Opinionator | Disunion: ‘A Gallant Officer’

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

One day during the summer of 1863, in Union-occupied Nashville, Tenn., Anna Rhoads visited the headquarters of Gen. Walter C. Whitaker and requested a meeting with him. Perhaps to her surprise, he granted one.

A Kentuckian known for his volatile temper and a fondness for alcohol, Whitaker was moved as the earnest young woman recounted the grim errand that prompted her visit. "Mrs. Rhoads is here with the body of her husband, Lt. Rhoads of the 7th Penn. Cav.," wrote Whitaker to Gen. Robert S. Granger, an old West Pointer in command of the military district that included Nashville. "He was a gallant officer. She has come from Pennsylvania to take his body home and is short of money." Whitaker added, "I send this note to you hoping in its perusal you may find it proper to give her transportation for herself and the body of her husband."

Anna had seen little of her husband since their marriage two years earlier. Back in the summer of 1861, she wed Amos B. Rhoads in the bustling Pennsylvania town of Williamsport. She was then an 18-year-old schoolteacher who eked out a living with her widowed mother and five siblings. Amos, six years her senior, worked in a local foundry as a molder of iron castings.

The wedding took place on Aug. 8, 1861, about a week after Amos returned home from a three-month stint in the 11th Pennsylvania Infantry. The apex of the regiment's brief existence occurred on July 2, 1861, when its rank and file skirmished with Confederates in Virginia near Falling Waters. The rebels were under the command of Col. Thomas J. Jackson, who would receive the nom de guerre Stonewall for his steadfast defense at the Battle of Bull Run a few weeks later.

A few months after Amos returned from the war, local Army recruiters in Williamsport came looking for volunteers to join a new regiment. Amos joined a company that became part of the Keystone State's Seventh Cavalry. The rank and file elected officers, a common practice among volunteers, and voted Amos first lieutenant.

The Seventh went to Tennessee and soon crossed sabers with bands of butternut horse soldiers commanded by some of the Confederacy's finest, including Nathan Bedford Forrest. On July 13, 1862, Forrest's men surprised and captured the Union garrison at Murfreesboro, where Amos and some of his fellow Pennsylvanians were stationed. They fell into enemy hands.

Amos spent the rest of the year as a prisoner of war in Georgia and Virginia, and was exchanged and sent to the North in January 1863. It was about this time that he posed for his carte de visite photograph in the New York City studio of Mathew B. Brady. He may have visited Anna before he returned to his comrades in the Seventh, who had remained on duty in Tennessee.

Five months later, on June 27, 1863, Amos was part of a 225-man detachment from the Seventh that participated with other federal cavalry units in a noteworthy attack against enemy infantry and artillery at Shelbyville, about 50 miles south of Nashville. The Confederate cavalryman John A. Wyeth described the engagement in his autobiography and an article in Harper's Weekly magazine. "I witnessed one of the most magnificent cavalry charges of the entire war," Wyeth declared. "Had we been wise our small band would have scattered at once into the woods to the east and saved itself, instead of waiting to be ridden over."

Wyeth watched as Amos Rhoads and the other Union cavalry approached along a main road on the outskirts of town. "On either side of the highway, in columns of fours, they advanced at a steady gallop, until they passed into the opening in a line of earth works, through which the main road led, some two or three hundred yards in our advance. As soon as they reached this point inside the works, still on the full run, they deployed from columns of fours into line of battle, like the opening of a huge fan. The movement was made with as much precision as if it had been done in an open plain, on dress parade, or in some exhibition of discipline and drill."

Wyeth observed that the federals came on rapidly with their sabers raised high. "It was a glorious sight, and the thunder of their horses' hoofs was the only sound. Not a word of command, not a huzza from them, or a yell of defiance from us do I recall. The truth is, there was no defiance from us, only the courage born of despair, for we knew we were doomed."

Wyeth reported, "Our orders were to stand until they approached within fifty yards, when we were to empty our rifles, draw our pistols, and then sauve qui peut!"

The silent fan of federals thundered down upon them. Wyeth and his comrades braced for action. "It was only a short space of time, probably the fraction of a minute, until they were so near that we could distinguish their faces, and in fact their individual features," Wyeth recalled.

He continued, "Leveling our guns at them we fired our final volley, and by the time our horses' heads were faced to the rear, they, coming at full speed, were upon us." Some of the Confederates fled into Shelbyville. Others, including Wyeth, took off into the countryside and went into hiding.

Rhoads and the rest of the Seventh paused at this juncture. They received new orders to pursue the retreating enemy into town, where a large number of Confederate infantry and an artillery battery of four cannon had massed.

The Seventh charged straight through the center of town, and it was supported by other troops that attacked along side streets to left and right of the Pennsylvanians. Most of the Confederates surrendered or skedaddled.

But a pocket of determined rebels continued the fight from a railway station and an adjacent brick structure. Rhoads and his company attacked the station from behind to force them out. A skirmish ensued, and six Pennsylvanians were shot and killed, including Rhoads. According to the senior officer of the Seventh, Lt. Col. William B. Sipes, the dead were buried before the regiment left Shelbyville.

In addition to the six killed, the Seventh suffered 10 wounded during the entire engagement. Total losses for all Union forces involved amounted to 35. Estimated Confederate casualties ran in the hundreds.

The charge at Shelbyville was the high point of the Middle Tennessee Campaign, a weeklong operation with low casualties commanded by Union Maj. Gen. William S. Rosecrans and his Army of the Cumberland. "Old Rosy," as his soldiers called him, skillfully maneuvered Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg and his army out of the region, and threatened the safety of rebel-held Chattanooga.

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News of the victory in Tennessee quickly spread to the North. But reports of the glorious victories at the Battle of Gettysburg and the Siege of Vicksburg the following week completely overshadowed the achievement of Rosecrans and his army.

In the midst of the wild celebrations that erupted across the Union in the wake of the twin victories, Anna Rhoads received word of the death of Amos. Smart, savvy and fiercely independent, she set out for the South to recover his remains.

Details of her journey are sketchy. One solid piece of evidence is the note written by General Whitaker to the district commander, General Granger. Whitaker requested that Anna be furnished transportation for herself and the body to Louisville, Ky., from where she would likely continue her journey to Williamsport. Granger denied the request. "We have no authority for transporting the body of her husband," he scribbled on the back of Whitaker's memo.

In the end, Amos's remains were buried in Tennessee. He was most likely interred in the Nashville area and later removed to the Stones River National Cemetery. According to a government burial list, the exact location of his grave in the cemetery is unknown.

Anna went to Washington, where she landed a job at the Treasury Department. At some point, she met Henry Marcotte, a lieutenant who had been wounded at the Battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. The two married in October 1865. Henry continued on in the regular Army, and Anna accompanied him to various frontier posts.

They eventually settled in St. Augustine, Fla. Anna rose to local prominence as the editor and publisher of The Tatler of Florida Society, a popular society newspaper published weekly during the winter tourist season. A crusader for civic responsibility, she was active in several organizations. After Henry died in 1923, she moved to New York City and lived with her only child, a daughter from her second marriage. Anna died in 1935 at age 93. She was buried alongside Henry in Arlington National Cemetery.

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Sources: James G. Wilson and John Fiske, eds., "Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography," Vol. VI; Anna M. Rhoads pension record, National Archives and Records Administration; 1860 Federal Census; John F. Meginness, ed., "History of Lycoming County, Pennsylvania; Amos B. Rhoads military service record, National Archives and Records Administration; William B. Sipes, "The Seventh Pennsylvania Veteran Volunteer Cavalry: Its Record, Reminiscences and Roster"; John A. Wyeth, "With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon"; Harper's Weekly, June 18, 1898; The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies; Joseph G. Vale, "Minty and the Cavalry: A History of Cavalry Campaigns in the Western Armies"; William F. Beyer and Oscar F. Keydel, eds., "Deeds of Valor: How America's Civil War Heroes Won the Congressional Medal of Honor"; Thomas Graham, "Flagler's Magnificent Hotel Ponce De Leon"; Sidney W. Martin, "Florida's Flagler"; New York Times, Nov. 11, 1935.

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Ronald S. Coddington is the author of "Faces of the Civil War" and "Faces of the Confederacy." His most recent book is "African American Faces of the Civil War." He writes "Faces of War," a column for the Civil War News.

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Opinionator | Summer Game: Can You Guess What This Is?

RULES
1. Player has not seen the photo beforehand.

2. Player must try to give context for the photo.

PLAYER
Ron Funches, comedian and actor who was most recently in the series "Undateable." Twitter:@RonFunches.

GUESS
I know exactly what this is. It's the crescent moon mushroom burger from "Yes Wiccan Grill It," my favorite pagan eatery in Williamsburg.

Great with a solstice shake and an "As Above So Phyllo" pastry.

There is also a small amount of semen on the plate, leading me to believe the burger has come to life and has made sweet love to the pickle. I like that.

ANSWER

So close, but the burger is at the Jelly Belly candy factory in Fairfield, Calif.

Jelly-bean mosaics of George Clooney and Ronald Reagan line the walls. There is a factory tour where you can learn how jelly beans are made. Visit on a weekday or you will see only empty conveyor belts and frozen machinery. After the tour, you can have lunch at the Jelly Belly Cafe, which sells bean-shaped pizzas and burgers with "sweet love" pickles.

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MY FAVORITE COMMENT
"A Boomerang Sandwich Which Comes Back to You As Heartburn."
— Peter C., Bear Territory

MOST ACCURATE COMMENT

This is a bean-shaped mushroom and swiss burger (chicken patty or vegetable substitute for beef) at Jelly Belly cafe. Price of product: $8.50. Boom.
— MDinsight, Illinois

See readers' guesses in the comments. Come back next week to take a guess on a new clue.

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Tamara Shopsin is a graphic designer, illustrator and author, most recently, of "Mumbai New York Scranton."

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Opinionator | Disunion: Buford Hold the High Ground

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

Neither side in the Civil War lacked for blowhards and glory seekers among its general officers corps. Many still command our attention 150 years later, and theirs are the names we often tend to recognize, while the steady, unassuming sort – those who did their jobs and sought no recognition – have often gone unheralded.

Few general officers deserve more credit from the historians for initiative, courage and fine soldiering ability than John Buford – and few have received less. In his classic "Army of the Potomac" trilogy, Bruce Catton epitomizes the view taken by most Civil War chroniclers, describing Buford simply as "a solid man who was hard to frighten and who was greatly admired by the men of his division." He was, in fact, a good deal more, and at Gettysburg, he was responsible for saving the day, the battle and, arguably, the Union.

Born in Kentucky in 1826, John Buford was descended from a long line of soldiers. He entered West Point in 1844, graduating four years later, 16th in his class of 38 – a ranking neither as impressive as that of Robert E. Lee, who graduated second, nor as ignominious as that of the two Georges, Custer and Pickett, each of whom finished last. He requested service in the cavalry, and was brevetted a second lieutenant in the First and then the Second Dragoons. Years of service on the Western frontier followed, during which Buford distinguished himself in numerous Indian engagements, including the bloody Battle of Ash Hollow, fought against the Sioux in 1855.

Buford served in Utah under Gen. Albert S. Johnston, during President Buchanan's ill-advised campaign against the Mormons. While stationed at Fort Crittenden, Buford studied cavalry theory and tactics, adopting the then-radical concept that cavalry could be better served by fighting as mounted infantry. This approach to combat would serve him well six years in the future, when his small force confronted the Army of Northern Virginia outside the small town of Gettysburg, Pa.

When the Civil War began, although Buford was a member of a slave-owning family and was offered a Confederate commission by the governor of Kentucky, he cast his lot with the Union. Initially assigned a desk job in Washington, in mid-1862 he was given command of a cavalry brigade, and fought with distinction at Second Bull Run. In the course of reorganizing the Army of the Potomac, Maj. Gen. George McClellan named Buford his chief of cavalry, a position he retained after Gen. Ambrose Burnside assumed command. When, in turn, Maj. Gen. Joseph Hooker took over from Burnside, he gave Buford command of the Cavalry Corps, Reserve Brigade, First Division. Buford subsequently fought at Chancellorsville, and later gained the advantage over Maj. Gen. J.E.B. Stuart's famed rebel cavalry at Brandy Station.

On June 30, 1863, Buford led the 3,000 men of his First Cavalry Division into the town of Gettysburg, looking for the enemy. Late in the afternoon he found them, when his scouts reported that enemy patrols had recently left the town, heading west on the Cashtown Pike. Buford stationed pickets, under the command of Col. Tom Devin, to cover the countryside and the roads leading in and out of town. Devin was sure they were dealing with only a small contingent of rebels, and assured his commander that he could easily handle whatever came along; Buford, who strongly believed that they were about to confront the bulk of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, quickly disabused him of the notion. "No, you won't. They will attack you in the morning and they will come booming – skirmishers three-deep. You will have to fight like the devil until supports arrive."

If West Point, years of combat experience and common sense had taught Buford anything, it was to claim and maintain the high ground. His small force stood alone between the rebels and the hills outside the town. It would take Maj. Gen. John Reynolds several hours the next day to bring up his I Corps, and Buford realized that if he withdrew and allowed Lee to claim the high ground, the battle – and quite possibly the war – could be forfeited. The only course was to fight a delaying action against an overwhelmingly superior force, no matter the cost.

With what light remained, Buford rode the countryside about, getting the lay of the land and visualizing what was to come on the morrow. That night, he seemed to be everywhere at once, puffing on his pipe. By the light of a bright moon, he sent scouts to the north and west, and warned his troops, "Look out for campfires during the night and for dust in the morning." He sent a messenger to Maj. Gen. George Gordon Meade – who had assumed command of the Army of the Potomac from Hooker only two days before – informing him of the situation. Meade replied that Buford was to hold the line and await infantry support next day from generals Reynolds and Oliver Howard.

Before dawn on what promised to be a hot July 1, the Yankee cavalry stood waiting the appearance of the Rebel force. The fields about were rich with growing crops, and for a brief moment, the scene was peaceful and idyllic. With the rising sun, a long column of butternut figures marched eastward toward Buford's position. As he had predicted, their lines of skirmishers was three deep, and coursing over the wheat fields along the Cashtown Road. Ironically, they were commanded by Gen. Harry Heth, alongside whom Buford had fought during the campaign against the Sioux in the mid-1850s. Reportedly, Heth had been leading his men toward Gettysburg in search of shoes and supplies; instead, he found John Buford.

Rebel skirmishers and four federal soldiers from the 9th New York Cavalry first spotted each other near Willoughby Run, and fired a few desultory rounds – thus beginning the Battle of Gettysburg.

Using his two unsupported cavalry brigades as mounted infantry, Buford dismounted his men and stationed them along a ridge just a few miles from town, in the path of the oncoming rebels. One man in four stood to the rear holding the horses for the others. This effectively left him with only 2,200 men – stationed at wide intervals – to hold the high ground. The line was anything but formal, with Buford's men taking cover as best they could, aiming their breech-loading Spencer carbines from behind trees, bushes and fence posts. Buford strategically placed his six cannon for maximum effect. Lt. John Calef, commanding the guns, aimed one cannon at a group of rebel officers nearly a mile distant, and fired. As Bruce Catton understates it, "The flash and the echoing report and the bursting shell notified the Confederates that they were expected."

Buford surveyed the battle from the tower of a Lutheran seminary on a nearby ridge. It seemed there was no end to the Rebel forces, and without infantry support, he knew his delaying action was doomed. He sent messengers to apprise Reynolds of his situation, and to encourage him to hurry up. Meanwhile, the numerically superior Confederate riflemen and artillery were hammering Buford's thin line, and taking a heavy toll. Calef's well-managed cannon replied, but the force of the guns was all on the rebels' side.

When he received word of Buford's position, Reynolds galloped on alone, ahead of his infantry. Reynolds reined in at the tower, asking, "What's the matter, John?" to which Buford shouted, "There's the devil to pay!" He filled Reynolds in, whereupon Reynolds sent off a note to Meade, reading, "I will fight [the enemy] inch by inch, and if driven into the town I will barricade the streets and hold him aback as long as possible." South of Gettysburg, the Union infantry quickened their pace toward the sound of the guns on what has come to be called Seminary Ridge. When he saw the rapidly approaching files of blue uniforms, Buford stated with relief, "Now we can hold the place."

Throughout that long, bloody day, Buford's men continued to fight alongside the Union infantry, which included the legendary black-hatted Iron Brigade. It was a hard-fought struggle, involving bitter hand-to-hand fighting, as well as the loss of General Reynolds to a sniper's bullet. After the first day of battle, Buford wrote of his small force, "The zeal, bravery, and good behavior of the officers and men on the night of June 30, and on July 1, was commendable in the extreme. A heavy task was before us; we were equal to it, and shall all remember with pride that at Gettysburg we did our country much service."

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Most of Buford's men spent a rainy night on the line of battle, between Cemetery Ridge and Little Round Top, while his pickets watched for enemy action from a peach orchard along the Emmitsburg Road. The next morning brought yet more fighting, beginning as early as 5 a.m. By now, Buford's men and horses were exhausted, their ranks badly thinned, their supplies and ammunition nearly gone. At around 11 a.m., Meade ordered Buford to withdraw his drained and depleted force for "re-fit." The order directed him to proceed to Taneytown, Md., 14 miles distant, and from there, to convey supply trains to the railhead supply base at Westminster. Here he could rest his men and mounts, and replenish his supplies.

Buford's actions at Gettysburg had delayed the enemy long enough for the federals to halt their advance. As Buford intended, he had deprived Lee of the high ground, and in so doing, had contributed immeasurably to slanting the outcome of the battle toward the Union.

Buford sought no recognition for his stand at Gettysburg. Perhaps the best description of the man's character comes from the contemporary historian and brevet brigadier general Theophilus Rodenbough: "Buford despised the false flourish and noisy parade of the charlatans of his service. He avoided too … the proper praise due his glorious actions, his bravery and dash, without ostentation or pride, his coolness and able management; and above all, the care of his men endeared him to all."

Later that year, Buford was stricken with typhoid. He grew increasingly infirm, finally taking to bed in the Washington home of his friend, Gen. George Stoneman. As Buford's condition worsened, Stoneman pressed the administration to promote his comrade to the rank of major general. On Dec. 16, President Lincoln concurred, writing, "I am informed that General Buford will not survive the day. It suggests itself to me that he will be made Major General for distinguished and meritorious service at the Battle of Gettysburg."

Buford's devoted aide, Capt. Myles Keogh, presented him with his promotion as Buford lay on his deathbed. After Keogh convinced him the advance in rank was genuine, the dying general replied, "It is too late, now I wish I could live."

Buford passed in and out of delirium throughout the day. His wife, Pattie, was hurrying to his bedside from their home in Rock Island, Ill., but she would not arrive in time. John Buford succumbed at 2 in the afternoon. Ever the soldier, as Captain Keogh held him in his arms, he uttered his last words: "Put guards on all the roads and don't let the men run to rear."

The following day, The New York Times printed Buford's obituary, stating, "He was considered the best field cavalry commander in the service, and was noted for his coolness and judgment under fire. He was … a man of generous nature and warm impulses. … The country has lost a noble spirit and a brave defender." Memorial services for Buford were held in the nation's capital, with the president in attendance.

If death was to be his fate during the war, this was not the death that John Buford would have wished. Nor was it the death ordained for Keogh, his valued aide. That would occur more than 12 years in the future, while in the service of the greatest glory hunter of them all. Keogh would perish in the wilds of Montana Territory, on the side of a grassy hill. At its foot ran a narrow tributary that the Lakota called the Greasy Grass. To the ill-fated soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, it was the Little Big Horn.

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Ron Soodalter is the author of "Hanging Captain Gordon: The Life and Trial of an American Slave Trader" and a co-author of "The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today." He is a featured writer and columnist for America's Civil War magazine and a frequent contributor to Civil War Times and Military History.

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Opinionator: The Real John Roberts Emerges

This time a year ago, the conservative chief justice whose vote saved President Obama's health care law was a figure of mystery. In fact, "The Mystery of John Roberts" was the title I gave to one of my Opinionator columns for The New York Times last summer. The right-wing blogosphere had turned on him venomously. Liberals didn't know what to make of his crucial vote, or of him. What was his game? Was he for real?

What a difference a Supreme Court term makes.

What became clear during the momentous term that ended Wednesday is that the real Chief Justice Roberts has been there all along, hiding in plain sight. We just needed to know where to look.

In the case of the Affordable Care Act, it's plain in hindsight that the real John G. Roberts Jr. was not the one who, with evident reluctance and seemingly close to the last minute, joined the court's liberals to place a taxing-power Band-Aid on the mandate's penalty provision. In his opinion, he referred unenthusiastically to that statute-saving interpretive move as a "duty."

Rather, the real John Roberts was the one who as part of that same opinion — not the part that ultimately counted — issued a full-throated condemnation of Congress's exercise of its commerce power to have enacted the mandate in the first place. "That is not the country the framers of our Constitution envisioned," he declaimed.

In saving the mandate's penalty provision as a tax, he followed his head. In denouncing the very notion that Congress might require people to buy health insurance, he followed his heart. In the term that just ended, head and heart were no longer at war.

THAT is not to say that he was always in control of the court, or that his view always prevailed. In United States v. Windsor, the decision that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, he was one of four dissenters.

Windsor was one of the four late June decisions by which the term will be known, and it was in fact the only major decision out of 73 argued cases that found the chief justice on the losing side. (He dissented a total of 11 times, the lowest number among all the justices, after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy's 7.)

A significant point about the Defense of Marriage Act is that it was an anomaly among the other hot-button cases in terms of its presence on the court's docket. A federal appeals court had found DOMA unconstitutional, and while the Supreme Court has nearly complete discretion to choose the cases it wants to decide, the justices feel obliged to review a decision that has invalidated a federal statute. Granting such a case (the health care case was another) is itself a neutral act that tells nothing about the justices' appetites.

The court's action in reaching out to decide the future of voting rights in Shelby County v. Holder and affirmative action in Fisher v. University of Texas was, by contrast, an exercise of pure will, fueled by a desire to change settled law.

The decision to review Hollingsworth v. Perry, a case concerning Proposition 8, the ballot measure that banned same-sex marriage in California, may or may not fit into this category. Chief Justice Roberts wrote for the 5-to-4 majority that the opponents of same-sex marriage, who lost in the lower courts, lacked standing to appeal. It was the justices themselves who added the question of standing to the case when they accepted the appeal last December. Given the chief justice's expressed interest in tightening up the rules for standing, along with general confusion in the courts about whether sponsors of a referendum can assert the interests of a state unwilling to defend it, it's possible that the standing issue is what drove this case from the beginning.

So if there is an overarching lesson to be derived from this term, a consumer's guide to the Roberts court, it is follow the docket. The 73 cases the court decided between the beginning of last October and the end of June were selected from some 8,000 appeals. Year after year, most of that large number — prisoner appeals raising questions of fact rather than law — have little claim on the court's attention. But hundreds, certainly, present issues with which the court might fruitfully engage.

Each case the court selects, by the agreement of at least four justices, under its internal rules, is a vehicle intended to accomplish something: to clarify the law, interpret an ambiguous statute, resolve conflicting decisions among the lower courts or, as in the Shelby County and Fisher cases, to change the status quo.

His voting rights opinion was startling for its activism.

Here is where the term got interesting. In its sweeping disregard of history, precedent and constitutional text, the chief justice's 5-to-4 opinion in the voting rights case was startling for its naked activism, but no one watching the court over the past few years could have been surprised by the outcome. The court made clear in a 2009 decision that it had Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, the "preclearance" provision, squarely in its sights. (Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's devastating dissenting opinion last week read to me as if major portions had been written back in 2009, rendered unnecessary by the compromise outcome then, but saved for the day that she knew was coming.)

The chief justice's antipathy toward the Voting Rights Act itself was well known, and was a significant reason that major civil rights groups opposed his confirmation to the court in 2005. Following his nomination, memos came to light that he had written more than 20 years earlier as a young lawyer in the Reagan administration.

The debate within the administration then was over whether Congress should make it clear that a violation of the Voting Rights Act did not require proof of intentional discrimination, as a 1980 Supreme Court decision had held, and that proof of a discriminatory effect should be sufficient. The looser standard, which Congress eventually adopted, would "provide a basis for the most intrusive interference imaginable by federal courts into state and local processes," John Roberts warned in a memo to Attorney General William French Smith.

Questioned at his confirmation hearing by Senator Edward M. Kennedy about his views on the Voting Rights Act, Mr. Roberts, then a judge, asserted that he had been acting at the time as a staff lawyer advising a client, but that as a judge he had an open mind.

In contrast to the voting rights decision, the University of Texas affirmative action decision was a surprise for its failure to accomplish anything of significance. It was a vehicle that never made it to the intended finish line. True, the 7-to-1 opinion vacated the lower court's ruling that had upheld the university's limited consideration of race as part of its admission plan. But Justice Kennedy's 13-page majority opinion applied what he described as existing law, from which he said the lower court had deviated.

So if the voting rights case was a mission accomplished, Fisher v. University of Texas was a mission that failed, conspicuously so, after eight months of deliberation following last October's argument. I assume there were four justices — the chief justice along with Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — who were eager to declare the Texas affirmative action plan unconstitutional, if not to upend affirmative action altogether. Justice Kennedy, presumably, couldn't be coaxed fully onboard.

The case may have played out internally as a potential repeat of one of the Roberts court's first major decisions, the Parents Involved case from 2007. In that case, which concerned racially conscious K-12 student assignment plans in districts struggling to preserve the hard-won gains of integration, Chief Justice Roberts failed to persuade Justice Kennedy to go along with a sweeping opinion declaring that preventing resegregation was not a "compelling interest" sufficient to justify a policy that took students' race into account. Rather than accommodate Justice Kennedy's more modulated view, which was that the districts' interest was compelling but the remedies they chose were too broad, the chief justice stuck to his position and ended up writing only for a plurality of four rather than a majority of five.

It was a notable failure of his early leadership that perhaps explains his silence in last week's case. While Justices Thomas and Scalia expressed their own views in separate concurring opinions, Chief Justice Roberts said nothing, silently joining what was clearly a brokered compromise, biding his time.

If there is no mystery about the nature of the chief justice's views, I remain baffled by their origin. Clearly, he doesn't trust Congress; in describing conservative judges, that's like observing that the sun rises in the east. But oddly for someone who earned his early stripes in the Justice Department and White House Counsel's Office, he doesn't like the executive branch any better.

He made this clear in an opinion dissenting from a 6-to-3 decision this term in an administrative law case, City of Arlington v. Federal Communications Commission. The question was whether, when the underlying statute is ambiguous, courts should defer to an administrative agency's interpretation of its own jurisdiction. The answer was clearly yes, according to Justice Scalia's majority opinion that built on decades of precedent on judicial deference to agencies. The chief justice's dissenting opinion was a discordant screed that bemoaned the modern administrative state with its "hundreds of federal agencies poking into every nook and cranny of daily life."

Congress can't be trusted. The executive branch is out of control. What's left?

The Supreme Court. There's a comforting thought as we await Year 9 of the Roberts court.

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Opinionator | The Stone: The Gospel According to ‘Me’

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

The booming self-help industry, not to mention the cash cow of New Age spirituality, has one message: be authentic! Charming as American optimism may be, its 21st-century incarnation as the search for authenticity deserves pause. The power of this new version of the American dream can be felt through the stridency of its imperatives: Live fully! Realize yourself! Be connected! Achieve well-being!

Guilt and alienation must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

Despite the frequent claim that we are living in a secular age defined by the death of God, many citizens in rich Western democracies have merely switched one notion of God for another — abandoning their singular, omnipotent (Christian or Judaic or whatever) deity reigning over all humankind and replacing it with a weak but all-pervasive idea of spirituality tied to a personal ethic of authenticity and a liturgy of inwardness. The latter does not make the exorbitant moral demands of traditional religions, which impose bad conscience, guilt, sin, sexual inhibition and the rest.

Unlike the conversions that transfigure the born-again's experience of the world in a lightning strike, this one occurred in stages: a postwar existentialist philosophy of personal liberation and "becoming who you are" fed into a 1960s counterculture that mutated into the most selfish conformism, disguising acquisitiveness under a patina of personal growth, mindfulness and compassion. Traditional forms of morality that required extensive social cooperation in relation to a hard reality defined by scarcity have largely collapsed and been replaced with this New Age therapeutic culture of well-being that does not require obedience or even faith — and certainly not feelings of guilt. Guilt must be shed; alienation, both of body and mind, must be eliminated, most notably through yoga practice after a long day of mind-numbing work.

In the gospel of authenticity, well-being has become the primary goal of human life. Rather than being the by-product of some collective project, some upbuilding of the New Jerusalem, well-being is an end in itself. The stroke of genius in the ideology of authenticity is that it doesn't really require a belief in anything, and certainly not a belief in anything that might transcend the serene and contented living of one's authentic life and baseline well-being. In this, one can claim to be beyond dogma.

Whereas the American dream used to be tied to external reality — say, America as the place where one can openly practice any religion, America as a safe haven from political oppression or America as the land of opportunity where one need not struggle as hard as one's parents — now, the dream is one of pure psychological transformation.

This is the phenomenon that one might call, with an appreciative nod to Nietzsche, passive nihilism. Authenticity is its dominant contemporary expression. In a seemingly meaningless, inauthentic world awash in nonstop media reports of war, violence and inequality, we close our eyes and turn ourselves into islands. We may even say a little prayer to an obscure but benign Eastern goddess and feel some weak spiritual energy connecting everything as we listen to some tastefully selected ambient music. Authenticity, needing no reference to anything outside itself, is an evacuation of history. The power of now.

At the heart of the ethic of authenticity is a profound selfishness and callous disregard of others.

This ideology functions prominently in the contemporary workplace, where the classical distinction between work and nonwork has broken down. Work was traditionally seen as a curse or an obligation for which we received payment. Nonwork was viewed as an experience of freedom for which we pay but that gives us pleasure.

But the past 30 years or so has ushered in an informalization of the workplace where the distinction between work and nonwork is harder and harder to draw. With the rise of corporations like Google, the workplace has increasingly been colonized by nonwork experiences to the extent that we are not even allowed to feel alienation or discontent at the office because we can play Ping-Pong, ride a Segway, and eat  organic lunches from a menu designed by celebrity chefs. If we do feel discontent, it must mean that something is wrong with us rather than with the corporation.

With the workplace dominated by the maxim of personal authenticity — Be different! Wear your favorite T-shirt to work and listen to Radiohead on your iPhone while at your desk! Isn't it nifty? — there is no room for worker malaise. And contrary to popular belief, none of this has assuaged the workplace dynamics of guilt, bad conscience and anxiety, which are more rampant than ever. In fact, the blurring of the boundary between work and nonwork in the name of flexibility has led to an enormous  increase in anxiety — a trend well-documented in the work of Peter Fleming, a professor of work, organization and society at the University of London. Women in particular feel totally inadequate for not being able to have it all — climb the ladder at work, make the same wages as men, have a family, have a voluminous sex life, still look attractive and act as if they are having a great time through all of it.

Work is no longer a series of obligations to be fulfilled for the sake of sustenance: it is the expression of one's authentic self. With the extraordinary rise of internships — not just filled by college students anymore, but more and more by working-age adults — people from sufficiently privileged backgrounds  are even prepared to work without pay  because it allows them to "grow" as persons. Every aspect of one's existence is meant to water some fantasy of growth.

But here's the rub: if one believes that there is an intimate connection between one's authentic self and glittering success at work, then the experience of failure and forced unemployment is accepted as one's own fault. I feel shame for losing my job. I am morally culpable for the corporation's decision that I am excess to requirements.

To take this one step further: the failure of others is explained by their merely partial enlightenment for which they, and they alone, are to be held responsible. At the heart of the ethic of authenticity is a profound selfishness and callous disregard of others. As the ever-wise Buddha says, "You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection."

A naïve belief in authenticity eventually gives way to a deep cynicism. A conviction in personal success that must always hold failure at bay becomes a corrupt stubbornness that insists on success at any cost. Cynicism, in this mode, is not the expression of a critical stance toward authenticity but is rather the runoff of this failure of belief. The self-help industry itself runs the gamut in both directions — from "The Power of Now," which teaches you the power of meditative self-sufficiency, to "The Rules," which teaches a woman how to land a man by pretending to be self-sufficient. Profit rules the day, inside and out.

Nothing seems more American than this forced choice between cynicism and naïve belief. Or rather, as Herman Melville put it in his 1857 novel "The Confidence Man," it seems the choice is between being a fool (having to believe what one says) or being a knave (saying things one does not believe). For Melville, who was writing on the cusp of modern capitalism, the search for authenticity is a white whale.

This search is an obsession that is futile at best and destructive at worst. The lingering question for Melville, on the brink of poverty as he wrote "The Confidence Man," is: what happens to charity? When the values of Judeo-Christian morality have been given a monetary and psychological incarnation — as in credit, debt, trust, faith and fidelity — can they exist as values? Is the prosperous self the only God in which we believe in a radically inauthentic world?

As usual, the Bard of Avon got there first. In "Hamlet," Shakespeare puts the mantra of authenticity into the mouth of the ever-idiotic windbag Polonius in his advice to his son, Laertes: "To thine own self be true." This is just before Polonius sends a spy to follow Laertes to Paris and tell any number of lies in order to catch him out.

And who, finally, is more inauthentic than Hamlet? Ask yourself: is Hamlet true to himself, doubting everything, unable to avenge his father's murder, incapable of uttering the secret that he has learned from the ghost's lips, and unwilling to declare his love for Ophelia whose father he kills? Hamlet dies wearing the colors of his enemy, Claudius. We dare say that we love "Hamlet" not for its representation of our purportedly sublime authenticity, but as a depiction of the drama of our radical inauthenticity that, in the best of words and worlds, shatters our moral complacency.

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Simon Critchley, a professor of philosophy at The New School for Social Research, and Jamieson Webster, a psychoanalyst, are the authors of "Stay Illusion: The Hamlet Doctrine."
 

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Editorial: American Mayors: Let Them Smoke Pot

It has been more than seven months since voters in Colorado and Washington State chose to legalize marijuana for recreational use, in contravention of federal drug laws. It has been more than three months since Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he would announce his department's response to the new statutes "relatively soon."

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So far: nothing. Mr. Holder has yet to indicate whether he will side with all nine former heads of the Drug Enforcement Administration, who published an open letter urging federal pre-emption.

On Monday, the United States Conference of Mayors passed a resolution suggesting the opposite: that the Obama administration should let the states decide this issue for themselves. "Despite the prohibition of marijuana," the resolution reads, "and the 22 million marijuana arrests that have occurred in the United States since 1965," some "42 percent of Americans" have used the drug.

Organized crime, the mayors continue, dominates the illegal marketplace; enforcement is not only costly, but also racially biased, with African-Americans far more likely than Caucasians to be arrested for possession despite similar rates of use across ethnic groups. In light of these facts, they say, states should be able to "set whatever marijuana policies work best to improve the public safety and health of their communities."

A guy named Barack Obama might have agreed with that when he was running for president. Asked about medical marijuana in 2008, he said, "I'm not going to be using Justice Department resources to try to circumvent state laws on this issue." But the Barack Obama who actually became president seems to have no problem with interference. In the past four years, the D.E.A. has conducted at least 270 SWAT-style raids on medical marijuana providers at a cost of roughly $8 million. 

What the Conference of Mayors resolved seems appropriate — and sensitive to the reality that public attitudes toward marijuana are liberalizing rapidly. In 1969, the Pew Research Center found that only 12 percent of Americans favored legalizing the drug. By 2010, that figure was 41 percent. In 2013, it was 52 percent, a majority.

At any rate, Mr. Holder's dithering helps no one. The status quo is chaotic and untenable. If you live in Denver or Seattle and you are thinking of applying for a license to sell marijuana, you have a right to know whether federal prosecutors will move to seize your property and jail you.

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Op-Ed Columnist: The Zimmerman Trial

This first week of testimony in the George Zimmerman trial has proved to be nothing short of fascinating.

On one level, the case is simple: if Zimmerman had not pursued — some say stalked — Trayvon Martin that dark, rainy night, Martin would still be alive.

That's the logical argument. The legal one is more complex. The case, it seems to me, spins on some crucial questions, some of which we may never completely know the answers to.

What was it about Martin in particular that Zimmerman found "suspicious" in the first place? So far, there has been no testimony that Martin was doing anything other than walking slowly and talking on a phone to a girl, as teenage boys are wont to do. Did Zimmerman consider every person walking thusly in the neighborhood to be suspicious? If not, what made Martin different? Was some sort of bias at play, whether an explicit one or an implicit one?

Why did Zimmerman leave his car, armed with his gun, and follow Martin? When the dispatcher realized that Zimmerman was in pursuit and told him, "We don't need you to do that," did Zimmerman stop?

Did Martin know that he was being followed, as his friend Rachel Jeantel testified, and did he feel threatened by the stranger following him?

In fact, the threat levels are a larger, more complex issue altogether. Who felt threatened, the teenager with the candy and the soda or the man pursuing him with a gun and a live round in the chamber? The answer on the surface would seem obvious, but it's possible that both felt some level of threat. It's also possible that threat responses washed back and forth between them like water in a tub, neither of them knowing about the other what we know now — that Zimmerman was armed and Martin was not.

If Martin was running away, as Zimmerman has said and Jeantel has testified, did he at some point stop fleeing, turn and approach Zimmerman?

There has been testimony establishing that there was some sort of verbal interaction between Zimmerman and Martin before a physical one. Who struck the first blow and why? If Martin struck the first blow, as the defense contends, could that be considered an act of self-defense?

Regardless of who struck the first blow, some testimony suggests that Martin was getting the best of Zimmerman. In that scenario, could the right to self-defense switch personage? Florida law seems to suggest it can. The law states that the use of force is not justified when a person "initially provokes the use of force against himself or herself, unless such force is so great that the person reasonably believes that he or she is in imminent danger of death or great bodily harm and that he or she has exhausted every reasonable means to escape such danger other than the use of force which is likely to cause death or great bodily harm to the assailant."

Even assuming that Martin was winning a physical fight with Zimmerman, did Zimmerman "reasonably" believe that he was in "imminent danger of death or great bodily harm"? Zimmerman was injured, but how do you evaluate the degree of those injuries? Independent assessments may or may not deem Zimmerman's injuries severe, but did Zimmerman, in the middle of the fight, believe them to be? Had Zimmerman "exhausted every reasonable means to escape"?

Who was yelling for help? Keep in mind that it is possible to be both winning a fight and simultaneously yelling for help.

During opening arguments, John Guy, a prosecutor, stated that investigators found none of Zimmerman's blood on Martin's hands or on the cuffs of his sweatshirt. How will the defense explain that?

The bar may be high for the prosecution, but the logic is basic: there has been no suggestion or testimony that Trayvon Martin was doing anything wrong the night that George Zimmerman caught sight of him and grew wary of him, pursued him and came into contact with him.

Zimmerman set that night's events in motion and rendered them still with the ring of a gunshot. Now, as Zimmerman sits in a Florida courtroom, Martin sleeps in a Florida grave. We will never hear Martin's side of the story, about the level of his fear or the feel of the bullet ripping through his body.

Morally, Zimmerman is by no means without guilt. Legally, it remains to be seen whether he will be found guilty of second-degree murder.

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Op-Ed Contributor: Sex and the H.I.V. Morning-After Pill

I RECENTLY had a serious H.I.V. scare after an episode of unprotected sex. The next day, at Whitman-Walker, a clinic in Washington that specializes in treating gay patients, I began a monthlong regimen of the drug Truvada, a form of post-exposure prophylaxis, or PEP. It has to be taken within 72 hours after potential contact with the virus that causes AIDS. The price tag would normally be $1,200, but I was able to get a subsidy the manufacturer gives to low-income earners.

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"You can only get this deal once," my doctor warned.

"Jeez, I hope so," I said. "I mean, it's not like there are PEP regulars, right?"

She sighed. "Oh, there are."

More than 30 years since AIDS emerged, and two decades since antiretroviral drugs transformed that epidemic into a chronic but manageable disease, conversations about H.I.V. remain awkward, especially for gay men.

When were you last tested? Did you test only for antibodies, or was it a full polymerase chain reaction test? What have you done sexually since you last tested negative?

It can be tough to rekindle any bedroom passion after such questions come up.

Two recent developments could make these conversations less awkward, or even render them moot. But they also raise troubling questions about promiscuity and responsibility that are reminiscent of debates from the 1980s.

The first development was the approval, last summer, by the Food and Drug Administration of an over-the-counter rapid-response at-home H.I.V. test kit. The test, called OraQuick and available nationwide since October, gives results 20 minutes after a cheek swab. The second is the increasing availability of PEP and of pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP.

PEP — the medication I am taking — has been called the H.I.V. morning-after pill, and PrEP, to follow the analogy, is akin to birth control. A study in the British medical journal The Lancet this month found that drug-injecting addicts who took PrEP were half as likely to become infected with H.I.V. as those who did not; other studies have shown that the drug reduces transmission of the virus from mother to child, and transmission among both gay men and heterosexuals.

The at-home OraQuick tests, at $20 a pop, are a bigger phenomenon than drugs like Truvada, which can be used as either a pre-exposure or a post-exposure prophylaxis, and can cost more than $10,000 a year.

A study by Columbia University researchers, published last year in the journal AIDS and Behavior, found that the at-home tests could be effective if widely used. It gave at-home testing kits to 27 gay men who reported having routine unprotected sex. Over three months, the 27 men had a collective total of 140 sexual partners; 124 of them were asked to submit to testing before sex, and 101 agreed. Of the 101, 10 tested positive (six learned of their H.I.V. status that way). None of the men had sex with a partner after learning that the partner tested positive.

The at-home test, OraQuick, also is not a sure thing. It tests only for antibodies, which sometimes don't emerge for months after infection. So the newly infected, who are 8 to 10 times more likely to be infectious, can still test as negative.

As for the pre- and post-exposure pills, cost is not the only barrier. Of 403 H.I.V.-negative gay men surveyed in a different study by Columbia researchers, only half said they would take PrEP on a regular basis. A 22-year-old art director on the Lower East Side told me of a recent scare he had after he took home a handsome but sometimes homeless man he met at a bar. Very drunk, they had unprotected sex. The next morning the art director panicked, but eschewed the post-exposure pills, he told me, because "I'm pretty health-conscious and careful about what I put in my body, especially medicine." (Weeks later, he did a regular H.I.V. test, which came up negative.)

Dan Savage, the nationally syndicated sex columnist who coined the concept of "monogamish" relationships, expressed similar worry, fearing that clinicians do not understand the psychology of the population they're trying to help. "The guys these sensible health care folks are trying to reach are not sensible," he told me. "They are self-identified idiots who can only be saved by a vaccine." Right now, in the final weekend of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Pride Month, it is a good moment to reflect on these issues. In the nearly two decades since "Rent" and "Angels in America," a generation has grown up in a world where AIDS did not equal death. That has led to a complacency that helps explain a troubling increase in new H.I.V. infections among young men who have sex with men.

I fear that, for all their potential benefits, at-home tests and the new pre- and post-exposure H.I.V. medications might give some gay men an exaggerated sense of safety, and encourage the promiscuity that Larry Kramer, the playwright and activist, has spent so many years railing against.

When a gay crowd gathered Wednesday on Christopher Street, where the modern gay liberation movement was born in 1969, to celebrate the Supreme Court's rulings on same-sex marriage, there was much cheering and talk about progress. But I wondered what the crowd did with the rest of their night.

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Opinionator | Measure for Measure: What Do You Reveal Onstage?

Ah, yes. Back to the songwriting series! I've missed writing about songwriting. Maybe you've missed me, too, a little. Why do we write songs, by the way? Usually we write for a reason — to express a feeling, to tell that boy what we think of him, or to sing the baby to sleep. Sometimes we write songs to be famous, but not usually. The best songs are useful in our daily lives. So therefore anywhere we sing a song can be a kind of stage.

And then there is the Big Stage, that stage that we approach fearfully. There are two things I want to say about the stage.

One is that The Stage Is A Sacred Space. That's what I learned as a young dancer studying ballet and the Martha Graham modern dance technique. We were supposed to leave all our earthly issues behind us when we approached the floor. This also applied to our rehearsal and our daily practice spaces. We could leave our junk on the side of the room underneath the barre but essentially we were supposed to leave the floor clear for the performance.

So it makes me crazy when I come out on a stage, no matter how large or small it is, and see that people have put up their drinks, their jackets, their reading material — once a woman even put her two little children up on the edge of the stage "because they are so beautiful!" Yes, they are. Now take them down, please.

The second part of this first idea is that the stage belongs to whoever is on it at that moment. If anarchists seize the stage because they have an agenda (this happened to me once in Italy) and refuse to yield "because we want to have a presence," you must not give them the stage unless their agenda is your agenda also. For that hour and a half, or two, (or three if you are Leonard Cohen), that stage belongs to you. And your vision.

So: The second thing is that (speaking of your vision) whatever you carry in your mind while you are onstage shows up through the magic of theater, so that everyone in the audience sees it, too. This is something my director, Kay Matschullat, said to me while we were working on a play together a couple of years ago.

This is so intriguing to me. How can that be? And yet we see it happening over and over, not just in theater or dance, but in music, too. We go to see a performer. We like his music. We like the way he looks. We prepare to see him by listening to his music and thinking about his life and the stories he tells. And yet once we get to the show we look at him on the stage, in the lights. But his mind isn't on it, he doesn't like the audience, he's not inspired, he's thinking of his laundry. How do we know? We can just tell. He sees his laundry, and we see it, too.

So the stage is a powerful place to be. And it doesn't have to be a theater — there are lots of smaller stages in all kinds of situations. For example, there's the corner of the kitchen where the father sings after dinner. The spot of the cafeteria where someone has decided to start a tiny coffeehouse, where the raised floor is barely enough to hold a chair and a microphone. Or maybe it's not a raised floor but just a flat piece of linoleum. Or the stone hallway in the basement of a chapel. Maybe there's a spotlight, but maybe there isn't. These are still stages, and they still hold power for you as a performer.

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Lately in my tours I have been doing a fair amount of workshops of various types.

There are two kinds of workshops — one in which I watch performances, and another where I lead the participants through a kind of guided meditation called What Is In Your Toolbox? In both cases I always try to follow the maxim expressed by Alex Haley: "Find the good — and praise it." I try to see each one as an individual in their very best light in all their beauty. What gift do they have that maybe they aren't even aware of?

I have worked with young kids in disadvantaged areas and older people in affluent areas, worked with people who have never written or sung before, and people who are accomplished professionals. One thing I have learned and continue to learn every single time is, you cannot tell what is being harbored in someone's soul (what their vision is) by judging them from the outside.

For example, I addressed a group of performers and songwriters in a well-to-do suburb. One lady with plump apple-pink cheeks and white curly hair, dressed in a velour sweatsuit, wanted to know, how could she be more like her favorite performer? I would never have dreamed what she was going to say … Eartha Kitt! The sleek, mixed-race, sultry (self-described) sex kitten. She asked me, how could she be more like her? This was her fantasy, and what she had in her mind. I told her, "Start with the songs — buy the music, learn the songs. Get someone to play the music if you can't do it yourself. Think about your costume. Maybe instead of velour sweat pants, a touch of a leopard-skin scarf or something exotic if you decide you want to perform for your friends or your church group."

A workshop on singing and the business of music at West Valley College. At 23:00, I talk about talent shows, at 36:36, I talk about making your name and at 52:00, I go over important tools that you have.

This has happened over and over. The young black kid wants to know if it's O.K. to write symphonies in A minor — it's his favorite key, but maybe he should push himself to write happier sounding music in a major key? Maybe an audience would like it more? I told him to push himself from time to time to explore other options but always know and remember that A minor has a special emotional resonance for him. Maybe it will be the key to his developing style.

Someone I took to be an English teacher — what was he wearing? corduroy pants and a button-down shirt? — reveals that he once was an artist by the name of Jimmy Sparklepants who used to perform in the nude. Yes, covered in sparkles. But now he is in his 40s and wants to consider other options. We discussed what these might be. And, honestly, I can't remember. The initial surprise must have popped them out of my mind.

Recently I worked with a group of young performers in Kansas. It was great. They ranged in age from 15 to about 28. They sang a few songs each in a "talent show" format so I could see the range of the material they were interested in. As each one approached the stage I thought, who is this person? If they were in a play, what would be their character? What I liked about it was that there was very little of the "American Idol" feeling — competitiveness, or impersonators, imitators — singing loudly or singing in clichés. There were some cover songs but they seemed to be chosen to reveal something about the person who was singing. And they sang original material also, which for the most part was really revealing and interesting to listen to.

Occasionally, though, I felt — this person could do more with just a bit more risk. The Midwestern values of modesty, sincerity and niceness were definitely at work. Some of the kids would try to talk over the applause as if to say, Oh no! Please stop that, this is embarrassing. I would think, this is a modest, personable, sincere young man or woman and just a touch of flamboyance or whimsy would go a long way.

One young woman got on the stage and told us she had written a song about having to choose between one lover and a second one. She was truthful and sincere and I liked watching her. But instead of the plain T-shirt she wore, I longed to see her in a scarlet velvet blouse, something that spoke of a bit of experience as a woman with a love life.

One young man was tall and thin with a pronounced black hairline and an aquiline nose, well-defined arched eyebrows, long thin hands. He was dressed in a plain mock turtleneck and khakis. As I watched him, I thought, this young man could get away with a lot if he chose to. The smallest prop would make him seem exotic — he could get away with a cravat, a top hat, a walking stick, a handkerchief, a newsboy cap. One of these would skew his onstage persona and would reveal something about his inner life. I suggested this to him. What was his inner fantasy? His face lit up. Freddie Mercury!

Of course you have to scale your production to your venue sometimes. I think he was used to playing in a local coffeehouse at noon, so I don't know if a full-throated version of "Bohemian Rhapsody" would go over, but you know, maybe it would.

Suzanne Vega just completed "Close-Up," a four-album series of stripped-down, intimate re-recordings of her back catalog. She continues to tour constantly, having played dates with artists as diverse as Moby and Bob Dylan, and is working on an album of new material to be released in the spring of 2014.

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Opinionator | Disunion: Making ‘Killer Angels’

Disunion follows the Civil War as it unfolded.

One-hundred-and-one summers after the Battle of Gettysburg, a family of four stopped their Nash Rambler at the site during a 1,000-mile drive from the New York World's Fair to Tallahassee, Fla. The father was a New Jersey-born former boxer, paratrooper and policeman who became a creative writing instructor at Florida State after enrolling to study opera. Before arriving at the park he had published dozens of science-fiction short stories, but nothing about history. But he had researched several Gettysburg participants for the trip, and he fascinated his daughter Lila and son Jeff with stories of his favorites while the family walked the grounds. They ended up staying for several days, because Michael Shaara was in the early stages of creating his masterpiece novel, "The Killer Angels."

Partly owing to meticulous research, it took Shaara (pronounced "Share-a") seven years to finish the manuscript. Relying chiefly on first-person accounts like memoirs, diaries and letters, he pioneered a new type of historical novel. Normally such stories revolve around fictitious characters in real events: the protagonist in "Rifles for Watie," the 1957 novel by Harold Keith, is an imaginary Union soldier who fights at Wilson's Creek and Prairie Grove. In contrast, "The Killer Angels" uses a combination of recorded and fictional dialogue, as well as imagined thoughts and incidents, to tell the Gettysburg story from the viewpoint of actual participants.

Shaara's extra burden was to portray such speculation in a manner authentic to the characters, which compelled him to research men like Robert E. Lee, James Longstreet, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Winfield Scott Hancock and John Buford in such depth that he once told an interviewer he was "visited" by them. Thus, when the author has the Confederate general Longstreet advise a poker-playing neophyte that his odds of drawing an inside straight are "none," he foreshadows the general's future anguish when ordered to direct Pickett's Charge while simultaneously hinting at the temptation the assault presented to Lee, desperate for a winning hand.

When attempted by a less conscientious researcher, Shaara's technique brims with danger. As a science-fiction writer he understood Oscar Wilde's implication, "Audiences will believe the impossible but never the implausible." By definition science fiction is fantasy, but the genre's good examples deliver credible stories, like the computer in "2001: A Space Odyssey" that overrules human decision making. Thus, both Shaara and his readers recognize that Lee would have been as unlikely to give poker advice as Stuart would have been to ignore a newspaper reporter.

Shaara succeeded so brilliantly that he shifted the accepted historical interpretations and even changed the park's landscape. Before the publication of "The Killer Angels" in 1974, academics thought that the ailment that waylaid Lee during the battle was most likely a virulent form of indigestion. They failed to consider incipient heart disease. But Shaara did. Having suffered a heart attack of his own while researching Lee and writing the book, the four-pack-a-day author recognized symptoms others overlooked. Similarly, the novel's implication that the Union general Buford's delaying action west of Gettysburg was intended to preserve defensible ground south of the town for Gen. George Meade's army has become the received wisdom. Before the novel, park grounds contained no monument to Longstreet, while its most popular site today, where Chamberlain and the 20th Maine regiment fought on Little Round Top, was hard to find. Shaara resurrected Chamberlain as a hero, and he has remained one of the most popular figures associated with the battle ever since.

Jeff Shaara

A cartoon by Michael Shaara, depicting two old Civil War veterans.

Despite its ultimate triumph, the novel's history is convoluted. When Shaara began sending the manuscript to publishers in 1971, our country was in the late stages of the Vietnam War. That war's casualty lists, combined with its protracted length and our failure to win it, left much of the public disrespectful of anything military. "The Killer Angels" was turned down by 15 publishers before it was accepted in 1972 by the David McKay Company, which was best known as a publisher of comic books like "Blondie," "Dick Tracy" and "Popeye." McKay was acquired by Random House in 1973 and published the book in 1974. The initial production run was only 3,500 copies.

Initially the novel sold modestly, but its critical reception was astounding: the following year, "The Killer Angels" won the Pulitzer Prize. Together with other Pulitzer winners and dignitaries, Shaara and his wife joined Gerald Ford for a White House dinner. The author was seated next to Henry Kissinger, with whom he had a brief disagreement on a forgotten intellectual matter.

Although he lived for another 14 years, the 1975 Pulitzer and White House visit were the author's lifetime high points. While on a teaching assignment in Italy in 1972, a motor-scooter accident put Shaara in a comma for seven weeks. He never fully recovered. His writing skills were diminished, and he was left with a permanent speech impediment. "The Killer Angels" was popular among Civil War buffs and certain military enclaves like West Point — where at times it was required reading — but otherwise the novel remained obscure.

Further commercial success was also probably handicapped when Shaara disregarded advice to consider other Civil War projects. His daughter, Lila, to whom "The Killer Angels" is dedicated, believes her father was determined to let his own wide-ranging interests dictate future subjects. Two later novels published while Shaara was still alive are presently so ignored that neither has a single reader review at Amazon. Only after his death did his son, Jeff, manage to secure a publisher for his father's previously snubbed baseball story, "The Love of the Game."

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Disunion Highlights

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Then came Ken Burns. When PBS unexpectedly captured 40 million viewers in 1990 with his Civil War documentary, interest in the war's most famous battle spiked, and new readers began to buy copies of "The Killer Angels." Among them was Ted Turner, who was told that the director Ron Maxwell had a film script based on the novel and was seeking financing. Mr. Turner agreed to provide funding, but changed the title to "Gettysburg" when market research demonstrated that uninitiated moviegoers said Shaara's title suggested a film about motorcycle gangs.

Through a combination of box office receipts, video tape / DVD sales, and online rentals the film became a commercial winner; since its premiere in October 1993, over 33 million people have seen it. Thanks to the film's success, Shaara's novel shot up to the top of the New York Times best-seller list, where it remained for four weeks. That was almost 20 years after it was published and 5 years after the author's death. It has since sold some 3.15 million copies, about 90 percent of the total copies sold since it first appeared, 40 years ago.

The commercial success of "Gettysburg" led Turner to suggest that the director consider a prequel and sequel. Maxwell agreed that Shaara's son, Jeff, should make the first attempt at the screenplay. When Random House was told of the project, they requested a copy. The publisher liked it and gave Jeff a contract to turn it into a novel. The result was "Gods and Generals," which was his father's original title for "The Killer Angels." the book was popular, but the film script was radically altered, resulting in success for the story as a novel, but failure as a film.

Jeff feels his father most likely identified closest to Chamberlain, a Union colonel whom he portrays as both masculine and intellectual — resonant of Shaara's Hemingway-esque life as a boxer-soldier-professor-novelist. But while Shaara may have identified with Chamberlain, his life after the book was more like that of an iconic Confederate soldier. In the book he quotes Lee addressing Longstreet:

To be a good soldier you must love the army. But to be a good officer you must be willing to order the death of the thing you love … that is the trap. You can hold nothing back when you attack. You must commit yourself totally.

Likewise, Shaara committed himself totally to "The Killer Angels" for seven years. It marked the high tide of his capabilities. But in his achievement, it was also his bid at posterity.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.

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Sources: Special thanks to Helen, Jeff and Lila Shaara – widow, son and daughter – for generously sharing reminisces.

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Phil Leigh is an armchair Civil War enthusiast and president of a market research company. He is preparing an illustrated and annotated version of the memoirs of Confederate Pvt. Sam Watkins, which will be released by Westholme Publishing this spring entitled "Co. Aytch: Illustrated and Annotated."

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Letters: Why the Humanities Still Matter

Re "The Decline and Fall of the English Major" (Sunday Observer, editorial page, June 23):

Verlyn Klinkenborg is right about the value of the humanities, and in particular about English as part of undergraduate education.

Teachers and professors should be rewarded, not penalized, for fostering students' imaginations, for requiring them to read the best poetry and fiction of Western (and other) cultures and for helping students develop the lifelong skill of clear writing based on their own thinking.

The problems facing our country have less to do with the technical competence of our work force than with the failure of our leaders and many citizens to understand the values, institutions and reciprocal commitments that bind a society together and link the future of our democracy to the dreams, welfare and rights of people throughout the world.

The study of history, philosophy, literature and foreign languages is essential for that understanding.

STEPHEN L. KASS
White Plains, June 24, 2013

To the Editor:

I read with interest Verlyn Klinkenborg's essay about the declining interest in studying the humanities and its deleterious effect on people's ability to write.

I teach writing to executives, some quite senior, in a range of organizations. The people I teach are smart, knowledgeable and hard-working. What many lack is what Mr. Klinkenborg describes as "the ability to distribute their thinking in the kinds of sentences that have a merit."

I think of it as a translation problem. Those who can translate their knowledge and understanding into meaningful sentences have a decided personal advantage.

BETTY SUGARMAN
Bronx, June 23, 2013

To the Editor:

Verlyn Klinkenborg points to the drop in the number of English majors as evidence that the humanities are in decline. But we should not measure the health of the humanities by the number of majors we mint. I teach college humanities courses to students who mostly do not go on to be majors. Nor do I measure my success by the number who do.

Instead, I tell them that the humanities can and should be an organic part of all fields of study. Whether they major in business, engineering, biology or even English, the values the humanities promote — clear expression, deep engagement with difficult texts, the importance of function and aesthetics, the power of imagination — are valuable everywhere.

Simply put, we don't need a few more students to be English majors. We need every student to think more like a humanist.

JOSHUA PEDERSON
Boston, June 23, 2013

The writer is a lecturer in humanities at Boston University.

To the Editor:

Verlyn Klinkenborg is correct that the number of college majors in the humanities is declining, and I share his sense that the world would be a better place if it were otherwise.

But I cannot leave unchallenged his implication that literary study has turned into a dull, pallid discipline. We may have to work harder to convince others of our value under conditions that seem unpropitious, and we will.

I invite students and prospective students to check us out: the reports of our death are exaggerated. We endure and prosper as a vibrant, innovative and passionate community that feels devoutly honored to come together in the critical enterprise of reading and writing.

RANDY MALAMUD
Atlanta, June 23, 2013

The writer is chairman of the English department at Georgia State University.

To the Editor:

I, too, mourn the shift away from studying the humanities, especially my major, English literature. How else can students develop the most important skills needed to succeed in business and life? I am referring to critical thinking skills.

In my marketing career, nine of 10 people I hired were English or humanities majors. I intentionally and happily hired those who could think and write over those who could explain statistics or business theory. Analyzing "Macbeth" or laughing at "She Stoops to Conquer" beats the basics of accounting any day.

MARKE RUBENSTEIN
Stamford, Conn., June 23, 2013

To the Editor:

Sixty-five years ago, in my first year of college, I attended a briefing by various faculty representatives to help freshmen decide which subject to major in.

The professor from Harvard's English department gave us some surprising but firm advice: If you think that you'd like to be a writer one day, he said, don't waste your education years studying writing. Instead, learn some of the fascinating things in our great wide world that you may want to write about.

The message resonated. I liked to write and did it fairly well. Yet unlike my roommate, who chose English lit as her major, I wasn't tempted to specialize in any subject other than my passion, history.

Even so, as it turned out, I've spent nearly all my working life as a (nonfiction) writer.

SUSAN M. SEIDMAN
East Hampton, N.Y., June 24, 2013

To the Editor:

I have been a writer and a teacher for nearly three decades. Every year I have seen the disdain for literacy grow, and lament the damage done to our language and culture.

Higher education has largely become an exercise in vocational training, leaving degree holders less than fully literate. Even so, the same general lack of reading and writing skills has given me a career and steady work. Businesses of all types have hired and continue to hire me expressly for my abilities to think and write clearly.

As much as any humanist or poet, I want to see the humanities return as the foundation of education and the definition of what it means to be educated. But I would need to find another occupation if it happened.

PAUL H. HEBNER
Woodside, Queens, June 25, 2013

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Editorial: Immigration Reform, Finally

The Senate on Thursday approved the most ambitious overhaul of the nation's immigration system in a generation. The vote on the bill was 68 to 32, enough to overcome a Republican filibuster and to deliver, as its sponsors had hoped, a strong signal to the House of Representatives that the measure has broad bipartisan support and deserves to be swiftly passed and sent to President Obama's desk.

Of course, as far as signals like those are concerned, the Republican majority in the House has its hands over its ears and is going la-la-la-la-la. It does not care about the Senate's preoccupations, and it is unimpressed with the months of debate and arduous deal-making that led to the historic vote. As John Boehner, the House speaker, has said more than once, the House majority will do what the majority wants, in its own way and on its own time.

And what that majority wants, apparently, is not a big, bipartisan immigration solution, at least not one that turns millions of undocumented immigrants into citizens. Mr. Boehner insists that he won't even bring a bill up for a vote unless a majority of Republicans support it.

To say immigration reform has uncertain prospects going forward puts it mildly.

Which is too bad, because the Senate's bird in the hand — the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act — is good for both parties and, lest anyone forget what this is all about, the country. It is not perfect, or even ideal, but it is a decent bill that could get better and offers the best chance in decades to improve on a disastrous status quo.

It starts with a path to citizenship for as many as 11 million people now toiling at the edge of society and outside the law. If offers them a chance to live, work and travel without the suffocating fear of arrest and deportation. Lifting that burden makes possible an outpouring of energy and hope such as this nation has never seen.

The bill contains other good and sensible reforms. It gives a faster citizenship path to farmworkers and to the Dreamers, the blameless young unauthorized immigrants who came here as children, and whose advocacy has honored their country. It allows some deportees to return from abroad to join their families and creates a more generous and sensible future flow of temporary workers. It reduces the backlogs that have kept millions waiting years to join their families. It includes reforms to the cruel and corrupted detention system and immigration courts and protections for vulnerable women and children.

The price of Senate approval for these good things has been a lot of foolish expense and enforcement overkill. The bill includes a vast expansion of the employment-verification system, whose implications for privacy and workers' rights the country has yet to fully grasp or debate. It throws billions more dollars at the southern border, soon to be gulped by private security contractors, the for-profit prison industry and a constellation of enforcement agencies lined up from San Diego to Brownsville, Tex.

And the citizenship path is far longer and costlier than it should be: at least 13 years and hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars per family, and strewn with other burdens. Make it any harder and you would have to honestly start calling it a path to limbo.

And for all these hard compromises, things could get worse. The House has a handful of bills in the works, of varying degrees of awfulness, to criminalize the undocumented and add new layers of self-defeating enforcement. Hard-liners will be applying all the pressure they can to drag reform further to the right or kill it dead.

But, even so, there is no reason to despair — yet. Democrats in the House can apply pressure, too. So can Mr. Obama, the American people and any Republicans who don't want their party continue its estrangement from the American mainstream. The failure of immigration reform would be a disaster, but it can be avoided if Mr. Boehner gives Republicans and Democrats the chance to vote on comprehensive reform. There is a strong chance that if he does so a good bill could pass.

There is a historic chapter on immigration to be written this summer. Mr. Boehner could help write it.

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Editorial: Obama Gets Tough on Bangladesh

In a move designed to push Bangladesh to improve working conditions in its clothing factories, the Obama administration on Thursday suspended the country from a trade program that grants preferential access to the American market. The decision should exert pressure on the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina to do right by four million workers.

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Fires, building collapses and other preventable industrial accidents have claimed hundreds of lives in Bangladesh's booming garment industry in recent years. In April, more than 1,100 people died when a building housing several garment factories collapsed outside Dhaka, the capital. And, in November, more than 110 people suffocated and burned to death in a factory fire.

We have urged American and European companies to demand that suppliers improve working conditions and to help pay for factory renovations. But the fundamental responsibility lies with Bangladesh's leaders. Ms. Hasina has repeatedly said her government would beef up inspections and make it easier for workers to form unions, but she has not done enough to follow through. Her government recently proposed changes to the country's labor laws that would not allow workers to unionize in export-processing zones where many large factories are.

The United States grants duty-free access to imports from many poor countries under a program known as the Generalized System of Preferences. But the preferences are limited and, in Bangladesh's case, America does not grant any preferences to clothing exports, which make up the bulk of that country's $4.9 billion in annual exports to the United States. The preferences for Bangladesh apply to other products such as tobacco, sports equipment and porcelain. As a result, the suspension will not directly harm the garment workers.

The Obama administration's move could also help embolden the European Union to revoke the benefits it provides to Bangladesh, which cover more exports. Europe grants duty-free access to Bangladeshi apparel, which gives it significant leverage over Ms. Hasina's government.

There is little doubt that revoking trade preferences will hurt businesses that are not responsible for the poor conditions in clothing factories. But Western governments have a right, which they have rarely used, to suspend these benefits when countries like Bangladesh repeatedly refuse to live up to their obligations to protect the rights and lives of their workers.

Leaders like Ms. Hasina are unlikely to change policies that are unpopular with the powerful families that own clothing factories unless they are forced to do so. American and European leaders have few tools to exert such pressure, which is why they must use the ones they do have when the lives of millions of poor workers are at stake.

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Taking Note: Bit by Bit, Evicting Madison Square Garden

The owners of Madison Square Garden deployed celebrities this month to dazzle New York City Council members into letting them stay perched atop Pennsylvania Station "in perpetuity." But apparently even a pro-Garden pitch from Spike Lee did not do the trick.

By a vote of 7-0, the Subcommittee on Zoning and Franchises agreed this week to give the Garden a ten year permit, at the end of which period the owners will either have to relocate, or go back through the permission process. The full Committee on Land Use concurred, by a vote of 18-1. Since City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has already endorsed a ten-year renewal and a commission to study how to find the Garden a better home, the signs point to final approval by city planners and final passage by the Council in late July.

For fifty years, ever since the lovely old Penn Station was torn down and replaced by today's subterranean eyesore, numerous architects, planners, developers and politicians have tried to untangle the Garden and the station. So far, no one has come up with a workable plan for what has become the busiest train station in the country. Even with the Council's nudge, it will take leadership from Governor Andrew Cuomo and from Washington to move the Garden and re-make the station into a safer, more suitable gateway to New York.

The most famous quote about the difference between the old Penn station and today's comes from architectural historian Vincent Scully Jr., who said: "one entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat." Until things change, that quote should be carved over the Penn Station doors in recognition of the sufferings endured by 600,000 passengers each day.

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Editorial: Retirement Villas for Laboratory Chimps

Long-suffering laboratory chimps will be given an honorable retirement under a sensible plan announced this week by the National Institutes of Health. They owe their reprieve mostly to their close resemblance to humans, which gave many scientists pause about causing them pain and keeping them in cramped cages, and to scientific advances that make experiments on chimpanzees less vital than they used to be.

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The N.I.H., the federal government's main supporter of biomedical research, announced that most of the chimpanzees it owns or supports — about 310 in all — will be retired in the next several years and moved to sanctuaries from which they cannot be recalled for research. About 50 will be retained for future research that would be conducted under stringent conditions and only if truly necessary. Hundreds of chimps that are privately owned are not directly affected.

The new policy was adopted after two expert groups — the Institute of Medicine and the Council of Councils, a federal advisory committee — concluded that most biomedical research on chimps is unnecessary because the same information can be gleaned through cell-based technologies, new animal models and, when ethically acceptable, testing in humans even without chimpanzee results.

The chief exception may be research on the hepatitis C virus, which infects only two species, chimpanzees and humans, and so cannot be studied in other animals. There is no consensus among experts on whether chimpanzees will be needed to test the effectiveness of a preventive vaccine for hepatitis C or whether it might be feasible, ethically and economically, to test a vaccine's safety in other animals and then test its effectiveness in humans.

The Texas Biomedical Research Institute, which has about 90 chimpanzees that the N.I.H. supports, said that 50 are not enough to enable rapid development of preventions and cures for hepatitis B and C, Ebola and new or emerging viruses that could cause pandemics.

Meanwhile, the Fish and Wildlife Service recently proposed classifying all chimps as endangered, whether in the wild, where they are already listed as endangered, or in captivity, where they are currently deemed only threatened and given less protection. The upgrading of captive animals to endangered status could make it virtually impossible to conduct future research in chimps that might be highly important, which seems overly restrictive. The upgrading is based largely on a judgment by the wildlife service that the wording of the Endangered Species Act is inconsistent with granting separate legal status to animals in captivity. Legal experts need to chime in during the two-month comment period as to whether this is a correct interpretation of what the act requires.

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Editorial: A Surprisingly Successful HPV Vaccine

A vaccine to protect teenage girls against dangerous strains of the human papillomavirus, or HPV, that are a leading cause of cervical cancer has proved to be enormously effective.

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A study published Wednesday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the prevalence of high-risk strains in teenage girls dropped by half after the vaccine was introduced in 2006, from 7.2 percent in 2006 to 3.6 percent in 2010.

Unfortunately, many parents still resist having their daughters immunized. A study published in March found that 44 percent of parents said in 2010 that they did not intend to vaccinate their daughters, up from 40 percent in 2008.

Some parents fear that vaccination might promote promiscuity (the new study found no sign of that); some see no need to vaccinate girls before they become sexually active, even though vaccination beforehand offers the best protection.

Health officials were surprised at the steep decline in infection rates because only about a third of American teenage girls have received the full course of three doses. In other advanced countries and even in a developing nation like Rwanda, vaccination rates have reached 80 percent or higher. Increasing the vaccination rate to 80 percent in this country could prevent an additional 53,000 cervical cancers and 17,000 deaths among girls now 13 years old and younger over the course of their lives.

Doctors need to recommend, and parents need to accept, a vaccine that can save thousands of lives.

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