Want to understand the development of product industrialization in America? Study guns. Despite the iconic stature they obtained with the “winning” of the West, guns were a product of the East Coast. They also shared a common technology that existed from the beginning of the nation and served to assist the growth of industrialization in other industries. And their success was in large part due to the American government’s assistance through the Army which supported the industry by purchasing so many of them.
Thoughts: And now we can’t get rid of them. We are a nation of guns and gun-owners and people who want to flaunt their ownership by taking their guns into national parks and Starbucks. Everytime someone goes bezerk and kills a family, ex-coworkers, strangers in a restaurant or in passing cars, there is a shortlived bemoaning of the dangers guns pose to our society. Its a cry in the dark, a wasted effort because the NRA will inevitably crush any resistance to widespread and indiscriminate gun ownership.
Susan B. Anthony isn’t just an icon on a failed dollar coin, she was a firebrand, an unceasing champion of women’s right to vote. She participated in the famous Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 which used the Declaration of Independence to make nineteen charges against the U.S. government, beginning with decrying the denial women’s right to vote. She was still at it nearly fifty years later when she died at the age of 86.
No one can deny Anthony’s passion and commitment to the cause of women’s suffrage;. She sacrificed home and family to travel across America giving speeches, calling for meetings, attending conventions, planning events and doing all she could do for the goal that eluded her during her lifetime – women’s right to vote finally become part of the American constitution in 1920.
However, it appears that in zeal her for women’s right to vote, there was a bias towards white women’s right to vote and not a belief in or support for this right to be expanded to all black Americans or others as well.
Thoughts: Seneca Falls was in 1848 and women finally got the right to vote in 1920. Prohibition against inter-racial marriages didn’t occur until 1967 more than a century after the Civil War. That gays are still struggling for the right to marry is no surprise against this history. The struggle is important both to clarify why the right is important and also to institutionalize the struggle so that the minority has the strength to make sure the right is fully implemented and that this victorious minority continue to live on as a powerful community of interests worthy of the fight.
The first German native American senator was Carl Schurz who rode the German immigrant wave into a Senatorial office from the great state of Missouri. Even more strange was that he became known as possessing great oratorical skills and great command of the English language despite the fact that he struggled to learn the language and he thought he would never would.
To thoroughly learn English, Carl translated texts from English into German and than back into English to compare how he did as compared to the original. As man who lived in two countries, two cultures and two languages he composed his memoirs both writing his German life in Germany and American life in English. He died before his memoirs were complete and two editions came out complete in German and English but that required dual translations and resulted in the English language readers missing stories told in the German part and vice verse.
Thoughts: What happen to the impulse of the immigrants to keep their own language in America? Why did all these groups relinquish their native languages so thoroughly that now Americans are pathetically monolingual and blissfully so. Seems to me – and this is true of myself – that an important tool of perspective, understanding of another language and culture is denied us, leaving us in a straitjacket of ignorance about the rest of the world. When other countries surge ahead, who will translate the fact into American English?
Alexander Gardner selected one hundred photographs to document the Civil War. His book sprawled over two-volumes and was called, “Gardner’s Photographic Sketch Book of the War” and served as a new uncomfortable kind of history. Gardner’s book was biased towards the Union and praised the technical and logistical superiority of the North’s effort. Gardner made sure the book catered to the officials responsible for the Union army’s infrastructure and included lots of photos of bridges, telegraph construction and medical facilities.
Yet there were other photographs that showed corpses strewn at battlegrounds like Gettburg. The focus on the dead wasn’t that war is brutal killer of men. That was a given. Life was brutal in those years and no one was surprised to learn that. People experienced an intimacy with death that today is extremely foreign to us in our daily lives. The real story was that these bodies weren’t buried, were allowed to rot. That was the real horror, the disrespect of the fallen.
Thoughts: I can’t help think of the controversy over the Bush administration’s refusal for photos to be taken of the flag draped coffins of the soldier shipped home in planes from Iraq. This was not the concern over burial of the dead. This was concern that the fact of the dead was so politicized that there were further controversy about scrolling photos and names of the fallen were shown on TV or print in the newspaper. To dignify the fallen soldier was to undermine the war.
The Civil War was an awful ordeal, a great gash across American history that could still be argued haunts our psyche. The Iraqi war? Just one in a series of American military adventures since the beginning of the Cold War. But it may haunt us in ways that linger for decades to come. What can we say about a war we waged so successfully the county’s leader was out of power within weeks and yet that country refused to let us win? Did we reach the end of military power with Iraq? Will America’s new era as the sole superpower provide us with minuscule security and even less superiority? Could we linger on as a great military power when that is no longer a guarantor of hegemony?
Lincoln’s second inaugural was six minutes long. That’s all. If that happened today it would be a scandal. Considering that the Union was close to winning the Civil War on March 4th when Lincoln spoke before the backdrop of the new Capitol dome, there was plenty to talk about in the here and now but that’s not what Lincoln did that day.
Lincoln used the occasion to address what it was to be an American, what purpose the Civil War served to advance the American cause and how flawed human beings could govern themselves. A signature shift for the Presidency and American government came with the idea that humans couldn’t comprehend God’s will and that government had to act without that expectation in place. This was not the speech of the shining city on the hill where we knew America was God’s beacon nor was it the speech that set out manifest destiny as the divine right of Americans to populate the land between shining seas. Lincoln’s God was powerful but less partisan and he spoke a truth that is still hard for many Americans to bear.
Thoughts: I think we face a crisis that is as monumental as the Civil War but not as dramatic or stark in its choices. Also there is no immediate likelihood that the nation will destroy itself in a military struggle. The crisis we now face is that we don’t like, believe in or trust our government. Even worse, we don’t trust government to fulfill a civic duty or even believe in a civic duty. And yet we continue to empower our government to take on increasing power and responsibilities over our lives. Our civic discourse has become so debased that it doesn’t seem capable of righting the ship of state.
Will we, like alcoholics, hit bottom and know it? As hopeless as things seem now, remember the early nineties were also times of great despair and then the economy took off and then the mid to late nineties became a time of great hope and effective government generating surpluses. Things can turnaround quickly and maybe we just need a moment for that to happen. Lincoln was communicating and strengthening the American political foundation at the very time it was most under siege.
The novel, “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott is imbued with a strong sense of Christian redemption. It’s spiritual guide is John Bunyan’s allegorical fable, Pilgrim’s Progress in which the girls of the March family are to redeem themselves of their selfish desires in reaching the Celestial City which is the attic of the house.
The book was published after the Civil War but was written during the conflict and while it doesn’t dwell on the War’s action, the absence of the men from the scene is noticeable as is the suffering of the characters doing without money because of the war. How attractive it must have been to Civil War readers to have a book that made home and house and domesticity central to its characters’ lives. And how refreshingly feminist that this locale was made the stuff of spiritual heroics for its characters.
Thoughts: Today feminists would bristle at the thought that “home” is defined as female and that it is still the place of identity for women. What if the idea of home is expanded to the greater world? Is that still a problem because its the paradigm that restricts women not the locale?
Emily Dickinson wrote some of her greatest poetry during the American Civil War. She asked the question, “When did the war really begin?” as if to suggest it started much earlier than when hostilities broke out in 1861.
Thoughts: Um, it couldn’t make sense of this essay at all. Is she saying that Emily Dickinson was providing the female perspective on war? Was an incisive commentator on the nature of war? Was a great poet? Maybe I’m just dense.
What to do about the Indians? This was the big dilemma in the America of the mid 19th century. The country was torn between the options of genocide and and ethnic cleaning. Then along came the ethnologist Lewis Henry Morgan who actually took four trips West to study the Indians up close and personal. He had the novel idea that Indian were capable of elevation, in essence lifting themselves from a primitive position to one of civilization if educated and Christianized.
Sadly, Morgan’s theory when turned into practice became the policy of assimilation which carved up tribal lands into individual parcels, turning the Indians into entrepenuers. This in essence broke apart the tribes’ communal social structure, the glue that made the Indians, Indians. Morgan’s enlightened ideas about the capacity of the Indians to change became a policy to destroy their culture and society.
Thoughts: American don’t listen and they don’t really want to understand people who are different than themselves. Thus, the treatment of the American Indians is a testament to always doing the wrong thing because the people involved were never respected or treated with dignity. I often think about white people’s horror at the Indian “violence” during our manifest destiny. How different is our failure to understand Mexican undocumented workers or Muslims today?
The Lincoln-Douglas Debates is that rare thing where high purpose meets mass acceptance and becomes a signature event in its time. In 1858, Abraham Lincoln, who hadn’t held a public office in nearly a decade, faced off aganst Senator Douglas in seven high profile debates which focused on slavery as the impending issue of the national moment. Lincoln lost the election despite winning a bare majority of the vote but many feel that he won the debate gaining strength as he went along with an argument of moral clarity leaving Douglas with his belief in local democracy to twist in the whim of the masses, unwilling to anchor his beliefs to a moral center. But even if Lincoln won the Presidency in part based on the prominence of his success in the 1858 debates, the real winner was the Douglas position that let the South and much of the rest of the country count out blacks from any real participation in the American political tradition for a century.
Thoughts: Moral clarity can be a powerful tool if its connected to a rising tide of public opinion. Can it be as powerful if there is no tide? Walter Mondale told the truth about taxes back in 1984 and was defeated in a historic landslide. George H. W. Bush reneged on his pledge of “no new taxes” and lost a second term. Now no politician will endorse raising taxes even though taxes must be raised in order for government to function. If Barack Obama told the truth about government and about the need for taxes to make it function, he would be telling a moral truth because we can only continue to act on behalf of the public if the public is willing to pay for that privilege. And if he were to do so, he would lose re-election. He can’t be Lincoln on taxes and I’m afraid that means he will not be Lincoln at all.
Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” was a modernist work in a number of ways. It began life in one form and evolved into other forms before its author died. Whitman dismissed literary precedents and engaged the world instead in free verse and wildly divergent images. He was democrat not just in a political sense but social one too. His work was ever accessible, personal and open to world events and changing times. That Whitman found readers given his eccentric writings and scandalous subjects – paeans to homo-eroticism and male bonding of a peculiar kind, is a wonder.
Thoughts: I think of another “game-changer” Allen Ginsburg who also abandoned literary precedents and freely advertised his homosexuality. But Ginsberg became instantly famous with “Howl” and his celebrity which must have affected the course of his career and his art. I don’t think Whitman had that problem. Ginsberg didn’t explicitly explore fame, celebrity and popular culture as did Warhol so his wallowing in it wasn’t a source of creativity.