ON CRIME & PUNISHMENT

by William H. Benson

March 5, 2010

     In Boston, on March 5, 1770 on a cold, moonlit evening, when a foot of snow lay on the ground, a gang of several hundred hostile Americans approached eight British soldiers, the hated Redcoats, sometimes called lobster-backs, and began to taunt them. The crowd then turned ugly and began shouting at the soldiers, cursing them, and throwing snowballs, chunks of ice, oyster shells, stones, sticks, anything they could pick up and throw. The cornered, terrified soldiers opened fire and killed five American men.

     The Boston Massacre, as it as since been called, was the opening salvo in what became the American Revolution. John Adams, a young attorney from nearby Braintree, Massachusetts, agreed to defend those eight British soldiers. Although he would later serve as a leader in America’s revolt against the British crown, Adams believed that it was his duty then to defend those soldiers from what appeared a most certain hanging.

     In preparation for the trial, Adams read the eighteenth-century Italian thinker, Cesare, Marchese di Beccaria, who had written an early work on the punishment of crime, titling it On Crime and Punishment. Beccaria had argued against the death penalty and torture, and had instead advocated for major reform of the criminal legal system, and that criminal justice should conform to rational forms of punishment.

     He presented certain enlightened principles: punishment should deter further crimes, rather than serve as a form of retribution; that it should be proportionate to the crime committed; that the certainty and promptness of the punishment, rather than its severity, would achieve the preventative affect; and that the proceedings should be made public.

Beccaria’s ideas were revolutionary in a day when capital punishment by hanging or firing squads was the rule.

     Standing before the jury, Adams argued that the British soldiers had acted in their own self defense when they had fired their guns into the crazed mob. “Do you expect he should behave like a stoic philosopher, lost in apathy?” Adams asked. “Facts are stubborn things, and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictums of our passions, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.”

     The jury acquitted six of the soldiers, and the other two, the jury determined, were guilty of manslaughter. But instead of being walked to the gallows, the two received a branding on their thumbs. For the rest of Adams’s life, he was pleased with his defense of those soldiers, calling it, “one of the most gallant, generous, manly, and disinterested actions of my whole life, and one of the best pieces I ever rendered my country.”

      When he wrote the Bill of Rights, James Madison included Amendment VIII: “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” That amendment eliminated any U.S. citizen from ever facing the more sadistic forms of torture: the rack, head screws, the use of boiling water, mutilations by cutting off tongues and ears and hands, and locking people’s feet and hands in stocks.

     Thirty years ago, a notorious white collar criminal and con artist, named Frank W. Abagnale, Jr., wrote a book of his life of writing phony checks all over the world. When finally caught, he was living in France, was tried and sentenced to six months at the Perpignan prison. He was thrown naked into a darkened stone hole five feet wide and tall, with only a bucket that was emptied whenever the guards wanted to.

     No letters, no visitors, no communication was allowed, no haircuts, no chance to shave or cut his fingernails, no light, and nothing to read. He slept on the stone floor. Food was scant. Insects and bacteria took up residence on his skin, and soon scabs ulcerated his body. The stench from the filth was suffocating.

     Six months later, the Swedes had their turn at Abagnale. He was tried and sentenced to six months in the Swedish prison, and was told, “You will find it very different from the prisons in France. In fact it is very different from any of your American prisons.” Frank was permitted to live in a dormitory at Lund University, where he could take classes or work at a job. He could wear his own clothes, in what he learned was a coed prison. He realized that “Swedish prisons actually attempt to rehabilitate a criminal.”

     Which system really works to deter the criminal—the barbaric French dungeon, the soft Swedish dorm room, or the cramped American cell with steel doors and bars? Or is branding a thumb a better option? The answer does not instantly appear, because governments and judges have learned that matching the punishment to equal the crime and thus prevent other crimes is an art not quickly mastered.

HUCKLEBERRY FINN

by William H. Benson

February 18, 2010

     “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”

     And with that brief introduction, Mark Twain began his story, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, publishing it in 1885, on this date, February 18. No one knew then that a boy’s story, about Huck Finn, a fourteen-year-old boy, and Jim, a run-away slave, floating on a raft down the Mississippi River would earn its esteemed position in America’s literary works.

     Ernest Hemingway said, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn. . . . It’s the best book we’ve had.” And Harold Bloom, the literary critic, said that the first seven paragraphs of the book’s 19^th chapter contain “the most beautifully written descriptive passage in all of American literature.”

     You may very well ask, “Why read and then reread this classic? or any classic? Why read literature at all? What is the benefit?” Mark Twain, invariably the humorist, defined the classics as “those books everybody says you should read but nobody does.”

     Students, especially the English majors, read them. Almost twenty years ago, the film critic David Denby decided that he would sit again in a student’s desk to read and discuss the classics. “In the fall of 1991, thirty years after entering Columbia University for the first time, I went back to school and sat with eighteen-year-olds and read the same books that they read. Not just any books. Together we read Homer, Plato, Sophocles, Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Marx, and Virginia Woolf. Those books. Those courses.”

     Except for the David Denby’s, deep reading of the classics is a talent few wish to master, and so it remains underappreciated, as a useless waste of our time. Unlike basketball stars, championship trophies are not presented to the most expansive readers, who can boast, as H. L. Mencken did, that he “read like an athlete,” when in his teens.

     Listening to the television is the skill most resorted to today; people listen to the sports newscaster, to the talking heads in a news studio, and to the empty heads who act and speak in some simple-minded television comedy or mystery. Conversely, to read is to tune in, listen, and catch the dazzling and daring ideas of the best thinkers from the past. 

     Yes, some of the great books, such as Hegel’s works, are exceedingly dreary, unintelligible, unfulfilling, and boring. Yet, only by reading them again and again, though, can a student gain that critical eye, discerning the good from the bad, the intelligent from the stupid, and the correct from the flawed. Nietzsche warned us to ask always, “Who is the interpreter and what power does he seek to gain over the text?”

     Sometimes the writer’s research leads him or her into areas that we, the readers, do not want to go, and so the texts swamp our very minds. A Newsweek writer wrote this past week, “Some works are overwhelming. We see authors struggling to create masterpieces that on almost every page threaten to collapse under their own weight. . . . But who wouldn’t rather read a flawed masterpiece than none at all. After all, not even Twain could figure out the right way to end Huckleberry Finn.”

     We read every day in the newspapers sorry tales of people who committed themselves to the most foolish choices that left them so vulnerable, so easily persuaded and intimidated, and so misled and gullible. They failed to ask beforehand Nietzsche’s question, “Who is the interpreter and what power does he seek over the text?”

     Certain texts will never go away. Harold Bloom said that “Freud, genius that he was, failed to apprehend the permanent power of texts that cannot vanish: the Tanakh, the New Testament, and the Qur’an. If asked the desert island question, I would have to take Shakespeare, but the world continues drowning in the blood-dimmed tide of its Scriptures, whether it reads them or not.”

     He also argued that “reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.”

     The next Great American Novel, that work which will eclipse Huckleberry Finn, is just ahead of us, perhaps around the corner, but few will recognize it when it appears, for genius is transcendent, beyond the limits of our thoughts, or as William Blake said, “The ages are all equal, but genius is always above its age.” Read well from those authors, such as Mark Twain, who dazzle us, our great cloud of witnesses to the human condition.

HAMPTON ROADS PEACE CONFERENCE

by William H. Benson

February 4, 2010

     Like a chess game, war moves through three distinct phases: a series of opening moves, a middle section, and finally an end game, the point at which one side capitulates to the other. In the dark days of 1942, Winston Churchill said, “This is not the beginning, nor is it the ending, but it is the beginning of the ending.” By the early days of 1865, Lincoln in the North and Jefferson Davis in the South were deep into their end games.

     By then the peace movement in the Confederate States of America was on the rise. If President Davis would have ordered his general Robert E. Lee to lay down his arms, Lee would have obeyed him, and Davis would have faced little political opposition. But, stubborn that he was, he would not admit defeat.

     To capitulate would mean that he would have to face hard questions: What kind of punishment would he and his fellow Southerners face? What will happen to their slave society? How will they hire the labor to work their fields? What will become of their government, their economy, and their theology? Would they have to admit that they were wrong about their slave-based society and their Confederate theology, of which Lincoln had said, “not the sort of religion upon which people can get to heaven.”?

     On February 2, 1865, Lincoln slipped out of the White House, boarded his steamer the River Queen, and sailed south to Hampton Roads, a port in Virginia. There, on February 3, he, with his Secretary of State, William Seward, met the Vice-President of the Confederate States of America, Alexander Stephens, and his two commissioners, Robert Hunter and John Campbell, three Confederates who had dared to cross battle lines.

     The historian Carl Sandburg drew a close written portrait of the scene. “Five astute men of politics and law talked four hours in a steamboat saloon. What went on in the minds of the five men, the tangled cross-purposes underlying the words of their mouths, no onlooker could have caught and reported.”

     Stephens opened with a question to Lincoln: “Mr. President, is there no way of putting an end to the present trouble?” Lincoln carefully answered with his three requirements to end this Civil War: the restoration of national authority throughout all the states, no negotiation on the banishment of slavery, and a cessation of all hostilities.

     Seward then dropped a bombshell when he explained to the three Southerners that Congress on January 31 had passed the 13^th Amendment, the Emancipation Proclamation that outlawed slavery. The news visibly rattled the three commissioners.

     Hunter voiced the concern that all Southerners felt: “if the South should consent to peace on the basis of the Emancipation Proclamation, it would precipitate the entire Southern society into irremediable ruin. No work would be done, nothing would be cultivated, and both blacks and whites would starve!”

     Lincoln tried to allay their fears by telling a story of a farmer with the chore of feeding pigs one winter, a rustic story that seemed to have little relationship to the issue, but then Lincoln underscored the moral. “And so in the dire contingency you name, whites and black alike will have to look out for themselves; and I have an abiding faith that they will go about it in a fashion that will [please] you in a very agreeable way.”

     And yet Lincoln, tender he may have been personally, was determined to vanquish the rebellion and the rebels. Hunter finally summarized Lincoln’s arguments, “Mr. President, if we understand you correctly, you think that we of the Confederacy have committed treason; that we are traitors to your government; that we have forfeited our rights, and are proper subjects for the hangman. Is not that about what your words imply?”

     “Yes,” said Lincoln. “You have stated the proposition better than I did.”

     Seward indicated though that to lay down their arms would not result in degradation or in humiliation, but that with peace, the Southern people would again be under the Constitution “with all their rights secured thereby.”

     Lincoln finally challenged Stephens to go back to his native Georgia and convince his fellow citizens in Georgia to withdraw their troops, end the war, and rejoin the Union. “Whatever may have been the views of your people before the war, they must be convinced now, that Slavery is doomed.”

     The Hampton Roads peace conference yielded nothing, as Lincoln had correctly suspected. The war continued for another two and a half months, and it ended very badly for the Southerners, a demoralized and beaten people, not what Lincoln had intended.

     February is Black History Month, the month of Lincoln’s birthday, February 12, and also that of Frederick Douglass’s, February 14, and the Hampton Roads peace conference, historians now consider, as just another missed opportunity to end a war.

POWER AND POETRY

by William H. Benson

January 21, 2010

     John F. Kennedy and Robert Frost met on the steps of the Capitol on January 20, 1961 at the inauguration of the 35^th President of the United States. Kennedy’s associate, Stewart Udall, had first suggested that Jack should invite the nation’s most distinguished poet, Robert Frost, to speak at the inauguration, but Kennedy, at first, had hesitated. “Oh no. You know that Robert Frost always steals any show he is part of.”

     During the 1960 campaign, Kennedy had ended his speeches by quoting Robert Frost’s memorable lines: “But I have promises to keep; And miles to go before I sleep; And miles to go before I sleep.”

     Both Kennedy and Frost were from Massachusetts: Kennedy from Hyannis Port on the coast, and Frost from Amherst, in the center of the state, where he was poet-in-residence at Amherst College, and that was about all they had in common, for in 1961, Frost was 86 years old, and Kennedy half that at 43. Where Frost was a distinguished poet, the grand old man of American belles letters, Kennedy was the wealthy scion of Joseph Kennedy, Catholic, Irish, a Navy man, and an exceedingly ambitious politician.

     And yet there was something within Kennedy that drew him to Frost. Someone said it was Kennedy’s “insatiable curiosity, his support of the arts in America, and his optimism.” Another said that his decision to include Frost at the inauguration “focused attention on Kennedy as a man of culture, as a man interested in culture.”

     Alice Roosevelt Longworth said: “The Kennedy’s were a fascinating incredible outfit. I had great fun with them, especially Jack. He loved to tease, and he could be very amusing. He also had a real feeling for learning. Both he and Bobby were eager to supplement their education by learning more. They really wanted to know.”

     The day dawned bright and sunny on the heels of a snowstorm just days before, and then after the swearing in, Kennedy spoke.

     “Let the word go forth . . . that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. . . . The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life. . . . And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country!”

     After the applause, Frost approached the podium, but because of the glare from the blinding sun, he discovered he could not read the 77 lines of the poem “Dedication,” that he had written for the occasion. After a few awkward moments, he instead recited the fourteen lines of “The Gift Outright,” a poem he had memorized.

     Frost’s private advice to the new president: “Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan age. Don’t be afraid of power.” Then in a thank you note back to Frost, Kennedy wrote, “It’s poetry and power all the way!”

     During the last two years of Frost’s life, he continued to circle within the President’s orbit, but then on January 29, 1963, at the age of 88, the poet passed away. Of Frost, Kennedy said, “He has bequeathed his nation a body of imperishable verse from which Americans will forever gain joy and understanding.”

     On Saturday, October 26, 1963, Amherst College conducted a ground-breaking ceremony for the Robert Frost Library and invited the president to give the key address, and in it Kennedy explored the distinctions and resemblances of power and poetry.

     “And it is hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations. When power corrupts, poetry cleanses, for art establishes the basic human truths that serve as the touchstones of our judgment.

     “But in a democratic society the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist, is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. I look forward to a great future for America—a future in which our country will match its military strength with our moral strength, its wealth with our wisdom, its power with our purpose. I look forward to an America, which will reward achievement in the arts as we reward achievement in business or statecraft.”

     Lofty words, but well worth pondering today, and they were virtually President Kennedy’s last intellectual thought, for four weeks later on Friday, November 22, 1963, while riding in a Dallas motorcade, an assassin’s bullet ended his life.

SHERLOCK HOLMES AND 2010

by William H. Benson

January 14, 2010

     Robert Downey, Jr. stars in the new Sherlock Holmes movie that Hollywood released this past Christmas season. Because it is an intricately-woven plot with a fair number of turns and twists, movie-goers must listen closely to the characters, an unusual request of most of Hollywood’s productions and made more difficult in this movie because Downey’s words come so fast and soft, almost unintelligible.

     The story includes all of the standard Sherlock Holmes trappings: Holmes himself—peerless and brilliant; Dr. John Watson, who, with Sherlock, lives at 221 A and B Baker Street; Mrs. Hudson, their domestic housekeeper; LaStrade, the inept London police detective; Irene Radler, Holmes’s female counterpart, played by Rachel McAdams; and a mastermind criminal, who, for this story, is named Blackwood. And then there is the gray and dreary nineteenth-century London setting—the Thames River, Big Ben, and horses pulling coaches over cobblestone streets.

     According to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s canon on Sherlock—four novels and fifty-six short stories—the master detective was born in 1854 on January 6, a day I find most appropriate, at the year’s beginning. January derived its name from the Roman god, Janus, two-faced, seeing into the past, but also peering deep into the future, much like Sherlock. In the present Holmes can step into a crime scene, see from the clues what happened in the past, and using detective reasoning and logic determine what he, Watson, and LaStrade must do to trap the perpetrator in the future.

     The new year, 2010, yawns before us, inviting us to live it, and we wonder what it will hold. George Will in Newsweek considered 2009 “A Clunker of a Year.” And, Jon  Meacham, Newsweek’s editor, called for “The Case for an Optimistic Stoicism,” and then quoted from Meditations, written by the second-century A.D. Roman philosopher Marcus Aurelius: “If you’ve seen the present then you’ve seen everything—as it’s been since the beginning, as it will be forever. The same substance, the same form. All of it.”

     Our ears long for a healthy dose of optimism, perhaps even a Marcus Aurelius stoic variety. A headline by Daniel Gross, another Newsweek columnist, shouted, “Snap Out of It! The dangers of economic pessimism.”

     Thirty years ago, America was adrift, suffering from galloping inflation, an Iran hostage crisis, a sluggish economy, and a cerebral but ineffective Democratic President, Jimmy Carter. Suddenly, from the wings, we heard a new voice, the California Republican governor Ronald Reagan, who startled everyone with his words, “There are those who think that America’s best days are gone, that we are now a has-been, a finished republic, but I say to you that America’s best days are in the future. We are the city on the hill, a guiding light for all the world to see and admire.” He was right.

     That kind of language uplifted and motivated a downtrodden American people then in 1980 and would do so again in 2010. But instead we read headlines: “How Great Powers Fall: Steep Debt, Slow Growth, and High Spending Kill Empires—and America Could Be Next,” and “An Empire at Risk.” Few words could be more debilitating.

     There are those who argue that the Republican Party must pull itself together, capture the independents and moderates, focus upon fiscal restraint, hold taxes down, finish and be done with these excessively foolish wars in third world countries that squander our people and resources, and then discard unaffordable federal government programs.

     Tim Pawlenty, the Republican governor in Minnesota said, “You can’t say you are going to be fiscally disciplined and then go to Washington and spend like crazy. You can’t say, ‘We are against corruption and bad behavior,’ and then engage in corruption and bad behavior. I mean, people aren’t stupid.” Pawlenty further believes that “we should pass an amendment to require a balanced budget.”

     Haley Barbour, Mississippi’s Republican governor, believes that the Republican Party, instead of struggling for a grand political theory, should take back the moderates. “People are crazy if they think we win by getting more pure. We win by getting big.”

     “Elementary, my dear Watson,” supposedly said Sherlock Holmes, once he had explained how he had solved a crime, but according to Doyle’s canon, Holmes never did say that phrase, for Doyle understood that seeing into the future is not ever elementary.

     And yet the clues are all there for what we face in 2010, and we try to focus upon it and see it, but pessimism and a helpless feeling have obscured and colored the picture gray, like a dreary day in Sherlock Holmes’s London. Let the sun shine on America.