THE OTHER SIDE OF 1492

by William H. Benson

October 12, 2002

     On January 1 and 2, 1492 the last of the Muslim officials abandoned Granada and chose permanent exile in North Africa.  All of what is now modern-day Spain was from then on ruled by the Monarchs–Queen Isabella of Castile and King Ferdinand of Aragon.  A sense of euphoria swept through the Iberian peninsula, for after seven centuries of Muslim rule on Iberian soil, the Moors had chosen to leave.  Christianity had triumphed.

     On March 31, 1492 Isabella and Ferdinand decreed that all of the Jews in Spain had three months in which to convert to Christianity or leave Spain.  Called the Edict of Expulsion, it affected some 80,000 practicing Jews.  About 40,000 chose to leave for Portugal, Italy, or North Africa, while the remainder converted and were thereafter called Conversos.

     Hated and accused of secretly practicing their Jewish faith, the Conversos received the full force of the Catholic Monarchs’ agency for discovering the truth–the Spanish Inquistion. The screams of the tortured resounded throughout the Chambers, where new and old methods of inflicting excruciating pain were used; execution was often a blessed relief.  The Inquisition executed more than 5000 Conversos, most in a state of confusion about what religion to believe.

     At the time, Christopher Columbus’s first voyage was almost a non-event.  (Of far greater importance was Vasco da Gama’s voyage around Africa and into the Indian Ocean.  This circumvented the longer and more arduous overland spice trade and was great news in Europe.)  Because Queen Isabella had little to lose, she agreed to finance the voyage, and on October 12, 1492 Columbus landed on a Caribbean Island.

     Over the last decade Columbus’s place in history has been downgraded.  His venture is not considered as innovative as was once believed.  His actions in the Indies remain open to question, especially his treatment of the islands’ natives.  However, he was a man filled with ambition, and aboard a ship he was a superb sailor.  And yet, he failed miserably as a colonial administrator.

     What is not so widely known is that he was also a religious fanatic.  Professor Teofilo Ruiz at UCLA has found that Columbus was motivated by an almost apocalyptic religious fervor.  He collected prophetic sayings, was deeply interested in apocalyptic writings, and may have seen himself and his voyages as ushering in a new age.  When he gazed on the delta of the Orinoco River, he believed that he had discovered the site of an earthly paradise.

     Columbus returned to Spain and presented to Queen Isabella some of the islands’ inhabitants plus some colorful tropical birds.  Isabella was less than impressed, but agreed to finance a second voyage.  And this was of more importance because Columbus took several ships with about 1500 men and set up a colony.

     What happened in the Caribbean is now considered “an ecological and human catastrophe”, for  the Castilians introduced institutions that allowed them to exploit the natives and secure their work in return for the promise of Christianity.  Within one generation, by 1510, disease and overwork virtually had exterminated the islands’ people.  The Spaniards repeated the pattern of conquest.  From the Caribbean they launched an invasion of the Aztecs in central Mexico and the Incas of South America.

     For the Muslims, the Jews, and the Catholic Christians of Spain in 1492, it was an intertwined history, marked by suspicion, animosity, violence, judicially-mandated torture and execution, an Edict of Expulsion, and a move toward a single pure and triumphant religious faith.  But for those natives standing before the Queen of Castile, as well as their families back on the islands, the future appeared bleak, if not ugly.  For they faced annihilation and a program of genocide. 

     The human record is not always one of inevitable progress working its way into a promising future.  More often than not, it is a record of human folly, of misguided actions with unwitting consequences, and of outright human devastation, at times religiously-motivated.  Consider the other side of 1492.   

WOODROW WILSON

by William H. Benson

September 26, 2002

     Woodrow Wilson wanted peace.  The Great War in Europe had claimed millions of lives, and it was Wilson’s dream to create a lasting peace, a world without war.  And so he offered Fourteen Points and proposed disarmament, self-determination, and his final point–a League of Nations, an international body that would eliminate war.

     In Paris, Wilson urged the winners of the war–the British, French, and Italians, to accept his Fourteen points, and they willingly agreed so long as they could then exact reparations from the defeated–the Germans and the Austrians, as well as blame them for the war.  Germany had no choice but sign the Treaty.

     In June of 1919 Woodrow Wilson returned to America and asked Congress to rubberstamp his Versailles Treaty.  When Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed concerns and came up with his own Fourteen Reservations, Wilson was incensed that anyone should question his ideas.

     When the Democrats in Congress suggested a compromise, Wilson shouted, “Never! Never!”

     Throughout his career as an educator at Princeton and as a politician, Woodrow Wilson was unbending, unyielding, uncompromising, unforgiving, and autocratic in his manners.  He aroused animosity when he would deliberately snub people.  Henry Cabot Lodge said, “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson.”

     Wilson took his case to the American people.  Beginning in August he traveled by rail some 8000 miles giving an hour-long speech everyday for twenty-two days.  At age 63 his health was not the best, but the strain of this schedule crushed him.  On September 25, following a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he collapsed and was rushed back to Washington where he suffered a stroke.

     He lay in a coma for weeks, and when he regained consciousness, he discovered that he was paralyzed on his left side, and incapable of continuing much of a fight with the Senate, other than to stonewall.  His wife, Edith, kept him secluded for the next eighteen months of his presidency.

     Three times the Versailles Treaty came up for a vote, and three times the Senate voted it down as well as the League of Nations.  Neither Congress nor the debilitated President would bend.

     The nations of the world eventually created the League but without the power and influence of the United States, it proved ineffectual, especially when confronted with the rise to power twenty years later in Germany of Adolf Hitler.  Indeed, it was the Versailles Treaty that Hitler so hated and was so determined to undo, and around which he rallied the Germans to take up arms.

     In 1919 the Democratic President wanted peace.  Today the Republican President wants war.  In 1919 the President believed in the power of an international organization to enforce the peace.  Two weeks ago the President stood before the United Nations and listed all of the resolutions that Saddam Hussein has failed to abide by; in so doing, Bush drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the United Nations.

     In 1919 the Republican-controlled Congress wanted no part of a League of Nations and trusted solely in Congressional sovereignty.  But today the Democratic-controlled Congress must also consider itself as the most prominent member of the United Nations.

     In 1919 Congress refused to accept its rightful position as a world leader and involve itself in another nation’s affairs.  Today the world’s nations watch warily as the President threatens Saddam Hussein and promises to set things right in Iraq.  In less than a century the roles reversed.

     The key question asked in 1919 as well as today is:  “What kind of a relationship should the United States–the most powerful nation on the globe–have with the United Nations?”  In 1919 the answer was “None!”  In 1945 following World War II, the answer was “congenial and collegial”.  But today the answer that the Bush administration is promoting is “go-it-alone” and not wait upon mulitlateral agreement.  Some see danger in this approach.  Others see the threat of annihilation as reason enough to go to war.  The answer to that key question is being rehashed and rethought and reworked today–for the better or for the worse.

CASUALTIES OF WAR

by William H. Benson

September 12, 2002

     On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese airforce attacked and bombed the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2403 Americans, wounding another 1178, and destroying 169 aircraft and at least 3 battleships.

     Sixty years later, on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001 (9-11), terrorists in a suicide mission flew commercial jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some 2800 people in New York City and another 233 in Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania.

     Both Pearl Harbor and 9-11 were heartbreaking and gut-wrenching events, but both tragedies were dwarfed in terms of bloodshed and lives lost by what happened in each of dozens of pitched battles on American soil during the Civil War.

     For example, at Sharpsburg, Maryland on Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862, 140 years ago next week, North and South soldiers fought until 23,000 men lay dead–the single bloodiest day in the history of our nation.

     And then at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania, soldiers from both sides were sucked into a kind of mindless savagery that went on all evening until past 2:00 a.m.

     “In a small space along the breastworks of Confederate trenches, in the pouring rain, the two sides had fought hand to hand continuously for eighteen hours in a kind of blood frenzy.  Men thrust bayonets through the logs or jumped onto the barricade and fired into the mass of soldiers below until they were themselves shot down.”

     The next day a young Union soldier named Oliver Wendell Holmes rode to the spot and wrote down what he saw.  “In the corner of woods referred to yesterday the dead of both sides lay piled in the trenches 5 or 6 deep–wounded often writhing under superincumbent dead.”

     And then there was Gettysburg, the two Bull Runs, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, and the Wilderness, Sherman’s March to the Sea, the burning of Richmond, and on and on.  Imagine Pearl Harbor or 9-11 every other week for four years.  And the enemy was ourselves, our neighboring states.  It was as if two cyclones had started spinning but in opposite directions, each convinced that the other was wrong, and when they touched, the consequences were deadly.

     The survivors looked for someone to blame, and for many thinking Americans after 1865, it was people like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, and other abolitionists who were considered responsible for the war and for the disaster called Reconstruction.

     The historian Louis Menand wrote, “The abolitionists had driven a wedge into America, and they did it because they had become infatuated with a single idea.  They had marched the nation to the brink of self-destruction in the nature of an abstraction.”  And yes, the abstraction was right.

     But the abolitionists had bypassed rational thinking.  They had dismissed the nation’s system of law by which civilized change can occur.  They had forced the South into a defensive posture.  They had refused to wait upon progress but had hotly insisted upon immediate and dramatic action.  They had refused to concede that other options exist other than strident talk of war.

     For Oliver Wendell Holmes, who witnessed the ghastly horrors of the war, abolitionism came to stand in his mind as a kind of superior certitude that drives men to kill one another.

      Today the “superior certitude” alive in the world is “fundamentalism”.  In Time last week the Egyptian Ali Salem wrote, “A long time before New York City’s Twin Towers were destroyed, many towers in my country were brought down by this same brand of perpetrators.  They killed President Anwar Sadat, who initiated peace with Israel and liberalism in Egypt; . . . They have committed all these crimes with the purpose of establishing the kindgom of God on earth and have succeeded only in turning our lives into hell.”

     Do we attack Iraq or not?  More rumors of war.  We would be wiser and better not to even allow the question to be forced upon us.  Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded much later in his life that when confronted with divisive issues,  it is often not a matter of choosing sides.  Instead, it is a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.

     A final quote.  Bertrand Russell said, “Occasionally we should hang a question mark on all of our most cherished beliefs.” 

READING

by William H. Benson

August 29, 2002

     Last week the columnist Thomas Sowell in two columns pointed out what he considers the obvious failings of America’s schools: that American students repeatedly place at or near the bottom on international tests, that too much time is spent on all sorts of non-academic projects, that the teachers’ union is utterly opposed at having to “teach to the test”, and that the teachers themselves do not know the material which is being tested and therefore cannot teach.

     Sowell’s arguments are similar to the ones that intellectuals have rehashed for several decades now.  To listen to Sowell, one would conclude that our schools are deplorable institutions, incapable of educating anyone, and that students are being badly served.  To all of these charges, I would not completely agree. 

     Instead, I would argue that the teachers in America, especially in the early grades, are our nation’s true champions, for they perform each year a miracle; they teach students to read–which is one generation’s gift to the next, a passing of the torch of civilization.

     Few things have been as beneficial or as rewarding to me personally, as well as to countless other Americans, as that ability to read.  Should I have grown up under other unsavory circumstances–without an alphabet, books, and language, I would have been most miserable.  Indeed, I would have made a very frustrated Neanderthal.

     For a child to learn to read on their own, without any help, happens only in fiction, such as Frankenstein’s creature and Tarzan.  As a boy Tarzan happened to find his dead parents’ cabin in the jungle, and inside he found their books.  Amazingly enough, from them and without any help, he learned the English alphabet and then began to read books.

     Frankenstein’s creature, stumbling alone in a forest and friendless, happened upon an abandoned knapsack, and inside he found three books–Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, and Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.

     Of this find the creature said, “The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.”

     Of course, the probability of Tarzan or Frankenstein’s creature learning to read without assistance is as remote from happening as were the circumstances of their upbringing or creation.

     In addition, something that Thomas Sowell did not admit in his column is that the rest of the world recognizes that our nation’s colleges and universities are some of the best in the world, in fact the best in the history of the world.  These shining examples of academic achievement have exceedingly high standards that American students somehow are capable of achieving.  Surely, the teachers in K through 12 are doing at the very least a few things right.

     The best and brightest of the foreign students want to study in America, and not just at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, John Hopkins, and Chicago, but also at the state’s colleges, and the junior colleges, and the local community colleges.  These foreigners know something that Americans are apt to forget–that education in America, although not inexpensive, is readily available, and offers to anyone a path to a much better future.

     Finally, about one thing Sowell said, I would agree.  Teaching material in order to pass a comprehensive and a standardized examination, even in the early grades, is not necessarily wrong, but is truly a proper course.  Later as young adults students will be expected to pass the bar or the CPA exam or a doctoral examination should they want to enter those professions, and their instructors are constantly “teaching the tests.”  Young students should face plenty of exams.

     And somehow in the midsts of lectures, homework, schedules, and those exams, students may find the time and the encouragement to spend some time every day alone with a quality book.      

     Walt Disney said, “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island . . . and best of all, you can enjoy these riches everday of your life.”  Have a great school year.

WOODSTOCK

by William H. Benson

August 15, 2002

     On the weekend of August 15-18, 1969 Max Yasgur’s 37-acre alfalfa field near Bethel, New York in the Catskills was converted into the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.  The town of Woodstock, New York had refused just weeks before the weekend to grant permission for the festival to be held on their premises.  And so the crowd streamed onto a hay field instead, some fifty-five miles away from Woodstock, swelling to an estimated 450,000 people, ten times that expected–mostly young, white, middle-class, and reasonably well-behaved.

     A twenty-mile traffic jam along Highway 17B forced people to abandon their cars and swarm through Bethel to the farm. The crowd eventually bumped up against the fences until the fences gave way, and then the ticket takers (six dollars for an advance ticket) were forced to give up.  So the crowd poured in, pitched tents, and settled in.  For as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but young people “walking, lying down, drinking, eating, reading, singing.”

     The police gave up trying to enforce the laws, especially those against drug use, and the audience, realizing this, seemed to relax, caused little trouble, and adopted their own rules of behavior, language, and costumes.  They swam in Max Yasgur’s lake, waded in his marshes, and some even helped milk his cows.  This counter-culture first promoted by hippies, flower children and other assorted oddballs had blossomed at least for a weekend at Woodstock into something new, what Abbie Hoffman later called “the Woodstock Nation.”

     But then problems accumulated.  Torrential rains turned the alfalfa field into a quagmire of mud.  Food, water, and toilet facilities proved inadequate.  Mounds of garbage piled up.  Bad drug reactions marred the otherwise peaceful festival. Three people died that weekend, but as an offset two babies were born.  Eventually, helicopters delivered water, food, and medicine to a crowd, estimated as big as Charlotte, North Carolina or Cleveland, Ohio were then.

     And then there was the music–the reason they had all gathered.  Striding across the stage that weekend included some of the top performers in 1969:  Santana; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Blood, Sweat and Tears; Sly and the Family Stone; Joe Crocker; the Who’s Who; Jefferson Airplane; Jimi Hendrix; the Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Credence Clearwater Revival; the Band; and Janis Joplin.

     Missing were the obvious–such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin, who all chose for their own reasons not to attend.

     The Woodstock Nation’s demand to end the war in Vietnam finally came to fruition two years later, but the call for promoting drug use fell on deaf ears.  The Establishment just said “No!”, and has continued to say “No!” ever since, solidifying its position and rightfully so.

     For on September 18, 1970 Jimi Hendrix died in London of a drug overdose, and sixteen days later Janis Joplin was found dead in a Los Angeles motel room, a supply of heroin nearby.  The evidence remains overwhelming that no matter how pleasurable, drugs destroy lives.

     Today, thousands claim that Woodstock gave them a “totally different outlook on life.”  It was “three days of peace and music”, a “total experience”, a “happening”, “days and nights of heady music”, music that had a hard edge, an anti-war posture, with calls for peace, and laced with disguised messages about drug use.  Woodstock had converted Max Yasgur’s farm into the land of H. G. Wells’s “lotus eaters”, bonded by rock music, drugs, brotherhood, and defiance of the Establishment.

     One author put it this way.  “To be part of it was to feel the delirious siege mentality that reigned among the 450,000 utopians who were determined to show that the counter-culture could come together in their own alternative world without cops, guns, Nixon, or napalm. . . . When it was over, the myth of victory was triumphant. . . . Woodstock Nation came to symbolize youth’s righteous crusade to change the world, and the most militant kind of love.”