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- [00:01]
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- [01:32]
Martin (Podcast Host)
History as it happens, it's late 1851. Herman Melville takes his readers aboard a whaling ship out of Nantucket, bound for the ocean to hunt whales for their oil until their captain can Captain Ahab reveals what they really shipped for to hunt the white whale. About a century after the publication of Moby Dick, there was a movie with Gregory Peck starring as Ahab.
- [02:01]
Captain Ahab (Movie Clip Voice)
All you masked headers now hear me. You're to look for a white whale, a whale as white and as big as mountain of snow. Whosoever of ye finds me that white whale, ye shall have this Spanish gold ounce, my boys. It's a white whale, I say. Death man, you've seen him. It's Moby Dick. Captain Ahab Was it not Moby Dick took off thy leg,
- [03:03]
Martin (Podcast Host)
And that is still the best cinematic rendition of Moby Dick. The book was a flop in the 1850s. It wasn't until the following century that it became a quintessential American novel, a masterpiece, and I finally read Moby Dick cover to cover a couple of years ago. Historian Michael Kimmage wants us to revisit the story now as a meditation on democracy, citizenship, the law. In an essay for the journal Liberties, Kimmage focuses on the role of Starbuck, the first mate aboard the Pequod, who clashes with Ahab over his mad pursuit of the white whale. Says Kimmage, Melville's Moby Dick, his monumental meditation on American democracy, needs Starbuck. It cannot revolve only around Ahab, who's the agent of destruction. He is the American who is not a democrat. No ship is exactly a democracy. Captains have privileges that can be abused and Ahab uses his legally allotted powers to co opt his crew and ultimately get them killed. Starbuck, says Kimmage, has the shortcomings of a single citizen when captain and crew are consumed by bloodlust and folly. Starbuck shows us more than this. He demonstrates the force of principle, the beauty of faith not in democracy, but in God, and the majesty of the law, not of rules, but of the law. His clarity of vision, his avoidance of self deception, and his law bound attempts to resist an errant captain are the very qualities that democracy demands from all its citizens, however hard these demands are to meet. Michael Kimmage is the founding director of an independent Kennan Institute here in Washington. Michael Kimmage, welcome back to the show.
- [04:41]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Great to be with you.
- [04:41]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Martin joining us from New England, but not New Bedford, Massachusetts, no, not even the Berkshires. You know, my listeners know you as a scholar, an expert on US Russia relations, the history of the Cold War. I never knew you could be such a wonderful literary critic. Your fantastic essay in the journal Liberties about Moby Dick and democracy, what inspired you to write it?
- [05:08]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
You know, it's a book that's evergreen and, you know, there's always a season for thinking about Moby Dick. You know, of course, it is the 250th anniversary of the Republic and this is one of the iconic American texts. So I guess those are all motivating factors, but I think in a more general sense, you know, of course, you always read great novels differently every time that you encounter them. I felt to me like, you know, this time around that Moby Dick is a very interesting commentary on candor in politics and on telling the truth. Also on virtue, you know, which are, of course, timeless themes, but seem to have their own kind of salience in the present moment. And it's not that the book is an editorial about anything, but it's a guide to thinking about these questions and, you know, just a joy to revisit as such.
- [05:52]
Martin (Podcast Host)
And there's so much more to Moby Dick than a simple good versus evil dichotomy. And, you know, your essay made me think about Moby Dick anew. I actually did finally get around to reading the full novel to two summers ago. You know, as a boy, I was captivated by the story and I probably read some children's version. And then at some point, I watched the 1956 movie, which is still the best film rendering of Moby Dick. And I watched that movie again yesterday to prepare. And, you know, I know this is blasphemous. If I might sound like Starbuck, there are parts of the movie that actually do the story better. Well, how can it be better than the original? I think the death of Ahab in the movie is more compelling than the death of Ahab in the book. We're gonna to the movie. I have a couple of clips I'll play you a little bit later on, but you really focus on allegory, maybe in your own mind, parallels or allegories. Melville, who wrote the book in the early 1850s, wouldn't have imagined today. Your essay's really a meditation on democracy, right. And how to sustain a democracy even though the ship was not a democracy.
- [07:00]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Right. You know, this is Ahab and his crew hunt the whale for years and then for three very memorable days in the novel. And then ever since, people have been hunting. The meaning of this book, although interestingly, with Moby Dick, it's published 1852. It doesn't really emerge as a classic until the nineteen teens and twenties at the very earliest. It's a kind of forgotten book. There's this very poignant detail that in Melville's very brief New York Times obituary, Moby Dick is not even mentioned. And I think the book is long, but out of print at the time that Melville died in the 1890s. So the hunt for interpretation and meaning in the book is maybe a 20th century and now a 21st century hunt. But it's very interesting to kind of observe over the span of many different readings and at the hands of many different literary critics. And, you know, a famous reading of the book is by a literary scholar who is at Harvard. His name is Alan Heimert. And he wrote a book on political symbolism, American political symbolism. And for him, very clearly not Ahab, but the white whale is John Calhoun. And the book is a prophetic anticipation of the Civil War and about race relations in the United States. North, south divides. A kind of mounting political fanaticism that Heimerd attributes to Melville's view of the period. Perfectly sustainable reading of the book. And then many, many people since the 1930s have seen the figure of Adolf Hitler in Ahab. You know, a kind of madman who leads his country to destruction, who is pursuing, you know, all of these kind of crazy, ungraspable things. And that's a common enough analogy. And you Know, you can fill in many other, you know, sort of images or connections that people have found in the book. And ironically, or maybe just intuitively, the book itself is full of analogies, you know, to the natural world. And, you know, it's an incredibly associative book where Melville is fascinated by the sciences and exploration and whaling, of course.
- [08:48]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Where does democracy come in, though?
- [08:50]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Well, I mean, I think the democracy reading, in a sense, is the counterpart to the reading of the book. The first reading of the book, which is the most natural and obvious, is reading the book as a reflection on authoritarianism, on the loss of democracy, on the collapse of democracy. Because Ahab, of course, is the charismatic figure who, with no real consent from the crew and no process, just pushes them into this quest and then they all meet their deaths because of the. Of the quest. And so that's an authoritarian problem, right? That's the problem of authority misused and of Ahab having too much authority. And what happens when the authority at issue in. In a political order is crazy, is mad as Ahab is mad. And that's why the book has been applied to fascism and all kinds of different varieties of 20th century and perhaps in the future, 21st century authoritarianisms. But there's a second reading of the book which I'm eager to promote because it's the less common reading of the book, which is the book as a reflection on democracy. And I think for that reason the figure of Starbuck becomes very important because he is a democrat, he is law abiding, he is respectful of process. He doesn't want to go in some kind of crazy quest. He wants the ship to come back into harbor so that he can get back to his family and kind of lead a normal civilian life. He has all the democratic impulses. And I think one could go further into the character of Starbuck, of course, and you can look at that as something that fails. That's impossible because Ahab is so much stronger and he does overpower Starbuck. But I'm interested in the way that Starbuck succeeds in the book. And I think in that you can kind of sense the success of democracy as Melville conceived it. So it's going a bit against the grain, a kind of counterintuitive reading, but that's often a fun thing to do.
- [10:29]
Martin (Podcast Host)
I loved reading the novel finally from start to finish, except for the middle third. Again, blasphemous. I know I'm not. But, you know, you said that the book was a flop.
- [10:38]
Libsyn Ads Advertiser
It was.
- [10:39]
Martin (Podcast Host)
People couldn't penetrate it because you Know what's so great about the book is Melville's Shakespearean flourishes. Here are these whalers on the high seas. They're about to be killed by this raging white whale. They're holding up their lances and harpoons and they go into some, you know, they go into a monologue, two or three page monologue while the whale is coming down at them. Well, here's what you write about.
- [11:02]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
I don't know, Martin, I will politely dissent from you in my view of the book. I mean, I love all of it, you know, I love all the wailing stuff. I would be very sad if there weren't a chapter in the book about clam chowder and cod chowder and the kind of wonderful digressions that the book is full of. I love the book when it's low key and just a normal adventure story. And then when it's this incredible, you know, set of explorations and soliloquies and exactly what you say. The kind of Shakespearean ambition of the book. But I love the highways and byways of this book, big and small.
- [11:32]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Yeah, I mentioned the middle third. It becomes a 19th century encyclopedia on whaling. It broke up the whole flow of the story. But that's all right, you know, that's all right. This is what you write about Starbuck, and you alluded to this earlier, but maybe you can go a little deeper on this now. You wrote in your essay, his clarity of vision, his avoidance of self deception and his law bound attempts to resist an errant captain are the very qualities that democracy demands from all its citizens, however hard these demands are to meet.
- [12:04]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Right. So one of the things that impressed me when I read the book, looking at the figure of Starbuck, who's not the hero of the book. He's not, you know, that central of a character, although he's important. But when you sort of look at him in the book and put him in the foreground, what you sense is how alone Starbuck is on this journey. So Ahab is crazy, you know, hell bent on killing the whale and he's gonna subordinate everything to that. The rest of the crew is not really crazy, but they get drawn into Ahab's vision. In a sense, they kind of want something more than just a regular whaling voyage. Ahab is very manipulative, very much able to pull them into this crazy quest of his.
- [12:40]
Martin (Podcast Host)
He bribes them too. With money.
- [12:42]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Yeah, he bribes them with money, with alcohol, with a sense of importance. And then there's also something scary about Ahab where he also intimidates and uses fear. I mean, again, all the authoritarian tactics are there in Ahab's repertoire, and he uses them. And what's scary about the book is that, you know, it's pretty clear that this is a disastrous choice of Ahab's, and yet people go along with it, kind of half knowing that it is disastrous. And there are all these omens and foreshadowings, right? When they leave Nantucket, there's a sort of prophetic figure who says that the ship is going to go down. And you get all these other omens and foreshadowings, but people choose not to see them. Except for Starbuck. Starbuck is fully aware that this is a mistake, that what Ahab is doing is wrong. It's foolish, it's self indulgent, it's a kind of insanity. And the great thing about Starbuck is not only that he sees that very clearly, but he says it, and he stands up for what is a reasonable view, that the ship should turn around and go back to port. And he's not able to get the ship to turn around. That matters, of course, and we can get into why. And, you know, Melville does help us understand Starbucks limitations. But it feels to me when you think of how alone he is out there on the sea and with a crew that doesn't really understand or doesn't want to understand, and with a crazy captain, the courage that's there in his honesty becomes all the more impressive. He just says the right thing and he tries to do the right thing. And there's something just awesome about that, because if. If it would be set in New York City and you'd have a crazy mayor and one third of the population didn't want to follow and two thirds was getting hoodwinked, you would still have that one third of the population. That would be fellowship for somebody like Starbuck. In this case, he's just completely alone and on the high seas. And so that made me really start to admire him.
- [14:22]
Martin (Podcast Host)
And Starbuck comes at this from many different angles. There's the religious one. He's a Quaker. He's thinking about the law. He's thinking about business. Right. This is not what they're supposed to be doing. They're supposed to be getting whale oil. People have to remember what whaling was like and how important it was.
- [14:37]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
No, exactly. You know, in that all of that you're describing, Martin, you could say in some ways that Starbuck is the paradigmatic American as Melville sees the paradigmatic American. You know, religious faith is one part of it. The sense of citizenship is another part of it. But he's also business oriented, as many Americans, of course, are. And he is thinking all through the trip about the bottom line. Because what he doesn't understand about Ahab is that, you know, they've filled the ship full of oil, got the wealth that they can bring back. The voyage has been a success. And yet Ahab presses on with his lunatic quest. But the point I would want to emphasize with Starbuck. In terms of just the grandeur of his character. Is what he is willing and able to do in solitude. He does not have other people around him to affirm that what he's seeing is correct. He has to stick with it. He does see that Ahab is leading everyone toward disaster. But he doesn't have a dozen people around him to say, yes, Starbuck, you're right about that. He's got a stick to his convictions. And then he also is able, under conditions of solitude, to speak up. And he's the kind of guy who's, you know, he follows orders. He's a company man, really. He's not cut out to be a kind of individualistic hero. And yet he is willing to defy the shipboard hierarchy. And tell Ahab to his face that the voyage is not, as Ahab is misusing it. The voyage is going in a terrible direction. So that really demands, you could say, an enormous amount of civic courage to do something like that.
- [15:58]
Movie Clip Characters (Stub and Others)
Yeah.
- [15:58]
Martin (Podcast Host)
It's not a military ship. So there's no the discipline of a military ship. Where if you divide your officer, you could be hanged or whatever. But it's still a ship with the captain is in charge. And the fact that it's a ship. So the Pequod is very much like America. It's got a multiracial crew.
- [16:16]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Right.
- [16:17]
Martin (Podcast Host)
But there's nowhere to go.
- [16:18]
Captain Ahab (Movie Clip Voice)
Right.
- [16:18]
Martin (Podcast Host)
It's not the American frontier where you could just move somewhere else. If you don't like who's around you. They are stuck. The only place to go is death. A Starbuck knows that. He realizes, as you said, the ship is doomed because you're not going to kill Moby Dick. The fact that the harpoons are stuck in Moby Dick's back. I don't know whale anatomy. You know, he's got the wrinkled brow, the crooked jaw. And all those harpoons from all those years, maybe centuries of whalers trying to kill him. That's a reminder that he cannot be killed if he's got all those harpoons stuck in his back. Starbuck, Michael tries different ways, right? He tries the power of persuasion in a democracy that doesn't work. So he thinks about violence. Pick it up from there.
- [17:05]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Yeah. I mean, Melville pushes on you, the reader, because you, the reader, you and I, Martin, everybody else who reads the book, we know that the ship is going down. And in many editions of the book, you can kind of turn to a map of the Pequod's voyage on the kind of inner leaf of the novel, and you see that at a certain point in the Pacific Ocean, it goes down. So there's no surprised, really, about what's gonna come in that respect. You know, the foreshadowing is there throughout the book. The very kind of early images of Ishmael, the narrator of the book, is sort of in a funeral procession in New York and, you know, leaving the city. And then you have Queequeg, who builds a coffin for himself to sleep in, you know, sort of weeks before the ship goes down. So you have all of this foreshadowing. And what Melville does with that is he pushes on you, the reader, the counterfactual of what if Starbuck kills Ahab? And what if there's a mutiny on chipboard? And it is kind of true in a factual sense that that's really the alternative. They're all going to die if they keep on chasing Moby Dick. And Starbuck knows it. He's not in any sense unclear about that. So you sort of feel, in a way, you kind of root for Starbuck to do something. And, you know, Melva really puts a lot of emotional pressure on you as a reader in this respect. It's a very poignant, touching scene where Starbuck talks to Ahab about their families back in Nantucket, and he even sees a tear in Ahab's eye. And he sort of assumes that that could maybe get Ahab to change his mind, but it doesn't happen. But I do think this is what I argue in the piece, that killing Ahab is. First of all, it's not what Starbuck is able to do, and I'm not even sure it's what Starbuck should do. Happy to develop on that.
- [18:35]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Yeah, let's talk about that.
- [18:36]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Yeah. This does take us back to democracy and what democracy is and what democracy and the law is not. But killing Ahab under these conditions, I'm not sure. I'm not sure. Of course, maybe that's the fantasy exit from this tragedy that we have, but I'm not sure it really works.
- [18:51]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Well, there's justice and the law, and in a posthumously published novella, Billy Budd, which is another fantastic film rendition. That 1962 movie with Peter Ustanov is fantastic, also explores that theme, the relationship between justice and the law. So let's go into that now, because I do have a question about that. You mentioned Hitler before. I'm going to bring up the Nazi analogy as far as the July plotters who thought they needed to kill Hitler because he was leading Germany, like the Pequod, into the abyss.
- [19:25]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Exactly.
- [19:26]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Starbuck realizes that, yeah, he could kill Ahab. He would also be killing something else in the process.
- [19:33]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
I think you could say that he would be killing himself, you know, and here the kind of religious convictions that he has matter, that he doesn't believe he has the right to take another person's life, you know, full stop, that there isn't a kind of clause or an exception to that when you're in service to a mad captain, that that doesn't change the wrongness of killing him. We could debate whether this is right or wrong, but, you know, I think this is Starbuck's view of things. But there's also something larger behind this, which to me also feels like a kind of grandeur in Starbuck's character, that he's able to see that there is an order, even though it's the shipboard. And you have all these images in Melville of how violent and cannibalistic the sea is and how violent and cannibalistic we as humans are. And, you know, Melville has all of that, the sharkish sea and, you know, in language that only Melville could come up with to depict how brutal and awful and rough and cold and harsh nature is, all of that is there. And Starbuck is sensitive to that, but he also senses that there's a human order that is different from that and in a way, is better. Starbuck refers to something of the soft feeling of the human in me, the soft feeling of the human. And that is a moral order that Starbuck participates in. And that, simply put, makes it very difficult for him to kill Ahab outright and to make violence the answer to Ahab's violence. And there's something very, very powerful about that as Melville develops the contrast. And of course, it's tragedy, right? There's not a way of really reconciling these issues. They're kind of in conflict and intention with each other. That's exactly what tragedy is. But I think in general, we kind of a little bit too much to Ahab's evil because it's so well depicted, and we fall short of recognizing the majesty of a character like Starbucks because it's much more understated and it's. It's harder to. To tease out. But that's. That's, of course, why I wrote the essay.
- [21:15]
Martin (Podcast Host)
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- [21:39]
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- [22:08]
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- [22:39]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Ahab as evil Does Ahab understand the consequences of his actions? I mean, there's no question he's mad and he's deranged. He's chewed up by hatred and vengeance. Before you answer that question or take on that issue, Michael, let me play a clip from the movie. I know we're talking about a novel, but movies sometimes have a way of taking you someplace. This is a scene inside Ahab's cabin on the ship. The first voice you'll hear is Gregory Peck, who plays Captain Ahab. This is right after Ahab explains to Starbuck that they're basically going to divert the mission from retrieving whaling oil to going after Moby Dick. And Starbuck is at a loss.
- [23:24]
Captain Ahab (Movie Clip Voice)
Why are you wearing that long face? Are you not game for Moby Dick, Captain Ahab? I am game for any kind of death if it comes in the way of the business we follow. That be no. But I came here to hunt whales, not my commander's vengeance. How many barrels of sperm oil will thy vengeance yield? What will it fetch on the New Bedford muck? Money's not the measure, man. It will fetch me a great premium here. To be enraged with a dumb brute. That acted out of blind instinct is blasphemous. Speak not to me a blasphemy man. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me.
- [24:08]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Gregory Peck was so good. Yeah, not to me of blasphemy man. I'd strike the sun if it insulted me. Take on Ahab's Persona here. Yes, he's mad, but he understands. Well, does he really understand what he's doing?
- [24:25]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
It's an extraordinary mixture in Ahab. Because he's fantastically eloquent, as you get from that scene. In Gregory Peck's voice, no less. He's deeply intelligent. He's learned. He sees a lot, certainly in human nature. That's, I think, necessary for any authoritarian. That if you're gonna manipulate people to follow you. You have to have an understanding of human nature. And Ahab certainly has that. He has an understanding of people's weaknesses and vulnerabilities. Starbuck, for sure, you know, he knows that Starbuck is a kind of subordinate figure. And is not, in the end, gonna challenge him. He knows that the men on the ship can't resist the adventure that he's offering them. And that feeling of tribal importance in sort of chasing this animal. You know, he is a decent person. The novel gives you this indication, you know, sort of a family man, a talented ship's captain. And yet there's this enormous distortion. Which it's not clear from the novel. Does that come from the wound that Moby Dick inflicts on him before the journey of the Pequod? And the anger and rage that he feels is something that was latent in Ahab. But the anger is so immense that it becomes nihilistic in Ahab's case. And whether he sees that, it's quite hard to say. But it doesn't bother him if the anger is nihilistic. I don't think it matters to him if his crew is gonna die, if the ship is gonna go down. It's sort of worth it in Ahab's calculus. And that, of course, is one part of his madness. But also just the way that he privileges the rage and fury. And here, I think, very legitimately, people do see this analogy between Ahab and Hitler. You know, what was the anger that Hitler felt toward Jews. Or to the various enemies that Hitler created for himself? Where does that come from? And why was Hitler willing to pursue that to the point of nihilism. And to the point of Germany's destruction? You know, I think Melville In a remarkable way, was thinking already in the 1840s or 1850s, early 1850s, about various kinds of 20th century tyranny. And I'm sure it came from his study of ancient history and just the world around him. But what intrigues me a bit about that is that the stuff of American politics, which is, you know, rough and tumble in the 1830s and 1840s, and yes, you know, on the eve of the Civil War, if people could have known it, the tyranny that Melville is describing in Moby Dick and the kind of evil of Ahab, that's not really the problem of American politics at that time. He's thinking outside of that world and onto either bigger topics. And, you know, you mentioned Shakespeare, of course, you have Richard III and maybe King Lear and in Shakespeare, who are also examples of how power can be abused and how power can commingle with evil. But in the end, Ahab is just sui generis in this respect. But it is. I don't know how you read the book, Martin, in this respect, but it is seductive. I think it's hard to read the book and not to get drawn into the figure of Ahab. And you kind of, I don't know, like, you think of the role also that Ahab has in popular culture. Right. He's sort of quite well known as an image, as a figure. He starts to occupy a lot of our psychological space as readers of that book. And that, too, is a part of his incredible power. The way that he conjoins power and evil is really very overwhelming in the book. It's one of the most compelling portraits of political evil.
- [27:24]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Yeah. And he has a relationship with the dumb brute, I guess, is what Starbuck calls Moby Dick. I mean, Moby Dick is a character that's fascinating. It's a mystery. Is Moby Dick intelligent? Does it know who Ahab is? And as a young boy, when I watched that movie, I mean, today with special effects and CGI, you know, a 1956 movie that's done partly on a soundstage, not all of it's done on the high seas. It still holds up. I found it fascinating and even a little scary at how the whale kills everybody. But I want to return to the politics of the 1850s and what Melville said about the book and the issue of slavery in a minute. But I want to stick with Hitler and political assassination and the relationship between justice and the law. We're living in an era now where political violence is very much front of mind, and assassins, over time, through history, have killed People for any number of reasons, right? A lot of the time, they're not killing somebody to solve a problem. We were talking about Starbuck contemplating killing Ahab as a way of getting them out of that jam. And who knows if it would have worked. For instance, the man who tried to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981. Hinckley. He did it to impress Jodie Foster. The assassins who killed Alexander II, the Emperor of Russia, the Tsar, in 1881, did that to try to incite a revolution. So, Hitler. The July plotters. I was thinking about this in the gym this morning, actually. Sometimes I prepare for my podcasts in my study. Sometimes I think about what I'm going to ask in between sets of shoulder presses. The July Plotters. We have a way of idealizing them or heroicizing them.
- [29:08]
Captain Ahab (Movie Clip Voice)
Them.
- [29:09]
Martin (Podcast Host)
They believed, correctly, that Hitler was leading Germany to the abyss. But they were not pacifists. They were hardcore German nationalists and expansionists who did not want to give up a lot of the territory Germany had conquered from the Soviet Union in the East. They simply wanted to get rid of Hitler and maybe bring the war to a close on more favorable terms. But it may not have worked. Well, we know their plot didn't work. Too much of the regime was loyal to the regime. Too much of the military was loyal to the military. Part of the plot was to assassinate Hitler, but there was a whole other part of the Operation Valkyrie to mobilize the reserve army and to take control of power centers. None of it worked. It was a complete flop. And the July plotters were reviled as traitors. You wonder, had Starbuck had the courage to pull the trigger, whether that would have made any difference. I'm layering this question with too many layers, Michael, but you're an expert at deciphering me. We're dealing with this issue today about. Some people feel like polls have shown this, that political violence in some cases is justified. Some people believe it'll solve a problem. Getting rid of this one person will solve something. Go ahead.
- [30:22]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Right, right. No. And that sounds to me like it's usually a fantasy, but maybe in the German case, you can kind of see occasion for those efforts. And certainly when I think about those efforts, there's always a twinge of disappointment that they didn't work out getting rid of Hitler. So, you know, each country, I suppose each situation has a degree of uniqueness in this respect. But I think we should take Melville in this context as an American writer in the political world that he's operating in, which is still our political world. There is a constitutional order. There are procedures that can be cumbersome and tedious and that people manipulate, but procedures that are of the essence when it comes to American democracy. And the whole premise of democracy is that you resolve differences through deliberation, through peaceful means, and through legal procedures. And obviously, we can go with a careful eye and look at American history and find all kinds of ways in which that was not the case or which that was perverted and in which the kind of ideal of a constitutional republic has fallen short. But you can't have American politics without the ideal of a constitutional republic. And so political violence, especially in the American context, has to be understood as anathema, as something that's not just wrong in and of itself. To kill people and to assassinate people is obviously something that's wrong, but it's also a betrayal of something that's deeply embedded in the system. And maybe in that respect, you know, the Alanheimer essay about Moby Dick is so persuasive and so interesting in terms of how it's a very studied reflection on American politics at the time. But maybe it really was the case that Melville was feeling something. And of course, it's nine years before the book is published, nine years before the Civil War breaks out. And of course, you have violence on the floor of the US Senate, and, you know, lots of civil violence, political violence in the United States in these decades, decades. Maybe he was sensitive to that and was responding to that and thinking about the value of a constitutional order and how important that is and how much better a constitutional order is than any political order that's determined by vengeance and vendetta and violence. And I will just add one further point, Martin, here in this regard. If my line of thinking is correct about the book, that the value of a constitutional republic is so much better than what you get on the Pequod with Ahab, then Starbuck becomes an even more important character, because Starbuck is our representative on the Pequod of a constitutional republic. He has the instincts of a citizen on a constitutional republic, and that instinct is not to respond to things with violence. And he's in a real dilemma because he can't achieve a rational result without violence. But he's probably. Either he's just too weak to do it, or he's convinced that he can't achieve a rational result on the Pequod with violence. So he's faced with a dilemma that he cannot resolve. But Starbuck really does focalize this point. And I'll add one further, further point here, Martin. That I find it just delightful that Starbuck's name is everywhere in the United States. Coffee company that happened to, for rather silly reasons, choose his name as their name, which is of course Starbucks. But here we have this great representative of the constitutional republic in Moby Dick, and his name is almost everywhere visible. You can't go to a airport or a public place in the United States without seeing Starbucks name. How lucky we are to have that memorial.
- [33:22]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Well, I was trying to think, has there ever been a situation where an assassination, setting aside the morality, the legality, everything produced a positive outcome on the other side of it? I think in most cases it just creates a whole new set of problems. I mean, in your essay you brought up John Wilkes Booth, right?
- [33:39]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Yes.
- [33:40]
Martin (Podcast Host)
He thought he was killing a tyrant.
- [33:42]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
No, I mean, it really struck me. I mean, when you think forward in time, what is that? 1865. So it's sort of. Obviously it's an event that Melville himself observed or witnessed via the newspapers in Real Time, 1865. And Melville wrote a really wonderful set of poems about the Civil War called Battle Pieces. It's a book that's not particularly well known, but, you know, he was a very emotional observer of all that was happening. How couldn't you be at the time? But it is startling to me that that situation between John Wilkes Booth and Abraham Lincoln sort of replicates, in a rather dark and twisted way, sort of replicates the Starbuck Ahab relationship in Moby Dick, but it flips it around. So John Wilkes Booth is the citizen who's very willing to indulge violence, kind of drawn to it, attracted to it. And he does so on a stage for its theater in Washington D.C. with a high degree of self importance and, you know, sort of shouts out about something Latin about tyranny when he does this. And his, his act of violence succeeds and of course reverberates throughout American history, but it's a grotesque action. I don't think that there's a constituency out there that feels that what John Wilkes Booth did was, you know, was valid or worthwhile. I think most people regard that with a kind of horror. And that's of course, because Lincoln is not an Ahab. He's almost the opposite of an Ahab. He's, you know, obsessed with the law, trying to preserve a constitutional republic and to do so in a way that is not fanatical and, and bloodthirsty and all of that. In a way, it's such an interesting inversion of the relationship that you have in Moby Dick. But if you want to go to the other end of the spectrum in politics from Ahab, it would be Abraham Lincoln. You know, that's the UN Ahab, the anti Ahab in American life. And wonderful in a way that the book and the figure. Right. Lincoln, I think emerges on the scene first in the national scene in the 1850s, that they're all, you know, kind of there rattling around at the same time, the literary characters and the political figures.
- [35:23]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Well, Booth got Andrew Johnson as president, a white supremacist who tried to stop Reconstruction.
- [35:29]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
So one of the biggest disasters. Yeah, you know, we're disasters of 19th century American politics.
- [35:34]
Martin (Podcast Host)
You know, I used to think of Moby Dick as slavery. So in the 1850s, actually the Compromise of 1850 was designed to finally solve the slavery issue by not solving it, pushing it to the margins again. Because in our country for a long time, defenders of slavery and people who did not like slavery, but thought that touching the issue was so explosive it would bring down the Union, tried to marginalize it. There was the censoring of the mails, not allowing anti slavery petitions on the floor of the House, et cetera. Then the Compromise of 1850. Not to go into all the history here, the allegory is if you go after Moby Dick, if you try to destroy slavery, you're gonna destroy everything if you just leave it alone. The Republican continue on, however perilously. Right. I don't know if that allegory really
- [36:24]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
works, but I mean, so many allegories could potentially work. I mean, from what I recall of Melville's biography, he was not an abolitionist, but he certainly wasn't pro slavery. He's from upstate New York, sort of Albany, New York City. And then he marries into a family where his father in law is a judge, Lemuel Shaw, who is actually quite involved in the Fugitive Slave Law, in the implementation of the Fugitive Slave Law. And so those issues certainly were within Melville's family and on his mind. You know, my guess is, Martin, that there's just a general perception that Melville has, which is very important for us at all times in the very stable country, that the United States can appear to be. But the perception that Melville has, that the ship can go down, you know, whether that's directly linked to slavery, whether it's linked to the possibility of civil war, whether it's linked to something else. You know, I make a reference in the essay to Napoleon and how Napoleon sort of ran roughshod over Europe for decades and sort of implicated Europe in all these senseless wars. And I think that that too was on Melville's mind. You know, I think one doesn't have to get too specific in a way, it's just all the different ways in which the ship can go down. And he's given us the greatest book imaginable. It's so invigorating because, you know, even now, where there's a lot of hyperbole about, you know, the United States is falling apart and it's not going to go on and it's all over, you get a lot of that in the kind of media culture around us. I think even at this moment, it's kind of hardwired into most Americans DNA that the country is just going to go on forever in the form that it's. That it is. And Melville's there to give us this book to say, well, maybe not. And, you know, here's an imaginative exercise or exercise of the imagination to see what it looks like when the ship goes down. But where Melville got that feeling from, you know, he also was a very careful reader of the Bible, although not, I think, in a conventional sense, a sort of pious Christian, maybe more of an atheist than a Christian. But, you know, Ahab is, of course, a biblical king. And the fall of the House of David, the fall of Israel, as a kind of Old Testament narrative is very embedded in Melville's psyche. And I think he's applying that, as many American Protestants did in the 19th century and thereafter, to the American republic. What would it look like if the American republic fell as sort of the House of David did in the Old Testament? So the game of analogies, and I think we should just open as many doors as possible with this game. It's truly endless. Martin, when it comes to this book, you can walk through the book into a hundred different pathways of analogy, and
- [38:41]
Martin (Podcast Host)
they all kind of work as a meditation on democracy. It's fascinating. I'm just gonna end here with one more clip from the movie and we'll wrap up. You know, when it comes to democracy, our founders were worried about too much power in an executive or a monarch. Right. Prerogative power. But they also worry about tyranny of the majority as well. And as you said, the crew was with Ahab. If more of the crew went with Starbuck, maybe, maybe they would have saved their lives. This is what Sean Wilentz wrote about Moby Dick and melville on page 654 of the Rise of American Democracy. There was no stable set of correspondences between Melville's characters and the nation's actual political leaders. Although Critics and historians have tried to find them. I had some vague idea while writing it that the whole book was susceptible of an allegoric construction, and also that parts of it were, Melville would say. Wilensk goes on to say the book contains no reference to fugitive slaves or the Fugitive Slave Law. That would have been obvious to most readers. Beyond the ambiguous person of the cabin boy, Pittsburgh Pip, who may have been born free in Connecticut or may have been born a slave down South, a whale would sell for 30 times what you would.
- [39:55]
Captain Ahab (Movie Clip Voice)
Pip.
- [39:55]
Martin (Podcast Host)
In Alabama, the second mate Stub, tells the boy after saving him from drowning. Bear that in mind and don't jump anymore. Melville, moved by indirection. It is in the general ambience and pileup of references that his prophecy of America's destruction, propelled by the politics of 1850 and 1851, acquires its force.
- [40:16]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
I mean, it's marvelous. You know, this is just to echo what the great historian Sean Malin says about this book. You know, there's an amazing, amazing, amazing image at the very end of Moby Dick in this book of amazing images of the ship is going down and the last thing you see is a kind of American flag and a hand hammering, you know, the flag to the mast of the ship, and then it goes down into the nothingness of the sea. You know, I do think that as universal as the book is, and of course, the book has a career outside of the United States, which is very significant of people who have read it and taken inspiration from it, and this motif of Moby Dick, you'll find bars and kebab places and others that are, well, we have the kebab place in Washington, but you have bars and references to Moby Dick all over the world. I'm familiar with a bar in Prague called the Whale, which has the wonderful Rockwell Kent illustrations from Moby Dick all over the walls of the bar. So it belongs to everyone, this book, as it should, but it really is an American book in intention. So at the same time that it's not just about the 1840s by any means, or 1851, 1852. It is a book about America. And that's, I think, very, very significant. You've mentioned the theme of race and ethnicity, which is, you know, very, very significant in the book. You know, other people have read the book legitimately as a book about capitalism and American capitalism, kind of lust for profit and how the Pequod becomes a kind of factory on the sea, but I would want to keep the book as a book about politics and very specifically since this again is a constitutional republic, as Malcolm Melville was well aware, he had relatives in his family who fought in the American Revolution. He was very proud of that circumstance. And Melville could be, in his interesting way, a kind of very patriotic writer. It's not just a book about politics and it's not just a book about democracy. It's a book about democracy that's also a book about citizenship, what it is to be a citizen. And so that's where the crew is very important, you know, the citizens of that boat. And they're not treated as citizens. It had treats them as subordinates, but they ideally would in their own eyes be citizens. They get swept up, up in Ahab's crazy scheme. And Starbuck does not. You know, he really is the exemplary citizen. And maybe it's the case that citizens, and this goes back to the question of assassination and political violence. You can't overturn the order as a citizen. That's sort of not what you would in a way even want to do. But you can represent that order at its best. And that's again exactly what Starbuck does. He sticks to the law. He is honest, he's very clear headed. He has the courage to confront Ahab in a number of different ways. He's actually a really spectacular citizen. And it's wonderful to have a book on American politics that takes us so deeply into the psychology of citizenship. Whether it works out or not, whether the book is a tragedy or not. I don't want to say that that's secondary. That's very important too. But you know, let us not forget, you know, a few days after the 4th of July, 250th anniversary of the Republic, the extreme importance of the notion of citizenship. And as much as Melville's book is the kind of reflection on evil that everybody takes it to be right. Like it's equally a reflection on citizenship, which is something that's not evil at all. And you keep those two things balanced in your mind with the book and you've got a great reading experience on your hands.
- [43:20]
Martin (Podcast Host)
I agree. I mean a republic, if you can keep it, it's very easy to poo poo all of that and dismiss it. But it then becomes self fulfilling. It is in our power to do things, as you say, through the procedures, through deliberations, through the courts, through law, not assassination. Last thing here. So this is where the movie is different than the book, how Starbuck dies. He dies in the novel aboard the Pequod where he's trying to sum up some courage because he sees death coming.
- [43:50]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Right?
- [43:50]
Captain Ahab (Movie Clip Voice)
Right.
- [43:51]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Yeah. Whereas in the movie he's actually out in one of the whaling boats.
- [43:55]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Oh, interesting. That's interesting.
- [43:56]
Martin (Podcast Host)
And I'm gonna play the clip here. I'll set the stage. So the way Ahab dies in the movie, we're gonna pick this clip up right after Ahab's death.
- [44:04]
Movie Clip Characters (Stub and Others)
Death.
- [44:05]
Martin (Podcast Host)
Ahab is on the whale and he's stabbing at the whale. And he gives this amazing, you know, monologue again. He's on top. From hell's heart I stab at thee. For hate sake, I spit my last breath at thee. And the whale takes Ahab under. And this is the film. But that quote is also in the. In the book, when the whale re emerges, Ahab is tangled up, up in all the harpoon lines from all the centuries of Moby Dick's battles with whalers. And he's dead. And the whale, Moby Dick, shifts back and forth in the water so that Ahab's limp, dead arm waves at the other whalers. He beckons. He's beckoning them to try to kill me. And I'm going to pick up the movie clip right here. Starbuck in the film loses his composure.
- [44:59]
Movie Clip Characters (Stub and Others)
No more of respect to the peacock. No more. There's no more of this.
- [45:04]
Martin (Podcast Host)
That was first mate Stub or second mate Stub saying, let's go back to the Pequod. And now here's Ahab beckoning.
- [45:17]
Movie Clip Characters (Stub and Others)
You see? Do you see? Ahab beckons. He's dead, but he beckons. Burn after him. After him. After that devil. Moby Dicks no devil. He's a whale. A monstrous big whale. Ay, but a whale no more. And we're whaling men, no less. We do not churn from waves. We kill em. Well, kill Moby Dick, Bo.
- [45:50]
Martin (Podcast Host)
So Starbuck loses it. We're wailing men. We do not turn from whales. We kill them.
- [45:55]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
Michael Kimmage, what a weird choice to end the film. I can kind of see why. Because in the novel, Starbuck's last scene would be rather difficult to put on film. It's a kind of internal monologue that he has at the end.
- [46:08]
Martin (Podcast Host)
They're all lost at sea anyway.
- [46:10]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
So then it's a kind of very basic heroism that it tries to attribute to Starbuck a kind of loyalty to the cause or loyalty to Ahab. Actually completely out of sync with the novel, but, well, so be it. One of many reasons, Martin, why your listeners should go and read the book or reread the book.
- [46:27]
Martin (Podcast Host)
I still get goosebumps though, when Stub is there on the boat saying Ahab's dead, but he beckons.
- [46:33]
Michael Kimmage (Historian and Guest)
I don't think that line is in the book, but that's great.
- [46:35]
Martin (Podcast Host)
No, Ahab dies differently. He gets hit by a line. He gets tangled up in a line and swept over, overboard and down into the depths he goes. For that is one of the great monologues, or what would you call it? A Soliloquy from hell's heart I stab at thee out of hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee from
- [46:53]
Movie Clip Characters (Stub and Others)
hell heart for hate's sake, I spent my last prophecy. No, damn it will.
- [47:14]
Martin (Podcast Host)
On the next episode of History As It Happens, we'll move from the ocean to dry land. The Russia, Ukraine, War. Over every war, there continues to be a battle over its origins. We'll be joined by Anatole Even of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft next, as we report History As It Happens. In the meantime, sign up for my newsletter. It is free. Just go to substack and search for History As It Happens.
- [47:43]
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