EDGAR ALLAN POE AND HALLOWEEN

by William H. Benson

October 29, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS

by William H. Benson

October 15, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHARLES SCHULZ

by William H. Benson

October 1, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EXPLOSION IN NEW YORK CITY

by William H. Benson

September 17, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THOUGHTS ON PLANET EARTH

by William H. Benson

September 3, 2009

     Over the eons, our planet, Earth, has staggered violently between centuries of sweltering heat or brutal chill. Cycles of global cooling followed by global warming have been the predominant pattern of Earth’s geological history. The last Ice Age began to end only about twelve thousand years ago, but at its peak, around twenty thousand years ago, about 30 percent of the Earth’s land surface was under ice, whereas today it is 10 percent. 

     The Wisconsian ice sheet covered much of Europe and North America then, and in certain places was half a mile thick. Standing at its leading point, a person would have gaped in astonishment at a towering wall of glacial ice over two thousand feet high, and life in any form atop those millions of square miles of ice had to have been a struggle.

     The size of the Great Lakes and Hudson’s Bay, as well as the thousands of lakes spread across Canada and Minnesota are evidence that those glaciers were indeed colossal. That it is today water and not ice is a fact that we owe to “global warming.”

     Bill Bryson suggested in his 2003 book, A Short History of Nearly Everything, “that ice will be a long-term part of our future.” Ice, rather than global warming.

     What causes an Ice Age and what reverses it are largely unknowns, even though theories abound, such as that the ellipsis that the Earth follows around the sun changes shape, or that the pitch of the orientation of the Earth to the sun wobbles.

     What is most astonishing is that on this, at times, bitter cold planet, life began, and, according to Bryson, “it happened just once. That is the most extraordinary fact in biology, perhaps the most extraordinary fact we know.”

     Matt Ridley, a biologist, said that, “Wherever you go in the world, whatever animal, plant, bug, or blob you look at, if it is alive, it will use the same dictionary and know the same code. All life is one.” And life’s beginning happened a long time ago.

     A hundred years ago this week, early in September of 1909, at the end of the fossil-finding season, an American paleontologist named Charles Doolittle Walcott stumbled upon the Burgess Shelf 8,000 feet high in the mountains of British Columbia, above timberline in steep country, a hundred miles west of Calgary.

     His was an extraordinary and quite lucky find, for the fossils he found that day were later determined to be extremely ancient, from about 540 million years ago, and originated from what is called the Cambrian Explosion, when life was then quite young.

     The fossils were imprinted upon shale rock, and he noted that they were “bizarrely different,” for there were animals with five eyes, others that were shaped like a pineapple slice, and even others with stilt-like legs. Animal life, it seemed to Walcott, was then exuberant and daring, trying out all kinds of forms, and experimenting,

     The Burgess Shale, wrote Stephen Jay Gould in his popular book Wonderful Life, was “our sole vista upon the inception of modern life in all its fullness.”

     However, the fossils that Walcott found were of the small and innocent-looking variety, such as minute oceanic crabs, but life moved on, drifting toward the big, mean, and fierce variety, the dinosaurs, which ruled the Earth, in a multiple number of forms, for millions of years, while the cycles of hot and cold raged on about them.

     And then, about 65 million years ago, the dinosaurs and about half the world’s species were obliterated, it is believed, by the devastation following an asteroid or a comet striking the Earth, and allowing our age, the Age of Mammals, thus a chance to begin.

     Based upon all of this, Bryson suggested four points: “Life wants to be; life does not always want to be much; life goes on; and life from time to time goes extinct.”

     “It is a curious fact,” wrote Bryson, “that on Earth, species death is, in the most literal sense, a way of life.” Of all the species of life forms that have every lived—an estimated thirty billion to perhaps as many as 4,000 billion—99.99 percent are now extinct. “To a first approximation,” said David Raup at Chicago University, “all species are extinct.”

     The environment’s conditions may change—from glacial ice to burning desert sand, from a sea to a high mountain range, from a temperate climate to a cold and inhospitable one—and yet life continues everywhere on planet Earth, undaunted and daring to be.

CARTER’S NATIONAL MALAISE SPEECH

by William H. Benson

August 20, 2009

     The 1970s seemed a disaster for our country. It was a time of faltering American military power relative to the Soviets, productivity declines in our nation’s industries, galloping inflation, and high unemployment. The causes for this disaster were mainly political: a failure to control the money supply, excessive taxation, and government intervention. In a word, it was a weak federal government headed by Jimmy Carter.

     By 1979, Carter’s approval rating had dropped to 25%, which was lower than Nixon’s during the Watergate scandal.

     If it was Carter’s job to restore the faith in the nation’s political system, “here was his greatest failure—solving the economic problems of the American people.”

     Then, when it seemed it could get no worse, during the last week of June of 1979, OPEC, the oil-producing cartel, announced a series of oil price increases. Gas prices skyrocketed, severe shortages resulted in long lines and waits at the pumps, and the people were mad, focusing their outrage over a seemingly endless economic decline.

     Beginning on July 4, 1979, Carter disappeared for the next ten days to his Presidential retreat at Camp David, and there, he listened to teachers, preachers, businessmen, and government officials—people whom he had invited—as they explained to him what was wrong with America, and what he should do about the energy crisis.

     Millions tuned in to listen to his televised speech on July 15. Since then, it has been called his “national malaise speech,” even though he never used the word “malaise.” People had expected him to talk about his energy legislation, and he did, but only briefly at the tail end of his speech. Instead, he chose to talk mainly about the American people’s lack of confidence, even though Walter Mondale, his Vice-President had warned him.

     A frowning Carter quoted from those who were at Camp David: “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation—you’re just managing the government.” “You don’t see the people enough any more.” “Some of your Cabinet members don’t seem loyal. There is not enough discipline among your disciples.” “If you lead, we will follow.”

     Then, he began to sound as if he was giving a sermon, which in a sense he was: “We are losing our confidence in the future.” “Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption.” “We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

     “This crisis of the American spirit is all around us.” “There is growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools.” “Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift.” “What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere is a system of government that seems incapable of action.”

     These were harsh words, and the people who heard them resented them. One commentator suggested that it was as if Carter had told the American public that they had bad breath, as if he had pointed an accusing finger at them and said, “It’s all your fault!”

     Two days later, on July 17, at a Cabinet meeting, Carter requested resignations from all the heads of the various departments. He only accepted five of them, but the damage was done: the public believed that the Carter Presidency was unraveling, and it was.

     Months later, the former Governor of California, sixty-nine year old Ronald Reagan, announced that he would run for President, and at that time he said, “I find no national malaise. I find nothing wrong with the American people!” Carter’s exact opposite, Reagan smiled, laughed, and joked. “A recession is when your neighbor loses his job. A depression is when you lose yours. And recovery is when Jimmy Carter loses his.” Reagan’s jaunty affability and folksy charm shone like sunlight upon the dark and gloomy mood, this so-called national malaise that Carter had dared to suggest.

     In a new book, What the Heck are You Up To, Mr. President?, the historian Kevin Mattson wrote that both “Carter and Reagan sprang from the same ideological impulse; both responded mainly to moral decline, but where Carter saw a need for humility and limits, Reagan saw a vacuum of optimism and determination. Reagan carried the day.”

      “The new President’s self-confidence, and confidence in America, soon communicated itself. It was not long before the American public began to sense that the dark days of the 1970s were over, and that the country was being led again.”

     The economic recovery that began under Reagan continued well into the 1990s, “the longest continual economic expansion in American history.”