From George F. Kennan: An American Life (John Lewis Gaddis, 2011) pp10,11,13
The trains at Nagawicka were not the only connection to a wider world. Just a short walk from Cambridge Avenue were McKinley and Juneau parks, which looked out over Lake Michigan. For a boy who loved boats, the oceans that lay beyond were not difficult to imagine. Lake steamers lined the docks along the Milwaukee River, even as bicycles, electric streetcars, and automobiles were crowding horses off the streets. Milwaukee had about 300,000 inhabitants at the time of George’s birth, three to four times the number when his father had settled there in 1875. A large percentage were recent immigrants: there were German, Irish, Scandinavian, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Russian Jewish neighborhoods. Foreign languages were spoken and read throughout the city. It even had a Social Democratic Party that, drawing heavily on the immigrant vote, elected a socialist mayor in 1910, the first in the United States.
Nor was there anything provincial about George’s family. The Jameses traveled widely, were knowledgeable about art, and supported it locally. George’s aunt on his father’s side had married a Frankfurt German, Paul Mausolff, who impressed his nephew with his goatee, his pince-nez, and his knowledge of languages. And George’s father’s first name honored Louis Kossuth, the failed Hungarian revolutionary who had been touring the United States at the time of Kent’s birth in 1851. Kent knew Europe well, having spent two years there during the early 18803 recruiting immigrants for the Wisconsin Central Railroad, and spoke German, French, and Danish. He had then worked as a mining engineer in the western United States and in central Mexico. Appointed tax commissioner for the state of Wisconsin in 1897, Kossuth Kent Kennan made himself an internationally recognized expert on income tax law and in 1910 published a widely circulated book on that subject. Two years later he took his family back to Europe, where he studied the German tax system while his children learned the language.
And then there was the other George Kennan, who had no middle name but whose life in many other ways prefigured that of George Frost Kennan. Born in Norwalk, Ohio, in 1845, fifty-nine years to the day before his namesake, this Kennan was a cousin of George’s grandfather, Thomas Lathrop Kennan. His first trip abroad had come in 1865, when he accompanied the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition to Siberia in a spectacular but unsuccessful effort to link Europe with North America via Alaska and the Bering Strait – the effort fell through when the Atlantic cable began operating the following year. Subsequent journeys to Russia followed, and by the 18905 the first George Kennan had become the most prominent American expert on that country.
Through his books, articles, and speaking tours, this Kennan did more than anyone else to shape the image of Siberia-and to a considerable extent that of tsarist Russia itself-as a prison of peoples. He delivered more than eight hundred lectures on the regime’s persecution of Jews and dissidents between 1889 and 1898, reaching roughly a million people. When the Russo-Japanese War began in 1904, six days before George Frost Kennan’s birth, President Theodore Roosevelt turned to the elder Kennan as one of his chief Russian advisers.30 Four decades later the younger Kennan held hopes – mostly unfulfilled – that another Roosevelt would similarly listen to him.
The parallels, George Frost Kennan reflected in his memoirs, went well beyond sharing the same name and being born on the same day:
Both of us devoted large portions of our adult life to Russia and her problems. We were both expelled from Russia by the Russian governments of our day, at comparable periods in our careers. Both of us founded organizations to assist refugees from Russian despotism. Both wrote and lectured profusely. Both played the guitar. Both owned and loved particular sailboats of similar construction. Both eventually became members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Both had occasion to plead at one time or another for greater understanding in America for Japan and her geopolitical problems vis-a-vis the Asian mainland.
—
Of Scotch-Irish extraction, the Kennans had emigrated to New England in the early eighteenth century. Like most Americans at the time, they were farmers, digressing occasionally into other professions-the Presbyterian ministry, Revolutionary War military service, the Vermont state legislature, ownership of a sawmill and tavern – but “there was not one who did not work long and hard with his hands.” Moving through upper New York and northern Ohio, they had settled, by the mid-nineteenth century, in rural Wisconsin. Kossuth Kent Kennan had been born in Oshkosh and had grown up on a farm near Packwaukee, which was still functioning when George visited it, a few years after his father’s death. “I lay there through the summer night, in the guest bedroom, listening to the chirping of crickets in the grass outside, and breathing the smell of hot, warm hay and manure from the barn; and I felt closer to home than I have ever felt before or since in my wandering life.”
The Kennans shared a certain temperament, George believed, an almost mystical self-awareness, across generations. They lacked the capacity for “gajety, phantasy, humor, the courage to be honest with yourself, and the self-discipline to learn to sin gracefully and with dignity, rather than to try unsuccessfully not to sin at all.‘ They passed neuroses along “like the family Bible.” But they never begged, cheated, lost their pride, or were mean, “except to themselves.” Indifferently educated, they were nonetheless intelligent; “terrified. . . of beauty, they were not impervious to it.” And there was somewhere deep within them a tenderness “which will take them all, I hope-and myself included – to the heaven they always believed in.”
It was important to George that, although the Kennans were often poor, “they never became proletarianized.” They had come closest, he thought, during his father’s generation, when several of Kent’s siblings had “disappeared into suicide madness, or the romantic dissolution characteristic of the American west.” Kent himself, however, did not give up. He began life as a plowboy, educated himself. and became “a cultured, though painfully shy, gentleman.”
Tgk1946's Blog 