Thornton Wilder’s “New Hampshire Boys”
Today in the New York times Frank Rich tells us that it’s impossible not to be moved by that Act III passage in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town where the Stage Manager comes upon the graves of Civil War veterans in the town cemetery and says: “New Hampshire boys had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they’d never seen more than 50 miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends — the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.”
But wonders how much of that “notion,” that the Union ought to be kept together, was theirs. Just as one wonders about the “patriotic” motives of those of our sons and daughters who have gone to fight, be it one generation ago in Vietnam for the notion that fighting would keep us free from Communism, or be it now in Iraq and Afghanistan for the notion that fighting would protect our way of life from those Islamic terrorists who, if they could, would destroy us.
People, and young people especially, go to war for all sorts of reasons. Probably only rarely, and perhaps only the well schooled and well behaved few among them, could they actually enunciate their leaders’ notions as to why the war was/is necessary.
The New Hamshire boys are now lying in the ground and are unable to reply to whatever notions we might have about them, about why they did what they did. Wilder’s notion is just one, one that Frank Rich would like to believe.
