Old Madam Yin

Old Madam Yin: A Memoir of Peking Life, 1926 - 1938  – Ida Pruitt

Ida Pruitt was born in Shantung province to missionary parents in 1888, After she grew up bilingual and bicultural in China, she was educated in the United States. She returned to China in 1918, worked as a medical social worker, and worked for twenty years as head of the Social Service Department of the Peking Union Medical College hospital. She had to leave in the late 1930s because of the what the Japanese still delicately call the China Incident, i.e, the war against China that cost roughly 20 million Chinese men, women, and children their lives.

Pruitt is best known for her book, Daughter of Han, which told about her friendship with an ordinary working woman the late 1920s and 1930s. Old Madam Yin is about a lady of the leisure class that Pruitt met when madam applied to the hospital for an orphan boy to be adopted by her second son. Pruitt and Madam Yin became friends, as they shared an affinity for keeping busy and managing the affairs of others (in a good sense).

Pruitt describes the graceful manners and gracious sensibility this social class. She keenly observes clothes, furnishings, gardens, courtyards, and houses. Pruitt’s subject, Madame Yin enjoys her life and the challenges of using her social and political skills to establish and maintain all she can to ensure the prosperity of her family. But change is inexorable. Harmony and concord are impossible to preserve. A daughter shockingly defies the family by marrying a cousin who is also a political radical. To Madam’s deep bewilderment, a son marries a Frenchwoman, who could not care less about learning Chinese and adjusting to Chinese ways though she married a Chinese man and moved to China. Pruitt candidly observes the success or failure of an international marriage largely depends on the wife.

For readers into traditional China, Republican China, deep descriptions of artifacts and places, and women’s issues this book is worth reading. Also interested would be readers who are into the bittersweet experience of reading about traditional civilizations and their customs that are utterly vanished from our modern-a-go-go world.

Powder House Day

Powder House Day commemorates the events of April 22, 1775, when Captain Benedict Arnold and his foot brigade demanded the keys to New Haven's city powder house, so that they might arm themselves and head down to Massachusetts to join the bloody fray of the American Revolution. 

The Minutemen and Their World – Robert A. Gross

In 1977, this book won the prestigious Bancroft Prize, given for histories about the Americas. From the viewpoint of social history, Robert A. Gross (UConn) analyzes the effects of the American Revolution on Concord, Massachusetts. Gross makes clear how the coercive acts of Parliament in 1774 exacerbated pre-existing social and economic problems.

Before the coercive acts, Concordians paid little attention to the outside world. They had faith in their local government, which was run by local potentates who owned roughly twice as much land as ordinary people. When the Crown replaced the locally-elected town council with a Crown-appointed institution, their politics changed quickly from loyalists to “rabble in arms.” Feeding this radicalism, however, were district loyalties and religious differences, a legacy of the Great Awakening in the 1730s.

The farmers, artisans, and other people of Concord knew that their community was in trouble. People had large numbers of kids so population pressure on the land made it impossible for fathers to pass land and livings down to sons and dowries to their daughters. Unable to make a living, sons could not marry and were encouraged by their parents to start farms in New Hampshire and Vermont. This loosened traditional ties and patriarchal control that bound people all the way back to the Puritans.

The best thing about this book is that if focusses on ordinary women, blacks, artisans, spinsters, the poor, and the substantial citizens. People formed and supported militias, through terrible economic hardship by the war’s end, not because they wanted a revolution, but because they wanted to struggle against social forces and preserve a world that offered opportunity, a world they feared was vanishing.  It is a perfect illustration of the quotation by Sicilian author Giuseppe di Lampedusa: “If you want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.”

Thomas Jefferson's Birthday

American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson – Joseph J. Ellis

Writing for the popular audience, Joseph J. Ellis presents information in longish essays. This book features five monographs that focus on Jefferson in his different roles: continental congressman, minister to France, political consultant based at Monticello in the mid-1790s, first-term as president, and finally a retired guy in the evening of his life.  Not a Jefferson partisan, Ellis examines the Jeffersonian cast of mind and character and has tough things to say. Sally Hemings was out of the scope of this book.

Studying Jefferson in his own time, in his own context, we see that he really was an ideologue. That is he was a believer in “an organized collection of seductive hopes and wishes, a systematic way of going wrong with confidence,” to quote John Adams. Jefferson bemused Adams for thinking that just because he (Jefferson) could imagine ideals he could make those ideals existent in the real world.

From his young adulthood, Jefferson had a deep-rooted hostility to concentrations of political power. In the Declaration of Independence, he criticized the King and monarchy. Later, he castigated Hamilton and the Federalists for conspiring to build “tyrannical” federal power. In our present political culture, the deep suspicion of central power especially from faraway places comes right from Jefferson’s visceral distrust.

However, Jefferson’s high Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals did not extend to what we moderns understand as democracy. He believed in property qualifications to vote and he thought ordinary people should not hold national office. Ellis asserts that Jefferson was a founder of not democracy, but American liberalism in the sense of an 18^th century liberal’s belief in individual freedom, unimpeded by government.

Ellis also emphasizes the fact that Jefferson had an amazing way of framing ideas. He was not a democrat but he discovered the kind of rhetoric that would work in a democratic society. Before the revolution, writing was targeted to a narrow audience of the educated elite, but taking a page from Tom Paine, Jefferson discovered the elements of rhetoric that would appeal to The People. It had to be simple. For instance, issues of colonial dependence and independence were complex but in the Declaration Jefferson he cast the debate in either/or terms, between enslavement to British tyranny or freedom. Jefferson also found that language had to be ambiguous and allusive, meaning anything to any reader. For example, extremists on the left and right can warm their hands with the fire of “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. ...” Ellis calls Jefferson our master of illusion, a master of our will to believe, because of his elusive use of evaporative language.

The problem with this book is the Ellis generally leaves alone Jefferson as tough politician and canny administrator. Jefferson, I think, for all his high-minded ideology and lofty ideals, had few illusions about how the world worked. He made serious contributions as secretary of state, as behind the scenes political consultant and boss man, and as president leading up to the War of 1812. Jefferson had to balance his principles (limited federal power) with real world goals (acquire territory, remove foreign presence, etc.) in order to accomplish big things like the Louisiana Purchase.

April Fool’s Day

The Travels of Sir John Mandeville

This strange book has been called the first travel narrative. In fact, scholars believe it to be a compilation of materials from various medieval sources. One acerbic critic said that the farthest point Mandeville reached was the nearest library.

The writer calls himself Sir John Mandeville. He claims to be a knight who traveled the Holy Land and North Africa. He confidently asserts that he advised a sultan and otherwise hobnobbed with the Great Khan. He describes bizarre creatures and weird human animal hybrids.

The reader is a dupe who looks to this short classic for genuine history or geography. The attraction of this book is the writer’s style and wit in stitching together information from various sources as a record of his own journey. With deadpan humor he implies that non-Christians aren’t half bad and that Europe may not have the market cornered in scholarship and civilization. The writer is matter-of-fact as he simultaneously tells stretchers himself and warns us against believing things he hasn’t seen with his own eyes. He’s comically skeptical. He’s engaging.

His hoaxing appeals to us readers who like putting on spouses, siblings, parents and friends. I know of a kid who tied a rubber band around his tongue when he noticed that doing so made his speech sound weird. He then went to his mother, garbling, “Ma, I don’t feel so good, My head hurts.” Thinking he was having a stroke, the mother held the little prankster to her breast, saying “Oh, honey, we’ll get help. Don’t worry.” The poor woman still tells this story on the embarrassed son who has no recall of such an incident. Anyway, if you find pranks like this and tall tales amusing, you the kind of hoaxer and trickster who will like this book.

Read it an edition in modern English, such as the edition published by Penguin Classics, translated by W.R.D. Moseley.

Massacre Day

The Boston Massacre, known as the “Incident on King Street” by the British, was an incident on this day in 1770, in which British Army soldiers, fearing for their lives under relentless attack by snowballs thrown by a jeering crowd, shot into said mob and killed people. Nine British regulars were charged; seven were acquitted and the other two were found guilty of manslaughter.

The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution - Alfred F. Young

In colonial times, George Robert Twelves Hewes worked a Boston shoemaker, a trade that paid little and garnered less respect. The coming of the British troops after 1768 activated his militant leanings. He entered the political arena and participated in the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. He was less proud to have been at the tar and feathering of the Britisher who beat him bloody. Rejected by the army because he was too short, he put in service during the war on a privateer, crewed during the capture of several prizes, and got screwed out of the prize money.

After the war Hewes, like many artisans, moved out of Boston, only to fail to find greener pastures. He lived in destitute obscurity in Otsego county, in upstate New York. In the 1830s, however, the national mood had changed from willful forgetting of the revolution and its veterans to celebrating the few remaining vets.

Young builds a persuasive case that in the 1830s radical labor organizers and radical abolitionists portrayed Hewes as a heroic working-class icon. Hewes was feted in Boston to during the Fourth of July celebrations of 1835. The rads appropriated Hewes to make the point that it was not only General Washington and men of property like Hancock who made liberty in America possible. It was humble people, like Hewes, who contributed equally, and by God should be treated equally with shorter work hours and more tolerable work conditions.

Social conservatives, argues Young, had been active in minimizing the radical aspects of the American Revolution. They downplayed the fact that the Tea Party had been a revolutionary act. Men of property developed Boston to the point that places like The Liberty Tree and familiar places and buildings associated with the Revolution were left to rack and ruin or pulled down. The Fourth of July was privileged over all other holidays that once celebrated the prewar events such as the Boston Massacre.

The book is divided into two parts, Hewes’ life and times and an examination of the role that personal and collective memory play in influencing of understanding of history. This book is an interesting and accessible read for general readers who want a deeper insight into how is history is used by conservatives and progressives for their own social and political purposes.

George Washington’s Birthday

Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation - Joseph J. Ellis

This Pulitzer Prize winning history features six long essays on the founders during the 1790s, the early national era. 

The Duel narrates the events and revolutionary passions that lead up to the duel between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton, which ended in Hamilton’s death. 

The Dinner explores Jefferson’s assertion that one of his dinner parties resulted in the deal that established a site on the Potomac River as the capitol in exchange for Virginia's support of Hamilton's plan for assumption of state debts by the federal government. Ellis argues that it was probably a host of conversations that lead to this swap.

The Silence covers the agreement that promised silence on the question of race-based chattel slavery among the founders despite the fact that the founders knew the institution flew in the face of revolutionary ideals of liberty and freedom. 

The Farewell discusses the role of George Washington in providing stability during a time when anybody with a brain feared for the continuance of the young nation. 

The Collaborators examines two fascinating dyads. One was the marriage of between John and Abigail Adams, especially during his presidency. The other was between mentor Thomas Jefferson and mentee James Madison during Adams’ administration. 

The Friendship tells about the reconciliation by letter-writing between Adams and Jefferson during the last fourteen years of their lives.

Ellis is an excellent writer, fair and sympathetic to shortcomings and failures to be found even among visonaries and especially among revolutionaries.

Abraham Lincoln’s Birthday

Lincoln's Men: How President Lincoln Became Father to an Army and a Nation - William C. Davis

This is an excellent book for readers interested in Lincoln, the Civil War or more generally, morale among soldiers. Davis takes an in-depth examination of the relationship between the troops and Lincoln as the commander-in-chief and father figure of the Union Army and Navy. 

Davis quotes from soldier’s personal letters, journals and manuscripts. Sometimes Davis cites more information in support of his point than he needs, but the anecdotes were so interesting that they kept me reading. Davis builds a persuasive case that although Lincoln was only a solider for 90 days during the Black Hawk War of 1832, he used that first-hand experience to give him insight into the problems and concerns of privates, volunteer officers and military discipline over a fractious, independent-minded population. 

Davis also goes over Lincoln’s understanding of the importance of visibility. He reviewed troops often and attended scores of events such as Sanitation Commission fairs, parades and serenades. The President's care worn expression made impertinent troops understand that he suffered like ordinary people and he had a genuine interest in their welfare.  Davis’ examination of the re-election campaign of Lincoln in 1864 helped me to realize more deeply how politically diverse and astute Union soldiers were.

Lincoln campaigned for better pay and pensions, helped soldiers with their problems, and visited the sick and wounded too.  He inclined to mercy and clemency, especially when very young soldiers got involved in incidents of desertion, cowardice, or insubordination.  Such was the respect and affection for Lincoln, that when indiscreet soldiers expressed satisfaction when Lincoln was murdered, they needed protection from angry fellow soldiers and CSA POWs rash enough to make cracks were handled roughly by their captors.

Sometimes the sentences are rather garbled. Sometimes there is confusion between “its” and “it’s.” I detested the quotation marks he put around the word “massacre” as in Fort Pillow Massacre. I also would have liked a discussion of Lincoln’s stance on “drastic war” against civilians as practiced by Sherman, Sheridan, and Hunter. Anyway, despite these missteps, this book is worth reading for those into the topic of soldiering during the Civil War.

Thomas Paine's Birthday

Tom Paine and Revolutionary America – Eric Foner

Not a biography, this book explains the political and intellectual contexts that influenced the author of the influential pamphlet Common Sense. Although not a long book, it covers a lot of ground: the complex political atmosphere of Philadelphia just before the war and then in the early national era, new and amended political ideas, religion and  conflicting economic interests fought in the stale arguments we hear still today.

Like thinkers such as John Adams and James Madison, Paine disliked the idea of political parties, believing that The People’s interests were complementary, i.e., what was economically good for bankers would be good for bakers. He believed in the high-minded revolutionary ideal that envisioned a harmonious social order ruled by the impartial pursuit of the common good.

Foner says that Paine appealed to famers, merchants, and artisans due to his use of direct "language of common speech:"

Paine's invention of a new political language and his creation of one of the first designs of an iron bridge went hand in hand; they symbolize the twofold nature of the revolution to which he was committed and the modern world which he helped to usher in.

Foner also discusses the fall-out caused by the pamphlet The Age of Reason, a blistering attack on Christianity. As Benjamin Franklin once wrote to him, "He who spits in the wind spits in his own face…if men are wicked with religion, what would they be without it?" Whatever its merits, the charge of atheism is one reason we Americans then and now do not consider Paine a founder.

Not wanting to be associated with a so-called atheist, Paine’s friends broke off relations. His end at aged 72 in 1809 was sad indeed. In his biography of Albert Gallatin, Henry Adams writes that Paine was very fond of Kitty Nicholson, who became Mrs. Few. Paine’s anti-Christianity views estranged them, leading to this sad deathbed scene:

When confined to his bed with his last illness he [Paine] sent for Mrs. Few, who came to see him, and when they parted she spoke some words of comfort and religious hope. Poor Paine only turned his face to the wall, and kept silence.

Paine died poor and alone and probably ravaged by alcohol. He requested to be buried in a Quaker cemetery. They refused for fear of the grave becoming a tourist attraction. He was buried on his New Rochelle, NY farm, but two years later his remains were disinterred to be taken back to England for a memorial service and burial. After this plan failed, the bones were put in a trunk on somebody’s farm. Then the remains disappeared.

Well-written, the edition 0195021827 has black and white reproductions of broadsides and title-pages that give the book an unexpected visual appeal, at least for those of us readers who think printing design and typography went downhill during the nineteenth century.

National Freedom Day

National Freedom Day commemorates the date this day in 1865 when Abraham Lincoln, who was the nation's president at the time, signed a joint resolution that proposed the 13th amendment to the United States Constitution. The amendment was made to outlaw slavery and was ratified on December 18, 1865.

When I Was a Slave: Memoirs from the Slave Narrative Collection - Norman R. Yetman (Editor)

In the late 1930s, the federal government hired jobless researchers and writers for Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). One mission was to interview elderly ex-slaves and record their experience in bondage, during Reconstruction and, as if those two periods didn’t boil with trouble and hardship enough for three lifetimes, in the Depression Era. The short collection When I Was a Slave contains a selection of 34 of the more than 2,300 narratives. 

The stories these ex-slaves tell provide insights into the social structure of the slave community, the monotonous and unhealthy diet of slaves, the superstition-ridden medical care, and unspeakable white nationalist terrorism during Reconstruction. They also tell stories about resistance ranging from insolence and defiance to secretly practicing their religion and learning to read and write. They maintained their humanity - such resilience seems super-human - but it’s not a wonder when the elderly people sometimes observe that they take pleasure contemplating that Mean Misses or Cruel Overseer are burning in torment in Hell.

Despite the fact the book is only 150 pages long, it is impossible to read this short book in couple of days.  Reading it slowly over the course of a week or two, I suggest, is a strategy that would reveal insights into the slavery system and, frankly, be kinder on the nervous system and blood pressure. Since this book came out of a federal project, the feds have posted a Slave Narrative project archive on the Library of Congress web site. It’s here.

Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day, 2017

The War Complex: WWII in Our Time – Marianna Torgovnick

For about twenty years, historians have examining how members of Anglo- American cultures collectively remember war and its consequences. Examples are Sarah Purcell’s Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory inRevolutionary America and David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The CivilWar in American Memory. English professors have also taken on collective memory, such as Paul Fussell’s incredible  The Great War and Modern Memory.

English professor at Duke Marianna Torgovnick studies WWII as a cultural touchstone, especially in light of the Bush administration invoking it as a rallying exhortation in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a series of essays she covers topics such as D-Day, Adolf Eichmann, the Shoah, WWII films such as Saving Private Ryan, and the fiction of W. S. Sebald. Mercifully, she keeps the jargon of Theory out, so the general reader can follow her line of thinking. For instance:

The war complex . . . is the difficulty of confronting the fact of mass, sometimes simultaneous, death caused by human volition under state or other political auspices, in shorter and shorter periods of time, and affecting not only the military but also, and even more, civilians . . . The war complex shows up as gaps or ellipses in public discourses around histories of quick, technological mass death.

As an example of mass death she cites the “Taipei Rebellion,” which I think an editor should have caught and corrected to the “Taiping Rebellion,” a little-known civil war that killed about 20 million men, women, and children between 1850 and 1864 in China. I’ve often wondered how (and why) English professors have cottoned to the philosophy of Sigmund Freud so it was interesting to see her examination of Freud’s idea about the altered state of consciousness produced by large-scale war and its lasting effects beyond the end of hostilities.

American Indian Heritage Day, 2017

The War that Made America - Fred Anderson

The French and Indian War (1754 - 1763) is the American name for the war that the British call The Seven Years’ War. Winston Churchill called it the first world-wide war because hostilities broke out from Canada to the Caribbean, from India to the Philippines. American historians have tended to see the conflict as a mere prelude to the American Revolution and emphasized it was the war in which George Washington gained his knowledge, skills, and abilities in things military.

However, through Anderson’s chronicle, we see that in many ways the French and Indian War was the most important war of the eighteenth century.

Anderson opens this readable history by underlining the importance of Indians and French in the conflict. The two empires – the Protestant British and the Catholic French – had difficulties over Indians on the frontier. He provides much information about how British commanders failed to understand how to win colonial (and Indian) loyalty and, indeed, how they drew entirely the wrong lessons from their extended acquaintance with colonials. Anderson is especially provocative on the effect of wartime experience on alienating American colonists, especially New Englanders, from their colonial masters. About 13 years after the British victory, the British Americans would demand and, in the end win, independence. 

He writes vividly and fluidly, making this book of interest not only to grad students need who quick information as background but also to general readers, which is the target audience.

Veteran's Day, 2017

Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America  - Sarah J. Purcell

John Adams, writing in 1815, said that he thought the Revolution began “in the Minds of the People, and this was effected, from 1760 to 1775, in the course of fifteen Years before a drop of blood was drawn at Lexington.” So Adams concludes that the war, “was no part of the Revolution.” In contrast to this example of Adamsian hyperbole, by examining the military memory of the war for independence in the early republic, Sarah J. Purcell shows how selective memory of the war contributed to the emergence of our national identity.

The book opens with evidence showing that from the very start of the war, opinion leaders such as journalists, public speakers, politicians, and pastors extolled the patriotism of fallen heroes such as Joseph Warren and Robert Montgomery. Recall that because of many battlefield defeats, the emphasis on heroes bolstered people’s morale and fired up patriotism. Sacrifice made the cause legitimate and glorious.

After the war, the leaders emphasized that patriotism ought to be rooted in gratitude toward those who made the ultimate sacrifice. The concept of gratitude is a guiding theme of this book. It is made clear that public memory discouraged alternative, skeptical views of the war for independence and generally made one’s attitude toward the war an acid test for one’s patriotism.

This book is also about how Americans remembered the war for independence with celebrations, commemorations and other ceremonies. Purcell details how different groups in society – women, African Americans, the poor, war veterans – gradually demanded to be included in commemorations, to the discomfort of elites who wanted to shove back into the bottle the democratic genies  that had been released by the war. For instance, during the war, the franchise in Pennsylvania had been extended beyond property-owning males. After the war, the property owners tried to pass legislation restricting it again. Protesters used commemorations of the war to publicize their point of view.

Citing sermons, almanacs, paintings, plays, memoirs, and biographies, Purcell employs many interesting examples of the uses of public memory for partisan purposes. She discusses  Shay’s Rebellion and efforts to establish the independent state of Franklin as example of efforts to use the history of the war as justifications for their claims.

Purcell also looks at the resounding silences. Postwar writers avoided the topics of guerilla war in the New York, New Jersey, and South Carolina. She points out that loyalists maintained such a low profile after the war (probably afraid of harassment and intimidation from neighbors) that they wrote no books or pamphlets and thus created no alternative public memory of their own.  As Charles Royster has pointed out, “[O]vert loyalism vanished after the Revolution, surviving in politics only as an accusation and an insult.”

A historian at Yale, Joanne Freeman, asserts in her course that isn't only the ideas and events leading up to the Revolution or the war for independence or the Constitutional debates that mattered, but in fact how we remember them also matters, to us and to our posterity. The reason is that the way that we remember history constructs its meanings and its impacts. History – what happened and how we understand what happened - can thus have a profound effect on our country that we live in now.

Yorktown Day, 2017

Ceremonies, a parade, fifes and drums performances, and special programs commemorate the 236th anniversary of America’s momentous Revolutionary War victory at Yorktown.

Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different - Gordon S. Wood

Historian Gordon S. Wood (Professor Emeritus of History, Brown University) neither emphasizes race, class and gender nor does he debunk the Founders with anecdotes that dwell on their personal faults and political shortsightedness. This probably appeals to readers who hero-worship the founders, who view history from the top down, and who could care less about the historical role of the less powerful and articulate. The preferences of certain kinds of readers, however, do not mean that Wood isn’t worth reading.

This book collects his fascinating essays that were originally published as chapters in books edited by other prominent historians. The essays examine six founders (Jefferson, Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, Franklin, and Madison) and the reasons why two figures are not regarded as founders (Paine and Burr).

“The past is a foreign country and it speaks another language,” said Joseph J. Ellis on Booknotes, “[A]nd, therefore, if you try and impose its values on the present, it's like a bad translation and you'll end up distorting more than you clarify.” Wood, like a good teacher must, reminds us to avoid applying post-modern meanings to words that the founders were using.

For instance, for the founders, “politeness” was sociability, cultivation, the source of civility, or civilization. An Enlightenment idea was that societies move through stages of development, from rude simplicity to commercial civilization, by the efforts of human beings whose leaders were “gentleman.” We post-moderns use “gentleman” as a sham-genteel synonym for “man” (or as on “Cops” shorthand for “white working class middle-aged half-naked overweight male arrested as drunken wife beater”).

However, for the founders a gentleman was reasonable, tolerant, virtuous, cosmopolitan, free of prejudice and religious zealotry– in other words, what a modern liberal arts education is supposed to deliver. Wood also points out that a leader was supposed to be a gentleman that was “disinterested” as in “impartial” or “fair” instead of our meaning of “indifferent” or “uninterested.”  Wood is obviously a reader – points in my book -- and cites Pride and Prejudice with Elizabeth Bennett’s search for a real gentleman with learning, grace, and character.

Wood also points out that for us “character” means “personality” but for the founders “character” was a persona, what people seemed to be. Instead of keeping it real by disclosing their authentic selves, the founders were self-consciously playing the role of the disinterested gentlemen rendering service to their country. They were first-generation gentlemen, the first in their families to receive a college education, and really become somebody. In the essay on Aaron Burr, Wood says that Burr’s inherited claim to leadership set him apart from other leaders of that generation. Born fully into nobility of 18th century America, Burr behaved very differently in promoting his own selfish interests over the interests of his country.

Finally, the founders were not “democrats” in our sense of the term. They were the elite and they knew it and they expected to lead and be respected because they were impartial and dedicated leaders working for the common good. Ironically, the founders succeeded only too well in establishing democratic and egalitarian ideals. In the early 19^th century the voices of ordinary people began to be heard, and it overwhelmed the high-minded revolutionary ideals advocated by the founders. Think Jackson. Think No-Nothings. The elitists succeeded in preventing any duplication of themselves. Politicians started to claim humble origins so they could connect with “guys like us” and get their votes. Who would you rather have a beer with, the Old Racist Crackpot or the Know-All Hermione?

Basically this is an interesting book whether or not the reader believes in The People, i.e., the wisdom of crowds. It makes us understand that the founders created a world in which their elite and politically creative kind was no longer possible.

Bennington Battle Day, 2017

Bennington Battle Day is a state holiday in Vermont to honor of the Battle of Bennington, which took place during the Revolutionary War in 1777. It was the first victory of the colonials of the war.

Common Sense – Thomas Paine

Born in England in 1737, Thomas Paine was born relatively poor, but even with only a grammar school education he was smart and fluent. In London, he attended public lectures about current affairs and met Benjamin Franklin. Like many bright rootless people, Paine hoped for better prospects in the colonies. Franklin wrote a letter of recommendation for Paine, which was a generous act in an age where testimonials opened doors in faraway places. Franklin referred Paine to his son-in-law who introduced him into Pennsylvania society. He became the editor of Pennsylvania Magazine and wrote about the possibility and opportunity of independence from the mother country when almost nobody else had reached that point of thinking.

After the Battle of Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, Paine drew the conclusion that the aims of the colonial revolt had to extend beyond unfair taxation in order to include full independence. Dr. Benjamin Rush urged him to write a pamphlet but discouraged him from using the words “independence” and “republicanism,” advice that he utterly ignored. He wrote for the common man so the argument is not subtle or scholarly. The simple style and easy word choice were powerful enough to convert people’s thinking toward independence or at least provide natural rights arguments for people who were inclining that way.

He put his ideas into a pamphlet Common Sense. By January, 1776, it had become a best-seller, selling over 120,000 in the first few months after it was released. Not bad for a man who had been in the country only a little over a year.

Published in July 1776, he demonstrates the shallow stupidity of monarchial tyranny, hereditary privilege, patronage, and corruption. His irreverence was effective, calling William the Conqueror, “a French bastard.” His scorn is scathing when he asserts, “And as a man, who is attached to a prostitute, is unfitted to choose or judge a wife, so any prepossession in favour of a rotten constitution of government will disable us from discerning a good one.”

To Paine, since the English Constitution lacked legitimacy, then it naturally followed that independence  was the obvious choice. In the second part, he related what kind of government the Americans could construct. In stirring language he says that colonists could launch a democratic revolution all over the world. It’s not hard to see why his arguments persuaded people to look at their issues in new ways.

Every thing that is right or natural pleads for separation. The blood of the slain, the weeping voice of nature cries, 'TIS TIME TO PART. Even the distance at which the Almighty hath placed England and America, is a strong and natural proof, that the authority of the one, over the other, was never the design of Heaven.

Paine bragged it was the best seller of all time. JohnAdams, however, didn’t like section on the organization of government, which he thought too democratical. Adams called Common Sense “a crapulous mass,” which is about what we would expect from a thinker who dismissed Plato’s Republic as mere “vaporizing.” It is a fact that Common Sense focused thinking and conversation on independence the summer of 1775, a topic either never spoken of or spoken of in whispers because it was treason.

Purple Heart Day, 2017

Acts of War:  Behavior of Men in Battle – Richard Holmes

This is an interesting book not only about the behavior of men in combat and its after effects, but also about basic training, male identity, comradeship, homesickness, and the preoccupations of most soldiers, i.e., when the next chance for warmth, food, sleep, tobacco, alcohol and sex are coming.
Holmes, an historian with a military background, gathers data from memoirs, interviews with vets, and the popular press. 

The soldiers are mainly British and American, from the two world wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Falklands, which was a recent conflict when the book was published in 1989. One drawback is that he uncritically applies the work of Freud, Jung and LeBon (of crowd psychology fame) to the subject, which nowadays is a sure way to induce shrugs and eye-rolling and the cool response, "Possibly" from scholarly types and readers that have read of stack of militaria.

Generally, this is a readable book that I have no reservations recommending to readers who enjoyed John Keegan’s The Face of Battle, J. Glenn Gray’s The Warriors, Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, or Jonathan Shay’s Achilles in Vietnam.

NY Statehood Day, 2017

The Life and Times of Captain N. – Douglas Glover

During the colonial period and Revolutionary War, New York had many influential loyalists (Tories) that had no time or sympathy for hot-headed revolutionary talk from Boston. They also criticized Boston’s cheating during the non-importation crisis. Still, there were plenty of patriots (Whigs) too. The beginning of the American Revolutionary War revealed many kinds of divisions among local people, as well as unity, because people had to make social, political, and ethical choices.

Tories and Whigs making choices lead to civil war on the Niagara Frontier, the land bordering the eastern Niagara River and southern shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario and is part of the region known as Western New York (where I live). It was an ugly war of Patriot neighbors versus Tory neighbors. The conflict also broke up the confederacy of Indians and set different bands against each other. A vicious parallel of property confiscations by the Patriots, raids, burning of farms and villages, revenge, massacre and ordinary people caught between irregular armed forces brings to mind the guerilla war in Missouri during the Civil War.

With this war within a war as background, this 1993 novel is about the lives of three literal head cases. Captain Hendrick Nellis, a loyalist, suffers migraines due to anxiety. His severe stress is caused by battle and fear of his entire world being turned upside down. "It is a strange thing," he thinks during a skirmish, "to fight a war over ground where you played foxes and hound as a boy and courted your wife and watched your children tumble in the hayricks."

Nellis’ son, Oscar, is a neurotic teenaged patriot who alternately moons over a love object who treats him meanly and wildly fantasizes about becoming a hero of the revolution. Oscar is lost and angry enough at his father for abandoning the family to go to war that he wants to kill him the next time he sees him.

Mary Hunsacker barely escapes when her family is massacred by loyalist Indians. To keep her in line, the Indian warrior Scattering Light bashes her head with a war club, which calls for a disc the size of a sovereign to be inserted in her skull by a doctor who doesn’t know what he’s doing. She experiences pain “as if Scattering Light's death maul had split me off from myself," and in nightmares she enters "some strange state between being born and giving birth."

Glover has his characters question their identities in the hallucinatory ways that we expect in post-modern novels. Nellis paints his face like an Indian, just like his headaches: “When the pain reaches my forehead my face is suddenly split in two. The right side is on fire, and the left is in shadow.” With the flexibility of youth, Oskar plays Patriot, then Tory, then Patriot again by writing letters to Gen’l Washington. Mary’s captor’s wife has threatened to stop sleeping with him if he doesn’t find a replacement for a dead daughter, so kidnapped and brain-injured Mary has to adjust to Indian life, which at least does not entail daily beatings from parents.

This is a short novel and more readable and plot-driven than post-modern novels usually are. It’s not a real pretty story (the pus-filled details are much in keeping with the  18^th century, after all - think of Tobias Smollet), but it gives a disquieting eerie sense of what ordinary people probably went through and how they felt about their worlds being turned upside down in civil conflict during the Revolutionary War.

Independence Day, 2017

American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence – Pauline Maier

The Declaration of Independence has become a sacred document for us Americans. Noting the quasi-religious imagery of its display at the National Archives, Maier asks how did a document drafted for a practical purpose become a sacred document. In this book, Maier examines how the Declaration of Independence was drafted and edited; how independence was announced to the people; and about how American people gradually re-defined it into a document whose wording has provided the American creed:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

I learned a lot in the first part of the book where Maier goes over how slow people were to get to the point where they thought independence was the right course. Maier explains that by 1774 the colonists had worked out the idea that the British Empire could be composed of countries with local legislatures united under the Crown, in other words, what the modern British Commonwealth became. The colonists were done with Parliamentary authority and tied only to the king. They deeply resented the withdrawal of the protection of the king in the Prohibitory Act. People take it personally, being declared outlaws and rebels. When Thomas Paine in Common Sense referred to George III as "the royal brute," it was a candidly seditious argument in support of independence that really captured people’s attention. A strong feeling of colonial unity was also a results of the events at Lexington.

The Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in May, 1776. The delegates expected to decide how to proceed in light of changes since the First Continental Congress late in 1774 and issue policy statements about reconciliation with the mother country. But Lexington and Concord changed the situation to the extent that the Congress found itself the de facto government of a nation at war. They had to raise an army and navy, manage the war effort, guide Indian affairs and many other pressing duties.

I was impressed by how careful and deliberate leaders were about declaring independence, as they didn’t want to proceed further and faster than people would support their decisions. Delegations to the Second Continental Congress wanted direct orders from their colonies before they started talking about independence. Though some states were slow, the delegations eventually got these orders.

Maier points out that in fact, there were many declarations of independence in various local areas so the Continental Congress was not the only forum where independence was discussed. Local declarations showed the mobilization of the people and their thinking about independence. Many local declarations list the grievances that are familiar to us because of the Declaration that Jefferson drafted; for example: British contempt of reconciliation, killings by troops, the stern Prohibitory Act, the use of German-speaking mercenaries in colonies, stirring up the savages the take up the hatchet.

In a town called Ashby, Massachusetts, in the north central part of the state, the people said, `If Congress decides to vote for independence, then we, the inhabitants of Ashby, will most solemnly defend that decision with our lives and fortunes.' Even people in remote places, Maier observes, had profound confidence that their opinion made a difference the course of human affairs. Nowadays we often focus so much on The Founding Fathers that we neglect the key point that ordinary people were part of the conversation.

The Congress assigned to Jefferson the job of drafting the Declaration. Editing and debate began on July 1. Word changes both moderated language and made it more extreme. Jefferson’s draft blamed the King both for introducing slavery into the Americas and for offering freedom to slaves if they fought for the Loyalists. The Congress, under the influence of the delegates from Georgia and South Carolina, struck all that wording out. Jefferson had much author’s pride in his perfect prose and was therefore not happy with the editing. Good thing he can’t see his memorial where the right to revolution when the government violates the social compact – which Jefferson thought most important – is not written on the wall. 

Maier is extremely careful to marshal facts to support her assertions so the copious evidence may try the general reader, who might think, “Okay, you make a good case. Now let’s move on.” This is the only drawback to a very interesting book.

Mount TBR #29

I read this book for the Mount TBR Reading Challenge hosted over at My Reader’s Block from January 1 – December 31, 2017. The challenge is to read books that you already own.

A Spy among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal - Ben Macintyre

Kim Philby was recruited by Soviet intelligence when he was a student at Cambridge in the 1930s. The ideological appeal of communism was that it wasn’t fascism nor was it an economic system that caused the Great Depression. His decision was purely political, he says, and so politics always trumped his personal relationships. He says it pained him to deceive and manipulate his friends and family. But then he said a lot of things. It’s just as easy to believe that he just felt jeering contempt for people he perceived as stupid and gullible enough to believe him.

His betrayal of many intelligence operations cost agents their lives. Remember too that Communists punish the family and friends of “enemies of the people.” For example, the British secret service hatched operations in which Albanian and Ukrainian patriots were infiltrated into their countries to work against the communists but they were effortlessly rolled up and executed because of Philby's advance warnings to his Soviet masters. There is no telling exactly how many people lost their lives or freedom due to Philby’s spying, but the figure must be in the hundreds. And all for a creed deservedly dead, in the trash can of history.

This is a well-written story of not only Philby but also the two Western agents he utterly took in, James Angleton of the CIA and Nicholas Elliott of MI6. During WWII, Angleton forged close ties with Philby and welcomed Philby to the US when he was assigned to DC after the war. Philby did his most serious damage from 1949 to 1951 in this job. The Americans had started to have grave suspicions about Philby, thanks to CIA employee William King Harvey, a former FBI agent, who had done research to back his doubts regarding Philby. Angleton obsessively double-checked for moles after Philby was confirmed as a Soviet mole defected to the USSR.  This obsession nearly wrecked the CIA.

Philby and Nicholas Elliott had been the closest of friends. After the truth about Philby came out, Elliott felt the betrayal bitterly. Elliott claimed he could not have prevented Philby's flight to Moscow. However, author Macintyre theorizes that Philby was allowed to defect to avoid an embarrassing trial. Embarrassing to the British Establishment, that is. This tale of the old boy network looking out for their own is right sick-making to us cosmopolitan readers that detest tribes, cliques, clans, syndicates, and secret societies that operate mainly for the convenience of their members. MI6 treated him like a gentleman even after they knew he was bad.

In the end, though, Philby remains a cipher. His egomania made him think he would never get caught, though as he aged his duplicity must have graveled him because he drank like a fish. It’s grim that somebody could feel so bad about his own country as to betray it, especially for a rotten system that meant oppression to millions.

Emancipation Day, 2017

My Bondage and My Freedom – Frederick Douglass

Born a slave, Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895) escaped in 1838 and became a key figure in the Abolitionist movement. My Bondage and My Freedom was his second memoir, written in 1855 as an expanded version of his best-selling autobiography of 1845. I have no reservation recommending this book to readers with an interest in antebellum America, race-based chattel slavery, the Abolitionist movement, social reform in the US, or memoirs of great Americans.

Douglass examines the baleful effects of slavery from many angles and in so doing demolishes pro-slavery arguments. For instance, in 2012, Arkansas state legislator Jon Hubbard, a Republican, argued that blacks received a better quality of life as slaves in the U.S. than they would have had they stayed in Africa.  Douglas reports that in fact slaves are poorly clothed, fed, and sheltered and that their lives are in constant peril of violence, torture, and sexual exploitation. To the argument that slaves are kindly taken care of in their old age, he tells the story of his own grandmother:

[H]er present owners finding she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud-chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die!

Douglass argues that slave-holders sold husbands and wives to different owners and tore babies from their mothers as deliberate policy. Breaking up families “is in harmony with the grand aim of slavery, which, always and everywhere, is to reduce man to a level with the brute. It is a successful method of obliterating from the mind and heart of the slave, all just ideas of the sacredness of the family, as an institution.”

Douglass paints a frightening picture of the total absence of law, of civil society, in slave states: “That plantation is a little nation of its own, having its own language, its own rules, regulations and customs. The laws and institutions of the state, apparently touch it nowhere.” Slavery also had a bad effect on slave owners and their families:

The poor slave, on his hard, pine plank, but scantily covered with his thin blanket, sleeps more soundly than the feverish voluptuary who reclines upon his feather bed and downy pillow. Food, to the indolent lounger, is poison, not sustenance. Lurking beneath all their dishes, are invisible spirits of evil, ready to feed the self-deluded gormandizers which aches, pains, fierce temper, uncontrolled passions, dyspepsia, rheumatism, lumbago and gout; and of these the Lloyds got their full share. To the pampered love of ease, there is no resting place. What is pleasant today, is repulsive tomorrow; what is soft now, is hard at another time; what is sweet in the morning, is bitter in the evening. Neither to the wicked, nor to the idler, is there any solid peace: "Troubled, like the restless sea."

Throughout the book, Douglass takes jabs at the work ethic that was undermined by slavery. Farms are shabby, workmanship shoddy. For all the talk of refinement and genteel manners, people are careless, stupid, ill-informed, angry, short-tempered, lacking in foresight, paranoid, and never seeing anybody outside a narrow world of uncouth stressed relatives and impatient vulgar cronies. Not to mention the whole system has to be propped up with an army of thugs such as overseers, slave breakers,  and hired kidnappers.

Ashley Wilkes, my red Indian ass. 

Race-based chattel slavery lowered and tainted everything it touched. It caused psychological, social, and economic damage. Douglass pulls no punches: “While slavery exists, and the union of these states endures, every American citizen must bear the chagrin of hearing his country branded before the world as a nation of liars and hypocrites; and behold his cherished flag pointed at with the utmost scorn and derision.”

Constituitionalism

Today in 1787 the US constitution was approved.

Faces of Revolution: Personalities and Themes in the Struggle for American Independence - Bernard Bailyn

Bernard Bailyn is a Harvard professor emeritus whose specialty is U.S. Colonial and Revolutionary-era history. Though he has appeared on The Brian Lamb Channel only once, he is a winner of two Pulitzers, a National Book Award, a National Humanities Medal and a Bancroft, which may mean nothing to the lay public but is the most prestigious prize among American historians.

This 1990 book is a collection of nine essays on the Revolution and one on the Constitution. Bailyn’s basic thesis is that the passionate ideology in favor of liberty and the spirit of individualism motivated the British Americans to revolt against the central authority of the crown.

In the essays about John Adams, Tom Paine and Harbottle Dorr, Bailyn shows that revolutionaries convinced themselves and others that evil ministers crafted British policies in order to enslave the colonists. The essay on Tom Paine argues that the power of the pamphlet  Common Sense  comes from its fiery arguments against colonists' fundamental anxieties about severing ties with The Mother Country. In these biographical sketches Bailyn explains the personalities and motivations of leaders and lesser figures (three essays cover religious figures who felt ambivalent about the Revolution) and how their psychology, or will, influenced their behavior.

Bailyn holds the point of view that the less important causes of the Revolution were social factors -  such as the differing interests between elites, rich merchants, a struggling middle class, and the poor and vulnerable.

I especially liked the article on Tory official Thomas Hutchinson, who is mainly remembered for being reviled by John Adams. I also enjoyed the piece about the difficult figure of Thomas Jefferson, whom Bailyn thinks is a mediocre thinker but an extremely pragmatic politician. The piece on the momentous year of 1776 brings together what thinking readers already know in new, provocative ways. The final essay covers the anti-Federalists’ criticisms of the Constitution and thus delves in the tension between lofty political philosophy and grubby political decision-making.

Bailyn’s prose has more style than we expect from a professor. He makes clear difficult ideas and seems impartial to all sides. Lay readers – like me - will be challenged but rewarded.