A Farewell to Henry's World

In a journal entry from June 6, 1944, Henry Montgomery, a doctor in the 47th Medical Battalion of the Army’s 1st Armored Division, cannot shake what he saw passing through the Alban Hills outside of Rome as the Allies advanced on the Italian capital.

The trip up there was a nasty one, the roadside being littered with German and U.S. dead. — Many more German than U.S. — The Germans were at least three days old — A dark burgundy in color and full of maggots. Yesterday I went into Rome to St. Peter’s Cathedral, the Coliseum, etc. — St. Peter’s surpassed my expectations, but all the time I looked up at the walls, the images of the dead along the way seemed to place themselves on the wall like a mural — so it seemed as tho we had ridden to Rome over a mass of human bodies. — It took about 200 yrs. to build St. Peter’s. How many people took part in it no on knows. — But however many people or how much time — not one of us could construct a human body in any given length of time. — Rome from history seems to be the site of a lot of wasted bodies.

I’ve had that passage and others that Henry wrote in his journals rattling around in my head for more than twenty-five years. Henry was my grandfather, and I’ve spent most of my adult life searching for the greater meaning of his experience. Before and after the war, he worked for the Frigidaire division of General Motors, spending his career treating workers with industrial injuries at a refrigerator factory in Dayton, Ohio. During the war, he was a battlefield surgeon treating Allied soldiers as the 1st Armored Division moved through North Africa and then Italy.

I never knew Henry. He died in 1973, four years before I was born. I didn’t know much about him, either. I knew he had been a doctor, that he had served in the war, that he died when my older brother was just a few months old. I knew he kept journals during his time in the Army, and that my father, Henry’s youngest son, had those journals in a box in the closet together with letters that he wrote home to his wife, my Gram.

When it was time to pick a topic for my senior thesis as a history major at Princeton in the late 90s, I was lost. On a trip home to Ohio, I looked in that box in the closet, hoping for inspiration. I was amazed at what I found. There in vivid and achingly human detail was the story of a man pulled away from his young family, sent on crash course training in tropical medicine in London, thrown into battle in the North African desert, and then stalled on the Anzio beachhead in Italy, hunkered in the sand for months taking German shells and bombs.

I had my topic. The result was a senior thesis about military medicine in World War II anchored by Henry’s writings, an attempt to thread together his personal story, an explanation of mid-20th century advancements in medical treatments applied in the crucible and chaos of the battlefield, and a sympathetic rendering of the emotional toll on doctors treating horrific injuries and confronting their own mortality.

I don’t pretend that it was a great piece of scholarship. But I hoped that it captured something of the sacrifice of Henry and all of the many others like him. By the time he wrote the journal entry above about his passage into Rome, Henry himself was broken after two years of treating the broken bodies of the soldiers in his care. I was profoundly moved by his story and was proud to have told it, even though I knew it would be buried in storage at Princeton, never to be read again.

Fast forward to 2025, and I'm approaching fifty and taking stock of my life, as fifty-year-olds are wont to do. I'm a reporter who became a lawyer when journalism imploded, a husband and father of three living in a nice house on a nice street. This isn’t exactly how I envisioned my life when I was in college, but I’d be a fool if I were anything other than grateful for my good fortune.

To be clear, I am grateful. But the truth is, there’s a dread stalking me every day, and as much as I’d like to ignore it, I simply can’t anymore. I feel crazy when I say it, but the source of my dread is an unavoidable reality: that the American democratic experiment is falling apart and that what is threatening to replace it is not only undemocratic, but tyrannical. It’s a dread that I am enjoying the last of the good fortune, that my children and grandchildren will be poorer, less healthy and less free. It's a dread that the fascism that Henry risked his life to defeat is now on the march in American streets.

Try as I might – and I have mightily tried to avoid it – if I honestly assess what is occurring, I can't come to any other conclusion. Troops sent into U.S. cities to quell peaceful protests. Casual talk of suspending habeas corpus. Arrests of political opponents. Innocent men disappeared to foreign prisons. Federal agencies unconstitutionally dismantled. Openly corrupt pressure campaigns against media companies, law firms, cultural institutions and universities. Threats of imperialistic land grabs. Attempts to whitewash American history. The rejection of medicine and science. The betrayal of our oldest allies.

Something else that's true: I don’t know what to do about any of it. I go to work. I come home. I run the kids to practices and games. I worry about saving for college and retirement. I talk to my wife about how bad things are getting, how it seems there's no resistance to it, how there aren't enough people doing the next right thing.

What is the next right thing, exactly? Hell if I know. I'm not in the practice of resisting a totalitarian makeover of our government. But I'd venture that, at a minimum, it means declaring our allegiance to America's highest ideals. And it means doing that even if we think it won't make a lick of difference, and even if we think that doing so will put us at personal risk. Our institutions are failing. No one is coming to save us. It's going to take regular folks to get us out of this mess.

So, hello, I'm a nobody, just a guy living in Ohio. I'm here to declare that I believe in America. Not the America we see now, cowering in fear and isolation, retreating from the world, stewing in retributive madness, punishing the powerless, stuck in the thrall of an aspiring dictator. No, I believe in the America described in the Declaration of Independence. I believe in liberty. I believe in freedom of speech, religion and assembly. I believe in equality. I believe in the rule of law. I believe in public education and science and history, real history, not just the kind that makes you feel good about yourself. I believe in the messiness of democracy. I believe we can forge a path to a better future if enough of us are willing to do the work.

As we’ve moved deeper into our political crisis, I’ve continued to turn over Henry’s story like a weathered stone. Examining his experiences started as a simple tribute to the World War II generation but has become key to my understanding of why it feels like I’ve been living through a massive unraveling.

It feels that way because there's really no better way to describe what life has been like in America, and in Ohio in particular, for a late Gen X kid like me. I'm not breaking new ground here. There's nothing novel about observing the struggles of the Rust Belt. But the obviousness of a problem doesn’t make it less of a problem or make it any easier to find a solution.

Growing up in the Dayton area in the 1980s, I couldn’t avoid stories of the city’s glory days. The Wright Brothers. Charles Kettering and General Motors. John Patterson and the National Cash Register Company. The city was a hub of technological progress and manufacturing prowess for the first half of the 20th century. Dayton had two newspapers. A rich civic life of Moose lodges and Kiwanis clubs. A bustling downtown with a Rike’s department store at Second and Main streets. This was Henry's world, Ohio in its heyday, an America of unlimited potential.

But we know how the story goes. The population peaked around 1960, then started a long decline that tracked the decline of manufacturing in the area. The city went from two newspapers to one. Civic organizations shriveled. The Rike’s closed. The downtown hollowed out, leaving behind entire city blocks of empty buildings. By the time I was a reporter covering manufacturing for the Dayton Daily News in the early 2000s, GM still had a vehicle assembly plant on the site of the Frigidaire plant where Henry worked, GM’s spun-off parts division Delphi still employed thousands, and NCR was still headquartered there. But the decline accelerated. The factories shut down. NCR relocated to Atlanta.

It’s a familiar story in this part of the country. Go to Erie, Canton, or Flint, and the arc from growth to decay is the same. The sense of dread inevitability is inescapable as you wait for the next round of cuts and closures. What prevails is a desire to go back in time because the past was better than the present, which is better than the future will be. Each new day presents a new risk that what you have will be taken away. 

What we understand now is that regional decline and democratic decline are inextricably linked and feeding off of each other, with a retrograde politics taking advantage of the one to facilitate the other. We're stuck as politicians promise things they can’t deliver using methods that won’t work. Republicans trying to reverse-engineer some fictionalized version of the 1950s by the blunt-force destruction of everything they claim is holding them back: the judiciary, Congress, the civil service, a free press, public education, research universities, the legal, scientific and medical communities, and history itself. Democrats becoming the party standing athwart history yelling, Stop!, clinging to the New Deal and Great Society and the vestiges of norms and institutions, some of them too scared to fight, some corrupted by the same moneyed interests, some thinking they can bargain with the arsonists busy burning down the place.

History tells us that the Republicans will fail because a movement this hubristic and corrupt will eventually collapse under the weight of its carelessness and unfulfilled ambitions. History tells us that the Democrats will fail because not enough of them are willing to fight the battle that must be fought.

In the meantime, we wait, paralyzed, and I’ve found myself thinking again about Henry marching into Rome. What did those dead Germans by the side of the road think they were fighting for? What did Henry think he was fighting for? What would he think about what’s happening to us now? Which side would he be on? How can it be that I don’t agree with friends and family about the peril we face? How do you live knowing that you may not share the same value system with people you love?

I could spend the rest of my life asking myself these questions, but I’ve decided that I won’t. The devastation unleashed in the second Trump presidency has given us permission to move on. The past instructs us, but it doesn’t have to bind us. The questions we’ve been asking ourselves are no longer the right questions to ask. What is clear now is that we are here. We have arrived at the destination of the American conservative project, and it is madness and desolation. There is no repairing what Trump and his movement have broken. The republic will need to be rebuilt.

We can see where we’ve been. Henry’s house is still there. I can take my kids to Marion’s for pizza and then walk down the street where my dad played when he was a kid, and I played when I was a kid during our visits with Gram. Henry would drive down the hill to the Frigidaire factory. There is still a working factory on that site, a rare bright spot for the local economy. A Chinese company makes automotive glass there. An Oscar-winning documentary was made about the company’s investment in the shuttered plant. But the jobs aren’t as good and there are fewer of them. Drive the rest of the city, and you can see its old outlines in the empty buildings and empty lots. You can see where the jobs were, where the people lived.

I can imagine Henry driving to work in the mid-century bustle of a growing city, just as I can imagine him in his medical tent on the Anzio beach, praying to a God he was unsure of to make it home in one piece and for the strength to keep working on those soldiers. He put himself at risk in the service of the fight to destroy one possible world and create another. But that world is now at an end, even though most don’t know it yet. Yes, we can see where we’ve been, but that's not where we’re going.

As for where we are, it’s a dangerous place. The question now is whether I’m willing to take a risk to do my part to get us out of here. There are many lessons I could teach my kids about this moment, but the one I keep coming back to is that if you believe in something, you have to be willing to fight for it. You can’t wait for someone else to do the work. It has to be you.

Which is to say: I'm willing to fight, for my kids and my community and a future worthy of America’s highest ideals. Even if it means putting myself at risk. Even if it means upsetting people I love who don’t share my convictions and fears. I don't know how to get where we need to go, but I know I at least need to declare which side I'm on.

I’m a nobody, but it’s the nobodies who are going to win this fight in the millions of little ways we’re going to refuse to accept the past as inviolable, the present as inescapable and the future as inevitable. Something new can and must be created. We are Americans. Time was, we believed the future would be ours. It’s not too late to believe that again.