WOMEN’S LIBERATION

by William H. Benson

June 28, 2006

     Revolution is an overused word today.  Its root, “revolt”, refers to a violent confrontation against the existing powers, especially a king: the American, French, or Russian Revolutions.  But today a revolution describes any change, mild or otherwise—in industry, the economy, in transportation or in communication.

     The historian Jacques Barzun identified Western Civilization’s four great revolutions in his work From Dawn to Decadence.  The 17^th century witnessed the religious revolution in which the many shades of Protestantism revolted against the unified Catholic Church, the many against the one.  The 18^th century proved that the people could successfully revolt against the Kings of both England and France.

     The 19^th century ushered in liberal thought—that individual human beings possessed rights of their own that were distinct and superior to the divine right that the kings for ages had claimed for themselves.  Beginning with Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason and ending with the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments to the Constitution, liberal thought freed the Western nations’ citizens.

     People of the 20^th century who found themselves marginalized in society due to their gender, race, or class demanded a voice and their rights.

     And so we the living of today are all heirs and beneficiaries of those four revolutions, fought across the span of five centuries.  Barzun further identified a number of themes that runs through all of them.

     One is emancipation.  “The individual wields a panoply of rights, including the right to do ‘his own thing’ without hindrance from authority.  And any right is owed to all that lives: illegal immigrants, school children, criminals, babies, plants, and animals.  It requires more and more limitations in order to prevent my right from infringing yours.”

     Another theme is primitivism. “The longing to shuffle off the complex arrangements of an advanced culture recurs again and again.  It is a main motive of the Protestant Reformation, it reappears as the cult of the Noble Savage, it warns against global warming, and it cries out, ‘Bring back the wolf!’.”

     David Denby, the writer and movie critic, in his book Great Books, said that “the women’s liberation movement is the only successful revolution of the twentieth century.”  That seems a startling, if not exaggerated, statement, and yet it very well may be true; there has been a change, perhaps even a revolution over the last three decades in which women are accepted in the work place and in positions of leadership.

     Denby wrote that “women are no longer dependent on men physically.  At their very luckiest, men and women exhibit a graciousness in their relations with one another that is something new on earth.  They are trying to make equality work.”

     Denby then quoted the French writer, Simone de Beauvoir, who in 1949 wrote, “those who are condemned to stagnation are often pronounced happy on the pretext that happiness consists in being at rest.”  Now I take her words to mean that she equated marriage and being a housewife, and a mother with stagnation (her word).

     Although Beauvoir denigrated the typical female roles, she was wise enough to understand the costs.  She wrote, “I am interested in the fortunes of the individual as defined not in terms of happiness but in terms of liberty.”  Now that is interesting.

     As Americans we believe that liberty will produce happiness.  Did not Thomas Jefferson write of, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”?  We tend to see them as equal, or that liberty will inevitably lead to happiness.  But George Bush’s gamble in Iraq has proven that greater liberty need not necessarily result in greater happiness.

     Simone de Beauvoir understood the same for women—that happiness is so elusive that it is only found in its pursuit.  Women’s rights might mean emancipation in the work place and a lessening of the responsibilities at home, but to be liberated can be difficult, and it can be painful, and it does not always guarantee happiness.  Now that is a revolting thought. 

FATHERS AND SONS

William H. Benson

June 15, 2006

     On June 15, 1752 Benjamin Franklin decided to spend some quality time with his son William.  Even though it was lightning outside, together father and son flew a kite.  Pictures of Franklin holding the kite and touching a key dangling at the end of the string with lightning bolts darting across the sky often include a small boy standing alongside Benjamin.  That would be William, Franklin’s illegitimate son.

     Scholars have never been able to determine the identity of William’s mother, but Benjamin claimed the child as his own.  Once Benjamin had entered into a common-law marriage with Deborah Reed, he brought William into their home, and together Ben and Deborah raised William.

     The kite and the key made Benjamin Franklin world famous in both America and Europe, as a scientist and a discoverer of scientific laws.  London, the center of the world’s intellectual learning and the seat of the British empire of which he was a citizen, beckoned, and Ben answered.  In 1754 father with his son sailed east across the Atlantic.

     Deborah stayed in her home.  She never would spend one night of her life outside of  

her native Philadelphia, but Benjamin would not settle for just what America offered.  He wanted more for himself and his son.

     Benjamin and William had a grand time in London, seeing the sights, traveling the countryside, which was “too beautiful to be outdoors,” and enjoying the intellectual stimulation they felt when they met English thinkers and writers.  Young William especially loved to party until late every night with his friends.  Both Father and son chose to stay together in England for the most part of nearly two decades.

     Then, Ben became quite concerned that William was not growing up to appreciate hard work, frugality, industriousness, and patience—those qualities that had served him well and which Poor Richard Saunders had preached in his almanac.  Like most good dads, Benjamin wanted to help William.  Through his contacts, Ben was able to earn for William an appointment as the Royal Governor of the colony of New Jersey.

     This was a plum, a prize normally given to a native British citizen living in London and not to an American commoner, especially one of illegitimate birth.  But William by then was prepared to display the regal nature of British royalty among the Americans.  A Loyalist, he obeyed the King’s commands, and he expected Americans to do the same.  He had learned those ideals under Ben’s tutelage when living in London.  William moved into the Governor’s mansion in New Jersey.

     Then, a rift developed in the relationship between this father and his son, and it was over politics.  The colonies began to disagree with Parliament over its supposed right to rule and tax the colonies.  Benjamin moved ever more closely towards the radicals’ view, arguing for a complete break with King George III and Parliament and for independence and the inception of a new country.

     William was repulsed by the thought of breaking up the British empire; he loved England too much.  When an adolescent living in London, William’s eyes had opened, and he now perceived the Americans as most British saw them: raw country cousins, who were backwards, ignorant, unsophisticated, incapable of grand ideas, and less than regal.

     The rift grew into a separation and finally a permanent estrangement.  With a vengeance Ben cut William out of his will, saying: “The part he acted against me in the late war, which is of public notoriety, will account for me leaving him no more of an estate he endeavored to deprive me of.”  William died in exile, destitute, in 1813.

     Fathers do not always agree with their sons.  As the son moves towards independence, tension and division can emerge. It is too bad when it ruptures and breaks as it did between Ben and William.

     Sunday is Father’s Day, a day to set aside ill will and tensions and celebrate the idea of being and becoming a great dad.

NORMA JEAN BAKER

by William H. Benson

June 1, 2006

     Norma Jean Baker, also known as Marilyn Monroe, was born June 1, 1926.  She would have turned eighty today.  She grew up in Los Angeles, during Hollywood’s golden age, a glittering dreamworld where any pretty face could become a famous actress, which was Norma Jean’s dream and obsession.

     Her friends could not quite believe she had movie star talent.  Captivatingly beautiful she was, but she had a sugary breathy voice and an had an odd habit of licking or twitching her lips.  But she was intelligent and fiercely driven to succeed, and she could use men to introduce her to other men even more powerful.  Entranced by her good looks, men were pleased to help her.

     One of her teenage friends, Eddie Friedman, met her in the summer of 1946 at the Lido Club’s pool behind the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when she was modeling bathing suits for a photo session.  Eddie later became the actor Ted Jordan, and he told the story of his sixteen-year friendship with Marilyn Monroe in his book, Norma Jean.

     Gradually he learned that “he was dealing not with an innocent and naïve girl with stars in her eyes but with a multifaceted personality of extraordinary complexity.”

     He soon discovered that Norma Jean’s family was filled with ghosts.  She had no home, but had lived in an orphanage and foster homes.  She had never met or known her father.  Her mother, Gladys Baker, suffered from bouts of insanity that drove her into an asylum.  Years before, Gladys’s husband, a guy named Baker, had deserted Gladys when he had moved to Kentucky, taking with him their two daughters, Norma Jean’s older half-sisters.  Then, Norma Jean called her foster mothers her “aunts.”

     And then Eddie discovered that Norma Jean had married a guy named James Dougherty, the boy next door, when she was sixteen.  She claimed that it was “a marriage of convenience” to avoid going back to the orphanage.  The navy drafted him during the war, and she divorced him.

     They were all ghosts: her father, mother, sisters, aunts, and husband.

     And then she found a two-minute role in a Marx Brothers movie, Love Happy.  Groucho made his famous eyebrows wiggle when Norma Jean walked away from him.

     She died her hair blonde, changed her name to Marilyn Monroe, and found an agent, Johnny Hyde; Twentieth-Century Fox first gave her a contract, and her wish came true.  She became a star and over the years acted in thirty movies.

     Along the way she married baseball legend, Joe DiMaggio.  The marriage lasted all of ten months in 1954; he had not appreciated the way the soldiers in Korea had ogled and whistled at her when she was performing on stage there.  And then she married the playwright, Arthur Miller, but after four years she had divorced him also.

     Rumors linked Marilyn romantically with the President, John F. Kennedy, and later with his brother, Bobby Kennedy, both whom she had met through the actor, Peter Lawford, who was married to one of the Kennedy sisters.  Unfortunately, it was Peter Lawford who kept Marilyn well stocked in pills.

     At the age of thirty-six, she died on the morning of August 5, 1862 in her Brentwood home.  The coroner ruled it an accidental suicide, but the conspiracy theories have spun tales that the Kennedy’s, the Mafia, Jimmy Hoffa, or the CIA were involved in a murder and a coverup.  Her close friend Ted Jordan believed otherwise.  He said, “No one had to murder Marilyn Monroe, for she was intent on murdering herself.”  The champagne and pills had directed her life for ten years, and they finally took it.   

     Six years later on June 5, 1968, in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel, Sirhan Sirhan shot and killed Bobby Kennedy, about fifty feet from the pool where Norma Jean Baker had stood in her bathing suit before a camera in 1946.

     Another popular culture icon, actually does turn eighty-years-old today—Andy Griffith.  His career began in 1962, the same year that Marilyn Monroe’s ended.  His life was a steady and respected television presence, but hers was a Fourth of July firework that exploded with a bang, lit up the sky with color and design, and then was gone.  

THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION

by William H. Benson

May 18, 2006

     In 1966 Chairman Mao Zedong, the leader of the Communist Party in the China, was seventy-three, and he was still very dedicated to the task of seeing the revolution through in China during his lifetime.  So dedicated was he to socialism for socialism’s sake that he cared little about the practical consequences or the real-world human suffering that his theories and policies brought about.  The name for his new revolution, which began on May 18, 1966, was the Cultural Revolution.

     Chairman Mao told children and teenagers, those nine to eighteen, that it was acceptable to rebel against authority figures: their parents, teachers, bosses, village government bosses and even communist party officials.  Mao then dispensed armbands, and called them Red Guards.

     They responded to his urging.  They left school and took to the streets where they criticized anyone who dressed or acted like a foreigner, who was less than zealous for Communist ideals, or who had even a smattering of Western education.  Without students or teachers, the schools and colleges closed down.  Mao had tipped upside down China’s social structure, and anarchy erupted.

     Throughout that summer and fall of 1966, the Red Guards demonstrated in Tiananmen Square, shouting their praise for Mao, calling him “our great teacher, great leader, great supreme commander, and great helmsman.”  Each waved high their own little red copy of Quotations of Chairman Mao.  The largest rally was held in November of 1966 when more than 2.5 million attended.  The Revolution had deteriorated into a personality cult.

     “Bomb the headquarters,” and “learn revolution by making revolution,” he told his Red Guards, and they responded with violence.  They especially liked to burst into their former teachers’ homes in search of anything that could possibly prove them an enemy of Mao.  People who aroused the least suspicion were forced to endure a “struggle session” in which they were required to wear a dunce hat and endure verbal and physical abuse before large crowds of accusers.

     The Red Guards would expect their victim to stand in the “airplane” position, bent forward with their arms extended behind them.  Then, they would force them to bow down at the name of Mao.  One victim who refused to bow said, “What kind of Cultural Revolution is this?  There is nothing ‘cultural’ about it!  There is only brutality!”

     By the fall of 1966 Mao was shocked by the viciousness of the attacks upon the teachers and other authorities, but he did little to rein them in for three years.  After all, it was he who had said, “A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle.”

     And then Mao turned on the Red Guards.  In 1969 he sent millions of these former students, who had lashed out at others in blind obedience to him, to work on the farms, dealing with pigs and night soil.  There in the countryside they learned little but bitterness for Mao, who, they now believed, cared little now that he no longer needed them.

     In the spring of 1969, Mao officially ended his Cultural Revolution, but in reality some remnants of it continued until his passing in 1976.  Estimates of the number of victims of the Cultural Revolution now hover around a million, and of them tens of thousand did not survive.  Many simply chose suicide.  The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s grand social experiment, and it proved a colossal failure.

     Forty years now separate the Chinese people, some 1.2 billion, from the lunacy and madness that marked the beginning of Mao’s call for the students’ to revolt.  China has since clearly outgrown Mao whose mistakes are today recognized.  In the process of re-establishing their schools, they learned that respect for teachers and for education are necessary.  And now China today is an economic miracle, a beehive of activity.

     In the United States this is the season when teachers and school officials honor those students who have obeyed the rules, met the schools’ requirements, and now are graduating.  Fortunately, no one along the way suggested that they “learn revolution by making a revolution.”

FOUR DEAD IN OHIO

by William H. Benson

May 4, 2006

     On Thursday, April 30, 1970, President Richard Nixon announced that a massive American / South Vietnamese troop offensive was moving into Cambodia with intentions of inflicting damages upon the enemy, the North Vietnamese.  He said, “We take these actions not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.”

     These words were not what the war-weary public wanted to hear, and they were not believed.  The war was in its seventh year by then with no end in sight and already tens of thousands of American soldiers had been killed.  (Indeed, it would be another four years before America ended its tragic involvement in Southeast Asia.)

     To most Americans, Nixon’s decision was an escalation of a war that America could not ever win, and that it meant more deaths and casualties.

     The President was quite unprepared for the American public’s hostile reaction that emanated mainly from students at college campuses.  At Kent State in Kent, Ohio, close to Akron, Ohio, students on Friday, May 1, threw some rocks, broke some windows, and attempted to burn down the ROTC building.  Ohio’s governor, James Rhodes, sent in the National Guard.

     On Monday, the fourth of May, a school day, 96 guards marched down a hill to a field in the middle of several hundred student demonstrators.  The crowd was initially peaceful and quiet but with the advance of the guards, the students retreated.  Then, as the guards retreated back up the hill, the students followed and began to throw rocks at them.

     None of the students were armed, and none of the guards were in any immediate danger.  Then, when the guards were just within seconds of stepping around the corner of a building and thus would have been protected from any stone-throwing, certain of the Guardsman wheeled around and began shooting into the crowd of students.

     The reason behind this action was never determined.  Some said that a sniper had fired first, and others said that their lives were in danger—neither of which was proven true.

      In 13 seconds they fired 67 shots.  Thirteen students were hit, and of them 4 died: Allison Krause, Jeffrey Miller, Sandra Scheuer, and William Schroeder.  Some of the 13 hit were not even part of the demonstrators but were onlookers or were students passing on their way to class.  One of the students hit was 700 feet away from the guards.  The closet hit was 60 feet away.  None of the thirteen presented any threat to the guards.

     Because the investigation afterwards was botched, the prosecutors failed in their case to convict any of the guards.  The judge ruled that it was impossible to prove which of the guards shot which of the victims.  In the civil case $675,000 was divided 13 ways.

     President Nixon called the parents of only one of those four students because that student had been a member of the ROTC.  The phone never rang for the parents of the other three.  White House tapes later revealed that Nixon believed that the demonstrators were bums, that he felt that those wounded had it coming, and that he deliberately stalled the federal prosecution against the guards..  

     Over 4 million students protested the guards’ actions, and over 900 colleges and universities shut down, more than 500 of them for the rest of the semester.  It was the first national student strike.  Nixon was staggered by this hostile reaction, pushed to the point of physical and emotional collapse, and he withdrew his U.S. military invasion into Cambodia.  The White House soon looked like a besieged city when policemen and parked buses surrounded the President’s home.

     H.R. Haldeman later wrote, “Kent State, in May 1970, marked a turning point for Nixon, a beginning of his downhill slide toward Watergate.  None of us realized it then; we were all too busy trying to calm the national furor over the Cambodian invasion.”

     The Greek dramatist Euripides centuries ago wrote: “Again, where the people are absolute rulers of the land, they rejoice in having a reserve of youthful citizens, while a king counts this a hostile element and seeks to slay the leading ones, all such as he deems discreet, for he feareth for his power.”