The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom

by Bill Benson

August 29, 2013

     Back in my preschool years, I and my brothers listened to a stack of 45 rpm records again and again. One was “Oh Danny Boy,” another was Stephen Foster’s “Camptown Races,” but a favorite was Mahalia Jackson’s “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Her amazing voice mesmerized me then, just five-years-old, and still does.

     This Wednesday marks the fiftieth anniversary of the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” and Mahalia Jackson was there. She sang “How I Got Over,” possibly “I’ve Been ‘Buked and Scorned,” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

     Behind that march lay two decades of planning. A. Philip Randolph, the dean of civil rights leaders, first planned a rally during Roosevelt’s administration, in 1941, but he called it off after FDR relented and prohibited further discrimination among the defense contractors.

     Yet, the discrimination persisted. “In the spring of 1963, the rate of unemployment for whites was 4.8 percent. For nonwhites it was 12.1 percent.” The blacks understood that the whites excluded them from the best paying jobs, and they saw the connection between the economic opportunity that a job represented and civil rights. Hence, their march was for “Jobs and Freedom.”

     Also in the spring of 1963, President Kennedy called the civil rights leaders—A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and others—into the White House and asked them to discontinue their plans for the march. “They politely rebuffed him.” This time they would march.

     The civil rights leader Bayard Rustin built a successful organization of staff and volunteers, and he expected 100,000 people to gather next to the Washington Monument and then march west beside the reflecting pool to the Lincoln Memorial. There the people would listen to speakers who would demand that Congress pass civil rights legislation. King said that the march would “arouse the conscience of the nation over the economic plight of the Negro.”

     People in Washington D. C. were terrified. Law enforcement officials called it Operation Steep Hill. Helicopters were fueled and ready. Sales of alcohol were banned. The law authorities and the courts expected a number of arrests, and in case of an inflammatory speech, they installed a kill switch on the microphone, and were prepared to play Mahalia Jackson’s “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”

     None of that happened, even though over 200,000 people arrived that day, including 60,000 whites.

     Ten people spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial that day. The first was A. Philip Randolph, who said, “We know that we have no future in a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty.” Mahalia Jackson’s songs captivated the audience, and then the final speaker, Martin Luther King, Jr., stood behind the microphone.

     That morning he was undecided about what he would say. In 1963 he gave 350 speeches and used similar words and ideas in most of them. Like most Baptist preachers, he could cut and paste as he spoke, incorporating certain phrases and words and dropping others from his prepared text.

     He said, “In a sense, we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check.” The founding fathers “were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. . . . It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note. . . . America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.”

     Mahalia Jackson, who stood only twenty feet away, called out to King. “Tell them about the dream.” Often she performed with Martin Luther King, Jr., and months before in Detroit she had heard him talk about his dream. King laid aside his text, and someone nearby said, “Those people don’t know it, but they’re about to go to church.” King continued,

     “I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

      When he would pause, the crowd would remain silent, but then they would stir when he would say again, “I have a dream.” His was sweeping oratory, mixing Biblical themes and the founding fathers’ words, and overlooking his shoulder was the huge statue of Abraham Lincoln, seated on a chair, his arms stretched forward, resting on the armrests. It is a moment etched in most Americans’ minds. Like Lincoln before him, King may not have had the whole world, but he had his audience in his hands.

     Historians rank King’s “I have a dream” speech the second best in America’s history, just behind Lincoln’s “Gettysburg Address,” and both men were assassinated, as was Kennedy three months later.

     “Let freedom ring!” King said, as he closed his speech and the march that day. May it ever be so.

The French Revolution

by William H. Benson

August, 15, 2013

     King Louis XVI welcomed 1201 delegates into his Hall of Mirrors at his palace in Versailles, ten miles west of Paris, on Saturday, May 2, 1789. The king had called this Estates-General to assist him in resolving his government’s financial crisis. It was bankrupt, drowning in debt, and unable to borrow additional funds from any bank or country.

    The king recognized that he needed additional tax revenues now. For centuries, France’s kings had exempted the aristocrats and clergymen from paying any taxes, even though they received income and owned property. The noblemen and bishops rejected each of the king’s finance ministers’ plans to tax them, and there matters stood when the delegates filed into the king’s splendid Hall of Mirrors.

     Over the next three months, the Estates-General’s members transformed themselves into a National Assembly, a legislative body of delegates determined to write a constitution.

     The delegates soon heard the dire news that on July 14, a mob in Paris had stormed into the Bastille, freed the seven prisoners held there, and murdered the guards. The common French people hated the Bastille because it represented the king’s oppressive rule, a place of torture and confinement.

     In the days that followed, the peasants and common people across all of France learned of the Storming of the Bastille, and they too rushed into their manors’ households and confiscated their bread and belongings. Because society’s bottom echelon attacked the top, the nobility and clergymen were terrified, and so a Great Fear swept over France. No longer would peasants defer to their oppressors.

     On August 4, the National Assembly’s delegates decided they must act now if they wished to stop the riots. That day and into the night, they passed nineteen decrees that abolished France’s ancient feudal system. They freed the serfs, who for centuries had been bound to the land and forced to pay duties to the landowners. The delegates abolished all mandatory tithes to the church. They decreed that all French citizens would pay taxes equally. They announced that all citizens were eligible to serve in the government or military.

     The August decrees calmed the people, causing the Great Fear to subside.

     Three weeks later, on August 26, the National Assembly’s delegates adopted seventeen articles in The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens. The second article defines these rights as “liberty, property, security, and resistance of oppression.” The fourth defines liberty as “the power of doing whatever does not injure another.” The tenth states that the government cannot harass any man “on account of his opinions, not even on account of his religious opinions.” The eleventh states that “every citizen may speak, write, and publish freely.”

     The thirteenth declares that taxes are “to be divided equally among the members of the community, according to their abilities.” The fifteenth states that “Every community has a right to demand of all its agents, an account of their conduct.”

     In that summer of revolution in 1789, the August decrees and the Declaration transformed France. They eradicated the aristocrats’ privileges. Gone were their titles. Henceforth, France was a meritocracy where all would work, pay taxes, and permitted to voice their opinions. Also, the state would not force people to pay tithes to support the clergy, and the peasants were free to move off the farm.

     Unless you are a French citizen, none of these decrees or rights apply to you. If you are an American, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights apply to you.

     Does any man and woman in truth possess any of these rights? I say that people do have rights, but only if their current government says they do. If a dictator, such as a Robespierre or Napoleon, assumes the reigns of power, he will stomp them into the ground. People’s rights exist so long as that government that instituted them exists. If it fails, so too do the rights.

     In the preamble to the Declaration, the National Assembly’s delegates said that “ignorance, neglect, or contempt of human rights, are the sole causes of public misfortunes and corruptions of Government.” The reverse is believed true. Recognize the people, their right to rule and pass self-governing laws, and misfortunes and corruption will dissipate.

     George Will, the columnist, said that “the business of America is not business. The business of America is liberty, and securing the blessings of freedom.”

Aware of Where We Are

by William H. Benson

August 1, 2013

     In May 1986 at Harvard’s graduation, an interviewer asked twenty-three graduates a simple question: “Why is it warm in the summer and cold in the winter?” Nearly all the graduates answered that during the summer the Earth is nearer the sun, and they were wrong. Only two knew the correct answer. Because the Earth tilts, the sun is more directly overhead in the summer than in the winter.

     Farmers know that, as does anyone who works outside. They watch the sun. A week ago a writer in the New York Times named John Edward Huth wrote that even “a Neolithic farmer could . . . explain that the sun was low in the winter and high in the summer.” Huth makes the point that when we divide knowledge into minute slices and pieces, we miss seeing the “larger conceptual framework.” Without that context, “we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge, and it loses its personal value.”

     To observe a phenomenon and arrive at a conclusion is a valid skill, not needing a teacher. Which direction is the wind blowing, and which direction is north, or south, or east, or west? Where is the sun in the sky? Where is the moon? What is its shape? What are the ocean’s waves doing? Where is the tide? Some are unaware of their surroundings; others pick up those clues without effort.

     In Australia’s Outback lives a tribe called the Guugu Yimithirr. These aborigines are unusual because they speak a language that is geographic oriented, that relies on cardinal directions. Because they maintain a keen sense of where true north is, they describe items by directions. “Look out for that big ant just north of your foot,” they might say, and “I left it on the southern edge of the western table.” If blindfolded and spun around twenty times in a darkened room, they will still point to north.

     To be aware of the physical is one thing, but a separate universe is human emotion. People feel emotions as well as think thoughts, often simultaneously. We walk on planet Earth and stare up at a star-littered sky, at a sun, and a moon, but we also feel things inside. We feel the pain when we lose our job, our home. We feel joy at a wedding, a win at a ball game. We feel relieved when we missed a disaster, an accident. We feel envious of others success, of their skills.

     Great writers, especially the superb novelists, include the range of emotions in their prose. Plot may be a story’s skeleton, but the emotions are its skin and features and the force that keeps people reading late into the night. Readers feel what the characters feel: shame, ambition, sorrow, and love.

     When conversing with another, some may miss what others are feeling, but others catch the cues, the facial features, the body language, and the voice’s tone. They read others like some read a book.

     Jane Austen’s character, Emma, in her book by the same name, asks Mrs. Weston why their friend Jane Fairfax spends so much time with Mrs. Elton, a silly person. Mrs. Weston says to Emma, “Well, before we condemn what she chooses, we have to consider what she quits.” If Jane stays at home, she has to hang out with her aunt and grandad, which Mrs. Weston believe would not be time well spent.

     An economist would say that Jane’s decision to visit a silly and inane person is an “opportunity cost.” Indeed, an economist named Michael Chwe published a book this year called Jane Austen, Game Theorist, and in it he pointed out how Jane Austen’s characters think and feel. Mrs. Weston is aware of why people choose as they do. She places her thoughts and feelings inside Jane Fairfax’s and considers her alternatives. Mrs. Weston is aware that when one chooses between two bad alternatives, he or she will choose the one least distasteful.

     The movie, Much Ado About Nothing, was released on June 7. Although I have not seen it yet, I read that the director filmed it in just twelve days and followed to the letter Shakespeare’s script of his better comedy. Beatrice and Benedick are young and single. Whenever they meet, they antagonize each other, they kid each other, and they put each other down. Their verbal battles are great sport.

      Then, Benedick’s friends whisper so that he can hear and convince him that Beatrice loves him, and Beatrice’s friends do the same and convince her that Benedick loves her. The two meet on stage, stare at each other, and wonder. Who do we trust? Others’ words, or our own feelings? They try to write and recite love poems, but the repartee was more fun. They examine their feelings, and the realization dawns upon them that, yes, they do love each other, and so they marry.

     Benedick ends the play, “a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour. Man is a giddy thing and this is my conclusion.” So it is much ado about nothing.

     Why is it hot in the summer? Which direction is north? Why did Mrs. Watson know what Jane Fairfax was thinking? Why did Beatrice and Benedict fall in love once they ceased teasing each other? To know is one thing, but to experience a feeling is another. The gaps in our knowledge and in our awareness of other’s feelings is huge. Man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.

Egypt and Conquerers

by William H. Benson

July 18, 2013

     Conquerers love Egypt. Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte each in their own time invaded Egypt, walked upon Egypt’s sand, sailed on the Nile River, and stared at the relics.

     Alexander, a Macedonian Greek, was only 24 years old in October of 332 B.C. when he arrived in Egypt. Because the Egyptian people hated their Persian rulers, they welcomed Alexander with open arms, called him their Savior and Liberator, a “son of the gods.” He and his troops gaped in amazement at Egypt’s religion, its ritual, its obelisks, its immense “temples not built to human scale,” and at the Great Pyramids at Giza. Alexander conquered Egypt, but Egypt conquered Alexander.

     Three hundred years later, in 48 B.C., the Roman general Julius Caesar invaded Egypt, but the Egyptian people resisted him. They pinned him down in Alexandria, at the mouth of the Nile, but he maintained his naval supply lines and waited for reinforcements. When they arrived, he attacked and destroyed his enemies at the Battle of the Nile in February of 47 B.C. With Egypt in his hands, Caesar placed Egypt’s queen, Cleopatra, upon the throne, and he fell in love with her.

     Napoleon Bonaparte, France’s general, invaded Egypt on July 2, 1798. On July 21, he and his French troops attacked the Mameluks at a site near Cairo, in what is now called the Battle of the Pyramids. As the battle commenced, Napoleon shouted at his troops, “Forward! Remember that from those monuments yonder forty centuries look down upon you.” His troops won the battle that day.

     However, the British Rear-Admiral Sir Horatio Nelson, had followed Napoleon to Egypt, and at a second Battle of the Nile on August 1, 1798, near Alexandria, Nelson destroyed Napoleon’s naval fleet. The French general marched his troops north into Palestine and Syria where he battled local armies at Jaffa, Acre, Nazareth, and Mount Tabor before he returned to Egypt, and then to France.

     Egyptians can point with pride at a spectacular ancient past that lasted for millennium, that built the Great Pyramids at Cheops, but they despise the foreign conquerers—Alexander, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon—who invaded and subdued their country’s citizens.     

     Today Egypt is in chaos. The Egyptian people are so desperate for food that they may welcome another foreign conquerer, one from Greece, Italy, France, Great Britain, or the United States, because, according to the columnist Thomas L. Friedman, Egypt “is falling apart,” “is in a deep hole,” suffers “from deep economic dislocation and distress,” and may be “ungovernable and the job of president impossible.” “[G]as lines and electricity shortages are everywhere.”

     Eighty million people depend upon the Nile River for their water, bread, and hydroelectric power. With global warming, the Mediterranean Sea’s level has risen, and that has pushed saltwater high into the Nile River’s delta. Mahmoud Medany, an Egyptian agricultural researcher, said, “The Nile is the artery of life, and the Delta is our breadbasket, and if you take that away, there is no Egypt.”

     This economic disaster is matched by political chaos. Following the Arab Spring in 2011 and the overthrow of long-time President, Hosni Mubarak, the new government has struggled. In recent days the people took to the streets to protest President Mohamed Morsi and his Muslim Brotherhood party’s despotic rule. Although elected by popular vote, the Egyptian army removed Morsi from power, and put him and his gang into jail, where they are held on the charge that they ruined the economy.

     His supporters have sat down in the streets since to protest his imprisonment.

     Friedman admits that Morsi was not capable. “Morsi was not focused on governing and appointing the best people for jobs. He was focused on digging himself and his party into power. There was no chance that Morsi was going to rise to this moment.” Instead, Morsi sought to solidify his own control.

     Friedman answers the question, “Can Egypt pull together?” with a solution. Egypt, he says, needs a leader who inspires “a spirit of inclusion,” who can “strengthen education, shrink the state, stimulate entrepreneurship, empower women, and reform the police and judiciary.”

     That is a solution typical of a journalist from the West, where education is strong, where women are empowered, where entrepreneurship is prized, and where the military defers to the civil government, but it may not be a solution appropriate for the Egyptian people today. They must discover their own solutions for their numerous economic and political difficulties. They must take ownership in their own future. They must muddle through until solutions appear.

     They do not need a foreign conquerer, who will sweep in on his horse and dictate orders. That action overwhelms and disgusts people, and they will rebel.

     Egypt is a land of enchantment, a mecca for tourists, a wonder, an astonishment, the country with the longest history. The Egyptian people will muddle through, as they have for millennium.

Civil Wars and Independence

by William H. Benson

July 4, 2013

     In George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty Four, his major character Winston Smith stood in a bar to buy a beer for an old man. The old man appreciated Smith’s gesture but said that the beer was better before the war, and Smith asked him,  “Which war was that?” The old man replied, “It’s all wars.”

     Although Orwell’s book is fiction, it is true that much of humanity’s history revolves around fights, revolutions, and civil wars. Some historians devote their full working careers to a single war, a single battle, or a single general involved in a single battle. They trace the reasons behind the war, how it progressed, and how it ended, but no historian prevents a war from beginning, or ends a war once it has begun. They are not in a position of power to do either.

     The only exception was the historian and Princeton professor Woodrow Wilson, our 28^th President, but he asked Congress for a declaration of war on the Axis powers in the Great War, World War I. 

    This week Americans celebrate Continental Congress’s vote to declare the thirteen colonies free and independent of King George III’s control and also their acceptance of Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Also, on July 1, 2, and 3 we mark the 150^th anniversary at Gettsyburg.

     The American Revolution was a civil war. Englishmen were fighting Englishmen, with the French siding with the American Englishmen. The Civil War in the United States was Americans from the North or the Union, fighting Americans from the Southern States or the Confederacy, but no British, French, German, or Spanish government or troops intervened. Then, there was the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, Mexico’s Revolution, and the Spanish Civil War—each a civil war.

     Twenty years ago, the former Yugoslavia deteriorated into a bloody civil war that included “ethnic cleansing” directed mainly against the Muslims. The horrific killing ceased four years later in 1995 once the United Nations forced all participants to agree on peace terms. Two years ago in the Arab Spring, Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya revolted against their respective dictators and won independence.

     Syria tried the same against Bashar al-Assad, but he fought back. He begged for and received help from Iran and now is close to crushing the rebels. After two years of indecision, our President has decided now to give weapons and arms to the rebels. A civil war has broken out among the journalists. Some say it is a mistake, that the United States has no vital interest in the fight, and that it will end in war with the Iranians and Russians, but others, including John McCain, argue for more assistance.

     Syria’s civil war will end, as all wars do end, but how and when remains hidden.

     A fundamental feature of Western thought is that stubborn faith in human progress, in human beings’ ability to create a world of justice and peace. Those noble ideals are swept away once people pick up a gun and shoot at their neighbor. No justice exists when innocent people are caught in the crossfire. The Syrian civil war has killed between 75,000 and 100,000 lives. “Its all wars.”

     Why is there a civil war? On some occasions, an individual grabs for power. He wishes to crush and remove the existing holder of that power. But more often the people rebel. They are tired of the tyranny, the lack of freedoms to say and do as they please. They are tired of the lack of good jobs, of economic opportunities. They are tired of being bullied, intimidated, and repressed. They hope for a better future.

     Thomas Paine told the Americans in 1776 in Common Sense that it was smart to rebel against King George III, to establish their own government, and to rule themselves without a monarch. Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Adams read Paine’s work, agreed with his words, and declared their independence. In his book The Rights of Man, Paine spoke of the “natural dignity of man,” and that he was “irritated at the attempt to govern mankind by force and fraud.”

     Paine was expanding upon John Locke’s ideas decades before Paine lived. Locke said that government is there to serve the wishes of the people by protecting life, liberty, and property. People can rule themselves by a representative government and by obedience to the law. They can denounce tyranny, and they have the right to rebel. Locke’s ideas are lofty, life-fulfilling, but dangerous to peace.

     To move from repression, tyranny, and “force and fraud,” to independence and self-government, one has to pass first through a civil war. Few people in powerful positions want to yield their power to another, and yet some do. Pope Benedict XVI resigned. Too bad that Bashar al-Assad will not resign. His current term as president will expire in May 2014, but do we dare hope he will not run again?

     Big Brother told Winston Smith and all of Oceania that “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength.” No, no, and no. War is not peace, but peace is more than the absence of war. Peace includes strength, knowledge, and freedom; the rule of law; independence without bloodshed; and self-government, without “force and fraud.”