JOHN ADAMS
by William H. Benson
July 4, 2001

     Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson died on the same day, July 4, 1826, exactly fifty years to the day after the 2nd Continental Congress had voted for Independence for the thirteen colonies.  Despite this coincidence, the two men were opposites. 

     Adams was short and chunky, talkative, combative, prone to fits of extreme anger, and a New Englander.  Jefferson was a tall and thin Virginian, who rarely spoke in public and who hated confrontation, more of a bookish intellectual.  Despite their differences, their lives were interwoven in the creation and government of the new country.

     Historians have usually regarded Jefferson more favorably than Adams, (even though Fawn Brodie explored Jefferson’s private life in The Intimate Thomas Jefferson).  After all, he wrote the Declaration of Independence, served effectively well as President for eight years, swung the Louisiana Purchase deal with France, and sent Lewis & Clark off on a very successful expedition.  Adams’s accomplishments seem to hold lesser appeal.

     Recently, however, historians have upgraded Adams’s reputation and lowered Jefferson’s.  Joseph J. Ellis in a recent book, Founding Brothers, made no secret of his partiality to Adams.  And now David McCullough just published a new biography on John Adams, and he concluded that he likes and approves of Adams over Jefferson.

     McCullough pointed out that Jefferson himself regarded Adams as “the colossus of independence”, and that he was the delegate most responsible for pushing independence through the Continental Congress.  Adams did the hard work; he delivered the votes.  If he had not done so, Jefferson’s document would never have been.  And the Louisiana Purchase came about because of peace with France, something Adams had achieved through personal negotiation and outstanding statesmenship.

     Adams served as Washington’s Vice-President for eight years, and then as the nation’s second President for four years.  He was not a popular President, and was then beaten in 1800 in his bid for re-election by Thomas Jefferson.

     Jefferson’s wife died early in their marriage while delivering a child, and he never remarried. Adams married well when he married Abigail Smith.  They both possessed a powerful sense of public duty, which they fulfilled despite great financial and emotional sacrifice.  For years they lived miserably apart while John carried on his work.  Nevertheless, they wrote often and tenderly, an extraordinary love story.  From France, he wrote to her, “I must go to you, or you must come to me; I cannot live without you.”

     Abigail managed his home and their finances in Massachusetts.  She supported him, and he turned to her for advice.  Their letters indicate that they held immense affection for each other, even though her parents felt that she had married beneath herself.  Still, she loved this chunky New Englander who never failed for words.

     Benjamin Franklin once described Adams as “sometimes and in some things, absolutely out of his senses.”  His enemies were less kind when they suggested he was “actually insane”.  His episodes of anger shocked and intimidated the faint of heart whom he confronted privately.     

     Nevertheless, he served his new country well–whenever he could.  McCullough wrote, “Never once did Adams refuse a mission for his country because of difficulties or unseasonable conditions, or something else that he would have preferred to do.”

     John Adams left behind an estate worth about $100,000.  Jefferson left behind an estate $100,000 in debt, and immediately after his passing, Monticello and all the other assets had to be sold, at a fraction of what they had cost him.

     Adams or Jefferson?  Equipped with vastly different personalities, they forged ahead, and together these two “founding brothers” created a new nation.

CUSTER AT THE LITTLE BIG HORN
by William H. Benson
June 25, 2001

     What Custer did not know was that the village of Native Americans–Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho–had swelled in just a week’s time from 3000 to 7000 people, from 800 to at least 2000 fighting warriors.  Strung in a three-mile stretch on the west side of the Little Big Horn stood perhaps 1000 lodges.  Because buffalo were plentiful in that area, the tribes had sufficient food.

     Shortly after noon on June 25, 1876, Custer divided his command of 566 men into three units: Captain Frederick Benteen with 125 men, Major Marcus Reno with 140 men, and Custer himself with 225 men.  Custer ordered Benteen south until he came to the Little Big Horn and then turn north and follow the ridges.  Custer then ordered Reno to cross the river and attack the village coming in from the south.  Meanwhile, Custer would head due north protected from sight by the ridges and then sweep into village coming in from the east.

     As the plan worked out, it was not a good one.  It divided Custer’s men when they should have remained together, backing each other up.

     Reno had never fought Native Americans before, but he soon was alarmed at the rush of enemies pounding at him in growing numbers.  He looked back for support from either Custer or Benteen and found none.  He held up his hand and ordered his troops to dismount and take a defensive position.  Two retreats later, Reno with only half his men by then found themselves high up on a bluff, pinned down.  Fortunately, for Reno Benteen found the attacked men, and together they held off the warriors that day.

     Neither Reno nor Benteen knew where Custer was late that afternoon.  They heard gunfire coming from the north, but did not know what was happening.

     Like Reno, Custer intended on attacking as planned, but then when he realized he was outnumbered, he took a defensive position even before he and his men had a chance to cross the river.  Up on Battle Ridge, Custer and his men stood while waves of warriors beat against them.  Soon those warriors were reinforced by the warriors who had given up attacking Reno.  Chief Two Moons, Crazy Horse, and Chief Gall led those attacks on Custer.

     Because there were no survivors among Custer’s men, no one is quite certain how the battle proceeded.  The Lakota Sioux Black Elk said, “There were so many of us that I think we did not need guns.  Just the hoofs would have been enough.”  A Sioux woman later recalled, “The Indians acted just like they were driving buffalo to a good place where they could be easily slaughtered.”

     We do know that the harrassed men finally shot their horses and used them as protective barriers.  There Custer and his men stood until all were killed or wounded, over 200 men in a little over two hours.  By 5:30 p.m. the warriors swarmed in and killed the wounded, and the women and children worked their way up through the ravines to rob the bodies.

     But there was no victory dance in the village that night because the tribes had lost warriors too.  Many suffered wounds.  Sitting Bull is reported to have said, “My heart is full of sorrow that so many were killed on each side, but when they compel us to fight, we must fight.”

     Early the next day, the 26th, the Indians kept up the attack on Reno and Benteen.  Driven wild with thirst, the soldiers at one point that morning attacked, allowing others to sneak down to the river for water.  But by noon the warriors gave up.  Sitting Bull and the other chiefs had decided to leave.  They dismantled the lodges and headed out of the valley bound for the Big Horn Mountains.  By 7:00 p.m. the valley was deserted.

     The next day, the 27th, Reno and Benteen heard the news that Custer and his men were wiped out and neither could believe it, until they rode north and saw the bodies.

     Custer’s Last Stand is truly the most overworked event in American history and from it, we can conclude that Custer and his troops lost that day because the Sioux and the Cheyenne outnumbered the soldiers three to one, because their families were in immediate danger, and because they were united, sure of themselves, and angry.

ANNE FRANK

by William H. Benson

June 6, 1944

     In his recent book The O’Reilly Factor Bill O’Reilly wrote that the mean-spirited and truly evil- minded people of the world have a run of power, but only for so long, and then they are over powered.  For example, he wrote that Hitler had about a dozen years.  He and others of his kind have the ability to create terrifying conditions for the innocent, but only for a season.  And yet, even within the harshest climates, flowers occasionally do bloom.

      Anne Frank, a Jewish teenager, living in Holland wrote a diary which she began on June 12, 1942 and ended on August 1, 1944.  She wrote about the trials of hiding in what she called “the secret annex” with seven others while the German Nazis controlled Holland.  Like many others, I watched the recent television miniseries on Anne Frank along with my wife and two daughters.

     Almost immediately my daughters asked the question.  “Why did Hitler hate the Jews?”  I wonder if there is even an answer to the question.  How do you explain irrational hatred–racism and facism, an adult thing, to a child?  Even Anne Frank struggled with the question.  At one point in the miniseries she asked an older lady, “Is it something that we have done wrong?”

     On the morning of August 4, 1944 between 10:00 and 10:30 a.m. a car pulled up to 263 Prinsengracht, and the SS sergeant Karl Josef Silberbauer with at least three members of the Dutch Security Police entered the secret annex.  They demanded all their valuables and cash and then arrested them.  The eight were sent to Westerbork, a transit camp for Jews in the north of Holland, and then on September 3, 1944 they were deported on the last train to leave Westerbork and arrived three days later in Auschwitz, Poland.

     Anne’s sister–Margot, her mother–Edith, and Anne were transported from Auschwitz at the end of October to Bergen-Belsen, a camp near Hannover, Germany.  On January 6, 1945 Anne’s mother died of exhaustion and hunger.

     The typhus epidemic that broke out in the winter of 1944-1945, as a result of the horrendous hygienic conditions, killed thousands of prisoners, including Margot and a few days later Anne.  She died in late February or early March of 1945, and her body was probably buried in a mass grave at Bergen-Belsen.  The British liberated the camp six weeks later on April 12, 1945, and Hitler committed suicide on April 30th.  Seven days later Germany surrendered.

     Anne’s father, Otto Frank, was the only one of the eight to survive.  He went back to Holland to their secret annex and found Anne’s diary and had it published. 

     The diary ends with this final entry.  “A voice within me is sobbing, ‘You see, that’s what’s become of you.  You’re surrounded by negative opinions, dismayed looks and mocking faces, people who dislike you, and all because you don’t listen to the advice of your own better half.’ . . . because when everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.”  

     June 6, 1944.  D-Day is now synonymous with righting wrongs, with a change in the tide of affairs, and a correcting swing of the pendelum.  Those who play a game of murder, theft, destruction, lying, cheating, and hate create shabby foundations upon which a nation or a people can build.  Their construction timber is full of holes, termite-eaten, and a D-Day eventually comes around to knock the whole thing over.

     Voltaire, the father of the French Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, signed all his correspondence with “Ecrasez l’infame”, which means “Crush the infamy”.  What he meant by that was to join him in a war against religious intolerance, for he believed that true religion is a source of peace.  Intoleration of others because of their religious beliefs, he argued, is a source of great evil in the world.  It was Voltaire who transformed “intolerance” into a vice and “toleration” into a virtue.  Let others believe as they want to believe, he urged.

     Eight people hid in a secret annex for over two years, all were arrested, seven died, and only one lived.  They had broken a law that declared that all Jewish people were enemies of the state.  “Intolerance” had become a national policy–but only for a dozen years.    

GRADUATION

by William H. Benson

May 24, 2001

     On May 26, 1954 archaeologists digging in the sand next to Cheops’s Great Pyramid at Giza discovered a pit carved into the bedrock and covered with blocks of stone.  Once inside, the Egyptianologists found a boat made of cedars from Lebanon that was broken down into pieces.  Reconstructed it measured 150 feet long and probably conveyed Cheops’s body from the east to the west bank of the Nile for burial–only some four thousand years ago.

     Stay with me while we now switch gears.  Graduation season is upon us, and with it the national columnists are voicing their opinions on the state of education in America.  Thomas Sowell last week commented that everybody eventually drops out of the educational system at some point, some sooner than others.  He points out that even the Ph.D.’s drop out–either before or after completing their work, and many who do drop out often return to school later.  In the U.S. education is always available and is achievable. 

     Charley Reese, on the other hand is very much down on what he calls the “government-funded and government-controlled” secular system which produces what he sees is a flawed product.  He suggests that parents should pull their children out of public schools and place them in private schools.  It is his opinion–right or wrong.

     But what else can today’s high school graduate take with them to the university?

     I recently read a quote about Irving Berlin and his philosophy of life.  He saw life as composed of a few basic elements: life and death, loneliness and love, hope and defeat–not many more.  With those as givens, he realized that approval is better than complaint, hope more viable than despair, and kindness nobler than cruelty.

     Applying that to the high school graduate, I would suggest that college is not a place where the complainers, the despairing, and the cruel belong, but it is a place for the thoughtful, the approving, the hopeful, and the kind-hearted.  With just a medium measure of brain-power and gigantic doses of determination and hustle, a person can achieve remarkable success at the university, if one learns to quickly put aside the loneliness and defeated attitudes that can cripple even the smartest.

     Above all, a measure of enthusiasm is required.  Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”  Beware.  In this dumbing down America we live in, a four-year degree is still something we must label “great”.  Emerson would have agreed.

     Now what does education have to do with a buried boat in the Sahara?  I think it addresses the other big problem that college students endure and that is “envy”.  Not everyone goes to college.  Instead, they get jobs, make money, get married, start a family, buy a house with furniture to fill it, perhaps a farm, a business, a car, a pickup, and a boat, and none of those things are wrong.  They want to build a pyramid–gigantic, colossal, grand, rock-solid, powerful, stretching into the sky.

     Now how can the college student compete with that?  He or she is buried in a bedrock of books, term-papers, reports, lectures, and class notes, usually poor without much income and a lot of expenses.  He or she faces a tough slog.  Locked in a self-imposed tomb, stuck in the sand, while beside them stands a pyramid.  But eventually graduation day arrives, (and it may feel like four thousand years instead of four), and the college graduate sails away.

     The difficulty with the pyramid is that no one can move it.  It faces a lot of weather, a blistering hot sun, and pirates gut it of its internal treasures.  Above all else, it cannot float.  There it  stands–forever.  The fancy economic phrase for this is “delayed gratification”.

     Another thing not to be slighted.  A college student has a chance to meet the wild and crazy, the witty, the intelligent, the determined, the grand, and the truly outstanding.  They are all there.  Why would anyone pass up the chance to meet them?

     A farmer entered his mule in the Kentucky Derby.  When asked if he thought his mule had much of a chance of winning, he replied, “No, but I feel the association will do him good.”

     Despite a recent scandalous admission, Jessie Jackson used to say something of importance to his audiences, “If you’re in school, stay there.  If you’re not in school, go back.”

IMPEACHMENT

by William H. Benson

May 10, 2001

     Just weeks after gaining the Vice-Presidency, Andrew Johnson moved into the White House and the Oval Office after John Wilkes Booth had done his damage in Ford’s Theatre.  The new President sought to carry out Lincoln’s generous policy toward the Southern states but without Lincoln’s political skill.  The Radical Republicans in Congress wanted revenge and treated the Southern states as conquered territories, rather than as fellow states in the Union.

     A hopeless conflict ensued.  Congress would pass vindictive legislation.  President Johnson would then veto it, and Congress would then try to override his vetoes.

     John F. Kennedy told the story of the showdown in his book, Profiles in Courage.  Johnson fired Edwin Stanton, the Secretary of War and a fierce Radical Republican bent on punishing the defeated South.  In firing Stanton, Johnson openly defied and, in fact, broke the Tenure of Office Act.  The House refused to accept Stanton’s firing and voted for impeachment.

     Out of the total 54 votes in the Senate, 36 were needed for the 2/3’s vote to remove Johnson from the Oval Office.  On May 16, 1868 the final vote came in at 35 for impeachment, one vote short of the necessary.  Seven Republicans, including Edmund G. Ross from Kansas, voted their conscience and refused to allow partisan politics to determine their vote.  Ross later said that he voted as he did because he feared a Congressional autocracy. 

     He later wrote, “I almost literally looked down into my open grave.”  As it turned out, he did commit political suicide.  His career in Washington ended, and back in Kansas he and his family suffered social ostracism, physical attack, and poverty.

     Of Congress’s 35 attempts at impeachment, only 16 have actually happened, and of those, only 9 have gone to trial.  Two of those were for Presidents–Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.  Another President, Richard Nixon, chose to resign on August 9, 1974 after the House Judiciary Committee issued 3 Articles of Impeachment.  Nixon well understood that the Senate had the necessary 2/3’s votes to give him the boot.

     Two years have passed since the last impeachment trial–that for Bill Clinton, indicted on two charges of perjury and obstruction of justice.  When pressed for a resignation, Clinton responded curtly, “Never.”  Because the Senate did not have the 2/3’s vote, the acquittal came on February 12, 1999.

     Recently, I read Bill O’Reilly’s book, The O’Reilly factor.  Outspoken, abrasive, opinionated, and blunt, he wrote of Clinton, “What a ridiculous waste!  Full of promise, intelligence, and charisma, this man will go down in history alongside Warren Harding and Richard Nixon as the most corrupt presidents of the twentieth century.

     “The much-publicized affair with Monica Lewinsky was trivial (except to Hillary and Chelsea).  What was not trivial was his lying about the whole thing, which paralyzed the nation’s executive and legislative branches for more than a year.  This man did tremendous damage to our country.

     “We Americans have the right to expect honest, disciplined leadership.  And we also deserve a leader who adheres to a decent standard of behavior within the walls of the White House.”

     Now some would conclude that O’Reilly overstated his disgust of Clinton’s sorry behavior, but others would not.  Loved by his friends and hated by his enemies, he remains today what he always has been–an enigma. 

     Andrew Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton–different times, different reasons, different facts, and different cases, and yet, the law is there.  Its gears turn slowly, but the machinery works.  The Constitution spells it out, defining impeachable offenses as those considered “high crimes and misdemeanors”.  The faces change, but the law remains steadfast, clearly what the Founding Fathers wanted and created.