Today’s politically correct anthologies of American literature are filled with rediscovered writing by rediscovered women and ethnic minority writers. Their writing is sometimes as interesting as well-known writing by well-known writers, but it’s nonsense to pretend that, in general, it is as culturally important. You can tell me that Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Rolla Lynn Riggs, and Elizabeth Madox Roberts, who all have work in the p.c. Heath Anthology of American Literature, are as central to understanding the 1920s as Dorothy Parker, but I won’t believe you.
I use the old-fashioned Norton Anthology of American Literature because, unlike the Heath, it includes Parker. Norton gives her only two and one-third pages and her overdone story “The Waltz,” but at least they say the right things about Parker and the 1920s:
This was the decade of “flaming youth,” the beginning of the “youth culture” that still characterizes American society. All over America, the activities of trend-setting and privileged young people were considered newsworthy. Dorothy Parker, a talented writer of wit and charm [question: are there untalented writers of wit and charm?], was among those whose sayings and doings were recorded in the gossip columns of New York newspapers and repeated around the country.
The anthology mentions that wisecracking suddenly came out of the closet and into newsprint and that “nobody was more skilled at it than Parker,” but it doesn’t print any of her wisecracks, nor her one immortal poem: “Men seldom make passes / At girls who wear glasses.” Here are some of Parker’s wisecracks:
He’s a writer for the ages -- four to eight.
One more drink and I’d have been under the host.
[Of the young actress Katharine Hepburn]
She ran the whole gamut of her emotions from A to B, and put some distance between herself and a more experience colleague lest she catch acting from her.
If all the girls at the Yale Prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.
[Her contribution to the Algonquin Roundtable’s “Most Unlikely Headline” contest]
“POPE ELOPES”
If you’ve got to be raped, you might as well lie back and enjoy it.
[Scene: two women meet before a door. The women: Dorothy Parker and Clare Boothe Luce, the glamorous, witty writer-politician wife of Henry Luce, founder of Time Inc.]
Luce (with a smile, gesturing for Parker to precede her): Age before Beauty.
Parker (stepping forward): Pearls before swine.
[On hearing that Miss Luce was kind to her inferiors]
And where does she find them?
Parker was a drunk and a perfectionist, which meant that her writing, unlike her fast mouth, pressed against deadlines. Harold Ross, the founding editor of The New Yorker (1925---), sometimes sent a copyboy round to her apartment to get what she’d written, superbly finished or not. One mid-day the copyboy pounded on Parker’s door for a long time before her hoarse voice came from within: “Tell Ross I’m too fucking busy. And vice-versa.”
Though not a twenties feminist in her personal life, Parker the public figure opened doors for women to be as funny and as raunchy as men. But at least once, we now know, one of her immortal wisecracks was topped by something even better, though then unprintable. The wits at the Algonquin Roundtable were told one lunchtime that President Calvin Coolidge had just died. "How can they tell?" Parker blurted out.
"He had an erection," said humorist Robert Benchley, Parker's sometime lover. Benchley’s comment passed down through his family and was only published in 1987.
Showing posts with label heroes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label heroes. Show all posts
William Sloane Coffin, Jr. (1924-2006)
Bill Coffin's mug shots after his arrest for civil disobedience in Montgomery, Ala., May 25, 1961.
Bill Coffin and I came to Yale in fall 1958, he as chaplain and I as freshman. At the ceremony to welcome my class (1000 males—coeducation at Yale, though only a decade off, was unthinkable), he stood out from all the other academics in dark blue robes because of his straight-shouldered leanness, youth (33), good looks, and smile. I had no idea who he was but I felt like smiling back. He was introduced and gave the invocation. My mother, in the balcony and more sensitive to eloquence than I, thought his prayer the best thing said all morning. “There wasn’t anything specifically Christian about it,” she said. “It was about courage and facing up to challenges.”
Later that semester, Coffin spoke to the 120 boys in the freshman program I was in. He wore a dark gray suit, white shirt, and tie. I was again impressed by his muscularity and the ease with which he vaulted up to the stage. He made a joke about the vault, saying he was getting too old to do it. “I was in sports car last week,” he said. “Hardly could get in. Saw what it was like to return to the womb.” I remember nothing else he said, but I do remember thinking that he used his black-framed glasses and his occasional slurring of words to offset the overwhelming impression he gave of physical strength and beauty.
Still later that fall, he had an evening Q&A with our program. By then I would have heard that, before Yale, he had been chaplain at Williams College for a year and that the president had been glad for him move on because Coffin had attacked as undemocratic the College’s all-powerful fraternity system. Amazingly to me now, none of us boys asked Coffin about his past. I never heard him speak of his infantry service and spy work in World War II or his three years with the CIA at the start of the Cold War. I remember that he said of Yale “You’re in a place where people ask ‘What do I need to know to be certain?’ and would never think of asking ‘What shall I do to be saved?’” And later: “Look, if you guys want to go out and lay every woman you can, that’s fine,” though he was telling us there was a better way to live. I was amazed he would permit us such liberty.
In 1959 or ’60 or ’61 I learned that Coffin and some of the boys gathered around him in the campus chapel, Battell Hall, were going as “Freedom Riders” to border states like Maryland and further south. They put their bodies on the line, nonviolently, to try to integrate lunch counters, restaurants, and hotels that didn’t serve Negroes. As a well-brought-up northern liberal, I opposed segregation, but I don’t think it occurred to me to join Coffin. If it did, I rejected the idea out of cowardice, not wanting to be arrested (Coffin was three times) or beaten up by the lunatics, as I thought of them, down south.
At the end of my undergraduate years I went to see Coffin during his open office hours. I was now grown up, 22, married, and I found life to be just as I had expected: desperate, sad, and boring. I was prepared for this by my temperament and, certainly no less, by the literature classes I'd taken. Sophocles and Shakespeare, Melville and Chekhov—all the greats demonstrate that suffering is inescapable, there being no forgiveness from the responsibility of fate and time. Students more sensible than I shrugged off this knowledge as soon as they left the classroom. I believed it. I felt it deep within me.
Not only did literature teach me that life was tragic, it taught me how to respond to tragedy. With stoicism. With unembittered resignation. I was so good at doing this I got the idea that perhaps I should go into religion. Though he didn't say so, Coffin was annoyed that I, not a member of his church, of any church, was bothering him with my problems. Didn't I know he had important things to do? He folded into a soft chair across the room and listened with impatience while I wondered aloud whether I was religious enough to go to divinity school. I said—and how long it took me to get it out—that, though I wasn't at all sure I believed in God, I knew I was looking for Him. "Have you ever thought that maybe God is looking for you?" Coffin said.
I was taken aback. I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to seem swell-headed (was I important enough for God to look for?) or too humble. It struck me as a good idea for God to be on the lookout for people since otherwise, if God really tried to hide, no one was going to find Him. "I don't know," I said. "That hadn't occurred to me. It's a nice idea." It was Karl Barth's idea, but I didn't know this.
I remember another thing from our interview. Coffin was talking about one's vocation when he said, with great feeling, "What we hope to avoid is being in the position of the man who, on his wedding night, suddenly realizes he married the wrong woman." "My God!" I thought, "he knows!" Then, "But he can't."
When I returned to Yale for graduate school in 1968, Coffin was nationally famous for leading the fight against our war in Vietnam. With Dr. Spock—the Dr. Spock—he had been convicted of conspiring to counsel young men to avoid to draft. In 1970, their convictions were overturned on appeal, and the NYT ran a front-page photo of Coffin just after he got the news while playing tennis. He was smiling, sweating, and holding a racket. By then he had divorced his first wife, the mother of his three children, and announced his engagement to his second in a curious press release that mentioned her first husband’s success as head of Encyclopedia Britannica sales in Japan.
I next encountered Coffin in his 1977 memoir, Once to Every Man, which I read to find out what happened to that first marriage, because his wife had been the pianist Artur Rubinstein’s gorgeous daughter Eva, who played Anne Frank’s sister in the original Broadway production of The Diary of Anne Frank. Coffin didn’t discuss their problems but he did say something that helped me justify to myself my later getting a divorce. He said, though not in these words, that he had come to realize that he wasn’t as special as he’d hoped—indeed, wasn’t special at all. If other people sometimes needed to divorce, there was no reason for him to think he would escape.
In 2002, I saw Coffin when he officiated at the memorial service for his friend R.W.B. Lewis, the Yale professor who’d been my mentor. Coffin was suffering the heart problems that killed him, his hair was white, and he walked with a cane in one hand and with his third wife holding his other arm. But his welcoming smile was unchanged. In the service he spoke about why death was necessary, giving several reasons. The one I remember was environmental: we had to make room in the world for others. If no one died, then “no Aaron Copland. No Dick Lewis. No you. No me.” He was smiling.
I know I am not the only Yalie between age 50 and 65 for whom his death comes as a reproof. Coffin lived boldly, involving himself in the great public questions of his day—civil rights, Viet Nam, nuclear-war planning. The world could easily have done without me. It was damn lucky to have him.
Do Like I Say, Said E.B. White
“More Good News for Your Heart” says the headline on the back of a Cheerios box. (Cheerios have oats, and oat fiber, studies have found, reduces bad cholesterol.) A joyous phrase, “good news for your heart”--one bright enough for a Rodgers & Hart song (e.g., “My heart stood still”; “The heart is quicker than the eye”; “If my heart gets in your hair . . .”).
A couple of generations ago, the essayist and children's book writer E.B. White was shocked, shocked, at advertising’s degradation of language (his bete noire: “Winston tastes good like a cigarette should”). But language is always being degraded, and being revived thanks to someone’s imaginative energy. Like the Cheerios copywriter’s.
Or, need I say, like White’s. His college composition teacher, William Strunk, Jr., had written a grammar book, The Elements of Style, that was long out of print. In 1959, White revised and published it, modestly remarking, “Longer, lower textbooks are in use in English classes nowadays, I daresay--books with upswept tail fins and automatic verbs.”
Yep, ad language. Despite his protestations, White in fact loved it, because, used ironically (and how else can an educated person use it?), it showed his cleverness and restrained his sentimentality.
Robert M. Crunden
Bob Crunden, delicious malice in his eyes. The picture was probably taken in the late 1980s. It's being faded and black-and-white are appropriate, since Bob was a Luddite when it came to technology, didn't have a TV or CD, and, though there was a computer on his desk, did his serious writing on a typewriter. I made the following remarks at the March 7, 1999 memorial service for my University of Texas at Austin colleague Robert M. Crunden, who had died at age 58. I was speaking to members, graduates, and friends of the American Studies Program (later a department) in which Bob and I had spent our careers. The names I mentioned needed no footnoting for the audience; none needed to be told for example that Bill Goetzmann had won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for history.
The American Studies family is broken--long live the family!
Bill Goetzmann, the father of us all arrives in 1964 or 5 or 6 (the date is shrouded in myth) and starts the Program in a wilderness of bureaucratic inertia and hostility, with the help of now-almost-forgotten faculty sympathizers and, even more, of Mewes, his wife, our secret mother.
Then, in 1967 or '68, comes Bob Crunden, the first son, a Goetzmann disciple at Yale and the one chosen to enforce Bill's vision. Like most firstborn, Bob internalizes his father's standards and ambitions--indeed so well that, to a degree, he becomes another Goetzmann, a counter-Goetzmann building things of his own on the side.
Then, in 1969, comes Elspeth Rostow, adopted sister to Bill and Mewes, consort and mother to other campus families, bountiful aunt and enabler to our Program.
Then I come, in 1971, because Goetzman's Pulitzer wins him the right to hire two new faculty. The guy who comes with me, a semi-anthropologist twin named Tim, doesn't last. Not everyone lasts in the family; some pass into legend, others oblivion. But I, the second son, am favored, indulged, encouraged to be a peacemaker-diplomat, allowed to be a clown.
Bob is always gentle with me, however exasperated. He knows I am a weak reed but he appreciates even me standing with him.
And there we are: the first family. Our descendants--some of you here--inherit from us. We see Bob in, for example, Jeff Meikle's stubborn self-assertion, though it came a whole lot easier to Bob, and in Mark Smith's curmudgeonliness, though Mark is of course a sweet curmudgeon.
And Bob and Bill and Mewes and Elspeth and me--we are spread across the country now, around the world. And our descendants now have other parents, too: Jeff and Mark and Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Bob Abzug and Desley Deacon and, we gratefully acknowledge, Janice Bradley Garrett and Cynthia Frese and the excellent women who came before them. All of us affecting eternity, as teachers do--as Henry Adams promised in a rare sentimental moment.
So, though Bob's death breaks the family, yet we live and will live on--as he will, in his books and children and friends, and in us and those who come after us and in the new lives we and they promote.
But this is not all I want to say. Bob taught me a great deal. I loved him like a brother (which means of course ambivalently), and I will miss him deeply and always.
One thing I'm still trying to learn from him is to speak boldly, even on occasions like this.
Were Bob here, at this lectern, memorializing me, as he would have been had the genetic roulette come up different, I imagine he would have talked about what we all feel at his untimely passing: life's injustice, absurdity, tragedy. Because he felt these deeply--inconsolably, I'm tempted to say.
I suspect Bob's dark view came from his cool birth family, his boyhood in boarding school (boys only) and all-male Yale. There may also have been a chemical component, as I--my life transformed at age 52 by antidepressant chemicals--tried to convince him.
He knew he was depressed ("Why do you think I keep writing?" he once said to me) but he accepted his fate--accepted it as fate, his necessary condition, the shell in which he lived.
I wonder whether Bob ever considered his and my depressions in the way that he and Bill and the American Studies gurus before them--Henry Adams, for example--encouraged us to see so much of life: in cultural terms, as a personal symptom of national history. He and I, born six months apart in 1940, I as France fell, he during the Battle of Britain, were children of war and Cold War. We were brought up to expect tragedy, responsibility, sacrifice, a long twilight struggle that, we believed, would never end because that was what life was like.
He and I, Yalies 1962, were taught to privileged the power of darkness, ambiguity, paradox, ambivalence, restraint, complexity that the New Critics found in the canonical literature whose words became our words. We believed that tragedy was the Truth, as of course it partly is, and that, as Melville said, the "mortal man who has more of joy than sorrow in him, that mortal man cannot be true--not true, or undeveloped." And Bob and I, married at 22, fathers at 27, embraced being old, responsible, and narrow of expectation, without, alas, having ever been young, irresponsible, and grandiose.
"The world has changed, Bob," I wanted to tell him these last years, though of course he knew this. "We're at peace. We don't need to tend the ramparts or be so unyielding. We're free!" And, I might have added, free not in the bitter, cheated way Linda Loman says "We're free!" over Willy's grave in Death of a Salesman, our central play, Bob being Biff, me Happy. "Bob, we really are free."
To which I suspect Bob, bitter and beautiful, would have chuckled and said, "Oh, yeah, Bill. Isn't it nice to think so."
UT's faculty memorial about Bob and a biography of his writing are at http://www.utexas.edu/faculty/council/2000-2001/memorials/Crunden/crunden.html
Stewart Granger
Scaramouche (1952) keeps popping up on cable channels. I mean to see it again. It’s the first movie I liked enough to see twice. A friend and I, both 11, went to see another movie at the Pix Theater in White Plains, New York, and the other movie wasn’t playing; Scaramouche was. “I’ve seen it,” I said. The ticket lady said she’d let us in for free, because of the mistaken newspaper ad, which made my choice easy.Scaramouche is lots of fun and sword fighting. I get it mixed up with King Solomon’s Mines (1950), another movie starring Stewart Granger. There’s a scene in one of the pictures where the hero, the girl, and you are in an underground river in a cave, and you have to swim under the rock roof, not knowing how far the roof runs, not knowing if it lets you come up for air before you drown. But you have to chance it because there’s death coming up behind you. When I read about Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, I knew what he meant, only for me it was a dive.
I think of the girl as Rhonda Fleming, who turns out not to be in either movie. I see her arching her head back to let fall her cascade of fiery hair, which is brilliantly clean and untangled despite her having been underwater, in the jungle, and on horseback riding through the woods. Needless to say, she is less a protagonist in the action than the prize the hero takes along to enjoy when the battle’s won.
Stewart Granger, I see now, I’ve undersold. I had thought that, like all suburban boys of the 1950s, I took my selves from rebellious Marlon Brando and James Dean. But no. There’s a lot in me of the Henry Fonda of Twelve Angry Men (1957) and Gregory Peck of To Kill a Mocking Bird (1962)—the quiet fellow in glasses who can be counted on to do his duty. But I realize I was on my way to becoming that fellow before either of those movies, thanks to unflappable Stewart Granger, who, I just now found out, hated playing the upright hero and was married for a decade (1950-60) to the sexiest and most infuriating girl in all cinema, Jean Simmons of Great Expectations (1946). “I don’t know which I chose worse,” Granger was to remark late in life, “my roles or my wives.” Say it ain’t so, Stew; your roles were ideal.
Kurth Sprague
Kurth in the kitchen of his home in Sandy, Texas. Photo by
Janice Bradley Garrett.
Bill Stott:
Kurth Sprague was an associate professor in American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin from 1988-95, teaching seminars on the influence of King Arthur and medievalism in American literature, art, and films, and “How to Write about Culture.”
Among the qualities that made him such a special teacher were his fearlessness in expressing enthusiasm for good student work—in fact, good work done by anyone (no academic reserve for him)—his gentleness, his sense of humor and explosive laughter, and his reverence for and encouragement of clear prose. A master of prose himself, he saw no reason that others shouldn’t become as competent as he, and he was willing to do all the coaching students would work to take in.
He was a close friend of American Studies faculty and staff—very much one of our team. When Bob Crunden died suddenly in 1999, Janice Bradley Garrett, our Administrative Associate, arranging how we dealt with death just as she did our teaching lives, had him MC the memorial service.
A great bear of a man, enthusiast and life-lover, Kurth was also, as I knew him, a cynic who saw the truth behind most shams—but a cynic of such sweet heart, that, knowing the truth, he did his best to protect those of us who shouldn’t see it—even at the cost of his having to play straight man, even the buffoon. If he was Falstaff, as many have suggested, he was the gentleman Falstaff never was.
The newspaper obituary:
A poet, novelist, popular professor of English & American Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, horseman, and bon vivant, Kurth Sprague lived an eclectic life with gusto. He died March 18, 2007 in Fort Worth at the age of 73.
Kurth was born March 11, 1934 in Jersey City, New Jersey. He grew up in Manhattan and went to St. Paul's School and to Princeton, and later moved to West Lake Hills, where he and his second wife, Bushie, owned and operated Blackacre Stable. Their home on the top of a hill above a hunt course drew students and scholars, medieval musicians, writers and riders, and English ecclesiastics, often in overlapping categories, sometimes to the astonishment of their children, Mark, Quin, David, and Charlotte.
Falstaffian in his exuberance, Sprague was a large and imposing but gentle man. The workings of his mind were as colorful as the medieval Celtic art that he loved. He received his doctorate in English from UT-Austin, writing his dissertation on T. H. White, the British author of The Once and Future King. A revised version of the dissertation is in press, prompted by the renewed interest in medievalism. It will be published under the editorial supervision of Dr. Bonnie Wheeler of Southern Methodist University.
Related to his dissertation are collections that he edited of White's poetry (A Joy Proposed, 1980) and short stories (The Maharajah and Other Stories, 1982). These books followed his first edited publication in 1977, the poetry of Ruth P. M. Lehmann, his teacher of Old English and Old Irish at UT-Austin.
Sprague's own published writings include three volumes of poetry: And Therefore With Angels (1970), My Father's Mighty Heart (1974), and The Promise Kept, which won the Texas Institute of Letters poetry award for 1976. His deep knowledge of the American equestrian scene is displayed in his 470-page history of The National Horse Show, 1883-1983 (1985). Two of the strands of his life, academe and horses, are brought together in his murder mystery, Frighten the Horses (2003).
Oddly enough, the two strands had been brought together years earlier during his service in the Army, when he was assigned to the Department of Publications and Non-Resident Training at the Artillery and Guided Missile School at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. As Sprague said years later, it was his writing ability in that assignment, rather than any athletic prowess, that caused him to be appointed to the United States Modern Pentathlon Team, which trained at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.
Sprague taught at the University of Texas at Austin from 1977 until his retirement in 1996. In 1983 he served as the editorial director for the Centennial Commission Report, and afterward he wrote the charter for the Texas Foundation on Higher Education.
The courses that he taught in the English Department and in American Studies included "King Arthur in English Literature," "Medieval Literature in Translation," "American Medievalism," and "American Chivalry."
A lover of English poetry, he would continue his conversations outside the classroom with friends, students, and former students. He was happy to spend hours passionately reciting and discussing the magic of Sir Thomas Wyatt's "The flee from me, that sometime did me seek," Shakespeare's Sonnet 73, Robert Herrick's "Delight in Disorder," or Swinburne's "When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces."
After Bushie’s death, Kurth lived in the Texas Hill Country in a house that reflected his epicurean hospitality and his love of books, horses, tweeds, England, Der Rosenkavalier, art, food, drink, and good friends. In recent years, he enjoyed the company of traveling and entertaining with Martha Hyder of Fort Worth.
Tom Cable, the Jane and Roland Blumberg Chair in English at UT and Kurth’s good friend:
If all the world’s a stage and if each man in his time plays many parts, Kurth’s multifaceted personality could populate a whole gallery of Shakespearean and Chaucerian characters.
From that gallery here are four: Shakespeare’s greatest comic creation, Sir John Falstaff, and from The Tempest, the wizard Prospero; and two from Chaucer, the Franklin and, less obviously, the young Oxford scholar.
Falstaff, of course, was always getting into trouble, in his high-spirited and irrepressible way, and getting his friends into trouble too, including the future king of England, Henry V. Well, I am not Prince Hal, nor was meant to be, but I know this, that during the 1970s and 1980s, I got in the doghouse more than once through what might be called dissolute behavior in the company of Kurth.
I’m amazed to think back on some of those Saturday nights and Sunday afternoons. The Sunday afternoons were spent watching the Dallas Cowboys, either at Blackacre or on my hilltop facing Blackacre across the valley.
I really have no interest in football. But Kurth, like a Jupiter of a planet, pulled me into the gravitational field of Sunday afternoon NFL, and for the only time in my life I talked as though I was on familiar terms with Roger the Dodger, Tony Dorsett, Randy White, Danny White, and somebody named Hogeboom.
Part of it was the simple joy of seeing Kurth jump up from the couch with “Hot damn!” when Roger Staubach passed for a touchdown. I think Quin, David, Charlotte, and Amory must have wondered why grown men act that way—not to mention what Bushie and Carole thought.
Aspects of the Falstaffian side of Kurth extended into the normally placid English Department. Each year at the Department holiday party, to the delight of Miss Rattey, Kurth would bring a fifth of Wild Turkey, in flagrant violation of all university rules.
I don’t mean to say that Kurth violated rules.
Maybe I do mean to say that. Oh Lord, yes, he violated rules.
He once told me he went four years without paying income tax because it depressed him. That struck me as reasonable. The next April I told Carole I was too depressed to file income tax that year. She was not amused.
Another obvious side of Kurth is the hospitality and generosity represented by Chaucer’s Franklin, with a touch of the host of the Tabard Inn, Harry Bailey. Of the many moments one could name when Kurth presided at a sumptuous table, among the most recent and most brilliant were when he teamed up with Martha Hyder in Forth Worth or Sandy or San Miguel de Allende.
Chaucer wrote about the Franklin, these lines:
A Frankeleyn was in his compaignye.
Whit was his berd as is the dayesye;
Of his complexioun he was sangwyn.
Wel loved he by the morwe a sop in wyn;
To lyven in delit was evere his wone,
For he was Epicurus owene sone.
Or to continue in a modernized version:
Such hospitality did he provide,
He was St. Julian to his countryside.
His bread and ale were always up to scratch.
He had a cellar none on earth could match.
There was no lack of pastries in his house,
Both fish and flesh, and that so plenteous
That where he lived it snowed of meat and drink.
With every dish of which a man can think,
After the various seasons of the year.
The last two characters, I’ll name together, and they make an unlikely pairing, the young thin, Oxford scholar riding a horse as thin as a rake, and Prospero, the mature sorcerer, living on his magic island.
Kurth’s magic island in his last years was his hilltop in Sandy, Newbold Revel, named after the home of Sir Thomas Malory, the author of the Morte D’Arthur, published by William Caxton in 1485.
On that hilltop he was both the wizard Prospero and—although many may find it hard to imagine—the ascetic scholar, or clerk, because he loved being alone with his books.
Chaucer said that the Clerk would rather have at his bed’s head, twenty books clad in black or red, than to have rich robes. “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”
If these various aspects of Kurth seem contradictory, we can say, in paraphrase of Walt Whitman, “Very well, then, he contradicts himself. He is large. He contains multitudes.”
Or, what Kurth says of literature one could say of the man, Kurth Sprague, himself: “Literature resists and eludes our best efforts to reduce it, to take it to bits, down to the last infinitesimal hairspring, and to say, authoritatively, this is what it means and no more—for its variety is immense, its scope immeasurable, its profundity limitless.”
The Dying, Damaged, and Old
The New York Times science writer Jane Brody had a column yesterday (March 6, 2007) about doctors predicting how long someone with a fatal condition--metastasized cancer, Alzheimer's, congestive heart failure--has to live, and whether they should be told of their condition.
In the article's last paragraphs she said that what is most important to dying people is feeling the doctors will "stay with them until the end." They fear being abandoned--and in fact sometimes are because "doctors see themselves as healers, trained to cure or ameliorate illness, and typically view the impending death of a patient as a personal failure. Rather than face failure, they abandon the patient." As a consequence, Brody put forward a surprising suggestion:
Patients may be able to help themselves in this respect by reassuring the doctor. “I know you tried very hard and I appreciate all you did for me,” they might say. “It’s not your fault that I won’t survive this disease. It would help a lot, though, if you stay with me for the long haul.”
In this suggestion Brody echoes the sad central idea--as I take it--of Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman argues that those who are visibly different from the norm--cripples, the wheelchair-bound, those with birthmarks or scars, Tourette Syndrome, the hugely obese, the ragged poor--so upset us normals that we have trouble responding to them as human, and so they, in addition to suffering their handicap, must also try to find ways to make us feel better about it and them.
I know of only two "authentic" ways for us normals to behave toward the visibly damaged. The first is exemplified for me by Bob Hope, who used to enter hospital wards of wounded G.I.s, calling out, "Don't bother to get up!" The second is exemplified by Gary Trudeau, who recently--working on his comic strip, yes, but also for personal reasons--spent a lot of time in the wounded ward in Walter Reed Army Hospital. He learned that the first thing he should say to the soldiers he met was "How did it happen?" He told a reporter they couldn't wait to tell him.
These thoughts come to me because in the last week I've learned of the death of a former student, Hal Rothman, at 47, of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. Hal, who had made himself the historian of Las Vegas (he taught at the University of Nevada there), generously, heroically, tried to make us feel better about his suffering, short life, and demise. "Truthfully, I got 47 perfect years," he told his university's magazine last summer, soon after he taught his last course. "Everything broke my way. That's a hell of a lot more than most people get. The gods reached down and put ideas in my head. Even better, they let them come out my fingers--and at a pretty good clip. Not everybody gets that."
President Franklin Roosevelt was crippled by polio, a fact he worked mightily to overcome and, when this wasn't possible, to hide. At least once, the Secret Service men standing at his shoulders and helping him move forward in a slow approximation of a walk while onlookers cheered didn't prevent him tripping, and he fell, like a tree, unbending, right on his face. Everyone gasped in horror. The sound that broke the spell was Roosevelt's bitter voice: "Clean me up, boys." In this instance FDR, unlike Hal, didn't make people feel better about his fate.
The fate I’m lucky enough to suffer now is age. I give a smile and greeting to the children I see, hoping thereby to encourage them to think that life is good, even for the old, and that there is nothing to fear. I think this one of the few useful things we old get to do.
In the article's last paragraphs she said that what is most important to dying people is feeling the doctors will "stay with them until the end." They fear being abandoned--and in fact sometimes are because "doctors see themselves as healers, trained to cure or ameliorate illness, and typically view the impending death of a patient as a personal failure. Rather than face failure, they abandon the patient." As a consequence, Brody put forward a surprising suggestion:
Patients may be able to help themselves in this respect by reassuring the doctor. “I know you tried very hard and I appreciate all you did for me,” they might say. “It’s not your fault that I won’t survive this disease. It would help a lot, though, if you stay with me for the long haul.”
In this suggestion Brody echoes the sad central idea--as I take it--of Erving Goffman's Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963). Goffman argues that those who are visibly different from the norm--cripples, the wheelchair-bound, those with birthmarks or scars, Tourette Syndrome, the hugely obese, the ragged poor--so upset us normals that we have trouble responding to them as human, and so they, in addition to suffering their handicap, must also try to find ways to make us feel better about it and them.
I know of only two "authentic" ways for us normals to behave toward the visibly damaged. The first is exemplified for me by Bob Hope, who used to enter hospital wards of wounded G.I.s, calling out, "Don't bother to get up!" The second is exemplified by Gary Trudeau, who recently--working on his comic strip, yes, but also for personal reasons--spent a lot of time in the wounded ward in Walter Reed Army Hospital. He learned that the first thing he should say to the soldiers he met was "How did it happen?" He told a reporter they couldn't wait to tell him.
These thoughts come to me because in the last week I've learned of the death of a former student, Hal Rothman, at 47, of ALS, Lou Gehrig's disease. Hal, who had made himself the historian of Las Vegas (he taught at the University of Nevada there), generously, heroically, tried to make us feel better about his suffering, short life, and demise. "Truthfully, I got 47 perfect years," he told his university's magazine last summer, soon after he taught his last course. "Everything broke my way. That's a hell of a lot more than most people get. The gods reached down and put ideas in my head. Even better, they let them come out my fingers--and at a pretty good clip. Not everybody gets that."
President Franklin Roosevelt was crippled by polio, a fact he worked mightily to overcome and, when this wasn't possible, to hide. At least once, the Secret Service men standing at his shoulders and helping him move forward in a slow approximation of a walk while onlookers cheered didn't prevent him tripping, and he fell, like a tree, unbending, right on his face. Everyone gasped in horror. The sound that broke the spell was Roosevelt's bitter voice: "Clean me up, boys." In this instance FDR, unlike Hal, didn't make people feel better about his fate.
The fate I’m lucky enough to suffer now is age. I give a smile and greeting to the children I see, hoping thereby to encourage them to think that life is good, even for the old, and that there is nothing to fear. I think this one of the few useful things we old get to do.
Hal Rothman and his wife, Lauralee
Thinking about Hiroshima
According to a 1995 Gallup poll, 59 percent of Americans approve of our dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The younger the people, the less they approve: among people 18-29, approval was 46 percent, with 49 percent disapproving. The students I taught in the late 1990s almost all disapproved.
I do too, intellectually. I know the Japanese were giving signs, albeit ambiguous, that they might sue for peace. I think there must have been some way to demonstrate the power of the bomb without killing 80,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimate you prefer. But that’s my intellect talking.
Another me speaks when I read about the bombing in Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II’s No High Ground (1960). The Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the bomb, was accompanied by another plane, the Great Artiste, which parachuted equipment to record the blast.
The anti-aircraft gunners on Mukay-Shima Island in Hiroshima harbor could now see two planes, approaching the eastern edge of the city at very high altitude. As they watched, at precisely seventeen seconds after 8:15 [a.m.], the planes suddenly separated. The leading aircraft made a tight, diving turn to the right. The second plane performed an identical maneuver to the left, and from it fell three parachutes which opened and floated slowly down toward the city.
The few people in Hiroshima who caught sight of the two planes saw the parachutes blossom as the aircraft turned away from the city. Some cheered when they saw them, thinking the enemy planes must be in trouble and the crews were starting to bail out.
When I first read this, I thought, “Ah, gotcha, you bastards!” rather as Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf did in the 1991 Gulf War when he realized the Iraqi air force and thus the enemy’s eyes were wiped out and so couldn’t know what he was cooking up on the western flank. “You think our guys are in trouble,” I thought. “Sorry, Charlie! It’s you.”
I believe this is a useful response for an American to have, even if one quickly despises it, because it shows us--shows you, reader, if you're an American--that, had you had the authority, you might have dropped the bomb to protect the lives of our soldiers or at least been among the 85 percent of our citizens who told Gallup in August 1945 they approved of the bombing.
Now an embarrassing confession. I thought this insight of mine important enough to share with John Hersey, who wrote Hiroshima (1946), the classic account of the bombing. In 1970, he was the Master of Pierson College at Yale College, and I sought him out during his office hours. He was tall, thin, and immaculate looking in blue slacks and white sweater; he reminded me of a Greek column with a capital of gray hair. What I was saying, as I trust I understood then, was that his book told only one side of the story--which was of course all he intended to do. I said that American students at that time (Vietnam!) needed to know the other side. He said he had told that story in his novel The War Lover (1959). He also said he agreed that it was wrong to draw a moral equivalence, as some on the left were doing (and do), between Hiroshima and Auschwitz. He also told me how touched he was by the mail he got from young people all over the world thanking him for informing them about the horror of nuclear bombs.
I didn’t bring up the question of our bombing Nagasaki three days after Hiroshima. I don’t think that can be justified.
A. Philip Randolph
Of 20th century African-Americans who advanced the cause of democracy, certainly half a dozen and probably more will be as much remembered in two hundred years as Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Betsy Ross, Crispus Attucks, Ethan Allen, Molly Pitcher, and Nathan Hale are today.
Consider the obvious candidates: Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jackie Robinson, Marian Anderson, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, Ralph Bunche, Medgar Evers,ß Louie Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, Roy Wilkins, Nat King Cole, Ralph Ellison, Sammy Davis Jr., Emmett Till, and, certainly not least, A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979).
Randolph, a man of refinement (he spoke like a Shakespearean actor) and unfailing dignity, changed American history on four occasions. First, he was the founder in 1925 and for 43 years the president of the only successful trade union of black workers, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Despite enormous pressure against blacks wielding such power, he got his union accepted into the American Federation of Labor and, in 1937, won recognition from the Pullman Car Company.
Second, he forced President Franklin Roosevelt to open defense-industry and government employment to blacks and other minorities on the eve of World War II. By 1940, America had become, in Roosevelt’s memorable phrase, “the arsenal of democracy.” The nation boomed, building weapons for ourselves and our friends (we hoped only they would have to use them). But Negroes, even skilled carpenters, cement workers, and electricians, were getting only a small percentage of these jobs. Standard Steel Corporation in Kansas City said, “We have not had a Negro worker in 25 years, and do not plan to start now.” An official of the International Association of Machinists at Boeing Aircraft said, “Labor has been asked to make many sacrifices in this war and has made them gladly, but this sacrifice [working alongside blacks] is too great.” A war housing project in Newport, Rhode Island, refused to accept Negro families, announcing in a press release, “In these critical times it is more important than ever to preserve the principle of white supremacy.”
Though only 10 percent of the population, Negroes, in part because they couldn’t get work elsewhere, were 16.1 percent of those enlisting in the military in 1940-41. But they were sent to Jim Crow units or into service and supply duties—kitchen work, truck driving. Randolph and other Negro leaders including Mary McLeod Bethune, a college president and Roosevelt’s special advisor on minority affairs, complained about these injustices to the President and, more often, to his wife, Eleanor. At Mrs. Roosevelt’s prompting, the President, the Navy Secretary, and the Under-secretary of War (our Department of Defense was then called the Department of War) met with Randolph and Walter White, head of the NAACP, and T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League on September 27, 1940. Two weeks after the meeting, the White House issued a statement that the meeting’s participants had agreed to the War department policy: “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”
Negroes around the nation were outraged, felt their leaders had sold them out. Randolph announced he was “shocked and amazed” but refrained from publishing the memorandum he and the other black leaders had given the President, calling for immediate integration of the armed forces and colorblind hiring in defense work.
He realized that the time for public statements, however strongly worded, and private meetings with government officials, however cordial, were over. What was needed now was power in the streets, and this could only be achieved through mass action by America’s blacks. On January 15, 1941, he issued a statement to the press: “Negro America must bring its power and pressure to bear upon the agencies and representatives of the Federal government to exact their rights in National Defense employment and the armed forces of the country.” He called for 10,000—later 100,000—black Americans to march together in Washington under the slogan “WE LOYAL NEGRO AMERICAN CITIZENS DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK AND FIGHT FOR OUR COUNTRY.”
Today, thanks to Randolph, organized mass meetings in Washington to protest or inspire government action take place every year or so, but one had never happened before. The nearest thing to it was the Bonus March of June-July 1932 when 20,000 World War I veterans, their families and supporters camped out in hovels and got brutally evicted by the U.S. army. Reasonable people were alarmed when Randolph formed his March on Washington Committee and later announced that the event would take place on July 1, a Tuesday. The NAACP and Urban League offered only tepid assistance, and so to persuade the White House that the march would take place and draw thousands of people, Randolph made himself ubiquitous in Harlem, talking it up on the street and in stores, restaurants, pool halls, bars, banks, and beauty shops. He did this not only to tell people about the march but also because he was sure that the FBI was shadowing him and would report how much support he had.
Randolph invited leading New Dealers to address the marchers, including Eleanor Roosevelt and the Secretaries of Labor and War. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote him that the march was a bad idea. President Roosevelt and the Office of Production Management sent letters to defense plants asking them to “take the initiative to open the door of employment to all loyal and qualified workers, regardless of race, creed, or color.” Randolph said that wasn’t enough: he wanted something legally enforceable “with teeth in it.” The White House then enlisted New York City’s liberal mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, an old friend of Randolph’s, to persuade him to call off the march.
La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt met with Randolph on June 13. As Randolph remembered:
Mrs. Roosevelt reminded me of her sympathy for the cause of racial justice, and assured me she intended to continue pressuring the President to act. But the march was something else, she said: it just could not go on. Had I considered the problems? she asked. Where would all those thousands of people eat and sleep in Jim Crow Washington?
I told her I myself did not see that as a serious problem. The demonstrators would simply march into the hotels and restaurants, and order food and shelter. But that was just the point, she said; that sort of thing could lead to violence. I replied that there would be no violence unless her husband ordered the police to crack black heads. I told her I was sorry, but the march would not be called off unless the President issued an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry.
Mrs. Roosevelt and La Guardia reported to the President that the march was going to go ahead unless he himself intervened. Roosevelt called for a June 18 meeting of the march leaders, his principle war advisors, and La Guardia. Until the meeting Randolph was asked to suspend all preparations for the march as a goodwill gesture. He refused. In his excellent 1973 biography of Randolph, Jervis Anderson reconstructs the June 18 meeting:
“Hello, Phil,” the President said. “Which class were you in at Harvard?”
“I never went to Harvard, Mr. President.”
“I was sure you did,” Roosevelt replied. “Anyway, you and I share a kinship in our great interest in human and social justice.”
“That’s right, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt, a man of great charm, had embarked upon one of his favorite filibuster stratagems. But, finding he could not engage Randolph in small talk, he turned raconteur and started regaling his audience with old political anecdotes. Randolph, unfailingly good mannered, allowed himself to be entertained. But the clock was running . . . so, with as much graciousness as he commanded, he broke in:
“Mr. President, time is running on. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries. Our people are being turned away at factory gates because they are colored. They can’t live with this thing. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
“Well, Phil, what do you want me to do?”
“Mr. President, we want you to do something that will enable Negro workers to get work in these plants.”
“Why,” Roosevelt replied, “I surely want them to work, too. I’ll call up the heads of the various defense plants and have them see to it that Negroes are given the same opportunity to work in defense plants as any other citizen in the country.”
“We want you to do more than that,” Randolph said. “We want something concrete, something tangible, definite, positive, and affirmative.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. President, we want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.”
“Well, Phil,” Roosevelt replied, “you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end to other groups coming in here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event, I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Question like this can’t be settled with a sledge hammer.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President. The march cannot be called off.”
“How many people do you plan to bring?”
“One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt didn’t believe Randolph. He turned to Walter White, whom he knew better, and said, “Walter, how many people will really march?”
White didn’t blink. He said, “One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”
Anderson, Randolph’s biographer, believes Randolph and White were bluffing: that the march would draw many more than 10,000 people but many less than 100,000.
“You can’t bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt said. “Somebody might get killed.”
Randolph said that that was unlikely, especially if the President himself came out and addressed the gathering.
The President was not amused. “Call it off,” he said curtly, “and we’ll talk again.”
Randolph said he had a pledge to honor with his people, and he could not go back to them with anything less than an executive order. Budging somewhat, Roosevelt suggested that Randolph and White confer with his presidential assistants over some way of solving the problem with defense contractors.
“Not defense contractors alone,” Randolph broke in. “The government, too. The government is the worst offender.”
This, Roosevelt seemed to feel, was going a bit too far, and he informed the president of the porters’ union that it was not the policy of the President of the United State to rule, or be ruled, with a gun at his head.
“Then,” Randolph replied, “I shall have to stand by the pledge I’ve made to the people.”
At this point Mayor La Guardia intervened. “Gentlemen, it is clear that Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march,” he said. “I suggest we all begin to seek a formula”—a compromise both sides could live with.
A committee was appointed to work it out. On behalf of the committee, Joseph Rauh, a young lawyer in the Office for Emergency Management, drew up drafts of an executive order and read them over the phone to Randolph, back in New York preparing for the march. Randolph turned down draft after draft as not strong enough. Finally, Rauh lost patience. “Who the hell is the guy Randolph?” he asked his superiors. “What the hell has he got over the President of the United States?”
On June 25, six days before the march, the President signed an order Randolph accepted: Executive Order 8802 outlawing discrimination in all defense industries and the government, and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee to “investigate complaints of discrimination” and take “appropriate steps to redress grievances.”
Randolph called off the march. When young activists excoriated him for this, Randolph replied: “The Executive Order was issued upon the condition that the march be called off. The march . . . was not to serve as an agency to create a continuous state of sullen unrest and blind resentment among Negroes.” There was enough of that, he said. To have allowed the march go forward “would have promptly and rightly been branded as a lamentable species of infantile leftism and an appeal to sheer prima donna dramatics.”
But Randolph was conscious that he had won from white America only part of what he sought. Negroes were employed in defense industries, but they were still in a segregated military. And here he made his third contribution to our history.
By 1948 it was clear that the U.S. might soon be at war again, this time with the Soviet Union. When President Harry S Truman sent forward a bill renewing the military draft without any mention of desegregation, Randolph saw his chance: he formed the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training and demanded Truman issue an executive order ending military segregation. On March 22, the President invited Randolph, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Charles Houston, a lawyer for the NAACP, to discuss the matter. The meeting was friendly until Randolph said, “Mr. President, after making several trips around the country, I can tell you that the mood among Negroes of this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of bias and discrimination are abolished.”
“I wish you hadn’t made that statement,” Truman said. “I don’t like it at all.”
“But, Mr. President,” said Charles Houston, “don’t you want to know what is happening in the country?”
Truman said he certainly did; a President was surrounding by people who didn’t tell him the truth.
“Well, that’s what I’m giving you, Mr. President,” Randolph said. “I’ve giving you the facts.”
Truman told him to go ahead.
“Mr. President, as you know, we are calling upon you to issue an executive order abolishing segregation in the armed forces.”
Truman thanked his visitors for coming and said there didn’t seem to be anything more they could “talk fruitfully” about.
Nine days later, Randolph told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “This time Negroes will not take a Jim Crow draft lying down.” He said he would personally “advise Negroes to refuse to fight as slaves for a democracy they cannot possess and cannot enjoy.” He promised a movement of mass peaceful civil disobedience, like Gandhi’s campaign to free India from British rule, and expected the movement to attract not only blacks. “I shall appeal to the thousands of white youths in schools and colleges who are today vigorously shedding the prejudices of their parents and professors. I shall urge them to demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the entire registration and induction machinery.”
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a liberal committee member who supported Randolph’s goal, was a former law school professor and was appalled at the means he proposed. Morse and Randolph engaged in a graceful debate that set forth the do-or-die terms under which the Black Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s would take place:
SENATOR MORSE: Your proposal, and put me straight on this, is really based upon conviction that because your Government has not give you certain social, economic, and race protection from discrimination because of race, color, or creed, you feel that even in a time of national emergency when your government and your country itself may be at stake, you are justified in saying to any segment of our populous—whether it is the color group or, as you say in your statement, a white group of like sympathies—that in under those circumstances, you would be justified then in saying, “Do not shoulder arms in protection of your country in this national emergency”?
MR. RANDOLPH: That is a correct statement, Mr. Senator. I may add that it is my deep conviction that in taking such a position we are doing our country a great service. Our country has come out before the world as a moral leader of democracy, and it is preparing its defense forces and aggressive forces upon the theory that it must do this to protect democracy in the world.
Well, now, I consider that if this country does not develop the democratic process at home and make the democratic process work by giving the very people whom they propose to draft in the Army to fight for them democracy, democracy then is not the type of democracy that ought to be fought for, and, as a matter of fact, the policy of segregation in the armed forces and in other avenues of our life is the greatest single propaganda and political weapon in the hands of Russia and international communism today.
SENATOR MORSE: I understand your position, Mr. Randolph, but for the record I want to direct your attention to certain basic legal principles which I want to say, most kindly, are being overlooked in your position. I want to discuss your position from the standpoint of a couple of hypotheticals and relate them to certain legal principles which I think you ought to give very careful consideration to before you follow the course of action which you have indicated.
Let us assume this hypothetical. A country proceeds to attack the United States or commits acts which make it perfectly clear that our choice is only the choice of war. Would you take the position then that unless our Government granted the demands which are set out in your testimony, or most of the demands set out in your testimony, that you could recommend a course of civil disobedience to our Government?
MR. RANDOLPH: In answer to that question, the Government now has time to change its policy on segregation and discrimination, and if the Government does not change its policy on segregation and discrimination in the interests of the very democracy it is fighting for, I would advocate that Negroes take no part in the Army.
SENATOR MORSE: My hypothetical assumes that in the time of emergency set forth in my hypothetical, our Government does not follow in any degree whatsoever the course of action that you recommend.
MR. RANDOLPH: Yes.
SENATOR MORSE: So the facts in the hypothetical then are thrust upon us, and I understand your answer to be that under those circumstances, even though it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight then to exist as a country, you would still recommend the program of civil disobedience?
MR. RANDOLPH: Because I would believe that it is in the best interest of the soul of our country. And I unhesitatingly and very adamantly hold that it is the only way by which we are going to be able to make America wake up and realize that we do not have democracy here as long as one black man is denied all the rights enjoyed by all the white men in this country.
SENATOR MORSE: Now, facing realistically that hypothetical situation and the assumption that it has come to pass, do you have any doubt then that this Government as presently constituted under the Constitution that governs us would necessarily follow a legal course of action of applying the legal doctrine of treason to that conduct? Would you question with me that that is the doctrine that undoubtably will be applied at that time under the circumstances of my hypothetical?
MR. RANDOLPH: I would anticipate nationwide terrorism against Negroes who refuse to participate in the armed forces, but I believe that that is the price we have to pay for the democracy that we want. In other words, if there are sacrifices and sufferings, terrorism, concentration camps, whatever they may be, if that is the only way by which Negroes can get their democratic rights, I unhesitatingly say that we have to face them.åß
SENATOR MORSE: But on the basis of the law as it now exists, going back to my premise that you and I know of no legal exemption from participation in the military service in the defense of our country other than that of conscientious objection on religious grounds, not on the grounds on which you place your civil disobedience, that then the doctrine of treason would be applied to those people participating in that disobedience?
MR. RANDOLPH: Exactly. I would be willing to face that doctrine on the theory and on the grounds that we are serving a Higher Law than the law which applies the act of treason to us when we are attempting to win democracy in this country and to make the soul of America democratic.
I would contend that we are serving a Higher Law than that law with its legal technicalities, which would include the group which fights for democracy even in the face of the crisis you would portray—I would contend that they are serving a Higher Law than that law.
SENATOR MORSE: But you would fully expect that because the law of treason in this country relates to certain specific overt acts on the part of the individual, irrespective of what he considers to be his spiritual or moral motivation and justification, that there would not be any other course of action for our Government to follow but indictments for treason?
MR. RANDOLPH: May I add something there, Mr. Senator?
SENATOR MORSE: First, do you agree with me that that would be certain to follow?
MR. RANDOLPH: Let me add here, in connection with that, that we would participate in no overt acts against our Government, no overt acts of any kind. In other words, ours would be one of non-resistance; ours would be one of non-cooperation; ours would be one of non-participation in the military forces of this country.
I want you to know that we would be willing to absorb the violence, to absorb the terrorism, to face the music and to take whatever comes, and we, as a matter of fact, consider that we are more loyal to our country than the people who perpetrate segregation and discrimination upon Negroes because of race or color.
I want it thoroughly understood that we would certainly not be guilty of any kind of overt act against the country but we would not participate in any military operation as segregated Jim Crow slaves in the Army.
Four months later, on July 26, 1948, not wanting to alienate Negro voters in the North, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 banning segregation in the armed forces.
Seven years later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a politically active black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her bus seat to white man and was arrested for violating the city’s Jim Crow laws. Thus began the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first battle of the Black Revolution that led to the sweeping civil rights laws of the mid-1960s. The boycott was led by the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., a disciple of Gandhi and Randolph who understood the force of nonviolent obedience to a Higher Law.
The crowning event of the civil rights movement was the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during which King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The march, which drew the largest crowd Washington had seen, more than 200,000 people, was Randolph’s idea and his fourth contribution to our history. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he introduced King to the crowd as “the man who personifies the moral leadership of the civil rights revolution.”
The actual march itself, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, was scheduled to begin at 11:30 a.m. At 11:20 the eager, well-behaved crowd began strolling down the mall in advance of its leaders—who in fact never caught up, the crush of bodies being too thick.
The media was interviewing Randolph and other march dignitaries near the Washington Monument when Randolph noticed the crowd moving and said, according to one reporter, “Wait! That’s my parade.” According to another reporter, he said, “Wait! Those are my people.”
Both were true.
Consider the obvious candidates: Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, W.E.B. Du Bois, Jackie Robinson, Marian Anderson, Marcus Garvey, Fannie Lou Hamer, Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, Ralph Bunche, Medgar Evers,ß Louie Armstrong, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Duke Ellington, James Baldwin, Ruby Bridges, Roy Wilkins, Nat King Cole, Ralph Ellison, Sammy Davis Jr., Emmett Till, and, certainly not least, A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979).
Randolph, a man of refinement (he spoke like a Shakespearean actor) and unfailing dignity, changed American history on four occasions. First, he was the founder in 1925 and for 43 years the president of the only successful trade union of black workers, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Despite enormous pressure against blacks wielding such power, he got his union accepted into the American Federation of Labor and, in 1937, won recognition from the Pullman Car Company.
Second, he forced President Franklin Roosevelt to open defense-industry and government employment to blacks and other minorities on the eve of World War II. By 1940, America had become, in Roosevelt’s memorable phrase, “the arsenal of democracy.” The nation boomed, building weapons for ourselves and our friends (we hoped only they would have to use them). But Negroes, even skilled carpenters, cement workers, and electricians, were getting only a small percentage of these jobs. Standard Steel Corporation in Kansas City said, “We have not had a Negro worker in 25 years, and do not plan to start now.” An official of the International Association of Machinists at Boeing Aircraft said, “Labor has been asked to make many sacrifices in this war and has made them gladly, but this sacrifice [working alongside blacks] is too great.” A war housing project in Newport, Rhode Island, refused to accept Negro families, announcing in a press release, “In these critical times it is more important than ever to preserve the principle of white supremacy.”
Though only 10 percent of the population, Negroes, in part because they couldn’t get work elsewhere, were 16.1 percent of those enlisting in the military in 1940-41. But they were sent to Jim Crow units or into service and supply duties—kitchen work, truck driving. Randolph and other Negro leaders including Mary McLeod Bethune, a college president and Roosevelt’s special advisor on minority affairs, complained about these injustices to the President and, more often, to his wife, Eleanor. At Mrs. Roosevelt’s prompting, the President, the Navy Secretary, and the Under-secretary of War (our Department of Defense was then called the Department of War) met with Randolph and Walter White, head of the NAACP, and T. Arnold Hill of the Urban League on September 27, 1940. Two weeks after the meeting, the White House issued a statement that the meeting’s participants had agreed to the War department policy: “not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organizations.”
Negroes around the nation were outraged, felt their leaders had sold them out. Randolph announced he was “shocked and amazed” but refrained from publishing the memorandum he and the other black leaders had given the President, calling for immediate integration of the armed forces and colorblind hiring in defense work.
He realized that the time for public statements, however strongly worded, and private meetings with government officials, however cordial, were over. What was needed now was power in the streets, and this could only be achieved through mass action by America’s blacks. On January 15, 1941, he issued a statement to the press: “Negro America must bring its power and pressure to bear upon the agencies and representatives of the Federal government to exact their rights in National Defense employment and the armed forces of the country.” He called for 10,000—later 100,000—black Americans to march together in Washington under the slogan “WE LOYAL NEGRO AMERICAN CITIZENS DEMAND THE RIGHT TO WORK AND FIGHT FOR OUR COUNTRY.”
Today, thanks to Randolph, organized mass meetings in Washington to protest or inspire government action take place every year or so, but one had never happened before. The nearest thing to it was the Bonus March of June-July 1932 when 20,000 World War I veterans, their families and supporters camped out in hovels and got brutally evicted by the U.S. army. Reasonable people were alarmed when Randolph formed his March on Washington Committee and later announced that the event would take place on July 1, a Tuesday. The NAACP and Urban League offered only tepid assistance, and so to persuade the White House that the march would take place and draw thousands of people, Randolph made himself ubiquitous in Harlem, talking it up on the street and in stores, restaurants, pool halls, bars, banks, and beauty shops. He did this not only to tell people about the march but also because he was sure that the FBI was shadowing him and would report how much support he had.
Randolph invited leading New Dealers to address the marchers, including Eleanor Roosevelt and the Secretaries of Labor and War. Mrs. Roosevelt wrote him that the march was a bad idea. President Roosevelt and the Office of Production Management sent letters to defense plants asking them to “take the initiative to open the door of employment to all loyal and qualified workers, regardless of race, creed, or color.” Randolph said that wasn’t enough: he wanted something legally enforceable “with teeth in it.” The White House then enlisted New York City’s liberal mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, an old friend of Randolph’s, to persuade him to call off the march.
La Guardia and Mrs. Roosevelt met with Randolph on June 13. As Randolph remembered:
Mrs. Roosevelt reminded me of her sympathy for the cause of racial justice, and assured me she intended to continue pressuring the President to act. But the march was something else, she said: it just could not go on. Had I considered the problems? she asked. Where would all those thousands of people eat and sleep in Jim Crow Washington?
I told her I myself did not see that as a serious problem. The demonstrators would simply march into the hotels and restaurants, and order food and shelter. But that was just the point, she said; that sort of thing could lead to violence. I replied that there would be no violence unless her husband ordered the police to crack black heads. I told her I was sorry, but the march would not be called off unless the President issued an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industry.
Mrs. Roosevelt and La Guardia reported to the President that the march was going to go ahead unless he himself intervened. Roosevelt called for a June 18 meeting of the march leaders, his principle war advisors, and La Guardia. Until the meeting Randolph was asked to suspend all preparations for the march as a goodwill gesture. He refused. In his excellent 1973 biography of Randolph, Jervis Anderson reconstructs the June 18 meeting:
“Hello, Phil,” the President said. “Which class were you in at Harvard?”
“I never went to Harvard, Mr. President.”
“I was sure you did,” Roosevelt replied. “Anyway, you and I share a kinship in our great interest in human and social justice.”
“That’s right, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt, a man of great charm, had embarked upon one of his favorite filibuster stratagems. But, finding he could not engage Randolph in small talk, he turned raconteur and started regaling his audience with old political anecdotes. Randolph, unfailingly good mannered, allowed himself to be entertained. But the clock was running . . . so, with as much graciousness as he commanded, he broke in:
“Mr. President, time is running on. You are quite busy, I know. But what we want to talk with you about is the problem of jobs for Negroes in defense industries. Our people are being turned away at factory gates because they are colored. They can’t live with this thing. Now, what are you going to do about it?”
“Well, Phil, what do you want me to do?”
“Mr. President, we want you to do something that will enable Negro workers to get work in these plants.”
“Why,” Roosevelt replied, “I surely want them to work, too. I’ll call up the heads of the various defense plants and have them see to it that Negroes are given the same opportunity to work in defense plants as any other citizen in the country.”
“We want you to do more than that,” Randolph said. “We want something concrete, something tangible, definite, positive, and affirmative.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mr. President, we want you to issue an executive order making it mandatory that Negroes be permitted to work in these plants.”
“Well, Phil,” Roosevelt replied, “you know I can’t do that. If I issue an executive order for you, then there’ll be no end to other groups coming in here and asking me to issue executive orders for them, too. In any event, I couldn’t do anything unless you called off this march of yours. Question like this can’t be settled with a sledge hammer.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. President. The march cannot be called off.”
“How many people do you plan to bring?”
“One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt didn’t believe Randolph. He turned to Walter White, whom he knew better, and said, “Walter, how many people will really march?”
White didn’t blink. He said, “One hundred thousand, Mr. President.”
Anderson, Randolph’s biographer, believes Randolph and White were bluffing: that the march would draw many more than 10,000 people but many less than 100,000.
“You can’t bring 100,000 Negroes to Washington,” Roosevelt said. “Somebody might get killed.”
Randolph said that that was unlikely, especially if the President himself came out and addressed the gathering.
The President was not amused. “Call it off,” he said curtly, “and we’ll talk again.”
Randolph said he had a pledge to honor with his people, and he could not go back to them with anything less than an executive order. Budging somewhat, Roosevelt suggested that Randolph and White confer with his presidential assistants over some way of solving the problem with defense contractors.
“Not defense contractors alone,” Randolph broke in. “The government, too. The government is the worst offender.”
This, Roosevelt seemed to feel, was going a bit too far, and he informed the president of the porters’ union that it was not the policy of the President of the United State to rule, or be ruled, with a gun at his head.
“Then,” Randolph replied, “I shall have to stand by the pledge I’ve made to the people.”
At this point Mayor La Guardia intervened. “Gentlemen, it is clear that Mr. Randolph is not going to call off the march,” he said. “I suggest we all begin to seek a formula”—a compromise both sides could live with.
A committee was appointed to work it out. On behalf of the committee, Joseph Rauh, a young lawyer in the Office for Emergency Management, drew up drafts of an executive order and read them over the phone to Randolph, back in New York preparing for the march. Randolph turned down draft after draft as not strong enough. Finally, Rauh lost patience. “Who the hell is the guy Randolph?” he asked his superiors. “What the hell has he got over the President of the United States?”
On June 25, six days before the march, the President signed an order Randolph accepted: Executive Order 8802 outlawing discrimination in all defense industries and the government, and establishing the Fair Employment Practices Committee to “investigate complaints of discrimination” and take “appropriate steps to redress grievances.”
Randolph called off the march. When young activists excoriated him for this, Randolph replied: “The Executive Order was issued upon the condition that the march be called off. The march . . . was not to serve as an agency to create a continuous state of sullen unrest and blind resentment among Negroes.” There was enough of that, he said. To have allowed the march go forward “would have promptly and rightly been branded as a lamentable species of infantile leftism and an appeal to sheer prima donna dramatics.”
But Randolph was conscious that he had won from white America only part of what he sought. Negroes were employed in defense industries, but they were still in a segregated military. And here he made his third contribution to our history.
By 1948 it was clear that the U.S. might soon be at war again, this time with the Soviet Union. When President Harry S Truman sent forward a bill renewing the military draft without any mention of desegregation, Randolph saw his chance: he formed the Committee against Jim Crow in Military Service and Training and demanded Truman issue an executive order ending military segregation. On March 22, the President invited Randolph, Walter White, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Charles Houston, a lawyer for the NAACP, to discuss the matter. The meeting was friendly until Randolph said, “Mr. President, after making several trips around the country, I can tell you that the mood among Negroes of this country is that they will never bear arms again until all forms of bias and discrimination are abolished.”
“I wish you hadn’t made that statement,” Truman said. “I don’t like it at all.”
“But, Mr. President,” said Charles Houston, “don’t you want to know what is happening in the country?”
Truman said he certainly did; a President was surrounding by people who didn’t tell him the truth.
“Well, that’s what I’m giving you, Mr. President,” Randolph said. “I’ve giving you the facts.”
Truman told him to go ahead.
“Mr. President, as you know, we are calling upon you to issue an executive order abolishing segregation in the armed forces.”
Truman thanked his visitors for coming and said there didn’t seem to be anything more they could “talk fruitfully” about.
Nine days later, Randolph told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “This time Negroes will not take a Jim Crow draft lying down.” He said he would personally “advise Negroes to refuse to fight as slaves for a democracy they cannot possess and cannot enjoy.” He promised a movement of mass peaceful civil disobedience, like Gandhi’s campaign to free India from British rule, and expected the movement to attract not only blacks. “I shall appeal to the thousands of white youths in schools and colleges who are today vigorously shedding the prejudices of their parents and professors. I shall urge them to demonstrate their solidarity with Negro youth by ignoring the entire registration and induction machinery.”
Senator Wayne Morse of Oregon, a liberal committee member who supported Randolph’s goal, was a former law school professor and was appalled at the means he proposed. Morse and Randolph engaged in a graceful debate that set forth the do-or-die terms under which the Black Revolution of the 1950s and 1960s would take place:
SENATOR MORSE: Your proposal, and put me straight on this, is really based upon conviction that because your Government has not give you certain social, economic, and race protection from discrimination because of race, color, or creed, you feel that even in a time of national emergency when your government and your country itself may be at stake, you are justified in saying to any segment of our populous—whether it is the color group or, as you say in your statement, a white group of like sympathies—that in under those circumstances, you would be justified then in saying, “Do not shoulder arms in protection of your country in this national emergency”?
MR. RANDOLPH: That is a correct statement, Mr. Senator. I may add that it is my deep conviction that in taking such a position we are doing our country a great service. Our country has come out before the world as a moral leader of democracy, and it is preparing its defense forces and aggressive forces upon the theory that it must do this to protect democracy in the world.
Well, now, I consider that if this country does not develop the democratic process at home and make the democratic process work by giving the very people whom they propose to draft in the Army to fight for them democracy, democracy then is not the type of democracy that ought to be fought for, and, as a matter of fact, the policy of segregation in the armed forces and in other avenues of our life is the greatest single propaganda and political weapon in the hands of Russia and international communism today.
SENATOR MORSE: I understand your position, Mr. Randolph, but for the record I want to direct your attention to certain basic legal principles which I want to say, most kindly, are being overlooked in your position. I want to discuss your position from the standpoint of a couple of hypotheticals and relate them to certain legal principles which I think you ought to give very careful consideration to before you follow the course of action which you have indicated.
Let us assume this hypothetical. A country proceeds to attack the United States or commits acts which make it perfectly clear that our choice is only the choice of war. Would you take the position then that unless our Government granted the demands which are set out in your testimony, or most of the demands set out in your testimony, that you could recommend a course of civil disobedience to our Government?
MR. RANDOLPH: In answer to that question, the Government now has time to change its policy on segregation and discrimination, and if the Government does not change its policy on segregation and discrimination in the interests of the very democracy it is fighting for, I would advocate that Negroes take no part in the Army.
SENATOR MORSE: My hypothetical assumes that in the time of emergency set forth in my hypothetical, our Government does not follow in any degree whatsoever the course of action that you recommend.
MR. RANDOLPH: Yes.
SENATOR MORSE: So the facts in the hypothetical then are thrust upon us, and I understand your answer to be that under those circumstances, even though it was perfectly clear that we would have to fight then to exist as a country, you would still recommend the program of civil disobedience?
MR. RANDOLPH: Because I would believe that it is in the best interest of the soul of our country. And I unhesitatingly and very adamantly hold that it is the only way by which we are going to be able to make America wake up and realize that we do not have democracy here as long as one black man is denied all the rights enjoyed by all the white men in this country.
SENATOR MORSE: Now, facing realistically that hypothetical situation and the assumption that it has come to pass, do you have any doubt then that this Government as presently constituted under the Constitution that governs us would necessarily follow a legal course of action of applying the legal doctrine of treason to that conduct? Would you question with me that that is the doctrine that undoubtably will be applied at that time under the circumstances of my hypothetical?
MR. RANDOLPH: I would anticipate nationwide terrorism against Negroes who refuse to participate in the armed forces, but I believe that that is the price we have to pay for the democracy that we want. In other words, if there are sacrifices and sufferings, terrorism, concentration camps, whatever they may be, if that is the only way by which Negroes can get their democratic rights, I unhesitatingly say that we have to face them.åß
SENATOR MORSE: But on the basis of the law as it now exists, going back to my premise that you and I know of no legal exemption from participation in the military service in the defense of our country other than that of conscientious objection on religious grounds, not on the grounds on which you place your civil disobedience, that then the doctrine of treason would be applied to those people participating in that disobedience?
MR. RANDOLPH: Exactly. I would be willing to face that doctrine on the theory and on the grounds that we are serving a Higher Law than the law which applies the act of treason to us when we are attempting to win democracy in this country and to make the soul of America democratic.
I would contend that we are serving a Higher Law than that law with its legal technicalities, which would include the group which fights for democracy even in the face of the crisis you would portray—I would contend that they are serving a Higher Law than that law.
SENATOR MORSE: But you would fully expect that because the law of treason in this country relates to certain specific overt acts on the part of the individual, irrespective of what he considers to be his spiritual or moral motivation and justification, that there would not be any other course of action for our Government to follow but indictments for treason?
MR. RANDOLPH: May I add something there, Mr. Senator?
SENATOR MORSE: First, do you agree with me that that would be certain to follow?
MR. RANDOLPH: Let me add here, in connection with that, that we would participate in no overt acts against our Government, no overt acts of any kind. In other words, ours would be one of non-resistance; ours would be one of non-cooperation; ours would be one of non-participation in the military forces of this country.
I want you to know that we would be willing to absorb the violence, to absorb the terrorism, to face the music and to take whatever comes, and we, as a matter of fact, consider that we are more loyal to our country than the people who perpetrate segregation and discrimination upon Negroes because of race or color.
I want it thoroughly understood that we would certainly not be guilty of any kind of overt act against the country but we would not participate in any military operation as segregated Jim Crow slaves in the Army.
Four months later, on July 26, 1948, not wanting to alienate Negro voters in the North, President Truman issued Executive Order 9981 banning segregation in the armed forces.
Seven years later, on December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, a politically active black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, refused to give her bus seat to white man and was arrested for violating the city’s Jim Crow laws. Thus began the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the first battle of the Black Revolution that led to the sweeping civil rights laws of the mid-1960s. The boycott was led by the young Baptist minister Martin Luther King, Jr., a disciple of Gandhi and Randolph who understood the force of nonviolent obedience to a Higher Law.
The crowning event of the civil rights movement was the August 28, 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during which King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The march, which drew the largest crowd Washington had seen, more than 200,000 people, was Randolph’s idea and his fourth contribution to our history. On the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, he introduced King to the crowd as “the man who personifies the moral leadership of the civil rights revolution.”
The actual march itself, from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, was scheduled to begin at 11:30 a.m. At 11:20 the eager, well-behaved crowd began strolling down the mall in advance of its leaders—who in fact never caught up, the crush of bodies being too thick.
The media was interviewing Randolph and other march dignitaries near the Washington Monument when Randolph noticed the crowd moving and said, according to one reporter, “Wait! That’s my parade.” According to another reporter, he said, “Wait! Those are my people.”
Both were true.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Stowe (1811-96) began writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, her first book, in 1851, at age 40, having borne seven children. She would later say the book was dictated by God, but the precipitating earthly cause was certainly the passage, in 1850, of the Fugitive Slave Law, which legally obliged the people of the North to return escaped slaves to their southern owners. Before that law, it was possible for northerners to overlook the Peculiar Institution down South; now northerners became accomplices in maintaining slavery. And what did they know of slavery? Not much. Southerners gave glowing accounts of it or argued that it was necessary to subdue an inferior race. Few northern writers—Frederick Olmsted was the exception—journeyed south and reported what they found.
Stowe, who had lived 18 years in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, knew slavery from people who had endured it and dared to try and escape. She determined, as she says in the book’s autobiographical “Concluding Remarks,” to “exhibit [slavery] in a living dramatic reality.” The picture she painted caused shock waves throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. 562,000 British women signed a proclamation expressing their admiration and gratitude to her. Queen Victoria wrote a fan letter. The book was banned in the South; young southern whites pledged never to read it. But Stowe continued to get vilifying letters from southerners, including an anonymous package that contained a black human ear.
Many historians would agree with the southern writer Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922) that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “contributed more than any one thing to slavery’s abolition in [Stowe’s] generation.” When President Lincoln met Stowe at the White House during the Civil War, he greeted her by saying, not entirely in jest, “So this is the little lady who made this great war.”
Literary critics have pooh-poohed the book for sentimentality and structural clumsiness. Stowe herself admitted she wrote with “no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.” Nonetheless, the book has an amazing vitality and variety of character. The English writer George Orwell believed that it will outlive the collected works of Virginia Woolf; the American writer Kurt Vonnegut suggested that literary excellence should be measured in units called “stowes,” in honor of the only fiction writer whose work made a real difference in the world.
That was precisely what Stowe wanted to do. She ends the book by directly addressing her readers, northern and southern, admitting that her story has “given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair. . . . Nothing of tragedy can be written, can be spoken, can be conceived, that equals the frightful reality of scenes daily and hourly acting on our shores, beneath the shadow of American law, and the shadow of the cross of Christ.”
Constantly throughout the book Stowe tears her fiction apart to say, in effect, “It’s true! Something like this is going on right now. Only it’s worse!” Her unremitting insistence that readers read through her story into the reality behind it is what moves me most in the book. Nearly all current editions cut the few short footnotes Stowe put in the book, but the cultural historian Russel B. Nye left them in his Washington Square Press edition (1962; out of print), which I read and from whose introduction I have gratefully borrowed here.
In Chapter 12, Haley, a slave-trader, purchases the slave Lucy and sells off her 10-month-old son behind her back. Discovering this, Lucy crumples in tears on the deck of the boat taking her south (a short while later she will commit suicide by throwing herself overboard). Stowe continues:
Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is a vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.”* But Tom, as we see, being a poor ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these.
That footnote is Stowe’s. It shows how deep her fury was. She wanted the reverend son-of-a-bitch who said that awful, stupid thing to be known, held accountable, and reviled.
*Dr. Joel Parker, of Philadelphia.
Stowe, who had lived 18 years in Cincinnati, just across the Ohio River from the slave state of Kentucky, knew slavery from people who had endured it and dared to try and escape. She determined, as she says in the book’s autobiographical “Concluding Remarks,” to “exhibit [slavery] in a living dramatic reality.” The picture she painted caused shock waves throughout the English-speaking world and beyond. 562,000 British women signed a proclamation expressing their admiration and gratitude to her. Queen Victoria wrote a fan letter. The book was banned in the South; young southern whites pledged never to read it. But Stowe continued to get vilifying letters from southerners, including an anonymous package that contained a black human ear.
Many historians would agree with the southern writer Thomas Nelson Page (1853-1922) that Uncle Tom’s Cabin “contributed more than any one thing to slavery’s abolition in [Stowe’s] generation.” When President Lincoln met Stowe at the White House during the Civil War, he greeted her by saying, not entirely in jest, “So this is the little lady who made this great war.”
Literary critics have pooh-poohed the book for sentimentality and structural clumsiness. Stowe herself admitted she wrote with “no more thought of style or literary excellence than the mother who rushes into the street and cries for help to save her children from a burning house thinks of the teachings of the rhetorician or the elocutionist.” Nonetheless, the book has an amazing vitality and variety of character. The English writer George Orwell believed that it will outlive the collected works of Virginia Woolf; the American writer Kurt Vonnegut suggested that literary excellence should be measured in units called “stowes,” in honor of the only fiction writer whose work made a real difference in the world.
That was precisely what Stowe wanted to do. She ends the book by directly addressing her readers, northern and southern, admitting that her story has “given only a faint shadow, a dim picture, of the anguish and despair that are, at this very moment, riving thousands of hearts, shattering thousands of families, and driving a helpless and sensitive race to frenzy and despair. . . . Nothing of tragedy can be written, can be spoken, can be conceived, that equals the frightful reality of scenes daily and hourly acting on our shores, beneath the shadow of American law, and the shadow of the cross of Christ.”
Constantly throughout the book Stowe tears her fiction apart to say, in effect, “It’s true! Something like this is going on right now. Only it’s worse!” Her unremitting insistence that readers read through her story into the reality behind it is what moves me most in the book. Nearly all current editions cut the few short footnotes Stowe put in the book, but the cultural historian Russel B. Nye left them in his Washington Square Press edition (1962; out of print), which I read and from whose introduction I have gratefully borrowed here.
In Chapter 12, Haley, a slave-trader, purchases the slave Lucy and sells off her 10-month-old son behind her back. Discovering this, Lucy crumples in tears on the deck of the boat taking her south (a short while later she will commit suicide by throwing herself overboard). Stowe continues:
Tom had watched the whole transaction from first to last, and had perfect understanding of its results. To him, it looked like something unutterably horrible and cruel, because, poor, ignorant black soul! he had not learned to generalize, and to take enlarged views. If he had only been instructed by certain ministers of Christianity, he might have thought better of it, and seen in it an every-day incident of a lawful trade; a trade which is a vital support of an institution which an American divine tells us has “no evils but such as are inseparable from any other relations in social and domestic life.”* But Tom, as we see, being a poor ignorant fellow, whose reading had been confined entirely to the New Testament, could not comfort and solace himself with views like these.
That footnote is Stowe’s. It shows how deep her fury was. She wanted the reverend son-of-a-bitch who said that awful, stupid thing to be known, held accountable, and reviled.
*Dr. Joel Parker, of Philadelphia.
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