McKay: It’s not about honor anymore. 

Bryan Burrough: Not as much. I mean, you can certainly find gunfights that seem to be taking part for a man’s honor, but what you see much more often is, you know, big feuds over land. And, you know, after 1901, there were certainly gunfights. I can name some, but what you find there is that in terms of newsworthiness and cultural importance, frontier violence kind of gives way to a fascination with frontier entertainment. So Western movies first, but also Western literature. I’m thinking of the Virginia Owen Wester’s 1901 book, certainly the rise of Remington and his sculpture. So I argue that it’s in that decade, in those years, in the early part of the 20th century, where Western violence begins to move from headlines to history. And so I think that’s a fair place to end the story.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And then, as you said, the gunfighter kind of got forgotten a little bit, but then there was this revival in the ’20s. And it just seemed like for the next 30 years, through the 1950s, I mean, it just provided fodder for Hollywood for these stories where they’re pumping out TV shows, radio shows, comic books, movies. What do you think was going on there? Like, why this sudden uptick in the interest in the Old West and particularly the gunfighter?

Bryan Burrough: Well, it’s funny because the gunfighter really wasn’t a thing in the Old West. I mean, you could read stories about gunfighters, but in terms of like dime novels and popular entertainment, Indian fighters, even detectives, soldiers were much more popular stock figures than gunfighters.

Brett McKay: Yeah, like Kit Carson was a popular dime novel character.

Bryan Burrough: Much bigger deal than Hickok. You know, Billy the Kid became a household name, but he was the rare gunfighter that at the time achieved true national fame. And much of that was just because he had a stellar nickname. But it really wasn’t until the 1920s that the gunfighter was introduced in a serious way into American entertainment. But what took it to the next level was the introduction of television around 1950, which suddenly out of nowhere had, you know, three or four networks and a real need for what we call today original content for original programming. And frankly, a gunfighter show was stunningly cheap to make. You just needed a back lot with some Old West buildings. And then it’s what, you know, 10 white guys and some guns. I mean, this is not expensive television to be made. And something like a third or 40% of every TV show on in during the ’50s, during the first 10 years of modern television, was a Western and most of those featured a gunfighter. But, you know, what really got good though, for those of us who are aficionados, was in the late ’60s and early ’70s with the introduction of Butch Casting the Sundance Kid in ’69, it really introduced something like more realistic Westerns to Hollywood cinema.

If you look at the Westerns that came out from Hollywood from ’69 for the next decade, I’m thinking about the, you know, Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch, McCabe and Mrs. Miller with, wasn’t that Warren Beatty? I mean, suddenly, you know, we lost kind of the glamour and the glitz and the, you know, singing to damsels in the moonlight and got something that was gritty and dirty and nasty and bloody. And those are the movies I think that have fueled, to the extent that gunfighters have continued to be a thing, I think much of it was because of those movies more even than 50s era television. Having said all that, and with apologies to Taylor Sheridan and Yellowstone and all that, you know, the gunfighter is just not what it used to be. A lot of the adventures, a lot of the narratives that used to star gunfighters now are set not in the Old West, but in outer space. And, you know, it’s a shame. There’s still a Hickok or a Billy the Kid movie every five or 10 years, and sadly, they no longer really attract the best and brightest. A lot of them just go kind of what we used to call straight to video.

Brett McKay: What do you think is the best movie that depicts an Old West gunfight?

Bryan Burrough: Ooh, you’re killing me here. There’s so many. I mean, I like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid a lot. It’s closer to reality than a lot of people want to believe. The Wild Bunch has to stand out because it was not only the most violent, but people forget it was the first most violent, you know, it was the first over the top violent Western. I think today, you know, just thinking about movies made in the last 40 years, it’s hard not to nod toward the Kurt Russell Tombstone from 93, which people just seem to love. And with the passing of Val Kilmer earlier this year has kind of been rediscovered for a lot of people. I watched that again the other day. And some of the performances in that movie from Powers Booth as Curly Bill Brocious to Michael Biehn as Johnny Ringo are just really wonderful. But even though Val Kilmer, of course, steals it, are just really wonderful. And yesterday I just watched the movie that it went up against, which was the Kevin Costner Wyatt Earp movie, which put me to sleep then and pretty much put me to sleep again the other day.

How do you make a boring Wyatt Earp movie? Well, they pretty much did.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I remember when I saw Wyatt Earp when it first came out in the movie, I fell asleep in the movie theater.

Bryan Burrough: There you go.

Brett McKay: One movie, and I remember you mentioned it, and it’s not very good. But I remember when I watched this when I was, I don’t know why I was watching this rated R, I was like 9 or 10. But back then my dad didn’t care. He was like, well, you know, he just watched HBO. And if you decide to watch with him, he’d just let you watch rated R movie. Young Guns, I for some reason, I watched that movie and I became fascinated with Billy the Kid after I watched Young Guns, but it’s pretty cheesy. 

Bryan Burrough: You know, but it’s not cartoonish. Yeah, the facts don’t really jive. I mean, it’s what the best thing you could say about it is it’s two or three cuts above Young Guns 2. And the one thing that I appreciate about it, watching it is that Emilio Estevez’s portrayal of Billy is someone who’s not totally stable. And that is the sense that you get about Billy, that he was not entirely stable. And I thought more than a lot of Billy the Kid movies, he brought that out.

Brett McKay: Well, Brian, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Bryan Burrough: Oh, golly, you know, this is my eighth book. It’s called The Gunfighters. It’s available on Amazon and in pretty much all bookstores now. It’s the first one I’ve written about the Old West. It’s the third I’ve written about Texas. I wrote it for people who don’t know much about the Old West, but were looking for one book that would kind of not only introduce them to a lot of these characters, but would really fill in in footnotes and elsewhere with other books where you can go to read, you know, if you want the best books about Billy the Kid, the best books about Wyatt Earp and such. You know, I made a point to point to other people’s work here, too.

Brett McKay: That is it. Well, Brian Burrow, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure. 

Bryan Burrough: Brett, fabulous. Thank you so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Bryan Burrough. He’s the author of the book, The Gunfighters: How Texas Made the West Wild. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/gunfighters, where you find links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and make sure to sign up for our new sub stack newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay. Remind you to listen to the AOM Podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

That Dwight D. Eisenhower became Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe, orchestrating the largest amphibious invasion in history on June 6, 1944, was far from inevitable.

He came from the middle of nowhere — Abilene, Kansas — had never led men in battle, spent most of his career as a staff officer, and didn’t make general until he was in his fifties.

How, then, did he become the leader on whom the fate of the world would rest?

Today, we trace the making of Ike with Michel Paradis, author of The Light of Battle. We talk about how Eisenhower’s Midwestern upbringing shaped his character, and how his most important education happened outside the classroom. Michel shares how crucial mentors were in Ike’s development, and how Eisenhower made the most of those relationships. We discuss the books that were most formative in shaping his thinking, including what he got from Nietzsche. We also get into some of the practices Eisenhower used to lead effectively, including how he budgeted his time to maintain his morale while under the pressure of planning D-Day and what he did the evening before the invasion to deal with the stress.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #641: How Eisenhower Led — A Conversation with Ike’s Granddaughter
• AoM series on Eisenhower’s leadership
• AoM Podcast #996: Remembering D-Day 80 Years Later
• The Line Man’s Bible: A Football Textbook of Detailed Instruction by Ernest Graves.
• Sunday Firesides: You Never Know How Many Chapters Are Still to Come
• Fox Conner
• The Czar of Halfaday Creek by James B. Hendryx

Connect With Michel Paradis

• Michel on LinkedIn
• Michel’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read theTranscript

Brett McKay: All right, Michelle Paradis, welcome to the show.

Michelle Paradis: Thanks so much for having me.

Brett McKay: So you got a book out called The Light of Battle, which is about D-Day. D-Day is one of the most studied and written about events in modern history. What do you think gets missed in the books on D-Day? And what were you hoping to bring to our understanding of D-Day with your book?

Michelle Paradis: No, that’s exactly right. There are so many great books about D-Day too that I definitely knew in starting this one that I couldn’t write just another book about D-Day. If only because like, you know, competing with people like Max Hastings is going to always be impossible. And so, you know, to me, I think the thing we missed, to answer your question about D-Day, the thing that fascinated me is not just the actual heroism of the men who hit the beaches, you know, on Omaha or on Juneau, but how much went into it. How much was behind them? We think about those 176,000 men who hit the beach in the first day, you know, obviously correctly. They are the literal heroes of that story. But, you know, depending on how you count it, about 2 million people made D-Day happen. And that kind of collective action, right, that working together for a common goal was essential to D-Day’s success. And that ultimately is what drew me, especially to Eisenhower. And obviously there’s no lack of historical celebration for Dwight Eisenhower, but I also think we almost take him for granted.

You know, there’s a book, a minute about people like, you know, about Churchill, about Patton, about D-Day itself, but there are actually very few serious studies of Eisenhower. The last, you know, significant biography, certainly covering his wartime experience, is at least about 10, 15 years old now. And I just thought that was amazing, right? I couldn’t understand that because here you are, you have this guy, he comes from the middle of the country, right, about as far away from anywhere as you could possibly get, which is Abilene, Kansas, and not only comes to the heights of military leadership in the Second World War, he commands the most complicated, and I would argue consequential military operation of that war, which is D-Day, and then goes on to be probably one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, the first president we call the leader of the free world. And so many, I think, even admiring takes of Eisenhower sort of look at him as like this inevitable figure or a boring figure at worst, like the, you know, the 50s, the mayonnaise on white bread kind of thing. And to me, I just knew that there was something more going on there.

And so in thinking about D-Day and thinking about the heroism of the men on the beach on D-Day, I really wanted to just understand how they got there and how they got there in a way to succeed. And that took me to Dwight Eisenhower.

Brett McKay: And that’s what I loved about the book. You get into his personality or try to, because he is kind of an enigma. He’s kind of a Sphinx character in a lot of ways, just kind of this affable, smiling guy. And I think that’s why he gets overlooked. But you try to paint a picture of him that, no, there’s a lot going on with this guy. And that’s why he was so successful as a commander and later as a president of the United States. So let’s dig into Eisenhower and try to figure out how did this guy manage to carry off one of the biggest military invasions in the history of humanity? You mentioned he grew up in Abilene, Kansas. How do you think his Kansas upbringing prepared him for his role in World War II?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, I mean, he’s such a fascinating figure, like as you say, because he’s known, certainly in his lifetime, particularly as president, as being, you know, everyone likes Ike. He is this smiling guy. He’s sort of almost seen as, again, bland or non-threatening. And yet he is probably, you know, responsible literally for the deaths of millions of Germans and one of the most, I think, cunning and in some ways ruthless military and political figures of the 20th century. But it’s all concealed around this very sort of bland, deceptively bland, I would say, packaging of smiling Ike. And a lot of that traces to his upbringing in Kansas. And there are a couple of things that I think shape him. You know, he’s born in 1890, which is sometimes celebrated as the year the West was closed, and he grows up in Abilene, which had been a, you know, a cow town from the Wild West, but by that point had become a fairly reserved, very religiously oriented community around the River Brethren. And his family, his father’s family, was a very prominent religious family, a farming family. But his own father was a, you know, a complicated guy.

He wasn’t a drinker, but he was definitely abusive. And even for the time, I would say, abusive. You know, late 1800s Kansas. And so Eisenhower grows up in this community in the middle of Kansas, which emphasizes a certain kind of, you know, humility. You know, if you talk to anyone from Kansas, the most important thing they’ll let you know is, well, Kansas is nothing to talk about. You know, we’re just humble people from the plains. And so that sense of Eisenhower of being, in a way, self-effacing is right out of Kansas, right? Everyone in Kansas recognizes that. But I think the other things he gets from growing up in his very unique circumstances is, one, a real burning desire to see the rest of the world. I don’t know that he travels more than about 100 miles or so before he ends up enrolling in West Point when he’s 19 years old. And as the middle child of a fairly low-income, large family, he just has this itch to want to see the absolute rest of the world. And that leads him to cultivate all sorts of mentors, both in Abilene and then really for the rest of his life.

It’s probably one of his greatest skills as a sort of a man in development is that he looks for people who seem to have figured something out that he wants to know. And he gloms onto them and tries to learn from them in a really intimate way. And in Kansas, one of his first mentors is the publisher of the local Democrat newspaper, the Dickinson News. And he just goes to this guy’s newspaper shop, hangs out there after school, typically with some friends. And this publisher sees in Eisenhower a curiosity, and Eisenhower wants to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. And so this guy starts just giving Eisenhower books to read. And one of Eisenhower’s favorite, or the one that makes the biggest imprint on him, is The Life of Hannibal. Now, when I said Eisenhower is the middle child of a very large, low-income family, that’s also a religiously pacifist family. His father and his mother were part of a movement called the Bible Students, which we now know as the Jehovah’s Witnesses, but were much more, how would we say, mystical movement at the turn of the 20th century.

And his religiously pacifist mother is not at all impressed when he brings home The Life of Hannibal, and in fact confiscates it from him and puts it away in her closet. And as Eisenhower sort of tells the story later, he would wait until she was out in the garden culling some of the crops, and he would sneak into her closet like he was looking for the Playboy and read The Life of Hannibal sort of in secret, and just became fascinated by, really in love with, a kind of military heroism, a kind of manly figure. And the thing he would always say about Hannibal in particular is that he knew from the time he was a young boy that Hannibal was one of the greatest generals in all of history because he was recounted as such, but only ever by his enemies. There are no extant tracts or histories by the Carthaginians of Hannibal’s exploits, only those written by the Romans. And to Eisenhower, the fact that someone could be so compelling as a figure, so powerful as a general, so brilliant, so heroic, as to go down in history that way when the only people writing about you are the enemies who fought you in battle, really impressed Eisenhower from a young age.

And so that upbringing in Kansas, that combination of, you know, it sounds cliche, but it’s true, small-town values, but combined with this real burning itch to get out of Kansas, to see the rest of the world, to be a part of the world, formed Eisenhower’s character at a young age in ways that you can see almost to the day he dies.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned West Point was his ticket out of Abilene. He went to West Point. How did West Point prepare him to be Supreme Allied Commander, you think?

Michelle Paradis: A couple of different ways. You know, Eisenhower went to West Point as his, you know, ironically enough, his way of rebelling against his parents and his ticket out of Abilene. And he gets there, and he’s really quite awkward. You know, he is a country boy, but he has a sense of this is where he wants to be. And this is where he’s, in a sense, always wanted to be since he was a boy. And so ends up doing two things in his career at West Point that end up, I think, shaping him and the sort of the Eisenhower we know forever. One is he has this deep concern about his background. He is not the son of a general. He is not part of the sort of burgeoning American aristocracy that is filling the ranks of his classmates. But that gray uniform they all wear at least covers up how sort of shabby and country his clothes are. But the way he talks, where he’s from, right? No one’s ever heard of Kansas, really. But people have heard of Abilene, that old west sort of history that Abilene carried as being the place where cowboys had shootouts in the town square. Eisenhower fully embraces as part of his personality.

And it’s where he begins to take on the nickname Ike as well, because Ike is this sort of typical name for a cowboy in the dime westerns that you’d get. You know, a cowboy who was out on the land all alone, who was his own man, who was always there to do the right thing, even if he was a little uncultured. And really leans into this identity of being sort of from the cowboy town, even though that is not at all consistent with how he actually grew up, but develops this kind of like cool, right? It’s funny to say Eisenhower was cool, but in West Point, he definitely develops this sense of cool and devil may care, big smile, you know, always ready for a good time that cultivates, I think, a very warm kind of friendship and respect between his classmates who go on to be his contemporaries in the army over the next 30 years. The other thing though, and this is, I think, underappreciated now, just given how different we think about sports, but he also was a star football player in his freshman and sophomore years, and not particularly skilled,

Right? He wasn’t a very, very fast runner, but he was a hardcore player, right? He would just throw himself into the opposing line. And so he was known as a bruiser and started, you know, having a lot of success and gaining quite a reputation for himself as a football player, but then blows out his knee. And at the time in West Point, if you had an injury like that, you could get kicked out, not of West Point, but kicked out of the army. And so Eisenhower is faced, you know, from a young age with the prospect of really not having a military career left just because of his knee injury. But the one thing he does, and the one thing the army sees in him is, you know, once he’s literally back on his feet, he can’t play football anymore, but he can coach it. And he becomes the assistant coach of the football team and demonstrates a kind of genius for the game, a genius for organizing men on the field that just as a practical matter, the army really appreciated back then because people used to play a lot of very competitive football. It was kind of the way softball leagues are maybe today.

But that in turn is what keeps him in the army. The army always wants a good football coach. And he basically spends the first 10 years almost of his career as like a star football coach in the army. But that also gives Eisenhower the first real lessons in leadership. And those lessons in leadership of leading a football team, coaching a football team end up, I think, shaping his understanding of what it means to lead in battle, to lead an army in ways that far surpass anything he actually learns in the classroom, either at West Point or the Command and General Staff School or anywhere else. It’s really at West Point and that opportunity to be a football coach that he learns to really be a leader.

Brett McKay: In this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know. But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct. And this section about his role as army football coach and as a player for the team, you talk about this guy, Ernest Graves. He was an army football coach and he wrote this book, Ernest Graves wrote this book about coaching offensive and defensive alignment. And mixed in with it were these sort of just insights about leadership. And after I read about that in your book, I was like, I have to go buy this book. I’m gonna go find this Ernest Graves book. And I read it in just like one setting. It was really easy to read. But you’re right, there’s these leadership lessons that I think Eisenhower probably picked up from Graves on how to lead not only a football team, but an army, a military unit. Yeah, absolutely. And I’ll flash forward to, I think, one of the most, spoiler alert, but one of the most climactic moments in the D-Day story, and certainly in my telling of it, is when Eisenhower ultimately has to make the call based on some very unclear weather predictions about whether to launch this invasion. And launching this invasion is either going to be the grand success that it became, or it’s going to be a complete and utter disaster. There is literally a hurricane outside the doors as he’s making this decision. And when he finally does, the thing he says is, okay, let’s go. And that’s his famous sort of send-off speech for the D-Day invasion. And that exact quote is something Ernest Graves used to say and used to tell coaches to say right before the men were to go out onto the field. He’s like, well, okay, when it’s time to go, the coach needs to take control of the situation and say something like, okay, let’s go. And again, whether or not that was sort of in the back of Eisenhower’s head, whether or not it was just a coincidence, we’ll never really know.

But yeah, that sense of, okay, it’s my job to lead this team. And the way to do it is the same way you would lead a football team, I think is totally correct.

Brett McKay: So he graduates West Point in 1915. World War I is happening, but he doesn’t get sent off there. Instead, he gets kind of sent off to different training positions, and then he becomes sort of this staff officer. Not really on the battlegrounds. How did those staff positions prepare him for D-Day, you think?

Michelle Paradis: I think they prepared him uniquely well. And it gets to something I was saying a few minutes ago, is that one of Eisenhower’s, I think, most important leadership lessons is the importance of followership. And it’s the importance, particularly when you’re young, particularly when you’re coming up, to understand that your job is not to be the smartest person in the room. Your job is to figure out who the smartest person in the room is and make yourself as useful as possible to them. Because in doing that, not only are you going to be much more effective than kind of butting heads with the person who actually knows what they’re doing with your own ill-conceived ideas, but you’re going to learn a lot. If you keep a genuinely open mind and pay attention to what that person is doing and how they’re making decisions, you’re going to learn a ton from them that you can then use as you rise up the ranks. And so for Eisenhower, one of the ways I even thought about telling his story is by telling it through his mentors. And I could rattle them

Off, but the big ones certainly are people like Joe Howe, who was that newspaper publisher, Fox Connor, who he spends a long and very formative period with in Panama. But then people like General Moseley, who is probably one of the more suspect figures in history, but who has a big influence on Eisenhower. Same thing with General MacArthur, and then obviously General Marshall, and then I would even say Roosevelt and Churchill. As Eisenhower rises up the ranks, there’s always someone who’s the smartest person in the room, and he gets that. But he makes himself as useful as possible to fulfilling their vision. And in the course of doing that, learns their skills, learns how they either command an army, how they manage a team, or how they develop and use political power in ways to get things actually done, the way Roosevelt and Churchill did. And so it’s by having the humility, really, to be that staff officer, to be the one who helps the leader execute their plans, that Eisenhower really does grow into an incredibly formidable political figure in his own right.

Brett McKay: One thing I’ve taken away from Eisenhower’s experience as a staff officer is, yeah, that humility, and then also patience with your career. I know Eisenhower lamented when World War I was over. He’s like, is it? My military career is over. It’s not going anywhere. I’ve gone as far as I can go, and I missed it. I missed my chance. And he didn’t know he was about to embark on the biggest part of his military career. And it would happen in his 50s.

So I mean, I think that’s a great lesson there for a young guy, or even if you’re a guy in your 30s or your 40s, you think, man, I missed the boat. This is as good as it’s going to get. Maybe not. You could have a whole big, giant book of life ahead of you, like Eisenhower had, after his staff positions.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s definitely an encouraging story to anyone who’s still not yet in their mid-50s to see that Eisenhower starts World War II as a colonel, and within a matter of three years, he’s a five-star general. And again, one of the preeminent figures of the 20th century, too. And yeah, it wasn’t just after World War I. There are a lot of false dusts in Eisenhower’s career where he thinks he’s just finished. It’s all over. I’ve wasted my best years. This is the end. And each time, he’s proven wrong because there’s a new and often greater challenge just waiting just a little bit further down the line that he ends up having to take on.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned one of Eisenhower’s mentors during this staff officer period of his career was Fox Connor. This was when he was in Panama. This is one of my favorite sections of the book because you explore the education that Connor gave Eisenhower. This is where really Eisenhower got his education. He didn’t get it at West Point. It was when he was in Panama with this Fox Connor guy. So what did that tutelage look like under Connor? What did he tell Eisenhower? What did he assign Eisenhower to read? Tell us about it because I think it’s really interesting.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah. Fox Connor, he’s the son of a Confederate wounded veteran, has an army career, a quite distinguished army career in its own right. He’s probably the principal military planner of the American Expeditionary Force in World War I, where he comes to know George Patton, George Marshall. Fox Connor has a pretty amazing repertoire of connections that obviously matter a lot in Eisenhower’s life too. And Eisenhower gets stationed with him in Fort Gaillard, Panama, and this is a backwater in a backwater. I got to be honest with you. And one of the things that I never was able to fully pin down is why Fox Connor got marooned to command this podunk post in the middle of nowhere. It’s not obvious. But one of the things that is suggested though is that Fox Connor was not an easy person to get along with at all.

He had a Mississippian sort of rigidity to his personality. He was extremely serious. He inspired very little loyalty, let alone affection in subordinates who saw him as extremely high-handed and brusque. And Eisenhower, frankly, is no different, I think, when he arrives in Panama. Fox Connor basically makes him every day write out these very complicated orders of the day. What is everyone to do for today and how are they to do it? And there’s no point in this exercise, right? The army’s job in Camp Gaillard is basically to make sure the camp doesn’t fall into the Panama Canal. And that’s it. There’s nothing going on there.

He was first in his class, and it’s from then on that Eisenhower’s career just takes off.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for your words from our sponsors. And now back to the show. You mentioned that one of the books Conor gave him was The Philosophy of Nietzsche, and you talk about the book. That book actually had a big impact, a lasting impact on Eisenhower. How did Nietzschean philosophy influence

Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower, you think? Oh, that was a real surprise to me, right? Almost the last person you think about when you’re thinking about Eisenhower is Friedrich Nietzsche. But sure enough, I was able to, again, one of the real difficult things as a research matter, but one of the most satisfying in trying to understand Eisenhower was just figuring out what books he read and then reading them. So what’s in his head and where can you see these ideas pop up later, if at all? And when I read the copy of Nietzsche that Fox Connor had, almost right away, I’m looking at almost verbatim things Eisenhower says later. And there are a couple of things that are going on in Nietzsche, or at least the Friedrich Nietzsche that Eisenhower reads, that are incredibly formative to Eisenhower. One is what we probably would just call basic stoicism. Going back to at least Marcus Aurelius, this idea of manhood being about seeing the world as it is in an unsentimental way and knowing that the truth is always going to matter much more than any ideology or idea or wish for how the world could be.

And that anytime you find yourself, as he often did and would, complaining about, oh, things aren’t turning out the way I hoped, knowing that, shut up, your feelings don’t matter. What matters is what is. And as soon as you can reconcile yourself to that, the better. And so that’s a big part of Eisenhower’s own philosophy, just being very objective and really quite hostile to ideology, which I think is one of Eisenhower’s most important and laudable traits, whether or not it’s Nazi fascism or communism or any of the other sort of, how would you sort of say it, sort of ideologies or theories of the day. Like he’s always worried and always thinking fundamentally about brass tacks. Okay, how does this really matter? What’s really going on? What’s really motivating people? Another big thing in Nietzsche that Eisenhower like fully embraces is the virtue of toughness and the manly virtues, so to speak, the willingness to fight for something bigger than yourself as a virtue in and of itself. And then the third thing I think that Eisenhower draws directly out of Nietzsche, actually quotes it several times without attributing it, but it’s right out of Nietzsche, is this idea that human beings all have a fundamental desire to be free.

And that when you motivate that, when you can appeal to that individual desire to be free, people are willing to do anything, to fight and to die for their own freedom. And indeed, one of the biggest quotes he often repeats that again is verbatim out of Nietzsche, is the idea that there is nothing more powerful than a motivated democracy. That democracy fundamentally is all about allowing free people to be free. And if you can harness that energy, that drive towards something greater than themselves, that individual desire to be free, to make their own choices, to pursue their own happiness, that you harness the most powerful force that human beings can muster.

Brett McKay: So Eisenhower graduates from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College. He’s still confined to sort of administrative positions. He’s the aide to General Douglas MacArthur. He serves as the chief of staff of the 3rd Infantry Division. He holds various staff positions in Washington, D.C. He’s a colonel when World War II starts. He’s never led a battle. He doesn’t have that big personality like a MacArthur or Patton, but he still gets the job of Supreme Allied Commander in Europe over George Marshall, who is also in the running. And there’s a whole interesting story there. But from the time he takes that command, he’s got less than six months to plan Operation Overlord, D-Day. What kind of physical and emotional toll did the pressure in planning that invasion take on Eisenhower?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, it’s an incredibly compressed time frame. The day by day is just stunning. And yeah, it has a huge toll. It has to. Eisenhower is basically sick the entire time, to varying degrees of severity. His cold basically comes and goes. He smokes like a chimney. He’s up to three packs a day by the time the D-Day invasion launches. I did the math on that. That’s about 11 to 12 hours of smoking per day. He begins to drink too much. He sleeps like three to four hours a day. And he really does bear the weight of it internally in ways that you, you know, it’s almost difficult to imagine anyone else being able to endure. You know, he’s lonely. He misses his family. He misses his son. There’s a moment when he, which I recount in the book, which is so poignant, when he’s asked to essentially give the commencement address at Britain’s equivalent of West Point and, you know, gives this very solemn speech about how the weight of the world is on these young men who are going to be literally his subordinates in a matter of weeks. And he writes this letter home that’s so meditative. It’s quite dark, where he says, you know, I just don’t understand this human need to destroy and how so many lives are put to waste and how we haven’t learned as a species to do better, to be kinder to each other.

And I think the poignancy of that moment came not just in the fact that he’s looking at these young men who he is confident he is sending to their deaths at some point or very well could, but they’re his son’s age. His son John is actually graduating from West Point, ironically enough, on June 6th, 1944. And, you know, as he’s bestowing awards and shaking their hands, like they look and act and are exactly like his own son. And that has to occur to him in terms of just like what is really putting what at risk? What are the costs? What are the dangers that these young men who are going to be crossing that beach, what are they confronting and why are they doing it? And he’s the one there sending them off, right? It’s his responsibility ultimately. He owns that. And the pressure is insane.

Brett McKay: So besides smoking and drinking a lot, another thing that helped Eisenhower deal with the pressure of the battlefront was spending time with what he called his official family. And this was like his tight inner circle of individuals he was close to. It included Case Summersby, his driver. There was his personal naval aide, Harry Butcher, his secretary, Mattie Panette. What role did Eisenhower’s official family play in kind of boosting up his morale during this period?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, yeah, I don’t want to overstate. He’s not a drunk, to be clear. You know, he basically spends, no, but he spends his nights. Eisenhower’s very disciplined about organizing his time. It’s actually one of the more interesting and I think prescient leadership traits that he has is that he knows that a big part of his job is just making so many decisions day after day, high consequence, low consequence, just one after the other. And to do that effectively, to make the best decision he can, regardless of how it turns out, he has to keep himself healthy, both physically and mentally, as much as he possibly can. And so he’s very disciplined ultimately about budgeting out his time, right? This is an era before smartphones. And so when he goes home basically to the official family, he basically is disciplined from about 7 or 8 o’clock at night when he can about turning off the office and playing bridge and watching movies together and chatting and reciting poetry. It’s a really, I think, important opportunity he has to just be as human as possible under the circumstances. And this official family is both his literal

Aides, right? There are secretaries and drivers and things like that. But I think they’re just also the people that he can relax with. These are the people who are not gunning for him. They’re not trying to get anything from him. They’re not trying to use or manipulate him for their own ends. These are just the people he can trust day in and day out. And he knows he needs that retreat and he needs to take advantage of that retreat and not just constantly be working because otherwise he’ll collapse, he’ll burn out, and he won’t be able to make the hard decisions that he

Brett McKay: Has to make. I think it’s a great lesson for even if you’re not the Supreme Allied Commander, take your rest time seriously and make time for it. If Eisenhower could have done it during Overlord, you can do it when you’ve got your 9-5 job. Like, you’re okay.

Michelle Paradis: That’s right. Turn your phone off. Hang out with your kids. Have a meal without looking at your

Brett McKay: Phone. So you mentioned there’s a lot of internal struggles that Eisenhower had. He knew the impact his decisions were going to have. He was going to send lots of young men to their death. I mean, how did he do that and think about the human consequences while not letting it paralyze him? Because I think that’d be really hard. I mean, if I were in that position, I would think, oh my gosh, I can’t even make a decision. I would just freeze. What do you think Eisenhower did to overcome that while maintaining his humanity at the same time?

Michelle Paradis: I think actually the key thing was that he maintained his humanity. You know, we talked a bit about Nietzsche and this is sort of a Nietzschean idea or a stoic idea at least, but I think it also comes right out of Nietzsche, is that he never looked away from the consequences of his own decisions. Like he fully embraced them only as a corrective to make sure he was making the right decision. And being able to hold those things in his head at the same time I think was a key part, certainly of his ability to lead in crisis and some of the hard decisions he made. I’ll give you just one example of it that almost brings me to tears every time I think about it, is the night before D-Day launches, he goes around and sees off the 101st Airborne. And there’s probably the most famous picture of Eisenhower addressing these young men who were all painted up and getting ready to jump out of these planes over France. And he had been given an estimate just before that about half of these guys are gonna be lost. Half! And he’s sending thousands of these young men across the English Channel.

So he goes and he goes to see them off and there’s no fanfare, right? This is not a review. He literally just has Kay drive up as quietly as possible, gets out and just starts mingling between them and shaking their hands and talking to them. And again, there’s this very famous photograph where his hand is forward and he looks like he’s very sternly telling them some sort of great rallying cry to get them over the beaches. And with a little bit of tracking down, Ribna find the actual story behind that photo. And the guy he’s talking to, he’s talking to him about fishing because he would just go up to these guys and be like, what do you like to do? Where are you from? What was your job? What’s your hobbies? Anyone from Kansas? And this guy said he likes fishing. And Eisenhower is an adamant fisher himself, and a fly fisherman on top of that. And he’s like, so when you throw a rod, this is how I throw it. And he’s demonstrating the throwing of his rod, and the photographer just sort of happened to catch the moment in this way that has this very sort of commanding overtone to it.

But what’s really going on there is he’s just treating that young man like a human being, like his son, like himself. And when he goes around and meets these young men and shakes their hands, he forces himself to look each one of them in the eye when he does it. And think about that. Each hand he shakes, he knows that basically every other one is going to die, right? Every other one is some kid who is either his son’s age or younger, who’s just not going to go home again, who’s not going to see his own father again. And Eisenhower made himself do that, not only, I think, to be there for them and to let them know that he saw them and saw them not as soldiers to be sent across the border, but as young men who he cared about, who had their own lives and dreams and interests, but to remind himself of that too. And when he finishes, he just collapses into the back of his car and just said, well, no one can stop it now. And that’s how he ends June 5th, 1944. But I also think that’s how he does it, because he doesn’t numb himself to the costs of what he’s doing.

He understands it, he internalizes it, and owns it. And so that when he has a hard decision to make, such as sending them over there, knowing how many of them are unlikely to ever come home again, he’s able to do it because he’s weighed the costs, the benefits in a real way that he owns. It’s as much about responsibility and owning responsibility as it is just making the best decision you can.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I mean, the idea of owning responsibility. Eisenhower famously wrote two memos before D-Day happened, and one of them was, if it was a failure, it’s like, if this mission failed, I take full responsibility for it. But he didn’t have to publish that one, but he kept letting me know that. Yeah, the guy took responsibility. So okay, this is June 5th, he sent off the men personally. How did he spend the night before the invasion in the morning? What was he doing?

Michelle Paradis: Smoking. He basically, he stayed up the entire night, best as we could tell, smoking and reading Westerns. He was an adamant Western reader. He had his guilty pleasures, as we all do, and he was very emphatic that he got to enjoy them. And so really from about two in the morning when he gets back to base camp to about 7, 730, when he finally sort of gets up and meets the day, he’s just sitting on his bed, laying in bed, reading Westerns and smoking cigarettes and just waiting for the news to come in. Yeah,

Brett McKay: You talk about the Western you read about. Black John is the name of the story.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. Eisenhower really liked good shoot-em-up Westerns. Those were his favorite. Tsar of Half a Day Creek is not one of those. It has like a sort of more humorous vein to it, and there’s not a lot of shooting. But it really was apt. It really kind of met the moment very well because it’s all about this guy, the Tsar of Half a Day Creek. His name is Black John Smith, who is the kind of the doer in the small camping town in Alaska, or in Yukon country I think it is actually, where he’s always up to something, but he’s keeping everyone just everything in line. Everyone kind of thinks he’s this old hillbilly, but he actually is the guy who’s always got the plan and is one step ahead. So it was a very apt book for Eisenhower to be reading on

Brett McKay: D-Day. Another lesson there from Eisenhower, don’t feel bad about just indulging in a guilty pleasure when you’re going through a stressful period. He read Westerns. It’s okay if you want to, I don’t know, watch a crappy movie on Netflix. That’s okay, as long as it kind of just takes the edge off. That’s fine.

Michelle Paradis: No, that’s entirely true because one of the things that I found super interesting about Eisenhower, which you don’t see on the surface at all, but is very true, is that he thought a lot about how he thought. And he understood that if he was tired, if he was exhausted, if he was overwhelmed, that he was going to make bad decisions. And bad decisions didn’t mean that those decisions would not turn out the right way. He understood that there was always risk, just like any poker player would. But he wanted to make sure he was always making the best decision available to him based on the information available to him. And so doing things like making time for guilty pleasures, making time for friends, not beating up on yourself too much about your own vices. Everyone’s telling him he’s got to stop smoking, otherwise his cold will never get better. And he’s like, yeah, yeah, I get it. But he understands that he only had so much energy, only so much sort of self-discipline and focus that he can direct. And so prioritizing what you’re paying attention to, what you’re really investing your emotional and mental energy in, is honestly just as important as any one decision you

Make because your ability to make those decisions is going to be entirely contingent on how focused you are, how clear-minded you are, and your ability to just take everything in and decide. And so, yeah, just giving yourself your guilty pleasures and focusing on the things that matter and figuring out what matters is just as important as any one thing that you do.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that idea that Eisenhower thought about his thinking and he was kind of this master self-psychologist. Another thing that I remember reading about him that he did, he had an anger drawer. So Eisenhower, he had a temper, and he struggled with it his entire life. But he had this tactic whenever someone would piss him off and he wanted just to light him up. What he did instead is he wrote this letter out, exactly what he wanted to say, no filter. And then he just put it in his drawer. It cooled off and he’s like, okay, I got it out of my system. Now I can approach this with the cool head.

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, no, as you say, he was his own psychologist because there was no one else around he could trust for that role, really, other than maybe Kay Somersby or Harry Butcher. And yeah, so he would do those sorts of things. Or if he just was like feeling overwhelmed, just same thing. He was feeling overwhelmed and he was like, if he was having trouble focusing on any one thing, he would sit down and literally just write himself a memo of all the things he had to think about one after the other and putting down a couple of thoughts about each one just to, again, put it out on the page, get it out of his body and into something tangible so that he could focus on it more clearly. He’s just full of all of these very specific habits and techniques for making him a much better thinker and leader than he otherwise would have been.

Brett McKay: So something that Eisenhower is known for is his political ability. He was able to manage these big egos, Montgomery, Padden, Marshall, Churchill, DeGaulle. Did it deftly. I don’t think any other person could have done that. But the other thing that impressed me about Eisenhower was his grasp of public relations. He knew how to manage the media.

How would you describe his approach? I think this is underappreciated about

Michelle Paradis: Eisenhower. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent. I agree. I think it’s totally underappreciated. He got in a very sophisticated way that media had changed a lot and had changed politics a lot by the 1940s. And he understood that there were really two things that he needed to do to be an effective manager of his public persona, which in turn would give him a much freer hand in dealing with difficult political issues. And one was, you’ve got to be friends with the press. And he made sure that when he was playing bridge and smoking and drinking, that reporters were always with him just to kind of hang out, with a few exceptions, as guys. And having that kind of intimate friendship-level relationship with reporters enabled him to know what was going on, what they were going to print and publish before they did, and also gave him opportunities to, in what we would now call, shape the narrative before things hit the press. And that helped him on several occasions, not the least being with people like George Patton. But the other thing, though, and this was so – I mean, it’s part of who he is, but it’s so prescient that it demands to be remarked upon, is he also understood that as the media was becoming more intimate and celebrity-driven, where you had these personalities who were not just on the radio or in newspapers, but actually on film and could be seen, that there was a huge value in being seen as ordinary.

And I’m not saying he put that on. This is, in a way, who he is. These are his Kansas instincts coming out. But he leaned really hard into it in a way that was certainly designed to conceal the sophistication of his own thinking in most situations, where he understood that being kind of folksy and having this, like, oh, I just like going out fishing, and being very seen as not grasping for power in an environment where most politicians, to include Roosevelt, and Roosevelt being only sort of a marginal exception to this, were still seen as these very stern, statuesque figures, was its own kind of political power. It’s where we get the idea of I like Ike. The idea that a politician should not be only a leader but likable more or less draws directly from Eisenhower. And I know this, again, almost seems too obvious to say now, but it’s difficult to overstate how revolutionary it was for a general, like a major powerful general, to be known broadly in the public for smiling. A smiling general. There’s almost nothing more incongruous than that if you really think about it. And Eisenhower fully leaned into that and had a kind of folksy celebrity that obviously becomes his trademark.

And I think in the environment that he’s in particularly, with people like de Gaulle, with people like Churchill and Stalin and Roosevelt, is crucial to his ability to wield power because none of them understand that yet. None of them understand the importance of likability in the media as a kind of political power. And so everyone around Eisenhower just underestimates him all of the time as just being sort of like a smiling nice guy because they’re obviously very much still in the Marvel statue mold. And Eisenhower both, I think, understands that and uses that to such great effect that now it’s actually difficult to think about a politician who doesn’t smile all the time, right, where it’s not this sort of like happy, I’m a nice guy, I’m just like you, whether or not it’s George W. Bush on his ranch and Crawford clearing brush, or Donald Trump eating a Taco Bowl, or Barack Obama smiling big and throwing baskets, right? All of our politicians now, we want them to, quote unquote, to be just like us. And Eisenhower kind of sets that mold and sees that that’s where society is going way earlier than anybody else does.

Brett McKay: So after researching and writing about Eisenhower, what’s something that stuck with you the most about his life or his leadership?

Michelle Paradis: I think for me, in addition to giving hope to 40-year-olds everywhere that life is not yet over, I think the most both inspiring and cautionary aspects of Eisenhower’s life to me are that he really did come from nowhere to achieve the absolute greatest heights of political power in the 20th century. He, through a combination of, I think, intelligence, luck, and ruthlessness, pulled himself up to that height to great, I think, benefit to not only the United States but to the world. And so the both encouraging but cautionary things that I always think about when I think of Eisenhower is encouraging is that talent is everywhere. Talent can come from the middle of nowhere, from someone you’d never expect, where it wouldn’t even be recognized by most people until well into their 30s or 40s or even 50s. And the cautionary piece of that that I worry about sometimes is, do we still live in that America, right? Do we still live in a society where talent can rise? Because we have more people than ever. We have more opportunity for more people than ever as well, and fewer barriers based on old lines, whether that’s gender or race. But do we still have a society that allows the very best to rise?

And I don’t know the answer to that. I worry about that sometimes because all the opportunities Eisenhower had have become much more difficult and much stricter and much more tied up in tradition or bureaucracy or sort of other kinds of red tape that I worry we may not be getting the talent that we have at our disposal to have the kind of leaders that we possibly could have.

Brett McKay: Well, Michelle, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Michelle Paradis: Yeah, the book is available anywhere fine books are sold, The Light of Battle. It makes a great gift in time for Father’s Day. I’ll plug that. And yeah, feel free to always reach out. I’m very easy to find. And so if you had any questions or ideas or thoughts about the book, good, bad or ugly, feel free to email me. I try to respond as quickly as I can.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Michelle Paradis, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Michelle Paradis: Thank you. It was a lot of fun.

Brett McKay: My guest today was Michelle Paradis. He’s the author of the book, The Light of Battle. It’s available on Amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is slash supremecommander. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmaleness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And make sure to check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay reminding you to listen to the podcast. Put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about “living your truth” and “being authentic.” These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean.

The concept of identity — how we understand ourselves — has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences.

Today on the show, Carl Trueman unpacks this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian, and the author of The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers — Charles Taylor, Philip Rieff, and Alasdair MacIntyre — who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discuss how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we’ve lost something essential in moving from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud by Philip Rieff
• Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity by Charles Taylor
• After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory by Alasdair MacIntyre 
• The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis
• AoM Podcast #723: Men Without Chests
• AoM Article: 3 Essential Books for Understanding Our Disorienting Modern World
• AoM Article: Why Are Modern Debates on Morality So Shrill?
• Carl’s writing at First Things

Connect With Carl Trueman

• Carl’s faculty page

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. When you scroll through social media feeds today, you’ll find countless posts about living your truth and being authentic. These ideas feel so natural to us now that we rarely stop to ask where they came from or what they really mean. The concept of identity, how we understand ourselves, has undergone a radical transformation over the centuries. What once was defined primarily by external markers like family, profession, and community, has shifted dramatically toward inner feelings, desires, and psychological experiences. Today in the show, Carl Trueman impacts this profound change and how we got to the lens through which we view ourselves today. Carl is a professor, theologian and the author of the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Throughout our conversation, he explores the insights of three key thinkers, Charles Taylor, Philip Brief, and Alasdair MacIntyre, who have mapped the historical and cultural shifts that have transformed our ideas of identity. We discussed how this transformation has reshaped politics, education, and religion, while considering whether we lost something essential and moved you from a shared understanding of human nature to an increasingly individualized conception of self. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at a aom.is/modernself. Alright, Carl Trueman, welcome to the show.

Carl Trueman: It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me on Brett.

Brett McKay: So you wrote a book called The Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self, and you explore how our concept of the self has changed in modernity and how that change has influenced everything from religious life to political life. And you look at three thinkers in particular who have grappled with this change. First one was Charles Taylor. We’ve talked about it on the podcast before with his book, A Secular Age, Philip Rieff, sociologist, we’ll discuss him. And then Alasdair MacIntyre, he’s popped up in our podcast a few times. And what I love about your book is I’ve read these three guys and I’ve always wondered like, why hasn’t anyone written a book where they’ve synthesized these three thinkers? ‘Cause they’re all hitting on the same idea, and they’re trying to figure out like, what does it mean to be a self in the 20th, 21st century? Why does being a person sometimes feel weird, confusing, weightless? And you do that in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. But before we get to these thinkers, we’ll start with basic definition. What do you mean when you talk about the self?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, good question. I think what I’m trying to get at there is, is how we imagine ourselves as sentient individual beings to be in the world in which we find ourselves. What is it that makes us us? So for example, if we would go back to the middle ages and we were to randomly pick on a peasant from my home village in Gloucestershire and say, who are you or what are you, you’re likely to get an answer to the effect of, well, I’m the son of so and so, or I’m the local blacksmith. I live in this particular village or my family are associated with this particular area. You’ll get a definition of yourself in terms of external and pretty unchanging fixed realities. The self today, when you ask somebody who they are today, you’re unlikely to get quite that sort of answer.

You’re probably going to get an answer that touches on things that relate to inner feelings. I’m a spiritual person, for example, or to go down the direction of sexual identity, which I deal with a bit in the book. You might get somebody saying, well, I’m a gay person, or something like that. And the shift there has been towards this inner space, we’re not so much marked. We don’t so much understand ourselves as the product, the givenness of our surroundings as we understand ourselves as a collection of feelings, desires, et cetera, et cetera. So when I use the term self, I’m really trying to get at how do we intuitively think about who we are and what we are relative to the world around us?

Brett McKay: And you talk about in the book Charles Taylor, he discusses that shift from the outer way of defining ourself to the inner, he calls it expressive individualism. Can you flesh that out a little bit more for us?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. The idea of expressive individualism is that what makes me really me will be the set of desires, feelings, et cetera I have inside. And this is where we get the introduction of an interesting term with which we’re all familiar, but which would’ve been meaningless back in the iddyl ages. What makes me authentic is my ability to express outwardly that which I feel I am inwardly. So expressive individualism is this idea that fundamentally I’m an individual. I define myself, I’m defined by my individual desires, passions, feelings. And I find my authenticity, my place in this world by being able to express those outwardly.

Brett McKay: Okay. And we’ll hopefully go back to this idea of authenticity ’cause yeah, it’s something I think we take for granted ’cause you hear it so much these days. But something you do in the book is you do a genealogical exploration of how do we get to this point of expressive individual and where we define ourselves by our inner feelings? And a lot of people might think, well, this is a 20th century, maybe late 19th century phenomenon, but you are, this goes back hundreds of years. I mean, you’d go into detail, but brief thumbnail sketch how do we go from a point where we define ourselves by who our parents are, where we live, maybe our profession, to whatever we feel inside of ourselves?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s difficult to answer in a sort of short way without indulging in a bit of simplification. But I would say on one level the last 400 or 500 years have witnessed, at least in the West, an increasing liquifaction of the world in which we live. What do I mean by that? We’re typically no longer bound to space in the way we once were. We travel a lot more. I live in the United States now. I was born in the United Kingdom. So our ability to define ourselves specifically relative to a particular place is no longer what it was. And that’s a sort of a symbol of the crumbling of these external authorities in general. The givenness of the world has become highly negotiable. The one side of the story is the old traditional markers of identity have become very volatile, very insubstantial.

On the other hand what moves in to replace them is a kind of move inward. You see this philosophically with somebody like Descartes. Descartes is wrestling with a difficult question in the 17th century when everything around seems to be changing, when everything is becoming fluid, what can I be certain of? Is there somewhere? Is there a an archimedean point where I can sort of place myself and stand and work out from that? Because that is the one place that is certain. And he finds the certainty, of course, in his own mind. I think therefore I am and Descartes is, I think, representative of a great shift that’s taking place in the 17th century where that inner space, the one constant we all feel in our lives these days is our self-consciousness. Our psychological lives seem to be the one thing that gives some sort of continuity to our lives, some sort of continuity to our existence. So it’s that crumbling of traditional external authorities combined with a reactive move inwards I think that really sets the stage for the extremes of expressive individualism that we see manifested in the world today.

Brett McKay: And part of that reaction or that turn inward you talk about in the book was Jean Jacques Rousseau in the development of Romanticism. For those who aren’t familiar with the idea of romanticism, what is that?

Carl Trueman: Romanticism is really an artistic cultural movement that flourishes in the late 18th and then on into the first half of the 19th century, associated with poets such as Wordsworth, Shelly, Keats, an artist such as JMW Turner, Casper David Friedrich, music, I think some of the later Beethoven has romantic touches to it, but Choppa would be a romantic composer. When you compare, say the music of a Choppa to the music of a Bark, you don’t have to know anything about music to know that something significant has gone on there. In Bark you have a lot of structure and order. If you move to, I know Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or to Chopin’s Nocturnes that music is not structured and ordered in quite the same way. It’s not chaos, but it’s really pulling on the heartstrings. It’s attempting to cultivate an emotional reaction in a way that Bark is not. And that’s reflective of romanticism as a term to cover a cultural artistic movement that is really wanting to explore, stimulate and shape those inner emotional feelings and responses.

Brett McKay: And then later on the 19th century, you had other philosophical movements that continued this liquification of the self. And you go into detail about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to our changing ideas of the self. And I thought it was interesting ’cause I think a lot of times people in the modern world, they say things, they may say something about what it means to be a self. I’m gonna create, I’m the creator of myself. I’m the artist of my life. And I’m thinking, you don’t realize this, but like that’s Frederick Nietzsche. You don’t know it. So tell us about Frederick Nietzsche and his contribution to this inward turn of the self.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, Nietzsche is a remarkable 19th century philosopher. Has almost no influence in his own lifetime. I think there’s one lecture given on Nietzsche’s philosophy before he collapses in madness in 1889. Nietzsche is the man who caused the bluff on the enlightenment. If we would take Jean Jacques Rousseau as a typical philosopher, think about Rousseau is wanting to explore the inner space. And he wants to ground morality very much in sort of spontaneous sympathetic reactions. Rousseau essentially says, as soon as you’ve got laws, you know something’s gone wrong. If you see an injustice taking place, you should naturally respond to that injustice. There’s a human instinct for justice. Rousseau in other words, he’s rightly pointing to the role I think of feelings in ethical reasoning. If you see somebody being beaten up and you feel nothing emotional, you’re a psychopath.

We understand the need for feelings in our ethical decisions, but Rousseau grounds that really in an understanding of human beings as having a human nature. And what Nietzsche does in the 19th century is he effectively says to enlightenment philosophers like Rousseau and particularly to the thought of somebody like Immanuel Kant, he says, hang on a minute, you guys have marginalized or even dispatched God into the wilderness. So he doesn’t play any positive constructive role in your thinking, but you’ve smuggled something in that plays the role of God. You’ve got rid of God as the sort of the grounds of morality, but you’ve substituted him with human nature. You still think there’s such a thing as human nature. And human nature has an authoritative moral structure to which all human beings are answerable. In other words, to be a human being is to have a moral structure. And Nietzsche says, you can’t do that. If you’ve killed God, if you’ve got rid of God, if you’ve killed God, you’ve really got rid of human nature as well. And that morality has no objective reality. Morality is at best a con trick pulled by the weak to subvert the strength of the strong. And where the features in the sort of the psychological story is, Nietzsche is fascinated by how our psychological response to the world around us shapes our moral thinking. But he’s detaching that from any objective moral structure now.

Brett McKay: And this will have consequences later on. We’ll see that. And Alasdair MacIntyre, we’ll get to him, he grapples with the consequences of Nietzsche’s ideas ’cause they’re significant, even though we might not think about them. You mentioned authenticity in Charles Taylor’s thinking on that. By authenticity you meant that you had to live your life according to whatever you feel on the inside. And that’s kind of a sort of a given. That’s how you wanna live your life today. And if you don’t do that, then you have some sort of false consciousness. At what point does Taylor think authenticity became a moral ideal?

Carl Trueman: I think it’s really in the 18th and early 19th century, the romantics are really the ones who start to articulate this in a powerful way. William Wordsworth writes this poem, it’s not one of his greatest poems, this poem, the Idiot Boy, which is this, a poem about a child. We would say today a child with serious learning difficulties. And he gets heavily criticized for this. Why are you writing a poem that appears to be mocking a child with such difficulties? And he responds in a letter to one of his students and friends, he says, basically, I’m not mocking him. I’m using him as an example. We would now say I’m using the Idiot Boy as an example of somebody with no filters. And what you have when you go to somebody like that, so we would say no filters, an inability to pick up on social cues, et cetera.

What you’ve got there is human nature in a more pristine state. It’s not being corrupted by the conventions of society. With the idiot boy what you see is what you get. And Wordsworth would say, and that takes you to the core of what it means to be a human being that binds us all together. Urbanized society has trained us to behave in different ways. It’s alienated us from that universal humanity. And so with somebody like Wordsworth, that’s where you get the emerging notion of authenticity. This idea that if we can get back beyond social conventions to those untamed, untrammeled truly human feelings inside and live according to them, then that’s what it means to be truly human or that’s what it means to be an authentic human.

Brett McKay: And they believe that if you did that, everything would just be honky dory.

Carl Trueman: That’s the idea. The romantic idea is a sort of a return to a rural idyll, if you like, where you don’t have the kind of petty rivalries, ambitions, nastiness, anonymity that is associated with the city. I grew up in a village, I can guarantee you that the rural Italy is not as idyllic as the Romantics thought it was.

Brett McKay: And Nietzsche called them on their blood and was like, yeah, you think that’s what it’s gonna happen. But actually probably not what’s gonna happen if everyone’s living by their inner desires.

Carl Trueman: Nietzsche has a much darker view of what it means to be human in many ways. The romantics have a very naive view. We could somewhat simplify, we could say, for somebody like Rousseau, bottom line is it’s society that corrupts us. With Nietzsche you know you’ve got the idea that actually what makes us great of the dark and violent desires that we have. Nietzsche is a sort of philosophical precursor of Freud in a lot of ways.

Brett McKay: Okay. So I think what we can talk about here, what we have here is what Charles Taylor sets up for us, is that there’s this shift from a sense of self that is ordered by the outside, by the external, where you live, who your parents are, the church, monarchy, as we progressed through the enlightenment and things like technology allowed you to travel. You’re no longer tied to the family farm. Monarchies started going away. We had revolutions and political life. The church started losing authority on people. You have this shift towards figuring out who you are by your inner feelings and your emotions. And the romantics kind of provided some fodder for that. And then you had philosophers like Nietzsche just adding fuel to the fire. So there’s an inward turn. Another thinker that you talk about that helps us understand this inward turn in our sense of self is a sociologist named Philip Rieff. And he wrote a book called The Triumph of the Therapeutic. This was written back in the 1960s. And in this book, Rieff lays out sort of a thumbnail sketch of the history of humanity and their conception of the self. And he says there’s four ages. What are those four ages of the self?

Carl Trueman: Well, Societies are sort of broadly organizing themselves around kind of four models. Now, it’s say in advance, I think the models are somewhat simplistic in that no age exclusively embodies one of these models. But in any given age I think one of the models is dominant. The first type of man that he thinks of is what he calls political man. And this is where human beings found their fulfillment in their activities, their participation in the public square. So the great example of this might be fourth century BC Athens where being involved in the assembly, that was the apex of what it meant to be a human being, to be informed about public affairs, to go to the assembly, to cast your vote, to make your speech, that kind of thing, the polis, it’s the polis in participating in the polis that makes you truly human. It’s the idea that…

Brett McKay: I was gonna say for the Greeks, if you were not taking part in public life, you’re an idiot. Like you’re a private person, you’re looked down upon, you weren’t even a person basically.

Carl Trueman: No, no. I mean, the Greek, when Aristotle talks about political, man is a political animal. He’s meaning man is a man of the polis. He’s a man of public life. And as you rightly point out the opposite of politicos is idioticos, the private man. So that’s the first arrangement. And Rieff sees over time that being supplanted by what he calls religious man. And religious man is, that’s an age where human beings find their fulfillment by being involved in public religious rituals. We might think of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a great example of the kind of literature that a society where religious man was the ideal. That’s kind of literally, which would be produced in that sort of culture. Where you have the shtick in Canterbury Tales is you have this rag bagg bunch of pilgrims from all levels of society united in going on this pilgrimage to Canterbury to pay homage to at the shrine of St. Thomas Becket. Today, we might think, if you may have Muslim friends, and they go on the Hoge to Mecca at least once in a lifetime, the idea is that their fulfillment is found in going on this pilgrimage, public pilgrimage to a religious or holy shrine.

So religious man is the age where public religious rituals are really the apex of what it means to be human. This is replaced for Rieff what he calls economic man. An economic man is the man who finds his meaning, the purpose of life in his participation in the economic activity of society. So, Charles Dickens’s books are full of economic man. He’s writing about industrial revolution, England. So you have figures like Ebenezer Scrooge or Mr. Grad Grind. These are figures who find their fulfillment being involved in economic activities in society. And Rieff sees all three of these as having something in common.

They may sound very different, but what they have in common is this, it is the role of society in shaping you to be a political, religious or economic man to direct you outwards. So education is about forming you in order to fulfill your political, your religious, or your economic role. Rieff sees the present age, and he’s writing in 1966. This is nearly 60 years ago. It’s one of those books, triumphal Therapeutic, which is more true today than it was when he wrote it. He says that what we have at the end of this is what he call psychological man. And Psychological man is the man whose sense of self, whose sense of fulfillment is entirely wrapped up with kind of psychological feeling of happiness. Is he happy and content with life? And psychological man represents a break with the first three.

And the break is this, that in the first three, the individual was to be directed outwards to fit into society. The therapy, if you like, of education was helping you, forming you to be a member of society. And a psychological manner reverse takes place. Now it becomes increasingly society’s role to accommodate itself to your feelings and to your happiness. So one could draw a contrast in forms of learning. I went to a very traditional boys school in England. Team sports was central to the curriculum. Why? Because education for me as a grammar school boy was about having my individuality crushed and being made into part of the team. That’s not child-centered learning that sort of dominates the airwaves today where the idea is to allow the individual child to flourish. So psychological man, it’s a very, very different culture to the first three.

Brett McKay: And it seems like it’s similar to Taylor’s idea of expressive individualism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s Taylor’s expressive individualism writ large for the whole of society. The romantics are writing, composing, painting away in the late 18th, early 19th century. It takes time for that vision of what it means to be human to permeate the whole of society and indeed to begin to transform the institutions of society.

Brett McKay: We’re gonna take a quick break for you word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. And something Rieff talks about, one of the defining characteristics of psychological man is that they have an analytical attitude. What does he mean by the analytical attitude?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it’s a lit has with a lot of things in Rieff, it’s a bit opaque.

Brett McKay: Yeah. He’s a hard read. He’s a very hard read.

Carl Trueman: And I think actually that’s part of the game. He’s trying to disorient the reader sometimes. But I’ll give you his definition and then I’ll try to sort of unpack it a bit. The definition that he gives in Triumph Of The Therapeutic is the analytic attitude expresses a trained capacity for entertaining tentative opinions about the inner dictates of conscience, reserving the right even to disobey the law insofar as it originates outside the individual in the name of a gospel of a freer impulse. Now, he’s talking there about Freud, and I think what he’s trying to get at is this, that for Freud society makes demands upon us. And it does that, it curbs our inner desires in order to allow us to live together. To put it in its most crude terms for Freud, males want to rape and pillage.

Our sexual desires are very, very powerful. We are savages, but we can’t live together if we’re savages. So there’s a trade off between the desire of the individual and the needs of society for perpetuating society. That creates though, those restrictions that society places upon us create all kinds of dysfunctions and malfunctions. We are never happy. We struggle because we’re not allowed to be who we really are because we need to be civilized. And I think what Rieff is getting at with the analytic attitude is the analytic attitude is really that study, that reflection upon that learning about the inner desires that allows us then to sort of negotiate between those desires and the demands of society. It’s not that we can ever come to a fully adequate compromise between the two, a peace treaty between the two, but the goal of therapy, for example, is to allow you to understand why you feel the way you do, why you struggle the way you do, to come to terms with the way you are. Key, I think to the analytic attitude is there is no objective moral order there, there is no divinely sanctioned moral order.

There are really just social conventions. They have a pragmatic usefulness, but they’re ultimately, you’re not grounded in anything beyond themselves. So the real thing you’re wrestling with are your inner desires. Those are the things you’ve gotta analyze in order to try to engage in in the kind of therapy that Freud is proposing.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that’s the big idea from Freud. Like Freud was trying to figure out, he’s there at the late 19th century, early 20th century. This is after Nietzsche, you had Darwin’s theory of evolution. So basically yeah, Freud was like, yeah, God’s dead. There’s no objective moral order, so what do we do? And his conclusion was, well, the best we can do is just you lay on a couch and you talk to a shrink to sort out your inner emotions. That’s about as good as you can do.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. It’s a sort of, it’s a therapy, to use Rieff’s term. It’s therapy. It’s helping you to come to terms with reality and learning where the limits are and learning where you can perhaps break those limits at points. So yeah, it’s a negotiating strategy.

Brett McKay: And one thing too, Rieff talks about, even though Freud’s ideas have been discredited in the 20th and 21st century, like we’re still living under Freud’s shadow. We all are psychological men. I mean, I’m sure all of us have picked up a book on cognitive behavioral therapy or how to manage my anger. And it’s never like, well, don’t be angry because God said not to be angry. It’s like, well, if I wanna have a good flourishing life, I need to just get a hold of my anger. And so, yeah, Rieff says what ends up happening is what the analytical attitude can do is we end up instrumentalizing things that were once ideals like love, faith, hope, courage, et cetera.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. I mean, it’s very much the case. I think there’s a sense in which a traditional religious man was born to be saved. Therapeutic man, psychological man is born to be soothed, if you like. And when you think of love, classical understandings of love, love has profound sacrificial connotations to it. To love somebody is not to engage in a relationship with them that just makes me feel good. To love somebody traditionally will involve at times a deep sacrifice of the self. As a pastor at times I’ve married numerous young couples, and I always make the point in the wedding homily that it’s easy to love your wife on the wedding day. She’s beautiful, the sexual desire is bubbling away, you love each other’s company, you’re embarking on this lifelong adventure together.

But what about when one of you has dementia and the other one is getting nothing from that person, but is having to help them even with their most basic bodily needs? And I raised the question, where is love most dramatically demonstrated? Is it on the wedding day or is it when one of the partners can no longer provide happiness for the other, can no longer be an instrument? And I think that gets to the notion of the instrumentalizing of love and think about our divorce laws now. No-fault divorce has a very instrumentalized view of love and loved ones in it. Hey, if my wife is no longer meeting my needs to feel happy, well, the contract no longer applies. I can just dissolve the contract and take my love to another. So, yeah. But you see that, the therapeutic ideal of love transforms the notion of love. And I would say a very impoverishing way.

Brett McKay: So again, Philip reached describing inner turn towards defining ourself. It’s all about just what makes me happy, what soothes me. And I think what I love about the book, the Triumph of the Therapeutic, and I encourage people to read it, even though it is opaque hard to get through, it really does capture, it helps you understand like this rise of wellness culture in the West of everyone that’s worried about their mental health, even if they don’t have like a severe mental illness. But like, everyone’s just concerned about, okay, my anxiety, or I’m feeling nervous, or I don’t have full-blown depression but I’m feeling kind of sad. What can I do to not do that? Like Philip Rieff describes, well, here’s why you have that idea.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. Because I would say anxiety, not feeling happy all the time, these are not unnatural things. We can’t be happy all the time. There is a level of discomfort that comes with life when you are engaged in relationship with other people. To have children is to make yourself vulnerable to distress, frustration at times. It is part of the human condition that we experience frustration, depression, et cetera, et cetera. These are not necessarily the signs of neuroses or illnesses or abnormality. They’re part of being a human being, rubbing shoulders into connecting with other human beings.

Brett McKay: One argument that Rieff makes in the triumphant therapeutic is that the psychological man has taken over Western society so much, or western culture, that you even see the therapeutic ideal in things you think it wouldn’t be aligned with like religious life. Did you see that when you were a pastor? Did you see the therapeutic or the psychological man creep into religious life?

Carl Trueman: Well, certainly. I mean, in most extreme form, when you think about, who is the most successful pastor in the United States? It’s Joel Osteen down in Houston. I think he has 80,000 in his congregation. Think of the books that Joel Osteen writes, Your Best Life Now, every day of Friday, it’s always confused me that one ’cause I tend to think Saturday’s the best day of the week. But every day of Friday. You think about, why is he the most successful pastor? Because he uses the Christian religious idiom precisely to soothe the therapeutic needs of society but even in more Orthodox Christian circles. Think about how a lot of people choose their church. If you’re Catholic listeners, it doesn’t apply to them. But if you’re a Protestant, a lot of people choose their church on the basis of, does the music make me feel good? Does the pastor sermon scratch where I feel I’m itching? Think of how people think about worship. Is worship as it traditionally was a matter of, sort of liturgical forms that form you by sort of squeezing you into their mold or is it a way of expressing yourself before the Lord? So there are all kinds of ways in which that reverse in the culture that the rise of the therapeutic represents have grabbed hold of tradition, even traditional religious ideas and institutions and flipped them, turned them 180 degrees.

Brett McKay: What are your thoughts Re? Is there a place for the therapeutic and religious life, or are you kinda like, ah, just get it all out of there?

Carl Trueman: Oh, absolutely. I think one can be very cynical about expressive individualism, but one of the things that, I didn’t do this in the book. I didn’t have space, but I wouldn’t wanna say there are certain things that the psychological turn has made us more aware of and has made us more sensitive to. Having said, feeling miserable in life is not necessarily an illness. Sometimes it can be. I think we are more aware now of mental illness than we were before. We are more aware of the importance of that inner life. It’s not the psychological struggles aren’t important. They are. And I think, look back to my education that I mentioned. I’m not sure that having my individuality crushed to be part of the team. It was necessarily the best model of education. It’s very different one to the one that applies today. And I would say there are dimensions of child-centered learning, for example, that are an improvement on the model that I experienced. So yeah, the rise of the therapeutic, it’s not an entirely bad thing. I think it has brought to light and has shone a light upon certain things that have improved, for example, the healthcare that we can get.

Brett McKay: You didn’t talk about this guy in your book, the Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, but I’d love to get your thoughts on him, Jung. ‘Cause Rieff talks about Jung a lot in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic. And I’d love to get your thoughts on this because you see him more and more in the popular discourse, I think, thanks to Jordan Peterson who’s talking about archetypes all the time. And you even see religious leaders talking about Jung and archetypes. One thing that Rieff argues is that Yung tried to take the analytical attitude of Freud where all you do is you just try to figure out what’s going on yourself. And he turned it into almost like a quasi-religious therapy. What’s your take on Yung?

Carl Trueman: Yeah, it seems to me that in some ways he’s a kind of psychoanalytical Rousseau or romantic. I don’t want to make a naive historical connection there, but it seems to me from what I’ve read of Jung, that he’s wanting to harp back to some sort of transcendent universal human nature, some sort of structure that binds us all together. I think Rieff in the Triumph Of The Therapeutic, he refers to Jung as having a sort of a weak God. And there’s that sort of return to something, some level of objectivity that allows you a sort of a framework for understanding these inner desires. And bringing up Jordan Peterson in that context, it resonates with that it seems to me, because Peterson, on the one hand seems to want to ground human nature in something. He wants to be able to talk in universal terms about what is good for human beings.

But I’ve never heard him make that final leap to full-blown theistic commitment. So he has interesting things to say about the Bible, but he always seems to be somewhat equivocal to me on whether the Bible is actually true in the way that Orthodox Christianity would consider it to be true. So from what I know about Jung, and I’ve not read very much of him, it seems that Jung represents a return to wanting to have his cake and eat it. And I think Rieff makes some comment somewhere that it’s almost preferable to have Freud’s non-existent, but powerful God than to have Jung’s existent but very weak God. And there’s a sense in which I would look at somebody like Jordan Peterson and say, I’d almost rather be dealing with Nietzsche than somebody who wants to have his cake and eat it.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So I’ve read a lot of Jung, and we’ve had guests on the podcast who are big in the Jung and talk about archetypes. And I’ve read all the, especially since I’m in like in the manosphere, there’s a lot of mytho poletic stuff where people go to Jung and talk about the king archetype and the warrior. And I read these books and like I always think they’re interesting, but it’s like, what much to do with this? ‘Cause they tell you like, well, you need to harness the king architect. I’m like, what does that mean? And they tell you just, well, you gotta think about Pharaohs and you’ll somehow become, like you’ll harness it. I’m like, I don’t know. And to me it just makes more sense. Okay. I’d rather just like, okay, what’s the specific deity that I need to organize my life around instead of this sort of this vague, weird general archetype?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And I think that sort of thinking is very vulnerable to the sort of critical theoretical question which Nietzsche would raise as well, of, are you not simply trying to grant your own personal preferences a sort of transcendent authority here, your own version of masculinity or whatever it is, you’re sort of trying to find some way of claiming that it has a transcendent truth beyond that which is typically justifiable. It’s interesting you raise it in the manosphere that, it’s fascinating to me that this is the manosphere, because it’s precisely in the manosphere that I think we are seeing people trying to baptize with transcendent objectivity some things that are really socially constructed.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I mean, I think Jung is interesting, but I’m not sure if it’s actually useful in organizing your life just based on my experience. We talked about Taylor, we talked about Rieff, they’ve all described this inward turn, we shape our sense of self by what’s inside of ourself. And it’s no longer external things that it’s helping us define ourself. And this brings us to Alasdair MacIntyre. What does Alasdair MacIntyre say are the consequences of this inward turn to defining ourself?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, for McIntyre in his book After Virtues where he sort of lays this out, the results are really pretty bleak at a social level in that when you enter this realm of we might say radical subjectivity, you end up losing he would say the great narratives or the great stories that bind cultures together. And so you end up really unable to engage in significant moral discussion or ethical discussion about things. One could take an example, when you lose a common understanding of what it means to be a human being, it becomes impossible to discuss and adjudicate debates about abortion, for example. Is the baby in the womb a baby in the womb, or just part of the woman’s body? Behind your convictions on those things like two entirely incommensurable stories about what it means to be a human being. And it’s virtually impossible to get the proponents of each view to sit down and come to any kind of common understanding relative to the other group. So for McIntyre, society’s ability to have important discussions starts to break down. And that has all kinds of political and social consequences.

Brett McKay: He says that since there’s no longer a common moral language, common objective, moral background, where we’re having these debates, what we had to resort to, he calls emotivism.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, yeah. And essentially that is that, your moral views are basically expressions of your own emotional preferences dressed up in the language of moral objectivity. So, debates become, you think you’re talking about principles, but you’re actually talking about one emotional preference versus another.

Brett McKay: And I think what McIntyre’s idea of emotivism can help explain is why political debates, particularly today, just feel shrill and they’d never go anywhere. ‘Cause we’re just yelling past each other, basically.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And it also explains why so many of the important questions in our culture now get to go by default to the courts, because in the courts you can have a straightforward legal fight. You don’t have to persuade the populist to vote for you in some way. And so a lot of attention in the last few decades, particularly in the United States, has been focused on Supreme Court decisions. The big questions about what it means to be a human being are being decided judicially rather than on the debating floor of the Senate.

Brett McKay: What did MacIntyre think was the solution to this? Did he think there was a solution?

Carl Trueman: Building strong communities, it really points, I think, in a local direction. And in a sense, Rod Dreher as Benedicts option, I think he published the book within 2015, 2016. Rieff’s on McIntyre to a certain extent that ultimately to have a coherent narrative, you’re gonna have to return to a kind of local level.

Brett McKay: Yeah. I think at the end of the book, McIntyre says it’s Nietzsche or Aristotle. That’s her choice.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Philosophically. And I think there’s a lot to be said for that. I would say, Nietzsche or Orthodox Christianity. But yeah.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So it’s hard. And going back to local, that’s gonna be hard. And I think even McIntyre says he’s not very optimistic about reviving maybe local communities, because I think he argued that people today they’ve forgotten like even how to do that. And so it’s gonna be hard, maybe even impossible.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that was 45 years ago before a lot of our interaction became technologically mediated in the way it is today. I mean, you and I, we’re not sitting in the same room. I’m not even seeing your face. We’re just talking through a computer. So much of our social life now is detached from any kind of notion of real physical, geographical place where you could actually build a local community.

Brett McKay: And I think the conversation so far, what we’ve hopefully painted for our audience is that okay, reason why things can feel confusing, why you just feel weightless or just discombobulated is your sense of self it’s, we no longer have that external order to base our lives around. So we’re all kind of winging it in a way. And that’s why you have existential crises ’cause you don’t really know what you’re supposed to do. And then, because we’re deciding how we look at our life, or what a good life looks like based on our own inner life, well, that causes all this debate that’s intractable and goes nowhere because we all have different subjective ideas of what is the good life.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, very much so. And I think we should not discount the importance of the loss of bodily presence in this. I mean, when you think about rising levels of anxiety among young people, I think some of that’s connected to the disembodied nature of social media. When I was growing up I had a group of friends, they were real presences in my life. Falling out was costly. I never reduced them merely to the beliefs or viewpoints they happened to express. There was real rich, strong interaction because we were actually real presences in each other’s lives. Social media insults are cheap, falling out is cheap. The tendency to reduce the people with whom we’re engaging simply to the views they express is very strong. And I think that makes us all feel less secure about who we are than would’ve been the case 30, 40 years ago. So there’s a strong, it’s not just philosophical stuff that’s going on there’s also technological stuff that is reinforcing and exacerbating this modern sense of the self.

Brett McKay: Yeah. When you’re online, you’re a psychological man.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Yeah. You are disembodied.

Brett McKay: Yeah. As I was reading your section about Taylor Rieff and McIntyre, I couldn’t help but think about CS Lewis’s book, The Abolition of Man. What insights do you think Lewis can add to the frameworks we’ve been discussing today?

Carl Trueman: Yeah. Well, I think in some ways Lewis could be seen, he sort of anticipates the emotivism idea in some ways in The Abolition of Man. I also think that he puts his finger, there are a number of thinkers in the 1940s who do this, Czesław Miłosz, the Polish poet is doing a similar thing at the same time as Lewis, putting his finger on the fact that it is anthropology, what it means to be human that is becoming the big question of the age. And I think that remains the same today. I think The Abolition of Man, a bit like the Triumph of The Therapeutic is one of those books that the author could not have known how truly he was putting his finger on things at the time as he actually was.

It’s more true today in some ways than other times. So I think first of all, Lewis is useful because yep, anthropology is the problem. Secondly, I think he offers a note of hope because his notion of the Tao, this idea that there is some sort of moral structure to the universe and I would talk about natural law, for example. I think that’s something worth exploring. I think we’re at a point where we’re beginning to see that yes, we could try to make human beings limitless through the technology we have, but in doing so, we’re actually destroying and not enhancing or improving our humanity because there is some natural moral structure to what it means to be a human being. So I think on that point too, Lewis, he’s not offering all the answers, but he’s certainly pointing us in the direction of the right questions.

Brett McKay: And I think another thing that Lewis does in The Abolition of Man, is he helps you figure out what to do with your feelings or sentiments. Because we’ve been talking about the romantics, and with the romantics, it was just important to feel, and whatever you felt, that was considered good. But Lewis, he believed in an objective moral order and that some things should make you feel certain feelings. He thought feelings were important, but you had to train your emotions so that you felt the right emotions for the right things at the right time, for the right reasons.

Carl Trueman: Yeah. And that’s where I think returning to reading somebody like Aquinas on virtue. The old idea of virtues is important here, that yes, we have feelings, but we need to have those feelings shaped by our rational side, by our reason, by our knowledge.

Brett McKay: I think yeah. Role not only for Aquinas, but the great books like reading that can go a long way to training your emotions, training your feelings, training the sentiments, looking at good art. The religious life can play a role in that, helping you order your desires.

Carl Trueman: Yeah, I mean, this is the Enlightenment thinker, Friedrich Schiller has this idea that human beings, we have two drives. You have the rational drive, and we have the Sensuous Drive. And those two, if you allow the one to run amuck, it’s a disaster. If it’s the rational drive, you end up with a French revolution. If it’s a sensuous drive, you end up with a sort of moral chaos going the other way. You need to have each informing the other. And for Shiller art was the answer, as you just said, contemplating great art. That’s what brought the two together. And that’s, I think, not a bad way of thinking about things. It does matter what you read. It does matter what music you listen to. It does matter what art you contemplate.

Brett McKay: Well, Carl, I think we covered a lot of ground in this conversation.

Carl Trueman: That was fun. Time seems to have flown by for me.

Brett McKay: It did. Well, Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Carl Trueman: I write a, I would say a fortnightly, but for American listeners that’s every two weeks, column at firstthings.com. It actually has a print version, but it’s also an online magazine dealing with religion and public life and culture. And I write a couple of columns a month for World Magazine online as well, which is, that’s a more distinctively protestant thing. Other than that, I’ve done a lot of podcasts. I pop up all over the place, I guess, but firstthings.com Would be the primary place to go and read me.

Brett McKay: Fantastic. Well, Carl Trueman, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Carl Trueman: It’s been a pleasure. Thanks For having me on.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Carl Trueman. He’s the author of the book, the Rise and Triumph of The Modern Self. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can check out our show notes at aom.is/modernself where you find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic. Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives and sign up for a new newsletter, it’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time is Brett McKay. Remind time listening when podcast would put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When you think about ancient gladiators, you likely have a certain vision that comes to mind: slaves forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of bloodthirsty Romans.

But much of what we think we know about gladiators is actually wrong.

Today on the show, Alexander Mariotti will separate the just-as-fascinating fact from popular-culture-derived fiction when it comes to gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Alexander is a historian and an expert on gladiators who’s served as a consultant for shows and films like Spartacus and Gladiator II.

In our conversation, Alexander explains how gladiatorial games evolved from funeral rites into professional sporting events featuring the greatest superstar athletes and sex symbols of the day. We discuss the different types of gladiators, their rigorous training regimens, why gladiators fought in their underwear, and whether they actually fought to the death. Alexander describes what a day at the Colosseum was really like, complete with elaborate special effects, halftime shows, souvenirs, and even concessions. And we talk about the connections between the gladiatorial games and the sports and spectacle culture of today, and why, despite the passage of two millennia, these ancient athletes continue to captivate our imagination.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: Lessons in Manliness from Gladiator
• AoM Article: The Men in the Arena–A Primer on Roman Gladiators
• Gladiator
• Gladiator II
• Spartacus series
• “Gladiator 2 History Consultant Hits Back at Inaccuracy Claims”

Connect With Alexander Mariotti

• Alexander’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art Of Manliness podcast. When you think about ancient gladiators, you likely have a certain vision that comes to mind. Slaves forced to fight to the death for the entertainment of bloodthirsty Romans. But much of what we think we know about gladiators is actually wrong. Today on the show, Alexander Mariotti will separate the just as fascinating fact from popular culture-derived fiction when it comes to gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome. Alexander is a historian and expert on gladiators who served as a consultant for shows and films like Spartacus and Gladiator II. In our conversation, Alexander explains how gladiatorial games evolved from funeral rites to professional sporting events featuring the greatest superstar athletes and sex symbols of the day. We discuss the different types of gladiators, their rigorous training regimens, why gladiators fought in their underwear, and whether they actually fought to the death. Alexander describes what a day at the Coliseum was really like, complete with elaborate special effects, halftime shows, souvenirs, and even concessions. And we talk about the connection between the gladiatorial games and the sports and spectacle culture of today, and why, despite the passage of two millennia, these ancient athletes continue to captivate our imagination. After show is over, check out our show notes at aom.is/gladiators. All right, Alexander Mariotti, welcome to the show.

Alexander Mariotti: Brent, thank you so much for having me. What an immense pleasure.

Brett McKay: So, you are an expert on the history of gladiators and you’ve taken that expertise. You’ve done a lot of research writing about gladiatorial combat in ancient Rome and you’ve served as a history consultant for shows like Rome, Spartacus. You’re there to make sure that the scenes they depict in those historical shows are as accurate as possible. How did you make a career out of researching and consulting about the history of Roman gladiators? Because I’m sure for a lot of guys, this sounds like a dream job.

Alexander Mariotti: It certainly is a dream job. I think it starts with the most important part, which is the lonely childhood. And a lot of time spent alone, thinking about weapons and armor and gladiators and Caesars and all that kind of stuff. And I was very lucky because my parents were immensely into history and I grew up playing in the Coliseum. So the Coliseum for me was just a little place that my brother and I would go hang out and kick a football. There really wasn’t, I think, such a vested interest in the gladiatorial world as there is today. So as I went on and I studied I think it’s just a world that kept calling me back and the more I got into it the more I was fascinated by it and it’s just the complexity of the sport, of its origins, of what it meant was just so immense, that it’s just one of these topics that when you go in, you just go down the sinkhole.

Brett McKay: Well, I hope in this conversation we do today, we can let our listeners know more about ancient gladiatorial combat and dispel a lot of myths because I think we’ll talk about this thanks to popular culture movies in particular there are a lot of myths about how gladiators fought and what it was like to be a gladiator. Let’s start with this basic question. What are the origins of gladiatorial combat? How do they end up with this thing where they built a giant arena so they could watch people fight. What’s the origins of it?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, the interesting thing is that there’s sort of various stages and what’s happened is that it’s an amalgamation of different pieces of historical context put together. So you know, as far as kings and feuding warfare has existed, there’s always been the sense of when there’s a funeral to put on a sort of, or the death of some very important person, to put on a very grandiose funeral. This usually would involve combat or bloodletting or sacrifice. You can go back to the first kings of Egypt. But in the history of gladiatorial combat, it comes from ancient Greece. So the Greeks were quite prone to when great heroes or important people passed, they would have games at the funeral. And I mean, these games involved boxing and javelin throwing and wrestling, but also fighting with weapons. And then you also had sacrifice. So if you take, for example, the Iliad, which is a piece of historical fiction, but it’s got a lot of historical notes in it, Achilles actually does that for Patroclus. He puts on a funeral in Book 23, and he’s got, you know, the soldiers, the Greeks are fighting in combat, but they’re doing it in a sort of sporting way to honor the dead. And he also sacrifices these Trojans.

So that kind of culture mixed in with the Greeks, you know, starting the Olympics, so having professional combat sports, you start to see the sort of very very beginnings, the seeds of gladiatorial combat. And what happens is the Greeks conquered in the 8th century, they start moving towards the south of Italy and colonizing it. So they bring their culture with them. So by the time that the Romans start to become a force of nature, they’re really infused in Greek culture. They’re infused with the culture that when there’s a funeral, they have bloodletting, there’s combat sports that they’ve inherited. And so, slowly but surely, that’s where the sport of gladiatorial combat starts to come from.

Brett McKay: Okay, so the seeds of gladiatorial combat came from the Greek tradition of holding combat games at funerals to honor the dead. And then wealthy Romans adopt this practice. How did these funeral combatants differ and how did things then evolve into the gladiatorial games that we think of when we think of gladiators?

Alexander Mariotti: So you would have these people fight over the funeral, but these aren’t really, I wouldn’t define them gladiators because gladiators are what comes afterwards. They’re athletes, they’re sports figures. These guys are called Bestiarii, which means they come from the bustum, the fire. So they’re the sort of, you know, because obviously you cremated people back then, and these men would fight amongst the fire or alongside the fire. Think of them almost as professional grievers. They’re there to put on a show to spill blood, to honor the dead, and it’s tied into two parts of Roman religion. The first is that the Romans believed as long as someone spoke your name, as long as you’re remembered, you continue to exist. So in putting on a very lavish funeral, you will be remembered because people say, well, I had this great feast at this funeral, but I also saw these incredible examples of combat. The other thing was that they believed that when you died, you became a shadow.

So to allow you to gain enough strength to pass the underworld, you needed blood of someone living. So the spilling of blood, not necessarily death, but just the spilling of blood was enough to go forward. So that’s where it is in Rome, but it takes someone very astute by the name of P. Rutilius Rufus, Publius Rutilius Rufus, and in 105 BC, this guy just obviously has observed how much people reacted to the fights. Because what we see is that initially the funerals were a feast, there was mourning, there was the fighting. The fighting starts to become the most prominent part because they realize that anyone who comes to these events, that’s what they’re really talking about. And Rufus understands this and what he does is he puts on the first gladiator fights, which are purely for sport. And from that moment on, the gladiatorial phenomena really starts to build because it’s a sport of its own. It’s born out of its own and it’s nothing to do with funeral rights and it’s nothing to do with death necessarily. It’s to do with show, with spectacle.

Brett McKay: And when did that happen?

Alexander Mariotti: That’s one of 105 BC. So you’re talking again, 180 years before the Coliseum’s even built, just to show you how much it progressed and how quickly. But another thing about Rufus which is interesting is he tells us just how well-trained these guys are. Because about 30 years previous, Rome had just got its professional army. So before that, the Roman army was a sort of series of people that were conscripted, brought together. They would fight the war and they would disband. So Rome didn’t really have a standing army. This is changed by Julius’s uncle, a man called Gaius Marius. So at the time of Rufus, the army is only 30 years old. And he actually realizes that these guys are so well trained, these athletes, these gladiators, that he goes to gladiator school in Capua and he hires the gladiator trainers to train the army. And from that moment forth, he produces basically super soldiers because any part of the military training from that point on is actually influenced by gladiatorial training. That’s how well trained these guys were in 105 BC.

Brett McKay: Okay. So brief recap there. Gladiator game started off as a funeral rite and then it shifted to just the fight itself. They became just public spectacle. It was basically like an MMA fight today.

Alexander Mariotti: It’s exactly, well, an MMA fight today is gladiatorial combat. It just doesn’t have the weapons. We’re not there yet. I’m sure in a couple of years, someone will say, why don’t we put weapons with these guys? And what a great idea. And then we’ll have come full circle to the Romans. But I mean, the fact that MMA exists speaks to sort of just how much we are like the Romans. We shouldn’t be surprised at this. Human nature hasn’t changed profoundly in the last 2,000 years. The desires that man holds, whether to be successful, to be remembered, to be loved, to be powerful, these are sort of universal themes that repeat themselves because ultimately people repeat themselves. And so it shouldn’t be surprising that in our culture, despite how civilized we think we are, we still find that one of the biggest sports in the world involves two men in front of, you know, 80,000 people in an arena, you know, beating each other out to see who’s the most primally powerful.

Brett McKay: What role did gladiatorial games play in Roman social and political life?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, they played an immense part. Actually, that’s one of the things that fascinates me so much about the gladiatorial phenomena is that it was responsible for the Roman Empire. I don’t think you would have had the Principate the emperorship without gladiators because when you look at the Emperor and you look at the poorest in Rome, you know, most people did not live like the 1%. So what does the 1% have in common with the 99%? Well, they have nothing in common because the emperor lives in a palace. He has immense wealth. He eats what he wants. He drinks what he wants. Nothing is close to him. That’s not the reality of most people in ancient Rome. But what did they have in common? Well, what they had in common is that periodically they would meet in an arena and they would watch this sport. And that’s how the emperor won the people because he built the Coliseum. He built an immense stadium and he gives you tickets to come.

And for a brief moment of your life, that hardship that you live, you get to forget it. You get food, you get wine, you get games, you get beast hunts, you get gladiator fights, you get ship battles in the coliseum and all because of this very gracious and you know generous figure and so you love the emperor and exchange he rules. And that’s really not a relationship that’s that different from today, because, you know, if you take the NFL or any sort of sporting body, they do the same thing. They build the stadiums, they put on the shows, and in exchange, they ask you to buy a product. In ancient Rome, the product was the emperor’s power. Today it’s some sort of product placement, but it’s the same relationship we have with our sports today.

Brett McKay: And what’s interesting too, I did some reading in preparation for this, is that even the emperors who weren’t really fond of the gladiatorial games they just, they added a version to it. Like Marcus Aurelius, for example, he wasn’t keen on them. He put limits on the gladiatorial games, but he still put them on because I guess he thought it was just something he had to do to maintain his power.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh yeah, it’s part of it. You know, the power of celebrity is something that’s universal. You see it today whenever, you know, we recently had elections and you see how celebrities roll out for their candidate and they use their sway and their popularity for a cause. Well, you know, it wasn’t that different if you had the top gladiators saying that you were the best Emperor and what a kind guy and out comes a champion gladiator and the Emperor lavishes him with gifts and he says what a great Emperor we have. Well, it’s the same concept really.

Brett McKay: And it seems like there’s also, even at the peak of gladiatorial combat in the Empire, in the Roman Empire, there were a lot of criticisms of it. You could find criticisms, just as you’d find criticisms today of MMA fights.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, absolutely. There’s an interesting notion, which is that great Roman philosophers complained more, not so much about the sport. I mean, the sport was seen as a very vulgar sport by the great minds. I mean, Marcus thought it was a vulgar sport. He loved wrestling. He thought wrestling was a very noble sport. He didn’t think gladiatorial combat was. But it was more about the effect that it had on the people. That’s the interesting part because they’re more concerned that these games bring out the brutal side of man. And the Romans, just like the Greeks, had a great philosophy about man being in constant battle with his urges. So you see things like the centaur or the story of the hydro with Hercules. They’re really metaphors for man being half beast, half divine and in a constant battle to fight your urges. So you really should try and become more divine. But the games brought out the beast in you.

And that’s what Christians had a problem with gladiator games. We always think that the gladiator games stopped because the Christians were so noble and they wanted to save the lives of gladiators. Well, the truth is the gladiators weren’t dying. That’s not the problem. The problem is that Christian writers say that the games turn men into beasts. And I don’t think that’s really hard to see if you go to a UFC fight you see what it does to the crowd. If you’re in the crowd it’s not a calm intellectual crowd. It is rowdy bestial pumped up adrenaline testosterone pumped crowd fueled by the games.

Brett McKay: Yeah, Seneca, the famous Roman stoic philosopher, he’s also the the assistant to Nero. He had a lot to say about gladiatorial games. He had a lot of things that you were mentioning there about how it just sort of depraves you and makes you feel less human. He talked about how you felt like less of a man after you watched the gladiatorial games, less human. But then he also at the same time, he’d say like, but it was so hard not to watch because it is.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, but it is. And isn’t that true though? I mean, it’s funny. There’s a great story by a Christian writer about a friend of his who’s studying in Rome, and he’s dragged by some friends to the Coliseum. And, you know, he’s like, oh, no, he refuses. And then he sits there in the crowd and he covers his eyes with his hands. Then he hears a roar and then he hears a clang and then all of a sudden he pulls his hands back and he peeks a little bit and not before long he’s just there cheering with the others and he says he gets drunk on the Furies. And I think that’s very true if you watch, you know, when we watch these sports, it does bring out a side of us that’s primal, that’s sort of genetically in there. And it’s meant to, I mean, it’s meant to then the purpose of the games is whether it’s MMA or gladiatorial combat, it’s about the toughest. It’s about survival. It’s about an example. And that’s when you reach the philosophical side of gladiatorial combat, which is that they represented to the Romans this great philosophy, which I think would be perfect for a podcast called the Art Of Manliness because the manliness to the Romans was virtus.

And what virtus was was a physical and mental endurance that you basically could survive anything physically and mentally to be the toughest of the tough. And gladiators were that because they were incredibly well trained, they were physically brilliant, they were courageous because they fought in a fight that you could die from. You could die from your injuries. I mean, you weren’t joking around. But you also were a great sign of resilience mentally because in the midst of battle when the referee told you to stop you stopped. That takes great self-control. So we don’t really see the gladiators as such but they are a wonderful example of self-control because they are obedient to their trainers, to the referee, to the emperor, and not to their instinct and their adrenaline. That’s virtus. We don’t have this philosophy spoken of today, but it does exist because we see it in our MMA fighters. We see it in our first responders. That’s manliness to the Romans. That’s virtus.

Brett McKay: I love that. That’s really interesting. Let’s talk about the gladiators themselves. I think the popular idea is that the gladiators were criminals, slaves. Is that true?

Alexander Mariotti: They were, but they were also free men. They were also athletes. They were also hunters. Basically you’ve got to again, look at the period of history, right? What opportunities do you have afforded to you 2000 years ago? So, you know, there’s no public education. So if you aren’t lucky to have an education, how are you going to make your money? How are you going to survive? Well, if you’re physically, you know, in a good shape, you could become a soldier. But again, that’s only opened to the poor by Caesar’s uncle in about 130 BC. So what else could you do? And again, being a soldier, it’s not like you’re going to survive. You might die, but you get three square meals and you get taught trade, but you looking at 16 to 25 years of your life. And though of course you gonna get paid is not lucrative, you’re not gonna get rich. Gladiatorial combat offered you another avenue which is that you train to be a gladiator.

You did a two year stunt as a rookie, which was the time it took to train them. And then after that, you took a five year contract, which stipulated how many fights you did per year, but also how much you’re gonna earn. And what we know from Marcus Aurelius’ time, because he passes some laws, which effectively ended the gladiatorial combat because he took the money out of it, is that these guys were making a fortune, an absolute fortune. You’re talking about anything up to 17, 18, 19 times the annual salary of a soldier in a single fight. So you do one to three fights a year, you’re set. And you know, they didn’t have long careers. Of course they didn’t, just as MMA fighters don’t because it was physically taxing. You are still fighting, you’re still beating each other up and you’re still putting the body through immense stress.

Brett McKay: So the gladiators themselves made that money or did it go to their trainer?

Alexander Mariotti: It was a split. Of course it was a split, but you had in your contract stipulated how much you earned.

Brett McKay: That’s fair. I didn’t know that. I always thought it was just like they were just slaves.

Alexander Mariotti: Well, no, but that’s because the slave part is more interesting. You know, if you made a movie about a guy who was out of work, became a gladiator, made a fortune, bought a villa and retired. I mean, that doesn’t sound like a great movie. You want a guy who’s a general who gets his families massacred by, you know, a corrupt emperor. He’s sold into slavery and he has to fight to win his freedom. That’s a story. And those are the stories we pick, but we also create them because they sound good. But that’s not reality. Gladiators were about a split 50-50 of slaves and of free men because people were drawn to the arena. Who wouldn’t be? I mean, you know, you get to stand in front of 80,000 people cheering your name. The Emperor of Rome cheers your name. Who else can say that? And no wonder people were drawn to become gladiators.

Brett McKay: So what was the social status of a gladiator in Ancient Rome? So it sounds like they’re, I mean, the way you’re describing it sounds like they were a professional athlete today.

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, They were. They were the first superstar athletes of their time. More so than, you know, any time I say that someone on the comments section starts going on about the Olympics. The Olympics did not have the reach. The athletes did not have the careers nor the money that gladiators did. When you look at sports stars today, their rich throughout the world, the wealth that they amass, the popularity they have, the only thing akin to that throughout all of human history is the gladiator. They’re the first superstar athletes. Because when you were known in Rome, you were known in the Roman Empire. 60 million people knew who you were. Your fame did not just extend to the regions, it extended to the entire empire from the north of Scotland to the north of Africa. Now socially, yes, you lost your social rights because the Romans did not see… They were very against people making a spectacle of themselves or showing off. So if you are pimp, an undertaker, an actor, you were declared an infami, so you had no political or social standing.

You’re kind of the lowest of the low. But it did really matter. I don’t think people have a great view of Conor McGregor or any of the MMA stars today socially. They rub shoulders with the bigwigs because of their popularity, but they’re not seen as intellectuals. You certainly wouldn’t imagine an MMA fighter becoming a president or a prime minister. And gladiators were the same, but they didn’t really care because they were absolutely adored. I mean, sexually no one else is more desired in the entire Roman Empire than the gladiator. He is the ultimate sex symbol of ancient times, more than the emperor.

Brett McKay: Okay, so half the gladiators were slaves and then half were freemen who volunteered to become gladiators because, I mean, they just wanted a chance at the lifestyle. They wanted fame and glory. And then with the slaves, it was a way for the owners of the slaves to gain prestige in financial gain through their slaves who were gladiators. ‘Cause if they won in the arena, they would get the fame and glory for that. And it was still a selective process cause the owners they would pick from among their slaves, the best of the best. And then they would train them and manage them. It was kind of like investing in racehorses.

Alexander Mariotti: Yeah, you know, well, the gambit of people who would become gladiators, I mean, you had to be tough, let’s be honest. You have to be physically exempt. You have to be really the sort of physical specimen of perfection because you have to have the body to do it. Not everybody became gladiators. You know this notion that poor slaves were thrown into the arena and told to fight is just utter nonsense. Because you’re talking about a war like society who knew combat, who saw war, who saw carnage. So the shows had to be better than the battlefield. And it’s true because the battlefield was scrappy. It was ugly. The battlefield was not beautiful. It was murder. We sort of sanitized combat for show, because when we watch movies, these great battles with these great moves, it wasn’t. It was people hacking each other like animals. The arena was different. It was skillful. It was elegant. It was craftsmanship. It was people studying each other the same way that, you know, boxing and MMA is not the battlefield. It’s not what war looks like and not, it’s not what a street fight looks like. It is about people who know their craft, who’ve studied. So the gladiators kind of gave people the sort of show that they wouldn’t have seen anywhere else.

Brett McKay: Something else that I’ve read, and you can correct me if I’m wrong on this with the idea that some gladiators are criminals because it gets kind of confused or conflated Because criminals could be sentenced to fight in the arena as a form of capital punishment. This included Christians because Christians were considered criminals. So it was like, we’re going to pit these people against the lion. But that wasn’t gladiatorial combat, right?

Alexander Mariotti: No, no. So there’s three very specific categories, which always get sort of amalgamized into one and, you know, later writers, especially Christian writers, kind of confound things that they’d never seen. They’re, you know, it’s kind of like people studying today, studying me. If I write a book about Napoleon, like a source, like, you know, and me telling you, well, Napoleon looked like this and he did that. I mean, I can hypothesize, but you know, I’m 200 years from Napoleon. And when you’ve got writers, 2, 3, 4, sometimes 500 years after the gladiator games, talking about gladiator games, they don’t know really what they’re talking about. They’re talking about something that’s sort of a whisper that’s kind of come along. So you’ve got beast hunters which were bestiarii or venatores. So you had guys who basically were hunters, professional hunters who fought animals or people who kind of tried their luck and were forced to fight against animals. But gladiators do not fight animals for the simple reason you cannot control an animal.

So when you’ve trained a guy and you’ve spent money feeding him and clothing him and housing him and you know having a doctor on call as gladiators did. And then you put them against the lion, the lion is probably going to destroy your asset. Then you’ve got noxii and noxii are criminals. So at half time show, the half time show involved criminals being executed. Now that’s simply because logistically the Emperor has now the attention of 80,000 people who have come to see him. So here’s a little bit of an interesting part of someone fighting a lion. Excellent. Now I’ve got your attention. Here’s a bit of music, here’s some fire-eaters, and now we’re going to condemn the criminals because I want you guys to know that if you cross the lines, if you defy me and defy my rules, this is the consequences. So it’s public execution. And those people were people thrown into the arena, told to fight to the death or pitted against animals, but they are not gladiators. The gladiators come afterwards in the afternoon and they are again professional athletes who’ve spent two years or more training, who’ve been fed, clothed, skillfully trained and sort of brought up in a social way to get us a following, which is still important today, so that when they perform, you want to see them, but they are nothing to do with the other two categories.

Brett McKay: Okay. That’s interesting. I think that’s a good clarification there. We’re going to take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. One thing I thought was interesting is that there are different types of gladiators. So you have this section of guys who fought one-on-one, but there was different types, just like there’s different positions in American football, like a linebacker or running back, the same thing with gladiators. Well, what type of gladiators existed?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, I would equate it more to the fact that they were the first mixed martial artists because they’re basically mixed martial artists. You’ve got different styles. Just as today you get the Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys and they fight against, you know, people have a taekwondo background with some grappling skills. What you have is you’ve got different categories of gladiators and they have different fighting styles. And this is predominantly based off the type of armor they have. So basically you get two definitive types of gladiators. You get scutarii and parmularii, which are ones with a large shield called a scutum. It’s about a four foot shield and it’s the one that’s used by the Roman soldiers. The parma is a smaller shield, usually square, sometimes round, and depending on the type of armor, the type of category of gladiator, they’re going to have very specific helmets. And that’s going to change the way they fight. So some of the most famous are, for example, the retiarius. He’s the net man. He’s the only gladiator who didn’t have a helmet. He had only a shoulder guard, and he had a net and a trident, and sometimes a small dagger.

But he’s got no armor whatsoever, except for the shoulder guard called a Galera. So you think that’s fairly unfair because again, any strike, any sort of blow he’s going to get, is going to give him a wound. And he’s going to fight against someone like a Secutor. Secutor’s had very large helmets, looked a bit like a fish, very small eye holes, a fin on the top. He had a mannica, which was basically segmented armor, much like you see in the roman soldiers covering his sword arm he has a large shield called the Scutum and he’s got greaves called ocreas. So very well armored guy against a unarmored guy. Well that’s because the guy without the armor, without the helmet is gonna be very quick very nimble and his fighting style is gonna be sort of jabbing a lot keeping his distance with the trident, swinging the net to confuse him and eventually sort of tires his opponent out and win points. Whereas the Secutor being very heavily armored is gonna be a thicker set guy, more muscular. He’s going to be slower, but more powerful. So he really has to study his moves because he’s got to work on the expenditure of energy. And think how exciting where you do have guys with different skills, different armor, different physiques fighting it out because you, you know, you’ve got your favorites, but you also see the skill of the fighter.

Brett McKay: And something about the armor. Didn’t all gladiators fight bare chested or just had like a toga? Some of them had like they had greaves, but other than that, that was pretty much it.

Alexander Mariotti: Well, it’s an interesting thing. In 174 BC gladiators appear in underwear. Now you can see this in a place called Paestum in the south of Italy, in these beautiful fourth century BC frescoes. So they’re the first images of gladiatorial combat we have in Italy. And they look just like a Greek, I mean, again, they’re a copy of a Greek funeral. So they look just like what you see in the Iliad. But what you see is these guys are in underpants, which is called subligaculum. It was a piece of linen fabric that was sort of tied in a triangular fashion around you, basically like briefs today. And the reason why gladiators are placed in them is because they’re trying to save their lives. So it’s interesting that these guys always fought in their underwear. And the reason why is because if you were a tunic and you got a wound, The wool or the linen, if any of those scraps went into your wound, you had a very high probability of infection and dying. The Romans knew this 2000 years ago. You know that’s one of the major cause in the American Civil War was death by infection because of the wool tunics that kept going into the wounds. So the Romans to mitigate this already know this 2000 years ago and they have gladiators fight basically in their underwear for the entire time to preserve them, to save them, which tells you that the whole thing of a gladiator dying is not what we think it is. It’s nonsense.

Brett McKay: Yeah, I wanna dig more into that myth that they fought to the death. But before we do, let’s talk about the just sort of daily life of a gladiator. So if you became a gladiator, you had to go to a school. It’s like a training camp and you basically spent your life there. What was life like in a gladiator school?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, you know, it was, let’s not joke around. The moment you went into gladiator school and you took the oath, whether you were free man, whether you’re a criminal, whatever you were outside was irrelevant. You became clay to be molded by the lanista and the doctores, the gladiator trainers. So you can expect that their lives are most like professional athletes today. Think of MMA fighters. You are taught combinations, you’re doing physical training to build yourself up, so weight training. So they had a very intense system called the Tetrad system, which was a four-day training program that was invented originally for the professional athletes of the Olympic Games. And so basically the first day you have like a preparatory day. So you do sprints, you do some light weights, you do some jumps. The second day was like the intense training day. So you would have done weights, you would have done combinations, you would have lifted like medicine balls. And I’m talking still ancient Rome, by the way, I know this sounds modern, but this is what the Romans were doing.

The third day was a rest day, which is very important. So you ate a good meal. You might have had a bath. You might have had like a sauna or a steam room, which the Romans had. And then on the fourth day, you did specialized training. So that would have been the day that you would have done weapons training, tried out your combinations, had your trainer do your one-twos against the post. All right. So if I strike you with the left and I come with a shield you’re gonna duck at this point come back with a shield hit. So that’s what would have been their sort of daily, you know, or their week to week. And when they were coming up for a fight, the intensity of the training would increase. And then when they were off season, they would bulk, they would eat, they would train lighter, and they would prepare for the next fight. Exactly like professional athletes today.

Brett McKay: Yeah, that sounds exactly like a professional athlete training. Speaking of their diet, I’ve heard that they ate so much grain that they were called barley men. Is that accurate?

Alexander Mariotti: No, I mean it’s accurate and it’s not accurate. Yes, they were called barley men. They did obviously have a… Look, you’ve got to take people and give them a diet, right? So they’re going to do a lot of weight training. They’re going to do a lot of physical exercise. People have tried to use this politically to say that, you know, gladiators are vegetarians. Nonsense. If you can find a vegetarian heavyweight box of the world, I’d love to meet them. You needed protein, of course. So they had a thing called puls, which is like a barley spelt stew, which would have been the main basis. A little bit like if you imagine for sumo wrestlers, they give them like a big sort of stew to beef them up, right? Because you’re taking someone off the street and you’re like, right, I’m going to make you into gladiator. How do I do that cost effective? But they will have, of course, eaten meat and fish and cheese and pretty much everything.

Brett McKay: Okay. So yeah, these guys, they were professional athletes. And so they were trained like professional athletes.

Alexander Mariotti: Right.

Brett McKay: Let’s talk about the arena where they fought. I think the most famous gladiatorial arena is the Colosseum in Rome. But were there other places that they fought in the Roman Empire?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh yeah, I mean there was amphitheaters all around the Roman Empire. It’s why I think we are so Roman today is that, you know, if you go back 3, 400 years ago, there was no stadiums around the world. The stadiums started popping up because of the popularity of baseball in America and cricket in England in the 1800s, end of the 1700s. And so they started building stadiums. But 80,000 spectator stadiums, you know, they only started propping up about 80 years ago. So nowadays you can go anywhere in the world and there are stadiums for all sorts of sports. And that’s very much indicative of the Roman world where you could go to North Africa, you go to Spain, you go to Gaul, Germany, Scotland, and they were amphitheaters of various sizes. The oldest surviving amphitheater dates to 70 BC. It’s found in Pompeii. It’s an incredible place. It’s only a 20,000 spectator stadium, but still not bad for a small town.

But yes, the Coliseum is, you know, it’s the Super Bowl. It’s the place you want to fight at when you’ve, I mean, who wouldn’t? Again, you know, 80 to 80,000 people, some say 50, but I tend to think they were more in the higher region because we don’t have any seating, so we don’t know the exact size. But nevertheless, you know, 55,000 to 85,000 people cheering for you. I mean, what a sensation, what a feeling. Imagine coming out of those undergrounds and a tunnel and someone cheering your name and 85,000 people erupting. And it’s such an intense feeling that people chase it today, you know, and very few of us get to experience it. But imagine what it must’ve felt like 2000 years ago.

Brett McKay: Did it work like how you see in the movie Gladiator where, you know, there were gladiatorial arenas in different parts of the empire, like North Africa. Did you like work your way up until you got to the Coliseum? Is that how it worked?

Alexander Mariotti: You could do, yeah. Or you could do the reverse, which was that once you were kind of a veteran, you know, and you’re kind of a little bit past your date, you could still go fight in the lesser provinces. Just as you see sports stars today, you know, when they kind of hit their heyday, they go to different leagues and maybe a little bit lesser prestigious leagues, but still, you know, your name kind of rang true and was still a draw. So I mean, I could give you a great example, you know, Mike Tyson, you know, we recently saw Mike Tyson fight. Who’s he fighting against? Who cares? It’s Mike Tyson, you know, has he fought in a while? No. Does it matter? No, it’s Mike Tyson. His name is legendary. Imagine applying that to Gladiator. You’re the guy who won the fight in the Coliseum in 97 AD. Okay, that was 20 years ago, but still, you’re in relatively good shape. You can go to North Africa, you’re a little bit overweight, you’re not quite the guy you used to be, you’re not quite as fast, but people still know who you are. They want to see you fight.

Brett McKay: Speaking of the Colosseum, is it true that they filled up the Colosseum with water to do naval battles?

Alexander Mariotti: Yes, absolutely. And that’s in the beginning. And it’s to do with a little piece of Fortuna’s history, which was that the building of the Colosseum incredibly came out of some very bad luck for the Emperor Nero, which was the misfortune of the fire of 64 AD. So natural disaster changed the world politically, socially, and culturally, because the fire made Nero unpopular. It wasn’t his fault, but his political rivals blamed him for it. Four years later, he plunges a knife into his neck. He kills himself. And the next emperor that eventually comes after a year of civil war is a sort of down-to-earth guy called Vespasian of the Flavians. And he says, okay, so the emperorship’s in trouble, how do I win popularity? Well, I’ll tell you what, let me take this a piece of Imperial land. I’m going to build a free cinema, theater, sports stadium all into one out of my own pocket. And I’m going to give you guys free tickets and you’re going to see the greatest show on earth. But where they built it was on an artificial lake that Nero had built. So they drained the lake, but they used the drainage system for the Coliseum.

So in the beginning of the Coliseum when it was first opened there was no underground. There were no lifts, trapdoors and pulley systems, that all comes afterwards as the games get more elaborate. But they did have the drainage system so they could drain it. And they could pull the water from the aqueducts and then dump it into the river and have ships come out and do mock naval battles. But eventually the Coliseum games got so elaborate that they had to build under the sands a series of trapdoors and lifts and pulleys and they moved them to a lake called Nemi because it’s just easier to do.

Brett McKay: The guys who took part in these naval battles, were they your typical gladiator or were they another genre or breed?

Alexander Mariotti: They tend to be criminals. They tend to be criminals because it was, again, particularly dangerous. You’ve got to think of actors and stuntmen, you know? Your actor is the asset. He’s the guy that you just can’t take a risk with, so you use the stuntmen. Kind of the same way you’d use criminals. And in fact, it’s from criminals and from a naval battle that we get one of the most famous misconceptions of gladiators, which is that during the time of the Emperor Claudius, they basically organized a naval battle and these guys, these criminals knew that there was no chance they were going to survive. So at least you got to give a criminal chance and say, look, if you fight, you might win your freedom. But they knew they had no chance. So they shouted to the emperor, hail Caesar, those who are about to die salute you. But they were being facetious. It was almost like saying, well, thanks very much. You know, we’re about to die. Hail to you, great Caesar. You know, what kind of a person are you?

And Claudius finds this funny and he actually retorts or not. And so they take it as a pardon. They take it that the emperor has pardon them and he has to hobble down because he had a medical condition and he has to try and convince them to keep fighting to put on show for the spectators. And that whole line, those who are about to die salute you, was never said by gladiators. It’s never recorded again and actually has nothing to do with gladiators, but it does sound cool and that’s why it’s attached.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah. So that’s a myth. I think there was a famous book about gladiators that had that title. Those who are about to die salute you.

Alexander Mariotti: There’s a series I just worked on last year on Amazon and that’s the title of it. And the joke, my joke is always a terrible joke. It’s a history nerd joke, but my joke is if it’s called those who rarely die, you wouldn’t want to watch it. You’re like, that doesn’t sound particularly good. You know, you want high stakes. You want the fact that your hero might meet death and is courageous enough to go and fight.

Brett McKay: So yeah, this leads to our next myth that I want to hopefully debunk here. Gladiators, did they really fight to the death?

Alexander Mariotti: So gladiators fought very rarely on, I mean, an absolute occasion to the death. But again, it’s an absolute rarity. Death did occur and it wasn’t that the gladiators didn’t accept death. They very freely accepted death that they knew that there was a possibility. In the same way that when MMA fighters go and fight, they know there’s a huge risk of being, you know, you might end your life, you might get life ending or life altering injuries. The gladiators accepted that, but they also accepted that because by the time the gladiator sports start to flourish, you know, Greek sports were close to 900 years old. So, you know, people like boxers, pankration fighters, wrestlers, when you look at how brutal they were in the Olympics, the rules, we have recorded deaths of Olympic fighters, of boxers meeting death, of pankrationists killing each other. We also have a huge amount of severe injuries that these guys sustained. So that was kind of generally accepted in the ancient world and gladiators were no different. They accepted that if they stepped into the arena, they could die. Predominantly gladiators will have died from injuries and from infection.

But one of the greatest doctors, actually the sort of great grandfather of modern medicine, a guy called Galen of Pergamon, he became the doctor of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius. And his writings, by the way, are the basis of modern medicine. We wouldn’t have modern medicine to the degree if it wasn’t for his writings, which still survive today. And he learned from working in a gladiator school. So we know the gladiator schools actually employed doctors. And because we found the gladiator cemetery in Turkey, and we can study the bones, we see that these guys have injuries that have been treated and that they’ve recovered from the injuries including medical amputations. So you see that death is not the purpose of the gladiator. Everything is being done from the way they dress, even their armor. I mean what’s the point of having a helmet that fully encases your head? You don’t see that on the battlefield. That’s really not, you know, imperative having a big can over your head with a couple of grades, sort of holes for your eyes, but it’s to protect the head of the gladiator and make him look cool at the same time. But you don’t see that in the battlefield.

Brett McKay: Yeah. So the goal of these bouts wasn’t to kill each other. It was to put on a good show.

Alexander Mariotti: The purpose was absolutely not death. No, it was to put on a good show. And in fact, there’s historical evidence that they didn’t fight with sharpened weapons. We have an inscription of somebody asking special dispensation from the emperor, an emperor called Alexander Severus, to be able to use sharpened weapons because it was such a risk and because the gladiator sport was monopolized by the Emperor. The Emperor owns the schools and everything. It’s all under the emperorship. So they have to ask permission to have the gladiators fighting using weapons that are sharpened weapons because of the degree of risk. And we know that even Marcus Aurelius makes gladiators fight with wooden weapons because he didn’t like the injuries.

Brett McKay: Oh, so if these guys didn’t fight to the death, like that wasn’t the goal. How do they know when a battle was over? Like how long do these things last?

Alexander Mariotti: Same as MMA. You know, it’s interesting that we’ve worked out through how many games went on in an afternoon that your bouts were between three to five. You had rounds first of all because you had referees, you had one in the middle one in the side, the rudis and the secunda rudis. So exactly like today you had a guy in the middle of the fight, guy in the outskirts kind of giving you the opinion. They fought in rounds because again once this is the sort of interesting part of my work is when I was younger I spent a whole period, you know, I was an ex-athlete so I was very physical and I worked at the museum where we’ve rebuilt all the armor the weapons and we said, right how do these work and tried on the helmets. And I can tell you that when you’ve got one of these helmets on, and I played American football, it’s hard to have everything on. You know, you do short bursts because otherwise you’d be exhausted. So you got to take the helmet off.

So the gladiators would have been the same because your breathing is hugely restricted. Your vision is hugely restricted. They’re very uncomfortable helmets, even with padding, the weight of the armor bears down on you and you’re fighting in the Mediterranean heat. So they fought in rounds and they had points and the referee would of course then go ultimately to the crowd and say who won and people would give their opinion and then you would name the winner. So you know just the same way how does somebody win a boxing match or an MMA fight?

Brett McKay: Kind of give us an idea what the games are like. So if I were a citizen in Rome and I heard okay there’s games planned for this week, what would Rome be like? What would the Colosseum be like on that day of the games?

Alexander Mariotti:Well, I want everybody who’s listening to this to appreciate one thing. We live in a time where we can go to stadiums of 80,000 people. So we’re at a huge advantage that anyone has been throughout history to understand the gladiator games because we know what the sound of 80,000 people sounds like. We know when we go to the games that it’s an all day thing, just as it was in ancient times. And by the time you’re walking towards the arena, you can see it in your vision. You’ve got a whole bunch of very excited people. There’s that sort of energy in the air. You’re ready to go to some tailgating, some cooking and eating, which is what the Romans would have done. You’ve got your ticket in hand, which is called a tessera. It’s a coin. It has a number on it. So it doesn’t matter if you speak Latin or not. You can still today on the Coliseum, when you see the arches, it has numbers that correspond to tickets. So they had a gated ticketed system in 81 AD already. When you walk through the store, there’s a guy who checks your ticket, lets you through, you go up some stairs, and as you come out of the second set of stairs, you walk out onto the arena, onto the stands.

You find your seat, you get some food and drink, there’s somebody passing by that’s serving food, they’re serving wine. You’ve passed the souvenir stalls, you’ll probably go to that later depending how the game goes. You might have bought a flag for your team and you’re sitting there with your friends and all of a sudden the announcer starts playing music and announces the entry of the Emperor. So think how exciting you get to spend a whole day with the most powerful and important person in the world, the Emperor of Rome, there he is right there with you. And they tell you where the games are on. And as they tell you the reason for the games, the music begins and suddenly popping out of the ground are trees because underneath the sand of the arenas are 50 odd trap doors and lift and pulley systems. So they put trees on them so trees would be popping out of the sand and transforming the entire arena into a jungle. Because you are never going to visit the jungles of India, but you don’t need to because the Coliseum brings the empire to you.

Suddenly a beast hunter pops out of a trapdoor, lions pop out of another, and with an aerial view and music playing, a whole soundtrack, you’re going to watch a hunter hunt a lion. So the lion’s stalking him, you see it getting closer, the music builds and he turns around at the last minute, he starts stabbing the lion and the music builds, crescendos, he kills the lion, the games are over, the trees stop popping down the ground, sand, and it’s time for the halftime show. Acrobats, dancers, executions, and best of all, a raffle. You’ll get thrown to the stands, little wooden balls, open them up. If there’s a coin inside, there’ll be a number, keep a hold of it, and later they’ll call that number and you can win a horse, grain, even a villa. What a great guy the Emperor is. You start to see that democracy is overrated, you don’t get free stuff, But when you’ve got an emperor, you get free tickets, free food, free wine, free things. And the best part is yet to come. Because when 4 o’clock reaches and the weather gets a little bit more moderate, that’s when the gladiators start.

So music plays and out comes from the dugouts. You know, the lesser known guy build up the title fight. That’s why we’re here. This is the trilogy match between two gladiators. You know, one’s won one battle, one’s won another. This is the epic third that’s going to settle it. Who is the champion gladiator of the Coliseum? And as the music plays, a guy comes out, people cheer, music plays, another guy comes out, people cheer. And with music playing, you get to watch them fight. And then at the end, when your team wins and the crowd erupts, you get this feeling of euphoria, or you might be on the other side and get the feeling of absolute dejection. But then you leave, and for one entire day of your life, you aren’t an accountant, a lawyer, you were a champion gladiator, a beast hunter, you were somebody who got to spend time with the emperor, and then you go back to your normal life. And when we go to stadiums or we go to cinemas, we reenact all of that. That’s why we go to the cinemas to see gladiator, because we want to see these things, and we’re in a period where we can and we can experience them exactly as the Romans did.

Brett McKay: As you’re describing that, I was just thinking about the professional sports games I’ve been to. I mean, the big picture is the same thing, like the raffle, you know, if you’ve been to a sports game, you’ve done that. We don’t win villas. You might win some free Arby’s after the game.

Alexander Mariotti: You might get a t-shirt.

Brett McKay: You might get a t-shirt. Right. And then also the souvenirs. Like you always you got to pick up a souvenir. You can get a flag. Were there like souvenirs of like the specific gladiators? Could you buy like a mug with them?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, yeah. Yeah. And there was also like retro ones, like vintage ones. So you’d go to the stalls and you’d be like, oh man, I remember this. My dad saw this one. This is a cool one. This is a collector’s piece. I’ll take this one. But you had statues and lamps and dolls of specific gladiators. You had commemorative bowls and so on of particular fights. So yeah, not, not any different, not any different at all. And of course you could buy food and people then the animals actually were butchered and then they were given to people and people, they did actually tailgate, they would cook their food while they were watching the games.

Brett McKay: That’s really interesting. All right. So the gladiatorial games, the gladiator games were huge. It was basically like NFL MMA for Roman and wrestling for the Roman Empire. Yeah.

Alexander Mariotti: Were put together. Like all our sports today have an element of it. Like I look at, you know, American football and it’s probably why I loved it so much and why I played it was because it kind of reminded me of being a gladiator. The helmets, the armor, the sort of clashing. But even MMA, of course, that’s ultimately the heart of what gladiatorial combat was, but wrestling’s like it because wrestling involves super humans. You look physically what the wrestlers look like. They’re not like us. I’m speaking for myself. There might be people who are 6’7″ out there and how many hundred pounds, but most of us aren’t. So, you know, when you were gladiator, you were the physical exception. You would have been six foot in a time when people were between 4’6″ to five foot, just as wrestlers today are six foot something and seven foot. You had music playing as you came out. There was an element of the fight, which wasn’t really real. You know, you weren’t aiming to kill each other. You were aiming to put on a show. I think that’s the sense of wrestling.

Brett McKay: Oh yeah. So when you say wrestling, you’re talking about like professional wrestling, like WWE or WWF wrestling.

Alexander Mariotti: WWE. That’s right. Yeah. I’m talking about The Rock. Like, and again, even the names, like the names of gladiators really mimic perfectly the names of wrestlers or wrestlers mimic the names of gladiators, you know, The Rock, The Undertaker. These are fantastic names because they evoke a feeling, an image, a persona and you had it with gladiators as well. You know, you just need to say Spartacus. Oh, wow. Okay. That’s a great name. Blade. We had one called Flamma, Fiamma, the Blaze. I mean, you can imagine a wrestler called Blaze and there was a gladiator called Blaze.

Brett McKay: That’s really cool. So why did they go away?

Alexander Mariotti: Well, they went away for the same, you know, the three things that changed the world, money, politics, and religion. So basically what happened was throughout the Roman Empire, because there was so many arenas, the priests of the Imperial cult, which is imagine it from an administrative point of view, you have people out in the provinces because the emperor doesn’t actually physically go there most of the time, who represent the emperor. And to show the locals that you are lucky to be in the Roman Empire, you get all the benefits, you know, like you do the sort of Starbucks of ancient times, you get civilization you get a Starbucks, a McDonald’s. Well in Roman times you get baths and you get a library you get a senate house and you get an amphitheater. And periodically the priest will put on games in honor of the Emperor. So the locals will be, you know, fantastic. I’ve got a local amphitheater and I’ve got people fighting for me because the Emperor is so kind. But the problem is that the people had to pay for them.

So Marcus Aurelius, to stop people ruining themselves financially to do this, puts a limit on how much money you can spend on a game, how much money the gladiators can earn. He basically puts gaps on them. And by the way, I feel that our modern sports are going to hit something very soon just like that. When you look at the astronomical quantities that players are paid, games cost to put on. You know, the Super Bowl, I was looking at the numbers, I mean, gosh, the amount of money that it takes to put on a Super Bowl is going to reach a level when the amount of money it costs is going to exceed the amount of money it makes. And then that’s when you’re going to have problems. That’s what happened with gladiatorial combat is that there were limits on how much people earned, how much the games could be, how much could be spent. So all of a sudden it wasn’t lucrative like it was. So the sort of heyday started to pass after 180 AD. It still goes on to 430 AD, but it doesn’t have the prestige it used to.

And I think a good example of this is baseball, where I don’t think baseball is quite as prestigious as it was, because the money’s kind of gone out of baseball. So, you know, if I’m an athlete, do I want to be a baseball player or do I want to be a basketball or an NFL player? Well, who makes the most money? Yeah, I think I’ll be an NFL player, thanks. And religion is ultimately, yeah, socially things change because Christianity came in, but again, the Christians were not so concerned with the well-being of the gladiators, the athletes, they couldn’t care less. They were more concerned that they wanted people to be less animalistic. And they felt that the games brought out the worst in people. So it just basically just faded away. And politics is because Rome was, of course, the capital of the empire. But the Emperor Constantine moved this to Turkey to Istanbul. And when Constantinople was founded, the public really had no power in Rome anymore. So the point of putting on the games is to win people over politically, to keep them happy, you know, distract them. But when they had no political sense anymore, political power, it made no sense. And they didn’t do it for them anymore. And of course, that’s where the Coliseum was. So it faded into history.

Brett McKay: So there’s been a lot of movies made about gladiators, and you’ve consulted on shows about gladiators. Do you have your like top three favorite gladiator movies?

Alexander Mariotti: My top movie, you know, I like, I love them all. I love them all because they all have aspects that I love. Obviously like Gladiator I was amazing because it brought the Coliseum to life. I don’t think anyone really had a sense of what the games were like visually until Gladiator came along. There’s this great shot where Maximus is fighting Tigris in the middle of the arena and it’s like a wide shot and you just see the whole arena and you realize people were just concentrated on two little figures in the middle. You know, I do love the series Spartacus because I think it gives you a real sense of what the gladiator was, his life was like, you know, the sort of sex, drugs and rock-a-roll of its time or sex, wine and I guess harp music, whatever the equivalent was in antiquity, probably opium, I suppose. But it really showed the sort of life of the gladiator inside the lotus. I thought that was great. And of course the sex involved because that was a huge draw.

You became a sex symbol, you know. Sex is a major drive for anybody and being a gladiator was a sure way to be just an object. And it’s amazing how many objects we find related to gladiators and sex from antiquity. So I like different shows for different aspects. And even Gladiator II. I have to say I really loved Gladiator II as well. I did some work on Gladiator II and I thought just the views of the Coliseum. Who’s ever seen a naval battle? We just got to sit and watch a naval battle in the Coliseum, brought to life with our technology. And how fascinating that to us it’s amazing. And then you think, imagine what it was like when you saw it in real life 2000 years ago. If it amazes us who have all sorts of spectacle to blow us away in technology, and yet we can still sit and see two ships in a Coliseum and go, wow, that’s cool. Imagine when you saw it in the amphitheater 2000 years ago.

Brett McKay: Last question, why do you think people continue to find gladiators so compelling, even in the 21st century?

Alexander Mariotti: I think it’s an easy one. I think there’s a variety of reasons. The first is because we still admire virtus, because we still admire strength and courage and resilience. Just like the Romans did. You see it in our superstars and our sports stars, our superheroes. The gladiators were the first version. I think second reads because we see ourselves more as the gladiators. They’re the most relatable of all the characters of antiquity because we don’t see ourselves in emperors or nobles. Very few of us do. We don’t live that life. But the gladiator is the commoner. It’s the guy who comes from nothing and makes his way up the ranks and makes fortune and fame and success. I’m still talking about them. But I also think that especially personally, and I think most people can sort of associate with it, is that there’s a great level of psychology. The arena was a representation of life. So when you saw animals fighting people, that was the savagery of wild and how man can confront even a lion.

It’s terrifying, but you can do it. You know, you have to be brave, you have to be full of virtus. When you saw criminals getting executed, you saw this chaos, but there’s order and bring order. And when you saw the gladiator, you saw a representation of how we live. We all find ourselves in a fight at some point in our lives. Not a physical fight. It can be an emotional or a mental struggle. It’s still battle. Life is war. It’s a fight. And somebody ultimately holds our fate in their hands. So really, if you look at it, you know, it’s a sort of metaphor there. The gladiator is us, the arena is life, and the emperor is whatever we’re fighting, whether it’s health or bad luck, who’s going to hold sway of our lives. And they inspire us to fight and to succeed, to face death and overwhelming odds of courage. And who cannot be inspired by that?

Brett McKay: Well, Alexander, this has been a fascinating conversation. Where can people go to learn more about your work?

Alexander Mariotti: Oh, that’s very kind of you, Brett. Thank you. You can find me on my website, alexandermariotti.com, or follow me on Instagram as thegladiatorhistorian. I usually put out all sort of my talks or appearances, or come visit me in Rome. I’m in Rome. I do some work over there. So whether Rome and London, you can come and find me at the British Museum or usually around the Coliseum somewhere.

Brett McKay: Well, Alexander Mariotti, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Alexander Mariotti: Brett, as they say, strength and honor. And thank you so much.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Alexander Mariotti. He’s a gladiator historian. You can find more information about his work at his website, alexandomariotti.com. Also check out our show notes at aom.is/gladiators. Where you can find links to our resources we delve deeper into this topic. Well that wraps up another edition of the AOM Podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com, where you find our podcast archives, and check out our new newsletter. It’s called Dying Breed. You can sign up at dyingbreed.net. It’s a great way to support the show directly. As always, thank you for the continuous support, until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you have heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Plenty of famous explorers and frontiersmen emerged from America’s periods of expansion and exploration, and today the likes of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett remain household names.

You’re probably not familiar, but should be, with the name of another prominent pioneer: Jedediah Smith. Smith was a hunter, trapper, writer, cartographer, mountain man, and explorer who notched a lot of firsts: He was the first to lead a documented exploration from the Salt Lake frontier to the Colorado River and was part of the first parties of U.S. citizens to cross the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, and the Great Basin Desert. Having survived three attacks by Native Americans and one mauling by a grizzly bear, Smith’s explorations became resources for those who followed after and led to the use of the South Pass as the dominant route across the Continental Divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.

In the new book he co-authored, Throne of Grace: A Mountain Man, an Epic Adventure, and the Bloody Conquest of the American West, my guest, Bob Drury, uses the oft-forgotten Smith as a guide to an oft-forgotten period in American history. Today on the show, Bob paints a picture of a volatile American landscape in which trappers and Native Americans collided and clashed in the early decades of the 19th century. We discuss how the Lewis and Clark expedition created a lust for adventure among young men, how the humble beaver played an outsized role in settling the Western frontier, and how warfare changed amongst Native American tribes with the introduction of the horse. Along the way, Bob shows us how the life of Jed Smith intersected with all these historic trends and shares the epic exploits that he and other mountain men took part in while exploring and mapping the American West.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Bob’s last appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #469 — How Valley Forge Turned the Tide of the Revolutionary War
• AoM article about mountain men
• AoM Podcast #681: The Epic Exploits of Kit Carson
• Hugh Glass

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Read the Transcript

Brett McKay: Hey, this is Brett. I wanna let you know that we have an enrollment going on right now for our summer cohort of The Strenuous Life. The Strenuous Life is an online-offline program that we created to help you put into action all the things we’ve been talking about and writing about on AOM for the past 16 years. And we’ve done that in a few ways. First, we created 50 different badges based around 50 different skills. There’s hard skills like wilderness survival, outdoorsman-ship, knot tying, building fires, but also soft skills like how to be a better host, how to improve your social skills, how to be a better husband, better father. We also provide weekly challenges that are gonna push you outside of your comfort zone, mentally, physically, and socially. We also provide daily accountability for physical activity and doing a good deed. And every new member of The Strenuous Life goes through what we call The Strenuous Life challenge. It’s a twelve-week bootcamp that’s gonna help you develop a bias toward action that’s gonna carry over to other areas of your life. And at the end of the twelve-week bootcamp, if you completed all the requirements, we’ll send you a challenge coin that’ll commemorate your achievement.

If you want to learn more about The Strenuous Life, head over to Strenuouslife.co. You can also sign up if you want to sign up. Deadline to sign up is Thursday, June 13th at 09:00 PM Central Time. And then the challenge, the bootcamp challenge starts on Saturday, June 15th. Strenuouslife.co. Go check it out. I hope to see you on The Strenuous Life.

Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Plenty of famous explorers and frontiersmen emerged from America’s periods of expansion and exploration, and today the likes of Daniel Boone, Kit Carson, and Davy Crockett remain household names. You’re probably not familiar, but should be with the name of another prominent pioneer, Jedediah Smith. Smith was a hunter, trapper, rider, cartographer, mountain man, and explorer who notched a lot of firsts. He was the first to lead a documented exploration from the Salt Lake frontier to the Colorado River and was part of the first parties of US citizens to cross the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, and the Great Basin Desert. Having survived three attacks by Native Americans and one mauling by a grizzly bear, Smith’s explorations became resources for those who followed after and led to the use of the South Pass as the dominant route across the continental divide for pioneers on the Oregon Trail.

In the new book he co-authored, Throne of Grace, a Mountain man, an epic adventure in the bloody conquest of the American West. My guest, Bob Drury, uses the oft-forgotten Smith as a guide to an oft-forgotten period in American history. Today on the show, Bob paints a picture of a volatile American landscape in which trappers and Native Americans collided and clashed in the early decades of the 19th century. We discuss how the Lewis and Clark expedition created a lust for adventure among young men, how the humble beaver played an outsized role in settling the western frontier, and how warfare changed amongst Native American tribes with the introduction of the horse. Along the way, Bob shows us how the life of Jed Smith intersected with all these historic trends and shares the epic exploits that he and other mountain men took part in while exploring and mapping the American West. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/mountainmen.

All right? Bob Drury, welcome back to the show.

Bob Drury: Oh, thank you, Brett. Thank you. It’s always a pleasure.

Brett McKay: So, you’ve got a new book out with your co-author, Tom Clavin. I really enjoyed this book. It’s called Throne of Grace a Mountain man, an epic adventure in the bloody conquest of the American West. And what I liked about this book is it covers a period of American history that I think gets overlooked by a lot of people. This is the period after the Lewis and Clark expedition, but before the mass migration of Americans into the West, starting in the 1830s, 1840s. And then you tell the story about this period through the life of this guy named Jedediah Smith. And this guy, I didn’t know this guy existed. He had an epic life. So, let’s do some background here before we get into Jedediah Smith and these mountain men. So, in 1803, the Louisiana Purchase happens, the US acquires a ton of new land from France, and Thomas Jefferson sends out Lewis and Clark to go check it out. So, what was the purpose of that expedition, and then how did that expedition influence American culture afterwards?

Bob Drury: Alright, so you have 1803. With the acquisition infix the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon, we doubled the size, veritably, of the United States. Now, President Thomas Jefferson, “What’s out there? What beasts are out there?” There were all kinds of rumors of cyclops and sirens, and it was almost like a Homeric that the monsters that could be out there in the mountains, the Rocky Mountains and beyond. So, of course, Jefferson extracts from Congress money for the Lewis and Clark expedition. That takes two years, from 1804 to 1806, they make it to the Pacific, and now they have a vague idea of how big this continent is. Or how big the North American continent is. And not only politicians, but businessmen back east, or the germ of a coast-to-coast empire started to germinate. If I may repeat myself, “How do we make this happen?” Now at the same time, you mentioned in your intro about this is an era that is really not been covered too much. And when my co-author, Tom Clavin and I, looked into this, we were shocked, as we think most Americans will be, about the violent mechanizations that were going on and the political mechanizations that were going on west of the Mississippi.

I mean, the Northwest, the Oregon Country, not the Oregon Territory. The Oregon territory became the state of Oregon, but the Oregon Country at the time, which today states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, the western sliver of Montana, the top of Utah, Nevada. It was contested territory. We did not have a Canadian border. In fact, we were negotiating in London where the border would be between Canada and the United States. It was the 49th parallel, but that only ran to the Rocky Mountains. So, Jefferson and presidents after him, from Madison to Monroe, they were worried that the British were going to. We had thrown them out during the American Revolution. We had repelled them during the War of 1812. And here they were using a private proxy, the Hudson’s Bay Company, to kind of filter down from Canada and come in the back door of the North American continent. And businessmen, railroad magnates, politicians were rather up in arms about this because the trappers, the beaver trappers from the Hudson’s Bay Company, they were building stockades and forts along the same route that Lewis and Clark had taken to the Pacific. So, everyone 3000 miles away in Washington, DC, was urging the westerners, and by westerners at this point, I mean, the newly elected state of Missouri.

We’ve got to get people, trappers up into those Rocky Mountains and beyond. I mean, everyone knew that, it was a Scotsman who coined the phrase, “possession is nine-tenths of the law.” So, whoever gets a foot in that back door, so to speak, they’re gonna have. Man, the cliches are rolling out of me today, but they’re gonna have a leg up on settling this land and colonizing this land. Of course, what I’m really saying is stealing this land from the Indians.

Brett McKay: And then not only were there the political conflict between the United States and Great Britain, there was Mexico was kind of there too, a little bit. And then you also had, in this area, speaking of Native Americans, we’re gonna talk about this here in a bit. The conflict between Native American tribes started going up and you also started seeing that conflict carry over to white Americans. And you also mentioned after this Lewis and Clark expedition, it really did. It set a fire, particularly under young men, to go out there. They saw these guys. They were celebrities. These guys were rock stars, Lewis and Clark. And they’re like, “I want to be like this guy.”

Bob Drury: Correct.

Brett McKay: And so you had all these young men signing up with these trapping companies to go out and be like Lewis and Clark.

Bob Drury: Well, you hit it on the head because I only mentioned the Northwest Territory. We didn’t realize during the research for this book. I mean, you think of the Alamo in 1836 and Texas becomes a republic, the Mexican-American War 10 years later. But as early as the beginning of the 19th century, Americans were already casting covetous glances at the northern Mexican territory, which of course, at the time was Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and the jewel in the crown, California, not to mention large swaths of Nevada and Utah and Colorado. And so you have the Brits to the northwest, you have the Mexicans to the southwest. And in between are these tribes which had, over the centuries, pretty much delineated their territory. Whether it was the Sioux, Arikara in the Missouri River corridor, whether it was the Pawnee, Cheyenne, Arapaho out on the plains, the Blackfeet and the Gros Ventre, the Shoshone up in the mountains. And these tribes, they warred among themselves to secure this territory. And what most people are, I think, unaware of and probably because Hollywood influence, a lot of these tribes that we think of being horseback raiders. The Cheyenne, the Pawnee, they were sedentary tribes.

They were farmers who lived in mud wattle houses and till the ground, until the great North American horse dispersal, when in the 1500s, the late 1500s, the Pueblos rose, overthrew the Spanish overseers who were basically enslaved them and wanted nothing to do with European culture. So they freed all these horses, all these mustangs who just started proliferating across the west. And they followed the old trading traces. So the Apache were first to get horses, then the Comanche, then the chia, and if you would almost follow the northern trail until the Cree in Canada had horses. And these horses changed everything.

Now where previously you really had to think about making war, if the Sioux were going to attack the Arikara, or if the crow were going to attack the Cheyenne, it meant a 100 mile march, a 200 mile march, and then a siege. But now with the horse, everything changed. And everything in the west became so fluid, so into this fluidity steps these American beaver trapping outfits. At the time, they were all, most of them were outfitted in St. Louis. And the best way to get up into the mountains was by Flatboat up the Missouri River.

It was a long, arduous journey. Each flat boat did have a sail, but mostly you were just poling or pulling through rapids. And in the beginning, the tribes helped Lewis and Clark. Lewis and Clark would have not made it to the Pacific if it wasn’t for the help of several different tribes. Everybody knows about Sacagawea, who was a Shoshone, by the way, but the Blackfeet showed them how to get through the Rockies. The Arikara put them up for several weeks. They didn’t mind this small group of white men. White hairy beasts, they called them. They didn’t mind them passing through. But as more and more of these trappers started trespassing into their territory, they became violent.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And part of the problem too, is these white settlers, these white mountain men they were stepping into, they didn’t understand completely the fluidity of the geopolitics amongst Native American nations. They’d think, like, “Oh, I’ll work with the Kiowa.” But they didn’t understand. Well, the Kiowa don’t doesn’t like this tribe. And then, like that other tribes gonna attack, and they just… They stepped in it several times because of that.

Bob Drury: You trade with the Sioux. Sioux were bitter enemies with the Arikara. You trade with the Sioux. And then you mentioned Jedediah Smith. His outfit would go up and then attempt to trade with the Arikara. And they say, “Well, wait a minute, you were just with our mortal enemies.” I mean, the Sioux hated the Arikara and the Pawnee. The Blackfeet hated the Cheyenne. The Cheyenne hated the Crow. So it was almost. It reminds me when I was in Afghanistan, every other valley was at war with the next valley until either Genghis Khan or the British or the Russians or eventually us came in. And then they banded together, more or less, to fight us. Well, it was almost the same in the early 19th century American West. Okay, I hate you, and I’ve hated you for centuries. But here come these white men, and they don’t want to just pass through. They want to take our land. And the concept of owning land, of course, was foreign to most of the Western tribes, and it just created a really violent mess. I mean, the throne of grace is not for the queasy. I mean, we depict many ways to die, whether it’s disemboweling s or beheadings or burnings at the stake.

By both sides, Brett, by both sides. And it created a dangerous milieu for these trappers who became known as mountain men, to be entering into.

Brett McKay: Yeah. The chapter about how the horse and the gun changed Native American warfare was really fascinating. You talk about this. That was really interesting how tribes in the West, we’re talking, like, west of the Mississippi, they fought differently than tribes in the East. And so you had these trappers who were coming from the East, who were maybe familiar with the Iroquois and how they did things.

Bob Drury: The Shawnee and the Mohawk, they were kind of hit and run. They didn’t have horses. They did have horses, but horses weren’t as proficient. And also, horses weren’t as expedient in the woodlands as they were in the plains. So the eastern woodland tribes would raid for say, they had been wiped out by… A village had been wiped out by drought. They needed men. They would kidnap kids. The tribes in the West, they had vast, vast territories to cover. And the tribes in the East never kind of raided for territory, but the tribes in the West did. And that came down to one thing, the buffalo. Where are the buffalo trails? Where are the buffalo moving? That’s the land we want. And if the Crow happened to be on that land, then the Sioux was gonna push them out. If the Blackfeet happened to be on that land, then the Shoshone is gonna make war on the Blackfeet. And once again, I’m repeating myself, but it was such a fluid sense of violence that here we come. We, I mean, Euro Americans, here we come walking into this, and we really have no clue. We just want beaver.

Beaver pelts at the time, were the most expensive fur in the world. And if we happen to step on some Blackfeet toes or some Arikara toes or some Gros Ventre toes as we’re going after the beavers, so be it.

Brett McKay: And you also talk about how a lot of these mountain men, they were shocked about how Western tribes fought ’cause, like, it was no quarter given.

Bob Drury: No, no.

Brett McKay: And everyone understood, all the tribes understood, if you get killed or you get captured, you’re gonna have a bad time, you’re gonna get mutilated ’cause I guess it’s just part of their belief that…

Bob Drury: A happy hunting ground. They believed most, I don’t want to put 100%, but I’d say a good 85% to 90% of the Western Plains and mountain tribes believed that you went to the afterlife, the happy hunting ground, in the shape in which you died. So if you wounded or captured or, and then you killed one of your captives, first you were going to take out his eyes because this afterlife was beautiful. It was filled with game. It was filled with fair maidens. It was the land of milk and honey, so to speak. But if you went there with no eyes and you couldn’t see it, well, that was your problem. If you went there with no fingers or no arms to draw back a bow to take this game, well then that was your problem. If you went there with no penis, would they cut your penis off and you could not take advantage of these wonderful, beautiful maidens, well you were almost in a living hell, even though it was heaven to them. It was almost like sending your enemy to hell. And that was another reason. When the Euro Americans and later Americans stepped into this violence, they were just aghast.

I mean, there were many soldiers that. We’re not talking soldiers yet from… We got another 50 years to go. Even though the first declared war against the Native American tribe did take place against the Arikara in 1820. But for the most part, the mountain men and the early soldiers, they would take a boot strap or even a piece of string and they would tie it to the trigger of their long rifles. And before, if they were losing a fight and they knew they were going to get killed, they’d turn that long rifle around and put the loop of the string around their toe and they blow their own heads off rather than be captured.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it’s crazy. So, you mentioned the beaver trapping, and I didn’t know this. I think most people think about the Western expansion. They think of buffalo and what happened in the 1850s and 1860s with the buffalo hunting. You hear those stories of hunters just riding on trains and shooting buffalo.

Bob Drury: Right.

Brett McKay: But, the next time you see a beaver, you see these little animals. I see them when I’m out on hikes. We have to thank that animal for Western expansion. That animal had such a big part in expanding the American territory. So tell us about this. What did the beaver fur industry look like in the 19th century? You alluded to it a little bit, but flesh us out more.

Bob Drury: All right, so the beaver has pretty much gone extinct in the mountains of Europe. Beaver, of course, live in high altitude, cool territories where they make their burrows and they dam up rivers and streams, and they live in these ponds. And so at the time, beaver fur, as I mentioned, was the most expensive fur in the world, more expensive than mink, than otter. And the reason was, I don’t wanna get too much in the weeds here about the science of the lanolin in the beaver fur made beaver fur waterproof. So the hat-making industry in Europe, here’s a stat that just blew my mind. Between 1800 and 1850, British milliners shipped 20 million beaver headpieces to the continent. They were couture in Paris. They were wanted in Italy and Spain. The Russians had killed off all their own beaver. And even the Chinese would make long beaver coats. And because of the oddity of the beaver fur being waterproof. And, in fact, here’s a little aside. I love these little asides. When they would make the mash to shape the beaver hat, hat makers would add mercury. Now, if you got mercury poisoning, it mimicked the symptoms of insanity.

And that’s where the saying “mad as a hatter” came from, because of people making beaver hats and adding the mercury. So, anyway, you could get rich, and many people did, including our protagonist, Jedediah Smith. You could get very wealthy going up into the North American mountains, which was the last bastion on Earth. We had even played out the Daniel Boone generation, had played out the beaver in the Appalachians. So the last place on Earth were in the Rocky Mountains stretching down from Canada all the way down into New Mexico. And so when we started going after this beaver, it just upended politically, socially, and culturally, everything that had happened in the previous millennia in the Western United States.

Brett McKay: Okay, so you have this situation. The United States has acquired New territory. They are worried about the geopolitics. They’re worried about Britain coming in and taking territory that belongs to us. Connected to that is the beaver trapping industry, ’cause Great Britain was basically using the beaver trapping industry as a front basically.

Bob Drury: Yeah right, there was a slow cold war going on in the Northwest.

Brett McKay: And then it all came out of St. Louis as sort of the starting off point for all these things. And you talk about. There’s basically, there was at the time, in the 1820s, started in the 1820s, there was this race, like, we got to get as much beaver as we can and acquire as much territory over there and claim it. And there was, I think there was like four big trading outfits that were in competition. Right?

Bob Drury: Right. Three of them out of St. Louis and one of them overland out of Minnesota. And they were all egged on is not strong enough. They were all encouraged, as I said, by the politicians, by the business magnets back west. We got to get a foothole here in both the southwest and the northwest.

So you got these outfits going into the mountains and beyond into the Snake River, to the Snake River country, into what was then the Oregon country. And most people think the Monroe Doctrine was aimed at Spain because of their Caribbean holdings, their Central American holdings, but it was really aimed at the Brits. It was Monroe telling them, stay out of the Oregon country. That’s our country. We had Lewis and Clark out there a decade and a half ago, and we aim to keep that country. So you’ve got this mechanism, and when you have the Hudson’s Bay Company trappers running into the American trappers out of St. Louis, there are near gunfights. And so how is all this gonna be settled? It’s all gonna be settled by getting the most people in there. And that’s what we tried to do, and that’s exactly what we did.

Brett McKay: We’re going to take a quick break for you. Word from our sponsors. And now back to the show. So, Jed Smith, Jedediah Smith came of age in this milieu, and this is the protagonist of your story. Tell us about this guy. What was his origins, where was he born? And then how did he end up becoming a beaver trapper?

Bob Drury: Well, here’s the deal Brett, Tom Clavin and I, I don’t know, especially with our frontier books, not so much our World War II books and our other combat books but with our frontier books, blood and treasure, the heart of everything, that is. We like to think that we write biographies of eras as opposed to of people. But if we’re going to write a biography of an era, and once again, when we started looking into this, the first half of the 19th century, you want to call that an epoch? We said, there’s stuff here, there’s great stuff here, but who is going to be our guide to take us through? And just as Daniel Boone was our guide through blood and treasure, just as the Sioux warrior chief Red Cloud was our guy through the heart of everything, that is, we started digging into the logical place to start was in St. Louis. In 1822, the lieutenant governor of St. Louis put out an advertisement in all the St. Louis papers asking for 100 good men to ascend the river Missouri to its source right on the continental divide, and to stay for one, two or three years trapping beaver.

So we started going through, who are these guys? It’s the Butch Cassidy question to the Sundance Kid, who are these guys that answered this ad? And there were so many to choose from. I mean, Jim Bridger, I’m surprised he’s not a bigger name today. He was only a teenager when he signed up, but he knew more than men, well I wouldn’t say twice his age, because there weren’t that many old mountain men, but he was teaching people. Oh, your buckskins are riddled with lice. Take them off and put them over a red anthill. The ants will eat the other insects. It was said about Bridger that however many bullets he went out with, that’s how many buffalo he would come back with. And broken hand. Fitzpatrick. Thomas Fitzpatrick is an Irish born. He became a scout, and he was probably the most… He handled horses better than any mountain man we read about. There was this one journal keeper Jim Kleiman. He was born in Virginia, and he had had something of an early education from Methodist circuit riders. And when we were reading his journals, you could tell he was an educated man.

He would write things like, the troop I am riding with now makes Falstaff’s battalion look genteel. But we could not find anyone who was kind of our Zellig, our Daniel Boone, our Red Cloud, until we ran across Jedediah Strong Smith. Jed had been born in 1899 in New York, Susquehanna Valley…

Brett McKay: 1799.

Bob Drury: 1799, I am sorry. And his family, hard Puritan stock, had moved west with the expanding nation, first to Pennsylvania, then to Ohio, then to Illinois. By the time he was in his late teens, he had already worked as a seaman on supply boats in the Great Lakes, supply ships on the Great Lakes. He was a crack shot. And when he saw General Ashley’s ad, Ashley being the lieutenant governor of Missouri, he took a skiff from Illinois down the Mississippi to St. Louis, and he signed up, and Ashley immediately hired him as a hunter-trapper. Ashley liked the cut of Smith’s jib, so to speak. I mean, among all these whiskey swilling, cigar-smoking, womaning up mountain men with a wife, “in every tribe”, Smith carried that Puritanism with him. I mean, in his saddlebags, he carried the family Bible.

He abhorred the smell of tobacco smoke. He drank. He would sip a wine when necessary just for politesse, but he was not a drinker. He never womaned up. One of the contemporaneous descriptions of him in the St. Louis newspaper was, and I like this phrase, I want to make sure I get it right, the mountaintop was his altar, the forest glade, his confessional. I mean, Brett, the guy shaved every day. Have you ever envisioned a mountain man without a big, burly beard? But what really drew Tom and I to Jed Smith was that he was an assiduous journal keeper and letter writer.

And his journals and his letters. We feel that contemporaneous writing is the key to the books we write. And Jed Smith supplied us with. He was the trailbreaker, and we followed his trail via his journals and via his letters, and he had nothing against commerce. He wanted to get rich but more important, Lewis and Clark were his idols. When he was a teenager, a country doctor had given him the Lewis and Clark journals, and he yearned to follow in their footsteps. And he wanted to be an explorer like Lewis and Clark. If he happened to make some money trapping beaver along the way, all the better.

And so here was our guy, and I know I’m going on, but when we kind of started digging into Jed Smith, Tom and I were like, we found our man. I mean, we never used the word discover in our books. I mean, Daniel Boone no more discovered the Cumberland Gap than Jed Smith discovered South Pass. Which of course is that break in the Rockies that became the Oregon Trail. It was wagon friendly, but I got to say, Jed Smith was the first American to pass through, to stumble through South Pass in the middle of a blizzard with the help of the Crows. He had gotten direction from the Crow tribe, and the only reason he knew he crossed the continental divide was because he dug down into the snow, and he could see beneath the ice that the frozen streams were running west. He was the first American to cross the Escalante and Mojave deserts and lead a party into California from the east. He was the first American to scout from San Diego up to what is today the Canadian border.

Then he came back east along the Canadian border and dropped back down to Utah around the Great Salt Lake. If you can envision this in your mind’s eye, and our book has plenty of maps to help you envision this, this man filled out the blank spaces that today are the contiguous United States. So when we found Smith, we said, we have our guide, we have our Boone, we have our Red Cloud, and we just ran with him.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And this guy, you mentioned all the stuff that he did, the firsts that he notched, but you also talk about the things that he encountered along his expeditions on these trapping trips, he had encountered a couple conflicts with Native Americans. There’s that first one with the Arikara.

Bob Drury: Arikara.

Brett McKay: Arikara tribe.

Bob Drury: Arikara. That was the war I mentioned before. That was the first declared war the United States declared on any Indian tribes west of the Mississippi. It was Smith’s trapping outfit who were ambushed by Arikaras on the beach below their villages, and they were pretty much wiped out. Smith survived, as did a dozen others, but that forced the blue coats in Missouri to march up the Missouri River. And it wasn’t much of a war. The Arikaras just scattered. Once the Americans started firing cannons and howitzers, the Arikaras just disappeared into the vast plains. But Smith, he led an expedition and his outfit was ambushed by Mojave Indians. And he and just a few survived. When he made it into California, he was immediately jailed as an American spy. And when he escaped from the jail near San Diego, made his way back up and he left his trapping crew on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada. Once again another first he was the first man to cross the Sierra Nevada in the middle of winter and then crossed the great man-killing Great Basin across Utah, Nevada recruited another party to rescue the men he left behind.

When he got there, they made a run for the Oregon country, and on the way they were ambushed by Umpqua Indians south of the Willamette Valley. And everyone but Smith and two others were wiped out. So he knew Indian fighting, he knew trapping. He was an inveterate, as I said, journal keeper, and here’s someone one day is sending plant cuttings, new plants he had never seen before, sending them by dispatch rider back east to botanists so they could study them. And the next day, he’s fighting Mojaves in the desert, outside the Mojave Desert. The man was a well-rounded man, Brad. He was a well-rounded man.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And so some of the things you talked about, that first attack by the Arakara, that was 1823, and then his trip out west to California where he was taken prisoner, then escaped and then got another attack that was like 1826.

Bob Drury: Correct.

Brett McKay: So he was constantly on the move during this period. He was never resting.

Bob Drury: No.

Brett McKay: And also during this time, I think he got attacked by a grizzly bear, right?

Bob Drury: Oh, yeah. Well, it’s almost like the word “hivernant” from the French “hibernation.” If you had spent a winter in the high peaks, in the high Rockies, you were considered a hivernant, which was a mountain man. Now, you’re a true mountain man, but you weren’t a really, really, really true mountain man until you were mauled by a grizzly. And of course, Jed was mauled by a grizzly as he was passing through the black hills. Took off the top of his head, and he always wore his hair long after that. Took off his eyebrows, took off part of his ear. But he survived. And I find that so many, Hugh Glass, Jed Smith, I feel that it was kind of accepted the flatlanders called the mountain men French Indians, and they were true mountain men if they had spent at least one winter. Well, I feel you weren’t a true mountain man until you got mauled by a grizzly bear.

Brett McKay: Also you mentioned Hugh Glass. This is another guy you talk about, famous mountain man. If you’ve seen that Leonardo DiCaprio movie.

Bob Drury: You’ve heard about the Richard Harris movie before, right?

Brett McKay: Right. For those who aren’t familiar with Hugh Glass, tell us about this guy ’cause it’s unbelievable what happened to this guy.

Bob Drury: Well, to be a true and good mountain man and to live, they’ve, not many of them lived long lives, but to live, you had to have a little luck. And Hugh Glass was one lucky man. He was moving up to Missouri with one of Smith’s outfits. And actually, Smith had broken off to explore the Black Hills, and he was attacked by a silverback. And basically, he was mauled so badly that Andrew Henry, the man who was in charge of the party, paid two men, one of whom was Jim Bridger, “Stay with him until he dies and bury him.” But they were surrounded by hostile Arikara. And Bridger was just a kid, but the older man said, “He’s dead. We got to get out of here.” That’s the shortened version of it. And so Hugh Glass wakes up. His gun is gone, his knife is gone. All he’s got is his flint in his possible sack. Possible sack was what mountain men carried that because anything you possibly needed was in this sack. And he made his hundreds and hundreds of miles. He stumbled, walked, crawled, eating dead buffalo calves that wolves had chewed over. He made it back.

Then when he made it back, he survived an Indian attack, and he vowed to go back up into the mountains to kill the men who left him for dead. By the time he gets back up into the mountains, he only finds Bridger. And he changes his mind. He goes, “You’re a kid. I should kill you, but you’re a kid.” So, anyway, now he’s trapping again, and Andrew Henry, his foreman, sends him back. “I need to get a message to St. Louis but don’t go back down the Missouri River. It’s too dangerous.” So he goes south, and he’s coming back down the Platte, and he’s attacked. He and four others are attacked by Pawnee. Two are killed right away. Glass, once again is left. He escapes. He finds kind of a caveish mountain, rocky outcrop that he hides in. But he still, once again, he’s hundreds of miles from what was then called civilization, an army outpost. He makes his way back to the army outpost. He straggles in and once again, is like, ” Hugh Glass. We thought you were dead.” For the second time, for the third time. And after that, I don’t want to give away what happened to Hugh Glass.

But after that, he temporarily abandoned beaver trapping to try his hand at trading down in Santa Fe. But he does end up back in the mountains at the end of our book, and he meets, no pun intended, a grisly end.

Brett McKay: So if you were a Boy Scout, you probably did something. I did this, the mountain man rendezvous. So you’d get together with, like, a bunch of other Boy Scout troops from a big geographic area.

Bob Drury: Jamborees. Didn’t they call them jamborees out west?

Brett McKay: Yeah, there was jamborees, but I did. There was like, they called them rendezvous, and it was supposed to mimic the mountain men rendezvous that happened during this period, where you’d go and you’d trade stuff. You’d trade pocket knives and patches and things like that. It was fun. So tell us about, this was an important part of mountain man culture, and Smith played a big role in that. What was the rendezvous?

Bob Drury: Well, in the early 1820s, they realized by the day, I mean, the trappers and their backers, the money men behind the trappers. They realized they were losing money, taking these keelboats up the Missouri River and then down its tributaries, whether it was the Yellowstone or the powder or the tongue or the Musselshell or up the Judith. There’s got to be a better way. And after Jed Smith more or less stumbled through South Pass and sent word back, hey, here’s a way through the mountains where we don’t need the rivers anymore. Well, this enabled, first, it took a while. It took several years before wagons actually came through, but this enabled long pack trains to go overland.

So they realized going all the way, hundreds and hundreds of miles from St. Louis through South Pass and then to pick up these beaver furs and deliver supplies and then come back, we have to have some system to this. So Jed Smith and his benefactor and boss, by this time, Jed Smith is partners with General Henry, the lieutenant governor of Missouri. They said, “You know what? Why don’t we do this every summer? We’ll set a place where all the mountain men throughout the west will come in June and they’ll bring in their beaver pelts, plews, they were called. They’ll bring in their plews, and we’ll sell them their moccasin oils, their new buckskins, their knives, their saws, their ammunition and shot their new guns and most of all, their whiskey in rumenous.

And this is how the rendezvous started. It almost started by accident. And of course, I think if you ask most people today, what they know about the mountain men, it would be, oh, the rendezvous. So these rendezvous went on for a good 15 years. They kind of petered out in the late 1830s as sadly for the mountain men, not only had they denuded the northwest and the mountains of beaver, but the new silk trade with newly opened China, British silk trade. Silk kind of took over as headgear, fashionable headgear from beaver headgear. But for a good 15 years, these mountain men rendezvous. Brett, I can’t imagine you or I what we would… How wide would our eyes be if we saw we’re standing on a bare plot of land where the rendezvous was supposed to be. Say we’re there two days early, and here comes men from hundreds of miles all over the west trickling in, carrying, leading horses with hundreds of pounds of beaver pelts. A, how did they find it? B, where did all the Indians come from? Because the Indians knew what was going on, and they came to trade. And C, the gunshots, the games, the drinking, the athletic contest, the shooting contest it’s just something that I can’t imagine in a modern world. It’s just, it’s something uniquely American that only happened for 15 years. And I’m not nostalgic about it at all. I’m just, I just wondered what would I be like if I were there. So.

Brett McKay: Yeah, it was crazy. It was all word of mouth. They didn’t have like the postal service wasn’t really set up.

Bob Drury: There was no telegraph, no smoke signals. No, it was just meet you and meet you in a year. In the Valley, the Aspen Valley, just Northwest of the Great Salt Lake. Okay, we’ll find you. Actually, that Aspen Valley became known as Cache Valley, C-A-C-H-E, because the mountain men would return every once in a while and cache their beaver pelts and then go back out again, waiting for the rendezvous to occur.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And again, Smith, he helped set this up. He was definitely, so that advertisement that he answered to, it was Henry. The advertisement said to enterprising young men, and Smith was an enterprising young man.

Bob Drury: Yeah. Well, when you think about it, I mean, not only, I mean, I don’t want to paint this guy as a religious prude because he was a leader. All those, the Broken Hand and Jim Bridger and Kleiman, they all gravitated towards Smith because they knew that he had the right stuff for his day. Probably would have been an astronaut in the 1960s. And just think about it. Here’s this, well, he’s not a kid. He’s 23 years old. He just turned 23 in 1822. He answers Henry’s ad. So he’s hired as a green horn hunter trapper. Within two years, he is partners with the general. And within four years, he and two other partners have bought the general out. So he’s running his own outfit as a 27 year old man. The guy knew his stuff.

Brett McKay: So you mentioned earlier, once we acquired the Louisiana Purchase, it was sort of like Darby monsters there. We didn’t really know what was going on. We thought there’s these, might’ve been these mythical creatures, but there’s also this idea that there was this mythical river that went to the Pacific ocean. I didn’t know about this.

Bob Drury: The Rio Buenaventura.

Brett McKay: Yeah. Tell us about this. ‘Cause this seemed like this was like the Eldorado of Americans.

Bob Drury: Precisely, precisely. In the mid 1700s, a couple of lost Spanish monks, they went North out of Mexico to proselytize and they ran into some Indians in Utah, of course, who told them about this river that ran to the salty water. Now, of course they were talking about the three rivers that ran into the great salt lake, but the monks misunderstood them. And for a good century, different map makers, both European and American, they had places Rio Buenaventura, my Spanish is… Buenaventura, the river of good fortune, running out of the Rocky mountains and entering the Pacific somewhere, usually around Monterey, sometimes into San Francisco Bay.

And politicians from Jefferson on were thirsting to discover this river because if we can find this river that will truly glue this country together as a coast to coast nation. And so every trapper or every foreman of every trapping company had two orders, bring in as much beaver as you can and find the Rio Buenaventura. And Jed Smith took a troop out and he had them circle the great salt lake. And he said, there’s nothing coming out of here. There’s three rivers coming into it. There’s nothing coming out of here. But wherever he went, he kept his eye. And finally he realized there is no river Rio Buenaventura, but no matter how many times he tried to tell the people back east through dispatch riders, there is no river. It continued to appear on maps, some maps into the 1850s.

Brett McKay: Yeah. And that looking for, when he was looking for that river, that’s when he got picked up by Mexico. What are you, you’re a spy. What are you doing here? And he was taking prisoner for a while.

Bob Drury: Right. Right. And he escaped and high-tailed it and trapped the Sierra Nevada as they were running. And he had two that that’s why he didn’t take his men with him over the Sierra Nevada. They had 2000 pounds of beaver pelts. So they caged him and he said, wait here for me. I’m gonna go get a company. I’m gonna come back and we’re gonna get this stuff out of here. And that’s when they made the run for Oregon. And that’s where they were ambushed by Umpqua Indians. And it just one thing after another, I mean, really. And Jed Smith lived all through it. He lived through it and well for a while anyway.

Brett McKay: Yeah. It’s a lot to live through and you can’t be a mountain man forever. So how does Jedidiah plot the next phase of his life? What happens to him?

Bob Drury: He’s five years into mountains. Hasn’t seen St. Louis. Hasn’t seen “civilization for five years”, but he’s getting homesick and he’s a wealthy man at this point. So he finds out that his mother has died back in Illinois and he decides to come out of the mountains and cash in his chips. He sells his company and this is how much money he had accrued. He made sure that St. Louis banks set up an annuity for his widowed father, which would today be the equivalent of $75,000 a year to, how did Jed Smith… To ease the pillow of his old age. But you can tell that he’s had it with the mountains. He’s only in his early 30s, but his letters back home, while he’s in St. Louis, he’s writing letters, not only to his father and to his brother. And there’s a religious, I mentioned before he was a hard Puritan. There’s a religious motif running through these letters.

He wrote to his father, the greatest pleasure I could enjoy would to be in the company of my family and my parish. He used the word home eight times in one paragraph with the assistance of divine Providence. I will be coming home soon, father. He was even more upfront to his older brother, Ralph. I just, I’m reading as it respects my spiritual welfare, dear brother, I hardly dare speak. Oh, when shall I be under the care of a Christian church? I have need of your prayers, my brother, I wish our society to bear me up before the almighty throne of grace. Well, when Tom and I read that letter, that’s what I said, there’s our title right there.

So anyway, he’s in St. Louis and not only is he writing letters home, but he’s writing these long missives reports really to president Andrew Jackson’s secretary of war, John Eaton. And when I told you before the specificity of his journals, he is telling Eaton exactly how many cannon the Mexicans have in each military Presidio. He is telling Eaton the disposition of the British along the Columbia river, what ship building capabilities they have at Fort Astoria, which is in Fort George, how many farmsteads they’re opening on the river. And he is pretty much railing saying we have to get out there. Americans have to get out there or this is never going to be part of the United States.

So anyway, while he’s doing this, sending his father money, he sends his brother Ralph money. There’s a farmstead. He buys a farmstead next to Ralph’s farmstead in Illinois. And he decides he’s going to retire there. And like his idols, his heroes, Lewis and Clark, he’s going to write his encyclopedia of the West, everything he’s seen. He even hires a professional map maker to put together, to professionalize his crude drawings. He hires a magazine editor to collate all his journals and his letters and his notes. As he’s ready to ship back East, three of his younger brothers show up in St. Louis, Ira, Benjamin, and Nelson. They all want to be mountain men. He’s like, he’s aghast. No, you do not want to be mountain men. You don’t know what it’s like up in those mountains.

So Nelson was only 16. So he sends him, he puts him in a college across the river in Illinois. He goes, Ira and Benjamin, I can’t forbid them to go up into the mountain, but let me give them a taste of what the frontier life is like. So he organizes a wagon train full of supplies that they’re gonna trade in Mexican Santa Fe. They’re gonna take the Santa Fe trail. Now the Santa Fe trail had been open maybe eight years before, so it was still rough and it was still frontier, but it wasn’t the mountains by any means. He figures, okay, let me give my brothers a little shakedown cruise here to let them know what they’re going to be up against.

So they set out in the spring of 1833 and they make, they’re following the trail, but Jed had bought a map that showed a shortcut across this arid desert piece of land. They called it the water scrape. So they crossed the Arkansas river, which was then the boundary, the border between Mexico and the United States. And they’re about eight days out and they’re out of water. They’ve run out of water. Jed is looking for the Cimarron river. Now the Cimarron, like the Mojave river is a dry river, which means it runs underground. It only surfaces during heavy rains or when it hits impermeable rock underground. He sees this rock outcropping several three miles away and he says, that’s got to be the Cimarron.

So he starts riding toward, the tongue of his Mustang is lolling out of its mouth. The horse is staggering. And he gets about a half mile away and he sees 15 to 20 riders come out from behind the rock outcropping. He recognizes them immediately as a combination of Kiowa and Comanche. The Kiowa and Comanche formed an alliance that became the most fierce, the fierce warriors in the Southwest. They had cowed the Spanish, the Mexicans after them. They’d even driven the mighty Apaches out of the territory. Now they had been watching wagon trains along the Santa Fe trail bisect their territory for seven, eight years now. And so they’re on the war path.

So Smith sees them and he figures, okay, I could try to make a run for it, but he notices their horses are well-watered, which means he was right. The Cimarron river was out there. Two, he could find some cover, a sand hill maybe, draw his creamer long rifle and his brace of flintlock pistols, try to fight them off and hope that the wagon train, which is maybe eight miles behind him, will hear the shots and send reinforcements or he can brazen it out and he could ride right into them and try to parley. And so those are three choices. Brett, I don’t know what choice you would make in that situation. I’m not sure what choice I would make in that situation, but if you wanna know what choice Jed Smith made in that situation, you’re just gonna have to read the damn book, aren’t you?

Brett McKay: So what was the legacy of this guy in the end? What influence did he have on American culture?

Bob Drury: I think at the time he would have been on the 19th century Mount Rushmore with Bridger, with Kit Carson, and probably with Boone. The reason that he’s not as well known as Boone or Crockett or Kit Carson is A, he wasn’t a self-aggrandizer. I mean, John C. Fremont wanted to run for president, so he made sure everyone knew every second of what he was doing. It was almost like they had Facebook in those days. And Crockett couldn’t say a sentence without the word Davy Crockett in it. And Carson and Boone were lucky enough to live to a fairly old age.

So dime novelists and newspaper men and magazine reporters and biographers, hagiographers really, they could talk to these men and I think that’s what made them famous. I think Jed Smith just died too young and I hope that his achievements, I hope our book, Throne of Grace, will somehow bring them a little more to light than they happen.

Brett McKay: Yeah, again, like think about all the firsts that he did. He filled in the gaps that Americans had at the time of their newly acquired territory.

Bob Drury: If you envision his travels, that’s the western half of the contiguous United States.

Brett McKay: When did The Age of the Mountain Man finally end in America?

Bob Drury: By the 1830s, the beaver were pretty much played out. And also, as I said, beaver couture in Europe was being overtaken by silk headwear. So late 1830s, I think the last rendezvous might’ve been 1840, 1841, there were mountain men who just stayed up in the mountains through the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s. But I’d say the heyday was the 1820s to the late 1830s. It was a very short period in our nation’s history, but it was certainly an exciting period. And due to the exploration that these men made, it was an important period.

Brett McKay: Well, Bob, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Bob Drury: Oh, anywhere. I mean, as you well know, Brett, we’re everywhere. I understand. I prefer, I give my business to independent bookstores, but I know that Amazon is cheaper. And if you want to buy the book on Amazon, that’s fine. And I’ll be interested in seeing what kind of, the book’s only been out a week and a half now. I’ll be interested in seeing what kind of feedback we get from historians, which we always do about how this may or may not raise Smith’s profile in that pantheon of American explorers that we talked about before.

Brett McKay: Well, Bob Drury, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Bob Drury: Brett, thank you. I appreciate it. Always a pleasure.

Brett McKay: My guest today is Bob Drury. He’s the co-author of the book, Throne of Grace. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. Check out our show notes at aom.is/mountainmen. We find links to resources. We delve deeper into this topic.

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AOM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you find our podcast archives, as well as thousands of articles that we’ve written over the years about pretty much anything you think of. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate it if you’d take one minute to give us a read on our podcast or Spotify. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think read something out of it. As always, thank you for the continued support. Until next time, it’s Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the AOM podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.