The Birthday(s) of These United States

A bit behind on observing Independence Day, I will simply re-post a slightly edited entry from last year:

Now that the fireworks are mostly over, it is time to remember the occasion for all the hoopla. On July 2, 1776, the Second Continental Congress voted to declare independence from England, with New York abstaining. Over the next two days, the Congress considered the draft Declaration of Independence, finally on July 4th approving a version with minor changes from Jefferson’s draft. The process of producing formal copies for signatures  was authorized. These copies bore the date of July 4, 1776, even though all the signatures were not completed until later, well into August. There was a long, hard road ahead to make the Declaration effective in actions as well as in words. I believe the Revolutionary War was the longest the United States has ever fought. Perhaps Viet Nam lasted longer, depending on when you designate the beginning and end of both conflicts.

Memorial Day Holiday

Words are weak when trying to honor the veterans, those still living, and those gone on the Long March before their comrades. Found this video of Vets at the World War II Memorial.

The Myopia of Power

The past week has been  dominated in the news media nationally by the question of “What did Nancy Pelosi know, and when did she know it?” regarding the briefings or non-briefings in 2002 on water boarding and other torture methods in use by CIA and military operatives in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. Speaker Pelosi’s denials, qualifications of denials, and re-explanations of her explanations have undermined her own credibility and distracted from the large domestic and foreign issues facing the country.

Book Connections

Writing yesterday about my adventures in bookselling got me to thinking about one of the authors whose work I sent on its way to new owners. Howard Bahr, author of The Black Flower and The Year of Jubilo, both of which I sold yesterday, is an interesting fellow. All authors are interesting, come to think of it, if you like their work. I especially liked the first book, a beautifully written account of a ghastly late battle of the Civil War, at Franklin, Tennessee, just south of Nashville.

Chattanooga 1960

The lunch counter sit-ins by black students in Greensboro, NC in February 1960 sparked a movement which eventually desegregated public facilities nationwide. Some areas were not affected until the Civil Rights Act of 1965, but other communities worked to ease the inevitable transition. Recently a locally produced segment on the PBS station interviewed participants in sit ins here, aging black men and women who were high school students in 1960, following the lead of the Greensboro activists. The show stirred my memories of those days.

In Chattanooga, starting with the closing years of Mayor Rudy Olgiati’s administration, business and civic leaders on both sides of the racial divide began to talk about a peaceful transition to what was obviously an inevitable change, regardless of what the entrenched opposition thought. What was good for business was paramount. Looking south to Birmingham and Mississippi convinced otherwise reluctant white leaders that change must come, and without violence.

Informal talks between the two communities involved black leaders like C. B. Robinson, an educator and legislator, and prominent white businessman William Brock, Sr., father of later Senator William Brock, Jr. Olgiati’s successor as mayor, Ralph Kelley, came to office in early 1963, as riots and fire hoses made national news in Birmingham. Mayor Kelley recruited Dr. John Bonner, rector of the downtown Episcopal Church of St. Paul to form an informal and unpublicized committee of black and white leaders to negotiate change. Churchmen and businessmen met in the board room of the Hamilton National Bank to find middle ground. John Bonner and my father were friends, and involved in various Episcopal organizations. My father agreed to join the committee. Over the following weeks, the members of the committee hammered out compromises and schedules. Integration of public facilities and schools followed swiftly.

Elements of unreconstructed segregationists made a certain amount of noise, but change largely came peacefully. One exception, not widely known until years later, was the burning of a cross in the front yard of Joe Conn Guild on Lookout Mountain. Mr. Guild was the head of the private bus company Southern Coach Lines, which was integrated with little fanfare at this time. The Lookout Mountain Fire Department extinguished the blazing cross, and all present were strictly enjoined by Mr. Guild to keep this news to themselves, so as not to inflame further the racist passions that were so dangerously high.

Later in the sixties, the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and other events provoked riots and demonstrations, but the groundwork had been laid for peaceful accommodation, and Chattanooga never gained the notoriety of other cities in the South.

Inauguration Day

So now we come to a beginning…and a continuation, both of the Presidency and of a hard-won chapter in the book of race and U.S. politics. Forty-three Presidents stand in a long line looking over Barack Hussein Obama’s shoulder, as the new President looks into the not yet recorded future.

As he said in his address this noon, President Obama’s father, sixty years ago, could not have eaten in most restaurants in the very city that is the seat of government over which the son now serves as chief executive. So another beginning is marked, which is really just another way station on the long journey towards the full redemption of the spirit as well as the letter of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

The challenges facing this country will need extraordinary efforts on the part of many in and out of government, with the President most in the forefront.

Let us, indeed, keep hope our watchword.

The Millers of Millersburg

I have a copy of a genealogy compiled by various hands at the prompting of my great-grandfather in the early years of the century just past. Mostly, there are lists of family members of my own patronymic line, as well as of maternal and collateral families. A few stories that had been handed down are sprinkled through the text, but all my forbearers were small farmers, forever on the move west, like so many of their countrymen, and they had little leisure for writing things down, and even less inclination, faced with a daily struggle to establish homesteads in hostile new soil.

A Time for Doubt

Yesterday, on a local college station, I heard the full version of Woody Guthrie’s great pæan to our country, “This Land is Your Land.” I had never heard the last two verses of the song. The final verse seemed very timely on the first day of a year so uncertain, a time so unsettled:

In the squares of the city – In the shadow of the steeple
Near the relief office – I see my people
And some are grumblin’ and some are wonderin’
If this land’s still made for you and me.

An economic crisis decades in the making faces a people used to primacy in all things.  We were the example of a great country to those lesser breeds without the American spirit, at least, the spirit of the United States of America. A sense of primacy fueled, for my generation, by the shadow of the Great Depression, the formative experience for my parents and grandparents. Following the end of World War II, the U.S. was the last major industrial power left intact, and prospered accordingly. Since 1960 or thereabouts, the growth of other economies in the world has changed the equation, with signs that change was eroding our economic power, which would not be so unchallenged in the late twentieth century and beyond.

The present difficulties world wide are partly the fallout from that shift, partly a result of terrible miscalculations on the part of nearly every executive or board involved in our own economy. We now face what appears to be at least a Great Recession, if not full depression and deflation of currency as in the 1930′s. Retail sales, stock and bond prices, every measure of economic distress is depressing the whole country. We doubt our own assessment of national identity.

But the great principles which the rebel gentlemen of 1776 so forcefully declared are still our chief claim to greatness. Economic cycles cannot of themselves undermine life, liberty and the pursuit (not right thereto) of happiness. Life and liberty have to be guarded, and our happiness must be individually pursued, but the principles are sound. Everything else is subject to our collective ingenuity, our will. Those have not failed, ever, may have bent, may have seemed weakened, but have proved resilient enough to survive wars both foreign and civil, uncivil unrest, crime and duplicity on the part of some of our leaders.

Change and hope have been the watchwords of our incoming president. We must all hope to follow sound leadership to achieve and to prevail. This land still belongs to you and me; do not doubt it.

Ideals vs. Experience

Thinking about the Presidential contest just ended, and the tangled, knotty mass of problems facing the winner come next January 20th, I wonder what the experience of having to face such problems does to the convictions of a President. Many offices in the government require balancing goals against reality, but the President has an exponentially more difficult job than anyone else in public life. As the recent campaigns show, knives have already been sharpened by those of other ideological persuasions; slings will be released and arrows fly in profusion while President Obama tries to extract order out of confusion.

Ideals and basic convictions can shift under such pressures, even for the most formidable presidents. I recently checked on quotations from Thomas Jefferson on the role of a free press, newspapers in particular, in a democratic society. Below are two, from two times of quite different circumstances for Jefferson.

Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.

—  Thomas Jefferson, in 1787

The man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them, inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods and errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

— Thomas Jefferson, in 1807

Great minds are not always consistent; the two above quotes are before and after Jefferson was elected President. The campaign of 1800, which resulted in Jefferson winning election, was as nasty and partisan as any in our time. Newspapers savaged the candidate of each party. There were few non-partisan voices in the daily press. Jefferson himself urged sympathetic editors to attack John Adams in appalling ways. Jefferson and Adams, grown further apart in the years since the Revolution, became bitterly estranged. Only in old age, retired from public life and grown more reflective in the detachment age brings did they reconcile, and their correspondence show the old friendship restored.

The exigencies of conflict and the compromises owed to reality re-shape ideas, even those as profound as Jefferson’s regarding freedom of the press. He never ceased his devotion to ideas being freely available to the public, but evidently newspapers occupied a very low place in his esteem after the election of 1800.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Change has been a mantra for this election just past; it will be interesting to see where change is more evident, in the system or in the men and women challenged to govern effectively.

I Make My First Journey Alone

I have been thinking lately about my childhood – actually, like most everybody, scenes from childhood recur every day with me – and following a letter from my Aunt Barbara last week, I have been remembering the summer she married my Uncle Tommy. It was 1952, Uncle Tommy was in the Army and the wedding was in the chapel at Fort Myer, adjacent to the Arlington Cemetery. The newlyweds left the chapel under a series of arched sabers held by Uncle Tommy’s Army friends, and settled into a horse-drawn open carriage for the short trip to the Fort Myer Officers’ Club for the reception. I had been the Ringbearer for the ceremony, and my sister Patricia was a flower girl. I was eight, Patricia was five.

What really has absorbed me the past week was a trip I took the week following, while my sisters stayed with our grandparents in Arlington, VA. My parents had left for a trip by themselves right after the wedding, traveling to Norfolk, Va, where my father had spent time in his first months in the Navy, during WWII, soon after graduating from college. After a week, I was dispatched to join them, and be introduced to Virginia history, starting with the naval base at Newport News. At the age of eight, I was tagged like baggage and loaded onto a DC-3 (I knew my airplanes, even then) to fly to Richmond and join my parents. The stewardesses were most attentive to me, and I felt quite grown-up to be on my own on this Adventure.

Collected from the airport by my parents, I was given a tour of Historic Virginia, starting with the naval base at Newport News, where I asked my father if a ship we saw was a submarine. The radar antenna on the top of the tower looked like one in a book I had. It actually was an aircraft carrier. Slightly different in size and everything else from a submarine. My father gently corrected my mistake. He was always kind.

We went on to see the battlefield at Yorktown, the restored colonial capital at Williamsburg, where I climbed the wall at the Governor’s Palace, caught and restrained by my father. Behind the Palace was the most interesting thing I saw the whole trip, a holly hedge maze which entranced me. A museum of hands-on naval armaments in miniature was on our agenda, complete with a remote-controlled gun turret for a battleship.

We swung west to pass the University of Virgina, my father’s alma mater, and paused at Washington and Lee College, standing before the tomb of Robert E. Lee. And so on home, my first solo plane trip, educational and entertaining sights and activities. I felt quite grown up. Important for an eight-year-old boy.

My parents loved me and gave me all they could. I would thank them personally if I could, were they not both gone. But they live on in what they have left me.