Author Archives: bpriddy

Dr. Crane’s most honorable occupation

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(Being a school teacher is hard enough in normal times but we cannot imagine how so many people in that profession feel as they ponder so much uncertainty as the days rush toward the beginning of school. Although his words were written more than a century ago and use some terminology that time has modified, we hope Dr. Frank Crane’s encouraging words are of some strength for—)

THE TEACHER

Teaching is the most honorable occupation in which any one can engage.  It is the most self-respecting business on earth.

In it one knows he is earning his salt, if he is faithfully fulfilling his duties. He is justifying his existence among men, he is doing his bit for the state, and he is serving the Lord.

No profession offers such constant inducements to be honest, truthful, humane, and intelligent. The teacher has the most admirable of all opportunities for the development of high character.

There are probably fewer immoral, shady, devious, or hypocritical person in the teaching business than in any other, not excepting preachers and reformers.

The school teachers I have met in my time grade higher, I deliberately assert, than any other class of workers…

Good teachers are born. When a [child] finds one, the kind God makes, the kind that inoculates the pupil with the love of learning, [that child] has found a pearl of great price…

The teacher’s influence I reckon to be the most far reaching of all. No reform is of much value that is not begun with children.

It is more honorable to teach school than to make money, or to hold high office, or to lead an army.

“The durable satisfactions of life,” says a recent article, “come faster, in greater variety, and stay longer for the live and growing teacher than for any other human being except the teaching person called by some other name.”

The teacher has the greatest opening for intellectual advancement, for we learn more by teaching than we do by studying…

Teaching is hard work. But it is the kind of work that strengthens and constantly refreshes life, and not exhausts life, when pursued in the right spirit.

Everyone should do a little teaching if only to find himself, for it is the best of all kinds of work for self-revelation, self-development, and self-discipline. Teaching is an excellent preparation for any other career. The President of the United States* was a teacher, and he seems to be holding his own with the kings and czars that have been in the ruling business all their lives.

Take off your hat to the teacher. He is a personage.

*This was written when Woodrow Wilson, who taught in several schools before becoming President of Princeton University before entering politics.

Us vs. It—part IX, keep your distance

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We’re back to this series of us against the virus because the virus is coming back, too. An increasing number of states are seeing terrible eruptions of cases and deaths and some of our numbers are on the rise. Each time Governor Parson has a virus update briefing he closes with urgings that we be responsible, social distance, wash our hands, and so on. He’s leaving it up to us to decide whether to wear masks. Personally, we’re scared enough about this virus that we do wear ours. I have three in my car and one at home for formal occasions—a dignified dark blue that matches my blazer.

We’ve come across a graphic description of how social distancing stay-at-home orders, and other other measures can work when a pandemic moves in. Please look at this graph as the virus begins to return to Missouri.

An organization calling itself Quartz.com, which says it provides global news and insights, has analyzed the big difference in Spanish Flu victims in Philadelphia and in St. Louis in 1918. Reporter Michael Coren writes that Philadelphia held a big parade despite warnings about soldiers carrying the Spanish Influenza virus. Two-hundred thousand people attended. Three days later, every bed in the city’s thirty-one hospitals was filled with a Spanish Flu victim. A week after the parade, the disease had killed 4,500 people. Only then did the local political leaders close the city.

St. Louis, under the aggressive leadership of City Health Director Max Starkloff, closed all of its schools, libraries, courtrooms, playgrounds, and churches within two days of learning of its first cases. The city banned gatherings of more than twenty people. It limited the number of people who could ride streetcars, and store and factory work shifts were staggered. The National Academy of Sciences reported in 20017 that per capita deaths in St. Louis were less than half the death rate of Philadelphia, thanks to Starkloff’s quick actions and the population’s response to his leadership.

The operative phrase is “death rate,” because Philadelphia was the nation’s third-largest city with a population of about 1.8-million then. St. Louis was the nation’s FOURTH-largest city at almost 700,000.

The graph that accompanies Coren’s article makes the point well.

We had a statewide lockdown in Missouri. Governor Parson began to lift it in early May and hopes Missourians have the good sense at a time when the virus is finding renewed energy to take steps that will avoid a rollback of the reopening. If we want to keep the jobs we have just recovered, and recover more; if we want to return to schools safely in a few weeks; if we want to keep being with friends again, we must not underestimate the capriciousness of this virus that we now know can attack and kill anyone of any age or condition. Hospitalizations are on the rise in Missouri. Seriously. Deaths seem to have moderated but we’ll look at the numbers in the next week to watch for indications of what our July 4th weekend behavior meant and whether the increased case numbers accelerate our death rate.

This stuff does not play games.

Our study of the 1918 pandemic earlier this year indicated viruses such as the one in 1918 and the one now seemingly can explode, and when they do, it’s awfully late to decide people need to dig in at home or think about masking-up. We cannot be blind to what is happening in other states, including states such as Idaho, Montana, and South Dakota. We can hope we somehow escape a second surge of the first wave, but reality better be sobering to even the most hopeful.

Nancy and I try to go outside and walk a mile or two every sunny day, breathing in fresh air (hoping that walking fast enough to speed up the heart and the lungs will make them stronger in case we, unfortunately, become positive in ways beyond thinking; Nancy and I got “nosed” last week and we were negative. But this is a new week.). We miss our social circles of friends from various activities but we don’t want to give them anything nor do we want them to give us anything but continued friendship.

There are, of course, those who will say wearing a mask is a blow against their freedom. We submit to them, and to everybody else, the story often told by the Chairman of the Prohibition National Committee in the 1880s, John B. Finch, who would say, “This arm is my arm….it’s not yours. Up here I have a right to strike out with it as I please. I go over there with these gentlemen and swing my arm and exercise the natural right which you have granted; I hit one man on the nose, another under the ear, and as I go down the stairs on my head, I cry out:

‘Is this not a free country?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Have I not a right to swing my arm?’

‘Yes, but your right to swing your arm leaves off where my right not to have my nose struck begins.’

“Here,” Finch would say, “civil government comes in to prevent bloodshed, adjust rights, and settle disputes.”

Our civil government in Missouri prefers each of us understands our obligation to the rest of us, whether it is swinging our arms, or spreading a virus. But we are confident our governor WILL tighten things down again if we fail in our personal actions to be as responsible as he wants us to be.

We hope all of you will look at the chart above and understand how important it is for us to endure the slight inconveniences necessary to protect one another. If we don’t get to see our friends for several more months, the minutes we spend behind a mask and the hours and days we spend binge-watching streaming-channel programs will improve the chances they will be there to be seen.

And we will be there to see them.

You’ve got to be carefully taught

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(The newest tell-all book about President Trump paints a distressing picture of family dysfunction. Dr. Frank Crane wrote a century ago about this kind of family culture, or—)

POISONING THE CHILD MIND

One of the recent discoveries in the art of healing is the therapeutic value of suggestion. That is to say, the physician, by suggesting to the patient, particularly the patient suffering from nervous disorder, sane and helpful thoughts about himself, can work a cure better oftentimes than by the use of drugs.

The force of mental suggestion is so great that many fads, and even new religions, have arisen which are based upon it.

If the influence of good suggestion be so great, the influence of bad suggestion is even greater.

I wish to call attention to one form of character poisoning of which parents are frequently guilty.

Perhaps the worst misfortune that can happen to a person is to be infested with the germs of fear, to lack decision and self-confidence, to be a pretty to the terrors of morbidity and doubt of self. Who can tell the mortal pain, shame, and self-torture of the innumerable victims of chronic fear?

Frequently, parents are responsible for this. A boy, for instance, develops some in-born trait of waywardness; he is untruthful, will not apply himself, is careless, disobedient, or persists in keeping bad company; the parent naturally tells him of his fault, and, as it seems to do no good, drops into a constant practice of scolding. Over and over the boy is reminded that he is “bad,” that he will never amount to anything, and so on. This finally filters in the child’s sub consciousness, and then the irretrievable damage; for when he comes to believe in his sub-mind that he is bad, he is bad.

Why not try to find the CAUSE of your child’s defects and remove it? When you KNOW that blame and reproof do no good, why go on?

We do not realize that it is a CRIME to say to any child under any circumstances, that he is bad, weak, or vicious. When you do that you are planting a seed of damage in his mind. Many a woman has been wrecked because her life was poisoned when she was a child by unceasing mental suggestions from her mother that she was naughty, wicked, unreliable, or untruthful.

Many a man is a weak failure in the struggles of mature life, simply because the cult of failure was carefully instilled into his childish mind by his thoughtless parents.

Dwell upon and encourage the good that is in your child. Ignore his defects as far as possible Learn how to shut your eyes. Above all, do not tell him he is wicked. Show him his faults, but never in public, but in sacred intimacy. Show him the consequences of wrongdoing; but enlist his aid in opposing his bad traits. Persistently suggest to him that he is good, brave, strong, and truthful. In after-life this belief of yours in him will tone up his self-respect and give him strength in his hours of crisis.

Better names

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If we are to remove the names of traitors from our military bases—and we should—whose names deserve to replace them? The issue requires some thought and some understanding of the purposes of the bases.

Rudi Keller is a longtime friend whose company I used to enjoy during my days as an active member of the Capitol press corps. Not only is he a fine reporter, but he is an excellent historian. During the Civil War Bicentennial, Rudi wrote hundreds of columns about life in central Missouri during the war. The columns were turned into two books, one covering 1861 and the other 1862. I hope that someday, somehow, his work covering other three years of the war are published.

Rudi is now the news editor of the Columbia Daily Tribune. He still finds time to write news stories and some opinion pieces published in the Tribune and in other Gatehouse-owned newspapers. A couple of weeks ago he offered some “humble suggestions for new base names,” a response to suggestions our military bases named for Confederate officers should get new, more honorable names. His ideas are worthy of consideration by the people who have the power to make changes.

Last Thursday, U.S. Sen. Josh Hawley voted against an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act directing that new names be chosen for bases honoring Confederate military heroes. The amendment targets 10 military bases — all in states that initiated a war to preserve the right to own another human being.

In a statement to reporters, Hawley played the history card. We’ve seen it before, used to defend everything from flying the Confederate battle flag at the South Carolina capitol to keeping statues of violent racists in places of honor.

“I just don’t think that Congress mandating that these be renamed and attempting to erase that part of our history is a way that you deal with that history,” Hawley said.

Well, as the Tribune’s resident expert on the Civil War, I would recommend that Hawley ask his colleague, U.S. Sen. Roy Blunt, for some books on the generals whose names adorn some of the nation’s most important military installations. Blunt, you see, was once a high school history teacher and is a trustee of the State Historical Society of Missouri.

Blunt is not advocating for the names to remain on the bases. In fact, he suggested to reporters that renaming some or all would be appropriate.

“If you want to continue to name forts after soldiers, there have been a lot of great soldiers who have come along since the Civil War,” Blunt said, according to CNN.

Blunt noted that Braxton Bragg, whose name is on the largest military base in the world, was “probably the worst commanding general in the entire Confederate Army. He’s an interesting guy to name a fort after.”

But in case Hawley is too busy to read some books, here’s a short list of reasons why renaming those bases is a good idea. As Blunt noted, some of them have less-than-inspiring records of military achievement.

FORT LEE

We’ll start with Fort Lee in Virginia, named for Gen. Robert E. Lee.

Lee was an audacious, enormously successful commander and an inspiration to his troops. He was scrupulously honest, a brilliant engineer and he had a lasting impact on higher education after the war with his reorganization of what is now Washington and Lee University.

But instead of fighting for the nation that had given him an education, employed him and made him prosperous, he took up arms against it. That, in the Constitution, is the definition of treason.

Lee’s greatest military achievements were as an enemy of the United States. If he had been any more successful, the property occupied by Fort Lee would not be in the United States.

Fort Lee is a training center. How about Fort Steuben, for Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben? A Prussian officer, he served in the Revolutionary War teaching basic military drill, tactics and discipline.

FORT HOOD

Fort Hood, in Texas, is named after John Bell Hood, an aggressive commander who destroyed through incompetence the last effective Confederate Army fighting west of the Appalachian Mountains.

Fort Hood is the army’s base for deploying heavy armored forces. How about renaming it Fort Patton, after the aggressive World War II Gen. George Patton? At a crucial moment of the war, he spearheaded an armored drive to defeat the last Nazi offensive in western Europe.

FORT BENNING

Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry L. Benning, a competent fighter who served under Hood. Benning was never a grand strategist and never held an independent command.

Fort Benning is where the U.S. Army trains its airborne troops and is the home of its infantry school. How about renaming it for Gen. Anthony “Nuts” McAuliffe? He was the commander of the 101st Airborne Division when it was surrounded at Bastogne, Belgium and acquired his nickname from the one-word answer he gave when Germans demanded his surrender.

FORT GORDON

Fort Gordon in Georgia is named for Gen. John Brown Gordon, who was an aggressive and audacious commander but who, after the war, opposed the Reconstruction policies that gave civil, social and economic rights to freed slaves. He is believed by many to have been the leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, although he is also on the record as having made some statements of benevolence to the people freed by the South’s defeat in the war to preserve slavery.

Fort Gordon is the Army’s center for signal and cyber security. Perhaps a better name would be Fort Lowe, for Thaddeus S.C. Lowe, who organized the Union Army Balloon Corps, which provided aerial reconnaissance of Confederate positions reported by a telegraph wire from a platform tethered up to 500 feet above the ground.

FORT BRAGG

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is named after Braxton Bragg, as Blunt noted, one of the South’s least successful generals. On two separate occasions, Bragg had major strategic victories within his grasp but failed at the moment of execution.

Perhaps a fitting name would be Fort Washington, in recognition of the fact that George Washington led a meager, ill-fed and ill-clad force in the Revolution. The name applied to the world’s largest base would celebrate the power of what Washington started.

FORT POLK

Fort Polk, Louisiana, a joint readiness and training center, is named for Gen. Leonidas Polk, who did not survive the Civil War. As a military leader, he made a major strategic blunder early in the war that cost the Confederacy the chance to turn Kentucky to its side.

As a readiness center, perhaps it would be better named for Gen. George Thomas, who held his command in readiness at Nashville during an ice storm and struck at Hood when the weather warmed, scattering the rebel army and ending any substantial resistance in the war’s western theater.

FORT PICKETT

Fort Pickett, a Virginia Army National Guard installation, is named for George Pickett, who gave his name to the famously futile Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. If the military wants a symbol of bravery in the name of a forlorn hope, perhaps it could remain Fort Pickett.

I offer the name Fort Johnson-Brown, for Gen. Hazel Johnson-Brown, the first black woman to become a general in the U.S. Army and, in retirement, a professor of nursing at George Mason University in Virginia.

FORT A.P. HILL

Fort A.P. Hill, an Army training and maneuver center in Virginia, is named for Gen. A.P. Hill, who died in the last days of the war after a distinguished battle record. Like Lee, Hill was educated by the United States at West Point and turned on the loyalties of a 14-year U.S. Army career to take up arms against his country.

It could be renamed Fort Sherman, for Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman. While Gen. Ulysses Grant was piling up casualties in Virginia in 1864, Sherman mainly used flanking maneuvers to drive Confederate Gen. Joseph E. Johnston back almost 100 miles to Atlanta.

FORT RUCKER

Fort Rucker, Alabama, is named after Gen. Edmund Rucker. A cavalry leader, Rucker was a competent commander and after the war, a business partner of Nathan Bedford Forrest, first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Fort Rucker bills itself as the home of Army aviation. How about naming it Fort Doolittle, for Jimmy Doolittle, who commanded the daring raid in which B-25 bombers launched from an aircraft carrier to bomb the home islands of Japan in early 1942? The raid did little damage but it did bring a big morale boost to a nation reeling from the Pearl Harbor attack and notified the Japanese that the U.S. had immense power to strike out.

If anyone is squeamish about the name Doolittle because it sounds like the camp for slackers, it could be Fort Wright, for the Wright Brothers, who built the first successful airplane and sold the Army its first air machine.

CAMP BEAUREGARD

And we come to Camp Beauregard, established as a training base during World War I and now operated by the Louisiana National Guard. It is named for Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard, commander of the forces that opened the war with the bombardment of Fort Sumter.

Beauregard won the First Battle of Bull Run, a battle he easily could have lost, but had few additional successes. His forté was dreaming up grandiose plans for a vast, strategic move with himself in command.

The camp is one of the oldest ones in existence from World War I. Might I suggest to the fine state of Louisiana one of their own, Natalie Scott, as the new namesake?

Known to be one of only three Red Cross workers to serve in World War I and II, Scott returned home from World War I a heroine. She was the only American woman to earn France’s highest medal for courage, the Croix de Guerre.

The current names are legacies of a time when racism turned those men’s traitorous conduct into a romantic legend of an honorable defense of home against invaders.

Time has consigned that legend to the ash heap of history and the base names should go with it.

Thanks, Rudi.

 

Dr. Crane says we can’t all be friends

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(Dr. Frank Crane might have been thinking about the already-feverish antagonisms of the 2020 campaign year when he warned a centuryu ago that nobody can be liked by everybody, that all of us have—)

THE ENEMY

Whoever you are there’s somebody that doesn’t like you.

The one constant figure on life’s stage is the enemy. He’s always there, sitting grim and silent, or busy with hostility.

“Be thou as pure as ice, as chaste as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny.”

Gentle maiden, as good as fair, with a heart warm and kind to all God’s creatures, anxious to spread happiness as May to spread flowers, it seems incredible, but there is someone to whom your presence is offense, and to whom your surcease would be pleasing!

In the chemistry of souls this repellency is most curious but undeniable. No human force ever comes into the world without the opposite. Every positive has its negative. In every love is a little spot of hate. Heaven and hell, in their deeper significance, touch every human heart.

Caesar had his Brutus, Socrates his Miletus, and Jesus his envious Pharisees.

When I read any book that pleases me, human Dickens or quiet Wordsworth, the exquisitely tooled word craft of Vernon Lee or the smashing liveliness of Conan Doyle, it often comes to me—somebody doesn’t like this.

Queer, isn’t it? Sinister and strange, but true. Little dove, the hawk soars stilly watching; little fly, the spider swings ready in his web; little doe, the cougar crouches behind the bush; little soul, among the gods walks one who looks darkly at you.

And the higher you climb, the brighter you write your name upon fame’s scroll, the louder your applause and the more signal your triumph, the surer there will be, somewhere muffled in the cheering crowd, the somber figure of some “Mordecai, sitting at the king’s gate.”

Is not America a beloved country? There are those who loathe it unreservedly. Is not President Wilson a fine figure among statesmen? There are many who would rejoice at his downfall, who watch eagerly to find his mistakes and herald them.

In a way the strength of the enemy is a reliable measure of one’s success. The more you amount to, the sharper the hisses. Many a man has been elected to Congress by his enemies, and many a writer has been hounded to fame.

The best way to meet the enemy is to let him see that you do not think it worthwhile to fight him. Nothing so enrages malice as to discover that you don’t mind. Nothing so disarms attack as for you to go about your business as usual. Such defense is the most exasperating vengeance.

When in doubt, say nothing. Your enemy can answer everything you can possibly say, can retaliate against everything that you can possibly do, except one thing. That is silence.

 

Why not Benedict Arnold Army Base?

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One of the issues growing out of the protests after the death of George Floyd is whether military bases named for Confederate Civil War figures should be re-named.

Their cases are different from discussions of whether Thomas Jefferson’s statue should remain at the University of Missouri or whether statues of other historical figures should be taken down because they were slaveholders in a time and in places where slavery was considered a normal part of culture.

Let’s consider Fort Lee, Virginia, originally named Camp Lee in 1917 to honor Colonel Robert E. Lee of the United States Army, a hero of the Mexican War. The camp became a permanent military outpost, Ford Lee, in 1950.

Robert E. Lee might be the poster child for the movement to sanitize our history. Boston College historian Michael McLean has written, “Robert Lee was the nation’s most notable traitor since Benedict Arnold.” He was a hero of the Mexican-American War that brought us California and the states of the Southwest. “But when he was called on to serve again—this time against violent rebels who were occupying and attacking federal forts—Lee failed to honor his oath to defend the Constitution. He resigned from the United States Army and quickly accepted a commission in a rebel army…”

Did he ever show any remorse about his choice?

General Armistead Long, who wrote The Memoirs of Robert E. Lee in 1886, quoted Lee saying shortly before his surrender in 1865, “We had, I was satisfied, sacred principles to maintain and rights to defend, for which we were in duty bound to do our best, even if we perished in the endeavour.”

This great-grandson of one of Sherman’s soldiers at Vicksburg sees Lee—and other Confederates whose names are on current military bases—through eyes that are distinctly different from the great-grandsons of Lee’s soldiers in the Army of Northern Virginia and leans toward a harsher assessment of Lee and the others than do some friends who admire him.

NPR’s Scott Simon commented on June 13, “Those bases were not founded in the wake of the Civil War, when President Lincoln encouraged national conciliation.” They weren’t opened until the nation geared up for World War I. Simon cited Civil War historian Harold Holzer saying the Army gave states “naming rights” to the bases in exchange for states giving the land to the federal government.

Simon went on, “Brigadier General Henry L. Benning was acclaimed as ‘Old Rock’ by his men. He once had two horses shot out from under him in battle. Harold Holzer calls him ‘a pretty formidable military commander. That is, effective in the war to perpetuate slavery. More to the point, he was a virulent white supremacist who issued incendiary warnings about the so-called dangers of having free black men outnumbering white men and threatening the purity of lily-white womanhood.’

“Harold Holzer says Braxton Bragg, ‘may have been the worst commanding general in the Confederacy. He was a bad strategist, an inept tactician whose usual order was to charge straight ahead…He did absolutely nothing to establish a claim to a place in national or even Southern memory…I just find it mystifying,’ he says, ‘that two iconic American army installations should have been named in honor of a racist and a screw-up.’ Braxton Bragg, we’ll add, may have qualified as both.”

He also cited English Professor Elizabeth Samet, who teaches at West Point and who favors re-naming the bases because they originally were named “to erase the true history, that the Confederacy fought the war to retain slavery.” She thinks the bases should be re-named to honor true heroes of various races who have fought for and died for our country.

President Trump seemed to miss the point when he said the bases “have become part of a Great American Heritage…The United States of America trained and deployed our HEROES on these Hallowed Grounds…” The grounds of those bases, however, are hallowed because of the heroes who trained there, not because of the names on the base entrance signs. The “heroes” he vows to protect took an oath upon their enlistment to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same…”

It’s basically the same oath created in 1789 and taken by other people such as Braxton Bragg, Henry Benning, Robert E. Lee and about a half-dozen others—all of whom deserted that oath and waged war against the constitutional system they had promised to protect.

If we evaluate prominent figures as historian Jon Meacham suggested in our last post, on the basis of whether their lives’ goal was to “form a more perfect union,” these figures fail badly.

…They were devoted to ending the constitutional experiment in the idea of Jeffersonian, however imperfect, however incomplete, idea of equality. And if anyone doubts—and there may be a few and they’re probably sitting there seething right now—if you doubt what we’re saying about what the Confederacy was about, go to your—what George W. Busch used to call “the Google machine” and look up the Cornerstone Speech by Alexander H. Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America. It is a speech that he gave in Savannah, Georgia that says, “The cornerstone of the Confederacy is the preservation of slavery.”

And once the battle against slavery was lost, then the cause of white supremacy took over. So those figures are part of that…History is history. That is what they were about. So why should we commemorate that? That has nothing to do with the sacrifices and the grace and grit of the men and women who have trained at those facilities. Nothing whatever.

They should remain on pages of our history books, not on the entrance signs at places where we train soldiers to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic,” a sacred promise these men broke.

Next week: A friend with good ideas about better names.

Dr. Crane would like some quiet

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(As we sink deeper and deeper into the muck of a major political campaign year, the noise level is going to rise with each new charge or claim or denial, with each new voice whether of a candidate a surrogate or a secretly-funded attack group. Although written almost a century ago, Doctor Frank Crane’s suggestion that we see all of this noise for what it is, is particularly contemporary.)

ALL NOISE IS A WASTE

Power is a curious and much misunderstood thing. Noise and display, which are commonly thought to indicate it, in reality are indications of its absence.

All show of force is a sign of weakness. Loud talking is a sign of a consciousness that one’s reasoning is feeble. When one shrieks it means that he knows or suspects that what he says does not amount to much, and it irritates him.

Profanity comes from a limited vocabulary.

A country is poor in proportion to its fighting spirit. A nation habitually peaceful is hardest to conquer. It was the United States that settled with the Barbary pirates.

In advertisements, a persistent over-statement will in time destroy all confidence. Even here the strongest, most impressive thing, in the long run, is modesty.

Power is an inverse ration to noise, as a rule.

The strongest being conceivable is God. And he is so modest, quiet, and hidden that many people to refuse to believe there is a God. He never blusters. Hence humbugs cannot understand how He exists.

The most powerful material thing in our range of experience is the sun, the source of all earth-forces. Yet the sun’s pull, energy, and radiation are silent. It raises billions of tons of water daily from the ocean with less noise than an April thunder-storm.

“The greatest things have need to be said most simply,” remarked a Frenchman; “they are spoiled by emphasis.”

 

If one of your ancestors owned slaves—

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—should their name be erased from your family tree?

Should Jefferson City and Jefferson County change their names because Thomas Jefferson owned slaves?

Should towns named for the Five Civilized Tribes or their leaders change their names because the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek (Muscogee), Chickasaw, and Seminole tribes sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War?

We began thinking of these questions a few days ago when we saw a Kansas City Star comment suggesting a fountain and a parkway named for J. C. Nichols be renamed because he was a racist whose real estate developments defined Kansas City’s history of racism that lingers in the minds of many citizens today, and upon hearing of a petition circulated by a University of Missouri student to remove a statue of slaveholder Thomas Jefferson from Francis Quadrangle (where the columns are in Columbia) and after seeing a news account that protestors in North Portland, Oregon had pulled down a statue of Jefferson at a high school named for him.

New to the discussion is that military bases should no longer be named for Confederate officers such as Braxton Bragg, John Bell Hood, Henry Benning Robert E. Lee, and others.

These are troubling issues and troubling questions in troubling times. Today, let’s consider Thomas Jefferson. The military bases will wait for a later posting.

Correcting the historical narrative is better than trying to erase it, for we learn nothing from erased history and we can learn everything from placing history’s people and events in context. Hasty action in emotional days might rob those in the future of needed guidance in shaping their eras.

University of Missouri Curators correctly decided to leave the Jefferson statue on Francis Quadrangle although the petitions had more than two-thousand signatures. University System President Mun Choi said, “We learn from history. We contextualize historical figures with complex legacies. We don’t remove history.”

To remove the statue of Jefferson because he owned slaves would also remove the statue of someone who was the main author of the Declaration of Independence, the creator of the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, the founder of the University of Virginia (three things he wanted on his original tombstone that also is at the University of Missouri-Columbia), and the president whose administration added most of the land west of the Mississippi River that made us a nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Dr. Choi and the curators had it right.

Here’s a more intimate dimension to this issue:

Several years ago when I was a guest lecturer at Kent State University, I met a sharp, earnest African-American student, Shannon Lanier, and this then-girlfriend (now his wife, Chandra, and mother of their three children). He told me he was the sixth-great grandson of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings, whom some identify as the half-sister of Jefferson’s wife. Martha Jefferson died at the age of 33 in 1782. Shannon already had co-authored a book about Jefferson’s black descendants. DNA studies indicate Tom and Sally had six children, four of them surviving to adulthood. Many white Jefferson descendants accept the Hemings descendants as part of the Jefferson heritage.

I wonder how those African-American Jefferson descendants would feel if they knew a proposal had been made at the University of Missouri to remove a statue of their most famous ancestor. Would the removal place them in the position of being branded as products of some kind of unforgivable Original Sin? Is their existence the result of some kind of unforgiveable disobedience of widely-accepted contemporary codes against sexual relations between different races (a code often ignored in plantation America, including here in Missouri)?

The censuring of Jefferson as a slave-owner could be seen as a disparagement of hundreds of his descendants, a continuation of the idea that any child born out of wedlock—let alone also born of an interracial relationship—should bear a mark of historic illegitimacy.

And what difference does it make in the long run? The importance of a life is not how it begins but how it is lived. That is why a rush to judgment in emotionally-charged times can be perilous.

As Shannon put it on CBS This Morning, on February 14, 2019, “Sometimes, I’m proud of his accomplishments and sometimes I hate him for not doing more…We can’t necessarily judge history with contemporary eyes but we can learn from history and the mistakes that our past leaders have made.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTC_UFAhrvA)

The PBS Newshour ran an extended piece that featured other descendants of Sally and Tom commenting on a Monticello exhibit about Sally. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Gm3HtijrMQ)

The New York Times ran a Farah Stockman’s story on June 16, 2018 (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/16/us/jefferson-sally-hemings-descendants.html) about the feelings of Hemings descendants about the exhibit. One of those descendants, former employee of the National Archives in Washington, D. C., Julius “Calvin” Jefferson, took pride in his slave ancestors: “They were there at the beginning of the country. When you are of African descent, you are told that we had nothing to do with that. I’ve realized that members of my family had a lot to do with that. The contributions that the slave community did at this one plantation afforded Thomas Jefferson the leisure to be the genius that he became.”

Additionally, how, if we are to follow the wishes of those advocating removing monuments of racists and slave-holders, should we treat the thirty-nine men who signed the United States Constitution in 1787? Or the 56 who signed the Declaration of Independence? Some of them were slave-holders yet they gave us the Declaration that declared we were a nation on equal standing with other nations and asserted the immortal line we are fond of quoting today despite the times in which it originated—All men are created equal—and then produced a Constitution that, with its Bill of Rights, defines our country as the republic that it is.

There is danger in applying a moral standard of our time to punish our ancestors for the values they held in morally different societies. To brand them for being part of an acceptable culture that would not be acceptable today runs the risk of diminishing our opportunities to learn from them. Failing to remember our past with its disgraceful as well as its noble moments is to risk an ignorance that could produce regrettable repetitions.

Thomas Jefferson, J. C. Nichols and all of those in our pasts whose flaws we recognize because of our contemporary values give us important context as we correct today’s shortcomings.

Tomorrow is more important than yesterday. But knowing about yesterday is vitally important in helping us shape that tomorrow. Ignorance of history is more dangerous than knowledge of it. Historic events and historical figures are products of their times. Placing people and events within the standards of their eras gives them a reality that we cannot ignore as we consider who we are today and who we will seem to be when we join them as history.

Our presence in these times is a history lesson for tomorrow whether we like it or not or whether those who come after like us or not.

Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham a few days ago on MSNBC discussed how he evaluates historical figures:

Was the person or the institution being memorialized ultimately devoted to the pursuit of a more perfect union or were they for ending the constitutional experiment altogether. And by that test, even the most flawed white Americans—Andrew Jackson, James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, could be memorialized and understood as imperfect people who nevertheless were about defending a system that ultimately gave us the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments that ultimately gave us the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Woman Suffrage. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, the story of the country has been one of all-too-gradual liberation and we should build our monuments; we should focus our collective commemorative memory around those moments.

Taken as a whole, was Jefferson’s life a quest for that “more perfect union?” Yes, it was and is the reason his statues should remain in Columbia and elsewhere, a representation of a man who—as is true of all of us—is greater than his shortcomings.

Dr. Crane on History

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(Demonstrations in recent weeks have dramatized the effect the past has on the present. Our Wednesday posts for the next couple of weeks will address a couple of the issues that have spun off of those demonstrations. It’s appropriate, therefore, that we offer Dr. Crane’s thoughts on—)

THE PAST

A good deal of morbid nonsense has been said and written and thought about the Past.

The Past is irrevocable, we have been told in sermon and story—you cannot escape the past—the Past can never be changed—and so on, and so on—the whole trend of this thought being that the Past is a kind of Sherlock Holmes dogging our steps forever, a sinister nemesis waiting its chance to strike us down, the account-book of an angry God sure to confront us some day.

All of this is morbid, most of it is dramatic; the underlying sentiment of it is false, weakening, and septic.

As a matter of fact, our Past, as Maeterlinck* says, depends on our Present and changes with it.

What the Past is depends upon the way you are now using it. Its effect upon your destiny will be gauged by how you translate it into the Future.

If we brood over the Past, and weaken ourselves with vain regrets, with self-contempt and remorse, then it will poison and undo us.

But no matter what it contains of our sin or folly, we can, by a right use of it now, make it minister to our welfare.

First, we can learn wisdom from it. By it we can realize our faults to be corrected and our offenses to be atoned for. And with this wisdom we can go onto better things.

The only true repentance is so to use th Past as to enable us to build a better future. Weeping and wailing and brooding are the luxuries of morbidity.

The Past is beneath our feet. We can go down into it and wallow in impotent grief, or we can step upon it to higher things.

The great enemy of life is Despair. The great friend of life is Hope. Despair paralyzes, ruins. Hope energizes, “for we are saved by hope.”

Up! Face the future! Whatever the Past has been, let it nerve you to spend your remaining days unfaithfulness and loyalty to your better self!

So Tennyson, with clear insight, with sane instinct for moral truth, wrote:

“I hold it truth, with him (Goethe) who sings

To one clear harp in divers tones,

That men may rise in stepping stones

Of their dead selves to higher things.”

*Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1849) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1911 in recognition of his “many-sided literary activities.”

           

Wrappers

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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell issued a statement about ten days ago in which he said the NFL had been wrong in not listening to players’ protests against racism and police brutality. He said the NFL supports the Black Lives Matter movement now:

”Without Black players, there would be no National Football League. And the protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality and oppression of Black players, coaches, fans and staff. We are listening. I am listening, and I will be reaching out to players who have raised their voices and others on how we can improve and go forward for a better and more united NFL family.”

Some have applauded the apparent awakening of the NFL to the issue. Some think the continued refusal of the league to re-sign Colin Kaepernick, who caused the initial stir by kneeling during the National Anthem, is a continuing sign the NFL is just talking a good game.

The proof of the league’s sincerity will be written in the future.

The message struck the President of the United States squarely in the knee, and the resulting jerk produced a Trumpian response that ignores the issue behind the message but helps stoke the fires of his loyal base. “Could it be even remotely possible that…he was intimating that it would be O. K. for the players to KNEEL, or not to stand, for the National Anthem, thereby disrespecting our Country and our Flag?”

I’m going to get in trouble from here to the end today.

I am one of those who loves our country and respects the flag that is its symbol for the good it has achieved as well as what our country can be. Should be. But that does not mean I should ignore the times when that flag has stood for regretful things or regretful things that linger.

I wonder if President Trump has ever visited an Indian reservation. I have. Some are better off than others and some are very poor, places where the ancestors of today’s inhabitants were forced to go so another race could appropriate their lands. I have, for example, stood at the edge of the ditch at Wounded Knee where so many were killed while the American Flag was flying overhead.

I can understand how the American Flag has a different meaning to those who live in those places.

I wonder if President Trump has ever thought about doing something to improve lives in ghettos and barrios or would visit one, mentally capable of understanding what he was seeing and what he was being told and then had the capacity to do something other than tweet about the experience.

I can understand how the American Flag lacks the meaning in those places that the President demands for it from his comfortable office.

I wonder if President Trump has ever visited the remains of an internment camp into which Japanese-Americans were herded a few years before he was born because they were considered security risks although their families might have been Americans for generations. I have.

I can understand why some descendants of those internees can see the American Flag differently from the President’s view that he seems to think is the only acceptable view.

It is easy for those whose lives have not included oppression or social uncertainty to wrap ourselves in a national symbol and feel warm and comfortable in it. But the flag is more than a wrapper. The problem with wrapping oneself in a flag of self-righteousness is that the wrapper can obscure one’s view of the real world around them.

The flag is my symbol, not just his. And I will decide what it symbolizes to me at any particular time. He will not dictate to me what the American Flag can mean and how I may legally express that meaning.

Among other things, the American Flag stands for moving beyond the status quo. The American Flag symbolizes a people always reaching for more, moving for more, developing more, creating more. The flag symbolizes a nation that would not be confined to thirteen states on the Atlantic coast. It symbolizes a nation that would not tolerate state-sponsored religion. It symbolizes a nation that, in time, would not tolerate a system of buying and selling people. It symbolizes a nation that demanded equality with other nations and got it. It symbolizes a people always asking, as Carl Sandburg put it, “Where to, what next?”

It symbolizes a nation with flaws and scars—and the best it can become despite them.

But moving beyond the status quo also means extending opportunity beyond the privileged. Moving beyond the status quo implies a public responsibility to one another so that allmight seek life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness without fear.

Going beyond the status quo requires those who are comfortable with it to recognize enforcing the status quo stifles the very values the wrappers claim to cherish and leads to resentment and challenge.

Do not tell me, Mr. President, that I may not take a knee in a country that speaks of hope for better days but is seen by many as doing little to bring them to those people. Do not tell me, Mr. President, that your ideas of freedom are the only ideas I am allowed to have. Do not tell me it is un-American to kneel during the National Anthem, or to refuse to say “Under God” as part of the Pledge of Allegiance, or in some other way indicate that I believe the American Flag represents still unfulfilled goals that we should never rest in reaching for.

I am an American and I will decide the meaning of our national symbols, not you. My respect for them is based on what they mean we can be. And what we can be is surely better than what we are.

I want to make America great. And that is why I will kneel if I choose to do so. And if I remain standing with my hand over my heart, it is because I choose to believe in what must be, not what is.

I will choose how I interpret the flag. I will not wrap myself in it and proclaim that only I am righteous enough to interpret its meaning. I will not wrap myself in it and demean those who see it through different eyes. That, frankly, is un-American.

A flag cannot be inspirational and aspirational if it is wrapped. It can only be those things if it is free to blow with the winds of change.

There is a strong breeze blowing in our land today. This is a time to let the flag fly so all may see it in their own ways and be guided by it to better tomorrows.