Category Archives: people

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.

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.

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.

Us vs. It—part VII, Thoughts from a Quiet Street, Pandemic edition

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A lot more thinking happens on the quiet street when you can’t mingle with your usual social groups and when you have to stand in the middle of the street to talk to your neighbor. It is amazing how profound one can be if the only one you can talk to up close is yourself.

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We’ve been keeping a journal of our thoughts about the pandemic year since March 28. No idea when we’ll stop because there’s no idea when the virus will stop. It’s not too late for you to start one, too. And you should. The State Historical Society has suggested it as a worthwhile time-filler for you and as a valuable historical resource in the future for those who want to see what life was like during this event. The society has some journals from the Spanish Influenza years and they give us some insight behind the newspaper headlines we have in our microfilmed newspaper files (about 60-million pages worth). Personally, a lot of mental wandering goes on as we reflect on each day’s events. Hopes and fears. Anger and frustration. Funny occurrences. Next-door sorrow. The disappearance of our children’s inheritances. Struggles to pay the rent, the mortgage, and the grocery and pharmacy bills. The sound of birds as we take our daily walks. The real story of this era will be found in the daily journals we keep and put into historical societies and other archives. And what we are experiencing can be instructive decades from now (we hope) when another pandemic sweeps the world.

As long as you are cooped up, write about it. It can be therapeutic.

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Today, tomorrow, and Friday are all that’s left of this legislative session, a historic one because of the circumstances facing it. The legislative session of 1820 when lawmakers created state government, the sessions leading up to the Civil War and the turbulent governance years during the war, and the longest session in history after adoption of the 1945 Constitution might be considered equally unique. The 1945 session that started on January 3 lasted 240 days for the House, which adjourned on December 12, 1946, about three weeks before the 1947 session began. The Senate met for 251 days and adjourned on November 25. The legislature met every other year back then but the 1945 session ran through ‘46 because the legislature had to change so many laws to make them conform to the new Constitution.

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This session will be remembered because of the virus that extended spring break, caused a re-write of the state budget, and rewrote the rules for floor debate, not to mention the images of masked people in committee hearings and on the chamber floors. Depending on how irrational the omnibus bills that have materialized in the closing weeks because so many different issues were combined in one bill because of lack of time for regular processes, we might see an unusual number of vetoes or court cases challenging the legality of the bills passed.

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This business of quarantining might not seem as difficult to retired people as those with jobs. Retired people have been working from home for years.

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We do wish our state and national leaders would don masks when they go out in crowds or to check on how well businesses are reopening. This is not a time for, “Do as I say, not as I do.” Please, folks, be the example of what you promote.

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We suppose a lot of you have binge-watched a lot of television in the last several weeks. Your vigilant observer and his faithful companion are going to have to make a list of all the shows we’ve been binge-watching, just to keep track of which ones we’ve exhausted, which ones we’ve tried and didn’t think merited continuing, and which ones are still active. The other night we accidentally watched a third episode of something we gave up on after two shows several weeks ago. If we don’t keep a list we’re probably going to waste another 46 minutes on the fourth episode sometime in the future.

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Nancy has the sewing machine humming today making masks. She made a mask for informal occasions last week and she’s working on a “tuxedo” mask for me now that I can wear for a formal occasion or when I want to look as dignified as I can look with hair that hasn’t been this long since the high school senior play when I was a cousin in “Hillbilly Wedding.” You probably haven’t heard of it. For good reason.

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Cole County kicks off its bicentennial year with an event at Marion on June 5th. Maybe I can wear my formal mask for that. Marion was the first county seat of Cole County, back before Moniteau County was split away from us. Our first courthouse and county jail were built on Howard’s Bluff, just down Highway 179 from the Marion Access to the Missouri River. For most of the county’s history, we’ve been told it was named for Stephen Cole, “pioneer settler and Indian fighter.” But that’s about all we’ve known about him. We’ve spent the last couple of months or more trying to learn more about him. And we’ve come up with some surprising stuff. If you want to know about it, come out to Marion on June 5th. We’re going to be joined by some Cole ancestors.

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As far as we have been able to determine, Stephen Cole was never in Cole County unless he stopped here while canoeing back and forth from Boonville to St. Charles.

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Something we’ve noticed when we go on our almost-daily two mile walks through the neighborhood. Men drivers who go past us are more likely to wave than the women. And all drivers have a tendency to swerve into the other lane of the street even though we’re hugging the curb when they go by.   We always walk toward oncoming traffic, which we were taught long ago is the proper way to do it.

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A few nights ago we were on YouTube and came across Johnny Carson’s 17th anniversary Tonight Show. It occurred to us that we enjoyed Carson because he was funny. Today’s late-night hosts seem to have lost that spirit. Of course, Johnny Carson didn’t have Donald Trump to kick around.

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Therefore, we’re thinking of using this space next week for some Coronavirus humor.

Dr. Crane on growing old but still growing

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(Just because you have lived through a lot doesn’t mean you are old. Don’t say, “Why, in my day…,” because today is your day, too. Doctor Frank Crane never caught—–)

THE OLD-AGE DISEASE

Boston, said the funny man, is not a locality; Boston is a state of mind. To those who have experienced Boston this is a truth that needs not be proved.

With equal accuracy it may be said that Old Age is not a number of years, it is a state of mind.

It has been observed that a woman is as old as she looks, and a man is as old as he feels; as a matter of fact, both are as old as they think.

There is no need of anybody growing old. For age is entirely a disease of the soul, a condition of ill health, which with reasonable caution may be avoided. It is no more necessary than measles, which the world once thought every one ought to have; now we know better.

The human being begins existence as a vigorous animal, whose body naturally weakens with time and finally perishes. The body runs its course, “ripes and ripes, and rots and rots,” like an apple, or any other organized growth of matter. Hence of course there is a decrepitude of one’s frame.

But this is not at all true of the mind. All things in nature, from mushrooms to oaks, from insects to elephants, and even mountains and suns and systems, have their periods of growth, maturity, and decay. The mind, however, has no such law. It is the “one exception” as Mark Hopkins called it.

And the mind is the real man. And the mind can be as young at ninety as it is at twenty-one.

In asking ourselves what is it that makes youthfulness, we discover the answer to be that it consists in three things.

Work, Growth, and Faith. So long as life functions in these three ways it is young. When any or more of these elements fall off, we are old.

By work is meant an active participation in the interests of human kind. Notice how the boy cannot be idle, he wants to be at something, he burns to play the game.

Idleness or aloofness is the essence of growing old. The business man who “retires” and devotes himself to doing nothing is committing suicide.

John Bigelow recently died at the age of ninety-five, and up to the last retained his interest in affairs.

It is work that keeps men young, more than play. No man should give up selling dry-goods if that is his life business, unless he has found some other business equally congenial and interesting.

I know a woman of eighty, mother of eleven grown children, who is as young as any of them, for she declines to be shelved.

The way to stay young is to keep in that game.

Secondly, growth. That is to say, mind-growth. Let the mind be always learning, alert for new truth, eager for new accomplishments.

It is when one’s intellect closes, ceases to learn, and becomes an onlooker that old age sets in. How many old people impress you as beyond teachableness? They have settled everything, religion, politics, philosophy.

You can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but because he will not learn new tricks is exactly why the dog is old.

It is when one takes up the study of Greek at seventy or at eighty begins to investigate psychology, that his mind breathes Spring air.

As long as a mind is teachable, open and inquiring, it is young.

There ought to be special schools for people of sixty and over. Who goes to school keeps young.

Lastly, faith, not intellectual assent to any statement (which operation is no more to do with faith than sole-leather), but a general belief in man and things; confidence; settled, abiding courage and cheer.

Faith in one’s self, in one’s destiny, in mankind, in the universe and in Him who manages it, this is youth’s peculiar liquor.

Doubt is the very juice of senility. Cynicism, pessimism, and despair are the dust that blows from a dried-up soul.

And faith is not something over which you have no control, it is a cultivable thing, it is a habit.

So long as one keeps at work, continues to learn, and has faith he is young.

Whoever does not work, does not learn, and has no faith is old even at thirty. Old age is a state of mind.

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(John Bigelow was an author and diplomat, one of the founders of the Republican Party, was described by the New York Times on his 94th birthday as “a marvel of good health and strength for a man nearly a century old. He still takes the liveliest interest in affairs, both in America and abroad, and no one is much better posted than he on existing conditions the world over.” He died three weeks later, December 19, 1911. Actually he was 94, not 95.)

 

Us vs It—Part VI, This better work

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This is the third day that Missouri is open for business and our lives haven’t changed here on our quiet street. The people at our house haven’t been tested yet and we don’t know anyone who has been. Our two hospitals offer testing. Maybe we’ll go see one of them soon. Columbia has five locations. Osage Beach has one. We mention those places because a lot of Jefferson City people work in Columbia, or will when the University reopens. And a lot of Columbia people work in Jefferson City now that state government is getting back to the new abnormal. A lot of these folks never quit working, of course. They just haven’t been in their offices. But we’ll be watching case numbers in Boone and Cole Counties, in particular, because of the numbers of people who pass each other going in opposite directions twice every day on Highway 63. And we’ll be watching case numbers in Camden County and Osage Beach because the reopening means tourism season has begun.

Governor Parson, the state health director, and various other state and private entities have assured us in the daily briefings that Missouri’s most critical numbers have been declining for the last two weeks, one of the main measurements needed to reopen. We’ve been assured the state is ready to quickly respond to hot spots such as meat packing plants in California and St. Joseph (St. Joseph had only one testing station when we checked the list last Sunday and California has none) and Marshall (which has one).

We have welcomed the Governor’s daily briefings. They have been examples of the kinds of Coronavirus briefings adults should conduct and we appreciate the recent change that allows reporters to be present instead of submitting questions. That’s important because answers often lead to other questions and the old system didn’t provide that opportunity very well.

We understand the growing pressure on states to reopen for business but the lack of a vaccine and the admission that the virus has not and will not go away leaves us nervous. The YMCA reopened on Monday with a lot of precautionary policies put into place to keep us safe. We haven’t resumed our three-times-a-week morning workouts yet although we miss our friends a great deal. We’ll go back soon, just not right now.

Our church isn’t going to go back to in-person worship services until the first Sunday in June. I don’t know that we’ll go to a restaurant or to a movie theatre anytime soon. We both plan to wear our masks for awhile any time we go someplace where a lot of people are visiting or shopping.

We are going to tiptoe into the world, not dash into it.

We want things to be okay. We want to be able to be with friends. We want our working friends to get their jobs back.

Your faithful observer has kept a journal since March 28th and it is unlikely that journal will stop anytime soon. Our wish is that there be little to add to it but we’re keeping it going into autumn, into the next flu season and, if the scientists are correct, into the second wave of this virus.

To be candid, we suspect reopening the state and the nation is as much a political decision as it is anything else. But reopening has to occur, or had to occur, sooner or later and most of the people in positions to decide when reopening is appropriate and safe (enough) recognize the responsibility they are assuming by giving the go-ahead. It seems to us from having watched the daily briefings from our capitol that the reopening order has not been hastily or easily given.

We do hope there are thresholds in place that will determine when stay-at-home orders will be put back in place.

If you’ve read these entries this year you know we spent a lot of time looking at what happened with the last great pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918-19, and while our abilities to fight a pandemic are better than they were, the shortcomings in response that we have seen leave us nervous.

We don’t think our governor would unlock the doors if he didn’t think it was safe to go out and responsibly conduct ourselves and our business.

But this is bad stuff and more Americans died from it in April than died in the entire Vietnam War and it is still on the loose.

This reopening better work.

 

Us vs. It—part V, Remembering

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I enjoy Scott Simon’s thoughtful brief commentaries on National Public Radio’s Weekend Edition Saturday and last Saturday he had one that caught my interest at the beginning—because I disagreed with the opening concept. I understood his point at the end, however, and agreed with that. Here’s what he said about the world we live in today.

Our oldest daughter turned 17 yesterday. It’s quite a time for a young person to have a birthday.

I’ve covered wars where I got to know families with teenagers, and I’d ask parents, “What do you want your children to remember of these times?” The answer was almost always, “Nothing. I want my children to remember nothing of all this.”

This coronavirus is not a war. Yet as in war, there are long spells of tedium, interrupted by episodes of anxiety, and sometimes danger, loss, and grief. No parent wants their children to carry that load through their lives.

But, any parent learns how children rarely remember what we hope. You may want your child to remember when they saw the Eiffel Tower or met an athlete. What they really recall is the ice cream they had at the end of the day, or a man with the lizard tattoo they saw on the subway.

I hope that when both our daughters think back on this time, they’ll remember how many good people worked so hard to keep the world running, often at risk to themselves. They’re often people we can take for granted, and identify just by a job title, a nurse, a driver, a cop, a sanitation worker, or a clerk. I hope our daughters will know their names and remember how much we owe them.

I hope our daughters will remember, too, how they found their own ways to help people now: to walk the dogs of neighbors who can’t venture out, play with children whose parents have to work, and to write cards and make calls to make people smile.

I hope they’ll appreciate the ingenuity of their teachers, who’ve tried to devise new ways to fire their young minds. And I know they’ll remember how their mother has held, nourished, and cared for all of us in all ways.

In a way, these times may help our children appreciate the fortitude of their grandmothers, who are now gone. They lived through world wars and many hard times, but carried themselves with lightness, grace, and humor.

A few days ago, I came upon our daughters as they shared a joke. I asked, “What’s so funny?” and they said nothing—and traded smiles as I turned away. I imagine the joke was on me; and I was delighted. I hope they remember that joke, and their closeness. I hope they remember that when the world may seem cold or dark, they can turn to each other and feel the sun.

The part I disagreed with was, “What do you want your children to remember of these times?” The answer was almost always, ‘Nothing. I want my children to remember nothing of all this.’

“This coronavirus is not a war. Yet as in war, there are long spells of tedium, interrupted by episodes of anxiety, and sometimes danger, loss, and grief. No parent wants their children to carry that load through their lives.”

I WANT my children, or more appropriately my grandchildren, to remember everything: the danger, the tedium, the anxiety. I hope they don’t directly experience loss and grief. But I want them to remember because we might not have to wait another century for a pandemic such as this one to hit again. In fact, a lot of scientists and healthcare people already are saying chances are good this virus will come back with the cooler weather in the Fall.

It’s important for them to remember that one way this version of the coronavirus was limited in the danger, loss, and grief was the tedium of shelter-in-place, the anxiety of wondering if somehow the virus might find you, the feeling of loss with each day’s new death count even if no one we know is among those terrible numbers. In an impatient world of increasing self-centeredness, disciplined patience and respect for the harm we might cause others by flaunting our perceived independence when it is increasingly obvious we are INTERdendent in so many ways is what has, to use the phrase of the day, “flattened the curve” in many places.

I want my grandchildren to remember the good things Scott Simon mentions. But I do not want them to forget the things many people want their children to forget—because memory could be part of their salvation.