If only this were true. At the very least, if only I were in Scotland... This just in from a friend, a television listing from a Scottish newspaper:
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My brief take on the Pilgrims, Squanto and the first Thanksgiving is in Chapter 7 of A Little History of the United States. The chapter is currently up on this website beginning on the Home page, if you don't have a copy. Or if you'd like an interesting Canadian perspective, an old friend and long-time correspondent of mine, Susan Felsberg of Happy Valley, Labrador, this morning pointed me to a post by Larry Dohey, archivist at the Provincial Museum and Archives in St. John's, Newfoundland. As I mention in Little History, Squanto's famous assistance given the Pilgrims—regarding fertilizing their crops with dead fish—was almost certainly not Indian lore but a European technique. Dohey provides more detail about Squanto's odyssey, which takes him from America to the slave markets in Spain, to England, and finally back to America by way of Newfoundland. Because of that journey, Dohey notes, Squanto was able to teach the Pilgrims "how to plant corn in hills, using fish as a fertilizer as he had seen in Newfoundland." Note, too, that it was the Indian crop of corn which helped the Pilgrims pull through. Three-hundred years later, in 1917, the U.S. Department of Agriculture was promoting the use of corn over wheat (citing the Pilgrims' example) due to the devastation wrought in Europe during World War I, which the United States had just entered. "Wheatless Wednesdays" (complementing "Meatless Mondays") were meant to wean Americans still hooked on European grains at a time when wheat, oats and barley were hard to come by. Few in those days could have foreseen the degree to which corn would conquer the world's dietary habits, not only in products made directly from it but also as an omnipresent sweetener (corn fructose) and as a food given to livestock and farm-raised fish.
Happy Thanksgiving! And don't make your feast entirely corn-based. This blog has been quiet for some weeks, due to textbook deadlines but also, more pleasantly, because of a ten-day trip to the Philippines, where my wife’s father, Valentine Untalan, celebrated his hundredth birthday. Readers of A Little History of the United States will be familiar with his service as a Philippine Scout in World War II, where he joined thousands of other prisoners in the Bataan Death March. On that grueling trek, he attempted escape four times, finally succeeding and working his way back from Bataan to his home in Pangasinan province. He eventually became an American citizen and served tours of duty with the American army in Europe, Japan, Korea and Vietnam before retiring and returning to live in the Philippines. He remains active and engaged in farming mangoes and mahogany as well as bananas and fish.
History measured in biographical terms seldom encompasses 100 years. When it does, the events bracketing such a lifespan astonish. As Val Untalan’s daughter Virginia pointed out during his birthday celebration, in 1916 the Philippines remained under American rule. Woodrow Wilson was president, World War I was raging. The Filipino population stood at a little over 9 million; today, it’s over 100 million. Val grew up in a world where petroleum-filled lanterns lit the homes in his hamlet of Doyong, where one traveled in a calesa or ox-pulled cart, rode a bicycle if you could afford one, or simply walked barefoot along the dirt roads. There was not yet a radio station in the Philippines. When Val was still a young toddler, the flu pandemic of 1919 left him an orphan, to be raised by his grandparents. Now well into the twenty-first century, he has his own great-grandchildren who, if they share his luck, will live to navigate the early years of the twenty-second century. And look back with astonishment to remember what? That people in 2016 got around in automobiles that still required drivers? That Miami and New York back then were not regularly plagued by flooding? That the United States, before Trump, was still a republic as well as the most powerful nation in the world? Earlier this summer I stopped at one of my regular haunts while up in the Adirondacks, The Bookstore Plus in Lake Placid, NY, and said hello to the folks who run the shop, Sarah and Marc. They have a good selection of titles—a particularly nice variety in my own areas of interest, history and the outdoors. It hasn't gotten any easier these days to run an independent bookstore, a truth vouchsafed by the very fact that you're reading these lines now on the Web—in the comfort of your home or even on the go, using a tablet or smart phone. How easy just to click through to a book and order without batting an eye! But it's worth thinking about how one comes across the best books. Sure, ordering off the Web is easy and quick, especially when you have a particular title already in mind. But the most interesting finds don't come when you proceed straight as an arrow. When I'm looking up a volume in the library for research, I always browse up and down the shelf, to see what else is there that I knew nothing about. Sometimes a really astute study is tucked six or seven books down, something that covers a subject far better than the book I was seeking. Other times an archaic tome surfaces, the dust still clinging to it but fascinating and useful for its own reasons. Sometimes the find is an utterly nutty artifact which relates to nothing in particular I'm doing, but leaves me grinning ear to ear. (I still have xeroxes I made in the 1970s, of a manual from the early twentieth century on stage hypnotism, as well as a handbook on trapping in the Canadian North, which laid out little-known tricks to hunting beaver in the dead of winter or "pulling" fox hearts. (Both books are good topics, come to think of it, for future posts...)
So stop by The Bookstore Plus if you're in Lake Placid and browse. Then take your newfound purchase a few doors down to Big Mountain Deli and dive into your read while sampling one of their 46 multigrain and multifarious sandwiches, each named after one of the Adirondacks' 46 mountains over 4000 feet. I recommend #17 Saddleback: smoked salmon and bacon, lettuce, tomato seasoned with cracked pepper mayo. Truly tasty whether you're cruising across the Atlantic on the Lusitania, being thrown out of a Milwaukee tenement, or beginning a 500-year journey across America.
Political dynasties have always been suspect in American politics. George Washington discovered this, to his dismay, when he agreed to serve as president of a new fraternal organization formed at the end of the Revolutionary War: the Society of the Cincinnati. Made up of army officers, its purpose was to assist soldiers’ widows and fellow comrades in need, as well as promote fraternal ties among veteran officers. Unfortunately, the organization also decided that membership should be hereditary, passed on through the eldest sons of its members.
This struck many Americans as antithetical to the new nation’s democratic creed. It was one thing to honor parents for worthy accomplishments, Benjamin Franklin commented, but why should descendants be honored merely because they had been born into a family? Some citizens suspected that the Society of the Cincinnati had placed Washington at its head to insinuate a hereditary monarchy into America’s republican government. The ruckus was loud enough to cause Washington to campaign for the elimination of any hereditary membership. When some state branches of the Cincinnati refused to go along, he gave up his position as president of the society. Over the past few years there has been grumbling from both sides of the political divide about the prospect of two rival families entrenching themselves in American government. Of course the Clintons and the Bushes are hardly the first to benefit from family connections. Despite the republican suspicion of hereditary dynasties, the second president of the nation, John Adams, was followed into office a quarter of a century later by his son, John Quincy Adams. William Henry Harrison took office in 1841 and in 1889 his grandson Benjamin became president. (The Harrisons were a prominent Virginia family: another Benjamin Harrison had served as governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary era.) Then too, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt were distant cousins, though members of different political parties. In truth, such family connections are common enough in all walks of life, which is why we use the proverbial aphorism about the apple never falling far from the tree. Hollywood acting dynasties are full of mother/daughter or father/son pairs: Kirk Douglas and Michael, Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh and their daughter Jamie Lee Curtis; Lloyd Bridges, sire of Beau and Jeff; Henry Fonda, father of Jane and Peter, not to mention grandfather of Bridget. Often enough, actors beget actors, lawyers bring up lawyers, historians raise more historians. You learn the ropes from your parents. In terms of today’s political dynasties, Donald Trump threatens to dispatch the hopes of both rivals. He already has put paid to the attempt by Jeb Bush to extend his family’s reign. Whether he will also block the Clintons remains to be seen. But Trump himself has taken great care at the Republican convention to showcase his own family. And that raises the possibility of a Trump dynasty too. Though daughter Ivanka has been active in her father’s campaign, at the convention son Donald Jr. exhibited the most strongly political profile and has admitted he may run for office in the future. "The Donald" and Don Jr. might usefully be compared with another father/son political duo, Ron and Rand Paul. Ron Paul’s aspirations for the presidency never quite escaped their roots in the fringe of the far right, with his gold bug ideology and conspiratorial views of the Federal Reserve. But Rand, now Senator from Kentucky and actually one of two notorious ophthalmologists on the current political stage, has shed his father’s wilder crackpot theories. (The other ophthalmologist, also the junior member of a father/son duo, is Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, who seems to have forgotten the Hippocratic oath, First do no harm, and instead doubled down on the bloodthirsty practices of father Hafez.) Will Donald senior prevail over Hillary Clinton? My own hunch (and fervent hope) is that Trump the candidate is not disciplined enough to alter his rowdy tactics of the primary campaign in order to appeal to a broader segment of the electorate. Like Ron Paul, he is just too far out of the mainstream. But Donald junior, like Rand, may rise for a second act as a more traditional representation of the Republican business class, as Jonathan Chait has perceptively speculated. Whether both Trumps triumph or neither depends in good part on how well they have gauged the mood of the electorate. Republicans have gerrymandered Congressional districts successfully enough to throw a tremendous amount of grit into the gears of government. When one’s philosophy is that government is never the solution, always the problem, being in a position to wreck the government does a good deal to advance your cause. Are enough Americans convinced that “bipartisanship” has failed on both sides of the aisle and a firm leader is needed to set things straight? Father and son may yet both have a chance at the brass ring. But if the Donald flames out, don’t count his son out in the years to come. When George Washington became president of the Cincinnati, a number of French officers who served with him made a present of the order’s badge, featuring a blue ribbon with bald eagle. It was designed, no less, by Pierre-Charles L’Enfant, who would later supply the master plan for the District of Columbia. The version of the badge presented to Washington was adorned with diamonds and emeralds. The general was mortified enough by the controversy over the Cincinnati that he never wore the medal and kept it hidden away in a drawer. One suspects that Trump would love nothing better than to pin a diamond-encrusted decoration to his chest...and then let his son inherit it. Update (9/21/16): Donald Jr.'s post convention role increasingly indicates that he inherits a good deal from his father, much of it suggesting that, unlike Rand Paul, the son is not interested in shedding the excesses of the father. At least not yet, according to this overview in the Times. Winner of the 500-year dash! The new Brazilian edition of A Little History of the United States is now available in Portuguese...
It’s graduation time and I had some news recently that moved me to take note of an end-of-year honor worth praising. Usually the cum laudes are tagged onto the diplomas of students but this one turns the tables on the academic hierarchy. It’s awarded by the students. I first met Michael McCann in the fall of 1964 as a college classmate and later roommate for three years. I recall vividly that he was the most voracious reader I had ever come across. He ranked his summer jobs according to whether they allowed him down time to read while he worked. He read things like War and Peace or Kant because…well, he thought it fun. I only read such works if I was assigned them. It’s not too much to say that Mike taught me, as much as anyone at college did, the virtues of intellectual engagement. Although he went off to divinity school after graduation and I went off to study history, over the years he slid out of the pulpit and into the classroom, teaching history to students at Lakeview Academy in Gainesville, Georgia. He continues to do so today. Along the way we’ve kept up a running correspondence about our readings in history (often he gets to important books before I do), about what he’s teaching and what I ought to be including in my history survey text projects. He carried on at least a decade-long campaign—victorious in the end—to get our college text to mention the Barbary Pirates, a favorite subject of his. When I was working on A Little History of the United States, he put in his two cents about approach and tone, and helped shape the book. And when it came out, he gleefully persuaded the head of school to let him use it in his American history courses. He continues to give feedback—and promises more, on how it can be best used in the classroom. From our correspondence I could see well enough that his infectious enthusiasm was a tonic for students; but I was more recently delighted to learn that his pupils showed their own appreciation this year by dedicating the yearbook to him—surely the mark of summa cum laude for a teacher, awarded by those who must either wilt or thrive under the direction of their tutors. The yearbook dedication page, above, features him reading a copy of Little History in his classroom; Mike notes that the book has “many talents and uses” including discipline of unruly students (photo, lower left). In college he participated in theater productions (a role in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, I believe, was his first). And he’s shown upper left in a more recent Lakeview Academy production of Legally Blonde, playing the Dean of Admissions at Harvard Law School. For that matter, it’s easy to imagine he could do a turn as Albus Dumbledore—indeed, given the magic he spins, he should straightaway apply for the position of Head at Hogwarts. A headline in the New York Times caused a brief flurry (modest, really, per usual) about a mother driving in Milwaukee with her two-year old in the back (but apparently not in a car seat), seeing a gun slide back from under the driver’s seat, got a hold of it and it went off, hitting the mother. She managed to steer the car to the side of the road but was dead by the time help arrived. Horrifying, but was the story’s fine print worse?
That’s in one week.
They say guns don’t kill people; people kill people. No. Guns kill people. There was no intent to kill on the part of the humans in these examples. From sea to shining sea, the United States contains over 270 million firearms, more per capita than any other nation in the world. Leaving aside the homicides and the even greater number of suicides by firearms, there are quite enough weapons lying around for things to just…happen. "The Lost Bet," 1893. Library of Congress I’ve just come back from voting in the New York primary, usually an exercise in little more than futility—a.k.a. civic duty, as New York votes relatively late in the primary season, when candidates are well on their way to victory and election results have less consequence. And of course in the general election, our state is so strongly blue that no presidential campaign bothers to visit or run ads. This year was different. While we were not bombarded by political ads morning, noon and night, we did see pitches for both Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton and John Kasich, and even had a Clinton campaign worker ring our doorbell. Perhaps due to these unaccustomed stimuli, plus a TV clip of Stephen Colbert joking with Hillary about the trials of eating campaign food, the strange currents of the subconscious set to bubbling last night and lurched my perceptions out of their usual quotidian track.
I awoke this morning from a typical dream: one of those scenarios that seem eminently rational until you awaken and realize they are absolutely absurd. This particular dream involved trying to set up a portable outdoor shower (normally used when camping), but this time in the middle of a downtown sidewalk…and awakening to say, “What on earth was I thinking?” Then almost instantly remembering it was primary day, the day to vote, and also realizing what a fever dream the entire presidential selection process has become. What on earth are we thinking? Here we are in April, with almost half a year of campaigning yet to come, and already the race seems to have gone on endlessly. For the candidates, the ritual has become sheer torture. Exploratory visits to Iowa years in advance, Trump riding down the escalator to announce his bid nearly a full year ago, pundits opining by late last August that if Joe Biden didn’t move instantly to get in the race, it would be too late. Endless county fairs and breakfasts and listening tours, town halls and family profiles and straw polls. Ever larger clown-cars stuffed with candidates rolling along New Hampshire highways and byways. The process has simply metastasized. The Iowa caucuses first made their mark decades ago when Jimmy Carter won them in 1976; before that election cycle, New Hampshire provided the effective starting gun. Now in debate after debate, moderator after moderator goads the candidates to attack one another until inevitably they become soul-sick of the endless sniping and name-calling and we become soul-sick of watching. A year and a half of constant bear baiting. The Web and cable news turn the process into a 24/7 marathon—fever dream indeed. Setting up a portable camp shower on the sidewalk seems utterly rational by comparison. How to put a stop to it? The political parties try after each election cycle to reform the process, or rather to control it to their advantages. After 2012 Republicans rejiggered their primaries to have more winner-take-all contests earlier, supposedly to make it difficult for rogue candidates to come out of nowhere and to get a nominee in place that everyone could get behind by the beginning of May. Hah. The Democrats established super-delegates in order to keep left-wingers like George McGovern and outsiders like Jimmy Carter from gaining outsized influence. The law of unintended consequences seems to argue against political parties solving the problem. We can blame the parties, the candidates, the media. But I am reminded of a lame joke my father used to tell. Two construction workers sitting on a girder, open up their lunch boxes. One guy pulls out a sandwich and rolls his eyes. “Peanut butter! Peanut butter again! Monday, it’s peanut butter, Tuesday it’s peanut butter, Wednesday…every day it’s peanut butter!” The other guy says, “Why don’t you get her to make something else?” “Oh,” comes the reply, “I make ‘em myself.” It wouldn’t happen this way if we didn’t turn on the TV every night and get caught up in the horse race, or click on the website for updates. But it’s an insane way to run an election; positively inhumane to its participants and degrading to its spectators; a process that if you sat down and tried rationally to devise, you would never create. Okay, I’ve got to go turn on the TV. They should be releasing the first exit polls any time now. |
James West Davidson
Occasional thoughts on history, teaching, paddling and the outdoors Archives
May 2019
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