A First-Rate Madness (4 page)

I don't claim that depression
invariably
leads to realism, nor that mania
always
enhances creativity, nor that depression
on every occasion
increases empathy, nor that hyperthymia
inevitably
promotes resilience. Rather, I argue that,
on the whole, more often than not, those mental illnesses enhance or promote those qualities more frequently than is the case in the absence of those mental illnesses.
Some people with manic-depressive illness are unrealistic (even psychotic), unempathic, and unresilient. We shouldn't romanticize this condition; in its most extreme forms, it is highly disabling and dangerous. But most people have less severe forms of these illnesses; there will be many more manic-depressive leaders showing the beneficial traits discussed in this book than manic-depressive leaders who are dangerously crazy.

We will see that our greatest crisis leaders toil in sadness when society is happy, seeking help from friends and family and doctors. Sometimes they're up, sometimes they're down, but they're never quite well. Yet when calamity occurs, if they are in a position to act, they can lift up the rest of us; they can give us the courage we may have temporarily lost, the fortitude that steadies us.

Their weakness is, in short, the secret of their strength.

 

 

In the brutal aftermath of the First World War, an American publisher asked British military historian B. H. Liddell-Hart to write a book on a key Civil War general, preferably Robert E. Lee. Liddell-Hart, who had concluded that European trench warfare in the recent conflict had replicated Lee's Virginia campaigns, chose another general. Lee's brand of battle had failed in the Great War, but Sherman had foreseen the future of warfare. In Virginia, Lee and Grant had fought a traditional war: one army sought to destroy the other using the Napoleonic concept of “strategic concentration,” repeatedly trying to mass forces in central frontal assaults, repeatedly failing, and trying again. Napoleonic strategy in the era of modern weaponry produced only carnage. Sherman took a different approach: his assault on Georgia and the Carolinas delivered a decisive, fatal blow to the economic and moral heart of rebellion.

Sherman transformed warfare from its nineteenth-century incarnation into the total war that became endemic in the twentieth century and beyond. Sherman's forces burned one-third of the South and destroyed Atlanta; he is famous, and infamous, for his cruelty. But he wasn't
just
cruel. Many Civil War leaders spent most of their postwar lives defending their decisions, or attacking their foes, or glorifying the whole experience. Not Sherman: he always taught the harshness of war. Our view of the postwar Sherman is distorted by the prism of his actions during wartime. For instance, he never said, “War is hell”—a declaration that is usually quoted to suggest that he blithely embraced the brutality of armed conflict. During an 1879 military graduation speech, he did tell the young men in the audience, representatives of a generation that had never known battle, “There is many a boy here who looks on war as all glory. But boys”—he paused—“war is all hell. You can bear this warning voice to generations to come.”

That voice has been lost in the mists of history. Reconstructing the real Sherman, with his coercion as well as his complexity, means recognizing that he had manic-depressive illness. In fact, of all the leaders in this book, I would say that Sherman is the prototypical mentally ill leader. In different aspects of his bipolar disorder, he displayed many of the powers of mental illness to improve leadership: depressive realism, empathy for the South (before and after the war), resilience beyond measure, and unique military creativity. Yet until recently, no historian had carefully assessed whether Sherman himself suffered from deep, indeed sick emotions. This task was taken up by Michael Fellman, a gregarious American, self-exiled in Canada since the 1960s, where he is professor emeritus of history at Simon Fraser University. A specialist in the American Civil War, Fellman had been taught traditional history: trace the documents of who did what, who said what, and what happened; pull it together for the reader; and let it go. Such history seldom made well-grounded analyses about the abnormal mental states of the people it studied.

Having himself suffered a painful depression, Fellman realized that traditional history was mistaken because such conditions have an enormous impact on people—famous, infamous, and obscure. He became attuned to evidence of abnormal mental states among the Civil War figures he studied. Besides Lincoln's melancholy, Fellman discovered depressive tendencies in Robert E. Lee, and outright mental illness in General Sherman. What followed was a biography—researching and reporting facts based on primary sources—that a century after Sherman's own memoir unmasked the whole man: greater than we thought, in part because he was much sicker than we knew.

 

 

PROBABLY THE OLDEST LINK between mental illness and a desirable personality trait was the one Aristotle first drew between creativity and depression. He noticed that poets tend to be melancholic, a finding that long ago became conventional wisdom; the depressed poet is an iconic stereotype. But the nature of the link—what causes what—has been a source of controversy, and few have asked how mental illness and creativity might be linked to leadership.

To understand the link, we should first figure out what creativity is. One definition of creativity is “divergent thinking”—generating many unusual solutions to a problem. There are several standard tests for divergent thinking; one asks the subject to “think of many different and unusual uses for a common item, such as a tin can or a brick.” Other tests use word association or partially drawn figures that test subjects must complete.

Some people question whether studies like these really reflect original, real-life creativity, the kind that makes famous people famous. We might also question whether the divergent thinking model has its terms reversed. Creativity may have to do less with
solving
problems than with
finding
the right problems to solve. Creative scientists sometimes discover problems that others never realized. Their solutions aren't as novel as is their recognition that those problems existed to begin with. Newton's theories left most physicists untroubled until a young Zurich patent office employee realized they didn't work when applied to light; Albert Einstein saw problems others hadn't seen and asked new questions that replaced old solutions. Creativity may be about identifying problems, not solving them.

Or perhaps it's about both. Psychologists Richard Mansfield and Thomas Busse propose a two-phase process: First, “the selection of the problem,” a creative activity dependent on personality traits of the scientist (individual autonomy, independent-mindedness, personal flexibility, and openness to experience). Second, the “extended effort to solve the problem,” where persistence matters—the ability to keep going even when one's views are unpopular or unrewarded (here again one benefits from independence of character). Though I focus on the cognitive aspects of creativity—divergent thinking and the ability to find the right problems—the role of persistence is well worth noting. Darwin famously attributed his success to his “doggedness,” not his genius. Here again mania, with its high energy (especially in hyperthymic personality), is advantageous; the energetic manic tends to be dogged—a trait General Sherman exemplified on his march through Georgia.

 

 

CREATIVITY, THEN, involves finding novel problems and solving them. Following the thinking of Aristotle and the nineteenth-century psychiatrist Cesare Lombroso, I believe that mental illness—and specifically mania—is a fine advantage in this process. Think of a classic manic symptom: flight of ideas. One's thoughts seem to literally fly in many different directions; they may or may not make sense, but they certainly get around. Divergent thinking is a daily experience in mania. Manic people are also hyperactive; they think quickly, talk rapidly, and need little sleep; they write much; they draw, plan, propose, implement. The psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, drawing from her personal experience, puts it like this:

“Exuberant behavior and emotions—whether displayed in love, manifested in laughter and play, or kindled by music, dance, and celebration—have in common high mood and energy. They act on the same reward centers in the brain as food, sex, and addictive drugs, and they create states of mental and physical playfulness.” She also noted the role of exuberance, as happens with mania, in leadership: “In times of adversity, inspired leadership offers energy and hope where little or none exist, gives a belief in the future to those who have lost it, and provides a unifying spirit to a splintered populace.”

A final, and maybe the most important, aspect of creative thinking that we see in mania is the ability to think broadly; psychologists call this “integrative complexity.” Creative people see farther and wider; their cognitive peripheral vision is clearer; they make connections between seemingly disparate things that many of us miss.

One way to measure this ability is the “paragraph complexity test,” which asks subjects to complete sentences like: “When I am in doubt, I . . .” or “When I am criticized, I . . .” Then researchers see if responses take more than one perspective versus being simplistic. Applying this method to the speeches and letters of Civil War generals, one study found that Robert E. Lee set the standard: his writings demonstrated high complexity, and the differences between his paragraphs and those of opposing generals correlated with battlefield success. Lee was much more complex in his thinking than those he defeated handily—McClellan, Ambrose Burnside, Joseph Hooker; and only somewhat better than the opponent who matched him at Gettysburg—George Meade. He was lower than only one man: the general who defeated him—Ulysses Grant. General Sherman's writing was not included in this study, but reading the complex and emotional letters he wrote his wife and family, I suspect he would have been the most integrative-thinking general of them all.

This integrative complexity happens with mania, though patients often find it hard to describe. One who has tried is Tom Wootton—who is in treatment for bipolar disorder and gives seminars about the benefits of the illness. He likens human experience to seeing only part of a painting; normally, we see just the middle of the canvas, but someone with bipolar disorder experiences oscillations in her view that allow her briefly to see larger parts of it. But the experience is vertiginous; it cannot be sustained without causing psychosis in mania, or abject despondency in depression. Only the great mystics, Wootton suggests, after years of spiritual training, can stand to see most of the painting, all at once, for extended periods of time. This all-encompassing view isn't feasible for most mortals.

Those brief insights stay with you after you return to normal. When not manic or depressed, those with bipolar disorder are normal, just like everyone else, but they retain an awareness that makes their perception just different enough to be unusually creative.

 

 

A NATIVE OF OHIO, William Tecumseh Sherman attended West Point, graduated in 1840 near the top of his class (despite demerits for misbehavior), went straight into the army, and married his childhood sweetheart, Ellen Ewing, whose father was in President Zachary Taylor's cabinet. Much was expected of the young Lieutenant Sherman; the president and key political figures such as Henry Clay and Daniel Webster attended his wedding. Yet in 1853, the low wages and lack of prospects for fame in a peacetime army made Sherman leave the military and pursue a career in business.

To his wife's exasperation, he frequently moved from city to city (a very common habit among those who experience mania). He accumulated debt by borrowing large sums of money for his investments, and except for happy events like the birth of his son, he was usually glum. In San Francisco he started a bank. Within four years, after the 1857 depression, this venture failed, leaving him bankrupt, $136,000 in debt (equivalent to over $3 million in today's currency), and despondent. “I am of course used up root and branch,” he wrote to his brother-in-law, adding in another letter to Ellen, “I am afraid of my own shadow.” He wished his asthma would kill him.

For the next two years he struggled on Wall Street, in San Francisco, and in St. Louis. Finally he moved to Kansas, where his in-laws owned land, and sold corn to prospectors headed west in search of gold. Much of the time he was alone; Ellen preferred the comforts of her father's Ohio home. Sherman's moods meanwhile fluctuated with every attempt to settle into a stable, remunerative job. “I am doomed to be a vagabond and I shall no longer struggle against my fate,” he wrote to Ellen. In 1859, he reentered the army, taking a position as superintendent of a new military college in Louisiana.

Sherman obtained the Louisiana position partly through the recommendation of old West Point classmates, future Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Pierre G. T. Beauregard. Though he now worked in the South, Sherman maintained an antiwar, antisecession stance throughout the increasingly tense years before the Civil War. His brother, John, a congressman from Ohio, gave fiery abolitionist speeches, provoking criticism from Sherman's Louisiana friends. Sherman was sympathetic to Southern concerns and was not critical of slavery. He saw fault on both sides: He blamed all politicians—abolitionist and proslavery alike—for stoking the North-South conflict. Before the war, he was rather friendly to the South and its culture; his support for the Northern cause was based on the principle, shared by many Unionist Southerners, of opposing secession.