October 4, 2015

Department of Good Stuff: Peace and war

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Google Charles Sumner, The True Grandeur of Nations, perhaps his most remarkable speech, back when he was a leading pacifist. Also his 1870 speech, The Duel between France and Germany, advising European disarmament after he had been chair of the senate foreign relations committee. Sumner was the greatest political philosopher of an era that also included Marx and Lincoln. He was the political Transcendentalist among his friends Emerson and Longfellow. The abolitionist forerunner of Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But because historiography has been controlled by confederates as WEB DuBois showed, he is a nonperson. If you want to see what democracy looks like, and what ours could become you start with Sumner, whose statue is at Harvard Square.