Kathrene and Robert Pinkerton married in 1911. He worked at a newspaper in a big city: long hours, deadlines, and stress. A doctor advised him to “get out of newspaper offices and out of cities,” if he wanted to preserve his health. He decided he would write fiction—short stories—and sell them.

When single, Robert had worked as a logger and fur trader in Ottawa’s woods, that vast wilderness that stretched between Lake Superior and Hudson Bay. He and Kathrene decided that they would build a cabin in Canada’s wilderness, and he would write his stories there, a romantic but idealistic thought.

It was summer when the train dropped them off at the station’s platform, in Antikokan, Ottawa, “the only railroad stop in two hundred miles that had both store and post office.”

The town’s bartender told them, “Never heard of anyone but Indians living in the woods. But there’s no one to keep you folks from trying it.”

That summer they spent their days kneeling in a canoe and gliding across countless lakes and rivers, their nights camping out in a tent, and brushing aside the pesky house flies, deer flies, and mosquitoes.

Late in the summer they built a cabin eight miles from Antikokan, reached only by canoe in summer and traversing a series of frozen lakes and rivers in winter.

In the autobiographical book that Kathrene published in 1939, Wilderness Wife, she described their five years living in that log cabin. Robert gave up on fiction though, because his stories did not sell, and instead, he began to write stories of their interactions with bear, moose, skunks, wolves, dogs, cats.

First snow came in September, and another in October. Freeze-up occurred over three weeks in November, when the lake froze solid enough to support Robert and a sled that carried out the furs that Kathrene had trapped and the few supplies they could afford back to the cabin.

Winters in the Canadian woods last a full five months, until April. Webbed snow shoes and heavy coats were a constant necessity. During a “cold spell,” temperatures would plummet. In December, winter began to “settle in,” when they noticed the thermometer read thirty degrees below zero.

Kathrene wrote, “A deeper cold came in January and February, when the temperatures average ten to forty degrees below zero.

“I would discover that fifty-five below made thirty below seem quite comfortable. Even normal winter temperatures increased our work. Robert spent three afternoons in seven cutting trees in the forest or sawing them at the woodpile. We burned a cord a week in the cold spells.

“Air at low temperature is as dry as desert air, and as hungry for moisture. I noticed that at forty or fifty below zero the clothes were bone dry when I brought them in, and at twenty they were still damp.

“Inside the cabin we were comfortable although we kept the temperature of the room at fifty. A large part of the burden of winter weather is the contrast with a super-heated house.”

Robert’s articles began to sell, enough reimbursement to pay for the postage to mail them off, but as for food the couple took what the land offered. If they wanted, they could have fish at every meal.

In the summer, Kathrene had preserved raspberries and blueberries, grew potatoes, and stored the lot under the cabin’s floor. She learned to make sour dough bread. She sewed trousers, shirts, and parkas.

Robert shot a moose or two, cut it up into steaks and roasts, and kept the meat hanging outdoors, frozen solid. It was a self-sufficient life, yet there lurked a constant element of danger.

She wrote, that, “The threat of freezing cautioned every movement. Any accident or injury was dangerous for we had to keep on our feet and moving.”

Kathrene described the noise the cold produced. “Sap in the trees froze, and the expansion sounded like rifle fire. Ice in the lake was heavy artillery. It boomed and thundered in the cold still nights, and as the ice was split, it produced a loud whine that ended in a vicious snarl. That was an air raid.”

For companionship, they had each other, and a fiercely independent cat they named Bockitay, who had the misfortune of stepping into a trap, a proud dog they named Belle, and a rare visitor.

In April, the ice on the lakes and rivers would break up, and for three weeks they were isolated once again, until they dared bring out their canoes. Floating chunks of ice do not mix well with canoes.

Wilderness Wife reminds me a little of Robinson Crusoe. Both are outdoor adventure stories, of people who thrive in inhospitable environments. Yet, they are different. Robert and Kathrene Pinkerton chose to live in Ottawa’s woods, but Robinson Crusoe was forced to live on a Caribbean Island.

Still, Kathrene’s story is a good one. One reviewer wrote, “ It is a true story of this family, written by the wife as she chronicled her daily experiences in the wilderness.” I must agree.

Immigration is not for the faint of heart.

With high school diploma in hand, a young African from Ghana named Robert Kosi Tette came to the United States in 1998, leaving behind family, friends, and “a simple life of blissful innocence.”

Ten years later, he described his decade in America, in an article that appeared in the March 1, 2008 issue of Newsweek, that he entitled “An Immigrant’s Silent Struggle.”

In it, he said, “It was as though I had run ten consecutive marathons, one for each year abroad.

“I now hold a graduate degree, and have a successful professional career, but every inch of progress has been achieved through exhausting battles. My college education had been financed partly through working multiple minimum-wage jobs.

“I was fortunate to secure a job upon graduation, but I found myself putting in twice the effort just to keep up. I feigned assertiveness, after I learned I would not be taken seriously otherwise.

“I went to graduate school part time. I have spent a small fortune in legal fees and endured stressful years grappling with the complexities of securing permanent residency in America.

“My body screams for rest.”

I would expect that Robert Kosi Tette’s experiences are not unlike those of most serious immigrants to America. They arrive. They seek jobs. They struggle to speak English. They pursue the best college education. They are fueled by an ambition to own a part of the American dream, and they succeed.

A Russian immigrant, Vitaliy Katsenelson, marked his thirtieth anniversary in America, in an article that appeared in Barron’s, on December 27, 2021, entitled, “Capitalism’s Imperfect Promise.” He said,

“On December 4, 1991, my family landed at JFK, our stop on the way to Denver. I was eighteen. Denver was flat, sunny, and unusually warm. Days before we were freezing our bones in Moscow in negative 30 degree weather. It was 65 degrees in Denver.

“We were picked up at the airport by half a dozen strangers, members of my aunt’s synagogue. Six of us stood there, holding thirty duffle bags. These strangers had furnished an apartment to people they didn’t know! That was shocking to me.

“I had been brainwashed into believing that Americans—capitalist pigs—would sell their brothers to supersize their happy meals. I think it took me six months to understand spoken American English.

“Getting a job was difficult. I was rejected by fast food restaurants on multiple occasions. I found a job bussing tables at a restaurant on Friday and Saturday nights. Everything I earned, down to the last penny, including tips, I gave to my parents. This money went for food and rent.

“Once I went on a date with a girl to a Chinese restaurant. She ordered kung pao chicken. I ordered water. It was embarrassing. I had to postpone dating for a while.

“In Soviet Russia everyone was equally poor. My family lived from paycheck to paycheck. Going to a restaurant was a big event for us. Our understanding of money was very limited. We never had any.

“Those were difficult years, but I would not trade them for anything. Those years taught me to work harder than anyone else.”

Robert Kosi Tette and Vitaliy Katsenelson are just two examples of countless others, who found a way to migrate to America. Once here, they learned that to buy groceries at a local store, and avoid the shame of homelessness, they had to find a job, and then they had to work harder than others.

Each can now look back at their no small successes. All young and ambitious people dare to climb a difficult and dangerous mountain, and now and then they stop and stare back with pride at the vast distance that they have climbed. For immigrants without English skills, it is doubly difficult, or more.

There are those who call for “securing our borders,” a phrase that often means “shut the door and not allow in any other young, driven, intelligent, law-abiding person,” a sure prescription to starve the American economy of the men and women who will start and build the nation’s newest businesses.

Of those immigrant entrepreneurs, Vitaliy Katsenselson says, “At first these competitors are content with breadcrumbs, but eventually they eat your lunch and dinner.”

Capitalism is imperfect. It makes promises that sometimes remain unfulfilled, due to bad luck, or injury, or poor choices, or lack of sufficient work. But for the lucky few who strike out on their own in America and succeed, it offers immense rewards, for both owner and customer.

For Americans, immigration is always a work in progress. Not quite correct, imperfect, flawed, and yet, for some, necessary.

Roots, the television miniseries, aired over eight nights, from Sunday, January 23, through Sunday, January 30, in 1977, forty-five years ago. It proved wildly successful, despite ABC executives’ fears about showing white men kidnapping, buying, selling, and whipping black men, and women.

It made television history though. Some 30 million people watched it every night, although I missed the episodes, something I now regret, because I was busy studying in college.

Based loosely upon Alex Haley’s book of the same name that he published the year before, the miniseries followed the lives of four generations of enslaved African-Americans late in the eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries.

There was Kunta Kinte, a teenaged boy who was kidnapped in Gambia, Africa, and transported across the Atlantic on a brutal, smelly slave ship to Annapolis, Maryland; Kunta Kinte’s daughter Kizzy; Kizzy’s son, Chicken George; and Chicken George’s son, Tom Harvey.

The cast included dozens of well-known black actors and actresses: LeVar Burton, as Kunta Kinte, later young Toby; Louis Gossett, Jr., as Fiddler; Leslie Uggams, as Kizzy; Ben Vereen, as Chicken George Moore; and Cicely Tyson, as Binta. Even O. J. Simpson starred as an African, Kadi Touray.

Among the white cast members were: Lorne Greene, of Bonanza; Vic Morrow, of Combat; Edward Asner, of The Mary Tyler Moore Show; Lynda Day George, of Mission: Impossible; Chuck Connors, of The Rifleman; Ralph Waite, of The Waltons; and Robert Reed, of The Brady Bunch.

As for the book, Haley devoted twelve years of steady work before completing Roots: The Saga of a Family. The most difficult part—Kunta Kinte’s ordeal when handcuffed to a board on a slave ship—Haley wrote nights, when at sea, on a freighter.

The book sold millions, and made Haley rich and famous.

Yet, it is still a question today, as it was in 1976, “Where in a library or a bookstore would you find Roots, in fiction or non-fiction?” I would lean toward fiction, in that Roots resembles James Michener’s novels: for example, The Source, Hawaii, Texas, Alaska, and Tales of the South Pacific.

Like Michener, Haley created memorable characters, placed them in a certain time and place, and recorded what he believed they said and did.

A writer named Michael Patrick Hearn wrote a lead essay last month in The New York Times Book Review, and in he described his relationship with Alex Haley, when both were at Hamilton College in Clinton, New York, in the late 1960’s, Hearn as a student, and Haley as his instructor.

Hearn says that at some point during the writing, “Haley’s ‘nonfiction’ book became a novel, though both author and publisher insisted that it was the unadulterated truth.” Haley was convinced that in Kunta Kinte, he had found his African ancestor, albeit back several generations.

Hearn though is more matter-of-fact. He writes, “Haley was not a scholar. He was not a genealogist. He was not even a novelist. What he was was a professional journalist always on the lookout for a good story. And he never found a better one than that of his own family history.”

Hearn quips, “Haley was not a historian, but he made history.” In 1977, Pulitzer Prize officials awarded him a “special award and citation” for journalism.

After his fabulous success, Haley was drug into court twice in 1978, on charges of plagiarism.

Margaret Walker Alexander, director of black studies at Jackson State College in Mississippi, brought a case against Haley, arguing that there existed “similarities between Roots and her novel Jubilee, that re-counted the life of her great-grandmother from 1835, into the Reconstruction era.”

Judge Marvin Frankel disagreed. On September 21, 1978, he issued “a 15-page opinion,” and said, that “no actionable similarities exist between the works.”

Then, on December 14, 1978, Haley agreed to a settlement, after a six-week trial, with Harold Courlander, a prodigious author who had written and published in 1967 a similar novel, The African.

Courlander’s novel tells of, “a slave’s capture in Africa, his horrific experience as cargo on a ship, and his struggle to hold on to his native culture in a harsh new world.”

Courlander’s suit alleged that, “Without ‘The African,’ ‘Roots’ would have been a very different and less successful novel.” A literary expert testified that, “The evidence of copying from ‘The African’ in both the novel and the television dramatization of ‘Roots’ is clear and irrefutable.”

Haley insisted that, “he did not plagiarize, but he admitted that some sections of ‘Roots’ appeared to have originally appeared in ‘The African.’” The settlement Haley paid was for a reported $650,000.

Despite the two trials’ negative publicity, Haley’s Roots “described the brutalities that one race inflicted on another.” Alex Haley passed away on February 10, 1992, at the age of seventy.

January 6, 2021

Donald Trump lost the 2020 election on Nov. 3, 2020. Although some 74.2 million voters voted for him, 81.2 voted for Biden, a difference of over 7.0 million. Then, Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232. Despite those facts, Donald Trump vowed he would never concede.

Instead of acting as a gracious political contender who had lost an election, he acted otherwise.

Trump claimed that the election was stolen, that ineligible voters had mailed in ballots. He rallied his supporters with, “Stop the Steal!” and “This election was rigged!” He tried to throw out the votes and overturn the results, even begging an election official in Georgia to “find him the votes.”

Yet, Attorney General William Barr and officials in each of the 50 states found no evidence to support Trump’s claims. Attorney’s who brought to court accusations of voter fraud or of possible irregularities failed to produce a scintilla of evidence to support the allegations.

On Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021, a joint session of Congress met to count electoral votes that would verify President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. At the same time, Donald Trump spoke at a “Save America” rally on the Ellipse, the park south of the White House, west of the Capitol.

Thousands arrived to hear the President speak, to cheer him on, to nod in agreement to his baseless claims that he had won the election, and to insist that Congress overturn the 2020 election and give it to Trump. Near noon, he began his speech.

“We won in a landslide. This was a landslide. They said it’s not American to challenge the election. This is the most corrupt election in the history, maybe of the world.” “This is not just a matter of domestic politics. This is a matter of national security.”

“With your help over the last four years, we built the greatest political movement in the history of our country, and nobody ever challenges that.” “We must stop the steal, and then we must ensure that such outrageous election fraud never happens again, can never be allowed to happen again.”

“Together, we will drain the Washington swamp, and we will clean up the corruption on our nation’s capital.” “And we fight. We fight. And if you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Near his closing, he said, “So we’re going to, we’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue. I love Pennsylvania Avenue. And we’re going to the Capitol, and we’re going to try and give.”

Yet, he did not walk beside the crowd. Instead, he rode back to the White House, where he turned on a television and watched as the crowd of thousands—by then an angry mob—stormed into the Capitol, shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” This was an insurrection and a direct attack on democracy.

Because of that mob’s attack on the Capitol, five people lost their lives.

A Capitol Police officer shot and killed Ashli Babbitt, as she climbed through a broken window. Roseanne Boyland was crushed to death by her fellow rioters. A rioter named Kevin Greeson suffered a heart attack and died, and a rioter named Benjamin Philips suffered a stroke, and he also died.

Also, the rioters overpowered and beat a Capitol Police officer named Brian Sicknick, who suffered a severe gash to his head. Carried away to receive medical care, he nonetheless suffered two strokes the next day, and at the age of 42, he passed away, the most tragic outcome of this provoked melee.

People in a crowd will do and say things that they would hesitate to do or say when alone.

Days later, after the riot, the House impeached Donald Trump for “incitement of insurrection.” On Saturday, Feb. 13, 2021, the Senate voted 57 to 43 to convict Donald Trump, less than the two-thirds needed to convict, but by then he was no longer President.

Mitch McConnell spoke for 20 minutes to his fellow Senators on Saturday after the vote and said, “Former President Trump’s actions that preceded the riot were a disgraceful dereliction of duty.”

“The riot was unsurprising given the lies that Trump had fed to his supporters about the election being stolen.” He was “practically and morally responsible” for the insurrection.

“This was an intensifying crescendo of conspiracy theories orchestrated by an outgoing president who seemed determined to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.” This vote “does not condone anything that happened.”

Democracy is not a right. It is tenuous, here today and gone tomorrow. It demands protection, and the voters’ allegiance, plus a willingness to respect and obey laws, and to step aside when voters insist.

Yet, certain officials—those who thirst for power and then work to grip it forever once they have it—rely upon timeless tricks. For example, they can declare a national emergency, discard an election’s results, shove aside their opponents, and proclaim themselves all powerful.

May it not ever happen in America anytime soon.