BENJAMIN FRANKLIN IN THE COCKPIT

by William H. Benson

January 31, 2002

     On January 29, 1774 an Englishman from the British colony of Pennsylvania stood in the Cockpit in London, England and received a two hour tongue-lashing from the solicitor-general at that time, Alexander Wedderburn.  In the audience that day sat members of Parliament, both the Lords and the Commons, as well as the London press anxious for scandalous news.

     The reason for the diatribe was that two days before, on the 27th, a packet ship had arrived from Boston with news that men dressed as Indians had dumped hundreds of casks of tea into Boston harbor.  And the recipient of this public dressing down was the well-known and highly intelligent Benjamin Franklin who had just celebrated his sixty-eighth birthday on January 17th.

     The Cockpit was so named because during the reign of King Henry VIII two centuries before the King had permitted rooster fights on this site where prized birds had torn each other to shreds.  The atmosphere remained the same in 1774; only it was human beings that tore at others.

     Alexander Wedderburn considered this Boston Tea Party a treasonous act against the British Parliament, and Franklin stood as a symbol and a spokesman in London for colonial resistance to Parliament’s rule.  So bitter and malicious was Wedderburn’s denunciation of Franklin that no London newspaper would print his speech.

     One biographer wrote this, “For an hour he hurled invective at Franklin, branding him a liar, a thief, the instigator of the insurrection in Massachusetts, an outcast from the company of all honest men, an ingrate whose attack on Hutchinson [the governor of Massachusetts] betrayed nothing less than a desire to seize the governor’s office for himself.”  Those in the audience howled and cheered as Wedderburn tore into Franklin.

     Throughout the ordeal Franklin stood silent, and when instructed to submit to questions, he silently refused.  A lesser man would have been humiliated, but Franklin was only angered.

     What does a person do when he or she has been sorely and badly mistreated?

     As a teen-ager Franklin had discovered that he could think and write and speak better than almost everyone around him, including his older brother and employer James, who beat relentlessly on Ben for his supercilious attitude and for talking back.  Ben did the smart thing; he ran away to Philadelphia.

     Then, as a young adult he had learned to disarm those who were prone to envy his success and his genius.  He avoided arguments, but if he did argue, he did so anonymously, mixing it up with a measure of self-deprecating humor.  Others laughed and were persuaded.  Now Dale Carnegie may have written How to Win Friends and Influence People in the twentieth century, but Ben Franklin instinctively knew the message of that book two centuries before Carnegie wrote it.

     But what could he do now after his experience in the Cockpit?  Run away?  He could not, for there was no place to hide.  Reconcile?  No.  His disarming and reconciling nature had only brought him abuse and condemnation.  The only course left for him now was revenge.

     An enlightened Benjamin Franklin sailed back to America, back to his home, convinced that the British in England were wrong.  Once a loyal Briton, from that moment on he was the most  radical of Americans who demanded independence from the British.  He helped draft the Declaration of Independence, and he guided the rebellion into a genuine and successful revolution.  He then helped create the Constitution.  Britain did itself more damage in those two hours in the Cockpit by alienating Benjamin Franklin than anyone there could ever have imagined.

     The best advice I have ever gleaned from all of the dozens of self-help books on the market is that the best revenge is to not necessarily even the score when mistreated but instead to go on and to live a great life without them–those that wish you poorly.  Benjamin Franklin on board a sailing vessel heading west to cross the Atlantic Ocean and still smarting from that slanderous tongue-lashing in the Cockpit perfectly understood that he and his fellow Americans could live a great life without them, and millions of Americans ever since have done xactly that.  

MUHAMMAD ALI

by William H. Benson

January 17, 2002

     The new movie Ali covers ten years of Muhammad Ali’s life–from February of 1964, when he defeated Sonny Liston for the heavyweight boxing title, until 1974, when he recaptured the crown by defeating George Foreman in Zaire.  Those ten years were pivotal ones for Ali and the nation.

     Nine days after the Sonny Liston fight Cassius Clay ceased to exist, and Muhammad Ali was born when he announced without apology that he was a member of Malcom X’s organization–The Nation of Islam.  In the months that followed he showed his vulnerability to the cult’s persuasion when he spouted off their rhetoric and their version of the Islam faith.  But then he soon revealed his strength and willpower when he walked away from Malcom X and cut him off.  Above all else, Muhammad Ali chose to be his own person.

     He refused to be drafted.  “The Viet Nam war is the white man telling the black man to go kill the yellow man,” he said.  This decision to take a political stand and oppose the war cost him much popularity.  Then, without a hearing or much discussion the Boxing Commission stripped him of his heavyweight title and took away his source of income, and so it cost him financially.  Only Martin Luther King, Jr., the Baptist minister and civil rights promoter, came to his defense and spoke out in his favor, that he had the right to refuse the draft.

     Religion and politics aside, Muhammad Ali understood the necessity of marketing himself differently than the typical silent and somber boxer.  Gorgeous George told him early on, “You can sell a lot more tickets being hated than being liked.”  He was a psychological fighter who knew how to taunt and berate and intimidate his opponents, predicting in which round he would win.  Everybody laughed, except his opponents who found him unnerving.  “Float like a butterfly and sting like a bee” and his “rope-a-dope” trick became his own trademarks.

     And then there was his strange relationship with Howard Cosell marked by a lot of banter back and forth.  They say it is lonely at the top of a profession, mainly because you quickly learn that you cannot trust anyone.  So, Ali and Cosell, two hyphenated Americans, one African and one Jewish, found each other.  Time magazine put it this way, “We don’t know exactly what he and Howard Cosell saw in each other; we just see him and the sportscaster playing their own mutually advantageous game while the rest of the media stumbled cluelessly in their wake.”

     In 1960 he won a gold medal at the Olympics in Rome, and thirty-six years later he carried the torch into the stadium to light the Olympic flame in Atlanta.  His redemption for all his past mistakes and miscues was complete.

     Idolized and yet scorned, admired and yet berated, loved and yet hated, Muhammad Ali mixed his own personal charm with a lightning fast wit to stand up against the harsh public criticism that he invariably created.

     Today at age sixty, Parkinson’s Disease, brought on by all the punches he took, has slowed his walk and slurred his speech, but his mind is as sharp as ever.  He passes out Islamic religious tracts to whomever he sees, and then, always the entertainer, he performs simple magic tricks.

     Now anybody can say, whenever they want to and in any context, “I am the greatest!”, but almost nobody ever says such an outrageous thing for fear of being criticized or laughted at.  It is only a very rare person–the one with enormous talent and superior strength and a deep inner will power who says and means it.  Muhammad Ali said those words, and if he was at first doubted, he has over the years converted many of those skeptics and doubters into genuine believers.   “I am the Champion!  I am the greatest!”

WAR AND PEACE

by William H. Benson

December 20, 2001

     Late in December of 1776 George Washington was desperate.  He needed a winning battle.  His army had dwindled to fewer than 8000 men, and most of them would finish their term of service after the first of the year.  He had earlier written to his brother that “if every nerve is not strained to recruit the new army with all possible expedition, I think the game is pretty nearly up.”

     It was then when the Colonists’ cause seemed almost hopeless that Thomas Paine published in the “Pennsylvania Journal” on December 19th, his American Crisis.  In it he argued persuasively that the Americans should seek freedom now.

     “These are the times that try men’s souls:  The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will in this crisis shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.  Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.  What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; — ‘Tis dearness only that gives everything its value.”

     Paine’s words stirred the Americans to not give up.  So on Christmas Eve Washington led his army across the Delaware River to attack the British settled in for the winter at Trenton, New Jersey.  In the battle the Continental forces killed the commanding officer at Trenton, and captured 900 British prisoners.  For Washington and his soldiers the war was not over.

     We are now nearing the Christmas season, and once again we are at war–this time with one of the least powerful nations in the world, whose people in a misdirected, foolish, and suicide mission dared to attack the United States.

     War is a heavy thing.  It carries a sense of urgency.  It represents aggression.  It is emotional.  It indicates that a change is about to happen and that the change will be violent.  Because it breaks and crumbles another nation’s government, it is like a hammer.

      On the other hand, peace is light, easy, casual, and in favor of the status quo.  It represents contentment.  It carries a let-them-be attitude.  It is hopeful and reasonable.  It is often about music, for peace is like a tuning fork.

     Although gender roles have changed, war has historically been a male adventure performed far from home outside in a field or in the woods or on a desert, whereas peace is found at home, close to the fire, with women and children present, and at a table.  (King Arthur supposedly cut off the table’s corners, so that none of the knights thought that he was seated improperly.  All were equal at a round table.)  

     Some people hear the tuning fork.  For example, Clara Barton, the founder of the American Red Cross, was born on December 25, 1821, and although that organization is today under close media scrutiny for bungling the donations received since September 11th, she created and built an organization that delivers help and comfort to wars’ victims.

     Some only see the hammer in their hand, and they wish to use it against what they perceive are the enemy.  Because they are not listening, they do not hear the tiny pitch that the tuning fork of peace produces when struck.  Osama bin Laden and his cohorts were sadly tuned out.

     At any given moment there walks on Planet Earth at the same time warmongers carrying hammers and peacemakers sounding out tuning forks, and even though those with the hammers hold the power, it is the latter that receive the blessing.  They create the music.  On that first Christmas shepherds reported that they heard angels singing a song with the following lyrics, “Peace on earth.  Goodwill toward men.”  I would think that all those angels sang on key, for they were listening to the same Tuning Fork, and so they could easily match their voices to His pitch.

     The war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and the Al Qaeda will end, and somebody will finally step forward and take the hammer out of one guy’s hand.  And then somebody else will strike the tuning fork, and peace will reign for a season.

PROHIBITION

by William H. Benson

December 6, 2001

     On January 16, 1920 the United States embraced a peculiar drama–Prohibition, a grand social and legal experiment designed initially to better people’s lives, and yet it was a dismal failure.  Fourteen years later on December 5, 1933 the 21st Amendment repealed Prohibition and the 18th Amendment, and H. L. Mencken wrote that those years “seemed almost a geologic epoch while it was going on, and the human suffering that it entailed must have been a fair match for that of the Black Death or the Thirty Years War.”

     Indeed, the law’s intention was noble enough–to Americanize the new class of immigrants and their notorious drinking habits.  But by the Law of Unintended Consequences, the utopian belief that a law can stop people from doing something pleasurable slammed up against the utopian belief that trade and free enterprise should be left unrestricted.  Far from driving the alien minorities into Anglo-Saxon conformity it actually enabled them to consolidate themselves.

     New York City’s bootlegging operations were controlled by the Jews, the Italians, the Poles, and the Irish, and Boston had Joseph Kennedy, an Irishman who discreetly provided its citizens with bootlegged liquor.  But in Chicago it was the the Italians who were particularly adept at manufacturing and distributing liquor in large and inexpensive quantities.

     First there was Joseph Torrio who by 1924  had accumulated some $30 million from his enterprise and retired comfortably to a villa in Italy.  He turned over his entire business to Al Capone who promptly turned Chicago into gangster-land, with murder a daily occurrence and extortion a fact of life.

     Organized crime built around families found its impetus and start during Prohibition.  After liquor was legalized, the mob moved then into drugs, gambling, prostitution, and loan sharking–an unwanted and embarrassing heritage that Prohibition has left us.

     The law was a social catstrophe.  Walter Ligget testified before the House Judiciary Committee in 1930 that “there is considerably more hard liquor being drunk than there was in the days before Prohibition and drunk in more evil surroundings.”  And the Wickersham report, commissioned by President Hoover, ended all pretense that Prohibition had been a success.  Page after page told the sorry story of its failures.  The 18th Amendment had never been and probably never could be enforced.  It was part of the Constitution, but it lacked the power of the people.

     Walter Lippman denounced the “circle of powerlessness in which we outlaw the satisfaction of certain persistent human desires, and then tolerate what we have prohibited.”

     Some would aruge that alcohol is now more intelligently regulated; enforceable laws prohibit underage drinking and drinking while driving.  Plus, education and treatment focuses upon the physical and social affects of alcohol.  However, so many of the issues with drugs that we deal with today are the same issues that people dealt with in the 1920’s over alcohol.

     How does a society force its people to stop producing, selling, and buying a product that its users find appealing and yet has such disastrous individual and social consequences?

     I will leave the legal implications to that question to the politicians and courts, and I will leave the social affects of alcohol and drug use to the sociologists and counselors.  But from the historian’s point of view, it is a mistake to naively believe that a law can radically reform a sick society or make it tolerable to its law-abiding majority.  

     The former Senator from New York, Daniel Moynihan, said, “The nation’s choice of policy, legalization or prohibition, offers a choice of outcomes.”  And neither is great.  Legalization means increased health problems–millions of  new addicts that will overwhelm the nations’s hospitals, whereas prohibition leads to an enormous increase in crime that has overwhelmed the prisons.

     In the months and years ahead the citizens of this nation will be constantly confronted with a choice of how best to deal with the rampant drug use in our communities.  We will be asked to vote and decide.  What do you want?  More hospitals and treatment centers or more prisons?  Despite Prohibition’s undeniable and catastrophic failure in the 1920’s, that historical fact cannot and should not be used as an excuse to go ahead and legalize drug use today.  The war on drugs is a war that we cannot choose to lose.   

THANKSGIVING

by William H. Benson

November 22, 2001

     Of the 101 people on board the Mayflower, 35 were Pilgrims, those who had separated from the Church of England.  Led by William Bradford and William Brewster, they wished to build a colony where they could worship unhampered by the Church’s heavy-handed authority.  Mid-way across the Atlantic on November 21, 1620, 41 men signed the “Mayflower Contract”–a social compact to provide for future government and “just and equal laws” based upon church teaching.  On December 11, 1620 those Pilgrims landed at New Plymouth.

     Ten years later Jonathan Winthrop and his fellow Puritans also landed at Boston Harbor.  The previous year Winthrop had sold his estate at Groton in England and had realized 5,760 English pounds that he then devoted to the Massachusetts Bay Company.  By 1629 Winthrop had came to the conclusion that England was over-crowded, irreligious, poorly governed, a lost cause, and that a newer version of England was the solution.  He wanted to purify the Church of England.

      Previous colonies had failed, Winthrop argued, because they were “carnal and not religious”.  Only an enterprise governed in the name of the reformed religion stood a chance.  He told his fellow Puritans that “we must consider that we shall be as a City upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.”  And so the colony became England but a better form of England–a New England.

     What they found in North America was abundance, indeed a Promised Land, an excellent mix of temperatures and rainfall and soil for growing crops, especially corn, the ideal cheap and easy food for an infant colony.  They discovered that the trees were loaded with nuts: chestnuts, walnuts, and hickory nuts.  They found wild plums, cherries, and mulberries.  And then there were the pumpkins, squash, beans, rice, melons, tomatoes, huckleberries, blackberries, strawberries, black raspberries, cranberries, gooseberries, and grapes, all growing wild.

     The sheer quantity of wildlife staggered these colonists.  There were turkeys, deer, bear, weasel, sable, badger, skunk, wolverine, mink, otter, sea-otter, beaver, squirrel, and hare.  Then, besides the seafood, over 200 kinds of freshwater fish were caught.  And then the timber for building homes and for fires astonished these immigrants who had left a continent where wood was scarce.  These New Englanders fell upon all this amazing natural inheritance with joy.

     What they did in New England, besides work for their livelihood, was read the Bible daily and intensely, both alone and silently as well as aloud and among families and in church.  Every home had a King James Version.  Constantly they sought direction for their lives and searched for that perfect knowledge of what the Scriptures meant for them individually.

     In New England religion became the overriding and powerful force in the colonists’s lives.  The Pilgrims and the Puritans were zealots, idealists, utopians, and saints, fanatical and uncompromising in their self-righteousness, immensely energetic, persistent, and courageous.

     Two centuries later Alexis de Tocqueville understood the Puritan’s influence and legacy when he said, “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the greatness and the genius of America.  America is good.  And if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.”

     For above all else what those early colonists found in America was the personal liberty to worship as they wanted, no matter how odd or strange or weird.  That yearning for the ideal form of worship had prodded them to liquidate estates and transplant themselves across an ocean. They happened upon self-government, a necessary ingredient for political freedom.  Then, in a serendipitous stroke of good fortune, they settled upon a land loaded with material abundance.

     It was then a quick step from that to gratitude–that inner appreciation of what they believed God had granted personally to them–in a word, Thanksgiving, that gentle virtue that makes life and living agreeable and pleasant.

     Late in this year of 2001 “we the people” are grateful for America, for its abundance, for its freedoms, for its people, for its churches, towns, and schools, for its parents and children, for its soldiers and sailors who are fighting a war to protect us from the evil doers, for its government, and for the food, clothing, and shelter that we are given.  Truly, we must be and we are grateful.

ARMISTICE DAY

by William H. Benson

November 8, 2001

     By the time World War I arrived, Harry Truman was already 35-years-old, and despite his age and poor eyesight and succession of business failures, his superiors recognized something in him and commissioned him as a battery commander in the 129th Field Artillery.  They sent him to France, and there he led his men with courage and skill.  He loved his gunners, and they loved him.  Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, stopped the carnage in the trenches, and Harry Truman came home a major.

     However, he chose to remain in the Army reserves and did not resign his position until he became commander-in-chief and President of the United States in 1945.  In a sense World War I made Harry Truman.  He appreciated the military’s discipline, the structure, and the organization.  He discovered he could lead, from the front and in the right direction.  He was an infantryman, an Army man of the first order. 

     In the 1930’s the U.S. and England looked with horror and outrage when Hitler’s Germany began the war by indiscriminate bombing raids upon Warsaw, then Rotterdam, Belgrade, and London.  By 1940 Churchill felt overwhelmed by the prospect of a Nazi occupation of Western Civilization–what he saw as a moral catastrophe, and so hesitantly he authorized a policy of mass bombing on German cities.

     One British military strategist called it “the Jupiter Complex”, the ability granted by the posssession of huge air forces to rain thunderbolts on the wicked.  The objective was to weaken the people’s resolve, end the war quickly, and minimize casualties.  The difficulty with the policy was that the bombs killed the innocent–civilians caught in the crossfire.  The democracies’ moral judgement had become distorted and corrupted by a war that Hitler’s Nazis had started.

     For example, on February 13 and 14, 1945 two waves of British bombers and a third by Americans destroyed Dresden, Germany.  The firestorm engulfed 85 square miles and killed 25,000 men, women, and children.  Because it was Shrove Tuesday, many of the dead children were still dressed in their carnival costumes.

     The Americans followed the same policy in the Pacific.  Late in the war and without much resistance, U.S. bombers sent wave after wave to bomb major Japanese cities.  On March 9 and 10, 1945 300 B29 Flying Fortresses turned Tokyo into an inferno, obliterating 15 square miles, killing 83,000, and injuring 102,000.  Truman’s decision in August to drop the atomic bombs upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a natural extension of the Jupiter Complex.

     Football season is here, and strategies are built around the question, “Do we run now, or do we pass?”  Super Bowl champions can do both equally well, pushing the defense continually off balance.  Harry Truman’s World War I was a ground game fought in the trenches;  his World War II introduced the aerial game.

     The new century and the new millennium are barely a year old, and we are now at war again.  Last week in Time magazine, Chalres Krauthammer called this war against Osama bin Laden “a war of necessity”, much like World War II, and not a war of choice, like Vietnam, Kosovo, or the Gulf War.  Because it is a war of necessity, he argues that it is time to put aside niceties and sensitivities, such as limiting air strikes on the the first Friday of the war in deference to Muslim sensibilities.  He asks, “Why such sensitivity?  We were attacked.  Our enemy chose the date.  We have no choice but to fight back–on our timetable.  The enemy cannot murder thousands of innocents then call time out for piety.”

    If this war is a war of necessity, look for our leaders to gradually put aside their sensitivity, (like Churchill, Roosevelt, and Truman did) readopt the Jupiter Complex, and begin bombing the innocent.  After all the Taliban are storing weapons in mosques and using schools as barracks.  Krauthammer writes, “Now the enemy is counting on American sensitivity to inadvertent civilian casualties to protect him–so he can live to slaughter American civilians again.”

     Also, look for the ground game to begin in earnest, on a massive scale.  D-Day is approaching.