WOODROW WILSON

by William H. Benson

September 26, 2002

     Woodrow Wilson wanted peace.  The Great War in Europe had claimed millions of lives, and it was Wilson’s dream to create a lasting peace, a world without war.  And so he offered Fourteen Points and proposed disarmament, self-determination, and his final point–a League of Nations, an international body that would eliminate war.

     In Paris, Wilson urged the winners of the war–the British, French, and Italians, to accept his Fourteen points, and they willingly agreed so long as they could then exact reparations from the defeated–the Germans and the Austrians, as well as blame them for the war.  Germany had no choice but sign the Treaty.

     In June of 1919 Woodrow Wilson returned to America and asked Congress to rubberstamp his Versailles Treaty.  When Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, expressed concerns and came up with his own Fourteen Reservations, Wilson was incensed that anyone should question his ideas.

     When the Democrats in Congress suggested a compromise, Wilson shouted, “Never! Never!”

     Throughout his career as an educator at Princeton and as a politician, Woodrow Wilson was unbending, unyielding, uncompromising, unforgiving, and autocratic in his manners.  He aroused animosity when he would deliberately snub people.  Henry Cabot Lodge said, “I never expected to hate anyone in politics with the hatred I feel towards Wilson.”

     Wilson took his case to the American people.  Beginning in August he traveled by rail some 8000 miles giving an hour-long speech everyday for twenty-two days.  At age 63 his health was not the best, but the strain of this schedule crushed him.  On September 25, following a speech in Pueblo, Colorado, he collapsed and was rushed back to Washington where he suffered a stroke.

     He lay in a coma for weeks, and when he regained consciousness, he discovered that he was paralyzed on his left side, and incapable of continuing much of a fight with the Senate, other than to stonewall.  His wife, Edith, kept him secluded for the next eighteen months of his presidency.

     Three times the Versailles Treaty came up for a vote, and three times the Senate voted it down as well as the League of Nations.  Neither Congress nor the debilitated President would bend.

     The nations of the world eventually created the League but without the power and influence of the United States, it proved ineffectual, especially when confronted with the rise to power twenty years later in Germany of Adolf Hitler.  Indeed, it was the Versailles Treaty that Hitler so hated and was so determined to undo, and around which he rallied the Germans to take up arms.

     In 1919 the Democratic President wanted peace.  Today the Republican President wants war.  In 1919 the President believed in the power of an international organization to enforce the peace.  Two weeks ago the President stood before the United Nations and listed all of the resolutions that Saddam Hussein has failed to abide by; in so doing, Bush drew attention to the ineffectiveness of the United Nations.

     In 1919 the Republican-controlled Congress wanted no part of a League of Nations and trusted solely in Congressional sovereignty.  But today the Democratic-controlled Congress must also consider itself as the most prominent member of the United Nations.

     In 1919 Congress refused to accept its rightful position as a world leader and involve itself in another nation’s affairs.  Today the world’s nations watch warily as the President threatens Saddam Hussein and promises to set things right in Iraq.  In less than a century the roles reversed.

     The key question asked in 1919 as well as today is:  “What kind of a relationship should the United States–the most powerful nation on the globe–have with the United Nations?”  In 1919 the answer was “None!”  In 1945 following World War II, the answer was “congenial and collegial”.  But today the answer that the Bush administration is promoting is “go-it-alone” and not wait upon mulitlateral agreement.  Some see danger in this approach.  Others see the threat of annihilation as reason enough to go to war.  The answer to that key question is being rehashed and rethought and reworked today–for the better or for the worse.

CASUALTIES OF WAR

by William H. Benson

September 12, 2002

     On Sunday morning, December 7, 1941, the Japanese airforce attacked and bombed the U.S. military base at Pearl Harbor, killing 2403 Americans, wounding another 1178, and destroying 169 aircraft and at least 3 battleships.

     Sixty years later, on Tuesday morning, September 11, 2001 (9-11), terrorists in a suicide mission flew commercial jet airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing some 2800 people in New York City and another 233 in Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania.

     Both Pearl Harbor and 9-11 were heartbreaking and gut-wrenching events, but both tragedies were dwarfed in terms of bloodshed and lives lost by what happened in each of dozens of pitched battles on American soil during the Civil War.

     For example, at Sharpsburg, Maryland on Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862, 140 years ago next week, North and South soldiers fought until 23,000 men lay dead–the single bloodiest day in the history of our nation.

     And then at the Bloody Angle at Spotsylvania, soldiers from both sides were sucked into a kind of mindless savagery that went on all evening until past 2:00 a.m.

     “In a small space along the breastworks of Confederate trenches, in the pouring rain, the two sides had fought hand to hand continuously for eighteen hours in a kind of blood frenzy.  Men thrust bayonets through the logs or jumped onto the barricade and fired into the mass of soldiers below until they were themselves shot down.”

     The next day a young Union soldier named Oliver Wendell Holmes rode to the spot and wrote down what he saw.  “In the corner of woods referred to yesterday the dead of both sides lay piled in the trenches 5 or 6 deep–wounded often writhing under superincumbent dead.”

     And then there was Gettysburg, the two Bull Runs, Chancellorsville, Vicksburg, and the Wilderness, Sherman’s March to the Sea, the burning of Richmond, and on and on.  Imagine Pearl Harbor or 9-11 every other week for four years.  And the enemy was ourselves, our neighboring states.  It was as if two cyclones had started spinning but in opposite directions, each convinced that the other was wrong, and when they touched, the consequences were deadly.

     The survivors looked for someone to blame, and for many thinking Americans after 1865, it was people like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas, John Brown, and other abolitionists who were considered responsible for the war and for the disaster called Reconstruction.

     The historian Louis Menand wrote, “The abolitionists had driven a wedge into America, and they did it because they had become infatuated with a single idea.  They had marched the nation to the brink of self-destruction in the nature of an abstraction.”  And yes, the abstraction was right.

     But the abolitionists had bypassed rational thinking.  They had dismissed the nation’s system of law by which civilized change can occur.  They had forced the South into a defensive posture.  They had refused to wait upon progress but had hotly insisted upon immediate and dramatic action.  They had refused to concede that other options exist other than strident talk of war.

     For Oliver Wendell Holmes, who witnessed the ghastly horrors of the war, abolitionism came to stand in his mind as a kind of superior certitude that drives men to kill one another.

      Today the “superior certitude” alive in the world is “fundamentalism”.  In Time last week the Egyptian Ali Salem wrote, “A long time before New York City’s Twin Towers were destroyed, many towers in my country were brought down by this same brand of perpetrators.  They killed President Anwar Sadat, who initiated peace with Israel and liberalism in Egypt; . . . They have committed all these crimes with the purpose of establishing the kindgom of God on earth and have succeeded only in turning our lives into hell.”

     Do we attack Iraq or not?  More rumors of war.  We would be wiser and better not to even allow the question to be forced upon us.  Oliver Wendell Holmes concluded much later in his life that when confronted with divisive issues,  it is often not a matter of choosing sides.  Instead, it is a matter of rising above the whole concept of sideness.

     A final quote.  Bertrand Russell said, “Occasionally we should hang a question mark on all of our most cherished beliefs.” 

READING

by William H. Benson

August 29, 2002

     Last week the columnist Thomas Sowell in two columns pointed out what he considers the obvious failings of America’s schools: that American students repeatedly place at or near the bottom on international tests, that too much time is spent on all sorts of non-academic projects, that the teachers’ union is utterly opposed at having to “teach to the test”, and that the teachers themselves do not know the material which is being tested and therefore cannot teach.

     Sowell’s arguments are similar to the ones that intellectuals have rehashed for several decades now.  To listen to Sowell, one would conclude that our schools are deplorable institutions, incapable of educating anyone, and that students are being badly served.  To all of these charges, I would not completely agree. 

     Instead, I would argue that the teachers in America, especially in the early grades, are our nation’s true champions, for they perform each year a miracle; they teach students to read–which is one generation’s gift to the next, a passing of the torch of civilization.

     Few things have been as beneficial or as rewarding to me personally, as well as to countless other Americans, as that ability to read.  Should I have grown up under other unsavory circumstances–without an alphabet, books, and language, I would have been most miserable.  Indeed, I would have made a very frustrated Neanderthal.

     For a child to learn to read on their own, without any help, happens only in fiction, such as Frankenstein’s creature and Tarzan.  As a boy Tarzan happened to find his dead parents’ cabin in the jungle, and inside he found their books.  Amazingly enough, from them and without any help, he learned the English alphabet and then began to read books.

     Frankenstein’s creature, stumbling alone in a forest and friendless, happened upon an abandoned knapsack, and inside he found three books–Milton’s Paradise Lost, Goethe’s Sorrows of Werther, and Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans.

     Of this find the creature said, “The possession of these treasures gave me extreme delight; I now continually studied and exercised my mind upon these histories, whilst my friends were employed in their ordinary occupations.”

     Of course, the probability of Tarzan or Frankenstein’s creature learning to read without assistance is as remote from happening as were the circumstances of their upbringing or creation.

     In addition, something that Thomas Sowell did not admit in his column is that the rest of the world recognizes that our nation’s colleges and universities are some of the best in the world, in fact the best in the history of the world.  These shining examples of academic achievement have exceedingly high standards that American students somehow are capable of achieving.  Surely, the teachers in K through 12 are doing at the very least a few things right.

     The best and brightest of the foreign students want to study in America, and not just at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, John Hopkins, and Chicago, but also at the state’s colleges, and the junior colleges, and the local community colleges.  These foreigners know something that Americans are apt to forget–that education in America, although not inexpensive, is readily available, and offers to anyone a path to a much better future.

     Finally, about one thing Sowell said, I would agree.  Teaching material in order to pass a comprehensive and a standardized examination, even in the early grades, is not necessarily wrong, but is truly a proper course.  Later as young adults students will be expected to pass the bar or the CPA exam or a doctoral examination should they want to enter those professions, and their instructors are constantly “teaching the tests.”  Young students should face plenty of exams.

     And somehow in the midsts of lectures, homework, schedules, and those exams, students may find the time and the encouragement to spend some time every day alone with a quality book.      

     Walt Disney said, “There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates’ loot on Treasure Island . . . and best of all, you can enjoy these riches everday of your life.”  Have a great school year.

WOODSTOCK

by William H. Benson

August 15, 2002

     On the weekend of August 15-18, 1969 Max Yasgur’s 37-acre alfalfa field near Bethel, New York in the Catskills was converted into the Woodstock Music and Art Fair.  The town of Woodstock, New York had refused just weeks before the weekend to grant permission for the festival to be held on their premises.  And so the crowd streamed onto a hay field instead, some fifty-five miles away from Woodstock, swelling to an estimated 450,000 people, ten times that expected–mostly young, white, middle-class, and reasonably well-behaved.

     A twenty-mile traffic jam along Highway 17B forced people to abandon their cars and swarm through Bethel to the farm. The crowd eventually bumped up against the fences until the fences gave way, and then the ticket takers (six dollars for an advance ticket) were forced to give up.  So the crowd poured in, pitched tents, and settled in.  For as far as the eye could see, there was nothing but young people “walking, lying down, drinking, eating, reading, singing.”

     The police gave up trying to enforce the laws, especially those against drug use, and the audience, realizing this, seemed to relax, caused little trouble, and adopted their own rules of behavior, language, and costumes.  They swam in Max Yasgur’s lake, waded in his marshes, and some even helped milk his cows.  This counter-culture first promoted by hippies, flower children and other assorted oddballs had blossomed at least for a weekend at Woodstock into something new, what Abbie Hoffman later called “the Woodstock Nation.”

     But then problems accumulated.  Torrential rains turned the alfalfa field into a quagmire of mud.  Food, water, and toilet facilities proved inadequate.  Mounds of garbage piled up.  Bad drug reactions marred the otherwise peaceful festival. Three people died that weekend, but as an offset two babies were born.  Eventually, helicopters delivered water, food, and medicine to a crowd, estimated as big as Charlotte, North Carolina or Cleveland, Ohio were then.

     And then there was the music–the reason they had all gathered.  Striding across the stage that weekend included some of the top performers in 1969:  Santana; Joan Baez; Arlo Guthrie; Blood, Sweat and Tears; Sly and the Family Stone; Joe Crocker; the Who’s Who; Jefferson Airplane; Jimi Hendrix; the Grateful Dead; Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young; Credence Clearwater Revival; the Band; and Janis Joplin.

     Missing were the obvious–such as the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Doors, and Led Zeppelin, who all chose for their own reasons not to attend.

     The Woodstock Nation’s demand to end the war in Vietnam finally came to fruition two years later, but the call for promoting drug use fell on deaf ears.  The Establishment just said “No!”, and has continued to say “No!” ever since, solidifying its position and rightfully so.

     For on September 18, 1970 Jimi Hendrix died in London of a drug overdose, and sixteen days later Janis Joplin was found dead in a Los Angeles motel room, a supply of heroin nearby.  The evidence remains overwhelming that no matter how pleasurable, drugs destroy lives.

     Today, thousands claim that Woodstock gave them a “totally different outlook on life.”  It was “three days of peace and music”, a “total experience”, a “happening”, “days and nights of heady music”, music that had a hard edge, an anti-war posture, with calls for peace, and laced with disguised messages about drug use.  Woodstock had converted Max Yasgur’s farm into the land of H. G. Wells’s “lotus eaters”, bonded by rock music, drugs, brotherhood, and defiance of the Establishment.

     One author put it this way.  “To be part of it was to feel the delirious siege mentality that reigned among the 450,000 utopians who were determined to show that the counter-culture could come together in their own alternative world without cops, guns, Nixon, or napalm. . . . When it was over, the myth of victory was triumphant. . . . Woodstock Nation came to symbolize youth’s righteous crusade to change the world, and the most militant kind of love.”

“WILD BILL” HICKOK

by William H. Benson

August 1, 2002

     Unlike the Lone Ranger or Roy Rogers or Gene Autry or the myriad other fictionalized Westerners who rode horses and were quick with pistols, Wild Bill Hickok was an actual person who lived during the lawless days of the Wild West.  Although archivists have only rare specimens of his signature, they do exist–proof that he was not thought up by a dime-store novelist.

     And the most amazing thing about the West of the latter half of the nineteenth century is that the more colorful characters, such as Wyatt Earp, Buffalo Bill Cody, and Wild Bill Hickok, entered into the Western mythology at the same time that they were living.  

     James Butler Hickok left his home in Troy Grove, Illinois shortly after his father died, and he headed west.  He drove wagons for Russell, Waddell, & Majors, where he met Bill Cody, who was riding horses for the Pony Express.  He sided with the Union during the Civil War and then scouted for General George Armstrong Custer during the Indian Wars.

     He claimed to have wrestled a bear with only a knife and lived to tell about it.  In Rock Creek, Nebraska, he quarreled with some young thugs and ended up killing them all but was judged innocent by reason of self-defense.  Above all, he worked hard at building up his reputation.

     But he impressed people wherever.  An officer at Fort Riley wrote home.

     “I forgot to tell you about our guide–the most striking object in camp.  Six feet, lithe, active, sinewy, daring rider, dead shot with pistol and rifle, long locks, fine features and mustache, buckskin leggings, red shirt, broad-brim hat, two pistols in belt, rife in hand–he is a picture.  He goes by the name of Wild Bill, and tells wonderful stories of his horsemanship, fighting, and hair-breadth escapes.  We do not, however, feel under any obligation to believe them all.”

     His real claim to fame though was as a Sheriff in the lawless cowtowns–Hays City and Abilene, Kansas.  After weeks of driving the cattle north to the railroad, the Texas cowboys strode into town ready to party.  They gambled, drank, and shot up the town, but they also had to contend with Wild Bill Hickok who ruled with an iron fist, and enforced the law that no guns were permitted in town. 

     In 1872 Wild Bill traveled east, where for two years he appeared in numerous traveling Wild West shows, including Buffalo Bill’s, sealing his fame as a larger-than-life Westerner.  But he quickly wearied of life on the stage and returned to the West.

     On August 2, 1876 at 4:10 p.m. Jack McCall walked into the No.10 Saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territories and shot Wild Bill Hickok in the back of the head.  It seems that Hickok’s enemies had convinced McCall that he should do this.  But whatever the reason, the bullet passed through Hickok’s body and eventually lodged in Captain Massey’s left forearm, where it remained.

     Hickok normally sat with his back to the wall, but that day the three others at the gambling table would not let him have that chair.  So he sat exposed.  Legend has it that he held two black eights and two black aces–which is now called the Dead Man’s Hand.  Wild Bill Hickok was buried atop Mount Moriah overlooking Deadwood.  He was thirty-nine years old.

     In the trial, Jack McCall was initially declared innocent and released, but in another trial in Yankton, he was found guilty and on March 1, 1877 was hanged.

     Wild Bill Hickok was the point man for the law’s push west onto the frontier.  Sworn to uphold the law, he tried to bring order.  For it is law and order, meaning that the two go hand in hand; one does not exist without the other.  What ensures American citizens’ their order and their liberty is the law.  The Statue of Liberty holds upright the flaming torch of liberty in one hand, but tucked up next to her heart is a tablet of laws.  The Founding Fathers understood that liberty and order exist and flourish in an atmosphere of rightly produced and executed laws.

     Keeping a lid on lawlessness is civilization’s ongoing battle.  It was so during Wild Bill Hickok’s life, and it is today.

TRAGEDY

by William H. Benson

July 18, 2002

     On July 18, 64 A.D. a fire started in the Circus Maximus in the city of Rome that raged for the next nine days and laid half of Rome in ruins.  The story goes that Nero, the emperor, from a safe place had watched the fire and played his fiddle and then recited a poem that described the burning of Troy.  The Romans initially blamed him, not for starting the fire, but for not caring.

     But then another story began circulating that he, in fact,  had deliberately started the fire so that he might see what a burning city looked like.  And so later he caught the blame.

     Historians agree that Nero actually was on holiday in the country when the fire erupted and that he quickly returned to the city where he directed crews of firefighters, threw open certain grounds of his palace to refugees, set up tents and huts, and then imported cheap food.

In other words, he did what he could to overcome the fire’s tragic outcome.

     But the people of Rome detested Nero, for they understood he was cruel and murderous.  He had plotted the murder of his own mother, Agrippina.  He had divorced his wife, Octavia, charging her with adultery, and then he had sent the executioners.  Guilty of such heinous crimes, starting a fire, the Roman citizens believed, would be well within his character.

     Fearful of losing the people’s support, Nero, in turn, blamed the fire on the Christians, members of a new religion, and so he had them rounded up and fed to the lions in stadiums filled with cheering crowds.  And he then conducted wholesale crucifixions.  Accused of a tragedy, Nero blamed the innocent, and so that summer his viciousness rapidly expanded.  

     The summer of 2002 has been a summer of tragedy: a drought which created conditions that erupted in forest fires in Colorado and Arizona, and then in a bizarre reversal, heavy rains produced flooding in areas of Texas and nearby in Keith County, Nebraska. 

     Without the necessary snowfall last winter and without the rains this spring, the high country lay exposed and vulnerable, and inevitably the wild fires began.  The Iron Mountain fire burned nearly 88 homes.  And then in June the Coal Seam blaze flared up near Glenwood Springs.  And then Hayman exploded, choking Denver on smoke, threatening homes and property in the foothills.  Then, the Missionary Ridge fire near Durango ran wild. 

     “This is the worst fire year in Colorado history,” said Ralph Campbell, a state forester.

     Indeed, as of June 30 the Hayman fire had consumed 137,760 acres, and Missionary Ridge 71,739 acres–the first and second biggest wild fires in Colorado’s history.

     And then another fire in Arizona riveted the nation’s attention.

     The physical world, sometimes called Mother Nature, plays havoc on human beings’ intentions, and when she destroys property or human life, we label her handiwork a tragedy.  Besides drought, fire, and flood, humanity groans under her other tricks–hailstorms, tornadoes, typhoons, earthquakes, and volcanoes.  And then there are the tragedies devised by human beings.

     Whenever a tragedy strikes and for whatever reason, it is then Human Nature to fix the blame upon another person or persons.  We want to capture and possess a culprit, get a conviction, and then lock him or her away.  In so doing, society punishes the evil doer, and supposedly brings a measure of harmony into the community.

     Mother Nature acts, and Human Nature reacts.  Suffering under a tragedy, one can never be sure how individual behavior will be directed, but normally accusation and blame play a part.

     What do we do when tragedy strikes?  What do we do when we discover we have a life-threatening disease or when we are the victim of a crime or when we suffer from an accident or when we watch as suicide pilots fly into buildings or as terrorists blow themselves up on a bus?  Do we lash out with blame?  Do we work, in turn, to harm the guilty?  Do we fight, or do we yield?  How do we as intelligent and civilized human beings properly respond to the ugliness of a tragedy?  There are no easy answers.

     All tragedies tear gaping holes in people’s lives, and the walking wounded frantically search to replace that emptiness.  The quick fix is to blame somebody.

    The Romans said that Nero played his fiddle, and Nero said that the Christians started the fire.