Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 96

Who Said It -4-25-2013

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18th President of the U.S.
Ulysses S. Grant
(Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress)

President Ulysses S. Grant: First Inaugural Address (March 4, 1869)

This requires security of person, property, and free religious and political opinion in every part of our common country, without regard to local prejudice. All laws to secure these ends will receive my best efforts for their enforcement.

(Source: Miller Center-University of Virginia)

Ulysses S. Grant was born on April 27, 1822 in Point Pleasant, Ohio. His remains, and those of his wife Julia, lie in the General Grant National Memorial in New York.

 

Who Said It 4/14/2013

Theodore Roosevelt with Reporters at Sagamore Hill
Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress

Theodore Roosevelt: “The Man With the Muck-Rake” Speech (April 14, 1906)

In Pilgrim’s Progress the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake; and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil.

(Source: Voices of Democracy: The U.S. Oratory Project/National Endowment for the Humanities)

Who Said It-4/8/13

Thomas Jefferson  (born April 13, 1743) “First Inaugural Address,” March 4, 1801

Freedom  of religion; freedom of the press, and freedom of person under the protection of the habeas corpus, and trial by juries impartially selected. These principles form the bright constellation which has gone before us and guided our steps through an age of revolution and reformation.

(Source: Yale Law School-The Avalon Project)

4/2/13

 

It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of the Congress, which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be in the balance.

Woodrow Wilson, Joint Address to Congress Leading to a Declaration of War Against Germany (April 2, 1917)

“A lover’s quarrel with the world”-Robert Frost

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Robert Frost (Courtesy American Memory Collection (Library of Congress)

In honor of his birthday on March 26, 1874,  a video tribute to Robert Frost.

I had a lover’s quarrel with the world

Robert Frost’s epitaph

One of my favorite places in Vermont is the Frost gravesite in the cemetery of the First Church in Old Bennington -just down the street from the Bennington Monument. This video was recorded there.

Apples, birches, hayfields and stone walls; simple features like these make up the landscape of four-time Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Frost’s poetry. Known as a poet of New England, Frost (1874-1963) spent much of his life working and wandering the woods and farmland of Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. As a young man, he dropped out of Dartmouth and then Harvard, then drifted from job to job: teacher, newspaper editor, cobbler. His poetry career took off during a three-year trip to England with his wife Elinor where Ezra Pound aided the young poet. Frost’s language is plain and straightforward, his lines inspired by the laconic speech of his Yankee neighbors.

But while poems like “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” are accessible enough to make Frost a grammar-school favorite, his poetry is contemplative and sometimes dark—concerned with themes like growing old and facing death. One brilliant example is this poem about a young boy sawing wood,  Out, out– 

The buzz-saw snarled and rattled in the yard

And made dust and dropped stove-length sticks of wood,

 

The first poet invited to speak at a Presidential inaugural, Frost told the new President:

Be more Irish than Harvard. Poetry and power is the formula for another Augustan Age. Don’t be afraid of power.

A brief biography of Robert Frost can be found at Poets.org, where there are more samples of his poetry. It includes an account of Frost and JFK.

Robert Frost died on January 29, 1963. He had written his own epitaph, “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” etched on his headstone in a church cemetery in Bennington, VT.

Here is the NYTimes obituary published after his death.

This material is adapted from Don’t Know Much About Literature written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

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.