RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://spectator.org/who-is-james-k-polk-an-old-question-asked-again/

Who is James K. Polk?” his opponents in the 1844 presidential election mockingly asked. Two centuries later, the question is asked again more quizzically. For one thing, James K. Polk proved a president can be both a big-picture visionary and an effective manager.

Elected as a Democrat from Tennessee, Polk has long been characterized as a dark horse. In fact, he was anything but. Before becoming president, Polk served 14 years in Congress — four as Speaker of the House. He had been governor of Tennessee, a hopeful for vice president in 1840, and the apparent choice to balance presumptive Democratic nominee Martin Van Buren of New York in 1844. When Van Buren failed to be nominated in a convention divided over the annexation of Texas, Polk rode a white horse out of the chaos.

Scholarly Polk was a stickler for detail all his life. As a young attorney in Nashville, he criticized an older Sam Houston for attempting to execute a judgment from a North Carolina court that was not properly authenticated. For his part, the much looser Houston is said to have observed that Polk was “a victim of the use of water as a beverage.”

Sober and somber, Polk carried his attention to detail throughout his political career, earning respect from friends and foes alike whether he was presiding over the House of Representatives or navigating the constituencies and issues of the cutthroat politics of 19th-century Tennessee.

“I intend to be myself, President of the United States,” Polk told a Tennessee confidante after his election, discounting rumors he would be Andrew Jackson’s or anyone else’s pawn. Then, Polk took the unprecedented step of insisting his cabinet appointees pledge not only to support the Democratic platform but also refrain from seeking the presidency themselves. If you run, Polk told them, you must resign.

James K. Polk never let executive details, political infighting, or public opinion distract him from the specific goals — his “four great measures” he called them — that he enumerated for his administration: the resolution of the decades-old joint occupation of the Oregon country with Great Britain; the acquisition of California and an expanse of the Southwest from Mexico; the reduction of the tariff that stifled the southern economy; and the creation of an independent treasury system immune from national bank wars.

With the 80th anniversary marking the end of World War II fast approaching, the number of combatants still alive is shrinking. The Bureau of Veteran Affairs estimated last year that, out of over 16 million Americans who served in the War, approximately 66,000 men and women are still with us, with an estimated 55 dying each day. As well, we are rapidly losing even those with memories of the War.

So it is fitting to mark battles in which members of our families participated. By early January 1945, the ultimate outcome of the War was obvious, yet an estimated 49,000 American GIs were yet to die in combat. Okinawa, Iwo Jima and the Battle of Berlin were yet to be fought. Among the lesser well-known battles was one that took place in Italy, where an estimated 100,000 German troops under General Albert Kesselring were embedded along what was called the Gothic Line, a roughly 200-mile defensive line running along the Apennines from Spezia on the Ligurian Sea to Pesaro and Ravenna on the Adriatic. Following the fall of Rome in early June 1944, Germans retreated north to this mountainous defensive position that protected the farm-rich Po Valley and the cities of Bologna and Verona. The key was Mount Belvedere, the highest peak, which overlooked Highway 65, the main road between Florence and Bologna.  

In March 1944 my father, then thirty-three, married and father of three (with a fourth on the way), was drafted. After basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama, he transferred to the 10th Mountain Division – the “Ski Troops,” who had trained in Colorado, but were then stationed at Camp Swift, about 40 miles east of Austin. In December, the 10th was sent to Fort Patrick Henry in Virginia, prior to being shipped to Italy later that month. A full complement of 14,000 men, under Major General George P. Hays, were sent to rout Kesselring’s troops from their mountainous redoubts. In Mountain Troopers, Curtis Casewit quoted General Hayes: “Mt. Belvedere must be captured before we can advance.”

In November 1944, elements of the British 8th Army and the U.S. 5th Army had attacked Germans entrenched on Belvedere. German counter-attacks caused them to retreat. Three months later, on February 19th, the 10th Mountain Division (now part of the 5th Army) made its ascent, beginning at 0030 hours. The night before the 1st Battalion of the 86th Regiment captured Riva Ridge, which overlooked slopes on Belvedere. Along with others, C Company (my father’s unit) of the 87th Regiment were ordered to move silently forward, with Division artillery supporting the attack. They walked single-file, ten feet apart. “The way up,” Peter Shelton wrote in Climb to Conquer, “was long and folded, riddled with streams and ditches, with sharp ravines and bombed-out wagon roads.” They had to avoid mined fields and went past “ghostly remains of U.S. tanks,” abandoned on that earlier attempt. Because of walking past German sentries, the GIs, with fixed bayonets, carried grenades but no live ammunition – at least until daylight. Unfortunately, several soldiers were killed by mines. By 0430 Company C had attained its objective atop Belvedere, but with three of its men killed. Hays was again quoted by Curtis Casewit: “Mt. Belvedere and the occupied ground will be held at all costs.”

https://www.frontpagemag.com/de-tocqueville-on-the-difficulty-of-freedom/

“Nothing is more wonderful than the art of being free, but nothing is harder to learn how to use than freedom.”  (Alexis de Tocqueville)

There have actually been people in history who have found slavery to be more comfortable than freedom, and indeed, I would argue that many such individuals exist today.  They would rather be taken care of by the government (or, socialism) than risk the “freedom of opportunity” necessary to provide for themselves.  Sadly, that just feeds the egos and lusts of power-hungry politicians who live to control other people and tell them what to do.  And when you control somebody’s finances, you definitely control them.  Congress can’t even go home for Christmas until they try to pass some kind of budget that gives them trillions of dollars to spend to enslave the masses.

We today don’t call such government oppression “slavery” (our Founding Fathers did), but in one sense, that is exactly what it is.  People are “enslaved” if it is only the government which allows them to have and do.  “Allowed freedom” is not freedom, it is indeed another term for slavery.

But many who do want freedom do not really understand what it is or where it comes from.  It is a gift of God, as Jefferson said in the Declaration of Independence, and thus is defined by that Author.  “There is no liberty without morality,” Edmund Burke wrote, and by that, he meant the morality that comes from on High.  Modern Marxist Leftism has rejected that morality for a human-defined selfishness and decadence that starts with “every man does that which is right in his own eyes.”  But this godlessness and immorality will end in tyranny, not freedom.  And Leftists know it.

Burke explained this very nicely:  “Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within [i.e., self-control], the more there must be without [government].  It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free.  Their passions forge their fetters.”  Self-government is not Washington, D.C.  Self-government is a person governing themselves, controlling themselves in harmony with the laws of God, which provide true freedom.  Otherwise, as Burke said, a person’s “passions forge their fetters.”  They will be self-destructive, and destructive of others.

Burke further wrote:  “But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint.”  This is what de Tocqueville meant in the quote at the beginning of this article.  Too many people do not know how to use freedom for they do not know from whence it comes.  Such has long been a curse of man and the main reason why “slavery” (government oppression) is far more common in history than true freedom is.