HEINRICH SCHLIEMANN

by William H. Benson

April 14, 2011

     Recently, I re-read the story of how Heinrich Schliemann dug up the ancient city of Troy.

     When a child in Germany, Schliemann loved to read Homer’s stories of the Trojan war in the Illiad, and of Odysseus’ wanderings after the war in the Odyssey, or so he claimed he did. He entered into a career in business, and with his intelligence and application, he acquired global business interests: seizing reserves of gold dust in California, and cornering the indigo dye trade across Europe. Believing himself wealthy enough, he retired and headed to northwest Turkey to find the lost city of Troy.

    “In the midst of the bustle of business,” he said, “I had never forgotten Troy, or the agreement I had made with my father to excavate it.”

     The first thing he did on the shores of the Mediterranean was to marry a new wife, a sixteen-year-old Greek girl, whom he had advertized for, and together, beginning in 1871 until 1879, the couple, plus eighty hired laborers, dug into a hill at Hissarlik, some three miles from the Aegean Sea.

     It was said that he arrived with a shovel in one hand and a copy of the Illiad in the other. “He was a man mad about Homer.”

     He dug a trench right through the center of the hill and after about a year, a worker brought to him an artifact that shone like gold. He dismissed the workers that afternoon, claiming it was his birthday, jumped into the trench and carried the precious artifacts away. All together as the digging continued, the trench “revealed an astonishing treasure of some nine thousand objects in gold and silver.” And each artifact he associated with a passage from the Illiad. He claimed he had found Homer’s Troy.

     Few, if any, believed his wild and unsubstantiated claims.

     Actually, his digging produced nine Troy’s, successive cities, each one built atop the other. The bottom he labeled Troy I and the top Troy IX. Schliemann was convinced that the Troy of the Trojan War was Troy II, but scholars pointed out to him that it was a much older city than Homer’s, all the way back to 2500 BCE. Homer had written his epics in about 700 BCE, of a war that had occurred five hundred years before his time, in about 1200 BCE.

     “Scholars agree that the Trojan War is based on a historical core of a Greek expedition against the city of Troy, but few would argue that the poems faithfully represent the actual events of the war.”

     Archaeologists today focus their attentions upon Troy VI or VII as the more likely candidates for the actual Homeric Troy due to the matching up of details within the poems to the artifacts uncovered, but no conclusive proof exists.        

     Heinrich Schliemann’s story begins with war, of Homer’s recount of the Trojan War, of frightening images, of the weapons of war that mutilate human bodies, and of the god Zeus laughing as warriors mutilate their enemies. It makes for gruesome reading. War is all about greed, power, glory, territory, ambition, and yes, even love. Helen’s was supposedly “the face that launched a thousand ships.”

     But Schliemann’s story continues with at least two other themes: first, the power of mythology and the hesitant steps toward professionalism.

     Schliemann was a man caught in the vise-grip of mythology. He allowed his wife to baptize their two children, but at the ceremony he laid a copy of the Illiad upon their heads and “read a hundred hexameters aloud” over them. Homer’s gods and goddess—Zeus and Athena—became the Greek’s religion and then also that of the Romans, believed to be true by generations, for centuries, until the day when Christianity overwhelmed them. No one should ever underestimate the power that the myth can hold over people: it is a rhythm buried deep within humanity’s psyche, so entrenched it is.

     Schliemann’s search for artifacts—stones, walls, gates, copper kettles, vases of pottery, shards, arrowheads, swords, crowns, gold necklaces, and skeletons—was his feeble attempt to reconstruct history, to determine what truly happened at Troy and when, and then to equate it to a literary document. Yes, he behaved like a bull stampeding in a china closet, and his statements were less than factual or reliable, but his attempt at Hissarlik was one of the first archaeological digs, ever.

     History is all about paying attention to detail, recording written documents, preserving artifacts, reflecting upon the whole body of knowledge, formulating hypotheses, and either proving them true or discrediting them. It demands a strict commitment to hard evidence.

     Literature is another field of human endeavor with its characters, plots, settings, themes, emotions, voices, and to match a literary work to points in history is to invite difficulties. Homer may have telescoped a series of wars between the Greeks and the Trojans into a single one. What was his intent? How much of what he wrote was historically accurate? The questions continue.

     So again, we start with war and end up with professionalism. It takes a certain kind to make a war, but afterwords, in order to make sense of that senseless act, of those unrestrained passions that kill and maim, we have to invite in the poets, the writers, the historians, and yes, the archaeologists: a man, his wife, a shovel, a book, a dream.

GEOGRAPHIC BEE

by William H. Benson

March 31, 2011

      I read in Newsweek last week where certain Republicans are now tentatively campaigning in New Hampshire; specifically those 2012 Presidential hopefuls, such as Tim Pawlenty, and Minnesota’s Representative, Michele Bachmann. It was reported that on March 12 Michele Bachmann stood before the voters of the Granite State, held up a tea bag, and said:

     “You’re the state where the ‘shot was heard round the world’ at Lexington and Concord, and you put a marker in the ground and paid with the blood of your ancestors.”

     Her listeners were astonished at her verbal blunder until someone privately explained to her the difference between the Concord that is in New Hampshire and the one that is in Massachusetts, where the American Revolution began. Yes her geography was off by seventy-plus miles, and I also seriously doubt that she would know that it was Ralph Waldo Emerson, of Concord, Massachusetts, who wrote the poem Concord Hymn, from which she was quoting:

     “By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled. Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world.”

     Yes, it is true: in the race of the academic disciplines, geography comes in dead last, in a tie with grammar, and perhaps just behind history and literature. Math, the sciences, and business win the race of respectability every time.

     In order to rectify the appalling lack of geographical knowledge among students of the world, a private organization, the National Geographic Society, came up with the Geographic Bee, an annual competition for third through eighth graders. Each state and territory then holds their own competition in late March or early April, this time of the year, and the 54 winners then compete in late May at the national level, when Alex Trebek of Jeopardy! asks the questions. Then, there is the world championship in the summer, when teams from different countries compete. Canada won in 2009.

     I applaud National Geographic Society’s efforts, for I contend that, without a working knowledge of geography, it would be difficult to read a news magazine or a newspaper, and impossible to govern.

     Last week in Newsweek, there were articles on the 8.9 earthquake off the coast of Japan, the resulting tsunami, the genuine fear of a catastrophe at Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the possibility of another earthquake imminent in California, the financial crisis in the countries of Europe, and Gaddafi’s superior armed forces strafing the ill-equipped rebels in Libya.

     Then, in last Sunday’s New York Times there was an in-depth article on the former nuclear power plant in Chernobyl in the Ukraine that ceased functioning on April 26, 1986 due to an explosion and a meltdown that spewed enormous amounts of radiation upward and outward that with the help of winds stretched across much of Europe.

     These few examples of the news tells us, the readers, at least one very important fact: the world is a very dangerous place. Tectonic plates about the Pacific constantly shift. The water normally contained within the ocean basins can and on occasion will rise and flood the shoreline. Crazed dictators, so anxious to retain their power and privileged lives, will murder those who dare to defy them, and the inventions of men, no matter the multiple levels of safety precautions, are still subject to accident.

     Like government, geography is about knowing where we are going, where we are now, and how can we best get there. It begins with reading a map, formulating a plan, determining goals. I say pitch aside the GPS for at least a moment, read the road signs, unfold that map in the glove compartment, acquaint yourself with your surroundings, and maybe stop and ask for help.

     What is so unique about a tea bag? How can it help lead Americans toward our destination of a better future for our children? Are officials expected to read tea leaves instead of a map? The Boston tea party was only one event of several leading up to the American Revolution.

     What about the Boston Massacre? That involved colonial Englishmen throwing snowballs at the dreaded Redcoats. How about a party that carries around snowballs? In 1776 Benjamin Franklin said, “If we don’t hang together, we shall surely hang separately.” How about a party of nooses? The battles at Lexington and Concord, both in Massachusetts, were fought with guns and bullets and sabers on the field, and off the field they were fought with ideas of freedom and liberty and equitable treatment, all written down. How about a party of bullets or perhaps of quill pens?

     Geography, history, literature: a number of moving pieces that do not fit together easily and build a  recognizable pattern, let alone a picture. To do so requires effort, work, thoughtfulness, intelligence, outside counsel from professionals, extensive reading, and the steady acquisition of knowledge.

     The Tea Party of today reminds me of the Know-Nothing Party of the nineteenth century. When its members were asked what they stood for, they responded, “I know nothing!” The party ceased to exist after only a few years, for its members knew nothing, stood for nothing, and achieved nothing.

     My advice for Michele Bachmann and all other Republicans wishing to run for President: lay aside the tea bag, unfold a map, plan your route, verify your statements, and claim you know certain things.

THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

by William H. Benson

March 17, 2011

     Jed Clampett of The Beverly Hillbillies once explained to his nephew Jethro how he saw through the intentions of a designing and matrimonial-minded woman. “Well, Jethro,” he said. “Us old foxes are mighty trap-shy, ‘specially when the bait comes chasing us.”

     The fictional Uncle Jed might have been of Irish heritage, for his quote is that of an Irish proverb: “An old fox is shy of a trap.” In the Gaelic language it had been slightly different: “Cha gheabhthar sean ean le caith,” which meant “An old bird is not caught with chaff.”

     Yes, the Irish love their proverbs: “’More beard than brains,’ as the fox said of the goat.” “Little by little the bird builds her nest.” “If you don’t sow in the spring, you will not reap in the autumn.” “You should never stop the plough to kill a mouse.” “The best throw of a dice is to throw it away.”

     Yes, it is St. Patrick’s Day, the day when thoughts turn to the Irish, to the four and a half million people who live on the green island, “the other island,” those who speak softly, show the utmost in gentle courtesy to strangers, and live a modest and leisurely life, so unlike their Irish-American cousins.

     The Irish descended from the Celts, the early inhabitants of the island, and today the Irish demonstrate that Celtic influence. Irish ancestry means dark hair, perhaps even red, with lightly-colored eyes, often blue or green, for Ireland’s cloudy skies may have lessened their eye pigmentation.

     Whatever their looks, wherever the Irish go, they display a “gift of words, of imaginative and persuasive oratory, and colorful language.” An English visitor asked for the time, and the Irishman replied that, “It was in the heel of the evening, about the time when the dew was thinking of falling.”

     Over the centuries the Irish assembled a treasure-house of mythological lore, of fairy-tales, and stories of “heroes, fairies, giants, demons, witches, hags, spirits, and of course leprechauns, those beloved impish manikins.” People without much in terms of wealth will naturally “cherish things of the spirit that they can pass on by a rich oral tradition.”     

     Still, the Irish suffer along with their own personal problems. One author said that Ireland groans under “the world’s highest rate of chronic psychosis.” That blanket statement is in need of statistics and documentation, but then another author went even further and said that their “depression is the main cause of an excessive consumption of alcohol, estimated to account for 10 per cent of all personal spending in the Republic.” Frankie McCourt’s father loved his “pint,” and plenty beyond that.

     The Irish seem hidebound to the uglier facets of their past. There was the Great Potato Famine of the mid-nineteenth century when nearly a million people perished of starvation and disease and another million packed it in and fled to America. They will never forget that trauma.

     Then, the hated English mistreated the Irish “for eight hundred long years!”, something Frankie McCourt’s father frequently shouted when caught up in a rage. The English laid claim to the island, ruled the Irish with an iron fist for centuries, bought up all the fertile land, and drove the Irish into lives of poverty as peasants and tenant shepherds, tied to the land, to the sheep, and to the peat bog. They well knew the meaning of the metaphor, “Colder than a landlord’s heart.”

     Something happened to the Irish though, once they crossed the Atlantic. Freed and unbound from the land and living in America, they sought out jobs in the cities of Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, and Baltimore, and so they became an urban people, “aggressive, competitive, and swaggering, sentimental, and tough.” “It is as if the shift from a static and deeply religious society to a thriving and largely secular society liberated hidden energies within the Irish mind.”

     A good example is the Kennedy family. Patrick Kennedy left Wexford County, Ireland in 1848, in the aftermath of the Great Potato Famine and settled in Boston. His grandson, Joseph P. Kennedy married Rose, the daughter of John F. “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the longtime mayor of Boston. Three of their sons, at Joseph’s prodding, entered into politics, and one of them, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, won the Senate and then the White House and the Oval Office. 

     Some people might think that to be Irish means a slight inclination to listen to Joe Feeney—a former Grand Island, Nebraska resident and Lawrence Welk’s Irish tenor—sing one more time either “My Wild Irish Rose,” or “Oh, Danny Boy.” But the Irish live among us. In fact, they are us, and their surnames tell as much: Blake, Barry, Boyle, O’Brien, Butler, Carey, Carroll, MacCarthy, O’Casey, O’Connell, Connor, Costello, Conroy, Cahill, Daly, Dempsey, Devlin, Dillon, Dolan, Donnelly, Flaherty, Flynn, O’Hara, Lynch, Leary, Kennedy, O’Malley, Murphy, Murray, O’Neill, Quinn, Reagan, and O’Sullivan.

     Today, the Irish Republic is struggling with a massive debt hangover. “Wages are falling, unemployment has tripled to 13 percent, and young people are again emigrating in droves.” These are tough economic times for the Irish. “A bit of bad luck,” you might say? Not to them. “’Tis only the luck of the Irish.”     

MENTAL ATHLETES

by William H. Benson

March 3, 2011

     In last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, I read an interesting article on mental athletes, or M.A.’s for short. These individuals compete at memory games: for example, they memorize thousands of random digits in less than an hour, or large chunks of epic poetry, or the order of two decks of shuffled cards in less than two minutes. These M.A.’s compete at various levels and the winners of those eventually end up at the U.S. and the World Memory Championships.

     None of them claims to possess a photographic memory: Ed Cooke, an M.A. From England, said, “Photographic memory is a detestable myth. Doesn’t exist. In fact, my memory is quite average. All of us here have average memories.”

     Then, how can they memorize at such a superior level to the average person?

     The answer is that they have learned to “think in more memorable ways,” and the best of these is the construction of a mental memory palace, such as “routes through town, or signs of the zodiac, or mythical creatures, or luxury homes featured in Architectural Digest, or body parts.” Then, that which they want to remember—people’s names, playing cards, lists of numbers—they convert to vivid images that they pigeonhole into specific compartments within their memory palace, in sequence.

     To remember, for example, the sequence of a memorized deck of playing cards, an M.A mentally walks back through the various rooms within his memory palace and visualizes the images within each room. The image brings him back around to the point he sees in his mind a playing card.

     “What distinguishes a great mnemonist is the ability to create lavish images on the fly, to paint in the mind a scene so unlike any other it cannot be forgotten. And to do it quickly.” 

     “The point of memory techniques is to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t that good at holding onto and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.”

     Our memories are extremely good at remembering the more exotic images: “the funnier, lewder and more bizarre, the better.” One M.A explained it this way: “When we see in everyday life things that are petty, ordinary, and banal, we generally fail to remember them. . . . But if we see or hear something exceptionally base, dishonorable, extraordinary, great, unbelievable, or laughable, that we are likely to remember for a long time.” This technique becomes more a function of creativity than of memory.

     Joshua Foer, the author of the article, suggested a theory: “Our hunter-gatherer ancestors needed to remember where to find food and resources and the route home and which plants were edible and which were poisonous. Those are the sorts of vital memory skills that they depended on, which probably helps explain why we are comparatively good at remembering visually and spatially.”

     So taken up by the thought of competing at the national level was Joshua Foer that he trained and won and even set the new U.S record in speed cards, less than two minutes, memorizing the order of the cards in two complete decks. At one point in the training he reached a plateau in which he could not memorize more than one card every ten seconds.

     To overcome this, Joshua purchased a metronome and paced himself 10 to 20% faster. He also purchased ear plugs and industrial-grade earmuffs and wore both when memorizing. “In the heat of a memory competition, there is no such thing as deaf enough,” he said. Also, he bought plastic safety goggles, spray-painted them black, poked a peek-hole through each lens, and put them on. Now that is focus! As a result of his equipment upgrade, his times required to memorize a card fell.

     It is important, I think, to keep this exceptional and quite astonishing memory competition in perspective: it is designed only to win the game, and other than that, accomplishes so little. No human problem is being alleviated, no hungry child is being fed, cancer is not being vanquished, and no war is giving way to peace, but then the same is true of all forms of competition.

     The best comment on memory was originated, I think, by the philosopher Nietzsche, who observed that there is a direct connection between memory and pain. In other words, we remember far better that which hurts—both physical and emotional pain—than than which pleases. Now remember that!

MARK TWAIN VS. GARRISON KEILLOR

by William H. Benson

February 19, 2011

     Mark Twain is a bestseller—number 4 last week on the New York Times Book Review list—for the publication of the first volume of his autobiography. He would be proud, for that work has never been one of his readers’ favorites. It is a muddled mess, a tangled hodgepodge, without structure, and written in a stream-of-consciousness style. Writers have attempted to organize it over the past 100 years, ever since his passing, but now the University of California has published it, just as he wrote it.

     Readers beware.

     Last month, an Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth Books, announced that they would publish the best of Twain’s books, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but a revised, censored, and expurgated version, one without the derogatory slurs, the one published on February 18, 1885.

     I would suggest that some author should rework the last quarter of the book, for once Mark Twain placed Huck Finn and the runaway slave Jim on their makeshift raft and let them sail down the Mississippi River into the Old South, he did not know how to retrieve them.

     A good question: How does one extricate themselves from as feudalistic and as vicious a society as was the Old South prior to the Civil War, once you have floated unwittingly into it? The book delivers a poor answer to the question and thus the ending is weak, but, who knows, perhaps Mark Twain may boast of two books on the bestseller list this year, one as he wrote it and the other as he should have.

     Mark Twain’s autobiography reveals a human being, a man, one filled to the brim with energy: a riverboat pilot, a silver miner, a journalist, a comedian, a writer of several literary genre, and a publisher. One critic said that “his energy was so ferocious in its effect on people and events as to distort the best-willed observer’s perspective.”

     But he had a dark side, a side that came out too frequently after he buried first his son, then his wife, and two of his three daughters. Late in life, he was bent and twisted into a greedy, lonely, brooding, and suspicious old man, at war with God, and wildly angry at having to live life. In such a state, he existed, a mixture of “rage and gentleness, of malice and affection, of creative genius and financial idiocy.”

     He was too human, all to human.   

     Switching gears, it was on February 17, 1979 that Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, his live musical radio show premiered for the first time on National Public Radio. Keillor had begun the show in July of 1974 on Minnesota Public Radio, and with the introduction of his comic monologues featuring the news from Lake Wobegon, his mythical hometown, the show became wildly popular and gained a well-deserved national reputation.

     I disregard Keillor’s music and his silly ads for local businesses, such as those for Bertha Kitty’s Boutique and the Chatterbox Cafe, for the heart and soul of Keillor’s radio program is the “News from Lake Wobegone.” Every week Garrison Keillor tells a story involving fictional citizens of this small Minnesota town, such as Einar Tingovld, Florian Krebsbach, or Wally (“Old Hard Hands”) Bunsen. The stories are warm, humorous, and so ordinarily human.

     He ends them the same every week: “And that’s the news from Lake Wobegon, my hometown out there on the prairie, a place where the women are so very strong, the men are so good-looking, and the children are way above average.” The listener knows that it cannot be true but appreciates it the same.

     In 1985, he tied together some of these comic monologues and published them as Lake Wobegone Days, and his reputation as a writer of serious / humorous fiction was assured. In the book’s preface, Keillor wrote, “Somehow the radio show kept going, perhaps because I had no illusion that I was good at it, and I brought in Lake Wobegon as the home of a weekly monologue. . . . It has been a good run and I’m a very lucky man, I think. One pretty good idea for gainful employment is still my livelihood.”   

     Certain of his later books, though, are in need of an expurgation, of a censor, for his steep slide into vulgarity distracts from the story itself.

     Mark Twain and Garrison Keillor, their best books are separated by exactly a hundred years. Both mined deep into their childhood experiences: one from the banks of the Mississippi River at Hannibal, Missouri, and the other from the small town of Anoka, Minnesota, just north of the twin cities. Twain was of the river, and Keillor was of the northern prairie, but each instinctively knew how to create vivid scenes with a multiplicity of sensory details, both verbally and on paper, and the overall effect is that audiences and readers will, invariably and without hesitation, laugh.

     Yes, we still laugh at Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer and their antics, but especially we laugh at Mark Twain, the man whom Samuel Clemens never could have been. We laugh at Garrison Keillor’s Leonard Tollefson and Pastor Tommerdahl, all trying to do their best while living “in Lake Wobegon, where smart doesn’t count for so much.” Perhaps Keillor too has a dark side, but if so he certainly keeps it well hidden.

ROGER WILLIAMS

by William H. Benson

February 3, 2011

     Roger Williams, the English Puritan clergyman, arrived in New England on February 5, 1631, just months after the colony’s inception. He was twenty-eight years old, educated at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, and married for a year. Jonathan Winthrop, the Puritans’ chief official, warmly welcomed Roger and his wife Mary into Boston, and asked him to serve as the colony’s minister and teacher.  

     Winthrop and the other Puritans were shocked when Roger turned down their generous job offer. Roger explained that he could not worship with them because they had not separated from the Church of England and furthermore they had not repented of their former attachment to the Church of England. Yes, they wanted to “purify” that church, which, for Roger, was not enough: he wanted separation.

     Jonathan Winthrop failed to understand Roger’s extreme form of Separatism. Quarrels erupted, and finally the Massachusetts Bay Colony governing officials banished Roger from their colony, forcing him to flee to the Narragansett Bay, and there, with the help of the Natives, he established his own colony, Rhode Island. He insisted that in his colony, “freedom of conscience” was the rule.

     Roger wrestled with questions concerning the relationship of the church to the state over the next four decades, and the contours of his thinking pushed the boundaries of Puritanism and Separatism to what Winthrop and the other Puritans believed were unsupportable conclusions.

     Roger was in a constant search for the pure church and never found it. He believed that no unregenerate or unsaved individual should be allowed to attend a worship service with the holy, the elect, the regenerate. This ferocious brand of separatism of Roger’s led to an exclusiveness that was absurd. The historian Edmund Morgan wrote that “Williams had clearly pushed the principle of separation to the point where the church was threatened with extinction for lack of suitable members.”

     He would create a church, such as with the Baptists, and then withdraw from it. He ended up late in his life in a sect with exactly one member, himself, even going so far, it was rumored, as to withdraw from taking communion with his wife, Mary, suspecting her of indiscretions. Harold Bloom, the Yale scholar, wrote that, “If there is any trace at all of this formidable individual left, it has to be his genius for schism.” Roger drew the line and separated himself from all that he perceived was unholy.

     Once a person starts walking down the path of Separatism, where does he or she stop?

     Roger further argued that the government should not participate in any of the several acts of worship, for those should be reserved for a church’s exclusive use. Taking an oath, such as that administered to a witness before testifying in a court, was an act of worship. Prayer conducted in a courtroom or before a legislative body begins its proceedings was also an act of worship. These acts of worship, Roger argued, should only be conducted within a church and among the elect, not in a courtroom, a town meeting, or a congressional body.

     His Puritan colleagues thought him mad, headstrong, exceedingly difficult, filled with strange opinions, calling him “a polemical porcupine.” Cotton Mather compared him to “a Dutch windmill so violently turned round in a storm that the stones themselves caught fire.”

     What is startling is that he ended up with the principle of separating the church from the state: he called for “a wall of separation” between the two. But it was not because he was an eighteenth-century citizen of the Enlightenment, like Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, open to and tolerant of all religions, and believing none of them. One legal scholar wrote, “Williams did not advocate religious liberty out of a personal lack of faith but out of an exuberance of it.” The primary bent of this man’s mind was invariably steered toward religion.

     Williams thought deeply about four questions: “Why is religious persecution evil? What harm does it inflict on its victims and its perpetrators? Why should government not supervise religion? Does a stable society require some measure of religious homogeneity?” Unlike his contemporaries, he answered each of those four questions with a modern answer. One historian wrote, “The gods were pleased to have their jest with Roger Williams by sending him to earth before his time.”

     The First Amendment, written a century after Williams’s demise, echoed Roger’s arguments, and it established a wall of separation between the government and the church, and the controversies surrounding that Amendment still challenge us to maintain it today.    

     Perry Miller, the American colonial historian, wrote that Roger Williams possesses for American history, “one indubitable importance, that he stands at the beginning of it.” Indeed, how fortunate it was to have as profound a thinker on the issue of liberty of conscience, as was Roger Williams, at the very beginning point of America’s history.