IF WE ASKED MEN TODAY TO LIST THE DUTIES OR DISCIPLINES that comprise true manhood, most would not include learning or the acquisition of knowledge. This signals a tragic failure to understand the traits that make a great man. The truth is most great men in history have become great because they aggressively pursued knowledge. They overcame gaps in their early education. They studied to understand the world at a level well beyond their years. They took responsibility for their education and did not wait for the knowledge they needed to come to them.
There isn’t the space here to list all the great men who set themselves apart through self-education. Just a few examples will suffice. Winston Churchill read so ravenously when he was a young officer in India that a biographer later wrote that “he became his own university.”17 Lincoln was also enflamed by a hunger to learn. He read every book he could buy or borrow on the Illinois frontier, enlisted tutors, followed lecturers from town to town and worked late into many a night to master a philosophy, understand a mathematical formula, or memorize a poem. Benjamin Franklin taught himself five languages and formed a junto of young Philadelphia journeymen who met regularly to teach each other in hopes of rising in society. Thomas Jefferson taught himself seven languages, including Arabic. These and hundreds of other prominent men first distinguished themselves through ambitious programs of self-education.
This devotion to learning is more vital today than ever. We live at a time when the amount of knowledge in the world doubles every five years or so. There is a technological revolution approximately every eighteen to twenty-four months. This is so established that experts call it Moore’s Law, and more than a few think the revolution occurs in something more like twelve to eighteen months. To put the amount of knowledge in our world into perspective, the average man living in the high Middle Ages only needed to possess as much knowledge as is contained in one Sunday edition of the New York Times. Think of how many times that amount we need to know today.
There is also the matter of how knowledge becomes obsolete. I remember clearly how my college roommate filled our dorm room with computer paper while he tried to master Fortran and Cobalt, computer languages his professors assured him he would need to know. I remember him slaving late into the night with other business majors, all terrified they would not succeed if they did not know how to use these systems with skill.
We graduated together in 1981. That was the year of the first personal computer. Within months of getting his degree, my roommate’s hard-earned knowledge became obsolete. Through the years since, he had to learn new ways of computing over and over again to become the successful Los Angeles businessman he is today. He did not go back to school to learn these new methods. He taught himself, repeatedly, using skills not all of his peers possessed.
Devotion to self-education is unquestionably one of the marks of an exceptional man. Passive men wait for knowledge to come to them. Weak men assume what they need to know will seek them out. Men of great character and drive search out the knowledge they need. They take responsibility for knowing what they must know to live effectively in their generation and to prosper. I know this sounds old school. I know this sounds like a lesson meant for the barefoot boy born in a dirt-floor cabin in the 1800s. I assure you it is a lesson for men today. In fact, it may prove to be one of the most important lessons for men today.
No one exemplifies this in recent history like Harry Truman, the only president of the twentieth century who did not have a college degree. He would serve as a county judge, a US senator, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, and, ultimately, president of the United States for many years, and, whatever criticism might have been hurled at him, no one thought him too ignorant to fill these roles. Yet most of what he knew he had learned on his own in a lifelong project of self-education.
In his youth, Truman almost perfectly fulfilled the stereotype of the bespectacled, undersized, sickly child. When he was eight he was diagnosed with a severe eye disease. At nine, he contracted diphtheria, which left him paralyzed for months. He passed the time by reading through thick, clouded glasses that friends said made him look like an irritated owl.
He devoured Charles Francis Horne’s Great Men and Famous Women, Plutarch’s Lives, and Caesar’s Commentaries. This was reading well beyond his years, but it set him on a journey into the world of books. “I always had my nose stuck in a book, history books mostly. There were about three thousand books in the library downtown, and I guess I read them all, including the encyclopedias. I’m embarrassed to say that I remember what I read too.”18
This was more than a bookish phase in the life of a lonely boy. The knowledge books granted him became a mandate to think and reason for himself. It made Truman an independent thinker, a boy—and then, ultimately, a man—who sought out ideas and perspectives often removed from the school curriculum and the intellectual consensus of his day. In his typically crusty manner, Truman explained this departure from the mainstream: “The thing I found out from reading was there is damn little information in most schoolbooks worth a damn. If you wanted to find out why France was against England during the Revolution and the why and wherefore of Jefferson’s being able to buy Louisiana, you had to go look it up for yourself. It didn’t matter how good your teachers were. They never taught you things like that.”19
His reading caused him to suspect bias in writers, particularly among historians—“Historians editorializing is in the same class as the modern irresponsible columnist. So study men, not historians.”20 And this moved him to read the writings of the men who made history. He eagerly consumed books like the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on Virginia, Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the works of Cicero, and the writings of Cato, William Sherman, Montesquieu, and George Washington. He made memoirs and autobiographies his intellectual diet and in later years often knew more about the great men of history than scholars who had only read writings about these men and not the writings of the men themselves.
This devotion to reading and to searching out knowledge on his own set Truman apart from other men of his time. At a time when secularizing trends meant religion was seldom emphasized in schools, even as a force of history, Truman knew the role religion had played in the world and found himself instructing far more institutionally educated men. In a meeting with numerous eminent ambassadors, he once sketched out the differences between the major religions of the world on a napkin, impressing—and educating—men with degrees from Harvard and Yale. He thought nothing of explaining the meaning of constitutional principles over dinner or describing during a game of cards how geography contributed to the crises of his administration.
For Truman, knowledge was not something removed from life. It was interwoven with life, an interpreter of life, perhaps even the earthly power behind life. He did not rely on society to provide this knowledge. He roared after it, dug it out on his own, and did not rest until he understood what he needed to understand in order to live and to lead.
Historians have often treated Truman’s unique self-education as a minor feature of a minor president. Yet during his presidency, Truman was forced to contend with the end of World War II; the Korean War; the dawn of the atomic age; the crisis of General Douglas MacArthur and civilian rule of the military; the founding of the United Nations; the birth of the nation of Israel; the spread of communism; a series of steel, coal, and rail strikes that nearly paralyzed the nation; the rise of McCarthyism; an assassination attempt; and racial equality in the armed services—among hundreds of other critical issues. He approached each of these crises believing that “there is nothing new in the world except the history you don’t know.”21 This belief left him with valuable perspective on each of these crises and helped him craft the principled approach to leadership that marked his years in office.
It was all fruit of his own passionate pursuit of knowledge, a pursuit not of the classroom but of the curious man consumed with the written word. Truman had read, pondered, applied, and learned. He had distilled wisdom from his years of reading and applied this wisdom as directly as any president in American history.
A publisher once asked the thirty-third president if he read himself to sleep. “No, young man,” said Truman, “I like to read myself awake.”22
This is a good moment to remember one of Mansfield’s Manly Maxims: “Manly men tend their fields.” It means that we take care of the lives and property entrusted to us. It means that we take responsibility for everything in the “field assigned to us.”
We cannot do this without knowledge. We cannot do it if we are ignorant of our times, blind to the trends shaping our lives, and oblivious to the basic knowledge that allows us to do what we are called to do as men. We must know enough about law, health, science, economics, politics, and technology to fulfill our roles. We should also know enough about our faith to stand our ground in a secular age, resist heresies, and teach our families. We also shouldn’t be without the benefits of literature and poetry, of good novels and stirring stories, all of which make us more relevant and more effective.
We need all of this, and no one is going to force it upon us. Nor will we acquire what we need from a degree program or a study group alone, as valuable as these can be. The truth is that men who aspire to be genuine men and serve well have no choice: they must devote themselves to an aggressive program of self-education. They have to read books, stay current with websites and periodicals, consult experts, and put themselves in a position to know.
It isn’t as hard as it sounds, particularly in our Internet age. Much of what a man needs to know can land in his iPad while he is sleeping, but he has to know enough to value this power in the first place.
To ignore this duty can mean disaster. How many men have lost jobs because they did not see massive trends on the horizon? How many men have failed to stay intellectually sharp and so gave up ground in their professions to others with more active minds? How many have lost money through uninformed investments or have not taken opportunities in expanding fields or have missed promotions because they had not bothered to learn about new technologies or what changes social media, for example, would bring to their jobs?
I do not want to be negative. Learning is a joy. Reading is one of the great pleasures of life. A man ought to invest in knowledge because it is part of living in this world fully engaged and glorifying God. Yet our times also make it essential. The amount of knowledge in the world is increasing. Technology is transforming our lives. New trends can rise like floodwaters and sweep devastation into our homes. Men committed to tending their fields learn, study, research, dig out facts, and test theories. They know how to safeguard their families. They serve well because they serve as informed men.
