THANK THE TEACHERS

by William H. Benson

May 14, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HERBERT HOOVER VS. FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT

by William H. Benson

April 30, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

     Hoover stared glumly at the ground.

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

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

ALBERT EINSTEIN

by William H. Benson

April 16, 2009

     As a child, Albert Einstein had difficulty with language. He did not speak words until he was nearly three, and when he did begin to talk, he exhibited echolalia, repeating phrases and sentences that he had heard, but softly to himself, again and again. He seemed withdrawn, distracted, and was on occasion referred to as “the dopey one.” It seemed to some he had a learning disability.

     Some current biographers have gone so far to suggest that young Albert may have suffered from autism, or that he may have had Asperger’s Syndrome, but others have dismissed that theory by pointing to Albert’s raucous sense of humor, not a symptom usually associated with autistic children.

     Born in Ulm, Germany to Jewish parents in 1879, Albert seemed an unremarkable child, average, perhaps even low, in intelligence, but as an adult he displayed a singular ability for physics, for the workings of time and space.

     His genius was that of the visual and spatial variety. He could dream and visualize, but then he struggled with the language to explain his thoughts. It seemed one part of his brain was over-developed and another was under-developed. His classroom lectures, once he had arrived at Princeton, were noted for being exceptionally disorganized.  

      In 1948, during an exploratory surgery, doctors discovered “an aneurysm, a swelling and weakening in his abdominal aorta,” that they understood would eventually burst. Seven years passed, and on March 14, 1955, he turned seventy-six, but by then the aneurysm had begun to enlarge. Doctors suggested a risky surgery, but Einstein refused.

     “It is tasteless to prolong life artificially,” he said. “I have done my share. It is time to go. I will do it elegantly.” To Helen Dukas, his long-time assistant, he said, “You’re hysterical. I have to pass on sometime, and it doesn’t really matter when.”

     On April 13, the pain in his stomach forced him to stop working, and two days later he entered the Princeton Hospital in New Jersey, and there, on April 18, Monday morning, just past 1:00 a.m., the aneurysm burst, “like a big blister.” Einstein was dead.

     His wishes were to have his body cremated, and it was. At a private service, his ashes were scattered upon the Delaware River. He had wanted no headstone, nothing that could then become “a place of pilgrimage, where pilgrims would come to view the bones of a saint.” He did not want his final resting place to serve as a subject of morbid veneration.

     Unknown to the family was that the pathologist at the Princeton Hospital on duty that day, Thomas Harvey, had performed an autopsy upon Albert, had done so without permission from the family or the hospital, and that he had removed and embalmed Einstein’s brain. Harvey was fired from his job, and rightfully so, and so he began to wander about the country—from Missouri, to Kansas, and even a trip to California—as he drifted through a series of jobs and marriages.

     And wherever he went, he took the glass embalming jars holding Einstein’s brain with him, and he did that for the next forty-three years. Whenever someone asked him about Einstein’s brain, he said that he was preparing a report, but he never did.

     Finally, in 1998, Thomas Harvey, then 86, did the right thing and returned Albert Einstein’s brain to the pathologist on duty at the Princeton Hospital, and testing could begin, but the tests were inconclusive as to whether his brain’s construction was the reason for his genius or not. It was average-sized, perhaps even small. Some noted that the Sylvan Fissure was missing. Others believed that the temporal lobe was an abnormal size, but nothing definitive could account for Einstein’s breathtaking mental capabilities at the same time that he had trouble with language.

     But Einstein had explained his genius in a series of comments years before his passing. “I discovered that nature was constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to find out the mathematical structure of nature itself. It is a kind of faith that has helped me through my whole life.” “The contrast between the popular assessment of my powers and the reality is simply grotesque. I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious.”

     “The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” 

CONNECTIONS

by William H. Benson

April 1, 2009

     William Manchester, the biographer and historian, was born on April 1, 1922. A Marine, he was wounded at Okinawa during World War II before returning to college where he studied journalism and English. He then became a foreign correspondent for the Baltimore Sun, and then began writing a series of oversized tomes on larger-than-life people: John F. Kennedy, Douglas MacArthur, and Winston Churchill.

     He had planned to write a three-volume biography of Churchill, but into his third volume, in 2001, at the age of 79, he suffered two strokes that left him paralyzed in his left leg and unable to write. “I can’t put things together,” he said. “I can’t make the connections. Language for me came as easily as breathing for fifty years, and I can’t do it anymore. The feeling is indescribable.”

     Manchester knew all about the devastation that strokes can produce. Early in his career at the Baltimore Sun, he had served as personal secretary to H. L. Mencken, the Sun’s witty and caustic reporter. A cigar and pipe smoker for decades, Mencken suffered three strokes: the last on November 23, 1948 at the age of sixty-eight left him unable to read or write. It was the young William Manchester who read to Mencken. “Much of Conrad, and ‘Huckleberry Finn’—twice,” Manchester reported.

     Mencken then died on January 29, 1956 at the age of seventy-five, after seven years of a kind of living death, and often, Mencken would refer to November 23, 1948 as “the day that I died.”  

     Ralph Waldo Emerson never suffered a stroke, but late in his life, he lost bits and pieces of his memory and his connection with words, due to aphasia, a form of dementia. When he could not think of a word, for example, “chair,” he would describe it as “the thing with four legs which we sit on,” until someone provided the missing word.

     Roger Rosenblatt, a columnist at Time magazine, wrote in 2001, “Of all the fears a writer experiences, the loss of the ability to make connections is the scariest. . . . It’s just that writers depend on the ability to make connections of out thin air, or no air.”

     Rosenblatt said, “Here’s the weird thing about connections: the impulse to make them is so strong, so fundamentally human, that we connect with those who cannot make the connections for themselves.”

     Who can truly make sense of this loss of connections?

     A scientist would conclude that the brain cells—neurons—had been destroyed. Or digging deeper they would say that the synaptic vesicles at the presynaptic axon terminal were jammed, or that the receptors at the postsynaptic spine—the dendrites—were clogged, or that synapse—the jump from one neuron cell to another—was being otherwise prevented.

     Or perhaps there was a problem with the myelin that covers the axon terminals. The most recent research indicates that talent—designing buildings; playing a top-ranking game of chess, golf, or tennis; or writing sentences, paragraphs, columns, or books—lies in the degree of thickness of those series of myelin wrappings upon each neuron cell.

     “Synaptic transmission in myelinated axons is a lot faster than in unmyelinated, because it just jumps from node to node,” wrote the neuroscientist Jeanette Norden. In other words the thicker the myelin, the more talented the individual. Practice thickens it.

     Science writing—all quite accurate—leaves one cold, in that it leaves out the emotional context of what a stroke causes—a loss of a human’s core. Lodged somewhere and somehow within the tangles of dendrites, axon terminals, and myelin coverings, within the gray and white matter, within the folds and convolutions of brain matter are those human characteristics called emotions: fear, envy, greed, love, ambition, anger, and hate. To lose them, plus intelligence and connections, even if only gradually, is terrifying.

     In reference to Manchester, Roger Rosenblatt wrote, “He has lost the words, and the process of losing them, little by little, must have been terrible.”

     Manchester died on June 1, 2004 at his home in Middleton, Connecticut at the age of 82, three years after his second stroke.

POLITICAL JUDGMENT

by William H. Benson

March 19, 2009

     On March 19, 2003 at 9:30 p.m. est, two hours past the deadline for Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein to resign, U.S. and British forces began a concerted air strike against Hussein’s government. A ground campaign followed, and by April 9, allied forces had control of Baghdad, and Saddam Hussein had gone into hiding.

     On May 1, President George W. Bush announced the end of major military operations in Iraq, stating “Mission Accomplished!” However, a peacekeeping force remained in place to subdue the insurgents. On December 13, 2003, U.S. forces found Hussein hiding in a hole in the ground. He was brought to trial, convicted, and eventually executed for his mass slaughter of the Kurds, a decade before.

     In selling the idea of a war against a destitute third world Middle Eastern country that most Americans knew little about, both the President and Vice President used words and language based more on wishful thinking than reality.

     In September of 2002, Dick Cheney tried to persuade Dick Armey, the Republican House majority leader, saying, “We have great information. They’re going to welcome us. It’ll be like the American army going through the streets of Paris. They’re sitting there ready to form a new government. The people will be so happy with their freedoms that we’ll probably back ourselves out there within a month or two.”

     In late 2002, George W. Bush described Saddam Hussein as “a man who would likely team up with Al Qaeda. . . .This is a man who told the world he wouldn’t have weapons of mass destruction, promised he wouldn’t have them. He’s got them!”

     In a recent book entitled Dead Certain, the author Robert Draper, wrote, “Bush wasn’t relying on intelligence to buttress his claims of Saddam’s dark fantasies of plotting attacks on America with Al Qaeda, or direct contact with Al Qaeda. For no such intelligence existed.” And the thin intelligence that claimed Hussein owned weapons of mass destruction was proven incorrect.

     Judgment, especially judgment in the political arena, is a rare quality. A columnist Michael Ignatieff recently wrote: “I’ve learned that acquiring good judgment in politics starts with learning when to admit your mistakes.” That means loosening your attachment to an idea that may be novel, curious, or even interesting but is patently false and will prove catastrophic.

     There are any number of ideas about a given issue, but only a few of them are true and applicable to human life, embedded in reality. It is those few ideas that can be trusted, and upon them decisions can be made. “Fail again; but fail better.”

     Ignatieff also wrote, “Good judgment in politics, it turns out, depends on being a critical judge of yourself.” That means listening closely to those internal warning bells ringing inside when being led toward a decision. The difficulty though is that in certain people who have lived charmed lives, warning bells do not ever sound.  

     Ignatieff suggested that a wise political leader must avoid staying in his or her cocoon of imaginings, but instead must confront the world every day, deciding who to trust, who to believe, and who to avoid. “Prudent leaders force themselves to listen equally to advocates and opponents of the course of action they are thinking of pursuing.” He or she must challenge all fixed ideas.

     There were some thinkers and writers in the early days of 2003 who showed good judgment on Iraq and predicted quite accurately the dire consequences that actually unfolded there. These people did not have more knowledge than those working in the White House, or even access to better intelligence.

     What they had was outright skepticism and a recognition of the limits of American power and authority. “They didn’t suppose that a free state could arise on the foundations of 35 years of police terror.” “They didn’t suppose that America had the power to shape political outcomes in a faraway country.”

     Paul O’Neill, Bush’s first secretary of the Treasury, was extremely skeptical of the war, when he said that the U.S. was “grabbing a python by the tail, by dropping a hundred thousand troops into the middle of twenty-four million Iraqis and an Arab world of one billion Muslims. Trust me, they haven’t thought this through.”  

MICHEL de MONTAIGNE

by William H. Benson

March 5, 2009

     On February 28, 1571, a French nobleman and a lawyer in Paris’s royal court named Michel de Montaigne retired. Coincidentally, it was his thirty-eighth birthday. He had shown no signs of literary ambitions, but he was determined to devote his remaining days to living in his country estate where he would think and write about nothing but himself.

     “Because I found I had nothing else to write about,” he said, “I presented myself as a subject. When I wrote of anything else, I wandered and lost the way.”

      For the next twenty-one years, until his passing at the age of fifty-nine from kidney stones, he wrote a series of, what he called, “essais,” a French word meaning “attempts” or “trials.” This was a first, for no one in all of literature had written only about themselves, using first person singular.

     Montaigne wrote “about his boyhood, his family, his education, his house, his travels, his books, his illnesses, his friends, his dreams, his interests, his habits, his experiences, his opinions, his religion”—a compendium of all thoughts that occurred to him, written down as they slipped in and through his mind, done without any plan or organization.

     He then gave each—some only two pages and others as much as fifty—a title: Of Smells, Of Friendship, Of Sadness, Of Idleness, Of Liars, Of Constancy, Of Solitude, Of Sleep, Of Fear, Of Age, Of Prayers, Of Conscience, How We Cry and Laugh for the Same Thing, Of Moderation, Of Thumbs, Of Cannibals, Of Names, Of Virtue, Of Anger, Of Vanity, Of Cruelty, Of Cripples, Of Glory, Of Presumption, Of Books, How Our Mind Hinders Itself, and Of Experience.

     In another essay that he entitled “Of Repentance,” he answered his critics when he wrote, “If the world finds fault that I speak too much of myself, I find fault that they do not so much as think of themselves.”   

      A reader can see in Montaigne’s essays his humanity, his warm self-deprecating humor, and his endless curiosity. “I set forth a humble and inglorious life,” he said, and in his “Preface” he wrote, “Reader, thou hast here an honest book.” His motto was his ever constant question: “Que sais-je?”, meaning “What do I know?,” in which he professed his absolute ignorance about many things.

     Again, in “Of Repentance,” he wrote, “So, all in all, I may indeed contradict myself now and then; but truth, . . . I do not contradict. If my mind could gain a firm footing, I would not make essays, I would make decisions; but it is always in apprenticeship and on trial.” An admirer of Montaigne’s once wrote, “He renounced all intellectual and spiritual authority and that renunciation became his authority.”

     Was Montaigne’s life a waste of his talents? His contemporaries, no doubt, believed so. Did he make a huge mistake retiring from his job as a lawyer at age thirty-eight to write drivel about himself? His colleagues probably believed so. But Montaigne came to believe “that human beings must discover their own nature in order to live with others in peace and dignity,” and this self-imposed isolation was Montaigne’s way.

     How shall I live? What should I do with my life? What do I know? These are questions some people ask of themselves, but few seem to act upon the answers they receive back. Life comes at us in a rush—childhood, education, marriage, children, jobs, purchasing a home, television, the news, sports, theatre, all happening while we are trying to find our way—and the crucial questions of life we can lay aside, easily. Life happens whether I or you think deeply about it or not.

     Montaigne thought deeply about his. Toward the end of his final and grandiloquent essay, “Of Experience,” he wrote: “For my part then, I love life and cultivate it, such as it has pleased God to bestow it upon us. I do not desire it should be without the necessity of eating and drinking; and I should think it a not less excusable failing to wish it had been twice as long. ‘A wise man is the keenest seeker for natural riches.’”