Action and Faction

The word faction originally stood for party (the political kind). The term was used in that sense in Roman times and also early in American history. Factions, parties, formed as soon as a democratic style of government came to be established. Factions formalized into parties around about 1787 and thereafter as the Constitution was ratified. The word rapidly took on negative connotations, obvious from the way George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and others used the word. These fathers of the country discovered the pleasures of political opposition—and didn’t like it. Washington thought that governance should rise above faction. Perhaps the negative connotations that stuck to the word eventually led to the use of another, party, a word that in the eighteenth century still attached to smaller groups like hunting or dinner parties.

In our time party has itself become encrusted with negatives. “Just party politics” means, although in a milder sense, much the same thing that our founders meant when speaking of “factional disputes”; they meant the contention of limited interests rather than action for the common good. Today—certainly in the media—a positive connotation attaches to activism. Yes. On the Right that word has strongly negative connotations instead, but in the ordinary discourse of the media an activist is someone good, a reactionary someone bad.

Amusingly, both faction and action come from roots meaning “to do,” the first from the Latin facere, the last from the Latin agere. This “doing,” however, in our context, seems always to include a qualifier: against or in opposition to. The activist acts against the System. The faction opposes another faction. The Founding Fathers believed in limiting power by institutional, legal, and procedural methods. Activists and factionalists are ultimately seeking power—but outside established institutional, legal, and procedural boundaries.

Agitation also derives from agere in its sense of moving, driving, and impelling. Factionalists and activists seek to rouse passive masses who, in turn, will either force changes in the System by those who control it or give the faction power so that, in turn, it can rule.

We need not seek far to find the root of party. Removing the tailing y will do. The parts contending to rule the whole. Were Washington and Hamilton ultimately naïve in thinking that an idealized projection of the whole actually existed, that there really was something out there that could act as a party of one? as the American People or the Athenian Demos? Or did they, perhaps, express a kind of nostalgia for a time when more people actually shared a common belief that transcended personal interest?

There is that tongue in cheek saying: “Don’t just do something, stand there.” People reject that because, echoing that sage of modernity, Gertrude Stein, they think that “there is no there there.”

The Military Order of the Purple Heart

This morning came an ordinary telephone call, the voice of an ordinary middle-aged woman, a voice like a neighbor’s, not mellifluous like soliciting voices tend to be: “This is Purple Heart calling. Would you have something to contribute? We’re coming by in two weeks.” The answer, in this house, is always “Yes.” “Fine. I’ll give you a reminder call a couple of days before.”

George Washington himself devised the Purple Heart as a decoration for soldiers in 1782. It was to be “the figure of a heart in purple cloth or silk edged with narrow lace or binding” — a little heart-shaped piece of cloth for merit. Why did Washington come up with this? Just before he published the general order instituting this reward, Washington had received orders from the Continental Congress ordering him to cease promoting soldiers for merit or to grant them commissions. And why did the Congress so order? It had run out of money. But merit should be recognized—or so George Washington thought. A little piece of cloth would symbolize it. And the Purple Heart was born.

The Military Order of the Purple Heart dates to 1932. It is an organization composed solely of the recipients of the decoration, and its mission was “to foster an environment of goodwill and camaraderie among combat wounded veterans, promote patriotism, support necessary legislative initiatives, and most importantly, provide service to all veterans and their families.”

The Order operates a good many programs—of which my caller belongs to the Service Program. This program consumes $6 million of the Order’s total budget of $9 million annually. It operates 70 offices, has a staff of 100 people, and collects clothing, shoes, books, appliances, and other items of value offered for sale in its shops. Unassuming, professional, barely noticed—and serving the needy well, well beyond people who have received this military distinction. The Order also has educational, memorial, scholarship, youth, and first responder programs, the last serving the families of law enforcement officers and fire fighters who have died in the line of duty. So many, many aspects of the core values of America are like that, like Purple Heart: quiet, but vigorously active.