MARY TODD LINCOLN

by William H. Benson

February 12, 2004

     Their friends and family often wondered what they saw in each other.  He was tall, 6’ 4”, gangly, ugly, poor, even-tempered, messy, poorly dressed, and given over to melancholy moods.  She was short, plump, neat, clean, well-dressed, anxious, jealous, insecure, sensitive, wild-tempered, blinded by severe headaches that drove her to bed for days, and possessed no sense of humor—her husband’s best trait. 

     Depending upon her mood, she would pinch pennies for months and then abruptly go on a shopping binge that would run up enormous debts.  And whereas he was utterly opposed to what he considered an immoral institution–slavery, she sympathized with the South, having grown up in Kentucky, surrounded by slaves, and had enjoyed their help.

     Despite their differences, Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd married.

     What they shared in common was ambition, particularly political ambition, and she told her friends, “Mr. Lincoln is to be president of the United States some day.  If I had not thought so, I would not have married him, for you can see he is not pretty.”

     In their home in Springfield Lincoln kept a low profile.  “There are no fewer than six eyewitness descriptions of her furies, one relating to how she drove him out of the house with a broomstick.”  A Valentine she was not, but then neither was he.  Lincoln chose to be gone and out of the house every year for three months in the fall and then again three months in the spring, riding the legal circuit to earn money for the family and leaving Mary with the care of their boys.

     About her husband Mary said, “He is of no account when he is at home.  He never does anything except to warm himself and read.  He never went to market in his life.  I have to look after all that.  He just does nothing.  He is the most useless, good-for-nothing man on earth.”

     Repeatedly her heart broke under a series of losses that each reduced her into something unrecognizable.  In 1850 her second son Eddie died when he was only four-years old. In 1862 just a year after the Lincoln family had moved into the White House, their son Willie, then eleven-years old, died.  Nothing would console Mary who took to her bed for months.

     One day Lincoln pointed through the window to the asylum for the insane and told her, “Do you see that large white building on the hill yonder:  Try and control your grief, or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there.”

     Three of her brothers served in the Confederate army, and all three died during the Civil War, a war her husband commanded for the Union side.  And she was sitting beside her husband at Ford’s theatre watching the play Our American Cousin when the actor John Wilkes Booth put a bullet in her husband’s head.  And in June of 1871 when her youngest son, Tad, her favorite, died at the age of eighteen, she would not be comforted.

     Mentally unbalanced and emotionally deteriorated, her surviving and eldest son Robert took her to court and had her judged insane, a case said to be “one of the saddest spectacles ever witnessed in a courtroom in this city.”  She was held in confinement for four months, and upon her release she wrote a scathing letter to Robert, demanding the return of her valuables, clothes, silver, and paintings and severing all relations with her son.  On June 15, 1876 a court in a surprise reversal pronounced her sane.

     She died on July 16, 1882 at the age of sixty-four, a most miserable and unhappy woman.  A friend said, “I think she was never entirely sane after the shock of her husband’s murder; but on most subjects she was entirely clear.”  

     Lincoln was born on February 12, 1809, the same day as Charles Darwin, the English scientist.  It was agreed by family and friends that Mary Todd was not strongest of women as she tried valiantly to adapt to life’s cruelest demands—the death of brothers, children, and husband and the betrayal of her son.  Survival of the fittest, adaptation, and natural selection may be a scientific theory molded together to explain facts, but it does little to explain the human psyche—its needs, fears, and temperaments, especially in one so sensitive and so fragile as Mary Todd Lincoln.

DON QUIXOTE

by William H. Benson

January 29, 2004

     The most well-remembered scene from Cervantes’s Don Quixote is the Man of La Mancha, a knight suited in steel armor, astride his horse in a full gallop, his lance tilted, in a full-throttled attack upon a giant.  Sancho Panza, his trusty pot-bellied sidekick, had warned him that it was not a giant but only a windmill, but Don Quixote had brushed aside his friend’s words.

     “It is easy to see that thou art not used to this business of adventure; those are giants. . . . Betake thyself to prayer. . . . For this is righteous warfare, and it is God’s good service to sweep so evil a breed from off the face of the earth.”

     His lance broke upon impact, and Don Quixote and his horse went rolling across the Spanish plain, “in a sorry condition.”  And so they picked themselves up and set off on more extravagant follies that Quixote believed were heroic and chivalrous acts. 

     At one point he stabbed at some wineskins, believing that they were enemy soldiers, until he saw their “blood” cover the floor red.  Then, he watched a puppet show until  he was overcome with emotion at a battle scene such that he jumped up onto the stage with his sword lifted and then slashed downward “at the Moorish puppets, knocking some of them over, beheading others, crippling this one, mangling that one,” stunning the audience and the puppeteer.

     Another time Don Quixote and Sancho rescued some prisoners who, once they realized they were free, turned on their savior and on Sancho and stripped them of their clothes and pelted them and their horse and donkey with stones.  Cervantes described the scene after the prisoners had fled.

     “They were left alone now—the donkey and the horse, and Sancho and Don Quixote; the donkey, crestfallen and pensive, wagging its ears now and then, being under the impression that the hurricane of stones that had raged about them was not yet over; the horse, stretched alongside his master, for the hack also had been felled by a stone; Sancho, naked and fearful of the Holy Brotherhood, and Don Quixote, making wry faces at seeing himself so mishandled by those to whom he had done so much good.”

     Of that pitiful scene a critic remarked, “All of which should teach us to liberate galley slaves precisely because they will not be grateful to us for it.”

     Don Quixote is too mad, too idealistic, too much of a trouble-maker, and Sancho is too trusting and too willing to follow.  Across the Spanish landscape they travelled, meeting up with rich and poor, men and women, royalty and peasants, masters and slaves, and Don Quixote thought it best to interfere in their lives.  Invariably all parties turned on him, and no one, least of all Don and Sancho, were seemingly better off after.

     Today officials would probably recommend professional help for someone so “quixotic”, so idealistic, and so beyond the realm of reality, but four hundred years ago the Spanish rulers would either imprison such a person or simply allow him to suffer the indignities and misfortunes which he brought upon himself for his foolish behavior, which is what happened to Don Quixote.

     Scholars are still trying to decide if Cervantes wrote a comedy or a tragedy or an interplay of both.  We, the readers, at first laugh at the foolishness, and then later we feel saddened as we watch the poor man’s illusions and dreams repeatedly being mangled by the cold hard brutal facts of life.  The Man from La Mancha had a dream, and instead of seeing it as something off in the future to be pined for until achieved, Don Quixote seized it when he put on his steel armor, spurred his horse, and charged at the giant.

     At the end of Cervantes’s book, which is too long and yet ends too quickly, Don Quixote put his life’s mission in perspective.  “I have set injuries and insults straight, righted wrongs, punished arrogance, conquered giants, and trampled on monsters.”  Few readers then or ever since have been able to claim such startling personal victories.

WINSTON CHURCHILL

by William H. Benson

January 15, 2004

     For Christmas this year I received two books, and coincidentally both were recent biographies on Winston Churchill.  Considered the greatest Englishmen who has ever lived and also the greatest leader of the twentieth century, his story is an amazing adventure in force of will, determination, and leadership.

     He was born on November 30, 1874 into wealth and privilege to an English father and an American mother.  His father, John Churchill, Lord Randolph and the Duke of Marlborough, was only twenty-five in April of 1874 when he married the twenty-year-old Jennie Jerome, the American daughter of a New York City financier who owned race tracks.

     Neither parent provided Winston with any direction during his childhood years, preferring to enjoy their own lives separately without any interference from their son.  Winston had a non-relationship with his father and a semi-relationship with his mother.  Early on they turned the parenting duties over to a hired nanny, Mrs. Everest, who then became the central emotional prop in Winston’s life.

     Eventually this troublesome lad was packed off to Harrow, a boarding school for boys devoted to the classics.  His teachers there considered him a very poor student, but Winston refused to get his mind wrapped around the numerous verb conjugations of Greek, Latin, or French.  However, he enjoyed narrative history, and he learned to write tolerable essays due to a Mr. Somervell.

     Winston later said that “this teacher was charged with the duty of teaching the stupidest boys the most disregarded thing—namely, to write mere English.  He knew how to do it.  He taught it as no one else has ever taught it. . . . I had three times as much as anyone else.  I learned it thoroughly.  Thus I got into my bones the essential structure of the ordinary British sentence—which is a noble thing.”

     His father then died when Winston was just twenty-years old, and Winston was then on his own.  But by age twenty-six Winston was world famous, a war hero, a best-selling author, a millionaire, and a member of Parliament where he would then serve for most of the next sixty years.  Seemingly coming from nowhere and without help from anyone he pushed himself into a position where people had to listen to him and then follow him.  How had he done these things?

     Certainly determination and ambition had always been there, but underlying those qualities was a superior talent in delivering the English language to his listeners and readers.  For six decades his spell-binding speeches in and out of Parliament captivated audiences.  And he could write histories and biographies that pulled his readers into new areas of scholarship and into fascinating facts and ideas that would eventually win him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1953.

     For Churchill the English language was his primary tool to accomplish his and Great Britain’s goals in defeating Germany in both world wars.  Sincerity always underscored his words.  When he said, “We shall never surrender,” his friends and enemies understood that he meant exactly that.

     His speeches included a strong beginning and an emotional ending.  He organized them around a single theme, and frequently he drew pictures.  “We shall fight on the seas and oceans. . . . We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”  Always he preferred the one-syllable Anglo Saxon word over the polysyllabic Latin or French word.

     Churchill died Sunday morning, January 24, 1965, less than two months after his ninetieth birthday, but coincidentally on the same day that his father–John Churchill, Lord Randolph, the Duke of Marlborough, the dad who had failed so miserably at parenting–had died seventy years before.    

     Winston frequently laced his speeches with words such as freedom and victory and loyalty and sacrifice and bravery and fighting to the bitter end.  All lovers of truth and freedom in every generation need to hear such words again and again.  We should hear them today.

NEW YEAR’S DAY RESOLUTIONS

by William H. Benson

January 1, 2004

     On January 1, 1831 William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist, began publishing the Liberator in Boston.  It carried its motto on the first page: “I am in earnest.  I will not equivocate.  I will not excuse.  I will not retreat a singe inch.  I will be heard.”

     Garrison was an extremist on the issue of slavery in that he called for the immediate release of all slaves on moral and religious grounds.  He was opposed to gradual emancipation and colonization in Africa.  He demanded total freedom for the slaves immediately.

      Garrison denounced the Constitution as “a covenant with death and an agreement with hell,” because it counted each slave as 3/5ths of a person for the purpose of determining how many representatives each state sent to the House, but then it did not permit the slave to vote.  On July 4, 1854 he publicly burned a copy of the Constitution with the words, “So perish all compromises with tyranny.”

     The Southerners responded to Garrison’s extreme view by bringing forward the reasons that slavery was a necessity in the South.  Increasingly fearful and anxious about a slave revolt, they tightened their controls over the slaves.  As the South fought hard to keep slavery, it became a bastion of reaction.

     A century before Garrison, a Quaker and a traveling minister named John Woolman worked his way each year from New England to the Carolinas and to the western frontiers preaching the Quakers’ vision of the Gospel.  Whenever he confronted slave owners in the South, he tried to convince them of the evil of slavery by insisting on paying the slaves who served him.  He worked quietly but persistently to move the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting toward an anti-slavery position.

     Woolman also wrote an essay, Some Considerations on the Keeping of Slaves, in which he persuaded his readers that slavery was an evil, a moral wrong, and a mistake.

     The historian David Brion Davis wrote, “If the western world became more receptive to anti-slavery thought between 1746 and 1772, the self-effacing Quaker was a major instrument of the transformation.”

     Garrison and Woolman represent two different methods when confronting a moral wrong.  One is aggressive and the other passive.  Garrison’s “I will be heard,” stands in stark contrast to Woolman’s “here are Some Considerations to think about.”  One method demands action now.  It is in your face.  It is emotional, and it is relentless.  It seeks to overwhelm the opposition.  The other is quiet, passive, but convincing in the rightness of its position.

     The Western world eventually turned on slavery and eliminated it, but not before the U.S fought a vicious and bloody civil war.  One view is that the war was mainly caused by the extremists in the North, the abolitionists, such as Garrison, and those reactionary Southerners who responded by pushing for secession.

     As is usual, there are moral wrongs and deep injustices in the world today.  Slavery is still an institution in certain pockets of the world.  Women are badly mistreated throughout the Middle East.  The issue of abortion has stubbornly not disappeared.

     And then there is the fight in Palestine over who will own and control the land—the Israelis or the Palestinians.  Israel’s Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has gone so far to stop terrorism that he is building a four hundred-mile wall to divide the two nations.  And after 9-11 what were we to do?  Send in the troops and root out the al Queda and the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, or turn the other cheek and in a state of paralysis wait for the next attack?  President Bush made his decision, and the French and the Germans did not approve.

     New Year’s Day is the day to formulate resolutions and write down goals for the next twelve months.  As we do so, we can think about our approach.  Shall it be highly charged or low-keyed, emotional or even-tempered, critical or persuasive, loud or quiet?  Each style produces a reaction from others who can undo what we wish to accomplish or can assist us in its achievement.  The wisdom is found in knowing which style is appropriate for a situation—Garrison’s or Woolman’s.

HARRY TRUMAN

by William H. Benson

December 18, 2003

     On the morning of December 5, 1950 President Harry Truman was reading in the Washington Post a most unflattering commentary on Margaret’s singing performance the evening before in Washington.  With his short fuse ignited by this attack on his daughter, Truman grabbed a pen and notepad and dashed off a hot letter to Paul Hume, the Post’s reporter.

     “Mr. Hume:–I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert.  I’ve come to the conclusion that you are an ‘eight-ulcer man on four-ulcer pay.’  Someday I hope to meet you.  When that happens you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beef steak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”

     Hume made public Truman’s letter and then sold it.  The entire country was aghast by their President’s ripe language, and yet he claimed that “the parents of children understand and will stick up for me.”

     On April 10, 1951 President Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur from his command of as General of the Army after a series of defiant acts of insubordination.  Years later in a hot fury with his blue eyes still blazing at the recollection, Truman recalled that he told General Bradley to do it quickly because he did not want MacArthur to hear about it and resign. 

     “And I told Bradley, I says, ‘The @#$%* isn’t going to resign on me, I want him fired.’”

     In August of 1952 Harry had decided that he would not run for re-election for a third term, and so he threw his support towards the Governor of Illinois, Adlai Stevenson.  Unfortunately, the intellectual and cerebral Stevenson was on occasion on the receiving end of Truman’s vile and tempered language–Army talk he had learned in Battery D in World War I.  And Stevenson was not the intelligent campaigner that Truman was and had been.

     And then Truman was outraged when he sensed that Stevenson was disassociating himself away from Truman.  He fired off a letter.

     “It seems to me that the Presidential Nominee and his running-mate are trying to beat the Democratic President instead of the Republicans.  There is no mess in Washington.  I’ve come to the conclusion that if you want to run against your friends, they should retire from the scene and let you do it.  I’m telling you to take your crackpots, your high socialites with their noses in the air, run your campaign and win if you can.  Cowfever [he meant Estes Kefauver] could not have treated me any more shabbily than have you.”

     Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Republican candidate handily won the election, and on January 20, 1953, the day of his inauguration, Ike and Mamie drove up to the White House but then refused to get out of the car, expecting the Trumans to come out to them, a clear break in protocol.  The Trumans, humiliated by Ike’s lack of tact, walked to the car.  Conversation was terse and short.

     Years later when reflecting upon Ike’s snub, Truman said, “You can’t very well forget things of that kind.”  And he didn’t.  Straightforward, aggressive, outspoken, and determined, he spoke his mind as he saw and believed it.  To forgive and forget was not one of his tactics.  Rather than let some insult or offense simply pass him by, Truman boldly declared his opinion.

     Sam Rayburn described Truman, “So right on the big things; so wrong on the little ones.”  And it was the little things that would so detract him.  He did not take easily personal slights or snubs or criticisms.  There was never any delicate ground around which he would dance.

     Very few of us during the course of our lives can tell off a newspaper reporter or a presidential candidate or fire a general, even though we may want to.  It is not the way to keep a job or our reputation or friends.  Perhaps only lameduck Presidents and crusty men from Missouri can do so.  Truman cautioned, “Keep your bullets bright and your gunpowder dry.”

     The message of “Peace on earth, goodwill toward men” is a request to release the hatred, give up the need for revenge, and let your enemies be.  The ideal of peace is so easily proclaimed, but so difficult to do, even for Presidents.

     Have a merry, merry Christmas.

CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

by William H. Benson

December 4, 2003

     Horror has never held my attention.  I have tried to complete a Stephen King novel numerous times, and invariably after a couple of chapters of gruesome and fanciful scenes, I give up.  But then two years ago King wrote a non-fiction book, On Writing, in which he described how he came up with ideas that he was able to translate into his stories.  That book I easily finished.

     Westerns I also cannot finish.  The same can be said of Isaac Azimov’s science fiction stories or of J.R.R. Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings tales.  I start, hoping to finish at least one of them, but then other more appealing and more satisfying works just crowd them out.

     If I had more time I would read the classics, those books that Mark Twain said everybody liked but nobody read.  And I especially like to read works that explain the illusive meanings behind Shakespeare’s plays. Arthur Miller said that nobody these days really reads Shakespeare; they read about Shakespeare because the body of work that has built up and around him is much more enriching than the plays are themselves.  I would agree.  

     These days with the limited time available I read mostly non-fiction—intellectual biography and history, but on occasion I will pick up certain detective fiction writers—Sue Grafton’s alphabet series, Robert Parker’s wise-talking Spenser, and Dick Francis’s British horse-racing stories.  I read them rather than solve cross-word puzzles; they seem about the same thing.

     People arrive in this life with certain inclinations or preferences seemingly built into them for what they will read or will not read, and those preferences can improve, depending upon a person’s stage in life, what is going on in their lives, their education level, the time available, and their level of determination to exercise their minds.

    C. S. Lewis, who died on November 22, 1963, the same day as President Kennedy, had the enviable talent of being able to write well in a number of different genre—essays, theology, literary criticism, and fiction–but he is probably best remembered for his extraordinarily successful Christian allegories, The Chronicles of Narnia, today considered children’s literature. In an essay Lewis wrote that there was no single literary taste common to all children; some read nothing other than for information.  They will not read when they can find another form of entertainment.  Some like to read fantasies and marvels.  Some are omnivorous readers, gulping down anything.

     In other words, children are like adults in that they have inclinations to read or not to read and  preferences of what they will or will not read.

     Lewis wrote: “We can approach the matter differently by listing books liked by the young: Aesop’s Fables, The Arabian Nights, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe, and Treasure Island; the last was written especially for children, and yet it is read with pleasure by many adults.  I who disliked The Arabian Nights as a child, dislike them still.”

     To Lewis’s list I would also add: Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Martian stories and also Frankenstein.  Both Tarzan and Frankenstein’s creation are most interesting in that they both supposedly learned to read on their own, Tarzan as a juvenile and Frankenstein’s monster as a full-grown creation.  In fact, that monster bypassed Dick and Jane and other children’s stories and began with Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, heavy material for anyone.

     Widespread reading as a child is important, if for no other reason than to discover his or her preferences.  It also leads to better reading.  Harold Bloom, the literary critic, recently published a new book, Stories and Poems for Extraordinarily Intelligent Children of All Ages, in which he wrote, “If one is to ever read Shakespeare and Chaucer, the best way to prepare is to read Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling.”

     It also can develop more discerning thought processes and better thinking skills.  For a child, few things are more crucial to their future than reading much and often.  And besides it can be just plain fun.  The stories and ideas we encounter as a child just seem the best, and they remain with us for the rest of our lives.

     This Christmas give the child a book.