DANIEL BOORSTIN AND THE QUAKERS

by William H. Benson

March 25, 2004

     The historian and public servant Daniel Boorstin passed away earlier this month in Washington.  He was eight-nine years old.  In addition to teaching law for twenty-five years at the University of Chicago and serving as the chief Librarian at the Library of Congress from 1975 to 1987, Boorstin also wrote exceptional and readable history.

     Early in his career he wrote the three-volume The Americans and then ten years ago he wrote another three-volume work: The Creators, The Discoverers, and The Seekers.  He was easily recognizable with his bowtie and black-framed glasses.

     My favorite Boorstin essay comes from his chapter The Quest for Martyrdom found in his book The Colonial Experience in which he described the lust that the Quakers’ of the seventeenth-century felt for hardships and torture and mutilation and imprisonment while in their search for a crown of martyrdom.  These Quaker men and women preferred “to die for the whole truth, rather than live with a half-truth.”

     From a base in Rhode Island they would trudge across the wilderness, risking Indians, snowstorms, and wild animals because they “felt moved” to go to Boston to preach to the Puritans, who already were set in their religious beliefs.  The exasperated Puritans would give these Quakers thirty stripes with a three-cord knotted whip, confine them to a jail without food nor water, cut off one of their ears, and, if all else failed, hang them.

     Three times Mary Dyer made the pilgrimage to Boston.  The first time she was banished to Newport, Rhode Island.  The second time in late October of 1659 the Boston Puritans marched her to the gallows along with two Quaker men, who were first hung.  Preparations were made to hang Mary Dyer, but then at the last moment, the authorities gave her a reprieve and banished her again for a second time.  Then, on May 21, 1660, she was back in Boston preaching her Quaker beliefs, but this time she was hanged.

     The Quaker Josiah Southwick told his persecutors after successive whippings that “it was no more terrifying unto him, than if ye had taken a Feather and blown it up in the Air, and had said, Take heed it hurteth him not.” 

     What seemed to redirect the Quakers away from their mindless focus upon martyrdom was land, in other words having their own colony in Pennsylvania, around Philadelphia, William Penn’s venture.  There they established themselves and then prospered, and along the way they gave up their frenetic devotion to spreading their particular form of the Gospel.

     But then Boorstin in another essay How the Quakers Misjudged the Indians pointed out how the Quakers’ pacifism left them unprepared when dealing with the Native Americans. 

     Boorstin wrote, “The political success, even the very survival of an American colony, often depended on a realistic estimate of the Indian.  But the Quakers’ view of the Indian was of a piece with their attitude toward war: it was unrealistic, inflexible, and based on false premises about human nature.”

     In 1748 instead of voting money for the defense of the colony, the Quaker Assembly gave 500 pounds to the Indians who promptly purchased lead and powder and guns and attacked the Irish and German settlers on the Pennsylvania frontier.  The Quakers failed to understand that by their own hands this bloodbath had happened.

     In August of 1756 Benjamin Franklin said, “In short, I do not believe we shall ever have a firm peace with the Indians, till we have well drubbed them.”

     How can we apply Boorstin’s lessons on the Quakers and the Indians to what Western Civilization faces from today’s religious fanatics?  We must somehow find ways to turn their focus away from their religion and their constant search for martyrdom and their wish to terrorize toward a more prosperous and substantive life.  We have to build up our defenses for our own protection.  And as Benjamin Franklin suggested, peace will happen only after “we have well drubbed them.”

COMEDY AND TRAGEDY

by William H. Benson

March 11, 2004

     Comedy is about getting the right guy with the right girl, and the play ends with a wedding.  It is about light-hearted and romantic emotions, smiles and kisses.  It is desire and fulfillment acted out in a solemn ceremony before others, for love is that quantity which keeps strife and chaos away.  In Much Ado About Nothing Benedick marries Beatrice, and the play ends.

     Tragedy on the other hand is about murder, the reasons leading up to it and the consequences thereafter.  It is serious and full of frowns.  It is hatred plotting its own course in private. 

     Master Shakespeare had read North’s translation of Plutarch’s life of Julius Caesar and had then put the murder in Act III of his play.  Brutus and Cassius had watched Caesar take over the powers of the government in a disregard for the law and for the Senate, and fearful of the outcome of his ambition, these nobles had plotted to murder him.  On March 15, 44 B.C. they gathered about and stabbed him repeatedly until he lay dead.

     They then cried out, “Liberty!  Freedom!  Tyranny is dead! . . . Ambition’s debt is paid.”

     And then Shakespeare, being the genius he was, brought love and murder together into the same play.  Because Othello and Desdemona loved each other intensely, they had married.  But then a third party Iago, out of his own jealousy and anger and hatred, presented evidence that Desdemona had been unfaithful, even though she had not.  Despite her pleas that she was innocent, Othello in a murderous rage suffocated his once-beloved wife.

     Romeo and Juliet on March 11, 1302, according to Shakespeare, married secretly.  Young and in love, “two star-crossed lovers” they were.  But then that same afternoon Romeo in the midst of a brawl on the streets in Verona killed Tybalt, one of Juliet’s relatives, and had broken the Prince’s law, who had strictly forbade fighting.  Knowing that the punishment for this crime was execution, Romeo fled Verona, only then to die beside Juliet.

     They say that love is blind, that it drives people in both the right direction and at times in the wrong direction.  Othello and Romeo were at the mercy of others and also of their own powerful unchecked emotions—love and anger and jealousy and hatred.  Instead of desire and fulfillment, they ended up with strife and chaos.   A wedding which should have been the means to a deep and abiding love ended in a tragic murder.

     Television can be classified into comedy or tragedy—either the thirty-minute sitcom or the hour-long murder mystery, and we can quickly flip channels from one to the other.

     Forty years ago on Monday nights I watched Andy Taylor and Barney Fife chase Helen Crump and Thelma Lou, and we laughed then as we do now at the reruns.  And then there was Perry Mason who each week solved a case, identifying who murdered the victim.

     Today we have Greg and Dharma and Law and Order, a comedy and a tragedy.   

     As it has throughout humankind’s history, the issue of marriage is once again today in the news.  But this cannot be classified a comedy, for it is not about getting the right guy with the right girl.  And neither is it a tragedy because no one is being murdered.  Perhaps it is that other of Shakespeare’s dramatic forms—history; some would argue that this is a just a social development filling the newspapers that future historians will sift through to try to determine its causes.

     However, some brave commentators have labeled it what it is–lawlessness.  Thomas Sowell said, “It is an issue solely because a few headstrong judges in Massachusetts and an opportunistic mayor in San Francisco decided that they were above the law.”  Bill O’Reilly said, “What kind of message does this send to Americans who don’t like a variety of other laws? . . . Either the law rules or it doesn’t.  And in California and much of the liberal press, it doesn’t.”

     “Liberty!  Freedom!  Tyranny is dead!”  The Founding Fathers understood and believed that liberty and freedom could only survive in a society when the laws were obeyed.

     We shall have a “Comedy tonight, and a tragedy tomorrow.”

KERRY AND BUSH

by William H. Benson

February 26, 2004

     Scandals, accusations, finger-pointing, denials, justifications, and dirt-digging—all seem to overshadow the run up to elections wherever and whenever across America, and the 2004 Presidential campaign is no different.  But this year, the Democratic Senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kerry, who deeply desires the Oval Office, has brought up for discussion two things from a time almost forty years ago: John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War.

     After all, Kerry has modeled his life after Jack Kennedy—the World War II hero, the former Senator from Massachusetts, and the President elected in 1960.  It is coincidental but they even have the same initials, JFK, and both were Eastern bluebloods, Ivy league-educated, war-heroes, and liberal-minded.

     Because Kennedy commanded a PT boat in the Pacific during World War II, Kerry requested duty aboard a Swiftboat, patrolling up the river in the Mekong Delta in Vietnam in a free fire zone, where his men shot at anything that moved, and he ended up receiving three purple hearts.

     George W. Bush also served in the military during the Vietnam War, as did 8,762,000 other Americans, but instead of going to Vietnam, he enlisted in the Texas Air National Guard where he learned to fly, transferring in 1972 to the Guard in Alabama where he could practice his “weekend warrior” duties, allow his flight physical to lapse, and not bother to show up very often.  Only the dental records prove he was there.

     Of course, Kerry wants to parade his war medals and drape himself in the memory of JFK because it embarrasses Bush.

     Pushing aside all of this to look at the facts that lie below the legend, the historian Paul Johnson wrote, “In November 1961 Kennedy did send in the first 7,000 US troops to Vietnam, the critical step down the slippery incline into the swamp.  That was the first really big US error.”

     And Kennedy had been warned.  On May 31, 1961 Charles de Gaulle urged him to cut his losses in Southeast Asia.  “I predict you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire.”  He knew, for that is what had happened to the French in Indochina.

     And Kennedy knew the dangers and said so.  “The troops will march in; the bands will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have forgotten.  Then we will be told to send in more troops.  It’s like taking a drink.  The effect wears off, and you have to take another.”

     He made a second mistake in the autumn of 1963 when he authorized American support for a coup that toppled and then murdered Ngo Dien Diem, the US’s main ally in South Vietnam.  The CIA then paid $42,000 in bribes to those officers who once in power set up a military junta.  “The worst mistake we ever made,” was Lyndon Johnson’s comment.

     Three weeks later Kennedy was himself murdered, and LBJ made a third crucial mistake when he ordered the bombing of North Vietnam rather than a forceful and aggressive ground attack.

     All these mistakes rested upon the “domino theory”, the idea that should South Vietnam fall to communism so would the rest of Southeast Asia to which Paul Johnson warned, “Beware public men when they use metaphors, especially mixed ones!”

     Even though Kerry has referred to it as “Nixon’s war,” ever since his return from Vietnam, it actually was Kennedy’s.

     And furthermore, the Time journalist Charles Krauthammer argued that polishing war medals will not guarantee Americans will get a great President.  FDR, an excellent war-time President, had no military experience.  Lincoln had only six months during Black Hawk’s Rebellion, and Grant, a brilliant soldier, was one of the worst Presidents ever. “Heroic military service doesn’t always translate into wise leadership at the top.”

     We as Americans in this election year of 2004 should insist upon more from a Presidential candidate than parading his war medals and then pointing out the conspicuous absence from the other.  Instead, we should expect an honest discussion on what is happening in Iraq and Afghanistan and what he will do to halt what could prove to be a slippery slope into a quagmire. 

MARY TODD LINCOLN

by William H. Benson

February 12, 2004

     Their friends and family often wondered what they saw in each other.  He was tall, 6’ 4”, gangly, ugly, poor, even-tempered, messy, poorly dressed, and given over to melancholy moods.  She was short, plump, neat, clean, well-dressed, anxious, jealous, insecure, sensitive, wild-tempered, blinded by severe headaches that drove her to bed for days, and possessed no sense of humor—her husband’s best trait. 

     Depending upon her mood, she would pinch pennies for months and then abruptly go on a shopping binge that would run up enormous debts.  And whereas he was utterly opposed to what he considered an immoral institution–slavery, she sympathized with the South, having grown up in Kentucky, surrounded by slaves, and had enjoyed their help.

     Despite their differences, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd married.

     What they shared in common was ambition, particularly political ambition, and she told her friends, “Mr. Lincoln is to be president of the United States some day.  If I had not thought so, I would not have married him, for you can see he is not pretty.”

     In their home in Springfield Lincoln kept a low profile.  “There are no fewer than six eyewitness descriptions of her furies, one relating to how she drove him out of the house with a broomstick.”  A Valentine she was not, but then neither was he.  Lincoln chose to be gone and out of the house every year for three months in the fall and then again three months in the spring, riding the legal circuit to earn money for the family and leaving Mary with the care of their boys.

     About her husband Mary said, “He is of no account when he is at home.  He never does anything except to warm himself and read.  He never went to market in his life.  I have to look after all that.  He just does nothing.  He is the most useless, good-for-nothing man on earth.”

     Repeatedly her heart broke under a series of losses that each reduced her into something unrecognizable.  In 1850 her second son Eddie died when he was only four-years old. In 1862 just a year after the Lincoln family had moved into the White House, their son Willie, then eleven-years old, died.  Nothing would console Mary who took to her bed for months.

     One day Lincoln pointed through the window to the asylum for the insane and told her, “Do you see that large white building on the hill yonder:  Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

     Three of her brothers served in the Confederate army, and all three died during the Civil War, a war her husband commanded for the Union side.  And she was sitting beside her husband at Ford’s theatre watching the play Our American Cousin when the actor John Wilkes Booth put a bullet in her husband’s head.  And in June of 1871 when her youngest son, Tad, her favorite, died at the age of eighteen, she would not be comforted.

     Mentally unbalanced and emotionally deteriorated, her surviving and eldest son Robert took her to court and had her judged insane, a case said to be “one of the saddest spectacles ever witnessed in a courtroom in this city.”  She was held in confinement for four months, and upon her release she wrote a scathing letter to Robert, demanding the return of her valuables, clothes, silver, and paintings and severing all relations with her son.  On June 15, 1876 a court in a surprise reversal pronounced her sane.

     She died on July 16, 1882 at the age of sixty-four, a most miserable and unhappy woman.  A friend said, “I think she was never entirely sane after the shock of her husband’s murder; but on most subjects she was entirely clear.”  

     Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, the same day as Charles Darwin, the English scientist.  It was agreed by family and friends that Mary Todd was not strongest of women as she tried valiantly to adapt to life’s cruelest demands—the death of brothers, children, and husband and the betrayal of her son.  Survival of the fittest, adaptation, and natural selection may be a scientific theory molded together to explain facts, but it does little to explain the human psyche—its needs, fears, and temperaments, especially in one so sensitive and so fragile as Mary Todd Lincoln.

DON QUIXOTE

by William H. Benson

January 29, 2004

     The most well-remembered scene from Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the Man of La Mancha, a knight suited in steel armor, astride his horse in a full gallop, his lance tilted, in a full-throttled attack upon a giant.  Sancho Panza, his trusty pot-bellied sidekick, had warned him that it was not a giant but only a windmill, but Don Quixote had brushed aside his friend’s words.

     “It is easy to see that thou art not used to this business of adventure; those are giants. . . . Betake thyself to prayer. . . . For this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”

     His lance broke upon impact, and Don Quixote and his horse went rolling across the Spanish plain, “in a sorry condition.”  And so they picked themselves up and set off on more extravagant follies that Quixote believed were heroic and chivalrous acts. 

     At one point he stabbed at some wineskins, believing that they were enemy soldiers, until he saw their “blood” cover the floor red.  Then, he watched a puppet show until  he was overcome with emotion at a battle scene such that he jumped up onto the stage with his sword lifted and then slashed downward “at the Moorish puppets, knocking some of them over, beheading others, crippling this one, mangling that one,” stunning the audience and the puppeteer.

     Another time Don Quixote and Sancho rescued some prisoners who, once they realized they were free, turned on their savior and on Sancho and stripped them of their clothes and pelted them and their horse and donkey with stones.  Cervantes described the scene after the prisoners had fled.

     “They were left alone now—the donkey and the horse, and Sancho and Don Quixote; the donkey, crestfallen and pensive, wagging its ears now and then, being under the impression that the hurricane of stones that had raged about them was not yet over; the horse, stretched alongside his master, for the hack also had been felled by a stone; Sancho, naked and fearful of the Holy Brotherhood, and Don Quixote, making wry faces at seeing himself so mishandled by those to whom he had done so much good.”

     Of that pitiful scene a critic remarked, “All of which should teach us to liberate galley slaves precisely because they will not be grateful to us for it.”

     Don Quixote is too mad, too idealistic, too much of a trouble-maker, and Sancho is too trusting and too willing to follow.  Across the Spanish landscape they travelled, meeting up with rich and poor, men and women, royalty and peasants, masters and slaves, and Don Quixote thought it best to interfere in their lives.  Invariably all parties turned on him, and no one, least of all Don and Sancho, were seemingly better off after.

     Today officials would probably recommend professional help for someone so “quixotic”, so idealistic, and so beyond the realm of reality, but four hundred years ago the Spanish rulers would either imprison such a person or simply allow him to suffer the indignities and misfortunes which he brought upon himself for his foolish behavior, which is what happened to Don Quixote.

     Scholars are still trying to decide if Cervantes wrote a comedy or a tragedy or an interplay of both.  We, the readers, at first laugh at the foolishness, and then later we feel saddened as we watch the poor man’s illusions and dreams repeatedly being mangled by the cold hard brutal facts of life.  The Man from La Mancha had a dream, and instead of seeing it as something off in the future to be pined for until achieved, Don Quixote seized it when he put on his steel armor, spurred his horse, and charged at the giant.

     At the end of Cervantes’s book, which is too long and yet ends too quickly, Don Quixote put his life’s mission in perspective.  “I have set injuries and insults straight, righted wrongs, punished arrogance, conquered giants, and trampled on monsters.”  Few readers then or ever since have been able to claim such startling personal victories.