Mark Twain vs. Winston Churchill

by William H. Benson

November 30, 2017

Samuel Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. His father, Judge John Clemens, died when Samuel was eleven years old, and his mother then raised her children in poverty and desperation in Hannibal, north of St. Louis, alongside the Mississippi River. 

Winston Churchill was born on the same day, November 30, but thirty-nine years later, in 1874. His father, Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill, was an aristocrat, an English politician, and a philanderer. He died when Winston was twenty. Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was an American socialite from Brooklyn, New York, who married three times. 

When an adult, Clemens changed his name to Mark Twain, a romantic name that put some distance between himself and his poverty-stricken childhood, but Churchill kept his proud aristocratic name.

Both men loved to smoke cigars, drink hard liquor, and write dozens of books. Twain’s first book, Innocents Abroad, was nonfiction, but his most popular works—Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Prince and the Pauper—were fiction. Churchill wrote history, works on the second World War, and A History of the English-Speaking People. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

When boys, both Twain and Churchill sported bright red hair, but late in life Twain’s turned white, and Churchill’s fell out. 

Twain served all of two weeks as a Confederate soldier, and then wrote a tongue-in-cheek account of his miserable experience. He escaped the Civil War by boarding a stage coach that carried him to Virginia City, Nevada. In essence, Twain dodged the draft. He had no use for political causes or war.

Churchill was a political animal. He fought in battles in Cuba, India, Sudan, and South Africa, wrote accounts of his adventures, won a seat to Parliament, and served there with distinction for decades. 

Twain discovered his gift for humorous public speaking in San Francisco, California. He rented a hall, put up posters, and announced, “Doors open at 7:00. Trouble begins at 8:00.” The crowds filled the hall, they howled, and they were astonished at his comic monologue.

Twain never worked another day in his life. Instead, he spoke everywhere, all over the world. People loved his after dinner speeches and his public lectures, and they accelerated his book sales.

Churchill gave the greatest speech by any Briton of the twentieth century on May 13, 1940, during the darkest days of World War II, when Nazi Germany threatened Western Civilization’s survival.

“You ask, what is our policy. I say it is to wage war by land, sea, and air. War with all our might and with all the strength God has given us, and to wage war against a monstrous tyranny never surpassed in the dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.”

Twain loved his wife, Olivia, with a passion. She called him, “Youth,” a grown man forever young, forever boyish. When she passed away, he was lost, and never recovered. Churchill loved his wife. He said that the greatest diplomatic coup of his life was when he convinced Clementine to marry him.

Neither of them had happy childhoods, and yet each married well and created stable families.

Churchill avoided religion. Politics consumed him. Twain though scorned religion. He labelled the more committed to their faith, “disciples of the wildcat religion.” Yet, his best friend was a New England Congregationalist minister, Reverend Joseph Twichell. 

Both Twain and Churchill fell in love with the English language at an early age. Twain liked the zinger. He would begin with a solemn thought, but then turn it around in a way a reader would not expect. For example, he said, “Nothing so needs reforming as other people’s habits.” 

Another zinger, “It’s not the parts of the Bible that I don’t understand. It’s the parts I do understand.”

Churchill loved an English sentence. He said that when a child, his instructors considered him a dunce, and they denied him the chance to learn Latin and Greek. Instead he was stuck with an English instructor, Mr. Sommervell. Years later Churchill said of his instructor,

“He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. Not only did we learn English parsing thoroughly, but we also practiced English analysis continually. Thus, I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence, which is a noble thing.”

I would contend that Mark Twain is the premier American writer, better than Emerson or Thoreau.

In 2002, more than a million British people were asked in a survey, “who was the greatest Briton ever?” Lady Diana, Darwin, Shakespeare, Newton, John Lennon, and Elizabeth I all placed in the top ten, but Winston Churchill received the most votes by a wide margin. When asked, “Why?” the voters would say, “He saved our country.”

Serendipity

by William H. Benson

November 16, 2017

     About fifty years ago, my dad lost his wallet while driving his tractor in a field. From a neighbor named Sam, he borrowed a metal detector, because he had some dimes and quarters in the coin purse in the wallet, but the field was too big.

     Twenty five years ago, on November 16, 1992, in Hoxne, England, Suffolk county, a tenant farmer named Peter Whatling lost his hammer. He called his neighbor Eric Lawes, and he brought over his metal detector. Instead of Whatling’s hammer though, Eric found buried treasure.

     Lawes contacted the police, and the next day archaeologists from the British Museum arrived with shovels, roped off the area, and began to dig. In the process, they found Whatling’s hammer.

     Their final inventory included 569 gold coins, 14,272 silver coins, 24 bronze coins, 29 items of gold jewelry, 98 silver spoons and ladles, 4 silver bowls, 1 silver beaker, 1 silver vase, 4 pepper pots, and even some toothpicks. The items, plus the hammer, are now on display in the British Museum.

     By the inscriptions on the coins, the archaeologists determined that an unknown person, from the fourth or fifth centuries, when Rome still controlled Britain, had buried his or her treasure and had failed to retrieve it. In November of 1993, twelve months after the discovery, the British Museum and a few private donors paid Lawes £1.75 million, the hoard’s estimated value, and he shared a portion of his windfall with Whatling.

     Most of us are not as fortunate as Lawes. We go to work, eat, relax, sleep, care for our children, and our lives drift on. Nothing extraordinary, and no buried treasure in our backyard. Yet, some people are more resourceful. They envision what others cannot.

     In Russell Conwell’s story, Acres of Diamonds, he tells of two men in the Middle East. One is Ali Hafed, a dreamer, who wants to find diamonds. He sells his farm, leaves his family with a neighbor, and sets out to search for diamonds. He travels through Palestine and Europe, and ends in Barcelona, where in despair and rags, and unable to find any diamonds, he hurls himself into the sea.

     Meanwhile, the man who bought his farm, leads his camel into the brook that flows through the garden, and finds a black stone lying on the white sands at the bottom of the brook. It was a diamond.

     Conway says, “Had Ali Hafed remained at home and dug his own cellar, or underneath his own wheat fields or in his own garden, instead of wretchedness, starvation, and death by suicide in a strange land, he would have enjoyed ‘acres of diamonds.’ Let every man or woman here, if you never hear me again, remember this, that if you wish to be great, you must begin where you are and what you are.”

     Wise advice.

     In the Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip, the king’s three sons displayed a talent for assembling clues and arriving at conclusions. For example, they suspected that they were following a camel, that it was blind in one eye, that it missed a tooth, that a woman rode the camel, and that she was pregnant. Soon, they caught up with a one-eyed camel that missed a tooth, and a pregnant woman.  

     In 1754, the English author Horace Walpole coined the term serendipity, a word he borrowed from that ancient fairy tale. He noticed that the princes were “always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of.”

     Serendipity, a virtue. Walpole called it a “gift,” this ability to discover something unforeseen and unknown, something amazing, when in pursuit of something else.

     Harvard University accepted both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, and yet both dropped out after their sophomore years. They had enrolled in Harvard to pursue a world class education, and yet, each caught a vision of a business, and by “accidents and sagacity” they found diamonds.

     A common question that most young people face is, “Do we stay here, where we grew up, and try to build our lives here, or do we move elsewhere?” A farmer once complained that his county’s two biggest exports were wheat and kids. Indeed, a village’s children move to the towns and cities to find educations, jobs, houses, and a life, and some return to the village, but not many.

     Thanksgiving approaches. It is not a long step from serendipity to gratitude. Both words include certain emotions. We feel astonished, amazed, proud of our families, and we pause to reflect upon all that we have received from this joy-filled thing called life. We set out to live, and all this came with it.

     Five years after my dad lost his wallet, I was on the tractor in the same field, and I saw something odd. I stopped the tractor. The leather was gnarled, the dollars in tatters, but the few coins ok.

Luther vs. Lenin

by William H. Benson

November 2, 2017

     Five hundred years ago, on October 31, 1517, Martin Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to his chapel’s door, the closest thing to a bulletin board. To them, he prefixed an invitation, “Out of love for the faith and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg.” The Reformation had begun.

     The German monk’s defiant and courageous act initiated Protestantism, a protest against the Catholic form of Christianity, and a creation of a new form. 

     The first of the ninety-five says, “When Jesus said, ‘Repent,’ he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” The last says, “And thus be confident of entering into heaven through many tribulations, rather than through the false security of peace.”

     The ninety-five unleashed a storm. “The pent-up anticlericalism of generations [was] thrilled at having found a voice.” The Church’s sale of indulgences in exchange for eternal bliss appalled Luther. He “had experienced the remission of sin as a free gift of grace to be apprehended by a living faith,” an “experience opposed to a system of relief by means of payments in money.”

     Church scholars tried to beat down Luther’s challenge to their power. In December that year, the Dominican Johan Tetzel published his “106 Anti-Theses,” but Luther came back with a Sermon on Indulgences and Grace. Tetzel again responded, and the debates raged on, and continue to rage still.

     The Catholic Church soon learned that Luther was resolute, not easily intimidated. The historian Will Durant said of him, “Luther enjoyed combat.” Luther himself said, “I have been born to war, and fight with factions and devils; therefore my books are stormy and warlike. I must root out the stumps and stocks, cut away the thorns and hedges, fill up the ditches, and make things ready.”

     Whereas Luther broke from the Church, certain Catholic priests, including one named Erasmus, chose “peaceful compromise and piecemeal reform,” and remained faithful to the church.

     Will Durant concluded, “The debate between Erasmus and Luther goes on, and will, for in these large matters, such truth as men can attain is begotten by the union of opposites, and will ever feel its double parentage.”

     One hundred years ago, in 1917, on October 25, / November 7, (New Style), Vladimir Lenin, and his fellow Bolsheviks seized control of Russia in Petrograd, now Leningrad.

     Condoleezza Rice wrote in the New York Times this week, that Lenin was “a firebrand to his core, spewing inflammatory rhetoric, eschewing compromise, and pushing political discourse to the extremes,” and that “Lenin’s victory brought civil war and a dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party.”

     The writer, Martin Amis, pointed out that Lenin’s Marxist program defied human nature. “Religion, you see, was part of human nature, so the Bolsheviks were obliged to suppress it in all its forms.”

     In March of 1922, Lenin wrote, “It is precisely now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, that we can carry out the confiscation of church valuables with the most savage and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come.” That year the Bolsheviks killed “1,962 monks, 2,691 priests, and 3,447 nuns.”

     Not a cheerful fellow, Vladimir Lenin, but there was someone worse waiting his turn.

     Amis said that, Lenin’s most grievous and tragic mistake though was to “bequeath a fully functioning police state to Joseph Stalin.” From 1924, when Lenin died, until Stalin’s passing in March of 1953, the paranoid Stalin murdered millions. Terror surrounded him.

     Another writer said, “He did not like any group of people. His hatreds and suspicions knew no limits; even party members from his native homeland of Georgia were not exempt.” Amis believes that if not for Stalin’s passing, “there would have been a second Jewish Holocaust by Christmastime.”

     Luther sparked a religious Reformation, and Lenin incited a political Revolution.

     Five hundred years ago, north and western Europe—northern Germany, Scandinavia, and England—fell under the Protestant banner; but south and eastern Europe—southern Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Austria, and Poland—remained Catholic. An east to west line split Europe.

     Following World War II, an Iron Curtain that ran north and south dropped across Europe. Eastern Europe fell to the Soviet-styled Communists, and western Europe remained democratic and capitalist.

     Whereas Luther sought to reform religion, Lenin crushed religion, and whereas Lenin sought for political power, Luther remained committed to religion.

Fake News

by William H. Benson

October 19, 2017

     There are those who would deny that Neil Armstrong, and eleven other astronauts, ever walked on the surface of the moon, and that the whole mission to the moon was a hoax filmed on a stage in New Mexico. For evidence they point to a picture of the American flag rippling in the wind, caused, they say, by a stage fan. They even claim they see on film a pop bottle roll in front of Neil’s feet.

     There are those who would deny that the Holocaust ever happened. Instead of six million men, women, boys, and girls murdered, there was less than a tenth of that. These so-called “historical revisionists” claim that it was the Nazi’s enemies who later fabricated the extreme stories of Nazi brutality and mass murder.

     There are those who would deny that Lee Harvey Oswald shot John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Instead, they believe that a conspiracy—composed of either the CIA, the Mafia, or the Russians—shot the President twice.

     In the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre, on October 1, 2017, misinformation proliferated on social media. The killer, according to fake news sources, was a part of a conspiracy, that he was “an anti-Trump liberal,” or that he was “linked to ISIS.” Officials have since proved these claims false.

     How do we believe what we see or hear? What sources do we trust, and which do we not trust? Historians grapple with these questions. They think in terms of evidence that stems from hard documents that are contemporary to the events they are examining.

     For example, the American history textbooks state that on October 19, 1781, 236 years ago, the British Major General Cornwallis surrendered to American General George Washington and French naval forces at Yorktown, Virginia. Now, how can a historian prove that statement true?

      She reads the eyewitness accounts as recorded in British, American, and French military reports. She reads of the battle in Yorktown’s newspapers. She reads the diaries and journals of soldiers who participated in the battle and witnessed the surrender. The sum of her reading leads to certain conclusions. A picture emerges. A visual or a scene unfolds in her mind. She sees the battle.

     Robin Winks, a twentieth century American historian, calls this “a legitimate inference.” He says, “This process involves a ‘leap of faith’ between the evidence (the data) and the conclusion (the generalization.) We all make inferences. We collect, sift, evaluate, and then act upon the evidence.”

     It is the historian’s job to test and determine a document’s authenticity, because not all documents are legitimate. Winks say, “Historians have developed certain common-sense rules for evaluating evidence in terms of its reliability, its relevance, its significance, and its singularity.” If the document breaks too many “common-sense rules,” then she cannot pass it on as credible evidence.

     How does she do that? First, she looks at the document itself and determines its approximate age, and whether it fits into the appropriate time frame under consideration. Next, she examines the text and determines if it is suitable for the author’s age, intelligence, and social class. She looks at the handwriting, and compares its to proven examples. The slightest discrepancy raises questions.

     For example, in 1983, the West German news magazine Stern paid $3.7 million to Konrad Kujau for Adolf Hitler’s series of sixty journals that Kujau said he had discovered. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper examined them and pronounced them legitimate, but then others subjected them to a more extensive forensic analysis and called them fakes.

     Indeed, Kujau had forged them. The analysts determined that the ink was new, even though Kujau had mixed water with the blue and black inks to give it a watery old look. Analysts further determined that he had sprinkled tea on the pages. The effect was pages that appeared aged, thirty or forty years old by then. Then, the handwriting analysts called Kujau’s imitated signature “a poor rendition.”

     This example demonstrates the fact that not all documents are true. Voltaire said, “history is a pack of tricks we play upon the dead.” In this case, the living played a trick on the living, using the dead.

     Despite the wishes and beliefs of extremists and conspiracy theorists, the bulk of the evidence indicates that between July of 1969 and December of 1970, Neil Armstrong and eleven other astronauts walked on the moon’s surface, that during World War II the Nazi’s murdered some six million people, and that on November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald shot President Kennedy. A wonder-filled human achievement, an abhorrent genocide, and a tragic assassination.

Defection by Aircraft

by William H. Benson

October 5, 2017

     No matter how powerful a dictatorial regime, certain people will want to escape, and they may try to escape by aircraft. Once a rogue government entrusts an airplane, a jet, or a helicopter to a pilot, he or she can steer that aircraft to wherever he or she wants. During the Cold War dozens of pilots flew their Soviet Union-built MiG’s to the West and begged for asylum. They defected.

     In March and May of 1953, two Polish Air Force pilots flew their MiG-15’s to Denmark. That same year, during the Korean War, a North Korean pilot, No Kom Sok, flew his MiG-15 to an American air base in South Korea. It is housed now at the National Museum of the U. S. Air Force, in Dayton, Ohio.

     On October 15, 1969, a Cuban pilot, Lieutenant Edwardo Guerra Jimenez, entered U.S. airspace undetected and landed his MiG-17 at Homestead Air Force Base, south of Miami. His defection embarrassed American military officials. On that day, Air Force One was at Homestead, waiting to fly President Richard Nixon back to Washington D. C.

     The United States government returned the aircraft to the Cubans, but then ten years later, on June 12, 1979, Jimenez high-jacked Delta Airlines Flight 1061, and directed the pilot to fly to Havana. Jimenez missed his homeland, his family, and friends.

     On September 6, 1976, Viktor Belenko, a pilot based at Chuguyevka Air Base in Siberia, flew his MiG-25 to Hakodate, Japan. The Japanese allowed the Americans to examine the aircraft, and even dismantle it, but the Soviets insisted that the Japanese must return the MiG to them. They did, in thirty crates that arrived on a ship at Vladivostok’s port on November 18.

     President Gerald Ford granted Belenko asylum in the United States, and in 1980, he received United States citizenship. Even though still married to his wife back in Russia, he married a music teacher from North Dakota. They had two sons, but later divorced. Belenko found work as a consultant.

     Why did he defect? He said he was fed up with the lies. The Soviets said that “the U.S.S.R. was a wondrous paradise,” but he knew that “its citizens were poor, that the economy was depressed, and that hopelessness stalked the land.” The first time he walked into a U.S. grocery store, he suspected that officials had staged it for him, but then he learned the truth.

     Another Soviet Union pilot, Aleksandr Zuyev, a Soviet Union pilot, baked a cake laced with sleeping pills on May 20, 1989, and served a slice to all of his support staff. When all were asleep, he walked out to his MiG-29, overpowered a single mechanic there, but was shot in the arm during the scuffle. Still, he managed to fly the MiG to Trabzon, Turkey.

     On March 20, 1991, another Cuban, Orestes Lorenzo Pérez, defected when he flew his MiG-23 to the Naval Air Station at Key West. He then begged Cuban officials to allow his wife and children to migrate to Florida to join him there, but the Cuban government refused.

     On December 19, 1992, near sunset, Pérez flew a twin-engine Cessna 310 from Marathon, Florida back to Cuba, and landed on a small coastal highway near El Mamey beach, where his wife and children waited for him. They jumped in. He took off and flew the Cessna back to Marathon that night.

     The strangest flight though during the Cold War was a reverse flight, from West to East. Mathias Rust lived in West Germany, was eighteen years old in 1987, and was an inexperienced pilot.

     On May 13, 1987, he flew his Cessna 172 from Hamburg, West Germany, northwest to Iceland in the North Atlantic. From there, he flew due east, to Bergen in Norway, then to Helsinki in Finland, and then he crossed into Soviet Union airspace. Surface-to-Air Missiles were poised, ready to shoot him out of the sky, but no military official ever ordered an attack.

     On May 28, 1987, he flew over Moscow, buzzed low over Red Square and the Kremlin, but then landed on a bridge near St. Basil’s Cathedral. The authorities showed up an hour later and arrested him. He received four years in prison, but served fourteen months before officials released him.

     Why had he flown to Moscow? He said that he wanted to create an “imaginary bridge” and “reduce tensions between the two Cold War sides.” He indicated that the breakdown at the Reykjavík summit in Iceland the previous October had disturbed him. There, Reagan had met Gorbachev to discuss banning nuclear missiles, but Gorbachev refused to agree to Reagan’s proposals.

     Gorbachev called Rust’s unhindered flight to Moscow an issue of “national shame,” and he purged from the military those officials who opposed his reform policies. In December of 1987, at the Washington Summit, he and Reagan signed the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty.

     The Cold War ended without a hot war, without massive casualties. Rust’s flight, and a series of defections played a small part in the Cold War’s demise.

Mikhail Gorbachev

by William H. Benson

September 21, 2017

     Mikhail Gorbachev was born in the village of Privolnoye, near the city of Stavropol, 700 miles south of Moscow, on March 2, 1931, a most horrible time for all Soviet Union citizens. The harvests were poor that year due to a drought. Plus, Stalin, the Soviet dictator, decided to collectivize the farms. He seized the nation’s farmland, and transferred ownership to either a collective or to the state.

     When the more well-to-do peasants, the kulaks, resisted Stalin’s land-grab, he crushed them. He executed or deported to Siberia hundreds of thousands of the kulaks, a misguided policy that resulted in a famine that starved to death an estimated seven million people across the Soviet Union.

     Mikhail said, “The famine was terrible. A third, if not half, the population of Privolnoye died of hunger. Entire families were dying. The half-ruined ownerless huts would remain deserted for years.” Two of his uncles, an aunt, and some cousins starved to death.

     In 1937, Stalin instituted a Great Purge, and officials arrested both of Mikhail’s grandfathers. One was deported to Irkutsk, the other was tortured, but both men returned to tell of their brutal experiences.

     Then, in 1941, Mikhail heard on the radio that the German Nazis’ war machine had marched deep into the Soviet Union. Mikhail’s father was sent to the front to fight the Nazi’s, but in 1945, after the war ended, he too returned home, and went to work on a collective farm driving a combine.

     For five summers in his teens, “from the end of June until the end of August,” Mikhail helped his father drive combines, up to “twenty hours a day.” Mikhail said, “I was proud of my ability to detect a fault in the combine, just by the sound of it.”

     In 1950, Mikhail received an acceptance letter to Moscow State University, and there he studied law for five years. He met and married Raisa, and after graduation, the couple moved back to Stavropol, where he worked as a Communist Party official. Soon, he oversaw the province’s industrial and agricultural production.

     On September 19, 1978, Leonid Brezhnev, General Secretary of the Communist Party in Moscow, and his associate, Konstantin Chernenko, stopped at Stavropol for an hour or two, when on a train ride to Baku. The two men met two other men: Yuri Andropov, a party official from Stavropol, and also Mikhail Gorbachev. The four men talked as they “strolled up and down the empty train station.”

     Mikhail later wrote in his memoirs, “It was indeed a rare sight: four men who in the near future were to succeed each other as General Secretaries of the Party!” Andropov would replace Brezhnev in 1982, Chernenko would replace Andropov in 1984, and Gorbachev would replace Chernenko in 1985.

     That night though, Brezhnev looked at Gorbachev and asked him, “how are things going in your sheep empire?” Gorbachev wrote, “Stavropol accounted for 27 percent of all the fine wool produced in the Russian federation. In early summer, after lambing, thousands of flocks grazed in the steppes: a total of ten million sheep. An impressive sight, I can tell you: truly a ‘sheep empire.’”

     In November 1978, Gorbachev and Raisa moved to Moscow, after Brezhnev appointed him Secretary of the Central Committee. Then, in March of 1985, party officials appointed Gorbachev the Soviet Union’s next General Secretary, following the deaths of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko.

     Over the next seven years, Gorbachev introduced reform policies designed to ignite the country’s depressed economy and its entrenched political system. His reforms included “perestroika,” or restructuring, and “glasnost,” or openness, as well as “democratic reforms.” Few people suspected that this party official, who believed in socialism’s highest principles, would permit these drastic reforms.

     The changes proved too much and led to the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev was forced to resign on December 25, 1991. That day he reflected upon the nation seven years before.

     “Our society was stifled in the grip of a bureaucratic command system. Doomed to serve ideology and bear the heavy burden of the arms race, it was strained to the utmost. We had to change everything. The totalitarian system, which prevented this country from becoming wealthy and prosperous a long time ago, has been dismantled. A breakthrough has been made on the road to democratic reforms.”

     One wonders why? “Why did a man at the head of a superpower undermine his own authority? Did he fail to understand the consequences of his actions.” He proved an anomaly among the powerful.

     Gorbachev is now eighty-six. Raisa passed away in 1999. Today, the western powers revere Gorbachev for his boldness, but in Russia, he is reviled and blamed for the loss of the Soviet Union empire. Russia’s current ruler, Vladimir Putin, has reverted the country back to “its traditional, authoritarian, anti-Western norm,” and dreams of re-establishing the empire. This proves “how exceptional Gorbachev was as a Russian ruler and world statesman.”