HENRY DAVID THOREAU

by William H. Benson

July 4, 2002

     On July 4, 1845 Henry David Thoreau declared his independence and moved into a cabin beside Walden Pond.  Almost 28 years old, for the next two years and two months he lived at Walden Pond to experience his own vision for a better life.

     “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.”

     Others in Concord, Massachusetts considered Thoreau an oddball, an eccentric, lazy, without a sense of responsibility, or any ambition.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, who owned the cabin and the land around Walden Pond, thought Thoreau was wasting his talents.  He could not understand why Henry chose to spend so much time outside.  Emerson wrote of Thoreau, “Instead of being the head of American engineers, he is captain of a huckleberry party.” 

     Thoreau refused to marry.  One girl, Sophie Ford, who worked in Emerson’s home, asked Thoreau to marry her, but fearful of any infringement upon his own freedom, he politely said no.

     Thoreau owned nothing and further did not want to own anything.  He borrowed the ax that he took with him to Walden Pond.  Educated at Harvard, he simply never applied his talents by pursing a job, other than as a handyman and gardener for Emerson.

     Living at Walden Pond he divided his time between his vast bean garden and his writing, for it was there that he wrote Walden, in which he argued his own philosophy to simplify life.  He scorned public opinion and refused to accept the common definition of success.  For him liberty and the pursuit of happiness meant no attachments to anyone–male or female, or to anything.  “I thrive best on solitude,” he wrote in his journal.

     He attuned himself to nature.  Ralph Waldo Emerson loved to walk with Thoreau about Walden Pond because Thoreau knew the names of all the birds, animals, trees and flowers that they encountered. 

     And Thoreau considered government absolutely unnecessary.  “That government is best which governs least, . . . or which governs not at all.”  He refused to pay his poll tax and spent a night in jail.  Where Jefferson, Adams, Washington, and Franklin had argued for a political liberty and a public independence, Thoreau insisted upon a personal liberty and a private independence.

     It is a slim minority of Americans who are so constituted that they can live without any ties to a wife or a husband, to a family, a home, a job, a business, a community, or to a government.  The few able-bodied people who accept assistance and charity without a sense of shame we label “bums”, or we see them standing in lines at soup kitchens, or we find them living in a cardboard box under a bridge.  Critics label Thoreau’s ideas as “parasitic” upon society.

     Thoreau’s philosophy if extended to a majority of Americans would result in anarchy, for we in America are everything that he was not.  Our society’s fabric and structure demands ambition and hustle and drive and a desire to own and get ahead of others.  America wants families and home ownership.  His message to simplify our lives by living alone, close to nature, and to strive for a personal liberty falls on deaf ears today.

     And yet, some of the things he wrote still strikes.  “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.”  “It is never too late to give up our prejudices.”  “There is no more fatal blunderer than he who consumes the greater part of his life getting his living.”  “The greater part of what my neighbors call good I call evil.”  “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”

     The Fourth of July for most Americans means independence, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and for Henry David Thoreau it also meant those same things but in his own way and upon his own terms.

     And so he ends Walden: “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us.  Only that day dawns to which we are awake.  There is more day to dawn.  The sun is but a morning star.”

     Have a great Fourth of July!

JAMESTOWN

by William H. Benson

June 20, 2002

     By any definition of the word, Jamestown was an abysmal failure.  Indian attacks, fires, famine, and disease all contributed to an exceedingly high mortality rate that killed off most of the early settlers.  Of the 6000 immigrants that the London-based Virginia Company sent to Jamestown between 1607 and 1625, some 4800 died there.  Jamestown consumed thousands before the first permanent English settlement was firmly established along the Atlantic.

     In December of 1606 three small wooden ships had set sail from England carrying 144 men and boys, including the red-headed John Smith.  By June 15, 1607 the men had constructed a three-sided fort, and on June 21, 1607 the men held their first service in the new church within the fort.  But then the problems began to accumulate.

     The men did not realize that the location was a poor one, primarily in that it lacked good drinking water.  At high tide the James River was salty, and at low tide it was muddy.  And the marshland that surrounded the fort bred mosquitoes that carried malaria.  Then the same foul water that the men drank from readily accepted their waste and sewer.  As a result throughout that first summer the men dropped like flies, such that by September more than half were dead.

     Also, the leaders of the settlement quarrelled and fought about what to do.  Some wanted to copy the Spanish and look for gold and silver.  Others wanted to explore for the Northwest Passage to the East Indies.  Few of them knew how to farm.  Accustomed to an idle life back in England, these gentlemen did not come equipped with farming habits.

     Eventually Captain John Smith ruthlessly took control of the fort, and through shrewd trade negotiations with the Indians, he obtained enough food for the survivors to last that first winter.  He also insisted that the men work in the fields everyday.

     On January 7, 1608 a fire broke out inside the fort and consumed most of the buildings.

    In 1609 after John Smith had left for England, the Indians turned hostile and refused to trade further with the English.  Horrified that they were losing their land and tired of the trinkets and beads, they repeatedly attacked Jamestown, trying to drive the settlers out, and in turn the English brutally burned Indian villages and fields and murdered the Natives.  As a result the English were totally unprepared going into the winter of 1609-1610. 

     Their supplies ran out.  They could not hunt or fish or farm because the Indians would attack them.  Stuck inside the fort, they ate whatever still lived–cats, horses, dogs, and even poisonous snakes. The colonist George Percy wrote that starvation appeared, “in every face.  Of five hundred people we had only left about sixty, the rest being either starved through famine, or cut off by the Indians.”  This was the low point, and the colony’s future hung in the balance.

     By June 1610 the few settlers still alive decided to abandon Jamestown and return to England.  They boarded their ships and floated down the James River, only to meet the incoming ship of the new governor–Lord Delaware, who brought the needed supplies, and he convinced the colonists to turn around and return to Jamestown and give it another try.

     The settlement did finally succeed, mainly because John Rolfe introduced the cultivation of tobacco which was in great demand back in England and brought a high price.

    Tenacity, perseverance, and persistence are words for the same thing–the refusal to quit.  Initial beginnings are difficult.  People everywhere go off to college, take on a new job, start a new business venture, get married, or pick up and move across the country.  The road is often tough and usually lonesome, and yet occasionally that highly-prized human attribute of perseverance will come forward, for they will stick with the venture when the personal and emotional cost is extremely high, they will enjoy some measure of success, and they will endure to the end or die in the process.

     A tradesman explained it this way.  “When I was young, I was too stupid to quit, and now that I am older and doing great, I would be stupid to quit.”

     Jamestown became Virginia, a British Colony, and then a State, and then a part of the United States, and eventually what we have today in 2002.  The payoff for the future generations of those pioneering English colonists was manifold and tremendous.

THE PENTAGON PAPERS

by William H. Benson

June 6, 2002

     What exactly were the Pentagon Papers?

     In 1967 when Lyndon Johnson was President and the fighting in Vietnam raged on fierce and endless, then Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara ordered the Pentagon to compile an objective study of the causes of the Vietnam conflict.  Classified as “Top Secret”, it required one and a half years to complete and included 3000 pages, plus 4000 pages of documentation, and a total of 2.5 million words.

     In January of 1969 the Pentagon submitted the finished document to Clark Clifford, the new Secretary of Defense under Nixon, and Clifford, for his own reasons, chose to ignore it.  So it languished in a file at the Pentagon for the next two years.

     If Clifford had thoroughly read it, he would have read a disturbing tale of U. S. involvement in Vietnam, one of duplicity and of nothing short of criminal folly.  Studded with evidence of evasion, pretense, and deceit on the part of the Federal government, the Papers told the truth.

     A couple of months ago LBJ’s tapes of his phone calls while in the Oval Office were published, and they corroborated this assessment.  At the same time that Johnson told the American public that the war was going well, he privately admitted to certain Congressmen that the war was not winnable and that he was caught in a trap–either escalate the conflict or shamefully retreat.

     Daniel Ellsberg, one of the Pentagon Papers’ writers and someone utterly opposed to the war, had access to one of the fifteen copies, and he handed his copy over to two newspapers: the New York Times and the Washington Post.

     Sunday, June 13, 1971 the headlines appeared in the New York Times–“Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces Three Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement”.  Another story appeared on Monday, the next day.

     Nixon wanted to ignore this leak out of his administration, but Henry Kissinger suggested otherwise.  “It shows you’re a weakling, Mr. President. . . . It is damaging to your image, and it could destroy our ability to conduct foreign policy.  If the other powers feel that we can’t control internal leaks, they will never agree to secret negotiations.”   

     On Monday evening the Attorney General John Mitchell sent a telex to the Times demanding that they discontinue the publication of the Papers.  The Times challenged Mitchell’s request, and the case was thrown into the courts, eventually appearing on the Supreme Court’s docket on Friday, June 25.  On Wednesday, June 30, the Court’s justices voted six to three for the Times‘s right to publish the Papers.

     The next day the next installment arrived at newsstands, but still the war trudged on for another three years before U.S. forces finally extricated themselves.

     Nixon and his cohorts were so outraged by Ellsberg’s “win” and their “loss” that John Erlichman ordered his Plumbers, an anti-leak unit, to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, searching for dirt with which to smear Ellsberg.  Although Nixon was unaware of this covert operation, this break-in was the point at which the Nixon administration overstepped the bounds of legality.  The next step, even bigger and more damaging, was Watergate.

     When the dust settled two years later, instead of an Imperial President, the nation had a triumphant press and an Imperial Congress that together had reversed the people’s democratic vote in 1972 that had re-elected Nixon President by a landslide– almost a surreal outcome.

     June 7 is Freedom of the Press Day, a day to honor those words from the first Amendment:   “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”  The Pentagon Papers were published because journalists have that constitutional freedom and they operate under a principle that “The people have a right to know.”

1972 HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION

by William H. Benson

May 23, 2002

     In February of 1972 President Richard Nixon made his historic trip to China, and then in May he visited the Russians in Red Square.

     On March 30, 1972 the North Vietnamese attacked South Vietnam, marching through the DMZ and Cambodia.  U.S. air forces retaliated by heavily bombarding North Vietnamese cities.  The stalled Paris Peace Talks were resumed on April 27, and the last of the U.S. ground combat troops would come home in August.

     Running for the Democrats for President in the upcoming November 1972 election was George McGovern, a candidate who Nixon thought was abominably bad for the country and that he, as President, should do everything possible to stop this maniac from winning.  As a result, on June 17, 1972 police arrested five men in an attempted burglary of the Democratic Party headquarters in the Washington D.C. apartment complex called Watergate.

1. Edgar Hoover died on May 2, 1972 at the age of 77, and on May 15 Arthur Bremer shot George C. Wallace of Alabama who lived the rest of his life in a wheel chair.

     On March 14, 1972 Clifford Irving admitted that his Autobiography of Howard Hughes was a fraud, based on some one hundred talks with the reclusive billionaire that never happened.

     The Godfather and The French Connection, noted for their brutality, took the top prizes at the box office in 1972, and Jonathan Livingston Seagull became the runaway best seller.

     Apollo 16 splashed down on April 27, 1972 after another successful descent to the moon.

     Also, in late May of 1972 across the fifty states, high school graduates accepted their diplomas.  Wearing a black gown and a square cap with an orange and white tassel, I walked across a platform in the gym and the district’s Superintendent then, Roger Blake, handed me my high school diploma–thirty years ago this month, this week, on the 25th.

     A lot can happen in the space of thirty years.  Both World War I and II were fought to a finish in the space of thirty years.  A half dozen Presidents will serve and then retire in thirty years.  The personal computer is not quite thirty years old, and entire careers are worked out in thirty years.

     I would argue that these last thirty years has been the best time ever to live as an adult in the entire history of humanity.  Living in the United States of America during the last third of the twentieth century was the best deal offered any human being–better than what the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans, the British under Queen Elizabeth, or the French under King Louis XIV ever dreamed possible.

     For we are the posterity which our forefathers thought of and provided for and built their government and their communities for, and we are the benfactors of their right decisions.

     What of the future, the next thirty years?  I am convinced that honesty and integrity will still be rewarded and that talent and intelligence will command respect–the basic rules of humanity.

     But in thirty more years will we have suffered through World War III and IV, or will we have enjoyed a continuation of the Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush era of prosperity that we have come to expect as our right, our entitlement?  Either way, if still alive I will be approaching my eightieth birthday, a sobering thought, but younger than Paul Harvey or Mike Wallace are now.

     Mark Twain observed, “Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.”  Perhaps.  But to lose our experience and to gradually erase clean the slate of our memory would be bewildering, if not frightening.

     As it is in this life, the best of all possible worlds, the past is engraved, recorded in our memories, prone to misinterpretation and forgetfulness, but never to be relived nor altered by anyone, neither human nor divine.  The present is simply that moment of time when the future pauses for a short while before becoming the past.  And the future, that next thirty years, is a blank slate available for us to write upon it whatever we wish.

 REBEKAH BAINES JOHNSON

by William H. Benson

May 9, 2002

     Last month Master of the Senate, Robert Caro’s third volume in his series Years of Lyndon Johnson, arrived at bookstores, exactly twenty years after he published his first volume The Path to Power.  In that first biography Caro told of LBJ’s mother–Rebekah Baines Johnson.

     Rebekah adored her father, an attorney and farmer in Blanco, Texas, who taught her the importance of the cultured life: books, reading, and the beautiful things in life, and so she grew up a romantic and an idealist, perpetually dreaming of the better life.

     After graduating from Baylor College, she took a job teaching public speaking in Fredericksburg, and there she met a young Texas legislator, Sam Johnson.  After a whirlwind courtship, they married in 1907, and he moved her to his ranch on the Pedernales River deep in the Hill Country of central Texas.  Nothing in her prior life prepared her for life on that ranch, for suddenly she found herself transplanted into a world where women were expected to work very hard–cooking bread over a wood burning stove, doing without running water, without electricity.

     Without a neighbor’s light visible in any direction, the loneliness at night bore down hard upon her, especially when her husband was gone much of the time to the Texas legislature in Austin and elsewhere.  Years later she told her eldest son, Lyndon,  “I never liked country life, and its inconveniences.”

     After three kids Sam moved the family into Johnson City, which in 1913 was a primitive and backward town without roads in or out, a bare island in an ocean of land, without books or a library.  And she was the only woman in the entire county with a college degree.  She understood that the schools were terribly inadequate.  “I don’t want to bring up my children in Johnson City!” she wailed desperately, and yet she did. 

     After two difficult deliveries with her fourth and fifth children, she quit doing the housework; she was simply tired and almost broken with all that work and child bearing.  Sam was forced to hire girls to come in and do the cooking and cleaning, and what they did not do, did not get done.

     Rebekah then persuaded the school board to set up a “literary society” where she could teach public speaking, poetry, dancing, debate, and theatre to the country girls and boys who were given their first chance to stand up in front of an audience and speak.  To complement those public lessons, she also gave private ones where she encouraged and stroked their tender egos, and in so doing, Robert Caro wrote, she “changed those young people’s lives” who saw distant horizons way beyond the shabby fringes of a Hill Country town.

     To her students and children Rebekah frequently quoted Robert Browning.

     “The common problem, yours and mine, everyone’s

     Is not to fancy what were fair in life

     Provided it could be — but finding first

     What may be and how to make it fair up to our means.”

     In a memoir Rebekah wrote of her first year on the ranch.  “Recently my early experiences on the farm were relived when I saw the movie The Egg and I;  again I shuddered over the chickens, and wrestled with a mammoth iron stove.  However, I was determined to overcome circumstances instead of letting them overwhelm me.  At last I realized that life is real and earnest and not the charming fairy tale of which I had so long dreamed.

     Motherhood, no matter how you look at it, it is self-sacrifice, time devoted to others rather than to yourself; it can be creating opportunity where none exists.  Sunday is Mother’s Day.

THE LIBRARY

 by William H. Benson

April 25, 2002

     Although technically under Congressional authority, the Library of Congress serves as our nation’s national library.  Its contents include books in all languages, a perfect Gutenberg Bible, Presidential Papers from Washington to Coolidge, Chinese and Japanese and Russian memorabilia, paintings, photographs, music recordings, etc.  It is truly a national treasure, a depository of knowledge. 

     Standing at 101 Independence Avenue on Capitol Hill, its three buildings cover 71 acres of floor space and each were named after Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison.  The Librarian of Congress oversees the Library’s day-to-day operations, and is appointed by the President with the Senate’s approval.  The poet Archibald MacLeish served as the Librarian in the early forties, and the bow-tied popular historian Daniel Boorstin served from 1975 until 1987.

     Congress initially funded the Library on April 24, 1800 with a $5000 appropriation and housed it in a room of the Capitol; however, on August 24, 1814 the British burnt the Capitol, and in so doing destroyed the Library.  To re-establish it, Thomas Jefferson in 1815 offered to sell his 6000-volume collection to Congress for $23,950, and a very reluctant Congress agreed.  So the Library had a new birth.

     Also situated on Capitol Hill just north of the John Adams Building stands another marble construction, another library–the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Henry Clay Folger, a former President of the Standard Oil Company of New York earmarked his entire fortune toward the establishment of this library, dedicated primarily to the British playwright.

     William Shakespeare died in 1616 on April 23, his 52nd birthday, for presumably he was born on April 23, 1564.  He wrote 37 plays, 154 sonnets, and five poems during a 25-year writing career in London.  In 1623, seven years after his passing, two of his old friends and fellow actors, John Heminge and Henry Condell gathered his works into a single volume–the First Folio. 

     Since then writers have written extensively about Shakespeare, and collectors have gathered memorabilia, such as playbills and promptbills and account books, from his era.  It was Henry Folger’s dream to gather all of these into a single library.  Today the Folger Library contains 79 copies of the 1623 First Folio edition, plus many of the quarto editions of individual plays.

     And so a library devoted to Shakespeare stands just a stone’s throw away from the legislature;  every other author has a niche of shelf space in the vast Library of Congress, but William Shakespeare has his own special place.

     Last month at a used book sale, I purchased two books–Joseph Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man and Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind.  Bronowski observes almost reverently man’s crawl out of ignorance, focusing on those miraculous moments when science overcame superstition, prejudice and fear and emerged supreme.

     On the other hand Bloom finds deplorable the current state of American intellectual life, and he severely judges the decline and decay of the typical American’s capacity to reflect upon life’s larger and more important questions.  Whereas Bronowski tout’s humankind’s previous victories, Bloom sadly comments upon today’s failures in the eternal battle against ignorance. 

     In virtually every community across America, stands a library, that dividing point between wisdom and ignorance.  Their doors are frequently open, and they charge nothing to enter.  And with even the most modest mental effort anyone can find inside the means to overcome their own lack of understanding and at the same time increase their capacity to reflect upon good and evil, truth and falsity, tolerance and prejudice, knowledge and superstition.

     Shakespeare’s Hamlet said it this way, “What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals.”

     And you can read all about it and much more in the library.