DIVISIONS

by William H. Benson

November 12, 2009

     Charles Darwin decided at the age of 29 he should marry, and he arrived at that decision in his methodical manner—by listing the pros and cons on a piece of paper. Listed among the advantages, he wrote, are “Children (if it please God)—constant companion (& friend in old age)—charms of music & female chit-chat.” Among the disadvantages, he wrote, are “Terrible loss of time, if many children, forced to gain one’s bread, fighting about [with] no society.”

     He then ended his jottings with the words “Marry, marry, marry. QED.” Quod erat demonstrandum: meaning, thus it is proved. He had decided.

     He did marry his cousin Emma Wedgwood, but not before he had had a discussion with her about his commitment to scientific inquiry over that of religious belief. But Emma, Charles learned, was open-minded: “she would not insist on word-for-word biblical belief, she told Charles, just an openness to the love of God.” And to that Charles agreed. Theirs was a happy marriage into which ten children were born.

     In November of 1959, 150 years ago this month, Charles Darwin published his major work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, and Darwin was catapulted into international fame.

     A new book by Deborah Heiligman entitled Charles and Emma: The Darwins’ Leap of Faith was published in May of this year, and in it Heiligman pointed out that the religious difference between them did not distract from their marriage. “In today’s climate of division between religion and science, it’s instructive to read about a marriage in which the two cultures improved each for exposure to the other.”

    “Had Charles spent more time with free-thinking, liberal intellectuals and less time sitting on the sofa with Emma, perhaps then he would not have been quite so conciliatory and conservative in his writing of the book.” The division between science and religion ran lengthwise, down the center of the Darwin’s kitchen table every morning.

     Armistice Day is also this week. At 11:00a.m., on the eleventh day of the eleventh month of 1918, fighting in Europe’s Great War ceased, after tens of millions had been slaughtered and wounded, most often in No Man’s land between the trenches. The division between the Allied and the Central Powers ran roughly along the national border that separated France from Germany.

     On Thursday evening, November 9, 1989, Gunther Schabowski, a Communist Party leader in East Germany, announced that a simple visa procedure would allow East Germans to visit West Germany, immediately. Alison Smale, an American reporter for the Associated Press, happened to be in East Berlin that evening, and she and an East Berlin citizen, Angelika Wachs, both 34 years old, crossed Checkpoint Charlie together, two of the first to do so.

     The next day, the two walls, separated by a No Man’s land of mines and barbed wire, came crashing down to shouts of jubilation. “Unglaublich,”—unbelieveable, Wachs had shouted as the Communist guards had looked the other way. The division between communism and capitalism, between East and the West, had divided the city of Berlin.

     Science vs. religion; the Allies vs. the Central Powers; communism vs. capitalism; East vs. West; the Soviet Union vs. the United States; liberal vs. conservative; Democrat vs. Republican; and on go the deep divisions that disrupt human thought and potential.

     Claude Levi-Strauss, the French anthropologist, died two weeks ago, nearly 101 years old. “As he saw it, the human mind tends to organize thought and culture around binary opposites, and then try to resolve the resulting tension through mythmaking.”

     In other words, people congregate around a political, religious, or cultural belief system, and then they look for reasons to justify their position, at the same time that they are scornful of others with a differing opinion—mythmaking. Divisions and fractures appear. Wars break out; walls go up, but people can stop the wars and tear down walls.

     In a leap of faith, Charles had married Emma, and with tolerance and a respect for the other, they had overcome the divisive issue of science and religion that his book had initiated. The Allies and the Central Powers agreed to cease their fighting, and the Berlin Wall was torn down.    

EDGAR ALLAN POE AND HALLOWEEN

by William H. Benson

October 29, 2009

     In 1831, then at the age of twenty-two, Edgar Allan Poe decided that he would try to make a career as a writer of poetry and short stories. Over the course of the next eighteen years, he proved himself versatile and talented, for “he used his extraordinary mind to work out his literary effects with almost mathematical exactitude.” However, he was never successful financially and was constantly penniless.

     In 1835, Poe wrote one of his less successful stories—The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall—which was published in June in the Southern Literary Messenger, and for which Poe received only the standard fee, a pittance.

     The story is about how Hans Pfaall, a citizen then living in Rotterdam, built a hot air balloon, which he filled with “a constituent of azote,” and with a cat and two pigeons soared into the sky. Nineteen days later he landed on the moon’s surface “in the very heart of a fantastical-looking city and into the middle of a vast crowd of ugly little people, who none of them uttered a single syllable.” None had ears.

     The story was quite fantastic, but above all else, remarkable in that it was one of the first stories in what would become a new literary genre: science fiction.

     Two months later, beginning on August 25, the New York Sun published an account written by a Dr. Andrew Grant who was the companion of a well-respected scientist named Sir John Herschel, who had developed a combination telescope / microscope that permitted him to see the lunar surface. Herschel claimed he had seen bison, goats, water birds, unicorns, beavers without tails that walked upright, and a race of bat-like winged humanoids, Verspertilio-homo, who built temples, all on the moon.

     At first, the paper’s readers believed Herschel’s claims as reported by this Dr. Grant. Circulation increased dramatically, and the profits rolled in. But then several weeks later it was determined a hoax, in the vein of P. T. Barnum, or today’s National Enquirer.

     Dr. Andrew Grant did not exist, and Sir John Herschel had not seen those living things on the moon. Although the Sun never printed a retraction, it was believed that the Sun’s editor, Richard A. Locke had staged the hoax as a stunt to boost circulation. It worked.

     Poe was outraged that Locke had stolen his idea from his short story, had then capitalized upon it, and that Poe had not received a cent.

     Nine years later on April 13, 1844, Poe wrote for the New York Sun a detailed and highly plausible account of a famous European balloonist named Monck Mason who had crossed the Atlantic Ocean in his balloon in 75 hours. Poe was astonished at the enthusiasm this story aroused. “I never witnessed more intense excitement to get possession of a newspaper,” he said. Unfortunately, Poe’s article was also a fabrication.

     The French have always revered Poe more than have the Americans. For example, the French author Jules Verne read Poe’s short story and his balloon-hoax story and wrote three works of fiction about balloon travel: Five Weeks in a Balloon, Around the World in 80 Days, and From the Earth to the Moon.

     The story of a hoax involving a balloon continues. Two weeks ago, the Heene family in Fort Collins claimed that their six-year old son was inside a balloon as it floated across the Colorado landscape, but then he was found hiding in a box in their attic. Officials now believe that the Heene’s may have staged the whole thing.

     The biggest hoax of the twentieth century occurred on the night of October 30, 1938. While broadcasting on radio H. G. Wells’s story, The War of the Worlds, the movie director Orson Welles interrupted the production with a news flash that Martians were indeed invading Earth, and thus he created confusion and panic among listeners who, gullible to a fault, had tuned in late and believed his report.   

     Halloween approaches, and Edgar Allan Poe has always seemed to me a Halloween-type of guy, with his weird stories like The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart— tales of murder, of being buried alive, and of utter terror.

     Look at what the man unleashed. When will the hoaxes end—those involving balloons; travel across the Atlantic or eastern Colorado; the Sun, the moon, and Mars; and    of Martian invasions? Quote the Raven, “Nevermore.” Do not believe it.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

by William H. Benson

October 15, 2009

     In 1995, James W. Loewen published a book he entitled Lies My Teacher Told Me, in which he released the results of his survey of a dozen different high school American history textbooks that each began with a similar account of Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage west across the Atlantic.

     Loewen observed that these twelve texts presented an average of 800 words on Columbus, covered two and a half pages, and featured either a picture or perhaps a map. Loewen then provided a synthesized recap of those 800 words, and then observed that “unfortunately, almost everything in this traditional account is wrong or unverifiable.”

     He had two major problems with what the textbook authors said about Columbus: first, they underplayed previous explorers, such as the Viking Leif Erickson of the tenth century, and second, none of them provided any kind of analysis of the major changes going on in Europe then that prompted the response there after Columbus’s return.

     In other words, Loewen faults the textbook authors for failing to provide adequate explanations for what Columbus unleashed—not just an Age of Exploration but the Age of Conquest in the new World.

     Loewen wrote: “We must pay attention to what the textbooks are telling us and what they are not telling us. The changes in Europe in the fifteen century not only prompted Columbus’s voyages, but also paved the way for Europe’s domination of the world for the next five hundred years. Except for the invention of agriculture, this was probably the most consequential development in human history.”

     What were these changes in Europe? First, there were the advances in military technology, mounting bigger guns on bigger ships; in other words an arms race. “We live with this arms race still.” The Western nations, including the United States, continue to try to keep non-Western nations disadvantaged in military technology, i.e. Iraq and Iran.

     Second, there were new forms of social technology: the printing press, double-entry bookkeeping, and bureaucratic chains of command that allowed the Spanish to maintain and direct their far-flung empire.

     Third, a shift in the theology in Europe sanctioned the domination of other peoples and the theft of their wealth as a means to win esteem on earth and salvation in the hereafter. In other words, Europe now had a Christian faith that they could transport, and that faith “rationalized conquest.”

     Finally, the Europeans had diseases, especially smallpox, that would decimate the native tribes, rendering them vanquished, before mustering a fight.

     Loewen addressed then the issue of Eurocentrism, by asking the question—why was it that the nations of Europe rose to dominate the world? “It is rarely presented as a question,” Loewen wrote. “It seems natural, a given, not something that needs to be explained.” Furthermore, why must one group, race, culture, tribe, or state dominate another, for, Loewen argued, domination is not a natural phenomenon but cultural.

     Columbus dominated; of that, we are sure. As soon as he was off the boat, he claimed ownership of all he saw for the King and Queen of Spain. His style was world class “shock and awe.” His purpose was not exploration, writing better maps, sightseeing, or even establishing trade, but conquest and exploitation of the people and their land. 

     Michael de Cuneo accompanied Columbus on an expedition into the interior of Haiti in 1494, and said this of him: “It seemed to the Lord Admiral that it was time to put into execution his desire to search for gold, which was the main reason he had started on so great a voyage full of so many dangers.” Once he had found Haiti’s gold, he enslaved the natives to dig it for him until they dropped dead of starvation and overwork.

     Exploiting the Americas transformed Europe: Spain, with its enormous horde of gold and silver, became the envy of the world. Islamic power to the east was undermined, and Africa became the source for laborers in the New World.

     Lowen wrote that the Columbus account as presented in the textbooks “allows us to accept the contemporary division of the world into developed and underdeveloped spheres as natural and given, rather than as a historical product that began with Columbus’s first voyage.”

CHARLES SCHULZ

by William H. Benson

October 1, 2009

     On October 2, 1950, Charles Schulz first published his Peanuts comic strip, featuring Charlie Brown, his dog Snoopy, and the others: Lucy, Linus, Sally, Schroeder, and Peppermint Patty. Schulz exaggerated all of his characters’ heads and then dwarfed their bodies, using what cartoonists call a “minimalist style,” primitive and simple, or as Schulz said, “Less is more.”

     The humor was soft, centering about Charlie Brown’s disappointments, his resentments, his inability to understand as quickly as did Lucy, and his feelings of humiliation. Schulz’s comic strip caught on and eclipsed all others. Over the course of the next 49 ½ years, he drew17,896 strips, almost up to the day he died, February 13, 2000.

     Along the way, he added books, television programs, and even music, until Schulz’s business was indeed very big, and yet strangely, he belittled all these accomplishments.

     To an interviewer, Schulz commented once: “What a waste of time. Well, you know: what have you done? Drawn a comic strip. Who cares? Now, I’m seventy-five years old.” The interviewer suggested that Schulz had built a “lasting legacy because of his achievement.” Schulz responded, “I think I’ve done the best with what ability I have. I haven’t wasted my ability. I haven’t destroyed it. I haven’t misused it in any way.”

     Known as a guy with a melancholy disposition, perhaps even a depressive, who harbored lifelong grudges originating from his childhood, Schulz had dared to admit what he, and others like him, have discovered: that in America, becoming a celebrity does not convert a commonplace, ordinary individual into a hero or even into greatness.

     The historian Daniel Boorstin explored this thought in his 1961 book The Image, in which he wrote the following: “We seem to have discovered the processes by which fame is manufactured. In the U.S., a man’s name can become a household word overnight. The Graphic Revolution suddenly gave us the means of fabricating well-knowness.”

     “Discovering that we—the television watchers, the movie goers, radio listeners, and newspaper and magazine readers—and our servants—the television, movie, and radio producers, newspaper and magazine editors, and ad writers—can so quickly and so effectively give a man ‘fame,’ we have willingly been misled into believing that fame is still a hallmark of greatness.”

     In other words, a woman or a man writes a book, the book becomes a screenplay, the screenplay becomes the movie, the movie includes music, the music is heard on the radio, and the magazine and newspaper writers submit the news of it to their readers. The forms of the media circle back upon themselves, and celebrities, who are long on luck or ambition but short on talent, are created, this way it seems everyday in America.

     But, Boorstin argued, it is all a hall of mirrors propped up only to reflect upon each other, without substance or reality at its center.

     “Movies and books mirror each other,” wrote Boorstin. “Both give us the fantastic, unreal image that which we wish to believe of ourselves. Music becomes a mirror of moods. Experience becomes little more than interior decoration.”

     What Charles Schulz did with Charlie Brown and Snoopy, Walt Disney did with Mickey Mouse, and what Jim Henson did with Miss Piggy and the other Muppets.

     And that is just the entertainment industry. Might we extend Boorstin’s arguments into other arenas: into politics, into religion, into business, or into government? Whom, among all those diverse viewpoints, do we trust? The Democrats or the Republicans; Catholic, Protestant, or Fundamentalist; business leaders; or government leaders? The mirrors that each holds up reflects back upon the other, and substance seems strangely missing. We believe some. We disbelieve others. We hope. We lose hope.

     On October 2, 1959, The Twilight Zone first premiered on television, and Rod Serling, the show’s host, began with these words: “There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.”

     We live today in a kind of Twilight Zone, where, on one side promises are trumpeted and fears are discounted, and on the other side, calamity and despair are shouted from the rooftop, and we lurch back and forth between them. Whom do we trust?

      At the end of the day, inside this hall of mirrors, this fifth dimension of imagination, we can applaud Charles Schulz’s created fictional world by shouting, “You’re a good man, Charlie Brown!”

EXPLOSION IN NEW YORK CITY

by William H. Benson

September 17, 2009

     At noon on September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn cart pulled up near J. P. Morgan’s headquarters at the corner of Broad and Wall Street at the south end of Manhattan. The driver quickly dismounted and dissolved into the crowd, but the wagon was loaded with dynamite and iron sash weights that exploded, sending flames shooting toward the sky as chunks of heavy metal rained down upon the people walking on the streets

     Thirty-eight people were killed, and 143 wounded. It was the worst terrorist action on American soil until the Oklahoma City attack in 1995, and the worst in New York City until the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. The explosion left a dozen or so pockmarks on the marble walls of the building, and those can be seen today. And yet the blast killed only one person inside the building, a 24-year-old clerk.

     Who would do such a despicable thing? J. P. Morgan’s bank had come under increasing attack in recent days for arranging a sizeable loan to help the Allies fight the Great War in Europe, but the public tended to think that it was the work of anarchists, radicals, Communists, foreigners, or labor officials. The public lumped together those segments of society and were incapable of differentiating between any of them.

     A crew of lawmen and detectives dug into the crime scene and found nothing. “But years of investigation yielded nothing—no indictments, no trials, no culprits. No one ever came forward to take responsibility for the crime, or to state what it was to accomplish.”

     Beverly Gage, a history professor at Yale, has recently published a book, The Day Wall Street Exploded, in which she argued that this New York City attack must be understood “in the wider history of industrial warfare that proliferated in America.”

     It was truly a war, one fought between management—the owners of the businesses—and their employees—the workers. Decades of brutal labor policies and governmental repression had forced employees to resort to violence to draw attention to their plight.

     Between 1881 and 1905, there were 37,000 labor strikes in the U.S., and many of these were bloody, bitter struggles. Management met all attempts to unionize “with clubbings, shootings, jailings, blacklistings, and executions, perpetrated by company goons, police officers, deputies, and soldiers. Dozens were killed in these conflicts.”

     There was the strike in 1877 against the B & O Railroad in 1877 that killed 26 people, the Homestead Steel strike in 1892, the Pullman railroad car strike in 1894, and the Boston police strike in 1919.

     The federal and state governments often sided with management. Calvin Coolidge, governor of Massachusetts, sent a telegram to Samuel Gompers, the unionizer, that read: “There is no right to strike against the public safety by anybody, anywhere, any time.” 

     What did the strikers want? They wanted the 8-hour working day instead of the typical 12. They wanted a decent wage, rather the pittance that management tossed their way. They wanted safer working conditions, and also the right to unionize, to strike, to collective bargain, and to address grievances. They wanted vacations with pay, and the elimination of child labor.

     Above all else, employees wanted respectability and a diminishment of the hopelessness, humiliation, and degradation that accompanies a man or woman who had hoped to provide a good life for a family but cannot when surviving on subsistence wages. Employees caught up in such a deplorable situation are paralyzed by the fear of losing their jobs, and so downtrodden, beleaguered, cornered, and desperate they will strike or turn to violence.       

     Samuel Gompers said it best: “If you wish to improve the condition of the people, you must improve their habits and customs. The reduction of the hours of labor reaches the very root of society. It gives the workingmen better conditions and better opportunities, and makes of him what has been too long neglected—a consumer instead of a mere producer.”

     A peace between management and labor was concluded at some point during the mid-years of the twentieth century, and “to no one’s astonishment civilization was not destroyed, nor did American industry collapse. Employees turned out as much as they had under the longer hours, and the businesses made as much and more profit.”