The Library of Congress The New York Times has an OpEd piece on Jefferson's view of religion, "Thomas Jefferson's Bible-Teaching." It's by two historians, Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf, and certainly worth reading. Both are careful scholars and here cautiously present their discussion of Jefferson's views without strongly waving their editorial flag. Even so, one could perceive the flag twitching behind their backs, for clearly they are exhibiting Jefferson's views as a much-needed corrective to the religious fanaticism and partisan wars that still bedevil us today. I agree with much of what they say, so it may seem churlish to object to a surprising blind spot at the center of their argument.
The article reminds us that for much of his career Jefferson was viewed by opponents as a dangerous atheist. "Rumors spread that Jefferson planned to outlaw the Bible. On his watch, [Federalists] said, incest and adultery would run rampant." But Gordon-Reed and Onuf make haste to point out—make haste to reassure us, it could be said—that Jefferson was no atheist, but an admirer of Jesus who only wished to strip away the superstitions that the Bible and its later followers had added. They note that one of Jefferson's intellectual projects led him to go through the New Testament and carefully cut away anything that obscured the actual words and thoughts of Jesus himself. Jefferson didn't publish this unusual editing, a kind of Readers Digest Condensed version of the New Testament, nor did he even share it with his family. But he did view these core beliefs as a model for the way Americans might one day evolve in a republic guaranteeing the freedom of religion. Clearly Gordon-Reed and Onuf share this broadminded view—and exhibit it as worth emulating. "Far from being an atheist," they say—God forbid one should be an atheist!—"Jefferson was a precocious advocate of what was later called 'civil religion,' the moral foundation of a truly free and united people." They point out that in 1904, Congress was so enamored of this vision of shared religious values that it actually printed 9,000 copies of this "Jefferson Bible," to be distributed to senators and representatives in Congress. Most devout Christians today “would be appalled by Congress’s action,” say Gordon-Reed and Onuf. But they're not appalled too? In a nation which, thanks in good measure to Jefferson, prides itself on a separation of church and state, what business does Congress have printing any Bible—Jefferson's version, the King James, the Old Testament, or the Koran? But Gordon-Reed and Onuf seem quite comfortable with the idea that all Americans can join in a version of Christianity that has been Enlightened-up (or is it watered-down?) by the Sage of Monticello. Americans who are non-believers, atheists, secular humanists, are left out of the equation. Yes, the Constitution prevents religious "tests for office," they say, but they find it hard to imagine "how a candidate who professed to have no religious beliefs could find favor." This doesn't seem to bother them. Their essay ends with a paean to "Jefferson’s idealistic vision of American civil religion, the shared faith of a free people," which in a world full of religious bigotry, seems "all the more attractive." In the nineteenth or twentieth century, the view of all Americans united under a religious standard might still pass for a spacious ecumenism. But in the twenty-first century, when increasing numbers of citizens matter-of-factly and even proudly embrace a secular moral standard, the notion seems more specious than spacious. The solution is to let believers and nonbelievers alike affirm their theologies and philosophies as they choose, separate from the embrace of the government, not to try to unite everyone under the umbrella of a vague "civil religion." On this matter, I prefer the Eisenhower Doctrine of church and state to Jefferson’s, even if Ike didn't recognize the unintentional humor in his words: "Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is."
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The summer solstice went by almost without my wife and I noticing it. But we felt it. We’re up in the Adirondacks, in camp, where we sleep on a porch screened on three sides. The sun comes up at about 5:30 on a lake where the call of loons is a regular occurrence. The stillness that morning was crystalline. Lying with eyes half closed, I heard the ripples of an object moving through water, really close by. We have a friend who loves early morning paddles and it sounded just like her wooden blade dipping into the water as she quietly worked her way around the edge of the bay.
But our friend wasn’t in camp yet, so I knew it couldn’t be her. Perhaps another early-morning paddler? Possible, but unlikely. Most folks aren't on the lake this early in the season. And then I heard it again—along with a little splashing noise. No one would paddle so close to our spot at this hour. I sat up, got out of bed to have a look. It proved to be a family of Mergansers, mother and about eight baby ducks who were being remarkably quiet—none of the quacking or gabbling I’m used to hearing. Though only days old, the young ones were already exhibiting personalities and moods. Most of the babies obediently lined up beside their mother. But two were playing tag, whooshing back and forth in ten-yard bursts, making the sounds I’d heard. I love this time of June. The long day’s light seems bluer, more transparent than other times of the year. Perhaps it’s only the spring green of the new leaves creating the airy light, but I suspect that, because the sun’s arc is higher at summer solstice, the color temperature leans toward the blue, with less atmosphere to pierce. Whatever the cause, the light on these days, accompanied by a light summer breeze, is delectable. A few hours after the encounter with the Mergansers, I caught the sun’s rays reflected off the water onto a breezeway ceiling which faces the lake, along with the sounds of a loon or two. If you want to listen, it’s on YouTube here. Happy solstice! Paul Krugman at the New York Times had a column on the contempt of Donald Trump for his blue-collar supporters—worth reading—in which Krugman recalls Trump's boast that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Krugman goes on to point out how much Trump is carrying out that boast, metaphorically, with the destruction his proposed programs would wreak upon his supporters.
But I was taken as much by a reader comment, posted from Teheran, citing an Iranian proverb I had never heard. Remarkably apposite! Being a writer, I am biased in favor of the printed word; but there are limits. I was reminded of them when I came across an engaging account of travel across the United States in 1882 by one Walter Gore Marshall, entitled Through America: Or Nine Months in the United States (available here on Google Books). The prosperous 1880s brought dozens of travelers from abroad, eager to explore the United States and then write travel accounts, Marshall among them. (Others included Robert Louis Stevenson, whose journey I have noted in an earlier entry.) Marshall lauds the beauty of my home country, here along the Hudson River, opining that the best time to see the river is autumn, "when its well-timbered banks are clothed with those rich and glorious tints; when the maples, elms and oaks have put on their autumnal dress, and their leaves have turned to bright crimson and gold; when the whole of this part of the country, in truth, is decked in the gayest and most brilliant colours." Happily, that season remains vibrant in the twenty-first century, but the Hudson River in the 1880s was a much busier thoroughfare, filled with both "palatial steamers...with a band of music on board" as well as freight haulers. "Scores of canal barges laden with every variety of merchandise, may often be seen lashed together in one long line, tugged by two or more steamers. Once I remember seeing two tugs abreast dragging after them down-stream forty of these barges, which were strung together in eight lots, five in each lot. Following close behind these came a second string of twenty-six, with three steamers tugging them; behind these, again, came a third string of thirty-eight, towed by three steamers likewise. Thus there was a procession of one hundred and four barges in three detachments drawn by eight steam-tugs!" But Marshall could not omit another less appealing feature of the river in his day, "the huge staring white-paint advertisemens of pills, plasters, etc., which here figure up as prominently as usual. Who is there who does not call to mind that conspicuous notice relating to "GERMAN LAUNDRY SOAP" planted at the base of the Palisades on the west bank of the river, and which can be plainly read from the opposite shore, though the river must be here more than a mile wide at least?" When Marshall boarded the New York Central on his train trip across the country, he found such defacements on view everywhere: Standing in the long shadow of this year's Earth Day, though there is much to fear from the ravages being plotted by the current administration, we are provided at least some comfort in knowing that the billboard aesthetic of the previous century is receding.
In 1867 cartoonist Thomas Nast portrayed a former Confederate soldier upset with having to allow voting rights for newly freed African American citizens. I had another colleague, however, who contested my case with a more hard-nosed pragmatism. Daniel Singal, a historian who has written perceptively on Modernism, the South and William Faulkner, drew on his own personal experiences:
“I started out (as so many of us did in the 60s) believing that what happened at the grassroots was the determining factor, while leadership had its symbolic functions but was nowhere nearly as important as "the many." A half century of observing and participating in American politics, as well as institutional politics on the campus where I taught, has convinced me otherwise, to the point where I have come to believe that leadership makes all the difference. “And in the case of Lincoln you had a leader with superb political skills—perhaps the best that has ever been seen. It is obviously impossible to know what Lincoln would have done had he lived, but the one certainty as I see it is that he could not have done much worse than Johnson. In effect (and as you know), there were two phases to Reconstruction—the first immediately after the war when Johnson was giving out pardons left and right to former Confederates and in essence signaling the South that all was forgiven and they didn't have to change whatsoever. Then the Radicals enter the picture and in short order totally reverse that, imposing military law and bringing about the ultimate nightmare for white southerners by giving blacks extensive access to the franchise and office-holding. Nothing could have frightened southern whites more at that moment than the prospect of a complete power swap in which they would find themselves in a society dominated by former slaves. That of course never happened—black access to power in actuality fell well below that threshold, but in the eyes of whites that seemed to be where they were headed. “I doubt that Lincoln would have permitted either phase to happen (or at least he would have worked hard and effectively to prevent it). His initial proclamation did call for states to get back on their feet with 10% of white voters taking an oath to uphold the Constitution, but that was his starting gambit back in 1863 and, aware of the pressure from the likes of Davis and Stevens, he would surely have added further stipulations that anticipated some of the Radical demands. Above all, Lincoln's modus operandi was to create a cohort of moderates (as he had done in all the northern states at the beginning of the war) who would naturally fall in behind his policies. That was the meaning of the 10% requirement -- he envisioned them as a group of white southerners he could count on to guide events in those states (especially after he provided them with patronage jobs). He would also surely have reached out to former southern Whigs to be part of his coalition, cementing their loyalties through commercial benefits like subsidies for railroad lines. In effect, he would have tried in each former Rebel state to put together a nucleus of political leaders who he could use to achieve a meaningful reconstruction. No one, alas, did that after Lincoln's death, especially Johnson (who had no talent for building coalitions). And that was precisely what was missing once the process of rehabilitating the South got under way. “Lincoln also would have had a cadre of moderate Republicans in the Congress who he could have counted on to keep the Radicals more or less in check. Those were his mainstays all through the war. But Johnson of course proceeded to alienate them with his vetoes and rhetoric to the point where they saw no choice but to go along with their Radical colleagues. "In effect, when Lincoln died we lost the political center at a moment in our history when we most desperately needed it. That's the heart of my argument. Whether the center in the end would have held (to use the cliché) and made an appreciable difference is an open question, but my hunch is that it would have to a significant extent." Could Lincoln have managed all of this in the space of the four years available to him in his second term? I don’t think so. But who knows for sure? Dan and I also discussed the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 60s as a testing ground for examining the relative importance of political elites and people on the ground. To excerpt from my response: “In some ways we’re not that far apart. I agree (as the essay stipulates) that Lincoln certainly would have done better than Johnson. You agree that it’s not clear in the end “whether the center would hold” despite Lincoln’s unquestioned skills. "On civil rights, I certainly do agree that King was an effective leader, as were many of the younger crowd that challenged him. I guess the issue here is how one defines leaders and where they come from. My argument about Trump [whom I also discussed in the History News Network essay] is that we need action from the ground up and if enough people push for action, leaders will emerge. This is what happened with the civil rights movement, when none of the top-down established political leaders took the bit between their teeth. Historians recognize the hollowness of claiming that JFK’s bold “New Frontier” led the vanguard. Kennedy was begging King not to hold his march on Washington. King himself pointed this out in his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The opinion leaders political elites are all out there saying, go slow, we’re with you but the time is not right. Even at the beginning, with the Montgomery bus boycott, when Rosa Parks got arrested it wasn’t King who mobilized, it was the women who ran ditto machines late at night to urge a boycott. King kinda walked in the next day at the meeting and they tapped him to lead, a bit to his discomfort, at first. Ezell Blair and those other students weren’t given marching orders to start the lunch counter sit ins at Greensboro. They did it on their own and then the sit-ins spread like wildfire. As I recall, somebody tried the same thing in Topeka in the early 1950s around the time Linda Brown's parents sued the school board…but nothing came of it. The conditions weren’t right and it wasn’t Eisenhower or Kennedy who stepped up to change things. "On the other hand, in terms of effective elites, I agree that Obama was a leader who accomplished a great deal more than most people give him credit for. Dems have been trying to get health care legislation passed since FDR. The Clintons made it their number one priority and failed, and they didn’t have the headwinds Obama faced. So I don’t want to be too polemical. I guess my point in doing the essay was to say, even with a guy as great as Lincoln, the ground has to be prepared. Now that Trump is in office and we don’t have a leader like Obama, it may seem depressing, but we need to prepare that ground! Then the leaders will emerge, as King and others did." "Spontaneous" demonstration at Boston harbor, 1773. Oh really? Day after day during the latest Congressional recess, crowds turned up at Republican town halls, pushing representatives for answers on health care, immigration and more. The insistent questions and the chants telling members of Congress to “do your job” have elicited a consistent response. “More of a paid attempt to bully and intimidate,” concluded Senator Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). These were “professional” protesters, suggested press secretary Sean Spicer. “I don’t think most of those are spontaneous, genuine protests,” agreed secretary of education Betsy DeVos, speaking of the resistance she encountered. “I think they’re all being sponsored and very carefully planned.” And from our Tweeter-in-Chief: “The so-called angry crowds…are actually, in numerous cases, planned out by liberal activists. Sad!” The responses are entirely predictable. Decade after decade, “outside agitators” have been blamed for numerous conflicts in American life, a tradition harking all the way back to the founding of the Republic. Like zombies, these outside agitators seem to keep springing to life to wreak their devilish mischief. Segregationists routinely claimed that the civil rights movement was fomented by out-of-town northerners and communists. The infamous “Southern Manifesto,” issued by over a hundred members of Congress in 1956, after the Supreme Court handed down Brown v. Board of Education, warned that “outside agitators are threatening immediate and revolutionary changes in our public school systems.” Segregationist governor George Wallace of Alabama in 1964 insisted that “we have never had a problem in the South except in a few very isolated instances and these have been the result of outside agitators.” The same refrain echoed a century earlier. Jefferson Davis, on his way to becoming president of the Confederacy, complained bitterly of northern interference in the South’s way of life. “Bad men have gone among the ignorant and credulous people, and incited them to murder and arson.” As one prominent plantation owner blithely explained, “Our slaves are the happiest three millions of beings on whom the sun shines.” But “into their Eden is coming Satan in the guise of an abolitionist.” In July 1835 a pro-slavery mob in Charleston, South Carolina broke into the post office, where they confiscated abolitionist tracts and burned them. This cartoon includes a poster offering "$20,000 Reward for Tappan," referring to a bounty placed by the city of New Orleans on the head of Arthur Tappan, founder and president of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the eighteenth century, it was not abolitionists but agents of the British crown who were being accused by southern patriots of setting their slaves against them. The approved term in use was “instigated insurrection.” As American colonials were deciding in 1775 that they must become independent of Britain to become truly free, the “dread of instigated insurrections,” reached new heights in South Carolina, where black slaves greatly outnumbered whites. Rumors spread that the new British governor for the colony would free all its slaves.
Worse, a plot was discovered—it is still not clear whether real or imagined—that Thomas Jeremiah, a free black ferry pilot, was fomenting an uprising of African Americans to aid the British. Jeremiah was promptly executed, but meanwhile, “the newspapers were full of Publications calculated to excite the fears of the People—Massacres and Instigated Insurrections, were words in the mouth of every Child,” recalled one colonist, suggesting a much greater range of vocabulary among young folk then than now. In North Carolina, similar fears were expressed, “in these Times of general Tumult and Confusion, that the Slaves may be instigated, encouraged by our inveterate Enemies to an Insurrection.” In all these cases, the notion was that outsiders were “stirring up” black residents who otherwise would never consider demanding their freedom. The same dynamic occurs in the area of labor history, where owners of factories regularly tarred organizers as “outside agitators, having no interest in the welfare of our city or our citizens,” but who nonetheless seek “to stir up trouble in the ranks of labor.” (That example is taken from the rash of strikes after World War I.) And, yes, the tactic has been used (though less frequently) by Democrats blaming Republican agitators. When members of the newly formed Tea Party swarmed town hall meetings in the summer of 2009, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested that organizers had “bragged about manufacturing to some degree that anger.” More recently, after violent protesters on the campus of U. C. Berkeley tried to prevent conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking, liberal professor Robert Reich claimed, “They weren’t Berkeley students. They were outside agitators…part of a group ready to create the tumult and danger.” Blaming outsiders allows people to claim, or even to believe themselves, that the disruption comes from beyond their communities. By labeling agitators as the Other, opponents also excuse their own conduct in lashing back—they are not battling neighbors in their own Congressional districts but invaders from abroad. Mike Huckabee, debating whether to display the Confederate flag over Southern state houses in 2008, framed his racist taunt in the usual way: “You don't like people from outside the state coming in and telling you what to do with your flag. In fact, if somebody came to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we'd tell 'em what to do with the pole; that's what we'd do.” It was the perfect dog-whistle for a region with a history of lynchings, whose residents were now being asked to cast their ballots for an African American seeking the presidency. But leave rhetoric aside for the moment. What about the reality? Aren’t there outside agitators, after all? Today, one needs only to go to websites like Indivisible to find indisputable proof of coordination. For that matter, during the civil rights movement students from northern colleges spent “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi. Before the Civil War, abolitionists agitated openly against slavery—prime among them that fellow Frederick Douglass, whom President Trump praised as “an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is getting recognized more and more, I notice.” Talk about a professional agitator! In the end, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Betsy DeVos clearly thought it was damning to reveal that protests against her were not “genuine” because they were not “spontaneous.” Rather, they were “sponsored and very carefully planned.” Yet DeVos seems to have had no qualms about giving millions of dollars of her own money to organize support for privatizing education. One presumes that money was not used haphazardly but in ways that were very carefully planned. Of course there are outside agitators! These are known as people committed to a cause, like Betsy DeVos and Frederick Douglass. The real question is, how much tinder is lying about when the match is struck? John Brown was an outside agitator, but his plans to lead an uprising near Harpers Ferry, where few slaves lived, was an abject failure. (Paradoxically, Brown was much more successful in arousing sympathy after he was caught, tried and hanged for treason by the commonwealth of Virginia.) Certainly agitators work to heighten awareness of conditions that need to be changed. The patriots of the American Revolution were adept agitators who worked unceasingly to coordinate resistance among distant colonies, through their Committees of Correspondence. In Boston the meeting at Old South Church, which sparked the original Tea Party, was hardly “spontaneous.” Sam Adams had carefully organized his “Indians,” who only awaited his signal to take to the harbor. That came when Adams told the assembly, “This meeting can do nothing more to save the country.” Any successful movement will include outside agitators. The debate should focus not on tarring them as the Other, but on determining the merits of their cause. Should those prove to be just, the proverb from the movie Field of Dreams seems appropriate: If you build it, they will come. Bronze casting of the life mask of Abraham Lincoln, Library of Congress Happy Presidents Day! An essay I wrote is now up on History News Network, the first paragraph of which appears below.
We expect too much of our presidents. Especially at this season, when we honor the two chiefs universally acknowledged as our finest. The mistake is understandable, for it’s human nature to embrace Thomas Carlyle’s assertion that “the history of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great Men who have worked here.” Great men and women there have been; and surely Lincoln stands among them. But he understood all too well the limits of “our poor powers to add or detract,” to borrow a phrase from the fields of Gettysburg. For that reason a certain modesty about his achievements should be our wisdom as well as his. And it may also suggest a way forward in the shadow of one of our worst chiefs of state. For the full essay: http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/165159#sthash.JzbtmqsI.dpuf This is the scene everyone knows. Pocahontas saving the life of Captain John Smith soon after the English established their colony at Jamestown, Virginia. The version above happens to be a New Deal mural painted in 1939 by Paul Cadmus and displayed at the Court House Annex in Richmond. But dozens more such representations have been created over the years. In an earlier blog entry, I discussed how historians have debated whether the incident actually occurred (most historians now tend to think it did); and if so, what it actually meant. One guess is that Powhatan may not have been intending to kill Smith, only to subject him to a test of courage before adopting him as one of the chief's vassals.
But I was recently reading A Land As God Made It, James Horn's fine study of early Jamestown, and was struck that little attention has been given to another incident, which Horn chronicles, when Pocahontas may well have saved Smith's life. The Jamestown settlement was perpetually unable to feed itself during these early years, and so Smith and others made repeated forays around Chesapeake Bay to trade for Indian corn and other food. Powhatan had supplied a good deal, but he wanted not just beads and trinkets in return, but some of the Englishmen's superior weapons: guns, cannon, copper shields. And Smith didn't want to trade those. When Powhatan at last refused to provide corn unless Smith would relent, the two leaders had a dramatic confrontation, in which each man diplomatically professed his love and regard for the other, while simultaneously threatening the other at first subtly, and then not so subtly, if the weapons (for Powhatan) or food (for Smith) were not produced. Finally, Powhatan left the lodge where they had been meeting, taking with him his wives, children and traveling gear. Warriors stayed behind and an older Indian told Smith that Powhatan was going to make a gift of a bracelet, as well as a chain of pearl. Furthermore, Powhatan's men would load the English boat with the corn he needed. What Powhatan did not reveal was that he planned to murder Smith that evening. But young Pocahontas, traveling in Powhatan's entourage, got wind of these plans and stole her way through the night back to Smith's camp to warn him. By then she had known the captain for many months and had gotten to like him a good deal. Smith thanked her and was going to bestow several gifts as a measure of his gratitude, but as he later noted, "with the teares runninge downe her cheeks, shee said shee durst not be seene to have any: for if Powhatan should know it, she were but dead." Then away she went, back into the darkness. Sure enough, soon after, "eight or ten lusty fellows" arrived with heaping plates of meat for Smith and his men, showing no sign of hostility. But Smith made sure his comrades kept the matches on their muskets lighted and held their weapons at the ready, so they could fire if needed, and then told his Indian hosts that he knew very well about their "intended villainies." Keeping his guard up, he managed a retreat. Smith played a bold game with the local Indians, as did his worthy opponent Powhatan with the English newcomers. Each regularly bluffed the other, while using honeyed words in their conferences. The captain was better at this game than any of his English comrades. But in the case of this final confrontation between the two men, he received much-needed assistance from Pocahontas. This time, he may truly have owed her his life. In A Little History, my next-to-last chapter ends with a brief sketch of Rachel Carson, one exemplar of how Americans had come to realize the interconnectedness of their world, both globally and in terms of the environment around them. (Gordon Allen's headpiece for the chapter (above) evoked Carson looking out on the ocean at a sailing ship on the horizon, a hint of temporal connectedness with Christopher Columbus's ship seen in the headpiece of Chapter 1 of the book.) Now PBS has produced a fine documentary in their American Experience series, entitled "Rachel Carson." At this writing it's available for viewing on the Web here. I highly recommend it.
I do so partly because a colleague, friend and coauthor of many years is one of the film's expert contributors. Mark Lytle did a biography of Carson, The Gentle Subversive, for a series I co-edit for Oxford University Press. Gracefully written and relatively brief (about 250 pages), it's a useful overview for those who want to dig a little deeper. 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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James West Davidson
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May 2019
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