WINSTON CHURCHILL

by William H. Benson

January 15, 2004

     For Christmas this year I received two books, and coincidentally both were recent biographies on Winston Churchill.  Considered the greatest Englishmen who has ever lived and also the greatest leader of the twentieth century, his story is an amazing adventure in force of will, determination, and leadership.

     He was born on November 30, 1874 into wealth and privilege to an English father and an American mother.  His father, John Churchill, Lord Randolph and the Duke of Marlborough, was only twenty-five in April of 1874 when he married the twenty-year-old Jennie Jerome, the American daughter of a New York City financier who owned race tracks.

     Neither parent provided Winston with any direction during his childhood years, preferring to enjoy their own lives separately without any interference from their son.  Winston had a non-relationship with his father and a semi-relationship with his mother.  Early on they turned the parenting duties over to a hired nanny, Mrs. Everest, who then became the central emotional prop in Winston’s life.

     Eventually this troublesome lad was packed off to Harrow, a boarding school for boys devoted to the classics.  His teachers there considered him a very poor student, but Winston refused to get his mind wrapped around the numerous verb conjugations of Greek, Latin, or French.  However, he enjoyed narrative history, and he learned to write tolerable essays due to a Mr. Somervell.

     Winston later said that “this teacher was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English.  He knew how to do it.  He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. . . . I had three times as much as anyone else.  I learned it thoroughly.  Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.”

     His father then died when Winston was just twenty-years old, and Winston was then on his own.  But by age twenty-six Winston was world famous, a war hero, a best-selling author, a millionaire, and a member of Parliament where he would then serve for most of the next sixty years.  Seemingly coming from nowhere and without help from anyone he pushed himself into a position where people had to listen to him and then follow him.  How had he done these things?

     Certainly determination and ambition had always been there, but underlying those qualities was a superior talent in delivering the English language to his listeners and readers.  For six decades his spell-binding speeches in and out of Parliament captivated audiences.  And he could write histories and biographies that pulled his readers into new areas of scholarship and into fascinating facts and ideas that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

     For Churchill the English language was his primary tool to accomplish his and Great Britain’s goals in defeating Germany in both world wars.  Sincerity always underscored his words.  When he said, “We shall never surrender,” his friends and enemies understood that he meant exactly that.

     His speeches included a strong beginning and an emotional ending.  He organized them around a single theme, and frequently he drew pictures.  “We shall fight on the seas and oceans. . . . We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”  Always he preferred the one-syllable Anglo Saxon word over the polysyllabic Latin or French word.

     Churchill died Sunday morning, January 24, 1965, less than two months after his ninetieth birthday, but coincidentally on the same day that his father–John Churchill, Lord Randolph, the Duke of Marlborough, the dad who had failed so miserably at parenting–had died seventy years before.    

     Winston frequently laced his speeches with words such as freedom and victory and loyalty and sacrifice and bravery and fighting to the bitter end.  All lovers of truth and freedom in every generation need to hear such words again and again.  We should hear them today.

NEW YEAR’S DAY RESOLUTIONS

by William H. Benson

January 1, 2004

     On January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, began publishing the Liberator in Boston.  It carried its motto on the first page: “I am in earnest.  I will not equivocate.  I will not excuse.  I will not retreat a singe inch.  I will be heard.”

     Garrison was an extremist on the issue of slavery in that he called for the immediate release of all slaves on moral and religious grounds.  He was opposed to gradual emancipation and colonization in Africa.  He demanded total freedom for the slaves immediately.

      Garrison denounced the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” because it counted each slave as 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of determining how many representatives each state sent to the House, but then it did not permit the slave to vote.  On July 4, 1854 he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution with the words, “So perish all compromises with tyranny.”

     The Southerners responded to Garrison’s extreme view by bringing forward the reasons that slavery was a necessity in the South.  Increasingly fearful and anxious about a slave revolt, they tightened their controls over the slaves.  As the South fought hard to keep slavery, it became a bastion of reaction.

     A century before Garrison, a Quaker and a traveling minister named John Woolman worked his way each year from New England to the Carolinas and to the western frontiers preaching the Quakers’ vision of the Gospel.  Whenever he confronted slave owners in the South, he tried to convince them of the evil of slavery by insisting on paying the slaves who served him.  He worked quietly but persistently to move the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting toward an anti-slavery position.

     Woolman also wrote an essay, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Slaves, in which he persuaded his readers that slavery was an evil, a moral wrong, and a mistake.

     The historian David Brion Davis wrote, “If the western world became more receptive to anti-slavery thought between 1746 and 1772, the self-effacing Quaker was a major instrument of the transformation.”

     Garrison and Woolman represent two different methods when confronting a moral wrong.  One is aggressive and the other passive.  Garrison’s “I will be heard,” stands in stark contrast to Woolman’s “here are Some Considerations to think about.”  One method demands action now.  It is in your face.  It is emotional, and it is relentless.  It seeks to overwhelm the opposition.  The other is quiet, passive, but convincing in the rightness of its position.

     The Western world eventually turned on slavery and eliminated it, but not before the U.S fought a vicious and bloody civil war.  One view is that the war was mainly caused by the extremists in the North, the abolitionists, such as Garrison, and those reactionary Southerners who responded by pushing for secession.

     As is usual, there are moral wrongs and deep injustices in the world today.  Slavery is still an institution in certain pockets of the world.  Women are badly mistreated throughout the Middle East.  The issue of abortion has stubbornly not disappeared.

     And then there is the fight in Palestine over who will own and control the land—the Israelis or the Palestinians.  Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has gone so far to stop terrorism that he is building a four hundred-mile wall to divide the two nations.  And after 9-11 what were we to do?  Send in the troops and root out the al Queda and the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, or turn the other cheek and in a state of paralysis wait for the next attack?  President Bush made his decision, and the French and the Germans did not approve.

     New Year’s Day is the day to formulate resolutions and write down goals for the next twelve months.  As we do so, we can think about our approach.  Shall it be highly charged or low-keyed, emotional or even-tempered, critical or persuasive, loud or quiet?  Each style produces a reaction from others who can undo what we wish to accomplish or can assist us in its achievement.  The wisdom is found in knowing which style is appropriate for a situation—Garrison’s or Woolman’s.

HARRY TRUMAN

by William H. Benson

December 18, 2003

     On the morning of December 5, 1950 President Harry Truman was reading in the Washington Post a most unflattering commentary on Margaret’s singing performance the evening before in Washington.  With his short fuse ignited by this attack on his daughter, Truman grabbed a pen and notepad and dashed off a hot letter to Paul Hume, the Post’s reporter.

     “Mr. Hume:–I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert.  I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an ‘eight-ulcer man on four-ulcer pay.’  Someday I hope to meet you.  When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beef steak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

     Hume made public Truman’s letter and then sold it.  The entire country was aghast by their President’s ripe language, and yet he claimed that “the parents of children understand and will stick up for me.”

     On April 10, 1951 President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur from his command of as General of the Army after a series of defiant acts of insubordination.  Years later in a hot fury with his blue eyes still blazing at the recollection, Truman recalled that he told General Bradley to do it quickly because he did not want MacArthur to hear about it and resign. 

     “And I told Bradley, I says, ‘The @#$%* isn’t going to resign on me, I want him fired.’”

     In August of 1952 Harry had decided that he would not run for re-election for a third term, and so he threw his support towards the Governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson.  Unfortunately, the intellectual and cerebral Stevenson was on occasion on the receiving end of Truman’s vile and tempered language–Army talk he had learned in Battery D in World War I.  And Stevenson was not the intelligent campaigner that Truman was and had been.

     And then Truman was outraged when he sensed that Stevenson was disassociating himself away from Truman.  He fired off a letter.

     “It seems to me that the Presidential Nominee and his running-mate are trying to beat the Democratic President instead of the Republicans.  There is no mess in Washington.  I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to run against your friends, they should retire from the scene and let you do it.  I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can.  Cowfever [he meant Estes Kefauver] could not have treated me any more shabbily than have you.”

     Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate handily won the election, and on January 20, 1953, the day of his inauguration, Ike and Mamie drove up to the White House but then refused to get out of the car, expecting the Trumans to come out to them, a clear break in protocol.  The Trumans, humiliated by Ike’s lack of tact, walked to the car.  Conversation was terse and short.

     Years later when reflecting upon Ike’s snub, Truman said, “You can’t very well forget things of that kind.”  And he didn’t.  Straightforward, aggressive, outspoken, and determined, he spoke his mind as he saw and believed it.  To forgive and forget was not one of his tactics.  Rather than let some insult or offense simply pass him by, Truman boldly declared his opinion.

     Sam Rayburn described Truman, “So right on the big things; so wrong on the little ones.”  And it was the little things that would so detract him.  He did not take easily personal slights or snubs or criticisms.  There was never any delicate ground around which he would dance.

     Very few of us during the course of our lives can tell off a newspaper reporter or a presidential candidate or fire a general, even though we may want to.  It is not the way to keep a job or our reputation or friends.  Perhaps only lameduck Presidents and crusty men from Missouri can do so.  Truman cautioned, “Keep your bullets bright and your gunpowder dry.”

     The message of “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men” is a request to release the hatred, give up the need for revenge, and let your enemies be.  The ideal of peace is so easily proclaimed, but so difficult to do, even for Presidents.

     Have a merry, merry Christmas.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

by William H. Benson

December 4, 2003

     Horror has never held my attention.  I have tried to complete a Stephen King novel numerous times, and invariably after a couple of chapters of gruesome and fanciful scenes, I give up.  But then two years ago King wrote a non-fiction book, On Writing, in which he described how he came up with ideas that he was able to translate into his stories.  That book I easily finished.

     Westerns I also cannot finish.  The same can be said of Isaac Azimov’s science fiction stories or of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings tales.  I start, hoping to finish at least one of them, but then other more appealing and more satisfying works just crowd them out.

     If I had more time I would read the classics, those books that Mark Twain said everybody liked but nobody read.  And I especially like to read works that explain the illusive meanings behind Shakespeare’s plays. Arthur Miller said that nobody these days really reads Shakespeare; they read about Shakespeare because the body of work that has built up and around him is much more enriching than the plays are themselves.  I would agree.  

     These days with the limited time available I read mostly non-fiction—intellectual biography and history, but on occasion I will pick up certain detective fiction writers—Sue Grafton’s alphabet series, Robert Parker’s wise-talking Spenser, and Dick Francis’s British horse-racing stories.  I read them rather than solve cross-word puzzles; they seem about the same thing.

     People arrive in this life with certain inclinations or preferences seemingly built into them for what they will read or will not read, and those preferences can improve, depending upon a person’s stage in life, what is going on in their lives, their education level, the time available, and their level of determination to exercise their minds.

    C. S. Lewis, who died on November 22, 1963, the same day as President Kennedy, had the enviable talent of being able to write well in a number of different genre—essays, theology, literary criticism, and fiction–but he is probably best remembered for his extraordinarily successful Christian allegories, The Chronicles of Narnia, today considered children’s literature. In an essay Lewis wrote that there was no single literary taste common to all children; some read nothing other than for information.  They will not read when they can find another form of entertainment.  Some like to read fantasies and marvels.  Some are omnivorous readers, gulping down anything.

     In other words, children are like adults in that they have inclinations to read or not to read and  preferences of what they will or will not read.

     Lewis wrote: “We can approach the matter differently by listing books liked by the young: Aesop’s Fables, The Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Treasure Island; the last was written especially for children, and yet it is read with pleasure by many adults.  I who disliked The Arabian Nights as a child, dislike them still.”

     To Lewis’s list I would also add: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Martian stories and also Frankenstein.  Both Tarzan and Frankenstein’s creation are most interesting in that they both supposedly learned to read on their own, Tarzan as a juvenile and Frankenstein’s monster as a full-grown creation.  In fact, that monster bypassed Dick and Jane and other children’s stories and began with Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, heavy material for anyone.

     Widespread reading as a child is important, if for no other reason than to discover his or her preferences.  It also leads to better reading.  Harold Bloom, the literary critic, recently published a new book, Stories and Poems for Extraordinarily Intelligent Children of All Ages, in which he wrote, “If one is to ever read Shakespeare and Chaucer, the best way to prepare is to read Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.”

     It also can develop more discerning thought processes and better thinking skills.  For a child, few things are more crucial to their future than reading much and often.  And besides it can be just plain fun.  The stories and ideas we encounter as a child just seem the best, and they remain with us for the rest of our lives.

     This Christmas give the child a book.

WILLPOWER AND GRATITUDE

by William H. Benson

November 20, 2003

M. Scott Peck said in his book The Road Less Traveled that life’s two greatest possessions are a forceful will and a grateful attitude. A person who has a forceful will is considered assertive, proactive, ambitious, driven, and a hustler.  Without it a person appears dull, lethargic, passive, or lazy—ill-equipped to face life’s enormous challenges.  A person with a grateful attitude appreciates what has been given to her or him.  Without it a person seems selfish and heartless.

     This is the season when we think about the Pilgrims, stuck in the bottom of the Mayflower, sailing across a wild and terrible ocean, leaving behind possessions and relatives.  To do what they did demanded an exceptional and forceful will.

     The historian Paul Johnson wrote, “The Mayflower men—and women—were quite different.  They came to America . . . to create God’s kingdom on earth.  They were the zealots, the idealist, the utopians, the saints, and the best of them were fanatical, uncompromising, and overweening in their self-righteousness.  They were also immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous.”

     It had to be people with those unusual qualities, such as William Bradford and William Brewster, who would dare to cross the Atlantic Ocean to establish a new home for their families, bringing with them highly disciplined views of how their lives should be structured.

     On November 21, 1620, two months out of England, the discomforts of the voyage led to dissension to such a degree that the future colony’s leaders drew up what they called the Mayflower Compact.  By its two-hundred words, they created a governing body which would create “just and equal laws.”  It was signed by all forty-one heads of households. 

     Just the day before on the twentieth, a woman named Susanna White gave birth to a son whom she and her husband William named Peregrine—the first child born to English parents on their way to New England.  So those Pilgrims who left so much and brought so little now possessed children and a governing document and that forceful will.

     They needed far more, for by the following spring half of them, about fifty of the one hundred and one colonists, had died of exposure and disease.  And the survivors would have then starved if not for Squanto’s help.

     Paul Johnson described their refusal to quit.  “These were not ordinary pilgrims, traveling to a sacred shrine and then returning home to resume everyday life.  They were, rather, perpetual pilgrims, setting up a new, sanctified country which was to be a permanent pilgrimage, traveling ceaselessly towards a millenarian goal. . . . They were conducting an exercise in exceptionalism.”

     In the fall of 1621, after their first harvest, they gathered to give thanks, for they were now grateful.  Despite the losses of loved ones as well as the disappointments they had suffered, those people mentally set that all aside to remember those things that they did have.

     Thanksgiving begins at the individual level but then it becomes a community event, acted out in families, but extended even wider to the national level.

     A “forceful will” is progressive, looking forward, the act of planning and moving to achieve certain worthwhile objectives.  A “grateful attitude” is looking back, pleased with what has been accomplished.  Having both means emotional balance.  Too much of one and not of another leaves a person lop-sided, out of kilter, either so driven that he or she is out of touch with those around him or her or so content for what is that they cannot see what is possible.

     President Kennedy’s life defined the meaning of a forceful will.  He challenged Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country.”

     He was assassinated on Friday, about noon, on November 22, 1963, forty years ago this Saturday.  I was in the fourth grade.  And we were then supposed to celebrate Thanksgiving the next Thursday.  That Thanksgiving Day in 1963, like that which the Pilgrims celebrated in 1621, was a difficult time for Americans.

     Shocked and stung by real grief and loss, people under those circumstances are forced to hunt to find something for which they are grateful, a search that pushes them in the right direction, toward a greater and better understanding of their own humanity.

     A forceful will and a grateful attitude—life’s best gifts.  Have a great Thanksgiving!