23 posts tagged “history”
The past few days have allowed me to watch two documentaries. One is from the Poetry Anthology series on the Victorian poets. The other is the PBS Empires series documentary on the Victorian Era. Like the other documentaries in this series (Napoleon, Egypt, Rome, Greece, The Kingdom of David, Peter and Paul and the Rise of Christianity, the Medicis) this documentary takes about four hours to pace its way through the key events of Victoria’s reign with a silent backdrop of costumed actors who never talk. It is not terribly exciting but one does get the basic outlines of the significant moments and influences in the reign of England’s Queen Victoria. Among the subjects covered are Industrialization, Prince Albert, the Crystal Palace, the Victorian Family, the Crimean War, the East India Company, the Indian Mutiny, the death of Albert, the journeys and work of David Livingston, the resurgence of interest in King Arthur, the conflicting ideologies of Gladstone and Disraeli, the Suez Canal, the Turkish-Russian War, Charles Gordon in Sudan (Khartoum) and the Mahdis, Cecil Rhodes and East Africa, the Boer Warand death camps, and the turn of the century.
I suppose what I found most interesting was the ideological battle between Disraeli and Gladstone and the way that the same battle would be reflected in the contests between Theodore Roosevelt and later, William Jennings Bryan. There is a tremendously similar argument going on between pro and anti imperialists in America. I feel like I have a much better sense of chronology between the events that I have long known about but never quite placed.
The documentary on the Victorian era poets was somewhat underwhelming to me. For some reason, Tennyson, Browning, Matthew Arnold, Swinburn, and Gerard Manly Hopkins all fail to light my fire. Perhaps it has something to do with their seeming devotion to form. Maybe I need to go back further and look at the Romantic poets to find my kindred spirits.
“He
is the Moses of race hatred in the United States.”
Gedalia
Bublick, of Madison Grant
Defending
the Master Race by Jonathan Spiro is probably the most important
work of History that I have or will read this year. Much like David
Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed last
year, this book is one that will take some time to get through but
will help a person to understand why a whole period of American
history (and in some cases, world history) happened the way it did.
Defending the Master Race
is a biography of Madison Grant that serves as a primer in the
origins, influence, application, and legacy of “scientific racism”
in the United States and, in the last chapter, Germany. In one of the
final chapters, Spiro makes the connection between Madison Grant's
writings (particularly his highly influential book, The
Passing of the Great Race) and
National Socialism explicit.
“German Eugenicists eagerly established close ties with the Grantians in the 1920s. They were full of admiration for the success of their American counterparts in restricting immigration, passing anti-miscegenation laws, and implementing coercive sterilization ask. German journals provided timely updates on developments in US eugenics and regularly translated the articles of the Americans.” P. 356
“Adolf
Hitler's closest scientific advisers were avid fans of Madison Grant
and accepted all the major tenets of his scientific racism. Hitler
himself, who wrote in Mein Kampf that ‘the highest aim of
human existence is... the conservation of the race,’ sent Grant a
letter thanking him for writing The Passing of the Great Race
and telling him that ‘the book is my Bible.’ Mein Kampf
is riddled with passages that seem directly inspired by The
Passing of the Great Race, in particular the chapters entitled
‘Race and People’ and ‘the State’, which encapsulate all the
aspects of Grantian thought.” P. 357
“In
1936, when the Nazi party published its official recommendation for
essential reading in the fields of human heredity, it mentioned only
two books by non-German authors: Gobineau’s Inequality of Human
Races and Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race.” P.
357
“Madison
Grant warned Harry H. Laughlin in 1934 that while ‘most people of
our type are in sympathy with the German eugenical measures,’
political considerations meant that ‘we will have to proceed
cautiously and endorsing them.’” P. 365
I often tell my students that “ideas have consequences” and this is a classic case of that truth. Spiro makes it clear that the objective of Madison Grant's life was a mission of conservation. He wanted to protect animals, trees, landscapes, and gene pools. Growing up in New York City in the later 1800's, Madison Grant could see “his city” being “taken over” by immigration and insisted that his “people” were being buried in an avalanche of mediocre to poor genetic material. As someone once put it, “a snob is someone who acts like he begat his ancestors.”
“In
1892, Madison and his brother Deforest, who had just graduated from
Yale, helped to found a slightly different type of club: The Society
of Colonial Wars, a fraternal organization with membership restricted
to ‘men of good moral character and reputation' whose ancestors had
attained distinction in the wars of the colonial period.’”
One
should note that Madison Grant was not alone. Indeed, U.S. President,
Theodore Roosevelt was a huge fan of Madison Grant and his writing.
“As
a frustrated [Theodore] Roosevelt told his friend Owen Wister: “they
[the public] seem unable to see that it is simply a question of the
multiplication table. If all our nice friends in Beacon Street, and
Newport, and Fifth Avenue, and Philadelphia, have one child, or no
child at all, while the Finnegans, Hooligans, Antonios, Mandelbaum's
and Rabinsky's have eight, or nine, or ten -- it is simply a question
of the multiplication table. How are you going to get away from
it?’”
It
is somewhat amazing to think that Theodore Roosevelt, a man who we
have up on Mt. Rushmore as being one of our greatest Presidents, had
this to say about Madison Grant's Passing of the Great
Race, a book that Adolf Hitler
referred to as “his Bible”
“This
book is a capital book; in purpose, in vision, in grasp of the facts
our people most need to realize. It shows an extraordinary range of
reading and a wide scholarship. It shows a habit of singular serious
thoughts on the subjects of most commanding importance. It shows a
fine fearlessness in assailing the popular and mischievous
sentimentality and attractive and corroding falsehoods which few men
dare assail. It is the work of an American scholar and gentlemen;
and all Americans should be sincerely grateful to you for writing
it.” P. 158
It
is not difficult to see why Theodore Roosevelt found such a kindred
spirit in Madison Grant. Some 20 years before Grant wrote his
treatise on scientific racism, Theodore Roosevelt had written in his
book, The Winning of the West of
the necessity of racial wars.
Necessity of the Conquest.
Whether the whites won the land by treaty, by armed conquest, or, as was actually the case, by a mixture of both, mattered comparatively little so long as the land was won. It was all-important that it should be won, for the benefit of civilization and in the interests of mankind. It is indeed a warped, perverse, and silly morality which would forbid a course of conquest that has turned whole continents into the seats of mighty and flourishing civilized nations. All men of sane and wholesome thought must dismiss with impatient contempt the plea that these continents should be reserved for the use of scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a few degrees less meaningless, squalid, and ferocious than that of the wild beasts with whom they held joint ownership. It is as idle to apply to savages the rules of international morality which obtain between stable and cultured communities, as it would be to judge the fifth-century English conquest of Britain by the standards of today. Most fortunately, the hard, energetic, practical men who do the rough pioneer work of civilization in barbarous lands, are not prone to false sentimentality. The people who are, are the people who stay at home. Often these stay-at-homes are too selfish and indolent, too lacking in imagination, to understand the race-importance of the work which is done by their pioneer brethren in wild and distant lands; and they judge them by standards which would only be applicable to quarrels in their own townships and parishes. Moreover, as each new land grows old, it misjudges the yet newer lands, as once it was itself misjudged. The home-staying Englishman of Britain grudges to the Africander his conquest of Matabeleland; and so the home-staying American of the Atlantic States dislikes to see the western miners and cattlemen win for the use of their people the Sioux hunting-grounds. Nevertheless, it is the men actually on the borders of the longed-for ground, the men actually in contact with the savages, who in the end
shape their own destinies.Righteousness of the War.
The most ultimately righteous of all wars is a war with savages, though it is apt to be also the most terrible and inhuman. The rude, fierce settler who drives the savage from the land lays all civilized mankind under a debt to him. American and Indian, Boer and Zulu, Cossack and
Tartar, New Zealander and Maori,--in each case the victor, horrible though many of his deeds are, has laid deep the foundations for the future greatness of a mighty people. The consequences of struggles for territory between civilized nations seem small by comparison. Looked at from the standpoint of the ages, it is of little moment whether Lorraine is part of Germany or of France, whether the northern Adriatic cities pay homage to Austrian Kaiser or Italian King; but it is of incalculable importance that America, Australia, and Siberia should pass out of the hands of their red, black, and yellow aboriginal owners, and become the heritage of the dominant world races.
Both
men were deeply impacted by the theory of Darwinisn and by the men
who so soon after Darwin carried his theories out to what they
regarded as their logical conclusions. Darwin himself had not engaged
in a great deal of policy speculation but he did see that his theory
would soon be finding logical expression in human societies. “We
civilized men build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the
sick;” he wrote,
“we
institute poor laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to
save the life of everyone to the last moment... thus the weak members
of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended
to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be
highly injurious to the race of man.” p. 122
Grant
would later name a his association of anthropologists who believed in
scientific racism after Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, the founder
of the Eugenics movement. According to Spiro,
“Positive
eugenics would encourage the fittest members of society to have more
children, while negative eugenics would discourage the propagation of
the unfit. Eugenicists of lesser refinement than Sir Francis
[Galton] would later refer to the positive and negative aspects of
their program as ‘breeding and weeding.’” P.120
“Grant
never felt that his background in zoology disqualified him from
taking up the study of man. To the contrary, he declared that man is
an animal differing from his fellow inhabitants of the globe, not in
kind but only in degree of development, and therefore an intelligent
study of the human species must be preceded by an extended knowledge
of other mammals.” p. 100
“The
Aryanists who had the most influence on Grant where three of the most
intriguing figures in the Western canon: Arthur Gobineau, Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, and Georges Vacher De Lapouge.” p. 103
The
race wars that Theodore Roosevelt was praising and predicting in 1894
when he wrote volume three of the Winning of the West
were being “scheduled” at least by 1899, the year that Ripley's
Races of Europe,
Chamberlain's Foundations of the 19th Century,
Lapouges L’Aryen and
Haeckel's Riddles of the Universe
were all being published. (Interestingly, 1899 was the year that Jack
London began publishing novels as a means of popularizing the
Darwinian ethos.)
Perhaps
one of the most interesting and troubling themes that one sees
throughout the discussion of Madison Grant and the eugenics movement
is the merging of religious and scientific impulses. Many, if not
most, of the scientific racists came from religious backgrounds and
many from Puritan ancestries. One senses that same predilection to
eradicate evil and bring about a millennial world, albeit with very
different methods. Similarly, one finds in the key evolutionists and
eugenicists a tendency to see their movement as a religious one. A
few quotes suffice.
“Haeckel claimed that in the wake of the Origin of Species, evolution had replaced religious dogma to become ‘the sure foundation of our whole world system.’ “Allis ist Natur. Natur ist allis.” P. 123
“Since
the inferior races are, he said, nearer to the mammals -- apes and
dogs -- than to civilized Europeans, we must, therefore, assign a
totally different value to their lives.” P.124
“Reformers
who are serious about improving the human race, and not just about
acquiring reputations as do-gooders, would do better to devote their
efforts to eugenic programs that strove to eliminate defective germ
plasm from the population.” P. 125
“Eugenics
offered the post-millennial hope that, through good breeding, the
victory of the righteous would be assured in the perfect kingdom
could be established on earth. We sense this in the American
Eugenics Society's proclamation that the discovery that man is able
to guide his own evolution by means of eugenics 'is the most
momentous of human achievements, ranking ahead of the discoveries of
fire, speech, tools, and writing.'” P.135
“Eugenical
truth, declared Grant's disciple Robert E. Wiggam, ‘is the highest
truth men will ever know.’ He explicitly referred to the genetics
laboratory as ‘the new Mount Sinai’ and announced that the
findings of eugenics were ‘the 10 Commandments of science.’” P.
135
“The
hero of this secular faith was Sir Francis Gaulton.”
Over
and over, this idea that scientific racism was simply another
expression of Puritanism and that what was going on was not so much a
replacing of religion with science as much as a transformation from
one religious world view to another. Consider the place that
“preaching” and sacrificial atonement play in the following
sentence:
“Grant
preached that the fate of the race outweighed that of ‘only few
particular humans who were of no value to the community’” p. 136
Indeed,
the leaders of the Eugenics movement saw it as a cause worthy of
tithing to and a means for wealthy people to bring about a “kingdom
of God”.
“Eugenics
was the supreme preventative medicine; it was the preeminent
philanthropy. As Davenport insisted, ‘vastly more effective than
$10 million to charity would be $10 million to eugenics. He who, by
such a gift, should redeem mankind from vice, imbecility and
suffering would be the world's wisest philanthropist.’” P. 137
(The leaders that Spiro mentions as being most influential are
Madison Grant, Harry H. Laughlin, Charles Benedict Davenport
(Eugenics Center at Cold Springs, NY), and Henry Fairfield Osborn
(American Museum of Natural History)
Jonathan
Spiro argues that The Passing of the Great Race is an
extraordinary overview of Western history as seen through the eyes of
a scientific racist.” P. 145. Anyone who has ever read the speeches
of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels or even excerpts from the biology
textbooks that were being served up to children in Nazi schools will
see the effects of Madison Grant's logic. “We can now see that the
social workers and their ilk have done ‘more injury to the race
than Black Death or smallpox.” says Grant,
“ .
. . Scientists have long understood that nature cares not for the
individual.... she is concerned only with the perpetuation of the
species or type.”
“In
clear, sober language that is indistinguishable from the official
dogma of National Socialism,” writes Spiro, “the charming Park
Avenue conservationist instructs us that the laws of nature require
the obliteration of the unfit, and human life is valuable only when
it is of use to the community or race.’” p. 151. “Anticipating
the rise of fascism, he predicts that the spread of scientific
literacy will enable us to see that ‘the basis of the government of
man is now and always has been, and always will be, force and not
sentiment.’” P. 156
Throughout
the writing of Madison Grant and his contemporaries, one finds this
celebration of the banishment of sentiment (and compassion). Even the
patron saint of birth control, Margaret Sanger, participated in the
frenzy of “objectivism” asserting that “sentimentalism was
dysgenic”
“Sanger
agreed with Madison Grant that sentimentalism was dysgenic, and
denounced society’s misguided policy of ‘indiscriminate charity’
towards ‘the very types which in all kindness should be obliterated
from the human stock.’” P. 192
Wars
of the 20th Century, here are your architects.
On
page 185, Jonathan Spiro mentions the “Fitter Families
competitions” that the Eugenicists inspired. Ironically, just last
week, my dad was showing me a newspaper article from 1922 when my
Uncle Paul was born that indicated that he was a winner of this
contest in Vermont that particular year.
When
the book returns to the subject of scientific racism and immigration
policy, we are again returned to the days of early Puritan New
England where the Puritan clergy of the Massachusetts Bay Colony were
banishing people to Rhode Island for not being theologically “pure”
and attempting in any way possible to exclude the Catholics in
general and Jesuits in particular.
“From
the Society of Colonial Wars to the American Eugenics Society, Grant
had sternly controlled admission to all his clubs, and now he was
intent on doing the same with his nation. His unflinching and
determined effort to preserve the Nordic character of the United
States involved three legislative steps that progressively and
severely restricted immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe: the
literacy test of 1917, the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, and
the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924. It was an
undertaking that one scholar has referred to as America's most
ambitious program of biological engineering.’” P. 197
“Grant
authoritatively explained to the president that ‘the old
theological views in regard to the unity of the human race and its
relatively recent origin some 6000 years ago is giving way to the
knowledge that man as such dates back two or 300,000 years, and that
consequently the line of cleavage between the so-called races of
mankind is fundamental and cannot be modified by any change of
environment in a life time of a nation.’ Therefore, speaking as a
‘scientist,’ Grant asked him [President Taft] to stand up to the
steamship companies, the industrial interests, and the immigrant
organizations and ‘preserve the Native American stock’ by taking
a brave stand in favor of immigration restriction.” P. 200
One
of the more fascinating aspects of the book is the way that Spiro
analyzes why the idea of scientific racism gained such traction so
quickly and why it lost it so quickly as well. He spends some time
examining the “group think” tendencies of the Eugenics movement
and notes how a small group of elitest individuals set up numerous
different organizations that made them look like they were on the
cutting edge of many different scientific movements when in fact it
was realy the same set of Oz-like propagandists behind the scenes of
each and every one. “Grant cited Laughlin who had based his
analysis on Bringham’s statistics,” writes Spiro,
“which
were in turn based on Grant's calculations of the racial composition
of the European population. What seemed, in other words, to unaware
observers, to be a plethora of independent studies by reputable
scientists was actually a series of self-referential claims... that
constantly fed upon itself.” P. 227
I
was reminded of the conclusions of the Senate Investigation on
Pre-Iraq War Intelligence as I was reading this.
Conclusion
3. (U)
The
Intelligence Community (IC) has long struggled with the need for
analysts to overcome analytic biases, that is, to resist the tendency
to see what they would expect to see in the intelligence reporting.
In the case of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
capabilities, the Committee found that intelligence analysts, in many
cases, based their analysis more on their expectations than on an
objective evaluation of the infomation in the intelligence reporting.
Analysts expected to see evidence that Iraq had retained prohibited
weapons and that Iraq would resume prohibited WMD activities once
United Nations’ (W)inspections ended. This bias that pervaded both
the IC’s analytic and collection communities represents “group
think,” a term coined by psychologist Irving Janis in the 1970’sto
describe a process in which a group can make bad or irrational
decisions as each member of the group attempts to conform their
opinions to what they believe to be the consensus of the group. IC
personnel involved in the Iraq WMD issue demonstrated several aspects
of group think: examining few alternatives, selective gathering of
information, pressure to conform within the group or withhold
criticism, and collective rationalization.
The
Committee found that the IC had a tendency to accept information
which supported the presumption that Iraq had active and expanded WMD
programs more readily than information which contradicted it.”
For example, the IQ tests that were taken during the enlistment of soldiers during WWI. “Karel C. Bringham’s Study of American Intelligence was a major achievement in the history of scientific racism.” says Spiro, explaining the way that eguenicists, anti-immigrationists, and scientific racists “cooked the books” to get the results they wanted.
‘Few
works in the history of American psychology,’ writes Leon Kamin,
‘have had so significant an impact.’ Henry H. Goddard declared
that the analysis of the Army mental tests was ‘probably the most
valuable piece of information which mankind has ever required about
itself.’” P. 219
But
if you look at the questions that these tests were asking, you
discover that they are really tests of the takers interest in white
American “Nordic” culture.
And yet these tests became the evidence that was driving the epistemological conviction of Senators Congressmen, Presidents, doctors, and white racist everywhere. Even Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes was taken in by the propaganda. “Three generations of imbeciles are enough,” Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in his Buck v. Bell decision, a case that determined the legality and morality of involuntary sterilization of “unfit” potential parents.
Eugenicists
like Grant were ecstatic that they were winning the “commanding
heights” of the culture to their views. “Continuous decimal
elimination, should become a part of eugenics creative civilized
people,” Henry Laughlin argued. His plan involved taking the bottom
ten percent of the population (by some definition that I am sure made
it unlikely that he would be in it) on a regular basis and
sterilizing them. To the scientific racists, decisions like Buck
v. Bell meant that they were on course to become the high priests
of a new religious world view.
“Justice
Holmes, in fact, explicitly viewed his decision as a blow against
religious fundamentalism in the United States, and he proudly wrote
to Harold Laski that ‘the religious are in a stir over Buck v.
Bell. Replying a few days later, Laski encouraged Holmes to stay
the course: ‘sterilize all the unfit, among whom I include all the
fundamentalists.’” P. 23
Perhaps
he was joking but it is not unusual for jokes to become, in time,
policies, and even doctrines. Spiro writes:
“It
is difficult not to notice that the leaders of the American Eugenics
Society, like high priests demanding ever bloodier sacrifices for
their cults, were, as Mark Heller says, ‘possessed by a compelling
urge to castrate the unfit.’ It is wondrous to witness the
vehemence with which such childless figures as [these] set about
attacking the genitals of the lower breeds.” P. 240
“The
readers of The Passing of the Great Race were informed that
‘in the modern scientific study of race we have long since
discarded the Adamic theory that man is descended from a single pair,
created a few thousand years ago in a mythical Garden of Eden.’
According to Grant, whites and blacks evolved independently of each
other, and only ‘old-fashioned’ thinkers still maintained that
all human beings belong to the species Homo sapiens.”
Chapter
13, “The Decline of Scientific Racism” is an analysis of why the
scientific racism of Madison Grant had such a short lifespan in the
American consciousness. To summarize, it failed because it was so
successful. After the 1924 immigration Act, Americans figured they
had solved the problem and forgot about the theory that had defined
it as one. Secondly, the war in Europe took so many white men
overseas that millions of African Americans migrated north to work in
the war industries and the improvements in their educational and
occupational lives quickly led to test scores that made the white
racist propaganda look ridiculous. Thirdly, Spiro also mentions that
there were hundreds of Jewish (and other ethnic groups?) students
graduating from American Colleges and demonstrating the lunacy of
Grant's assertions to intellectual superiority and dominance.
Fourthly, the field of Sociology began to publish numerous studies to
show the ignorance of those who had argued that cultures were the
result of genetics, not human initiative. Fifthly, the field of
psychology began to critique the ridiculous notion that a test of
American pop culture was an adequate means to test intelligence.
Next, the science of genetics made tremendous advances detrimental to
the racists cause, taking the science out of “scientific racism”.
Seventh, the Great Depression of the 1930's served as a great
equalizer. It hit the pocketbooks of old stock and new immigrant
alike. And an ideology that said that suffering populations should be
eliminated seemed a bit stupid in a society where everyone was
suffering. Eighth, Spiro notes that the restrictive immigration
policies of the 1920's cut American immigrants off from the
populations and cultures they left, making it abundantly easy for
their kids to assimilate into American culture with far more ease
than the racists had thought possible. Additionally, the rise of
Naziism and the reports of brutality and discrimination in Germany
made the the whole idea of scientific racism stink foul in the
nostrils of a people who still retained enough of their basic decency
to know that something was “fishy in Denmark”. Lastly, scientific
racism failed because so many of its leaders had never chosen to
marry and have children. The list of those leaders of the movement
who felt themselves too pure for mere mortals to marry and conceive
children with is so long as to be bizarre. The cause of this
self-imposed celibacy among so many of the movement's key leaders is
worthy of investigation.
“Eugenics,
concluded the New York Times at the end of the [last Eugenic
Congress], ‘seems to have become a disguise for race prejudice,
ancestor worship, and cast snobbery” P. 341 and “when copies of
Madison Grant's new book, the Conquest of the Continent were
stacked on the shelves at bookstores at the end of 1933, they
remained there.” P.344
William
Langer, of Foreign Affairs referred to the book as “Science
submerged by opinion.”
Sadly,
the movement that Americans were interested in casting off, was being
heartily accepted in Germany, a place where Madison Grant and company
were hailed as prophets of a new age. “A commonly heard slogan
during the Third Reich was ‘National Socialism is nothing but
applied biology.’” 378. I suspect that this was an accurate
description of every idea Madison Grant ever had.
Spiro
notes that there were Nazis who used portions of Madison Grant’s
work in their trials at Nuremburg.
Question for Comment: Who do you think bears more responsibility for the damage done as a consequence of the adoption of a “dangerous idea”? The people who create them, popularize them, or implement them?
As anyone who reads this blog will know, I have an interest in historical drama and a particular interest in the subject of how directors seek to contain their interpretations to historical accuracies or to simply make use of history as they receive it for ideas about good plot lines. Napoleon is famous for saying that History is the set of asserted facts that people agree to accept and so it is particularly intriguing to watch a movie about the last days of Napoleon that basically conforms itself to the director's emotional wishes. Monsieur N is filmed on St. Helena and gives a profoundly accurate picture of what Napoleon's life in exile would have looked like while at the same time constructing a story that considers the possibility that he escaped to live a life of ease on a Louisiana plantation.
The central non-Napoleonic character in the movie is the the young aide de camp, Basil Heathcote who many years later pieces together evidence to suggest that Napoleon may well have bribed and conned his way off St. Helena. Basil would have it so and explains why in the movie's final words.
"Why was my mind trying to gather so much evidence [that Napoleon had escaped]? Why was it stubbornly turning its back on reason? Was it, as the emperor used to say 'man's passion for the fabulous working within me?' If my mind were to prove that part of my being still poisoned by reason that all this was not merely a dream? Who then was this Mr. Labell whom I had so easily started calling Mr. Abbe so delighted I was by the metaphor? I wanted to believe that the emperor didn't die stupidly at St. Helena. Had he won his final battle? Had he died a free man or rather chained to his rock? My mind still refuses to answer that question today. Choosing would mean accepting to become reasonable and I wish the limits of that prison on no man."
Western societies have, since the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, felt a certain amount of loyalty to reason - to evidence - to facts. "Facts are stubborn things" said John Adams in his unpopular defense of the British soldiers who fired their guns in self-defense at the "Boston Massacre" ... and the implication is that they should be. Monsieur N asks us to consider working backwards into the evidence from our wishes. Director by Antoine de Caunes does not want someone as great as Napoleon wasting away in a useless exile on St. Helena and thus he constructs a story that resists that conclusion. In short, he refuses to become reasonable, finding the imposition of such limits a prison that no man should accept - at least not easily. If there is the slightest hope that things happened differently than the official story says they did, why not take advantage?
It begs the question. Has our commitment to reason become an exile from happiness? Are we likely to live happier lives unharnessed from evidence?
In the past few weeks, I have managed to watch two different television series on DVD. Deciding not to have a TV has beenone of my life's better decisions I think but every once in a while I like to connect with some aspect of contemporary TV culture so I am not a complete troglodyte. The two series both focus on the relationship between a central couple. HBO's John Adams focuses on the relationship between John and Abigail (both played brilliantly I thought) and Legend of the Seeker which is a fantasy recreation of the Sword of Truth novels of Terry Goodkind that focuses primarily on the relationship between Richard Cypher (The Seeker) and Kaylan Amnell (his confessor). It is interesting that in both series, the central story is about a relationship but the title is about the male member of it. I am not sure where else to take the comparison however as these are two completely different genres. John Adams is, of course somewhat limited in what it can do with the permission to create new plot lines not based on the book (John Adams is based on the biography of John Adams by David McCulloch.
One realizes from watching the life of John Adams no amount of power can keep a person from suffering heartbreak if the people they love fail them, betray them, leave them, or wound them. Legend of the Seeker provides a world where such separation is always threatened but never succeeds. In the last episode, there is euchatastrophe everywhere. Does all go horribly wrong? Never mind, time can be set back to the moment just before it all started.
If you are into multiple episode plotlines where people meet the loves of their life and stick with them no matter what, these will both come recommended. John Adams if you like history (even though some historical points are less than perfectly accurate) and Legend of the Seeker if you don't mind evil forces, a few nightmares, two or three sword fights per show, magic, and a bit of harsher-than-I-would like scenes of cruelty and even torture.
These are both worlds where love is also loyal.
Question for Comment: If asked, how would you illustrate the trait of loyalty from your own life?
Today I finished For the record: A Documentary History of America, Vol 1 By David Shi and Holly Mayer. I suspect that not many people can say that they have read this almost 600 page anthology of Historical sources from cover to cover but ... I am just weird that way. Not only have I finished it but I have, as the result of my labor of love, a 28 page list of discussions questions I have managed to create for any classes I were to teach with it. Whether or not I ever get such a class remains to be seen ... but I am just weird that way. Suffice it to say, it has taken me days of concentrated effort to accomplish this task and I hope it carries its own rewards. I do know that I now have a much better appreciation for the arguments that have shaped the course of America's destiny and for the experiences of those thereby shaped. I often wonder if, in the over all story in which I play a part, if I will wind up more a shaper or shaped. I confess, I have been stunned by how smart people who are dead wrong can be and how much power their can be in an uncontested argument. If only those who made arguments knew how devoted their disciples could be in carrying them out, I suspect they would think more.
Some of my favorite communicators in this anthology of over 300 sources include Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Patrick Henry's opposition to the ratification of the Constitution, George Washington's Farewell Address, Jefferson and Madison's Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, A number of different Presidential Inaugural Addresses, John Quincy Adams Reflections on the Missouri Question, Daniel Webster on the Foote Resolution, John Calhoun's Ordinance of Nullification and Andrew Jackson's response, Samuel Morse's Imminent Dangers to the Free Institutions fo the United States of America, William Lloyd Garrison's Declarations of Sentiments of the American anti-slavery Society, Lydia Maria Child's Prejudices Against People of Color, the whole chapter on the Crisis of the Union, Frederick Douglas' The Reason For Our Troubles, Abraham Lincoln's Letter for Springfield Rally, and Louisa May Alcott's Hospital Sketches.
The work that has gone into this anthology is impressive. I can think of a few sources I would leave out and a few that I would insert but on the whole, the reader will get a good feel for the arguments as they were being played out. One leaves this book with the feeling that "ideas have consequences" and that is as it should be. I am constantly amassed at what people can and will believe about things without having ever let the experiments that should precede knowledge take place. So often people are taught a story of history that they mistake for experience itself. It also occurs to me that the great curse of any argument is a lack of exposure to good counter-arguments. Few exchanges are as sharp and crackling clear as the 7th of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. Having had at each other six times previously, watching Lincoln and Douglas go at it shows just what good minds are capable of when they get down to real ideas. Alas, I only wish that the Lincoln-Douglas debates had been the Lincoln-Douglas-Douglas debates. I would have loved to have seen how Frederick Douglas would have enlivened that exchange with a whole additional layer of perspective.
But I am sure I have put you to sleep with all this.
Peter Burke in Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (1978) admitted that he had “too little to say about women, for lack of evidence.” This anthology of texts and manuscripts from the early modern period (1550-1700) is an attempt to rectify that. The editors have assembled an impressive collection of printed material from the period, drawing from legal documents, letters, religious texts, medical manuals, mother’s legacies, fiction, non-fiction writings, poetry, plays, and applied arts and music. It also includes a chapter of women’s writings in defense of women’s worth, if not equality.
Early legal tracts, reinforced the idea of women’s inferiority and labeled “female” crimes that were punishable. These included witchcraft, infanticide, and scolding “suggesting that verbal violence by females was the equivalent of physical violence perpetrated by males.” Some of these early books on raising children insisted that women should not be educated in a way that would “interfere with their housewifery.” Unless their husbands had specific needs for their educations, the object of their reading should simply be to remind them of their religious duties. As I often tell my students, “The greatest weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed” and these texts capture a moment in Western History when women are just taking the Normandy beachhead of an argument that will take centuries to win.
For some understanding of what women in this period were contending with, consider the best selling misogynist work by Joseph Swetman (1615)
“Women have a thousand ways to entice thee and ten thousand ways to deceive thee and all such fools as are suitors unto them: some they keep in hand with promises, and some they feed with flattery, and some they delay with dalliances, and some they please with kisses. They lay out the folds of their hair to entangle men into their love: betwixt their breasts is the vale of destruction: and in their beds there is hell, sorrow, and repentance For take away their painted clothes, and then they look ruggedly: their coifs and stomachers, and they are simple to behold: their hair untrussed, and they look wildly. And yet there are many which lays their nets to catch a pretty woman, but he which getteth such a prize gains nothing by his adventure but shame to the body and danger to the soul . . . Many women are in shape Angels but in qualities Devils, painted coffins with rotten bones.” Joseph Swetinan, Tue Arraignment of Lezt’d, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 1615
To “combat” this blatant misogyny, Protestant ministers might celebrate the virtues of Godly women and enjoin husbands to love and cherish their wives but there was precious little feminism to be found in the sort of Protestantism that would have transplanted itself to the American colonies. One of the more influential Protestant ministers during the period of American colonization was Thomas Gataker, who took the opportunity of the marriage OF Robert and Dorothy Cooke to clarify where women and men stood in the family and society.
“In this consolidation which we call wedlock is a locking together.,” he would write in a later tract,
“It is true, that man and wife are one person: but understand in what manner. When a small brook or little rivulet incorporateth with Rhodanus the Rhone, Humber, or Thames, the poor rivulet loseth her name: it is carried and recarried with the new associate: it beareth no sway: it possesseth nothing coverture. A woman as soon as she is married is called covert; in Latin iupta, that is, ‘veiled’: as it were clouded and overshadowed: she hath lost her stream. I may more truly, far away, say to a married woman, her new self is her superior: her companion, her master." Thomas Gataker, The Lawes resolution of Women‘s Rights, 1632
In his sermononic advice to Robert and Dorothy, Gataker makes ample use of Paul’s teachings in his letter to the church at Colossea to establish in as many ways as he can the importance of establishing and maintaining a hierarchical relationship between husband and wife.
“Now in the next place as the Apostle beginneth with Married persons, Man and wife; so of the twaine here he placeth (f) the wives dutie in the first place. A course constantly observed both by (g) Peter and and (h) Paul, as hereto else-where, that they begin first with the wives dutie and so (i) passe on to the husbands; and that for two causes.
First to shew the inferioritie of the wife in regard of the husband; for we may observe that the Apostle beginneth ever with the dutie of the inferiour: (k) first the childrens, (l) then the Parents: first (m) the Servants, (n) then the Masters: and so first the Wives then the Husbands: the Womans first, then the Mans.
Secondly, to shew where dutie is to begin, on the wives part; it is to begin at the inferiour and so to ascend to the superiour. For * Love goeth downeward: dutie commeth upward.” It beginneth with the inferiour and so goeth up to the superiour. And this first serveth to admonish the wife to be forward in performance of such good duties as God requireth on her part; and not to straine courtesie and stand upon tearmes, as to say, Let him doe what he should doe, and then I will doe what is befitting me. Wouldest thou have him to to doe that that is his dutie? there is no way more agreeable to the word and will of God, more consonant to the course and order of nature, more likely to proove successefull and effectuall to that purpose and to have a blessing of God goe with it, then the carefull performance of they dutie to him, then which nothing is more forcible to draw dutie from him.”
The conclusions that he draws from the creation of this hierarchy are almost self-explanatory. If there is some conflict between a husband and wife, it is her obligation to reconcile herself to him. Her stream must be subsumed.
“The maine dutie, on the wives part is Submission; or Subjection. That the Apostles of Christ both (e) Paul and (f) Peter exact ever, on her part. . . . it is a matter of Comelinesse and Decency.”
Gataker is relentless:
“Now where they be equals, there may be some question, some difficultie, whither shall have the prioritie, and they take it commonly, as it falleth out, or by turnes. But where there is an apparent inequalitie, there it is without question that the inferiour is to yeeld to the superiour.
Now here the Husband is the Superiour, and the wife the Inferiour, as the Apostle else-where prooveth, both from the Creation, and since the transgression.”
The consequences of ignoring this hierarchical approach to family management are almost too dire to consider Gataker continues:
“A masterly wife is as much despised and derided for taking rule over her husband, as he for yeelding it to her; and that not onely among those that be godly and religious, but even among those that be but meere naturall men and women. Yea it is the next way to bring all to wrack . For * where the wife maketh head against the husband; there is nothing but doing and undoing, and so all things goe backward, and the whole house runneth to ruine, as by lamentable experience too often appeareth.”
Gataker then pre-empts any argument that might be based on the relative superlatives of the wife’s merit by saying:
“yea though she be her selfe of a greater spirit, and in some respect of better parts, though she bring much with her, though the maine estate come by her, yet to acknowledge her husband, as God hath appointed him, to be her superiour as he is her husband and her head: (which acknowledgement is the ground of the dutie here urged; as the contrarie conceite cutteth of all conscionable carriage in this kinde) that she be willing a to weare the yoake and beare the burden that God in his ordinance hath imposed on her: and not onely avoide and forbeare, but even hate and abhorre the contrary, as a course abominable in Gods sight, odious in mans eyes, and prejudiciall to them both.”
Step by step Gataker eliminates conflict from the marital relationship by denying that the wife exists as a separate stream.
“We must nor therefore conceive it, that this Submission consisteth in a complementall crowching and courtesing, or the like, as as hypocrites place religion onely in ceremoniall observances:: but rather in a faithfull and carefull, in a constant and conscionable performance of such duties as issue and flow from the inward acknowledgement of that superioritie of power and place, that God hath given to the husband in regard of the wife .
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And these duties may bee re-ferred, or reduced to three heads: |
{ |
Reverence, |
Gataker’s sermon is only just beginning. He has a great deal to say about the duties of men to their wives as well. And no point lacks its Biblical support.
http://www.usask.ca/english/gataker/gat_txt.html
Obviously the reader will draw their own conclusions about the merits of Thomas Gataker’s exegesis. And they will be able to look at their own families of origin and draw their own conclusions.
Reading Early Modern Women: An Anthology of Texts, Manuscripts, and Print, 1550-1700 is simply an attempt to establish that there were streams of women’s thought, reflection, passion, belief, conviction, perspective, and reason in the early modern period and that they deserved to be remembered. As though they were streams with names and not simply currents in the lives of men.
Questions for Comment: What are the implications for the future of this sort of faith in a society where women are, every year, graduating from colleges and graduate schools in greater numbers, taking more and more supervisory positions in higher education and business, etc.? How do women who find themselves in collaborative, egalitarian, or supervisory roles with respect to men at work maintain faith in a divine social order at home that may not reflect the way things seem to work in their work lives"? Would Paul advocate hierarchical relationships in families today if he were to write his epistles today? Are his positions consistent with the core teachings of Jesus or are they more reflections of his Hebrew and Classical education? Is it possible to take exception to these arguments AND maintain faith in other aspects of the text or is it simply an all or nothing decision that one has to make? Would Paul regard Thomas Gataker's exposition an accurate explanation of the social order he intended to impose on the church's families? Does Gataker's social hierarchy offend and yet "work" for some people? And if so, what are the implications? Is Western society in trouble for lack of application of this model? Should students of history be asked to consider this view of the family as an option or would it be a history teacher's responsibility to use class time to challenge it and force people to evaluate it in accordance with cultural assumptions about women's equality? If you had been sitting in Gataker's church the day he preached this sermon, what would your internal dialog have been saying to yourself as you left the church?
Nothing matches an afternoon of Terry Jones talking about the Middle Ages to inspire one to the lofty ideals of Medieval Christendom. Monasteries were, to him, prayer factories. "Monks could not cut themselves off from the wicked world. They were part of the wicked world. And whats more, very often, they ran it."he says. And as for knights? Not chivalrous defenders of maindenhood, Christ, and the poor. They were, rather more like well armed mafia thugs and mercenaries who trafficked in killing for compensation. Some even ran protection services and profitted only so long as they could keep Europe from an unwanted era of peace.
Terry Jones begins each of his documentaries on Medieval Lives with a question, essentially casting doubts on each and every impression that we might have that Medieval ideals were ever anything but fiction and propaganda. Damsels were not in distress. Knights were not noble. Monks were not adverse to turning prayer and propaganda to coin. The same jaundiced eye is cast on minstrels, kings, philosophers, and peasants. It is hard to know just where Terry Jones got his visceral cynicism about all things noble, pious, or devout but he brings the same skeptical approach to this work as he did earlier to his documentary on the Crusades and to his attempt at portraying Don Quixote. His message of "except it wasn't like that at all" reverberates through all the episodes.
These works of historical documentary are really intended to teach a way of seeing the world, or of not seeing. To Terry Jones, mystery, faith, devotion, piety ... these are all to be regarded with deep suspicion as the tools of exploitation. Knights are more likely to be arms dealers as saints.Abbots are more likely to resemble Enron CEO's than moral leaders. "The greatest weapon in the arsenal of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed" he would no doubt assert. "Beware of those who say they have no vices."
Question for Comment: Looking back on your life, do you think you have made more mistakes believing too much or believing too little? Being too naive or not being naive enough?
Just finished one of the many books on my list of readings assigned by my son. Ahhh for the days when it was he and not I who had a long list of books to read. Grin. Pastwatch, is the first in a proposed trilogy by Orson Scott Card that goes back in time and looks at pivotal moments in history with a veiw to the question "What might a few knowledgable people have been able to do to change the course of history and our present world if they had been able to go back and act as influencers of different decisions?" Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus is Card's first attempt at taking one of those moments, the exploration of Christopher Columbus. I suppose I can rely on the above link to tell the story if you are interested.
I confess, as a history teacher, I find his writing inspiring. It engages both my historical interests and humanitarian interests as well as my critical faculties to try and imagine how knowledge of the past can be used to shape the future.What is unfortunate for those who love history is the fact that our lknowledge is sealed off from being useful to the people we study, namely the people of the past. There is a certain pain in that limitation that almost makes you want to crawl up in a fetal position and cry. Doctor's can take what they learn and DO SOMETHING with it to heal the pain and suffering of those who are afflicted by their ignorance. Historians can only look around at the world they live in and say "... and I understand how you all arrived in this place of pain. If I could go back into the world that I now understand, I could help." "The vision of the gods without the power of the gods" as one character in the book laments in the opening chapters after realizing that the past could be seen but before realizing that it could be influenced. "What a terrible gift."
The interesting plot twist in the book is that there have been saveral attempts in the past to "patch" history and divert its flow to avoid disaster but not until this point in time have the people who have gone back to do so thought about trying to heal what is wrong with humanity rather than simply diverting its destructive symptoms from one target to another. Instead of dealing with the heart of Columbus' "problem" former interveners had simply redirected him either to a crusade against the Turks allowing the empires of Central America time to develop and become imperialists themselves.
Perhaps one other thing that is interesting about the book is how Card weaves in columbus' personal desire to redeem the mistakes that he made in his own personal life as those from the future attempt to prevent him from making grand scale mistakes that will lead to the suffering of millions.
I wonder sometime if my life - given what I do for a living - spends too much time looking backwards and not enough forward. An exchange from the movie The Mission comes to mind.
"Such is the world" . . .
"No. Such have we made it."
Tonight's movie was The Inner Tour, a rather unscripted movie that essentially takes the viewer on a bus ride around Israel with a number of Palestinians from several refugee camps and villages in the West Bank and Gaza. Imagine perhaps a tour bus full of Sioux Indians being given their first experience traveling in the Black Hills. Most of them had never been out of their own restricted areas. Some had been in jail. A few had lost husbands or fathers to one of the various conflicts. Some are old and have nothing but memories of the Israel of their childhoods to buoy up their spirits in the face of Israeli statehood. This movie provides an opportunity to become more personally aware of the inner lives of typical Palestinians and how they engage emotionally and intellectually and spiritually with the realities of their respective losses.
One of the most moving moments, to me, was watching a young Palestinian woman explain how her husband had been sentenced to life in prison for killing an Israeli soldier. She was articulate about the pain she lived with and the pain she had to live with in her future. I think that was the saddest moment really. That moment of realization that there is no law in this universe that says that the pain that you have already gone through will serve as some coupon for a pain free future. In the last scene, an old Palestinian man finds the grave of his father in the fields that lie where his village once stood. And the following words appear on the screen:
"A new chapter will have to be written in the two parallel and contradicting books which reflect the history of our land."
An excellent movie to have on the shelf if one is interested in seeing the conflict through the eyes of real people ... and we all should have such an interest I think.
Question for Comment: If you could hire a personal historian to help find common ground between your history of some period or event in your life and someone else's, what would you set them to researching?
Some days I wish I could take you all into the conversations of my family's homeschooling life together. The last few days, we have been talking about the rise and fall of Medieval Christendom from Augustine to the Reformation. So much of the Medieval church's power came from having one an argument about basic assumptions that was almost never successfully contended. How the church won that argument and how, at the height of its power, it began to lose it, is a subject worthy of a few hours of good storytelling. I think quite often it happens that once an institution, be it a family or a religion or a state gains enough power to silence arguments, it begins to lose its interest in being able to win them ... and thus, in time, it loses.
One of the questions that has interested me about this period has to do with why we find ourselves so fascinated with it. Why are so many people intrigued with this period of time and why do we keep revisiting it in our poetry, our movies, our legends, our imaginations? My son Skyler thinks that it is because the Middle Ages was a time when there was certainty about good and evil. There was meaning to one's life in that cosmic battle and there were few complexities about who was good and who was bad and which side one was on. As if the immersion in this period of continual warfare were an antidote to modern relativism and post-modernism where every position among hundreds is right or wrong depending on the point of view of the evaluation. It is also a period of time that valued loyalty almost above all other traits and attributes. It valued loyalty even above success or survival. this is something that we seem to have a dearth of in the modern corporate world. It was a time when people believed things - and where they would die for those things in which they believed. Who among us today would do the same. who is so certain about anything that they would chose death over compromise?It was a time when people believed that great forces of good and evil fought for them or against them, making great things worth setting out to accomplish and things accomplished worth the sacrifices it took to accomplish them. It was an age that gave you blanket solutions for failure and that would sing about you if you did fail (assuming that your cause was regarded as worthy.)
Today, Skyler and I sat on the couch and read The Song of Roland together. "Goading their horse's flanks with frenzied spurs until they bleed again. So rush to death. What else could brave knights do?"
In the first part of the battle, Roland and his band of merry men win fame for their warrior traits in honor of their Norse ancestral ideas about the need for REAL men to win glory in battle. In the second part of the battle they win fame by willingly choosing martyrdom on the field of battle to retreat, thus fulfilling their duty as Christians to the manliness of self-sacrifice. The story provides both their cultural heritages with what they demand and they see no contradiction between the two. Indeed, the archbishop of Turpin comes close to displaying perfect manliness on both counts, killing many and being himself killed.
"We fight for right." Roland incites his men, "These cowards fight for wrong." and thus when the Saracens are smitten in battle, the author assures us that "Satan siezes their gibbering souls" and drags them off to hell, "the foes of God" being slain by the hundreds. All enemies are hated by God. All allies are loved. All enemies go to hell upon the moment they expire. All allies are escorted by angels "on wings of gold to escort their souls to heaven". Everything is clear. Everything is uncomplicated. Morality wears uniforms. It is no wonder we find this era fascinating. We live in a world with significant vitamin deficiencies in this respect. we all suffer from the scurvy that results from our steady diet of absolute-free relativism (though it extends our lifespans long beyond the average in the Medieval world).
Question for Comment: Has your definition of "real manliness" changed over the course of your life? Do you carry conflicting images of what sort of man should be and will be immortalized in th emamory of those who knew him?
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