THOUGHTS ON CUSTER

by William H. Benson

June 25, 2000

     “The defeat of General Custer and the Seventh Cavalry on June 25, 1876, with a loss of 265 men killed and 52 wounded, was the most sensational battle of the western Indian wars.” So wrote George Bird Grinnell in his chapter “The Custer Battle, 1876” in his classic work, The Fighting Cheyennes.

     Grinnell was most unusual among western historians: he spent time with the Native Americans, interviewed them, especially the Cheyennes, and then recorded their oral histories of what had happened at their battles with the white soldiers between 1856 and 1879. Most historians dismissed the Native Americans’ accounts as untrustworthy, but Grinnell wrote them down as he heard them, “without comment.”

     “Grinnell found among the Cheyennes that their leaders were men of honor and veracity, honest and guarded in their statements, avoiding hearsay.”

     By the mid-1870’s, certain of the Plains Indians tribes resented the Americans’ invasion of their lands, and they refused to accept the white men’s treaties.

     Chief among these “non-treaty” Sioux was the Hunkpapa Sioux medicine man, Sitting Bull, who had witnessed a vision, that the gods had granted him power over the white soldiers. To him in the Rosebud River country of southern Montana in the spring of 1876, he gathered thousands from the tribes of the Sioux nations: the Hunkpapa, Brule, Ogalalla, Minneconjou, Santee, and the Yanktonnais. Joining these Sioux were also the Northern Cheyennes and the Arapahoe.   

       The U.S. government responded to Sitting Bull’s defiance, and dispatched three armies toward the Rosebud, one of which was commanded by General Alfred Terry, along with his Lieutenant Colonel, George Armstrong Custer, from Fort Lincoln near Bismarck, North Dakota. The three armies intended on converging on the Rosebud.

     Early on Sunday morning, June 25, 1876, Custer of the 7^th Cavalry was on the divide between the Rosebud and the Little Big Horn River, when he received his scouts’ report that the Plains Indians were situated on the west side of the Little Big Horn, north and west of his current location. Custer decided to attack, and divided his army three units.

       Major Marcus A. Reno attacked the south end of the Indian camp, but when Reno saw the size of the camp, he decided not to continue his attack, when he was only a quarter of a mile from the village. A mistake. He and his troops retreated to a grove of timber, but panic-stricken, his 112 soldiers then bolted from the woods’ protection, crossed the Little Big Horn, and sought refuge upon a bluff.

     The Cheyenne later told Grinnell that they thought the white soldiers’ behavior was bizarre. “We could never understand why the soldiers left the timber, for if they had stayed there, the Indians could not have killed them.” More than 40 soldiers were killed.

     Frederick Benteen, Captain of Custer’s second unit, arrived on the bluffs just as Reno’s men were scaling them. Benteen asked Reno, “Where is Custer?” But Reno did not know. Custer had led the third unit himself, five miles to the north hoping to flank the entire Indian camp in a surprise attack. Suddenly, Custer too saw the immensity of the village, between 10,000 and 12,000 Indians, of which some three thousand were warriors.

     Custer chose not to attack. A mistake. But the Indian warriors, led by the chiefs Gall, Crazy Horse and Two Moon, recognized Custer’s indecision and attacked, while Custer and his soldiers tried to stand them off.

     “Indians and troopers fought in a big tangle. Everyone fired wildly. No one stopped to see who was who. They were so densely packed that the Indians were shooting each other. . . . Many of the Indians hacked away with clubs or hatchets. Soldiers died. It was every man for himself.” The fight was soon over, and Custer’s entire unit was wiped out.

     Years later, the Cheyenne warriors who fought there that day admitted to George Grinnell “that if Reno and Custer had kept on and charged through the village from opposite ends, the Indians would have scattered and there would have been no disaster.”

     That may have been so, but at the age of thirty-six, George Armstrong Custer, the most flamboyant and sensational Civil War general and Indian fighter that America had ever produced, was gone. The Indians had called Custer “Long Hair” or sometimes “Son of the Morning Sun.” The latter was a name filled with homage, for the Native Americans’ revered the sunrise, that eastern sky where the sun is born again and again.

TELEVISION AND TIANANMEN SQUARE

by William H. Benson

June 11, 2009

     Television audiences all over the world were focused upon events playing out in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China in 1989, twenty years ago last week. Angry students had taken to the Square, where for days they had marched in protest against the communist government, shouting themselves hoarse by demanding greater freedoms.

     Never to be forgotten though was the scene of a single college student standing before a line of army tanks defying them to roll over him. Television cameras captured it all.

     On June 4, the government declared martial law and sent in the army, and with guns blazing, the soldiers and tanks did roll over the students. “Amid the gunfire, the protests quickly subsided.” The students fled, but the government rounded them up, and many were executed. Chinese television reporters for weeks afterwards repeatedly broadcast shots of despairing students on the wanted list, handcuffed and being taken into custody.

     And, then one day the picture on the television screen changed. Suddenly, there were scenes of prosperity and reports upon the progress in China. The government had instantly swept away from the public’s eye the Tiananmen Square demonstrators. As a result, the young Chinese, those under the age of thirty, know little about what happened at Tiananmen Square because the government had changed the channel, permanently.

     Eleven months later on May 3, 1990, an author named Bill McKibben, then living in upstate New York, decided he would watch television on all the channels of his cable company for the twenty-four hours of that day. To do this, he enlisted the help of about a hundred of his friends to record on videocassettes one of the channels. Then, for weeks afterwards, he watched each of those channels.

     McKibben, in his book The Age of Missing Information, asked a question, “Does having access to more information than ever by way of television mean that we know more than ever?” McKibben did not believe so. “We say information reverently, as if it meant understanding or wisdom but it doesn’t. Sometimes it even gets in the way.”

     Television directs a fire hose of information and entertainment into our homes. Tiananmen Square gave way to the Persian Gulf War, to the Clinton Presidency and his impeachment, to 9-11, to Bush’s War in Afghanistan and Iraq, and finally to President Obama speaking in Cairo last week. It is all instantaneous and alive, and it is not old information but new: after all, it is the news.   

     The television is ubiquitous, ever-present, standing in our living rooms, available 24 hours per day, and it is repetitive: who has not seen a re-run of Andy Griffith?

     UNESCO in 1953 investigated the new phenomenon of television and concluded, “Television constitutes an enormous drain on creative talent. It is difficult if not impossible to provide every day of the week good dramatic shows, good entertainment, good educational broadcasting, and good children’s programmes. The result of long hours of programmes is bound to be that quality becomes the exception.”

     Fred Friendly, a network executive, once said, “Television at its very worst makes so much money. Why would it ever want to be its very best?”

     And the people rule; television watchers determine the content. “It’s what you want,” McKibben wrote. The chairman of MTV networks once said, “The consumer is our God. Millions of dollars are spent to find out what the viewers want to see.” What counts are the people, and the networks ceaselessly curtsey and curry our favor. This inevitably distorts our view of the world; the thought is that we, each of us, are the most important point in the universe. “We do it all for you,” and “Have it your way,” are TV slogans.

     The truth is that the world does not care. It is actually an exceedingly dangerous place for people, and there are forces ready to roll over us without pausing.

     “The stars in the night sky hold no interest to advertisers,’ McKibben wrote, “for they don’t reflect us. The stars that do reflect us are the kind that appear on talk shows.” Television creates “celebrities who are celebrated almost entirely for being celebrities.”

     Chairman Mao insisted that citizens “serve the people.” And a constant refrain was that, “Since 1949, the people are the masters.” The newspaper is the People’s Daily, and the country is the People’s Republic of China.

      For the people, the Chinese government changed the channel in 1989, and so Tiananmen Square is “the Forgotten Revolution,” but in America, “We the people” can change the channel whenever we choose, but one channel is no different than is another, an easily “forgotten” comedy or drama or news story. A hundred channels, but nothing worth watching.

CHOOSING A MAJOR

by William H. Benson

May 28, 2009

     The graduation season is now behind us, and a new school year and college looms ahead for the graduates, some weeks hence. This summer the new crop of high school graduates will arrive at a decision they have been mulling over for months—what subject will they major in. The act of choosing one major precludes choosing all the others: in order to enroll at the university we are compelled to be selective.

     This decision has an overpowering impact upon students’ lives that carries forward for decades. Thirty-five years ago, the student who majored in psychology has struggled ever since with a succession of jobs—at a big discount store, as a truck driver, and now he is a custodian at the post office. Another enrolled in physical education classes, never located a job in a school, and now barely survives as a handy man. Another studied English literature, has taught English in a Denver metro high school ever since, and now counts the years and days until she can retire. 

     Choose wisely, perhaps a subject with broad commercial appeal, for your choice will echo forward through the decades of your life and your children’s lives, in terms of earning potential, personal gratification versus the misery index, and where you can live.

     There are few rocket scientists in rural America, only a smattering of brain surgeons there, but most small towns have schools that need teachers, banks that need bankers, and offices that require attorneys or realtors or accountants. If you want to live in a small town, you might plan your major around the jobs that exist there.

     The job market degrades us all; it forces us to accept the job that is available where we find ourselves, not necessarily that job for which the university has trained us.

     The universities and colleges of America are world class, and they do an excellent job of preparing people for the professions. Yet, they do an even better job of pulling open the doors marked wisdom and pointing to the treasures contained within the world. The university is a depository of human knowledge that the wisest humans have accumulated painstakingly over the ages of human existence, and it is available, only for the asking.

     The perceptive student asks, “Where else can I go and read all day?” Others show up the first day at college with a contradictory attitude. “What I don’t know isn’t worth knowing,” they might say, and then defy anyone to teach them a thing, but at college, curiosity is a prerequisite.

     “There are whole areas of knowledge which, if we have any curiosity or sense of life at all, we crave to explore.” Each area of knowledge is a new world—a series of caves that opens wider and wider.

     Sometimes the research may lead us into places we may not want to go. We are forced to visualize, to see with new eyes, for example, the sweeping changes of the historical past, the intricacies contained within the living cell, the power of great literary works, the symmetry of a chemical molecule, and the transformation of a language over time.   

     The world in which we live is an incredibly complicated one. If a student declares a major in biology, the first question is, “which aspect of biology?” For there is cellular biology, biochemistry, botany, zoology, microbiology, anatomy, ecosystems, and a series of other subjects that all fit under the header of biology.

      If you were to study history, you might well ask “what era and what geographical region?” History includes ancient, European, American, Asian, or even African histories. European history is further divided into British, French, German, Dutch, Italian, and Russian, and these are each divided into centuries, and those centuries into topics.

     The same can be said for chemistry, mathematics, astronomy, religion, physics, medicine, business, for within any broad subject there is layer upon layer of knowledge that has been carefully researched, documented, and then written into the textbooks. A careful student will limit his or her scope.

     Henry David Thoreau said, “Simplify. Simplify. Simplify.” He followed his own advice by living in a cabin near Walden Pond, but instead, I say to you, future college student, “Outline. Outline. Outline.” It is a proven method for organizing a mountain of mind-twisting information, much like a wall of pigeonholes, so that you can retain that information, perhaps withdraw it later, and then use it, for your own betterment.

     To choose a college major wisely means selecting where you want to live, factoring in your own innate curiosity, expanding your talent to visualize, limiting your scope, and finally adding in a measure of patience. Wait and allow your major to reveal itself to you. “Patience and patience,” said Emerson, “we shall win at last.”

THANK THE TEACHERS

by William H. Benson

May 14, 2009

     Anna Quindlen announced her retirement last week, and I was disappointed. For the past nine years, every other week, she has written the essay, “The Last Word,” on Newsweek’s inside back cover, alternating with George Will. Newsweek is redesigning itself, beginning this week, and now that Quindlen is in her mid-fifties, she feels ready for retirement, and will now allow another the opportunity to write.

     She recently received three binders containing clippings from younger reporters, and she was amazed. “They were so thoroughly reported, so well written. Whether local, national or international news, they were just what journalism ought to be.” Dripping with talent, these young writers were so well-trained. We should thank their teachers.

     It is mid-May and the graduation season is upon us, the time when the teachers say for a final time, “You are excused. Go, apply yourself, and find your place.” It is coincidental that at the same time that Anna Quindlen has decided upon retirement, a new crop of graduates will enter the workforce. Graduation and retirement—the beginning and the end for America’s workforce.

     Some graduates think that at post-graduation their life will fall into place, when they find that first job. It works that way for some, but not for others. These others struggle mightily to find a job, a position, or a career—one far better than what their parents or teachers expected of them or could ever have imagined for them.

     Often a graduate has to wait, sometimes for years, before he or she finds a place in the world—gathering experience, determination, and hard knocks—until an old timer retires or is relegated to the sidelines. Each generation pays its dues.

     For example, Harry Truman had done very little—a farmer, World War I veteran, men’s clothing store owner, and municipal court judge—until he was elected to the U. S. Senate in 1934 at the age of fifty. An older Senator advised him that the Senate was composed of two types, “the show horses and the work horses. Be a work horse.”

     Another example was the teacher Frank McCourt. Nearing the age of forty, his prospects were dim. He was in a marriage that would eventually dissolve. He had slept through his night college classes at New York University, after working all day, until earning his diploma. “A failed everything, I looked for my place in the world. I became an itinerant substitute teacher drifting from school to school.”

      Then, one day he met Roger Goodman, the head of the English department at Peter Stuyvesant High School on 15^th Street in Manhattan, and Goodman asked Frank if he would cover the English classes for a teacher on sick leave. Soon, Frank was teaching there permanently, and he admitted in his book Teacher Man that he was “Coming Alive in Room 205.”

     This was, he wrote, “the top high school in the city, the Harvard of high schools, alma mater of various Nobel Prize winners, of James Cagney himself. Thirteen thousand candidates set every year for the Stuyvesant admissions test, and the school skimmed off the top seven hundred. Now I taught where I could never have been one of the seven hundred.” Leapfrogging over the other teachers, McCourt had landed at the top spot.

     Some never get that lucky break; some make their own breaks, and some are trapped—in a stifling marriage, in a rural setting without opportunities, in a religion that does not encourage advancement, or in a miserable job without any light at the end of the day—a terrible waste of human talent.

     Underlying this entrapment is the feeling that you cannot do any better. “Do not believe it,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” Over time we learn the truth of Emerson’s words, “The years teach us things that the days never knew.”

     Teaching the next generation is difficult. There is a vast difference between writing an essay and teaching others to write an essay, between doing a science project and teaching another how to do a science project. The skills are poles apart, and some do not recognize that. George Bernard Shaw said, “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.” I think that on that issue Shaw was wrong: teaching is doing the harder work.

     Congratulations to all the graduates this season, and welcome to the workforce. Thank the teachers.

HERBERT HOOVER VS. FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

by William H. Benson

April 30, 2009

     On Saturday, March 4, 1933, the President, Herbert Hoover, and the President-elect, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, rode together to the Capitol for the new President’s inauguration. FDR was sociable and talkative, but in contrast, Hoover’s face was heavy and sullen, for he could not conceal his bitterness. The night before he had told his close friends, “We are at the end of our string. There is nothing more we can do.”

     It has been said that “Politicians whom the gods wish to destroy run out of luck,” and clearly Hoover had run out of luck. The Great Depression had begun in the autumn of 1929, just seven months after Hoover had become President, and for the three and a half years since he had desperately fought it.

     He cut taxes. He insisted that wages be kept artificially high. He deliberately ran up a huge deficit, “the largest-ever increase in government spending.” To provide relief to the farmers his passed his Agricultural Marketing Act, and then he extended this idea to the entire economy in December of 1931 with his Reconstruction Finance Corporation.

     He initiated major public works projects: the San Francisco Bay Bridge, the Los Angeles Aqueduct, and the Hoover Dam. Then, he pushed for the passage of the 1932 Revenue Act, which, in an abrupt about-face, was “the greatest taxation increase in US history in peacetime.”

     Although it was not known in 1933, “the essence of the New Deal was now in place.” Rexwell Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s colleagues, confessed as much in 1974: “We didn’t admit it at the time, but practically the whole New Deal was extrapolated from programs that Hoover [had] started.”

     By March of 1933, Hoover’s administration had ground to a stop. Congress, horrified by his deficit spending, had turned on him, insisting that he bring the budget back into balance. American exports had collapsed. Industrial production had been cut in half from what it had been in the twenties, and unemployment had climbed to 24.9% of the workforce. Millions more were subsisting on some form of public or private charity.

     By the final weeks of the Hoover’s administration, the banking system “came to a virtual standstill.” Truly, these were the toughest of all times for the American people, and they turned on their President, calling their shantytowns Hoovervilles.

     Dour, bitter, and gloomy, Hoover became the “Depression Made Flesh.” A cabinet member said that he admitted that he avoided the White House to escape “the ever-present feeling of gloom that pervades everything connected with this administration.” H. G. Wells called upon Hoover and found him “sickly, overworked, and overwhelmed.” When told to relax, Hoover replied, “I have other things to do when a nation is on fire.”

    Once inside the Capitol on that Saturday morning in early March, Hoover and FDR separated, but then at noon a bugle blew and Roosevelt, holding his son’s arm, walked as best he could down a maroon-carpeted ramp to the platform outside. Hoover followed. With a hand on a Dutch Bible, Roosevelt took the oath of office of the President.

     To the crowd and to millions listening at home, he said, “Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself—nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance. In every dark hour of our national life, a leadership of frankness and vigor has met with that understanding and support of the people themselves, which is essential to victory. . . . We must act and act quickly. . . . We do not distrust the future of essential democracy.”

     Hoover stared glumly at the ground.

     Roosevelt’s first hundred days was a blitz of legislation—the AAA, the NRA, the PWA—such that Congress had barely time to come up for air. Although confident, witty, relaxed, and empathetic with the American people, Roosevelt, like Hoover before him, discovered just how difficult it was to fight off the devastation that this Great Depression had laid upon the nation. It continued for another seven years.

     Popular mythology holds that Hoover was somehow responsible for the Depression and that FDR deserves the credit for the recovery, but the facts are more complex that that simple interpretation: each did what they could with the tools at their disposal.