Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 95

Who Said It 3/25/13

Dwight D. Eisenhower- “The Cross of Iron” Speech

Delivered Before the American Society of Newspaper Editors, 4/16/53

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road. the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

 

(Source: Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum)

Born on October 14, 1890 in Denison, Texas, Dwight D. Eisenhower died on March 28, 1969.  Read more about Eisenhower’s life and presidency in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

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Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents
(September 18, 2012-Hyperion Books)

Pancakes, Politics and the Civil War

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Vermont Maple Country
(Courtesy Vermont Maple Sugar Makers)

Pancakes and Politics?

Spring in Vermont. As the temperatures and sap rise, you see the web of sap lines descending from the woods to galvanized vats beside the roads. Dense clouds of wood smoke billow from sugar houses, large and small.  This weekend (March 23-24), Vermont celebrates the season with an Open House Weekend at sugar houses around the state.

But the maple sugar season has another historical meaning. Some 70 years before the war began on April 12, 1861, people had looked to maple sugar  –both as a political and economic weapon against slavery. The idea was simple –replace cane sugar, produced by slave labor, with maple sugar and it would be a blow to the slave system.

One of the first to advocate the idea was Benjamin Rush, a physician and signer of the Declaration and an early voice of abolition in America.  With the Quakers of Philadelphia, Rush proposed using maple sugar as a means of hastening the end of slavery by replacing one of the key products manufactured by slave labor.  (Rush also opposed the death penalty, was a proponent of public education, and advocated for the humane treatment of the mentally ill.)

In 1788 Rush had published an essay on the “Advantages of the Culture of the Sugar Maple Tree” in a Philadelphia monthly. In 1789 he had founded, with a group of Philadelphia Quakers, the Society for Promoting the Manufacture of Sugar from the Sugar Maple Tree. He had even staged a scientific tea party to prove the potency of maple sugar. The guests – Alexander Hamilton, Quaker merchant Henry Drinker, and “several Ladies” – sipped cups of hyson tea, sweetened with equal amounts of cane and maple sugar. All agreed the sugar from the maple was as sweet as cane sugar. (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Their aim was simple, as Rush’s 1788 essay put it: “to lessen or destroy the consumption of West Indian sugar, and thus indirectly to destroy negro slavery.”

Dr. Rush found an enthusiastic disciple in Thomas Jefferson, who explored the concept of an American maple sugar industry during a journey to Vermont and even attempted–unsuccessfully it would turn out– to import sugar maple trees to Monticello.

Jefferson and other conscientious consumers could now … “put sugar in (their) coffee without being saddened by the thought of all the toil, sweat, tears, suffering and crimes that have hitherto been necessary to procure this product.” (Source: The Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia)

Dr. Rush and other Abolitionists were ultimately disappointed as the maple sugar idea failed to gain a foothold and speculation in maple forests actually created a “maple bubble” which burst before this “sugar substitute” could prove itself an economic weapon against slavery.

Abolitionists continued to  pursue the cause of maple sugar in the 19th century. The American artist Eastman Johnson attempted to make maple syrup a political statement through a collection of works showing the sugaring process was not only a part of New England’s social fabric, but a way to strike a blow for freedom.

This failed effort to make what we buy and eat a political act may have been a quixotic disappointment. But the thought of putting maple syrup and sugar to use in a noble cause only makes them taste a little sweeter. And the fundamental idea that taking care in what what we purchase and consume can make a difference is still a valuable principle.

(Note: This is a revised version of a post originally written in March 2011.)

who said it? 3/19

 

Dwight D. Eisenhower, on his appointment of Earl Warren as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

(Source: NYTimes, PBS/The Court and Democracy,)

Earl Warren was born on March 19, 1891 in Los Angeles. The former Governor of California, he was appointed Chief Justice by Eisenhower in 1953 and led the Court in the landmark Brown V Board of Education decision that year.

Warren died on July 9, 1974. (New York Times obituary.)

Who Said It 3/11/13

 President Lyndon B. Johnson,  The “We Shall Overcome” Speech (March 15, 1965) to the full Congress in which Johnson called for passage of the Voting Rights Act a few days after the Selma, Alabama protests met by police violence.

These are the enemies: poverty, ignorance, disease. They are our enemies, nor our fellow man, not our neighbor. And these enemies too — poverty, disease and ignorance — we shall overcome.

Source: PBS American Experience; LBJ

Johnson sent the bill to Congress two days later. It was passed and LBJ signed it into law in August with Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks and other civil rights leaders in attendance.

IN 2008, LBJ”s noted  biographer, Robert Caro, wrote a reflection on this 1965 speech and Johnson’s role in the civil rights movement on the Op-Ed pages of the New York Times:

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans … but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

Portions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are currently under review by the United States Supreme Court. This is a link to the New York Times archive on the Voting Rights Act.

The National Endowment for the Humanities educational website Edsitement also offers classroom resources on the “We Shall Overcome” speech.

Cherry-Picking Thomas Paine

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Thomas Paine: Courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540

Thirty years ago, on March 8, 1983, President Ronald Reagan delivered a speech to a group of evangelicals in Orlando, Florida.

Most of what Reagan said that day has been overshadowed by a single, memorable phrase: he called the Soviet Union the “evil empire.” Within a decade, of course, that “empire” had fallen and the “Cold War” disappeared from view.

Reading Reagan’s text uncovers more fully what the speech was about as America was in the midst of a very hot “Culture War.” Reagan spoke about ending abortion and passing a constitutional amendment that would once again permit prayer in public schools. Only near the conclusion of his remarks did he turn his sights to the Soviet Union.

Reagan’s text was peppered with cherry-picked references to America’s Christian past and quotes from some of the “Founding Fathers” –William Penn, Washington and Jefferson among them. But these remarks to an evangelical group led to an odd choice as Reagan concluded:

“One of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine, said, ‘We have it within our power to begin the world over again.’”

The pamphleteering Paine is best known as the author of Common Sense and The Crisis, among other works that supported the cause of independence. But after the Revolution, Paine ended up in France and was caught up in the bloody Revolution there, winding up in a French prison cell, facing the prospect of the guillotine.

After eventually being freed, Paine wrote an open letter in 1796 angrily denouncing President George Washington for failing to do enough to secure his release. This was a serious case of bridge burning and Paine fell from grace in America. But apart from dissing the Father of the Country, Paine had also fallen from favor for his most famous work after Common Sense. In 1794, he had published The Age of Reason (Part I), a deist assault on organized religion and the errors of the Bible.  In it, Paine had written:

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

(Source: USHistory.org)

That essential part of Thomas Paine’s philosophy was notably missing from Reagan’s words about the role of church in America.

You can read more about Thomas Paine, his relationship with Washington and his ultimate fate –as well as Ronald Reagan’s presidency– in Don’t Know Much About the American Presidents.

 

 

 

 

“In Depth” on Book TV with Kenneth C. Davis

On November 4, 2012, New York Times Bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis sat down for a comprehensive three-hour interview with C-Span’s Book TV.

The interview, which included questions from callers and via e-mail, covered Davis’ career as a writer spanning more than 20 years. In the interview, he discussed his approach to writing history in such books as Don’t Know Much About® History. He also described his background, growing up in Mt. Vernon, New York, how he became a writer, and his early work, including his first book, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America, which discussed the rise of the paperback publishing industry and the impact of books on American society.

Davis also described the success of his “Don’t Know Much About®” series, with its emphasis on making history both accessible and entertaining while connecting the past to the present.

Watch the video here.

Who said It-3/4/2013

Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals” in Orlando, Florida” (March 8, 1983)

While America’s military strength is important, let me add here that I’ve always maintained that the struggle now going on for the world will never be decided by bombs or rockets, by armies or military might. The real crisis we face today is a spiritual one; at root, it is a test of moral will and faith.

Source: Reagan Foundation


This speech is best known as the “evil empire” speech in which Reagan used that term to describe the Soviet Union. It was also a spirited call for allowing public prayer in schools and opposing abortion. With frequent references to Christianity in American history, Reagan cited the views of a number of Founding Fathers on the role of religion in America. He closed with a quote from Thomas Paine,

 We have it within our power to begin the world over again.

It is somewhat ironic that Reagan chose to close with the words of a man who had by the end of his life rejected Christan orthodoxy. As Paine wrote in The Age of Reason (Part 1):

My own mind is my own church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

who said it 2/25/13

 

Abraham Lincoln’s “Cooper Union Address” (February 27, 1860)

 

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.

The complete text of Lincoln’s speech, which helped catapult  him to the Republican  presidential nomination, can be found at the National Park Service’s Lincoln Home site.

Don’t Know Much About® Executive Order 9066

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Photo of Japanese-American grocery store on the day after Pearl Harbor
Dorothea Lange
(Source: Library of Congress)

Franklin D. Roosevelt famously told Americans when he was inaugurated in 1933:

The only thing we have to fear is fear itself

But on February 19, 1942 –a little more than two months after the attack on Pearl Harbor– President Roosevelt allowed America’s fear to provoke him into an action regarded among his worst mistakes. He issued Executive Order 9066.

The result of this Executive Order was the policy of “relocating” some 120,000 Japanese Americans, and a smaller number of German and Italian Americans,  into “internment camps.”

I have written about the subject of the internment of the Japanese American population in the past. I relink these today, including this post on the birthday of Ansel Adams, who photographed the internment camp at Manzanar, and another on photojournalist Dorothea Lange, who also documented the period. Both of these posts include links to other resources on the history of “Internment.”

Among these resources is a site devoted to the War Relocation Camps –a Teaching With Historic Places Lesson Plan from the National Park Service called “When Fear Was Stronger than Justice.”

 

2/18/2013

 

For happily the Government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

George Washington, “Letter to the Jews of Newport” (August 18, 1790)

Source: Touro Synagogue National Historic Site

A facsimile of the letter can be viewed at The ages.