If you had to pick one word almost guaranteed to raise people’s dander here in the United States, I would pick “reparations”. Almost everyone acknowledges that bad and misguided policies in our past caused the oppression, enslavement, relocation if not deaths of millions of Native and African Americans. However, almost every white person today feels that while these things happened long ago, they didn’t cause them so they should be held harmless. In addition, since discrimination by race is now illegal, the problem of racism is solved! Discussion over!
Arizona is attempting to deal with illegal immigration through essentially legislating ethnic profiling, which of course is just legislated racism. Just imagine the ruckus if roles were reversed and whites were judged likely of not being a citizen because they were white. That this is happening in Arizona of all places is more than a little ironic. Whites settled states like Arizona largely by pushing Native Americans and Hispanics off the land where they were the natives. Moreover, the vast majority of Hispanics living in Arizona are legal residents, and native born. But since Hispanics coming from Mexico illegally are considered a pervasive problem, sure, just write a law saying it’s okay to ethnically profile all Hispanics in Arizona!
They say the victors write the history books, and this is true particularly here in the United States. Here our history books give short shrift to issues like the forced relocation of Native Americans but plenty of puffing up how special and blessed our republic is. While Americans certainly enjoy an extraordinary amount of freedom compared with most countries, our history books and our history teachers have omitted a whole lot of pertinent facts that would present a more balanced picture of our history. While I was aware of the general problem, I did not understand the full extent of the problem until I started reading Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, a historian, sociologist, professor and scholar.
Loewen’s in depth research is both fascinating and depressing. Most students studying history have little idea of our real history because, like in the old Soviet Union, so much of it has been airbrushed away. For example, few know that Christopher Columbus and the policies of the colonial Spanish government exterminated the natives of Haiti. Most of us have no idea that more than ninety five percent of the Native Americans living in what is now the United States died from diseases we brought over from Europe.
It’s all there and more, and it’s a sad, sorry but interesting story. For the most part, we know that Patrick Henry would accept only liberty or death, but don’t know that Patrick Henry was also a slaveholder and believed that negroes were intellectually inferior, a common view among whites at the time. We may have heard that Thomas Jefferson was a slaveholder as well. Yet, the handfuls of slaves that he freed upon death were related to him by blood. He actually increased the number of slaves in his household as he aged. His father owned slaves too, which accounted for his relative wealth, but Jefferson’s wealth, his fabulous Monticello estate (which I visited recently), not to mention his huge collection of books, most of which went to the University of Virginia that he founded came from wealth generated by human beings that he enslaved.
Nor are we aware that the first settled colony in what is now the United States was not Jamestown, but one populated by rebellious slaves in what is now South Carolina, slaves who were aided and assisted by inclusive Native Americans. I had no idea that many whites that came to this country joined Native American tribes, finding with them a much freer and inclusive life than was available in their colonies, where they were often oppressed or indentured. I had no idea that in 1864 at Democratic Party rallies people gleefully sang (to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy”) the “Nigger Doodle Dandy” with lyrics like:
Yankee Doodle is no more,
Sunk his name and station;
Nigger Doodle takes his place,
And favors amalgamation.
The sad truth is that we were a largely segregated society because the whites would have it no other way. For much of our history, the United States emulated South Africa under Apartheid. The Civil War solved the issue of slavery, but it did not change that many hearts. Hearts change slowly, over many generations, and racism never seems to die out completely.
In my last post, I mentioned my recent trip to Richmond, Virginia and the proud, almost obnoxious way it clings to its Confederate past. Our governor Bob McDonnell made the national news recently by proclaiming Confederate History Month in Virginia. In his proclamation he left out any reference to the evils of slavery, an omission, he says that was entirely accidental. Umm, right. If it weren’t for the discord between North and South on slavery, there would have been no Civil War. Curiously, only recent Republican governors bother to proclaim Confederate History Month. Democratic governors seem to realize that the Confederacy was a terrible mistake and slavery, the animus that started the Civil War, was a great wrong.
The truth is that even in the 21st century we are still at best only beginning to emerge into a post racial society. Professor Loewen though does an exquisitely professional job of documenting just how pervasive the racism was, why and how it still exists today. It exists due in part to the victors writing the history books. Moreover, selective rewriting our textbooks to fit our current political state of mind is still going on. Perhaps you read about misguided efforts by the Texas Education Board to rewrite history by discounting the role of Thomas Jefferson in the founding of our Republic. Perhaps Texas could start by telling the truth about its own history. White ranchers who craved the land held for generations by Hispanics who inconveniently lived there already formed the short lived Republic of Texas. Not surprisingly, they also considered the Hispanics to be intellectually inferior. The Battle of the Alamo in what is now San Antonio (and which I expect to visit in a few weeks) was a pivotal event in this lost cause. It was one of the reasons Texas decided to join the United States. There was strength in numbers and the United States was acknowledged as a white people’s country.
Much of the animus behind The Tea Party comes from largely unacknowledged racism. The party is overwhelmingly white, Republican and a majority believes crazy things like President Obama was born in Kenya.
What would real reparations look like? It is hard for me to really envision, but it would be justice if all profits earned at the Monticello estates went to scholarships for African Americans. That might make some small amends for Jefferson’s racism and enslavement of over two hundred human beings. It would be a start. In truth, we’ve got a long road ahead of us if we want to be post racial in fact, as well as in law.
Four years ago, I reviewed the book Michaelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King. King’s look at life in and around Rome at the time the Sistine Chapel was painted was fascinating and insightful. It was often revolting to realize how bestial people were back then. King noted, for example, the running of the Jews in Rome during a Roman carnival, which meant that soldiers prodded Jews from behind on horseback with spears. In 2008, I reviewed Alison Weir’s also excellent book on the life of Queen Elizabeth I from the same time. It too was full of depressing stories of barbarity of man against man, including descriptions of various notables of the era being drawn and quartered.
Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley chronicles the key periods of a now largely forgotten time when the Mediterranean Sea was fiercely contested between the Ottoman Empire, the Barbary States and various Christian states. Empires of the Sea is not for those easily grossed out. It takes a steady stomach to read the wrenching details of the various battles and campaigns, much of them waged by fleets of fast running galleys. At the same time, the book is fascinating and even riveting. It is the sort of book that is eminently readable and hard to put down, as well as meticulously researched. It is full of surprising detail and depth. It is easy to imagine yourself at the Siege of Malta or the Battle of Lepanto caught up in horrific events of human bloodshed that are hard to believe actually happened.
The late 15th and early 16th centuries were a time when, if your nation was not at war you were probably doing something wrong. A nation was lucky if they were fighting just one war at a time. Some nations, like the city-state of Venice, did their damnedest to buy peace from their oppressors, but it often came to naught. For back then, as is still unfortunately true today, religion and imperialism triumphed a lot of common sense.
The Ottoman Empire may be as close as the Muslim world ever got to a true Muslim empire. The remnants of the empire comprise what is now Turkey, but at the time, the Ottoman Empire was busy trying to expand both eastward and westward. Eastward meant frequent wars with Persia. Westward expansion typically meant campaigns in Hungary and Austria. There was also the battleground of the Mediterranean Sea. The Ottoman Empire controlled roughly the eastern half of the sea, although Venice controlled Cyprus and a little known religious organization called The Knights of Saint John occupied the island of Rhodes on Turkey’s coast. Greece at the time was part of the Ottoman Empire.
On the western side of the Mediterranean Sea was a country called The Holy Roman Empire that you may have read about in history class. Basically, it was an imperialist Spanish state which occupied parts of France and Italy, periodically parts of Portugal as well as vassal states to the north and east like The Netherlands, Austria and Hungary. The north coast of Africa was home to set of loosely aligned outlaw Arab states that today we think of as the Barbary States.
Roger Crowley takes us into these turbulent times in the Mediterranean. The book is anchored around four pivotal events. It begins with a successful siege of the island of Rhodes by the Turks. We learn that the Ottoman army was experts in the art of siege. Even so, they had their hands full trying to capture the well-fortified Rhodes from the Knights of Saint John, who had tenaciously clung to it for centuries. The details of the siege are horrific and bloody, as you might expect, but in some ways, they are a mere prequel to much bloodier sieges and battles to come.
Between major encounters, we learn of the horrific piracy in the western Mediterranean by The Barbary States, principally organized by bloodthirsty creatures straight from the id like Hayrettin. A typical raid would consist of a few dozen well-armed galleys overrunning a town or village. The men were quickly killed, and the women and children were sold into slavery. Crowley informs us that far more whites were sold into slavery during these times (largely by other whites) than were blacks centuries later. Of course, the place was also plundered for all its wealth. While most of the barbarity was inflicted by those aligned by the Muslim Barbary States, Spain and Venice were not beyond similar exploits. Both Christians and Muslims were supposed to represent higher values, but it is clear that cruelty was boundless on both sides back then. Gentlemen were few. Barbarians were aplenty, and many of the plunderers delighted in the most hideous acts of cruelty and terror. Crowley leaves nothing to our imagination.
The Siege of Rhodes leads up to another huge Ottoman siege of the island of Malta, which sits south of Sicily. The siege and the perseverance of the islanders against great odds is probably the highlight of the book. The descriptions of the siege are riveting. A loosely-aligned federation of Christian states that were supposed to come to the aid of Christian Malta largely turned their backs on their fellow Christians. Despite overwhelming Ottoman and Barbary forces, no relief and poor preparations, somehow the residents of Malta manage to survive the surge. The descriptions of both the siege and the destruction afterwards, which killed tens of thousands of people, should have your hair standing on edge.
The Siege of Malta at least had the effect of organizing the various Christian states against the common enemy. (It should be noted that Christians probably had much of what was inflicted on them coming, as these events can be seen as payback for the various crusades centuries earlier.) Pope Pius V, feeling the barbarians moving toward his gates, successfully convinced King Philip of the Holy Roman Empire along with the city-state of Venice to inflict coordinated revenge. However, they could not organize effectively enough to keep the Ottomans from laying siege to Cyprus. The Venetians endured a long and brutal siege on their fortress of Famagusta on Cyprus. A noble surrender ends tragically with the beheading of hundreds of Knights of Saint John.
The book moves toward a swift conclusion with a description of a massive naval battle off Greece that seems to have been swallowed up by history but which Crowley details with chilling realism. The Battle of Lepanto was a naval battle of a size that had never been seen before and has probably not been equaled since. It involved hundreds of galleys and turned into a rare Christian victory. The size of the battle is hard to comprehend as it occurred at close quarters, but was lead by the famous Don Juan. How big and bad was the battle? It would take nearly three hundred years before a bigger battle would occur on either land or sea. Even the fictional siege of Minas Tirith depicted in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings does not quite compare with this epic sea battle. Yet, the Battle of Lepanto is largely lost to history. Cervantes was present at the battle, and his character Don Quixote speaks of the horror of the battle in the book of the same name.
All these sieges and violence seem so pointless centuries later. Both the Ottoman Empire and the Holy Roman Empire are long gone. The Vatican remains but Venice is just a city in Italy. Ultimately, no side won. Short-term booty there was aplenty, but only at the cost of enormous suffering by multitudes of innocents. Centuries later it is clear these massively bloody events were just an epic waste of time, money and lives, as our modern events will likely be seen in a few centuries. All empires are doomed to contract at some point as they overstretch the land they try to govern. Still, as history this era is compelling. While ultimately pointless, the individual events of the period still fascinate when their detail can be exposed. The book’s focus on events at sea during this era, instead of the land wars that get most of the attention, is long overdue.
If you are in general not much into reading history, you should make an exception for Empires of the Sea. Actual history can often be far more compelling and fascinating than anything you can dream up. While barbarity still occurs on a massive scale, rarely does it reach these sorts of magnitudes today. Thankfully, we are generally more civilized today. While some crazy neoconservatives would be happy to emulate the cruelty of those days again in CIA torture chambers, hopefully they will remain a small minority. After reading Empires of the Sea, you realize that only fools or ignoramuses would want to revert to those crazy and barbaric days of yore.
The corpse of the last decade has not even started cooling but pundits are all over the place proclaiming what an awful decade it was. No question about it: on the macro level, the years 2000 through 2009 had little to recommend them. Most of us will not look fondly on the decade. At best, our real income stayed even but in many cases our net income declined, much of it eaten away by out of control health care costs. Then of course there was September 11, 2001, which, for us Americans, was the defining day of our decade. Naturally, we attacked the problem of terrorism using 20th century tactics that had proven widely discredited. This quickly resulted in quagmires in both Iraq and Afghanistan costing us thousands of lives and wasting trillions of dollars. Just when we thought it could not get any worse, our laissez-faire never-think-about-tomorrow economy all came tumbling down only to be rescued by massive overspending. Our overleveraged country went into what is now widely called the Great Recession. It was not as bad as the Great Depression but oh Lord it sure was not good. We start 2010 technically out of the recession but as a nation feeling like we were gang raped. Only, we mostly did this to ourselves through rampant selfishness and a lack of anything resembling fiscal discipline.
I am glad to say goodbye to the 2000s. However, I have also lived long enough to realize that most of the decades I have lived through sucked. Of course, many of you reading this were not even alive back then. I was born at the crest of the baby boom in 1957, so I can speak accurately from 1960 and beyond. In addition, I can also speak with a reasonably informed opinion about my parents early years and how they saw things. Let me take you on a tour of the decades from 1930 or so. Maybe you will appreciate that the aught decade did not suck as much as you thought.
The 1930s. This was unquestionably the worst decade of the 20th century, although the Great Depression actually began in the 1920s. For my deceased mother, born in 1920, the 1930s were a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad decade that framed the rest of her life and came close to destroying her spiritually. This was because like most Americans, she was a victim of the Great Depression, but even worse, she was one of a dozen children in an immigrant household, which meant she experienced the worst of the worst of it. It is hard for us today to understand how bad things were during those times, but you can get an idea of it from books like this one or watching movies like Seabiscuit. You think ten percent unemployment is bad? During the worst of the Great Depression, it was double that. The decade ended with the worst over but with America feeling something like the Great Recession we endured the last few years. For almost everyone in this country and overseas, it was a miserable decade full of painful lessons about the precariousness of life.
The 1940s. If you studied your history books, you know that the Second World War framed this decade. The only thing you can say that was good about this war is that it kicked us out of the Great Depression. Tens of millions of soldiers and civilians lost their lives, and fortunes beyond imagining we spent trying to win wars on two fronts. The war killed an uncle I never met. In the end, both Germany and Japan were defeated but it left pretty much every country except the United States destitute and impoverished. The Second World War destroyed the British Empire. While it left America ascendant, new trouble was stirring in the Soviet Union. A new and costly Cold War was beginning. America’s nuclear trump card was to be quickly neutered when the Soviet Union also figured out how to build the bomb. The decade ended with the Chinese Communist revolution. Our new world looked painted red.
The 1950s. The rapid spread of communism left Americans scared and paranoid. We quickly were bogged down in our first unwinnable war on the Korean peninsula, which ended not with peace, but a cessation of hostilities and only when President Eisenhower threatened to nuke North Korea. Communist hysteria was everywhere. Joseph McCarthy, the alcoholic and gleefully abusive senator from Wisconsin, whipped its flames. People were harassed or imprisoned for imagined or real (but generally entirely lawful) associations with communists and socialists; some died from guilt by association. A number of severe recessions rocked the decade. America became puritanical and plastic. Toward the end of the decade, the Soviet Union shot a satellite into space and we tried desperately to think of an appropriate response.
The 1960s. To quote Charles Dickens, they were the best of times and the worst of times. The best of times came in response to Sputnik. America quickly became ascendant in the space race and ended the decade putting men on the surface of the moon, a feat so mind boggling that it is still hard for us to get our minds around it. The worst of times were the Vietnam War, which framed the decade and much of the 1970s as well. We could not quite afford the Great Society we created and it did not work as advertised. Millions died in Vietnam in a stupid and pointless war. The civil rights struggle was rampant. Our cities burned in riots and our best and brightest died from assassins’ bullets, including Martin Luther King, Malcolm X and two Kennedys. We ended it by electing the biggest crook to ever sit in the Oval Office: Richard M. Nixon.
The 1970s. This was my coming of age decade and I remember it well. We spent years trying to get out of Vietnam. Vietnamization in the end turned out to only be a ruse to let us withdraw from Vietnam. As our forces withdrew, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army quickly overran the country. We left humiliated and defeated. All this was happening whilst Watergate was unfolding and we found our constitutional system rocked to its core. The good news is that unlike during the Bush Administration, it worked in holding power accountable, mainly Congress took itself as a coequal branch of government seriously. We had two major oil shocks in the 1970s. Inflation routinely ran close to or above ten percent a year while unemployment was also high. While we waited in line to buy gas, Iranian revolutionaries invaded our embassy in Tehran and held Americans captive for 444 days. Disco was briefly in. President Carter wanted us to conserve energy and wear sweaters. We blew off his common sense and instead elected Ronald Reagan who promised us the plasticity of the Eisenhower era again.
The 1980s. If it was Morning in America again, you could not tell for the first half of the decade due to what was then the worst recession since the Great Depression. Reagan’s solution to solving the Cold War was to outspend the Soviet Union, at the cost of reckless federal spending and huge deficits. So many things went wrong in this decade including:
A bombing in Beirut that killed hundreds of Marines
A silly war to stop Communism in Grenada of all places
A Savings and Loan debacle that after our most recent bailout now looks minor
The Iran-Contra affair in which we helped make Iran an even bigger threat to us
Our helping insurgents in Afghanistan fight the Soviet occupation, who we would abandon when we would find it convenient. They would train their hatred on us in 2001.
Reagan was a great communicator but in reality, a lousy president who stayed largely detached from government and made sure he got his afternoon naps. His staff largely ran the government. Toward the end of his final term, it was clear he was turning into a space cadet. Later we would learn he had Alzheimer’s Disease.
The 1990s. To the extent we had a great decade, this was it. With the Cold War gone we could spend money on things that mattered again. Still, it was no cakewalk. It began with the Persian Gulf War, which was militarily successful but inconveniently caused a bad recession, resulting in voters turning George H.W. Bush out of office. Bill Clinton probably won only because spoiler Ross Perot got votes that would have otherwise gone to Bush. We had real prosperity in the 1990s and family incomes at all levels rose steadily. We found a good balance between taxing and spending and the government lived within its means. The decade ended with a substantial federal surplus. Still, there were a scattering of seismic events that precluded bad things to come: the bombing of the federal center in Oklahoma City by our homegrown terrorist Timothy McVeigh as well as bombings of embassies overseas. Republicans got into a huge snit with Bill Clinton because he lied about oral sex with an intern while the rest of America truly didn’t give a damn. Yet, Republicans impeached him basically because he was not a Republican. The Republicans also delivered on their Contract with America that turned into a contract on America, principally when they shut down the government in 1995 in a mean partisan snit. The tech bubble bubbled to overflowing by the end of the decade, but we saw the emergence of the Internet economy and the real delivery of the information age.
In summary, we have been through a rotten decade, but some perspective is in order. Most decades are rotten, but life goes on somehow. If you want to feel nostalgic about a decade, feel nostalgic about the 1990s. None of the other decades deserve fond remembrance.
For your amusement, here are a few mini-reviews of movies and shows I have seen recently.
The Men Who Stare at Goats
If you put George Clooney, Ewan McGreggor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey in the same movie will it necessarily be funny? To me this was the existential question of The Men Who Stare at Goats. Funny is as funny does, and this movie does have its funny moments. However, this is no Borat or Brüno. Its humor is far subtler. Whether you will find it humorous or not depends in large part on whether you think its premise is humorous.
Its premise is that during the 1970s the U.S. military, afraid that the Soviet Union was winning the Cold War in the new psychic operations battlefield, decided to invest some time and money of its own to create a set of New Age psychic warriors. The movie does have some loose basis in fact. Jim Channon, a Lieutenant Colonel who served in Vietnam proposed a First Earth Battalion to the Pentagon. This new force would win the hearts and minds of the enemy by using tactics like positive vibrations and sparkly eyes. In real life, this did not get much beyond a Pentagon sponsored mailing list. In the movie, George Clooney plays Lyn Cassady, the most gifted of this allegedly defunct Special Forces unit. Among his talents is that he can stare at a goat with such intensity that it will keel over dead.
Ann Arbor Daily Telegram reporter Bob Wilton (Ewan McGreggor) runs into Cassady in the country of Jordon, who he soon associates with a crazy man he interviewed back in Michigan who told him about this Special Force. Before you know it, both he and Cassady are venturing into Iraq. Cassady apparently is on special assignment. Cassady uses his dubious psychological skills to outwit a few kidnappers, but they end up lost in the desert eventually, only to discover that a psychic corps is already out there. However, this group was contracted out, like much of our War in Iraq. The movie comes complete with lots of flashbacks where we meet the corps legendary founder Bill Django (Jeff Bridges), who is clearly playing Jim Channon.
The movie is strange but just plausible enough to suspend disbelief. It’s not a bad way to spend 94 minutes in a theater. It will keep your attention as well as keep you mildly amused. Ultimately, it tries too hard to make a movie out of a premise that has little humor in it. The main reason to see the movie is to see Clooney, McGreggor, Bridges and Spacey interact on screen and do their best with this thin material. I found myself chuckling at times but this is not one of those movies where you are on the floor laughing. It is probably worth renting but is nothing overly special. It is clearly aimed at the Catch-22 crowd. I give it a modest 2.8 points on my 4-point scale.
Paper Clips (2004)
I did not know what to expect of this documentary, but since it was on my sister’s Netflix list and she liked it, I added it to mine. Whitwell, Tennessee is the unlikely location for a story about understanding the Holocaust. Two teachers were looking for a project for students at the Whitwell middle school that would help them understand the magnitude of the Holocaust. Whitwell is one of these mostly lily white towns in the middle of Appalachia, and seemingly not fertile territory for empathizing with the plight of the Jews or learning about discrimination in general.
To help the students understand the magnitude of the Holocaust, the teachers start the students on a project to collect six million paperclips, one for every Jew killed in the Holocaust. The students start writing various people and organizations looking for donations of paperclips. At first, the paperclips trickle in, and then become a torrent. Each contribution is counted and meticulously cataloged. Soon, rooms are bulging with paperclips and the press is starting to pay attention.
The students make friends with actual Holocaust victims, who come to share their story. Over several years, succeeding classes of middle schoolers continue the project. Eventually the school receives an authentic boxcar that was used to transport Jews to concentration camps. It is turned into a memorial and filled, of course, with paperclips. You can visit the mini memorial today if life takes you through Whitwell, Tennessee.
The documentary succeeds in helping students insulated from the ugliness of much of the world understand the prejudice and discrimination inflicted on different people far removed from them. They open bridges into a wider world that they would otherwise not come in contact with. If the documentary has a flaw, it is that despite its premise it is not particularly engaging. It could have done with a lot less saccharine music. Still, it is an unusual story and worthy of capturing. If I were teaching in middle school it would be required viewing by my students
I’ll leave it unrated. If you feel you need a lesson in empathy, it is worth seeing.
The Music Man at The Kennedy Center
When you go to hear a musical in concert, particularly with a pops orchestra, you should not set your expectations too high. Last Friday, we took my father (age 83) to The Kennedy Center to hear the music from the musical The Music Man performed live by the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Marvin Hamlisch. The Music Man is his favorite musical. Growing up we often heard the sound track to The Music Man during our languid Sunday mornings.
What we got was a greatly abbreviated version of The Music Man, partially staged in front of the orchestra. Shirley Jones, who played Marian the Librarian in the 1962 movie, was part of the cast. At 75, Ms. Jones is way too old to play Marian, and arguably way too old to play Mrs. Paroo, Marian’s mother. Actually, Rebecca Luker who sang and performed Marian’s part is also too old to play Marian, who is supposed to be 26. (Ms. Luker is 48.) It didn’t really matter though. Luker was terrific in the part, and made me wish I had seen her perform the full musical on Broadway back in 2000. Patrick Cassidy, the son of Shirley Jones and Jack Cassidy, played Professor Harold Hill. He also directed the performance. Cassidy’s performance was not particularly noteworthy, but nothing for which he should feel ashamed.
The Washington Post found little to like about the concert except for Ms. Luker. The Post misses the point. The point of the concert was for us to hear Ms. Luker, enjoy an afternoon with the NSO Pops, check out Shirley Jones (who is aging very gracefully) and have a good time during a busy holiday weekend. I certainly had no expectations that I would be seeing anything of Broadway quality, which is why it was so nice to have Ms. Luker doing such an excellent job both singing and acting in the part. It was also nice to be four rows from both performers on a blustery November afternoon. After the performance, both Shirley Jones and Patrick Cassidy shared a few intimacies with the audience. Ms. Jones was pregnant with Patrick when The Music Man was being filmed. During the final intimate scene at the footbridge, Robert Preston felt Patrick kick and exclaimed, “What was that!” Twenty years later, Patrick related that he finally got a chance to meet Robert Preston. “Without missing a beat,” he said, “Mr. Preston said, ‘We already met.’”
The real treat for me was simply to see my father dabbing his eyes during the performance. It is hard to touch someone’s heart but on this one rare occasion, I fully succeeded. I am glad I was there to enjoy these moments with the best father a son could ever want.
No question about it. Republicans are in the doghouse, for reasons I outlined recently. Even prominent Republicans like Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security, who could probably wrest the Pennsylvania senate seat from new “Democrat” Arlen Specter, prefer to just so no. The brand is badly tarnished. You have to look hard to find Republicans worthy of admiration.
You might expect that if I were to memorialize a Republican, I would memorialize former New York state representative and HUD Secretary Jack Kemp, who passed away recently. There is no question that Kemp had a distinguished career, which included being Bob Dole’s running mate in the 1996 election. Kemp was certainly a decent man but I will let others memorialize Kemp. Instead, I wish to draw your attention to Robert B. Choate Jr., who passed away on May 3, 2009 at the age of 84. Choate was a Republican. Today he would no longer fit inside the much smaller tent that is today’s insular Republican Party. Choate was more of the Rockefeller type of Republican, a wing that has virtually been purged from the Republican Party.
Choate inherited most of his wealth from his father, who published a newspaper. In spite of being a Republican, he was a progressive in the best sense of the word. In the 1950s while traveling overseas, he contracted hepatitis. During his convalescence, he read the memoirs of civil rights leader Walter White. The book transformed Choate’s life. Through the memoir, Choate learned just how horrible poverty actually was. He vowed to do his part to reduce poverty. He was a major force in Washington for the hunger lobby and worked closely with organizations like Citizens Crusade Against Poverty. Because of his Republican credentials, during Richard Nixon’s term in office, he was appointed to work with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. There he led a groundbreaking study child nutrition in America.
What he discovered appalled him. In many cases, he learned that children had enough calories, but lacked basic nutrition. He quickly focused on breakfast cereals. He discovered that most breakfast cereals had plenty of sugar but little in the way of the nutrition required by a growing body. Today’s Republicans would leave this as a problem for the free market to solve or ignore. Instead, in 1970 Choate directly took on the nation’s cereal manufacturers. Choate coined the term “empty calories”, which defined foods high in calories but with little nutrition. Of the sixty cereals he studied, he found 40 of them were full of empty calories.
The cereal industry protested, but his doggedness was effective. Within years, cereal manufacturers added nutritional labels to their cereals. Today we take food labeling for granted. Yet without Choate at the vanguard, we might still be ignorant of the calories and lack of nutrition in the many packaged products that we eat.
Call him Mr. “Empty Calories”. His term has stuck with us these last forty years. It is almost impossible to discuss nutrition in America today without using the phrase. America is clearly in the grip of an obesity epidemic but thanks to Choate, we at least know why. Essentially, we are eating a lot of crap that our body doesn’t need. Moreover, because the food we eat tastes good but does not fill us up, we want to eat more of it, which means that our waistlines keep expanding.
Americans at last are starting to heed the advice that Choate promulgated nearly forty years ago. In the last decade, we have seen an explosion of supermarkets emphasizing organic foods high in nutrition and taste. While it is easier to find nutritional information for groceries, for the most part we do not have the same information about the food we eat in restaurants. I suspect if Choate were alive today that he would be pressing Congress to have restaurants disclose the nutritional information of their dishes.
Choate, a mere citizen activist, transformed America. Americans today live longer lives, but in many ways due to our poor eating and exercise habits, our quality of life has deteriorated. I am hoping I will be one of those Americans that take Choate’s advice to heart. For many of us who do, we can look forward to long and healthy lives, giving us many decades of an extended quality life to enjoy.
Many people are concerned about choosing life, but fewer are concerned ensuring our quality of life. For that, we can thank Robert B. Choate.
Cuba lies just off the Florida Keys but for most of us, it might as well be in Outer Mongolia. It is technically illegal for American citizens to visit Cuba unless you have a certain status (journalist, politician or, more recently, if you have family in Cuba). While it may be technically against the law to visit Cuba in practice there are no sanctions for doing so. You just need permission to catch a flight through another country. The Cuban government is anxious to part you from your nice, fat American dollars.
This February, the Cuban Revolution turned fifty years old. From reading Havana Nocturne by T.J. English, this is truly remarkable. For much of its history Cuba was the prototypical banana republic, run by all sorts of figurehead presidents and dictators, many of whom were actually at the whim of capitalist masters in the United States. This fifty-year reign of socialism was possible only due to Fidel Castro and his dictatorship. In truth, he remains one of Cuba’s many dictators, often ruthless but at least unique in that he does not appear to be corruptible. It is remarkable that his state has survived so long, although having complete control of the army, the police and a network of spies obviously helped. It is unclear if Cuba’s socialism will long survive Castro’s death.
From reading Havana Nocturne, I learned that Cuba’s communist state was a commensurate result of the egregious corruption that preceded it. For decades, U.S. presidents and Congress have railed against Castro and his communist state. However, as English makes clear, Castro was made possible through the unenlightened policies of many U.S. administrations. FDR, Truman and Eisenhower all placed their hopes in various Cuban strongmen, even though they knew they were corrupt and the Cuban people were getting the shaft. Time and again in Cuba, our capitalistic impulses overrode our common sense and democratic principles.
For those enamored with unfettered capitalism, Cuba in the 1950s was an ideal laboratory. The results were not pretty. The United States was very concerned that its sugar and other companies on the island remain unfettered; we did not worry about the costs of these policies on its people. We largely looked the other way while strongmen like Fulgencio Batista opened the doors wide to the Mafia. In the 1950s, Cuba in general and Havana in particular became thoroughly corrupt. Mafia interests built huge resorts and casinos that resulted in graft in hitherto unseen scales. Batista was on the take and squirreled away millions in Swiss banks, but Cuba in general was awash with graft. The Cuban military and police ensured that the people went along and secretive death squads silenced most opposition.
Tourists, principally American, were largely mindless of the corruption. They were attracted to Cuba like moths to a flame. For those longing from an escape from the neo-Puritanism of the 1950s, Cuba was their refuge. John F. Kennedy was among the prominent politicians who came to Cuba and indulged his wild side with lavish, Mafia-financed sexual orgies. Pretty much any eccentricity or kink could be satisfied in Cuba in the 1950s. Whores were plentiful and cheap. Live sex shows were bountiful and in classier places were part of large stage shows catering to hundreds of tourists at a time. Even homosexuals could find some tolerance for their lifestyle in the red light districts in and around Havana.
All this was made possible by the Mafia, which saw Cuba as its parasitic state. The notable mobster Meyer Lansky acted as something of a Mafia CEO for mob interests in Cuba. Taciturn by nature but ruthlessly ambitious, Lansky was the primary catalyst that turned Havana into a Mafia run empire. He made sure that all his cronies, even mobsters he did not like, had their share of the Havana action and its profits, which at the time seemed potentially limitless. His goal was to create a state the Mafia could corrupt and control indefinitely. Until the Cuban Revolution finally undid it, he found in Batista the means to realize his vision.
Those fascinated by the underworld will find much to enjoy in this meticulously researched history, which explores how the Mafia so successfully exploited Cuba. The result was a 1950s version of Sodom and Gomorrah. Every imaginable vice was available in Cuba, for a price of course. Las Vegas had but a shadow of its vice. Cheap tourist flights to and from Havana brought in people who seemed to have limitless interest in gambling, boozing, floorshows, dancing and whoring. In spite of its corruption, Havana of the 1950s was often classy. Its gambling casinos were unrivaled in size and usually included ornate showrooms that booked the top stars, including Sammy Davis Jr. and Frank Sinatra. The Mafia fascinated Sinatra. He even purchased a share of a Mafia run resort hotel.
Though the setting is principally in Cuba, English explores the many mobsters in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s, their personalities, connections, feuds and rivalries. While most mobsters were more interested in money than violence, some had few qualms about killing others to advance their interests. Lansky was amazingly successful at getting mobsters to cooperate. They realized all could prosper if they could get along. Lansky’s low-key nature was the key to making this large criminal enterprise work.
For such pragmatic businessmen, greed was the mob’s eventual undoing. The Mafia eventually allowed their empire to grow too large and too corrupt. Since their success depended on Batista’s henchmen to keep the Cuban people in check, the larger the corruption grew the more the Cuban people resented it. As English makes clear, Cuba is communist today largely due to the egregious corruption of the 1950s in Cuba. Fidel Castro, his brother Raul and fellow revolutionaries like Che Guevara found a country ripe for revolution and sick of exploitation by foreigners.
It seems likely that Cuba’s experiment with socialism will end with the Castros. Based on its history, it is likely to return to its banana republic status, with another succession of strongmen and corruption. Perhaps though this time it will be different and U.S. administrations will be more focused on its people than exploiting the country and its people for its abundant resources.
T.J. English performs a valuable service by meticulously exposing the details of this period in Cuban history. It is a time that predates a middle-aged man like me. Without this book, these details would be lost to history. Since they have now been captured for posterity, perhaps both the United States and the Cuban people will not revisit these mistakes in the decades ahead.
Need a passage to India but cannot afford the ticket? Try spending $18.00 for the paperback version of Indian Summer (2007), which chronicles the ignoble end of the British Empire in India. Historian Alex von Tunzelmann (a she, by the way), in her very first book, puts together an often-fascinating portrait of the lives of the people that shaped India and Pakistan and the British overlords who saw it through its violent transition from colony to independent nation.
Through her voluminous research, von Tunzelmann takes us into the intimate life of Mohandas Gandhi, the famous pacifist whose nonviolent fasts could move empires. Gandhi though turns out to be something of an ancillary character. He is explored in depth, but von Tunzelmann turns most of her attention on the handsome Louis Mountbatten and his lovely and amazing wife Edwina Mountbatten. In his time, Louis Mountbatten was known as “Dickie”. Today he is best known as the paternal grandfather of Prince Charles, and the father of Queen Elizabeth’s husband Prince Philip. Dickie and Edwina lived oversized lives, which for a few years took them to India, with Dickie as its last viceroy and its first governor-general. Dickie’s unenviable job was to withdraw British forces from India, which had been bled dry from the Second World War, and which could simply no longer afford its empire. He had to do this while peacefully creating two new countries and without igniting a war between the new countries of India and Pakistan. Principally he had to arbitrate between two ardent nationalists, Jawahalar Nehru, who was to become India’s first prime minister and Mohammad Ali Jinnah, who would have the same honor leading the new country of Pakistan.
To say Dickie found his job challenging would be an understatement. Imagine trying to come to find consensus between polarizing figures like Grover Norquist and Michael Moore. Nehru and Jinnah of course were but one of many characters influencing the birth of these new nations. The process was gloriously messy and certain to leave a bad taste in any viceroy’s mouth. Dickie’s career had been more mediocre than exceptional, but his oversized ego and noble blood led him to think he had the gift of succeeding in anything he did.
Dickie did have certain powerful assets, principally his charming wife Edwina, who could become friends with virtually anyone and if the gentleman was sufficiently interesting, lovers as well. Dickie married Edwina in part for her fortune, but they were not married too long before they realized they were temperamentally unsuited for each other. Dickie was devoted and simple minded. Edwina was sociable, brilliant, full of enormous energy and polyamorous to boot. She found little compunction to live her life by established rules. Her enormous wealth ensured she would not have to do so anyhow. Nor after a while did Dickie seem to mind. He found that to love Edwina he had to give her space to be who she was. This meant that through most of their marriage, they lived chaste lives, sometimes together but often apart, while Edwina frequently played the field. Dickie seemed to be born without the jealousy gene and appeared grateful for any time they could have together when they did not fight, which was often.
Anyone suspecting Edwina of being a trollop would be mistaken. She was quite discriminatory with who she slept with and with the right man she could be an extraordinary partner and lover. She preferred the exotic lover to the ordinary kind, which partially explains why shortly after meeting Nehru their relationship blossomed from good friend to lover. Through their extraordinary correspondence, much of it preserved and parsed over by von Tunzelmann, we learn that Edwina and Nehru’s both saw each other as the central love of their lives. They were never happier than when they were together, although those times were often fleeting.
The book thus is part soap opera and part history but mostly a page-turner. If you had to pick one character for whom this book is really about, it is Edwina Mountbatten. It is hard to finish the book and not see Edwina as one of the most remarkable women of the 20th Century. She was fully liberated far before it was acceptable. She had boundless energy and boundless compassion, most of it for the poorest and most wretched among us. Moreover, she was absolutely fearless. Von Tunzelmann walks us through numerous occasions, particularly during the violent partition that created India and Pakistan, when Edwina daily put her own life in danger trying to sort through the unfolding human tragedy of nearly unfathomable proportions. Millions died because of wars associated with the partition. Edwina could often be found in refugee camps organizing aid, tending to the wounded, ministering the spiritually bereft, and even sorting through the piles of bodies found on the sides of the road. While some would be shocked by her libidinous love life, unquestionably she was a woman of great love and character. Women of any age looking for a woman to admire would have a hard time finding a better example than Edwina Mountbatten. She lived an authentic and fully engaged life on her own terms. Despite her enormous wealth, she connected more with the common person than Fidel Castro did with the humble Cuban. I hope that someday Hollywood (or Bollywood) will do her story justice on the screen.
Yes, this book is indeed a passage to India, and you are along for the ride amidst of often fascinating and controversial characters. You can be thousands of miles away and still feel the heat of New Delhi on a one hundred seventeen degree summer day. You also learn in great detail about the many factions and political tensions in India and Pakistan, and the horrible political violence that occurred in Kashmir and elsewhere. It is sad to see so many of these tensions still abound today, as witnessed most recently in the Mumbai terrorist attacks that murdered hundreds of innocents.
To make sense of the present, it helps to understand the past. Von Tunzelmann performs an admirable service by explaining the genesis of Indian and Pakistan quagmire, as well as the end of the British Empire, in a fascinating and intimate way. Since she is young, I hope she can give us many more histories like this in the years ahead. I will likely be first in line to purchase them.
I can think of few places that I would want to be less than in Adolph Hitler’s bunker during the last few weeks of the Third Reich. The Russians were approaching from the East, the Americans from the West, and the proud city of Berlin was quickly being reduced to rubble by invading forces. A few German armies outside the city still fought but were quickly being encircled. They were unable to assist Adolph Hitler in his final days. In April 1945, Hitler’s empire, which had at one time extended from the Russian Front to Northern Africa, was rapidly being reduced to a strip a thousand meters wide in downtown Berlin. Some Germans, including a boy on the edge of adolescence, rallied to defend the city. Many that did not were shot or hung as traitors. Artillery shells rained down on central Berlin. In the bunker beneath the city, the final remnants of the Third Reich catered to an increasingly dysfunctional Adolph Hitler, tried to reconcile the dichotomy between their devotion and their understanding that the Reich was ending, drank to excess, partied and fornicated.
At least that is the story presented by Traudi Junge in the movie Downfall. Junge was the personal secretary to Adolph Hitler, and lived with him in the bunker during those last days. She was one of a few to escape and lead something like a normal life afterwards. As played by Alexandra Marie Lara, Junge was a pretty, lithe and early twenty-something single woman dutifully devoted to the Fuehrer but blithely unaware just how evil her boss was. She also possessed an ability to remain largely unruffled by the chaos around her. These turned out to be useful survival skills in those final days. Somehow, despite the death outside and the dying and amputations inside the bunker she dutifully knew her place, always looking clean and fresh, and could faithfully take dictation or type when called asked.
The real Traudi Junge, who survived nearly to the 21st century, is interviewed at the start and conclusion of the film. This, and a brief scene near the start of the film capturing the night she was hired by Hitler, are virtually the only parts of this two and a half hour movie that do not occur in or around Hitler’s bunker. The film is disturbing for its high level of violence but like most fine great war movies feels uncannily accurate.
Hitler’s inner circle ranged from the fanatically devoted, to the pragmatic realists and to those who found escape in drinking or dancing. Hitler himself veers sharply between lucid and crazy. At times, he seems resigned to his defeat and at other times, he feels that he will somehow turn things around and resurrect the Third Reich. His mistress Eva Braun, on the other hand, is portrayed as something of morale officer. Knowing her end is imminent, she seems determined to dance, have fun and spread some cheer until the moment of death. You might say she fiddled while Berlin burned.
Bruno Ganz’s portrayal of Adolph Hitler is chilling, intimate, memorable and feels eerily accurate. Hitler is not always portrayed as mad. At times, you see something in him resembling a common man. Mostly though he is a man consumed by passion, his ego and his feelings of righteousness. Faults ultimately lie in his staff and his generals, but never in himself.
The most chilling of many portrayals in this movie is probably Corinna Harfouch’s, who has the dubious privilege of portraying Mrs. Goebbels, the Ann Coulter of the Nazi Era. Mrs. Goebbels knows only unquestioned duty, so of course she dutifully drugs then poisons her own children as the end nears. If her children have to die, she figures, it is best if their mother does the evil deed. Yet, she is one of many memorable characters in this movie. The subject matter may be hard to endure, but once you begin watching Downfall, it is hard to turn it off. It is riveting.
Downfall thus is one of those really good but awful movies, excellently directed and acted but certain to churn your stomach if not empty it altogether. The end of this war is portrayed in all its garish horror. It should be hard to feel any sympathy but you do at times for men, women and children foolishly devoted to this wretch of a man, as well as the dutiful and patriotic soldiers doing their best in an impossible situation.
As I age, I am more and more drawn to history. Surveys report few students these days find history interesting. The 1998 book, The Life of Elizabeth I, by Alison Weir will dispel this notion. The book, which covers the 45 years of the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, is a page-turner. It is hard to put down and provides a fascinating, intimate and detailed look into the life of the last of the Tudor sovereigns, as well as the many fascinating characters that populated her court.
Elizabeth was born in 1533 to Anne Boleyn, one of King Henry VIII’s many wives who he found convenient to have executed. Having your mother executed by your father is a very traumatic thing for any daughter to deal with. Elizabeth herself once came close to being executed too and spent many months in the Tower of London. She was imprisoned by her half sister Queen Mary I for her Protestant faith. In the end, she was released and a dying Queen Mary permitted her to succeed her. She was crowned at age 25 and reigned for 45 long years. She remains one of England’s longest serving sovereigns. England’s current queen, Queen Elizabeth II, is one of the few to serve longer. During her reign, luminaries like William Shakespeare and Sir Francis Bacon were contemporaries.
Those lusting for a female president would find her a great example of a female leader. She was very well educated and spoke fluently in French, German, Latin, Spanish and Italian. She had thousands of horses at her disposal and was rigorous about morning walks and lengthy horse rides. She had one overriding goal during her reign: keep England out of foreign wars. She did not entirely succeed. While she wanted little to do with war, other countries very much wanted control of England. Spain was her principle enemy. She ended up lending support to Protestant governments fighting Spain, including the Netherlands and France. After her success defeating the Spanish Armada, she became proactive dealing with Spain. She periodically sent her fleet to destroy Spanish ships while they were in harbor. She also attempted to rule Ireland, often unsuccessfully. In general, she had little in the way of imperialistic ambitions. She realized that to the extent that England could get along with other countries it would remain at peace.
Known as The Virgin Queen, she remained a virgin in part because she felt it necessary to ensure England’s security. She had a constant stream of foreign suitors, which continued well past her childbearing years. There is little doubt that she was strongly heterosexual and she even fell in love a few times. She nearly married the French Duke Anjou, who was much younger than she was. However, it is clear that for a time their affections were real. It is even possible that their love was consummated. Elizabeth had much to recommend her as a spouse beyond the prestigious position of being queen. She was an accomplished equestrian, dancer, poet and scholar. She was politically adroit. She kept England at peace for so long by constantly leading on foreign suitors and playing them against each other. Playing the game of romance forestalled many military adventures against England.
She was often despised outside England for her militant Protestantism. She codified the Book of Common Prayer used by the Church of England. The Pope repeatedly offered bounties to anyone who would kill her. King Philip II’s Spanish Armada was one of many attempts that he made to revert England to what he said was the true religion of Roman Catholicism.
All these details are widely known. What Weir does is bring history to life. Elizabeth lived a public and very well documented life. She saw being England’s sovereign as a great responsibility. We are accustomed to presidents who are replaced in four or eight years. She led England’s foreign policy for forty-five years with one single and constant vision. She was both conservative and liberal. She was conservative in the sense that she was not anxious for England to change and wanted very much to preserve the status quo for future generations. She was also notorious niggardly, and ensured her royal household lived well within its means. She was liberal in being unusually compassionate. Perhaps because his father had so few problems having his opponents’ heads removed, she reserved this terrible punishment for a relative few. With every execution, she seemed a bit diminished. For decades, she dithered over the chronic problem of her stepsister, Mary Queen of Scots. Near the end, despite being protected in England, Mary was covertly working to violently overthrow her government and restore Catholicism. Equally traumatic was the execution she ordered late in her reign for her close advisor, Robert Devereux, more commonly known as the Earl of Essex. A headstrong young man with boundless ambition he failed miserably in his attempt to subjugate an Irish rebellion. When he returned to England, he tried to blame Elizabeth for his own failings and used his popularity to try to bring about civil insurrection. He paid with his life.
Catholicism was another constant problem that dominated her reign. After the Church of England was established, England remained full of Catholics, and many remained loyal to the faith. For many years, Elizabeth practiced benign tolerance of Catholicism, and even had some Catholic advisors in her government. As plots against her life and the state multiplied, she found it necessary to oppress Catholics. Eventually they were forbidden to attend mass and were required to attend Church of English services or be taxed. Today these actions would seem quite harsh. In the context of the times and the real need to keep England united, they were sensible strategies.
Elizabeth was also blessed with a coterie of top-notch political advisers, including the ever-present Lord Cecil, essentially her chief of staff and Lord Walsingham, who ran a huge spy apparatus for the state. If you have seen the twomovies about Queen Elizabeth I starring Cate Blanchett (my motivation for reading this book), you will grow well acquainted with these two men. Movies can only give you a hint at the complexity of being a sovereign. She had many, many more in her cast of characters over her 45-year reign. She made the occasional misjudgment in her appointments, such as with Lord Essex. Overall though her record of appointing competent people to positions of power was excellent, and would be the envy of all politicians. That she did so over a 45 year reign is an extraordinary accomplishment.
This biography also captures the experience of living in Tudor times in a way that makes you feel as if you were alive back then. The prevalence of disease was a sad and overwhelming fact of life. Few people lived past their fortieth birthday. The plague hit London virtually every summer. The queen’s long life was due to being proactive. During the summer season, while Londoners died of the plague she took annual “progresses” into the English countryside to meet with many lords, ladies and the public. Indeed, she rarely stayed in one place very long. She had dozens of castles at her disposal. She and her court frequently moved from one to the other. There was no one place that she thought of as home.
Most kings and queens lived public and well-documented lives. Few though were kinder and acted in what were truly the best interests of her subjects. It is unsurprising that as a result she was so beloved. Alison Weir provides an exceeding intimate look at this remarkable woman that is compelling and brings history alive. I doubt that anyone can get past the first fifty or so pages of this biography and leave the rest of the book unread. Thanks to Weir’s biography, we are blessed with a human and intimate portrait of a truly remarkable woman. There is no question that in the top ten most influential women of all time, she would be on the list.
There is no lack of Civil War sites in this country. East of the Mississippi and south of the Mason-Dixon Line, it is hard to drive a hundred miles without running into a Civil War battlefield. I found that one rather obscure Civil War battle, The Battle of Ox Hill, was fought just a few miles from my house. This sacred battlefield has largely been desecrated. Shopping malls and apartment complexes now occupy grounds where hundreds of Confederate and Union soldiers paid with their lives.
There are also Revolutionary War sites that you can visit. These understandably are fewer and further between. Some of these have also been paved over. For example, the longest battle of the Revolutionary War, The Battle of Long Island, was fought in and around Brooklyn Heights. As you might expect since that time Brooklyn Heights has grown up. There is not much in Brooklyn Heights to remind you of the thousands who died in that long battle.
What about wars fought in the United States before the Revolutionary War? The British probably instigated the first, when in 1670 they laid siege to St. Augustine in Florida, which was then held by the Spanish. For most of us who studied history, The French and Indian War, which was fought from 1754 to 1763, was the first war of significance on the North American continent. Yet it remains a war seemingly lost in history. I did not expect that there were battlefields from the French and Indian War that I could visit. Yet there are.
Over our 22nd anniversary weekend last month, my wife and I ventured into Southwestern Pennsylvania. Our three-day mini holiday gave us ample time to explore the local area. Our trip was fortuitous because it allowed us to become acquainted with Fort Necessity. It is one of the few sites within the United States where the French and Indian War was fought. The more exciting parts of the war were fought in Quebec. The British eventually won the war. The spoils included most of the land in North America east of the Mississippi. This was not a bad deal for seven years of warfare.
The instigation of this war had long faded from my memory. A visit to Fort Necessity near Farmington, Pennsylvania helped jog my memory. It was at Fort Necessity that the father of our country George Washington suffered his first and only military defeat.
In 1754, there was no United States of America. George Washington was then a 22-year-old Lieutenant Colonel for the British Army. He commanded a garrison of over four hundred troops. They were charged with the unglamorous task of creating a wagon road into Ohio. Washington, perhaps in an attempt to show he was ambitious, appeared to provoke French troops that had claimed Western Pennsylvania. The French were encamped at Jumonville Glen, in what is now Uniontown, Pennsylvania. Depending on whose story you believe, either Washington’s soldiers were fired upon by the French or the French were surprised by Washington’s sneak attack. Technically neither France nor Britain was at war with each other at the time. Washington’s actions would change this. Ten French soldiers were killed in the attack and 21 others were wounded. It was what happened afterwards though that probably really started the war. Washington lost control of his troops, who decided to massacre the wounded French soldiers. Washington’s Indian ally, Seneca chief Tanaghrisson, put a tomahawk through the head of the remaining survivor, Ensign Jumonville. The French, once they got wind of the attack, were not amused. They went with larger forces in pursuit of Washington and his troops.
Washington withdrew to a great meadow near Farmington. There he and his troops hastily built a fort that he aptly named Fort Necessity. As you can see from the re-creation they did not have much time to work on the details. In fact, it took the French less than six weeks to locate the fort, which they attacked on July 3, 1754 and subsequently burned to the ground.
The “fort” itself was round, about fifty feet in diameter with a small storehouse in its middle. Constructed from local hardwood trees it was rudimentary and offered little protection. To defend the fort, Washington also ordered his troops to construct earthen berms from which they could fire at French troops. The French were quite successful picking them off from the woods during a driving summer rainstorm. Their defenses would not be enough. What would become known as The Battle of Great Meadows resulted in his defeat at the hands of 600 French soldiers and 100 allied Indians. Fearing a massacre, he negotiated for terms of surrender, which he later claimed to have misunderstood. The terms said that he personally assumed responsibility for the death of Ensign Jumonville. However, because of his surrender, his garrison was allowed to beat a hasty retreat back into Maryland.
Washington and his garrison were lucky to emerge alive. Yet as subsequent events unfolded, he eventually got the last laugh. His skirmish and the subsequent battle instigated the French and Indian War, which the British eventually won. When the Americans eventually won the Revolutionary War this wild land west of the Appalachians opened to settlement and would eventually become part of the United States.
While there is not much to see of the fort itself, Fort Necessity is worth a visit. The meadows look much as they did when Washington and his troops camped there over 250 years ago. When we were there, it was both peaceful and bucolic. Nearby there is a visitors center. For $5 admission fee, you can tour the small but interesting museum and enjoy a twenty-minute engaging film discussing the battle and its repercussions. One of these was the sponsorship by Congress of The National Road, a first effort by our fledging nation to expand westward. The National Road comprises parts of U.S. 40 along this area of Pennsylvania.
My bet is that you, like most Americans, were unaware that our first president sparked the French and Indian War. Nor are you likely aware of Washington’s great failure at Fort Necessity. The site may not be large, but I found it fascinating nonetheless. It took me to a time that on the American time scale is ancient. Perhaps after a visit like me you will find yourself inspired to learn more about the French and Indian War. For the history buff there is much to learn about the war. Moreover, you do not have to cross an ocean to appreciate it first hand.
I kept coming back for your excellent writing and clean designs.
Your political posts really do help me understand things better as it's hard for me to read through all the rhetoric out there and see what's what.
I like your style. You're not afraid to dish it out to both major political parties -- I wish everyone could be as willing to accept the faults of both.
You've always got something interesting to say.
A wonderful source of reading for me.
Great blog.
I think your blog is great, and most of your entries are engaging and well thought through.
Your output recently has been amazing... I particularly like to hear your thoughts on life.
You write well and with humour and an endearing humanity. I am envious.
Thanks for your great website.
Little insights like this entry are exactly why I read O.R., despite the obligatory self effacing humor.
Your site is an excellent part of our struggle against that slide into ignorance, I congratulate you for it and thank you for taking the time to provide what for some may be a helping hand from ignorance to reason.
I hung on your every word as if it was life.
On behalf of many women (and certainly myself, because I am one and coping with many men I really love and respect), I thank you profusely.
Keep up the great work on your blog.
I found Occam's Razor through Potomac Tavern. The writing in both places is both stimulating and relevant.
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