The Point of Decision

by William H. Benson

July 12, 2018

     In the harsh winter of 1836-1837, the New York City editor Horace Greeley wondered about how the city might rescue the homeless, and the destitute. In his newspaper, Greeley encouraged them to flee the city, to migrate west, and perhaps they might find freedom and opportunity there.

     Greeley said, ”Fly, scatter through the country, go to the Great West, anything rather than remain here. The west is the true destiny. Go to the West; there your capabilities are sure to be appreciated, and your energy and industry rewarded.”

     On July 13, 1865, in the days after the Civil War’s bloodbath had concluded, Greeley said the same thing in a phrase he popularized, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country!” 

     Was Greeley’s advice wise? One wonders how many young American men and women’s lives were altered, for good or for bad, because they chose to heed his advice? How far west did they go? To the next county west of their parent’s county in Pennsylvania? Or as far west as Ohio, Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, or Oregon? Or possibly to Hawaii or Alaska?

     In 1981, the English rock band, Clash, wrote and first performed a now classic rock and roll song, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” The catchy tune includes lyrics about a man or a woman, who confronts a decision, whether to stay at home, or to move away. To say, “no,” or to say “yes.”

     The Clash’s question is one that most young people face, more so than Hamlet’s “To be or not to be.” Young people wonder whether to stay at home, or to try their luck and talent at a college in another town or city; or whether to stay on the farm, or move to the city to find a job and buy a home. 

     The decision is not always easy. It includes a young person’s hope to seek opportunity, Jefferson’s so-called “the pursuit of happiness.” It also includes a separation from the family’s comfort and security. Some choose to move west, or even east, but then return home.

     In 1947, then eighteen-year-old Warren Buffet left his home in Omaha to attend college in the east, in Philadelphia, at the Wharton School, at the University of Pennsylvania, but after two years he came back home to the University of Nebraska. For graduate school, he attended Columbia in New York City, but then after all that education, he returned to his native Omaha, where he felt more comfortable.

    A favorite Warren Buffet quote is, “The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say ‘No!’ to almost everything.” To the question, “Should I Stay or Should I Go,” he would answer 99 times out of 100, “Stay. Do not try anything foolish. When presented with a decision, say ‘No!’ almost all the time.” Not what Horace Greeley recommended. 

     The move from rural to urban continues to unfold in our lives. Young people in eastern Colorado migrate west to Denver, Colorado Springs, Fort Collins, or Greeley. Young people in western Nebraska move east to Kearney, Grand Island, Hastings, Lincoln, or Omaha. A long-time Nebraska resident explained that Deuel County exports two things, wheat and kids. Most leave and do not return. 

     Life is never easy, though, wherever a person lives. The city includes daily doses of heavy traffic, pollution, crime, and a feeling of alienation. Rural life means the farm, the fickleness of commodity markets, and less-than-adequate-paying jobs. There is both good and bad on the farm and in the city.

     When fifteen, Alexander Hamilton left his home in the British West Indies, and sailed north, in order to attend King’s College, now Columbia, in New York City. He stayed in the city.

     Years later, Hamilton’s political rival, Aaron Burr, challenged him to a dual, and he chose to go. He and his assistant rowed west across the Hudson River, to Weehawken, New Jersey, and there on the morning of July 11, 1804, Aaron Burr shot Hamilton in the abdomen. He died the next day. 

     Looking back at Hamilton’s decision, historians have concluded that he should have forgotten about pride and honor, and stayed in the city that day, or he should rowed his boat east, across the East River.

     As for Horace Greeley, he failed to follow his own advice. He stayed in New York City all of his life, except for a single trip west in 1859, on a stagecoach. He saw Kansas, Denver, and then on the Overland Trail he traveled to Salt Lake City, and to California, but then he returned to New York City. He had no interest in staying in the west.

     Should I stay, or should I go? That is the question.

John Wayles, Thomas Jefferson, and Sally Hemings

by William H. Benson

June 28, 2018

John Wayles was born in Lancaster, England, in 1715. When a teenager, he sailed to Virginia, and there he acquired vast landholdings, over a hundred slaves, and enormous debts. By his first wife, Martha Eppes, he had a daughter, also named Martha, who in 1772, married Thomas Jefferson. 

After John Wayles buried his first wife Martha in 1748, he married Tabitha Cocke, who produced three daughters, before she too passed away. John’s third wife, Elizabeth Skelton, died barren.

John then took a concubine, a slave named Elizabeth Hemings, and a biracial woman. Her father was an English sea captain named Hemings, and her mother was an African woman. By John Wayles, Betty produced six children: Robert, James, Peter, Critta, Sally, and Thenia, each born into slavery, although each were 3/4’s white.

Thomas and Martha Jefferson were married for ten years, from 1772 until 1782, and during that decade, Martha gave birth to five daughters and a son, but only two of her daughters, Patsy and Jane, lived to adulthood. When Martha died, Jefferson suffered “many a violent burst of grief.”

Before she died, she made Thomas promise that he would never marry again, and he never did.

Most historians now agree that Thomas then took a concubine, Sally Hemings, John Wayles’s daughter by Betty Hemings. Jefferson’s wife Martha, and Sally Hemings, were half-sisters. They shared the same father, John Wayles, but had different mothers, and they may have looked alike.

No complete description of Sally Hemings exists. In 1847, Isaac Jefferson, a Monticello slave, said, “Sally Hemings’ mother Betty was a bright mulatto woman, and Sally mighty near white. Sally was very handsome, long straight hair down her back.”

Sally Hemings gave birth to six children, most likely by Thomas Jefferson: Harriet, Beverly, another Harriet, another un-named daughter, then Madison, and Eston. The four who survived childhood were considered slaves, because of Sally’s status, although they were 7/8’s white. In 1822, Jefferson allowed the two oldest to escape slavery, and by his 1826 will, he freed the two youngest. 

Thus, two Virginia families were intertwined. There was the Wayles-Jefferson family, and there was the Hemings family. When John Wayles died, Thomas Jefferson inherited Wayle’s slaves, including Betty Hemings and her children, who lived and worked in Monticello, Jefferson’s home. 

For decades, descendents of the Wayles-Jefferson family refused to believe that Sally Hemings’s children were also Jefferson’s, but DNA testing proved it true. Markers on the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, confirmed that the sons who claim Field Jefferson, Thomas’s uncle, as their ancestor, match those sons who descended from Eston Hemings.

John Wayles and Betty Hemings, as well as Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, exemplify the complexities associated with race and slavery in colonial Virginia. The reality was that many women did not survive their child-bearing years, and many children did not survive childhood. The Virginians knew that they had to produce many children, if they wanted to ensure their English colony’s success.

Did Betty and Sally welcome their masters’ attentions, or was it assault? One descendent of Madison Hemings said, “I really don’t think the slave women had a choice.” Another said, “I think it was a love story. Did Sally look like Martha? I think she did.”

On Saturday, June 23, 2018, a new exhibit opened at Monticello, a room dedicated to Sally Hemings. Instead of her picture though, officials will project a shadow of a female slave on a wall.

Each year since 1962, several dozen immigrants have become naturalized U.S. citizens at the “Monticello Independence Day Celebration and Naturalization Ceremony.” This year a federal immigration official will ask each immigrant to, “please raise your hands and take the oath.”

The speaker at Monticello’s July 4th celebration this year is Andrew Tisch. Past speakers have included certain naturalized citizens: Nadia Comaneci, Tracey Ullman, I. M. Pei, and Robert Goizueta. 

On July 4, 1995, Goizueta, an immigrant from Cuba, said, “When a person becomes a U. S. citizen, he or she receives a magical gift, the gift of freedom, and its corollary, opportunity.”

Slavery is the opposite of freedom and opportunity, the most precious of commodities. Betty and her daughter Sally knew only slavery, and they never experienced that magical gift called freedom.

At Monticello this year, visitors will walk into Jefferson’s house, will stare into Sally Hemings’s bare room, and outside they will walk along Mulberry Row, and look into the slave’s huts, a devastating reminder that the writer of the Declaration of Independence owned people. How awful. 

To my readers, enjoy your 4th of July holiday. 

The Stasi and the Overcoat

by William H. Benson

June 14, 2018

The East German communist government collapsed in late 1989, and soon thereafter, its people were amazed to learn that the Stasi secret police had a bulging manila-colored file on many of them.

For decades, across East Germany, thousands of spies had watched for indications of suspicious activity or words that indicated an individual’s dissatisfaction with the communist government.

Fellow workers, neighbors, family members, even spouses, spied on each other and then submitted detailed reports to the Stasi. Officials then added the reports to a person’s file, and then re-stacked the files on metal shelves, seven-shelves high, deep inside a Stasi directorate building.

It was a vast operation of spying, producing reports, and preserving files, mainly gossip, all done in secret. Its purpose: “to root out the class enemy.”

The Stasi, the Ministry for State Security, was formed on February 8, 1950, and was dissolved a month shy of forty years later, on January 13, 1990. One investigator ventured to say, “The Stasi maintained greater surveillance over its own people than any other secret police force in history.”

The Stasi abandoned “arrest and torture,” in favor of psychological harassment. Officials would go into someone’s home and re-arrange the furniture, or change their brands of tea bags, and other tricks designed to let the victims know that officials were watching. As a result, the people crouched in fear. 

At the most, the Stasi employed 91,000 workers, but they relied on 189,000 unofficial spies, a cobweb of unidentified informants, called IM’s, Inoffizielle Mitarbeiter. 

In late 1989, when East German governing officials sensed the end was near, Stasi employees set to work to shred the files, but the sheer volume was too vast. In early January of 1990, a crowd gathered outside a Stasi office building, and demanded that Stasi officials stop the shredding, and they did, but not before they had shredded millions of pages, about 5% of the total.

Ever since, investigators have dug into some 16,000 huge manila-colored bags of shredded documents, containing about 45 million pages, and worked to re-assemble them, but the job is big.

The remainder of the files stand on the shelves, 69 miles long (111 kilometers), in 13 offices in Berlin and other German cities, and “they contain the everyday results of a people being spied upon.”

At first, there was anxious discussion about whether to seal the files, keep them secret, or allow everyone to see their own file. At some point, the new government decided to permit free access to the files. People read their own file and could, with some effort, identify who had spied upon them.

Numerous Stasi officials were prosecuted for their crimes after 1990, when the files were opened.

How did a secret police organization maintain its power for forty years? One researcher explained, “The psychological terror the Stasi state depended upon, from the first day to the last, was the presence of the Red Army, and the willingness of the Soviet Union to use force. When the Red Army went, the Stasi state went too.” Indeed, the KGB maintained liaison offices in all 8 main Stasi directorates.

Yes, the KGB and the Soviet Union’s Red Army intimidated the Stasi, but in addition, there were thousands of East German clerks who, also out of fear, refused to speak out, and chose to participate in the spying, reporting, and filing.

The Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol, described the justifications that governing clerks make to survive, in a short story he entitled, “The Overcoat.” In his office, the main character, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin, did one thing, copy other documents in longhand, day after day. 

When offered more productive work, like change the header, or reword the documents’ words, Akaky refused. Unthinking and unfeeling, he copied all he was told to copy and would not change. 

Today, in our world of 2018, the internet is wide open, and social media is pervasive. Governments, companies, and institutions struggle to define a person’s right to privacy. The fear is constant that a ruthless government might use the internet and social media, as tools to browbeat, intimidate, and then control a nation’s citizens, obliterating right to privacy, and a host of other rights.

When that happens, the regime will construct a bureaucracy, hire an army of clerks, build thousands of office cubicles, give them each a computer, and set them to work, to shatter other people’s lives. No longer will they need reams of paper, or miles of shelves to hold the files. 

Summer-time Reading

by William H. Benson

May 31, 2018, 

The invention that makes men and women most human is recorded language, embodied in the alphabet. In the far distant past, a wise soul decided to attach a written character to a human sound. Today, when we see “Sh, z, p, th, t, b, or d” on a printed page, we know the sound, we imitate it, and we understand the idea that the author recorded and wished to convey to his or her readers.

By stringing together letters in ink on white paper, men and women for centuries have transmitted their ideas into the future. Books record an author’s thoughts, opinions, experiences, and emotions.

Animals lack this ability. They cannot relive or experience another animals’ life moments. Instead, they experience life moment by moment, second by second, with little reflection on their past.

Teachers encourage their students to read, and many do. Elementary students read grade school-level books, mainly fiction. Middle school students love to read adventure stories, like Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island, Charlotte’s Webb, Tarzan of the Apes, or Robinson Crusoe.

At some point in high school though, some students surrender their love for the adventure story and gravitate toward more serious works, like Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, or William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

After college, adults, more often than not, lay aside books, especially those of literature. They have jobs, a boss to obey, families to feed, endless football and basketball games that need watched, and little spare time. If they read at all, they read books and papers that their jobs require. Warren Buffett says, “I read 500 pages every day,” but he reads business publications.

This past week I read one guy’s opinion, “I am still fascinated by how much a person can change by reading a single book. Books carry decades and centuries of knowledge and wisdom.”

Over the past couple of weeks, I have re-read three novels I read in high school: Animal Farm, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies. Each are short, fun, easy to read, and packed with ideas.

George Orwell published Animal Farm on August 17, 1945. In it, the animals on Farmer Jones’s farm headbutt Jones off the farm and take over his land and farming operation. One pig, Napoleon, then dictates how the other animals, those he calls his “comrades,” will work. 

Napoleon says, “the happiest animals live simple lives,” and he formulates Seven Commandments that he inscribes on the barn wall. Number seven reads, “All animals are equal.”

The cart-horse, Boxer, says often, “I must work harder,” and “Napoleon is always right.” The sheep bleat out the farm’s slogan, “Four legs are good. Two legs are bad.”

Orwell admitted that his book is an allegory, and that Animal Farm represents the Soviet Union, and that Napoleon is Stalin. In order to consolidate Napoleon’s power, the pig transforms each of the seven commandments. The seventh becomes, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

In October of 1953, Ray Bradbury published Fahrenheit 451. The title, he said, came from a Fire Chief at the Fire Department, who explained, “Book-paper catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit.”

Bradbury’s main character, Guy Montag, lives in an anti-intellectual world where possession of a book is criminal. Guy and his fellow firemen start fires by spraying kerosene-fueled flames that they aim at books, or at the houses that contain books. 

One night at a fire, out of curiosity, Guy conceals some books under his arm, takes them home, and reads them. He reads Ecclesiastes and Revelations from the Bible, works by Thoreau and Shakespeare and Jefferson, and is amazed. He decides he must quit burning books, and his life begins to unravel.

William Golding published Lord of the Flies on September 17, 1754. To his wife, he explained that he wanted to write a book about how a group of boys would change, for the worse, if tossed together on a deserted island, without the protective influence of adults nearby.

Instead of enjoying the adventure together, the boys—Ralph, Jack, and Piggy—divide into vicious tribes, each intent on subduing or killing the other. The boys cling to a superstitious belief that a beast, the Lord of the Flies, lives on the island, and to flush out the beast, they set the island on fire.

In short, the boys transform into monsters, lacking pity for the others.

Golding said, that “the shape of society depends directly upon the ethical nature of the individual,” and that “civilized society can quickly deteriorate into danger, terrorism, and anarchy.”

This summer take a vacation, and read. Every day for thirty minutes, read the books you failed to read in high school, but always wanted to, and then tell your friends and family what you learned. You just might gain some of the “knowledge and wisdom,” that the books contain.

Patterns vs. Randomness

by William H. Benson

May 17, 2018

Frederick Douglass was born in Maryland in 1818. Although born into slavery, Douglass was fortunate enough to escape to the north as a young man, and there he became an ardent abolitionist.

Douglass said, “The problem is whether the American people have honesty enough, loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough to live up to their own Constitution.”

Also, born in 1818, on May 5th, was Karl Marx, the German political writer and thinker. A writer for The Economist said, “Marx was a latter day prophet. The fall from grace is embodied in capitalism; man is redeemed as the proletariat rises up against its exploiters and creates a communist utopia.”

In 1816, a few English writers enjoyed a summer’s vacation at Lake Geneva, Switzerland. The poet Lord Byron suggested that they compete to see who can write the best ghost story. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s girlfriend, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, then just eighteen-years-old, dreamed of a scientist who built an eight-foot-tall creature, and then galvanized the spark of life into the being. 

“From vaults and charnel-houses he exhumed dead bodies,” Mary Shelley wrote. The scientist, Victor Frankenstein regretted his experiment. He said, “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life.” Mary Shelley published her ghost story, Frankenstein, on January 1, 1818, 200 years ago.

Three random events: the birth of an African-American slave boy in Maryland, the birth of a Jewish boy in Germany, and the publication of the world’s first horror story. Few at the time considered those three events important, and yet we acknowledge them now.

An interesting thought. What is happening now, or who is being born now, in 2018, that people in the year 2038, 200 years, or eight generations, into the future, will look back on as noteworthy? A difficult question, because human beings see far better into the past than into the future.

Space exploration is the wonder of the age. For example, on Saturday, May 5, at 5:05 a.m. Pacific time, at Vandenberg Air Force Base, NASA’s team launched a rocket towards Mars. It should land on Mars’s surface on November 26, 2018, after six months and twenty-one days of travel across 300 million miles of space. America’s achievements in space astonishes the rest of the world. 

The discovery of life, even intelligent life, on other planets though, may occur sooner than we want. Like Victor Frankenstein, we may regret that possible discovery, depending upon the degree of intelligence and of technical sophistication that we may find elsewhere in the universe.

An interesting podcast I heard last week on Invisibilia asks a set of intriguing questions, “Are we destined to repeat our patterns, or do we stray in surprising directions? Is the course of our lives a predictable pattern, or is it random?”

The podcast introduces Shon Hopwood, who in March appeared on 60 Minutes. Shon grew up in David City, Nebraska. After dropping out of college, “after about ten minutes,” he returned home, shoveled manure in a feedlot, drank plenty of beer, and then robbed five small banks in Nebraska.

Authorities caught him at the Doubletree in Omaha, and the judge sentenced him to twelve years. He arrived at the Federal penitentiary, in Pekin, Illinois, in May of 1999, and there he lifted iron, ran miles on the track, played hours of basketball, and worked in the law library.

A casual observer would say that Shon’s life would continue to disappoint his parents and siblings, that he would achieve very little stuck in prison, and that his life pattern was well-established. Pekin released him in April of 2009.

In June, Shon will turn forty-three. He is now married with two children. He received his college degree from Bellevue University in Nebraska, and his law degree at the University of Washington. Today, Shon teaches criminal law at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. 

How did he transform his life? He began to read the law books in Pekin’s law library. He came to love the law, and saw that, “the law was a big puzzle.” He wrote appeals for other prisoners, and two of them the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear, an incredible stroke of unmerited luck. 

To Steve Kroft, on 60 Minutes, Shon said, “my life doesn’t make sense to me, and I lived it,” and he credits, “the people who went out of their way to make grace for me, and that made the difference.”

Steve Jobs spoke at Stanford College’s commencement exercises on June 12, 2005, and he said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.” 

I wish my best to the high school and college graduates this year. I say, work to connect the dots one at a time, and create a life pattern that will astonish your parents and friends. Yield not to the temptation to swallow the delusions of racism, communist utopias, fabulous ghost stories, or robbing banks.