Much to my surprise, Slate.com republished the piece I did for them last year on Frederick Douglass and his famous Fourth of July speech in 1852. For those interested, the essay is available here.
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I’ve been reading up a bit on loyalists during the Revolution and came across a slim volume, published in 1909 but available now on Google books: The Tories of Chippeny Hill, Connecticut by E. LeRoy Pond. Pond wanted to memorialize one community of loyalists, mostly farmers, who lived in a hamlet in western Connecticut near present-day Bristol. Chippeny Hill overlooked these lands and a spot there known as “the Ledges” held a tiny cave where loyalists hid out as needed. The cave (shown above) is still in existence and there are directions here for those who want to hike to it. Connecticut was contested ground during the Revolution. Although the state never fell under British control, neighboring New York City did, as well as Long Island just across the Sound. Patriots intimidated those who refused to join the movement for independence (“inimicals,” these Tories were also called, as they were deemed inimical to American liberty). Those who would not sign pledges of allegiance or who refused to fight the British were frequently subjected to “rough music,” including being ridden out of town on a rail, tarred and feathered, stripped naked and dragged through creeks or taken to hog sties and covered in dung. (For more on rough music, see my earlier entry about the term.) These harassments were rough indeed. One Tory described in Pond’s book was hanged by the neck from a tree but then cut down by a more sympathetic patriot who left him nearly senseless on the ground. Recovering later in the evening, he fled to the cave four miles distant. What interested me about this particular book was not the story of the cave so much as the feelings, in 1909, of the book’s author, E. LeRoy Pond. The name alone discloses loyalties. We can infer that Pond preferred to be known by his middle name, which is of course French for “the King.” And during the Revolution, Tories were frequently known simply as “the King’s friends.” (The term loyalist didn’t come into use until late in the war.) By the opening of the twentieth century, American nationalism had long placed the Revolution’s patriots on pedestals. But Pond begged to differ. He contrasted the ascetic Puritan ways of many New Englanders with what he imagined was a more gentle existence flourishing around Chippeny Hill. “Life was not so stern,” he noted:
Pond’s genial loyalists experienced a natural bond with their king, he enthused, even if they would never lay eyes on him: “They liked to hear what play had been presented before him, what noble he had knighted, what hospital he had founded… They prayed for him as their sovereign lord and king,—not lukewarmly, my friends, as you repeat the Lord's prayer day after day, but affectionately…” This rosy rhetoric almost lulled me into missing the depth of anger manifested in an encounter Pond describes between a patriot named John Wilson and Ruth Graves, the wife of a leading Chippeny loyalist. Ruth was “a timid woman,” Pond claims, “of whom her daughter is recorded as saying that she used to tremble with fear when she heard at night the "ooah! ooah!" of the bears in the neighboring wood.” But Graves and other Tory women alerted their menfolk working in the fields at the first sign of rebels arriving to harass or arrest them. The wives signaled their husbands to flee to the woods by blowing their dinner horns, whose sonorous tones echoed through the valley. Ruth Graves, for her part, possessed a conch shell which she used for the purpose. She blew it loudly one day when Captain John Wilson came through. Wilson led a band of the Sons of Liberty who patrolled the county—rather like the Ku Klux Klan of Southern regions, Pond explained to his readers in 1909. This was a comparison most northerners of his day would not have been inclined to make, though in fact Pond was not so far off the mark in comparing the tactics of the two paralegal organizations. Their ideological creeds, of course, varied immensely. In any case, Captain Wilson had heard the conch shell blow its warning and so charged into Ruth Graves’ cabin, and managed to catch her
Did you catch it? What meek Ruth did, using her “quick wit”? I didn’t at first, because LeRoy Pond, the king’s friend, is being a little oblique in describing her actions. But readers in 1909 would not have missed the import of Ruth taking “something from under the bed” to throw in his face—not in an age when the majority of farmhouses still lacked indoor plumbing and chamber pots remained in use.
For Ruth Graves, the animosity between patriot and Tory endured well beyond the War for Independence. Pond notes that “Many years afterwards, when Mrs. Graves heard of Captain Wilson's death, she exclaimed: "I'm glad on't." Her husband reminded her of the Christian duty of forgiveness. She replied that she could not forgive him, for he had not brought back her conch shell that he had stolen.” And I’ll bet Wilson never forgot the rough music he received at her hands either. Revolution is a sharp stick driving participants on both sides to stand up or stand down. Tory boys may have enjoyed raisin puddings, but those who baked them could be every bit as determined as their patriot tormentors. 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. The Hudson River begins at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks, near the summit of Mount Marcy. The highest point in New York State, Marcy was being climbed by Vice President Theodore Roosevelt when word came that President McKinley had succumbed to complications from an assassin's bullet. As readers of A Little History of the United States know, Roosevelt went racing back to civilization along rough trails and muddy roads until he reached the railroad station at North Creek, where he was sworn in as the new president. It's along the river here that a whitewater derby is held every year, consisting of a "giant slalom" race held on Saturday and a downriver contest on Sunday. The slalom is too odd for any hardcore paddlers to attend. Its gates are spread much farther apart than Olympic-style courses (hence the appellation "giant"). But it provides good fun for old duffers and youngsters alike; and a group of us have been coming to it for well over forty years now. For us, it's like the annual rendezvous that the Mountain Men used to hold at the end of their fur trapping season, when they gathered to sell their season's catch and whoop and holler. Come to think of it, our rendezvous has persisted for far more years than the fur trappers' version, which lasted little more than a decade in its heyday. There's a novice slalom race that allows newcomers to the sport to ease into the competition without too much paddling experience; but the giant slalom requires crossing the river to a number of gates on the far side, which can be dicey in higher water. And the last five gates are set in bigger rapids, which require more skill. By now we know the course by heart, though there are variations from year to year, as to which gates are reverse (you have to back through) or upstream (which requires paddling upstream through them, against the current. Every year we scout the position of the gates, debate how to maneuver around the boulders and souse holes, and take our one shot on the course for yet another year. Almost always there's some screw-up, major or minor, which leaves us the rest of the afternoon to float downriver with friends and debate what we did wrong. The capsize below is from three years ago, and took place a few weeks before I had a cataract removed that had left me temporarily blind in one eye. Not that I need that kind of excuse to capsize! This year nobody spilled and the weather was fine. My coauthor on The Complete Wilderness Paddler, John Rugge took top honors in his class as usual, paddling with his grandson Mishkin, who has been racing since he was about eight or nine. Below, they're negotiating Gate 18 quite nicely, the most difficult needle to thread this year. And after the float down the river, it's back to a nearby farmhouse where we stay, for a nice communal dinner, political debates, and margaritas. I suspect if the Mountain Men had margaritas, they would have kept coming back for forty years too...
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. After returning from the holidays in California, I am duty-bound to post a testimonial squib on behalf of a marvelous attraction for history buffs in the San Francisco Bay area. That is Coit Tower, standing atop Telegraph Hill. The tower was erected in 1933, thanks to a bequest by the eccentric Lillie Hitchcock Coit. As a girl Lillie lost two playmates in a fire and as a teenager developed close connections with the fire fighters in Knickerbocker’s Engine Company No. 5. Over the years she not only joined in their street parades as a mascot but often dressed in men’s clothes and smoked cigars when she went out with the boys for an evening of poker or other games of chance at the hangouts along North Beach. Eventually she married a wealthy businessman, Howard Coit, and when she died, left a third of her fortune to the city of San Francisco to augment its beauty in some appropriate manner. Coit Tower is the result. The tower itself provides a magnificent view of the city, reached by elevator; but the real attractions, for my money, are the numerous murals on the tower’s interior walls. They were created by over two dozen artists during the Great Depression, through a project sponsored by the federal Public Works of Art (PWA). The murals are frescoes evoking scenes of California life: busy ferry scenes, lush orchards, canneries and construction sites, cable cars, farmworkers, lawyers, business leaders, architects, librarians, pickpockets, athletes, FDR and Eleanor, boys with ice cream cones and much more. A wonderful book displays the artists' handiwork, Coit Tower San Francisco: Its History and Art, by Masha Zakheim Jewett, the daughter of one of the artists. My wife and I have visited the tower several times, but on this occasion we were delighted to discover that the delicate frescoes had been recently cleaned. Most are visible on the first floor. We had also learned from the Coit Tower website that small groups could arrange for a tour of the spiral staircase, not generally open to the public, where additional murals are located. We had tried without success to contact the tower in advance in order to arrange a tour; but when we arrived, someone kindly agreed to show our party of six or seven the murals alongside the stairs. San Francisco, of course, is famous for its steep hills and cable cars; and fittingly, the primarily mural on the stairs was of Powell Street, one of those steep thoroughfares and also, as it happened, exactly where we were staying for our time in the city. Our guide pointed out various details of the mural with a flashlight in the dimly lit passageway. (The tight quarters are why the stairs are not used by the public now: too great a danger of brushing up against the frescoes and degrading them.) The top of the stairway had an additional set of paintings, Home Life, by Jane Berlandina, which were quite different in style. Most of the artists were students of Diego Rivera, the influential Mexican painter of murals. But Berlandina had been taught by Raoul Dufy, a French Post-Impressionist. Her creations are more schematic and limited in their color palette to reds and browns, their figures outlined in white. A stunning contrast to the other works. Take plenty of time to seek out the details. The artists loved in-jokes, used each other and their wives, husbands and friends as models. Squint at the books in the law library and you’ll see ironic copies of Das Kapital painted in next to volumes such as Law of Bankruptcy; tongue-in-cheek headlines in newspapers, including ART COMMISSION AWAKENS FROM ITS DEEP SLEEP; copies of The Daily Worker and The Masses on the newsstand next to the more staid Time magazine; or a banner exhorting, “Demonstrate on May 1st against Hunger War Fascism.” On your way to the tower, enjoy the hike up Telegraph Hill along walkways and paths that lead past pleasant residential gardens. A great spot to spend several hours! “I think there are two Donald Trumps,” said the Donald, after former rival candidate Ben Carson endorsed him for president. Carson claimed to have seen a new and different Trump beyond the one “on stage.” The second version, said Carson, was “very cerebral, sits there and considers things very carefully.”
We are now beginning to get glimpses of this second Trump. In the most recent Republican debate (March 10), an almost eerie calm descended, quite striking after the no-holds-barred mud wrestling displayed in previous outings. Partly this was the exhaustion of Trump’s rivals, especially poor Marco Rubio, who concluded he had gained little by jumping into the gutter and matching Trump insult for insult. But Trump restrained himself too. He was given plenty of opportunities to stir the pot and didn’t. His new demeanor suggested that pundits were wrong to dismiss him as little more than an unmodulated showman who wore his ego on his sleeve and worshiped the sound of his own voice. To be sure, the Donald’s ego is outsized enough to weigh down any sleeve. “I’m a big thinker,” he maintained, responding to Carson’s compliments. “And I have my ideas and they’re strong, and typically they worked out.” At times, that ego can quite firmly control what appears to be an unconstrained id. Trump has a way of modulating his anger, ramping it up and pulling it back, condemning violence and then excusing it, alternating praise (“I love Ted, I really do”) with slander (“And as for Lying Ted… ”) There is indeed a kind of wild Mr. Hyde and dignified Dr. Jekyll that reflects the two Trumps, if you will. And the candidate can slip easily in and out of both personae. Sometimes the switch seems well controlled, as at the calmer debate—not made in the heat of the political moment. But that control makes it all the more worrisome Bernie Sanders is “lying” that he has not encouraged his supporters to go protest at Trump’s rallies, Donald tweets. “Be careful Bernie, or my supporters will go to yours!” One begins to imagine a “very cerebral” Trump considering tactics, musing whether to let loose his “disruptors” upon his rivals. Dr. Jekyll wished to believe he had nothing to do with Mr. Hyde, but the two were inescapably connected. Perhaps Trump is entirely calculating in the manipulation of his fans. But the New York Times did a penetrating background piece on events driving the billionaire realtor to launch his political career. A major turning point, the article alleges, occurred at the 2013 White House Correspondents dinner, when President Obama, himself the butt of Trump’s repeated aspersions about an alleged African birth, turned round and mocked Trump at the dinner, who was in the audience. That same night that the president gave the order launching the SEAL raid against Osama bin Laden, which burnished the president’s reputation and prompted jubilant crowds to gather in front of the White House and chant “USA! USA!” America seemed to have been made great not by the man in the red cap but by the very rival who had put him down a day or two earlier. To suppose now that Trump, with cold calculation, cerebrally incites crowds of Americans who feel scorned and left behind, underestimates how much he may have felt scorned himself. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde existed within the confines of a single body, reflecting aspects of a single personality. And when reporters pressed Trump on his supposed twin identities, he concluded, “I don’t think there are two Donald Trumps. I think there’s one Donald Trump.” A sage but frightening conclusion. By pure serendipity I received two emails nearly simultaneously from separate correspondents the other day. A friend and colleague spotted A Little History on the "Bestsellers" table (aspirational, surely!) at the Cincinnati airport. And an international rep from Yale Press found it cozied up with Bill O'Reilly in the Eslite Bookstore in Hong Kong.
Terrific opening paragraph to an article in The New York Review of Books by Jacob Weisberg, especially the epigram from Dwight Macdonald, that unremitting critic of middlebrow culture, or "midcult," from the 1950s. Weisberg's piece, "We Are Hopelessly Hooked," currently available with one easy click, is worth a read for the discussion of how the Web inveigles its way into ever-increasing facets of our daily routines. I do find myself skeptical when it comes to books and essays on the sociopsychological effects of the Internet. Writers tend to split into two camps, the sunny optimists about the potential benefits and the gloomy pessimists convinced we are becoming loners incapable of authentic personal interactions. Surely the Web is susceptible to use and misuse, like any tool. It has opened up vast worlds at the click of a mouse, it's been a boon for historians and researchers, I will attest; and undoubtedly it has unleashed a plague of trolls who hurl insults and hide behind anonymity. But Weisberg's most telling points come toward the end of the essay, where he turns to the psychology of interactions that all of us experience. The builders of apps increasingly construct their programs based on techniques pioneered at Stanford University's Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute. (Why is it that every damned think tank seems to be designated an "Advanced Research Institute"? How about a little modesty, Ivy Leaguers? Would it kill you to strike Advanced?) In any case, as Weisberg explains:
Clicking indeed is a pleasure that cuts both ways: leading us into worlds that are fascinating to explore...but also tempting us to surf idly and aimlessly. That intent yet listless gaze into the screen is the reflection we seldom see, from which we would recoil if we did.
Now blink several times, go off and take a walk! |
James West Davidson
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May 2019
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