Tag: history

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Monumental Democracy

Thought I would visit some of the monuments and think about our democracy on a beautiful, low humidity Washington day.

I have mixed feelings about monuments to flawed humans. We revere and remember great individual because of one or a few great ideas or deeds. The man himself is less important but it is too easy to slip into hagiography when in these temple-like monuments. Still and all, the mark makes a memory, so I seek them out.

Starting with Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson did not want a monument. He wanted to be remembered for his work and mentioned only three things, but they were good ones – “Author of the Declaration of Independence [and] of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.” Jefferson is my favorite founding father. He was interested in everything and appreciated nature. I would have been great to talk to Jefferson, although I understand that he was a little shy.

John F. Kennedy’s Remarked at a Dinner Honoring Nobel Prize Winners of the Western Hemisphere. “I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

Next I visited FDR. Like Jefferson, FDR did not want a memorial, at least not a big one. He wanted a monument no bigger than his desk and that is what he had for a long time. There is a 3x7x4 block of marble near the National Archives. That is appropriate, but subsequent generations wanted something more.

I have probably read more books about FDR than about anybody else and I made the pilgrimage to his house in Hyde Park. I appreciate his complex leadership style and his political genius and I really like his love of nature. He was a great conservationist and often described his profession as grower of trees. His establishment of the CCC was a great move. On the personal level, the CCC probably saved my father from delinquency and so made me possible, so say what you want about FDR, I have to like a guy so committed to conservation.

Next around the Tidal Basin is Martin Luther King. This is a new memorial. Jefferson was one of the founders of freedom; FDR protected it; Martin Luther King reminded the country that it freedom was for all Americans. His non-violent method used moral suasion, appealing to the better angels of American natures and so created a lasting legacy. I am not very fond of the statute, however. It is too stern & has that mid-century monumental feel. It was made in China and kind of looks like it was made in China.

Of course, I have not forgotten Washington and Lincoln, but I tend to ride past their monuments very often on my way to other places in Washington. I have to make a special side trip to see Jefferson, Roosevelt and King.

One more thing about monuments. We should be careful as lovers of democracy in creating monuments to individuals, both in stone and in our minds. IMO, we should construct no monuments to anybody until they have been dead for at least twenty-five years and certainly not to any living politician.

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Old World Wisconsin

Wisconsin was demographically more like Mitteleuropa than middle America in the late 19th Century.  The majority of the population was immigrants or their children.  The biggest ethnic group was German, but there were lots of Norwegian, Swedes, Poles, Fins and various others.

At first, they looked for their fellows from their own countries, but very soon they were merging into the culture that became Wisconsin’s.

America was MORE a nation of immigrants back in the late 19th Century than it is today, and they were MORE diverse.  It is fashionable today to talk about diversity only in terms of skin tone, but it is more a matter of culture and habits.  A Polish peasant coming from rural Galicia was more different culturally from an America-born neighbor that a typical immigrant from Nigeria or China is from his American-born neighbor today.  Consider that the Polish peasant may never have heard a word of English before embarking for America.  He would not have read American novels, heard American music and he could not have seen American movies or listened to American radio.  You can find nobody like that today unless you go into the forests in places like the Amazon or New Guinea, even there maybe not.

We look back on the successful integration of immigrants back then and think its was easy.  It took about three generations, which is not that different from now looking at how fast immigrant language become only second languages and then largely disappear.

Our mental model of assimilation is also wrong.  America did not assimilate the immigrants of the late 19th Century.  We integrated them and their cultures into the American whole.  I often choose the Germans as example, since they are Americas biggest ethnic group, at the time of Old World Wisconsin, they made up at least 25% of the American population and a majority of the people in Wisconsin.  People of those days thought they would never fit in completely.    I bet people reading this are surprised how much of America is German.  Why?  Because they fit in so well that we don’t think about it anymore.  Americans think that they are just being American when they have a beer and a hot dog, when they send their kids to kindergarten, eat an apple pie or hamburger.  And these things ARE American, since they are modified from the original.

The value of diversity is that we can appropriate and adapt the more useful or attractive parts of the cultures we meet, while sharing ours with them.   Appropriate AND adapt.  We do NOT want to keep the cultures pure or separated and we should never encourage people to keep the old ways.  If you want to see and appreciate the old ways, you can go to places like Old World Wisconsin.  In Old World Wisconsin, you can see the roots of lots of our habits and behaviors.  We are today more aware of the flowers and the fruits.
The first two pictures show livestock. They have heirloom breeds, like those immigrant would have owned. Next is the Polish house, followed by a Norwegian house. These are actual structures moved to Old World Wisconsin from other parts of the state.  Last is a schoolhouse. Immigrants thought education was the way to the future and they were right, so they build schools like that. They taught only in English, often using the famous  McGuffey Readers to teach reading and wider America culture.

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On the Road – Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio

On our way to Missoula, Montana for a conference on fire science. Missoula is a center for the study of wildfire, so when I saw a conference on the subject in that place, I thought it would be great to go at least once.

A few interesting sites along the way. One is a rest stop in Maryland that you see in the first picture. It has to be one of the best rest stops I have ever seen. Next is a place that claims to have invented the hot dog, at least in its current form. We checked into it. There are other claimants. This place was a little cramped. Worth seeing but not worth going to see. Chrissy had the hot dog. It was like other hot dogs. Later that day we stopped at Jackie O Taproom in Athens, Ohio. It is not named after Jackie Onassis, but they admit that it is a draw. Next two pictures are our usual beer drinking pictures.

Also on the road are pre-Columbian earth mounds in Chillicothe, Ohio. The people who built them disappeared from the archeological record around 1500 years ago. While they are probably related to some contemporary groups, there is no direct line.

By the time Europeans arrived, none of the local tribes were mound builders, so the ancient culture is called “Hopewell” after the guy whose farm they were found.

The Hopewell people did not build cities or villages. Archeologists have never found remains of more than a few huts. They were mostly pre-agricultural. But they did like to build earthen mounds. This was no easy task. They did not have metal tools or pack animals. There is evidence of long-distance trade, including copper from around Lake Superior and shells from Gulf of Mexico. My first two pictures show the mounds. You can see me in the first picture for scale. Last is a groundskeeper doing some work. It occurred to me that this guy with his metal shovel and powered vehicle could move as much dirt as a hundred guys on foot carrying baskets and digging with sticks.

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The Fate of Rome

The great thing about ancient history is that we learn more every year. History is not just out there to be discovered. It is the creation of historians, who fit a narrative to events that are otherwise just one darn thing after another. The narrative is necessary. It may not be wrong, but always incomplete. We seek to come closer to truth, knowing that we never get there.

Recent advances in the science of genomics and climate science have made possible an understanding of ancient history not possible even a decade ago. Human events play out on a changing stage. The climate and the disease load has changed a lot during our history and it has made a difference. History is contingent. There is no such thing as fate or destiny. Shit happens. But it happens in patterns that we can try to understand.

The Roman Empire flourished during a particularly favorable climatic time. It was warmer and wetter than the time before or after. The author calls the period in the first and second century as the Roman Climate Optimum (RCO). From the time of Augustus until the reign of Marcus Aurelius there were also no pandemics. These conditions changes about AD 180. Roman leaders made some good and bad choices, but their margin for error was smaller.

Events outside the Empire also were affected by rapid climate change. Warmer and wetter weather on the Eurasian steppes got cooler and drier, inducing movements of peoples. The Huns burst out of Central Asia pushing everybody else.

In the course of one lifetime, the “eternal empire” was disintegrating. The author contends that the Empire in the West fell from 404-410 and not 476, when the last emperor was deposed. It was more a decay than a decline & fall.

The Romans lost control of their borders after the defeat and death of Emperor Valens at Adrianople in 378. The Barbarians did not plan to destroy the Empire. They just wanted a piece of the action. Absent the challenges of climate change, disease and the attendant demographic challenges, the Empire might have survived.

An interesting contingency is the plague of Justinian. Justinian was in process of reestablishing Roman power, when his base was destroyed by the plague. Recent DNA analysis indicates that this was indeed the black death, bubonic plague.

The interesting contingency here is that it hit the Romans hard, but did not as much affect the steppe nomads of thinly populated areas like Arabia. Had the plague not hit when it did, Roman power would have been reestablished and Islam never would have spread as it did.
One more thing to recall. The Roman Empire evolved into a territorial state. All people of the Empire became Roman citizens in AD 212. People living in Egypt, North Africa, Asia Minor or Gaul were citizens. It was like California, Texas or Florida being integral parts of the USA, although they were not original members. Most of the Empire’s leadership came from outside Italy after the 1st Century. Some former parts of the Empire were never run as well after the fall of the Empire.

Anyway, good book. I have been reading these things since at least 1966, when I borrowed my father’s copy of Edward Gibbon’s “Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire.” It continues to be an interesting period.

BTW – I suggest that Michael W. Fox take a look at this book. He mentioned studying with William McNeill. This is the kind of book that takes the big sweep too and the author frequently refers to McNeill as a source and inspiration.

The Fate of Rome
https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Rome-Climate-Disease-Princeton/dp/0691166838/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1520024102&sr=8-1&keywords=the+fate+of+rome

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La Jornada

You don’t have to go into the Albuquerque Art Museum to enjoy its holdings. A sculpture garden surrounds the building. Most interesting for me was La Jornada.

It depicts the journey of Spanish pioneers coming to New Mexico in 1598. It is very reminiscent of American pioneers moving west with a few big differences. The most obvious was the time. 1598 – that was nine years before Jamestown and twenty-two years before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. Another difference was the organization of the colonization. The Spanish effort was centrally directed, although financed mostly privately, and it seemed to be well-equipped. American pioneers were usually people just moving on their own, sometimes in defiance of the central authorities.

You can see what the statues look like in the photos. It is big. In addition are plaques containing the names of the colonists and origins of the colonists. Most came directly from Spain or Portugal, but others came from Mexico. Many of their descendants still live in New Mexico.

I was broadly aware of this interesting history, but visiting New Mexico has given me a lot better appreciation for the extent of the settlement.

My first two picture show the sculpture. Next is the story of the jornada. The last two are unrelated. Number 4 is St Francis and the last one is Geoffrey and Rothco. I think Rothco is the dog, but the plaque did not specify.

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On the road – Missouri, Illinois & Ohio

The National Road
The National Road was authorized by Congress and signed into legislation by Thomas Jefferson in 1806. It started in Cumberland, Maryland and ended in Vandalia in what became the State of Illinois. It was the first piece of big public infrastructure that facilitated the settlement of western Maryland, Ohio, Indiana and Illinois – the first “West.” Vandalia was the first capital of Illinois and the place where young Abe Lincoln got his start.
I went to see young Abe and the terminus of the National Road. Life was tough for the pioneers. Imagine carrying everything you own in a wagon and establishing yourself in a wilderness. It was primitive. It is amazing that they could build our great country.

The first picture is the monument to pioneer women. It stands at the end of the National Road. Next is Abe and then Abe and me. My friend Steve Holgate used to do Lincoln one-man-shows, so he should appreciate that young Abe kind of looks like him. Next picture is the busy US 40. US 40 more or less follows the route of the National Road. It is now superseded by Interstate 70. Last is the old State Capitol.

The Iron Curtain
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an “iron curtain” has descended across the continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.” This is what Winston Churchill said in a speech in Fulton, Mo on March 5, 1946. It was a recognition of the Cold War. Some people, many people, thought that our wartime friendship with the Soviet Union could continue, but our goals and values were fundamentally incompatible.
I stopped at Fulton to see the place where the speech was delivered. It sort of completes my middle America history visits, since I went to see Eisenhower and Truman
This part of history has always been fascinating for me. Fighting world communism was one of the reasons I joined the FS. For the trip back home, I got a new audio book, The Cold War: A World History by a couple Norwegians, Julian Elfer and Odd Arne Westad. It is a different perspective.

The authors go way back to pre-WWI times and characterize Russia under the Czar as a hierarchical anti-capitalist country, while the USA was where the market developed most. After WWI, several flavors of anti-capitalistic/anti-democratic regimes developed, including the Soviets, Nazis, along with various other sorts of fascists and authoritarians.
Fascists and communists shared hatred for free market democracy, but they also hated each other, since each wanted to impose its own sort of totalitarianism. This is as far as I got.

Anyway, we vanquished the Nazis in 1945 and the communists in 1989, but these bad ideas have ways of resurfacing. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
My pictures are from the Churchill memorial. The first is a piece of the Berlin Wall. We sort of got used to it, but consider how truly evil it is to kill people who want to leave your country. Reagan was right to call it an evil empire.

The Wright Brother

In the worth seeing but not worth going to see department, I went to see the birthplace of Wilbur Wright. You have to drive around seven miles from I-70 along a pleasant country road fittingly called “Wilbur Wright Road” that connects with “Wilbur Wright Circle.”
Chrissy suggested that if his parents had anticipated having such an illustrious son they would have investing in a more appropriate house.

There is a good book on the Wright Brothers by David McCullough (the same guy who wrote bios of John Adams and Harry Truman). The early the last decades of the 19th century and the first ones of the 20th were a dynamic time in American history. Airplanes, automobiles and lots of other things were being invented and perfected. My Brazilian friends don’t credit the Wright brothers with the invention of the airplane. They credit their own Alberto Santos-Dumont, who they also say gave us the wrist watch. The Wright brothers flew in 1903. Santos-Dumont flew in 1906, but Brazilians argue that Santos-Dumont’s machine took off on its own power. Suffice it to say that they were all pioneers of aviation.

I didn’t take a picture, since I thought it might be rude, but there were lots of signs opposing a proposed wind farm in the area. I think it would be appropriate to have big propeller-like structures, but the locals disagree

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Colonial Williamsburg

Colonial Williamsburg gives an idea of life in Virginia a few centuries ago. It is a pleasant place with lots of period buildings and big trees. But it is more pleasant in our modern contemplation than it was to live in those times.

The English were not prepared for Virginia. It was deadly to many of them and you can understand why. We live in a tamed Virginia today. Back in those days, there were all sorts of dangers ranging from unusual diseases, to very hot and humid weather to hostile natives. We do not really live in nature as they had to do.

They built as they did in England. You can see examples in the photos. These houses are adapted England’s generally cool wet climate. In pre-airconditioned Virginia, these neat, buttoned-up houses must have been stifling. Of course, people spent a lot of time outside.

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American traditions: National Guard & Post Office

Alex and I went downtown to see the Postal Museum and the National Guard Monument nearby. Both near Union Station.
 
The exhibits at both were good, but better was that they provoked some thoughts about America and how we built our country. Both the Post Office and the National Guard have deep roots and were essential to making American what it became. Both go back to the beginning.

Virginia National Guard
The National Guard is obvious. It is the descendant of the famous Minute Men and the tradition of citizen soldiers has been tightly entwined with the American character from before the Revolution to today. Serving as a citizen soldier is both a duty and a right of an American citizen. These are the guys who extended and protected our frontiers.
 
And they fought in all our major wars. Alex’s unit – 116th Infantry Regiment from the 29th Infantry Division from Maryland, DC and Virginia – landed on Omaha Beech on D-Day. A Company from Bedford, Virginia proportionally had the highest D-Day losses. More recently, the Virginia Guard has served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, Alex recently returned from his deployment in Qatar.
 
The Post Office
Like the National Guard, the Post Office predates the American Revolution. Ben Franklin was a postmaster.
 
The Federal footprint was small in the early republic and the Post Office was often the part of Union average citizens saw most often. The letters people wrote helped bind our nation together and the letter immigrants wrote back to friends and family in the old country brought in more waves of immigrants.
 
It is easy to forget how important connection through the post were before our age of easy communications. Divided by time and distance, people were bound in epistolary relationships. These could be as dense and were often deeper than those we enjoy today. People took time to compose their thoughts and share them. Much of our historical writing is based on letters. Letters between John & Abigail Adams, or between John Adams & Thomas Jefferson are worthy of being called literature.

W/o a reasonably effective Post Office, American would never have developed into the great country we are today. Today it is fashionable to ridicule the Post Office. “Going postal” is a way of describing crazy. This is likely unfair today and it certainly was not appropriate in the past. Besides the connections mentioned above, careers in the Post Office were instrumental in helping generations of poor and immigrants to pull themselves into the middle class.

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Edison and West Orange

We went to West Orange, NJ to look into innovation and Thomas Edison. Edison invented a practical light bulb, the phonograph & the motion picture camera. At least that is what I learned in school. Since then, I have come to understand that invention or discovery are rarely that simple. No one individual is responsible. Rather, many factors come together that enable the leap.

Progress comes as punctuated equilibrium. We certainly credit Edison with amazing creativity, but he sprung from the same fertile soil that produced the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone & George Westinghouse among many others. We call them inventors, but maybe a better term is innovators, since they bring together lots of ideas and people and put them together in different ways. That is where the “fertile soil” comes in. When you get a bunch of innovators together, they innovate as the ideas bounce around, mutate, evolve and improve. That is why giving credit to a single inventor is so hard.
All that aside, Edison was a great inventor and a great innovator as an individual. If he depended on the ecology of innovation, he was a big part of that ecological system. He understood this better than most. He knew great innovations often come in a flash of innovation … followed by years of hard work to make them practical. Edison was practical. He organized a team for innovation. He invented a system for invention just as Henry Ford invented a process for mass production. You could say that those ideas were “out there” but it took someone to make them work.

Historians today mostly reject and even disparage the “great man theory” and they are right to do so. For some of the reasons I mentioned above, the great man theory does not work to explain history. However, the “shit happens” theory is also unsatisfying. Innovation can happen only when conditions are ripe, but ripe conditions do not guarantee innovation and the innovators set the direction, the path of progress. To the extent that innovations are path dependent, after a few steps the great individuals have indeed made history different than it would otherwise have been. So the great man theory is not wrong, just incomplete. Edison was one of those great men who changed the direction of history.
Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.
My pictures show Edison’s factory in West Orange. Next is the workshop floor. Notice the belts. The machines did not have their own power, but rather ran off the mechanical power overhead transmitted by the belts. The third picture is Edison’s music room. He recorded music there, but lost market share because he refused to hire big names. He was more concerned with technical quality than with star quality. The last photo is an Edison phonograph. The picture is one I took a while back at the Henry Ford Museum. I will include a link to that trip in the comments section and say a little more about Edison in a new post.

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FDR – heroic age of conservation

The first half of the 20th Century was the heroic age of American conservation. The Forest Service was founded in 1905, the National Park Service in 1916. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and Works Progress Administration (WPA) came out of the New Deal. The 1940s brought the American Tree Farm System (ATFS) and Aldo Leopold’s land ethic described in the “Sand County Almanac.”

I chose to use the term heroic age specifically and not golden age. Heroic ages produce the good stories and the … heroes, but they are not pleasant for the people living through them. Heroic times require heroes and heroic effort precisely because time are so tough.
The push toward conservation was provoked by severe ecological disasters. A series of disastrous forest fires culminating in the Great Fire of 1910, called variously the “Big Burn” or the “Big Blow-up.” Call it what you will, it burned about three million acres and killed 87 people, mostly firefighters. Even w/o it burning up, experts predicted that we would run out of wood within a few decades. The horrors of the dust bowl, the worse hard time, have entered the mainstream American imagination, but we usually fair to understand the extent of the loss of soil and productivity. Yes, the heroic age of conservation was a dark, dusty and dangerous time and people who thought deeply about the environment probably thought it would only get worse.

We have come a long way, but some of the solutions from the heroic age have become burdens today. Conservation heroes such as both Roosevelts and Gifford Pinchot used warlike metaphors to describe the fight to improve the environment. I just did it too, since it is hard to get away from their formulation. But then the concept of struggle is big in any heroic narratives.

One of the things Pinchot did was to put fire in the role of enemy of the forest. It is easy to criticize this as a mistake but it made sense at the time. He was struggling to get acceptance for the Forest Service and for conservation more generally. America’s recent experience with fire made it easy to identify this destructive and deadly force as the enemy. Ordinary people could easily see the need to protect forests from the destruction. It worked too well and for more than a half century, we fought to keep fire out. This fundamentally changed the ecology of the ecosystems and built up excess fuel that fuel leading to even more disastrous fires.

There is no enemy and no struggle when you think systemically and ecologically. Factors are more or less appropriate contingent upon the situation at hand. Moreover, the situation is constantly changing, making the appropriate response different ever time. The thing you need to eradicate today may be the thing you propagate tomorrow. It is further complicated by the obvious fact that we alter the situation by working with it, even by just looking at it.

Anyway, these are some more of my thoughts from Hyde Park. You see what you look for. I could talk about FDR’s social or economic reforms, but I still see the conservationist.
My first picture is the Hudson Valley near Hyde Park. Next is a collection of New Deal posters about the National Parks. These posters were made as part of the Federal Arts Project, part of the WPA. After that is FDR talking to Gifford Pinchot and finally is me listening to a “fireside chat” in a reproduction of a 1930s kitchen.