History Gadfly

Death, Happiness, and Leadership

2011-10-06T08:41:00.001-07:00

The death of Steve Jobs has brought to light his Socratic side, the conviction that a good life is about preparing for a good death. (Compare Jobs's 2005 Stanford commencement address to Plato's Apology, Crito, and Phaedo.)

From Socrates to Steve Jobs, the art of living comes down to this: living as though you will soon die. With the urgency to get things right, you will simplify. You will have increasingly peaceful, positive relations with fellow human beings. You will be a better listener and friend. (You will finally succeed in living the Golden Rule.) You will quit trying to control people and situations you cannot. (You will finally succeed in living the Serenity Prayer.) You will not take another's foul mood so personally. (You will finally be more adept at letting go of perceived injuries.) Since you want to leave a positive legacy, you will challenge yourself to make people feel that their life is better because of their encounters with you and your work. No backbiting, no negativity, no whining, no complaining: just good words about people, about our stories, about the work we do, about the opportunities to grow amid struggle, and about our vision for -- and actions consistent with -- a better life for all whose lives we are privileged to touch. Ironically, the approach of death can focus us and make us happier.

Considering how death focuses the mind, I want you to undertake a little thought experiment. Try to imagine how this notion of the art of living impinges on the art of leadership. If you were to ask leaders what they'd do if told they had only five months to live, they no doubt would focus on their relationships -- with children, spouse, family, and close friends -- exactly what Steve Jobs did. Now, if you were to ask leaders what they would do if told they had only five years to live, they would still tend to the primary relationships in their life, but they would also try to do something that they would be proud to leave behind -- some service to humankind or expression of the best of their gifts. This larger horizon would concentrate their efforts on legacy, on how they'd want to be remembered, and they no doubt would do something great.

Since none of us knows when we'll die, what's stopping you from giving the best of your gifts to humankind now? You just may become a happier human being and leader if you start living with more urgency to get your relationships and work right today.

The Elegant Geographic Symmetry of America's Four Largest Cities

2011-09-06T03:57:00.000-07:00

Looking at a map of the United States, have you ever noticed the spacing of America's four largest cities? The distribution on our four coasts, and even the ecological symmetry, is striking:

New York City is on the first coast -- the Atlantic -- in the forested northeast quadrant of the nation, east of the Appalachians.
Los Angeles is on the second coast -- the Pacific -- in the arid southwest quadrant of the nation, west of the Rockies and coastal ranges.
Houston is on the third coast -- the Gulf of Mexico -- in the south-central part of the nation between the crest of the Appalachians and the Rockies, west of the Mississippi River mouth and basin, in the ecological boundary between the forest and more arid lands.
Chicago is on the fourth coast -- the Great Lakes (so designated by the U.S. Coast Guard) -- in the north-central part of the nation between the crest of the Appalachians and Rockies, east of the Mississippi River source and basin, in the ecological boundary between the forest and more arid lands.

How did such remarkable spacing happen?

America's four largest cities -- New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston -- are distributed in a striking way vis-a-vis our four coasts, two dominant mountain ranges, forest-prairie ecology, and the continent's greatest river.

American Founding -- The Untold Story of Our Constitution

2011-08-30T12:23:00.000-07:00

September 17 is Constitution Day. The delegates formally began their great adventure on May 25, 1787, when they had a quorum and formal start of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. For almost four months, delegates from 12 of the 13 states debated a new frame of government to replace the Confederation. General George Washington served as president of the Convention. On September 17, 1787, they finished the first phase of their work. The second phase, ratification, would prove to be as difficult and divisive as the Convention. The following essay served as the basis of several talks I delivered on the U.S. Constitution during the spring and summer of 2011.

Our National Story

The story we Americans tell about ourselves is not carved in stone but is revised from time to time. One of the best ways to detect rewrites of our national story is to examine the way we talk about the U.S. Constitution and the convention that produced it. Since the founding of our country, there have been at least five major rewrites of the meaning of the Constitution and the convention in which it was created.

(1) Great Men Americans born after the framers did their work lived during the Romantic Age. The temper of the age cultivated the belief that the founders were indeed the “assembly of demigods” that Thomas Jefferson claimed they were in 1787. In the 1840s the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle expressed the Romantic theory of history in his famous utterance, "The history of the world is but the biography of great men." You can see the hero-worship in young Abraham Lincoln. His lyceum speech of 1838, delivered when he was 28 years of age, was informed by Thomas Carlyle's Great Man theory of history. Lincoln emphasized the “towering genius” of Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, and the other men who produced the Constitution, calling them “a forest of giant oaks,” “pillars of the temple of liberty.” His generation, by contrast, lived in an age of decline that would likely not measure up unless some great test challenged them to rise (such as a civil war?). Otherwise, the best they could do would be to show “reverence for the Constitution and its laws.”

(2) Great Nation After the Civil War and Reconstruction, Americans rewrote the narrative of the Constitutional Convention to emphasize our common national story since Pilgrim Rock. The need was to knit the nation back together after such a terrible trauma that took the lives of 626,000 men in the North, South, and West. The Great Nation narrative avoided saying too much about the slavery debates that almost tore the Convention of 1787 apart. Rather, it honored the patriotic delegates from North and South who, despite regional differences, came together to create the greatest fundamental law in human history. It is what a nation in need of healing needed to hear.

(3) Great Con Job Then a landmark book came along in 1913 – during the so-called Progressive Era – that emphasized the economics of the founding and the economic motives of the founders. Written by Charles Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States argued that our frame of government grew out of the reactionary phase of the American Revolution. The Constitution reflected the class interests of propertied delegates who met in Philadelphia in 1787. The result was a shrewd maneuver by selfish men of wealth bent on keeping the middling sort and poorer classes at bay. The propertied class protected their interests by setting up legal guardrails against the democratic excesses let loose in 1776.

(4) Great Debate By the time I was an undergraduate, Beard’s work had been overturned by R. E. Brown, Forrest McDonald, and historians working in the spirit of John G. A. Pocock, who went back to the archives and saw that the framers were not merely protecting their class interests, but that they had a more disinterested goal in mind: to found an enduring republic, the greatest republican empire the world had ever known. They were unsure of how successful their experiment would be. A basic question they asked was, Does republican self-government rest on the virtue of the people or on the formal political institutions that channel and control human behavior? The Federalists trusted human nature enough to go forward with the bold experiment of a large republic with a strong national government based on republican principles. The Anti-federalists, on the other hand, so distrusted human weakness and our propensity to corruption that they shuddered at the prospect of putting powerful political instruments in the hands of a few. The Constitutional Convention amounted to a great debate over the prospects of various forms of republican government in the modern age.

(5) Great Crimes That republican rewrite has begun to fade from the scene, and students today are taught mostly about the crimes and sins of the framers who debated and wrote the Constitution. Indeed, they know more about their shortcomings than any previous generation. Many of you no doubt have heard about the brouhaha surrounding the President’s House in Philadelphia. It’s where George Washington lived from 1790-1797. The house, just a short walk from Independence Hall, is presented as a prison for nine slaves that George and Martha kept. As one reviewer for the Denver Post wrote about the site, “Washington is exposed…. The first president’s reputation is savaged….Washington was mean and selfish and worked tirelessly to defend slavery.”

The human drama that arises out of hypocrisy makes a history syllabus more interesting, to be sure, but it does not push discussion very far if other important lessons are neglected. Our students should be learning that, without George Washington and the Constitution he championed, fearless critiques of our Founding Father might not be possible. Students should be learning that, without the Constitution, they would not have the ability to pursue happiness the way they want. They should be learning that, without the Constitution, most of their pop culture icons would not have the freedom of expression to entertain them as they do. In short, we are the freest people on earth. None of our students are going to jail because of their beliefs or manner of expression -- which is extremely unusual in the perspective of world history.

The Greatest Story Never Told
(in Today's Classrooms)

The Constitution of 1787 is one of the greatest documents ever drawn up by human beings. In fact, because it does such a good job of preserving freedom, we are free to ignore it.

As a history teacher, I say this with irony, of course. Every year, the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia conducts a survey to find out how well Americans know their Constitution. What’s our narrative these days? Sadly, nowadays there is not much of any narrative. A few years back, the survey asked teenagers to compare their knowledge of the Constitution with their knowledge of pop culture:

- 3/5 know the names of the Three Stooges, but only 2/5 can name the three branches of government;

- ¾ know which city has the zip code 90210, but only ¼ know the city in which the Constitution was written;

- 4/5 can tell you how many members the most popular rock bands have, but only 1/5 can tell you how many

U.S.

Senators currently serve on Capitol Hill.

Looking at the results of the survey, Dr. Richard Beeman, a professor of early American history at Penn, opined that our system of republican government “came with no guarantees. Not in 1787, and not today. They knew that the new republic would require active, informed citizen involvement to preserve, protect, and defend it.”

Today the Constitution may be the greatest story never told to our children, and this should unsettle us all. Kids may be only 25 percent of our population, but they 100 percent of our future. How do I hook college freshmen on the American founding and lay the groundwork for them to know more about the Constitution and to spend a lifetime exploring it?

1. Dramatis Personae -- What a Piece of Work Are Men!

First, I draw students into the very human story of the Constitutional Convention because they don't have a good sense of who these men were. The cast of characters comprises the greatest generation of political talent ever. Historians like to jest that they lived in the "Age of Marble," but of course they're not marble statues, cold and inaccessible. They were human and deeply flawed. Some of them drank too much (Luther Martin), some had illegitimate children (Benjamin Franklin), some were adulterers (Alexander Hamilton and Gouverneur Morris), some owned slaves (George Washington and James Madison), and some were so irascible (John Adams) they could hardly get along with others. Yet these men with complicated private lives worked together and performed heroically for the commonweal. They inspire us -- flawed though we are -- to do no less.

2. The Confederation -- a Time of Troubles

Since learning from the mistakes of the past is important, I expose students to the troubled circumstances that led to the Constitutional Convention. In truth, it came about because of one of the most powerful engines of historical change -- frustration; the Annapolis convention of 1786 had failed to address adequately the economic difficulties among the states. The Convention also came about because of another powerful engine of historical action -- self-preservation; Shays's Rebellion demonstrated that republican liberty is threatened not only when government is too strong, but also when government is too weak.

The nation that succeeded in breaking away from the British Empire seemed more unified by the color on maps than by its culture, society, politics, or economy. Do you know that there had been eight attempts to pull British North America into some kind of greater union together before the Convention of 1787? So the fruit of the framers' efforts -- "a more perfect union" -- was an amazing feat.

Consider the political difficulties. Initially the Second Continental Congress was without constitutional authority. It was little more than a conference of ambassadors from the 13 states. The Articles of Confederation were eventually ratified during the War for Independence. Many regarded them as the “Articles of Confusion" because of their numerous shortcomings.

It is always hard to launch a new government; doubly so to launch a new type of government. The

United States

was a republic in a world of monarchies. Actually, we were 13 republics. And make no mistake: These 13 republics were sovereign, coining their own money, raising their own armies and navies, erecting their own tariff barriers, and even fashioning their own foreign policies. The legislature of Virginia, for example, separately ratified the 1778 treaty of alliance with

France

. New York and Vermont almost went to war over their border. Several of the states were engaged in trade wars with one another. The potential chaos went far to convince Americans that too weak a national government is just as much a treat to liberty as too strong a national government.

Economically the times were among the most difficult Americans have ever faced. The country's war debts oppressed each of the 13 states; the possibility of default was real. Moreover, 1786 was the worst year of a depressed economy. British North America's coveted commerce with the Mother Country had been reserved for loyal parts of the Empire during the war. After the war, British manufacturers had inventory that they dumped on the American market at cheap prices, thereby pulling the rug out from under new American manufacturing. The economic suffering manifested itself when a patriot, Daniel Shays, led a revolt of farmers in western Massachusetts that revealed all the frayed edges around the status quo.

Socially there were strains. The stabilizing Tory elements had fled to

Canada during the war. Thirteen

diverse colonies lost some of the glue that held them together during the war. And Shays’s Rebellion revealed just how much many farmers resented the merchants and shippers on the coast.

Despite the difficulties of these times, it is also important to give the Confederation its due. The 1780s saw a lot of good, but the good it did has largely passed out of our communal memory. For instance, the Confederation Congress passed one of the greatest pieces of legislation ever, the Land Ordinance of 1785, which provided that the acreage should be sold and the proceeds used to pay off the national debt – a principle that would apply throughout the 19^th century until the closing of the frontier. (This explains why the U.S. didn’t have an income tax till after the frontier was closed and the federal government had sold off most of our public lands.) The Land Ordinance also provided that future land rushes be effectively accommodated with an orderly surveying system, and it provided that the 16^th section of each township be sold to fund public education – a stroke of genius in the early republic and one of the glories of this Congress.

Perhaps most significant of all, in its twilight the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 – part of our organic law – which championed freedom by outlawing slavery in the new lands being settled. And to its everlasting credit, it averted a future civil war by handling the western lands with wisdom. There was no doubt that the new republic would eventually become the world's greatest empire, but the West would have to be "won" with wisdom. New states, new republics, would not be subordinated to the original states, but be admitted on an equal footing. In this measure is embedded an important history lesson. The founders knew that the peace of the Roman Republic and Empire had been disturbed repeatedly by the unequal treatment of outlying provinces -- in part those disturbances were the undoing of the republic. The American Republic could not become a great empire if it repeated Rome's crippling mistakes. [See J. Rufus Fears, "Julius Caesar in History," in Life Lessons from the Great Myths (Chantilly, VA: Teaching Company, 2011), lecture 27.]

It is important to keep the Confederation Congress in mind when considering the Constitutional Convention. Both bodies of patriots were meeting at the same time in the summer of 1787, the former in New York City, and the latter in Philadelphia. Both -- both -- built the architecture of freedom that we enjoy to this day.

3. The Convention

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was one of the most extraordinating meetings of all time, a turning point in history. As Pepperdine government professor Gordon Lloyd sees it, what happened between May 25 and September 17 was a drama in four acts. Delegates tried various proposals on for size -- the Virginia Plan, New Jersey Plan, and Connecticut Compromise -- until a workable institutional mix was found for the new republic. None of the framers thought that they had conjured up the ideal commonwealth. The Constitution that emerged out of the debates was a mish-mash of compromises -- the best they thought they could produce under the circumstances.

Could it fly? The convention was not entirely kosher, and Anti-federalists pushed the point hard in Philadelphia and in the ratification debates that followed. Delegates had been sent to Philadelphia by the states to revise the Articles of Confederation, not to produce an entirely new frame of government. But the latter is what the Federalists pushed for and got. James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris -- from day one, they made the Convention an extraconstitutional gathering. Rhode “Rogue” Island was so wary of the enterprise that they never sent delegates to participate in the framing of a new constitution.

The delegates in convention and in the ratification debates that followed had tedius, exhausting discussions over the institutional mechanics of a modern republic. They grappled with the specifics of how power should be (1) divided among three branches of government checking and balancing each other, and (2) attenuated further by a federated polity in which the national government respected the traditional prerogatives of states and locales.

At a more philosophical level, the delegates were probing and pushing the very nature of republics. These were men of the Enlightenment who nevertheless possessed a keen sense of the historic rights as Englishmen. They not only knew the philosophy of Locke, but also the historic reality of the English Bill of Rights; not only Hume, but also Magna Carta; not only the Commonwealthmen, but also their Bible.

They put tough questions to each other. What were republics anyway? (Not just a representative democracy, which we are erroneously taught today.) Why had past republics succeeded or failed? What were the geographic limits of a republic? How were factions contained? How much executive power is too much? (Again, too weak a government is just as much a threat to liberty as too strong a government.) What about standing armies? What are the dangers of pure democracy -- and the mob -- to enduring sovereignty? What constitutes the happiness of a people? (Not just the private pursuit of pleasure, power, and profit, which we are erroneously taught today.) And -- and! -- what about the glaring ugliness of slavery in a so-called free nation?

Despite heated debates that on several occasions almost brought the Convention to an intemperate end, most of the delegates kept their tempers within the reasonable bounds of procedural debate. No one resorted to arms. The rule of law prevailed. Aristotelian prudence combined with a spirit of flexibility, compromise, and accommodation. The Convention was a major chapter in the development of the American leadership style. As Thomas Jefferson observed, “The example of changing the constitution by assembling the wise men of the state, instead of assembling armies, will be worth as much to the world as the [other things] we have given it.”

To make the Constitution the law of the land, the Federalists' ambitious agenda was to overcome the opposition of the Anti-federalists and get 13 republics to secede from the existing Confederation. Only eleven years earlier, the American colonies had seceded from the corrupt British Empire, and now the idea was to get them to secede from the ineffectual American confederation. That is what the hard-fought ratification debate from September 1787 to July of 1788 boiled down to. As MIT historian Pauline Maier argues in her authoritative study, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, the ratification debates were good training for citizens in the new republic.

4. The Preamble

Toward the end of the Convention, Gouverneur Morris was tasked with creating an opening statement for the Constitution. His handiwork became the most economical lesson in political philosophy ever written --Morris condensed 2,500 years of wisdom into a few lines. Allow me to explain.

The central problem with which the Constitution grapples is power – how to order power. Since we are lower than the angels, it is prudent to disperse the powers of government. And that is precisely what the delegates to the Constitutional Convention did by creating three branches of government that could check and balance each other, and by creating a federal system that further diluted national power by respecting the prerogatives of states and traditions of locales. The resulting order of government is one of the most elegant contrivances ever wrought by the hand of man.

But that is not all that the Constitution does for liberty. The Founders’ understanding of the idea is strikingly harnessed in Gouverneur Morris's one sentence Preamble. Its 52 words declare:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

These ordinary words pack extraordinary meaning. Note the six aims of the Constitution, announced by the words “in order to.” The six great aims of our Constitution define the common good. They are union, justice, peace, defense, welfare, and – not just liberty – but the blessings of liberty. In that order. The ordering of the six aims is deliberate, not accidental. In these few words our Founders established the official priorities of our government. A little reflection shows that the Founders expressed their priorities in the proper sequence (and I am happy to acknowledge my debt to Michigan Chief Justice Thomas Brennan for the following observations).

a. Form a more perfect union. The Founders made union or unity the first priority. There is no possibility of serving the common good unless the community is first identified and defined. It is a question of physical and social geography. There must be a jurisdiction in which the common good can be pursued and defended. Lines on the map that say: this is our community, our state, our nation. Within these boundaries, it’s all for one, and one for all.

b. Establish justice. The Founders made justice the second priority. Unless a society is just, unless it is committed to render to every person what is due that person, nothing it does will be for the common good.

c. Insure domestic tranquility. Domestic tranquility is the third priority, after unity and justice. Should justice be done at the cost of tranquility? Absolutely. That’s why policemen carry guns. Peace without justice is a pax terrorem. It is the gray streets of Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany. The fact is, there can be no true and lasting peace where there is no justice.

d. Provide for the common defense. The fourth priority in the Preamble is to provide for the common defense. It logically comes after union, justice, and domestic tranquility. A nation that is not unified cannot be defended. A nation that is not just should not be defended. A nation that is not at peace with itself will not be defended against foreign aggression. Witness the collapse of South Vietnam in 1975.

e. Promote the general welfare. The fifth priority is the one politicians, lobbyists, bureaucrats, citizen groups, and the media give most of their time and attention to: promoting the general welfare. To the Founders this did not mean welfare in the sense of relief from poverty or privation. The overwhelming majority of immigrants to America were by definition poor; the well off stayed back in the Old World. Well aware of this fact, our Founders did not call for the national government to provide assistance in the sense we understand it today. Rather, “the general welfare” is understood as legitimate public action on behalf of the common good; public expenditures for public purposes like transportation, communication, and the like – the public infrastructure people need to generate the wealth to provide for themselves, their families, and the goods and services society requires.

f. Secure the blessings of liberty. Now we come to the sixth and most interesting priority set out in the Preamble – to “secure the blessings of liberty.” Two things are noteworthy. First, the word “liberty” comes last in the list of aims and priorities of our Constitution. Why? Because the other aims – union, justice, peace, defense, and the general welfare – must be realized before a people can enjoy true liberty. Is this not what Iraq and Afghanistan are teaching us today? The fact that liberty is not first tells us that the Founders realized it is a fragile achievement of civilization, hard won and easily lost. To keep liberty from being lost, it must be built on the scaffolding of other institutions. It must be guarded with vigilance and upheld by our morals, reason, and willingness to live under the rule of law.

The second thing to note comes from parsing the sentence. Grammatically, liberty is not a direct aim set forth in the Preamble of the U.S. Constitution. Grammatically, the word is relegated to a prepositional phrase – the object of “blessings.” What is going on?

One way to interpret this wording is that liberty was a given in 1787. The Patriots had won back their ancient rights as Englishmen. The new republic was free; its citizens, sovereign. The Founders had proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence that all men are endowed by their Creator with the inalienable right to liberty. This self-evident truth was implicit in the Constitution.

Now, the wording states that the aim of the Constitution is to “secure the blessings of liberty.” If the Founders seem as interested in securing “the blessings of liberty” as in liberty itself, then it is because they viewed liberty as instrumental. It is a means, not the end – rather like money. Most people want money, not for its own sake, but for what it allows one to have: status, security, power, material comforts, and so on. It’s not the money per se but the blessings of money that we want.

By analogy, the grammatical treatment of liberty in the Preamble suggests that the Founders viewed liberty not as an end in itself, but as the means to the end. What is the end? In a republic of virtue, the end is the good life. So liberty is good because it allows us to achieve other good things. But liberty can only be good if it is ordered – ordered by the infrastructure of surrounding institutions and also by our morals, reason, and willingness to be subject to the rule of law.

So this ennobling sentence, this Preamble of the Constitution, provides a veritable tutorial in freedom to citizens. More precisely, its 52 words drive home a lesson not just in freedom, but in ordered freedom. Pondering the Founders’ idea of ordered freedom should give us pause about the notions of freedom most Americans hold today.

5. Results

The work of the Constitutional Convention must not have seemed very promising when delegates adjourned on September 17, 1787. Fully 16 of the 55 delegates wouldn’t even sign the document they had debated. Moreover, the nation's political elite split into two dominant parties -- Federalists vs. Antifederalists -- a pattern that has prevailed in various permutations ever since.

After ratification in 1788, the U.S. Constitution endured, although amended 27 times. Today it is not the oldest extant constitution (a distinction belonging to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts), but the oldest national extant constitution.

After so many tests over the past 23 decades, the U.S. Constitution stands as the best framework in the modern world for diffusing power on the one hand, yet having a strong enough national government to address the challenges of the modern world on the other.

Significantly, the U.S. Constitution has enabled America to endure -- and even reinvent itself several times -- in the face of serious challenges:

- we resolved the issue of sovereignty and slavery in the Civil War, with what Lincoln called "a new birth of freedom";

- we morphed from an agricultural Eden into the greatest industrial power in the world;

- we absorbed the Progressive Movement without a revolution;

- we did not just survive but thrived after World War II when we faced our greatest existential threat, and our nation became the economic, political, and moral superpower of the world.

In conclusion, allow me to leave you with a counterintuitive thought. We have looked at all the ways the Constitution is at the center of a great story. Yet I've not mentioned the most important element that has helped our nation survive -- the most important reason that our Constitution serves us generation after generation: It is because of our nation's unwritten constitution. America's unwritten constitution is composed of the habits of a free and virtuous people who cherish ordered liberty under the rule of law. Our unwritten constitution is found in citizens who balance rights and duties. The unwritten constitution exists where a people jealously guard the just treatment of fellow citizens: equal justice under law. These elements ultimately derive from a culture that traces back to Angles, Saxons, and Germanic tribes of the Middle Ages. Indeed, our politics work because of our long culture of ordered freedom. So long as America remembers her cultural roots, then we should be all right politically. And that's a story that should be told over and over and over again.

Iowa geography and history

2011-08-06T04:56:00.000-07:00

Contour farming enhances the rolling landscape.

Pure American Prairie As you slip south of the Great Lakes, traveling west, somewhere in Illinois you all of a sudden realize that the woods are receding and the groves are farther apart. The trees look shorter, the sky looks bigger, and the horizon looks farther away. This Illini prairie wedge is preparing your senses for the "splendor in the grassland" that is Iowa (... apologies to Elia Kazan)!

Boundaries defined by the two great Western rivers Iowa looks more like a piece from a jigsaw puzzle than most states. If the states were pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, Iowa's squiggly left and right sides would squeeze between the Missouri and Mississippi rivers, fitting snugly on top of Missouri, and capped by Minnesota. Did you notice that Iowa is bordered by four "m" words?

This breadbasket has fed billions "Rolling prairie, the homesteaders called it. Part of the greatest unbroken, unspoiled expanse of land found anywhere in the world -- that area of this wonderfully new, pure continent that was to become the breadbasket of the world. A land distinguished by the wonderfully rich soil that would feed billions. A land nurtured by its native peoples. Absolutely unspoiled.... One can still see the land as the pioneers saw it. Marvelous. Quiet. Stretching endlessly. Verdant. Grasses swaying in the ever-present wind. Having come from the worn-out lands of Europe, how wonderful this rolling prairie must have seemed to those people of no fear." ~Kent Baker, "A Stroll across Hillside Farm," in Glimpses: Iowa's Rural Legacy, p. 72.

90 percent of Iowa's landscape is devoted to agriculture. Contour farming magnifies the visual impact of a rolling landscape, as this aerial photo from the archives of the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service shows.

The greatest story never told Apropos of our Iowa breadbasket, Dumas Malone, the Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Thomas Jefferson, once told journalist Hugh Sidey, "So much of recorded history is about the struggle of individuals and families to feed themselves. That changed dramatically in this country. The greatness of this country was rooted in the fact that a single farmer could produce an abundance of food the likes of which the world had never seen or imagined and so free the energies of countless others to do other things." It's the greatest story never told, in Hugh Sidey's opinion.

Iowa's changing landscape since the early 1800s The Iowa that Lewis and Clark encountered in their journey up the Missouri River was carpeted by prairie grasses so dense that there was no room for bushes or trees to take advantage of the unbroken soil. Periodic fires swept through the grasslands, keeping bushes and trees at bay. Since the Corps of Discovery went through the region, Iowa's landscape has gone through three overlapping transformations.

Settlement: In the early 1830s, the territory was opened by Congress for settlement. The surveyors' straight chain was imposed on the rolling landscape. Land rushes resulted in pioneers churning up the tall-grass prairie, transforming the rolling hills into angular croplands. There were few conservation measures, and much rich, black topsoil ended up washing downstream into the Gulf of Mexico, where it found its graveyard in the Mississippi River Delta.
The New Deal: One hundred years later, the New Deal brought widespread conservation measures to the Hawkeye State. Contour farming became the practice. Rows of trees were planted to act as windbreaks. It's surprising to see how many old trees still grow at the edges of fields. Farmers needed shade from the scorching summers and windbreaks from the freezing winters, as Kent Baker notes [p. 73]. The lack of prairie fires that once swept through the region also allowed the trees to persist.
Turning silos into smokestacks: The family farm has been disappearing, replaced in recent decades by agribusiness and factories. In Waterloo, for example, you can see John Deere tractors being assembled. John Deere, the world’s leading manufacturer of agricultural tractors, is the sole tractor manufacturing plant left in the world that retains its founder’s name.

Native Iowan Henry A. Wallace

Henry A. Wallace This native son of Adair County took his degree from Iowa State University, where he was trained as a plant scientist. In rapid succession he served as FDR's secretary of agriculture, secretary of commerce, and second vice president -- before running for president in his own right in 1948. Words associated with the Secretary of Agriculture (from an Iowa monument to their native son): prairie restoration, terracing, contours, erosion control, soil restitution, crop rotation, single-cross hybrid seed, farm ponds, woodland restoration, first U.S. Soil Conservation District.

Big tractors, corn, soybeans, hay -- that's Iowa, which bills itself the "Food Capital of the World." It's the kind of place where, if you spend any time there, you should know the difference between a John Deere A and a John Deere B.

At the edge of a rural neighborhood.

Transformation of farms If you talk to people whose families have farmed in Iowa a long time, you learn that two twentieth-century developments made all the difference in rural America: technologically, tractors replaced horses by the end of World War II, bringing much more power to farming; genetically, hybrids replaced older plants, producing superior crops that could grow through disease, drought, and grasshoppers. ~Neil E. Harl, Introduction, Glimpses, pp. 7-8.

Neighboring skills Iowa is the kind of place where a lot of people live in identifiable rural neighborhoods. (Think about that word -- an area where people know each other by name and sight and are often "neighborly.") Traditionally at the center of an Iowan rural neighborhood were two institutions: a one-room schoolhouse and a church. A 4-H club might meet nearby. Rural sociologists, studying the cooperative nature of these remote neighborhoods, have observed the "little platoons" people form to help one another. But in recent decades the decline of "neighboring skills" has been noticeable. ~Jack Van Laar, "Maple Grove -- A Rural Neighborhood," in Glimpses, pp. 13-16.

Land of rural towns People justifiably think of Iowa as an agricultural state. Yet, improbably, Iowa lays claim to 950 towns and small cities -- more than any state but Texas. [LaVon Griffieon, "Let's Keep the 'I' in Iowa," in Glimpses, p. 118.] I don't believe it. As I travel I-80, the nation's greatest, most historic, east-west transportation corridor, I just don't see that many towns.

In the case of I-80, the kitsch is countered by a historic transportation corridor that follows the journey of the American Dream into the West. The Mormon Handcart Trail was blazed across Iowa near I-80, and it approximates the later Lincoln Highway, the nation's first coast-to-coast road. West of the Missouri River, I-80 approximates the Oregon and California trails, and is associated with the first Transcontinental Railroad.

I-80 It is fashionable to blast travel by interstate as kitschy, soul-sucking monotony. But the Interstate-80 corridor, connecting New York and San Francisco via Chicagoland, is one of the great conduits through which our nation's history has pulsed. America's second-longest interstate highway, I-80 most closely approximates the route of the historic Lincoln Highway, the first road across America; and it roughly traces other historically significant travel routes into the West: the Oregon Trail, California Trail, Mormon Trail, Pony Express, and first Transcontinental Railroad.

Cities According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2010 the United States had 275 cities with a population of more than 100,000 people. Iowa has only two cities that make the list: Des Moines is ranked 106th with 203,000 people; and Cedar Rapids is 196th with 126,000 people.

Iconic Iowa: Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930

American Gothic Speaking of which, Cedar Rapids is famous for the most iconic work of art ever associated with Iowa. Grant Wood's American Gothic, one of the most parodied paintings of the 20th century, was created in 1930. A product of the Great Depression, American Gothic depicts an Iowa father and his daughter (modeled after Wood's dentist and sister) expressing grim determination to get through hard times. Many modernist critics believed the painting's "deeper" meaning amounted to a satire of the Midwest's provincial lifeways, but apparently Wood was not aiming at social criticism. You can decide for yourself if you go to the Art Institute of Chicago to see the painting.

Hawkeyes The logo on Iowa football helmets is called the Tigerhawk. The mascot is named "Herky the Hawk." Both are traditions that developed after World War II. But the nickname "Hawkeye" was actually coined in the 1830s to commemorate Chief Black Hawk of Black Hawk War fame.

Pie shakes An Iowa original. Can't miss 'em!

Iowa's Loess Hills present some of the best loess (windblown silt) topography in the world. You can see picturesque landforms carved out of loess on the western rim of the state above the Missouri River floodplain in places like Council Bluffs and Sioux City. (Again, the Plains are not flat!) Abraham Lincoln ascended Council Bluffs to inspect a potential site for the eastern terminus of the transcontinental railroad. And Sargeant Charles Floyd, the only fatality in Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery, was buried in the Loess Hills above Sioux City. The silty deposits came about during the Pleistocene, when continental glaciers ground down rocks to the consistency of flour. When the glaciers retreated and the vast meltwater lakes receded, winds blew the floury silt that had lined the lakebeds into dunes mostly on the east side of the Missouri River floodplain. In many places, the silt deposits are more than 90 feet thick, and erosion has sculpted the loess into fantastic ridges.

Splendor in the Grassland

Iowa in August County fairs, butter cows, bikers on their way to Sturgis (South Dakota), and the quadrennial straw poll mark the waning days of summer in the Hawkeye state.

* * *

Bibliography Iowans have great pride in their landscape, which is one of the reasons I enjoy visiting the Hawkeye State. Two gems edited by Robert F. Sayre include, Take This Exit: Rediscovering the Iowa Landscape (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1989); and Take the Next Exit: New Views of the Iowa Landscape (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 2000).

Another little gem I found, on the Mississippi River overlook near the Quad Cities, is Glimpses: Iowa's Rural Legacy (Ames: Iowa Farm Business Association, 2004).

Happiness

2011-07-17T09:08:00.000-07:00

The following essay served as the basis of my guest sermon at Fountain Street Church, Grand Rapids, Michigan, on July 17, 2011. Because the congregation is latitudinarian, I chose to address a topic of near universal interest, happiness, and to ground it in several traditions. I would like to thank the Rev. Fred Wooden for inviting me to address the church.

A Vain Pursuit?

Imagine two different people. One of them discovers that she’s won the lottery and is suddenly worth millions of dollars. The other is run over walking to church; he survives but will suffer from paraplegia for the rest of his life. Now fast-forward one year. Who will be happier, the person who wins the lottery or the person who suffers from paraplegia?

If you are like me and like most people, you’re confident predicting that the lottery winner will be happier a year from now. And we’re wrong. Dan Gilbert points out that real case studies show that the person who wins the lottery and the person who suffers from paraplegia will be about equally happy one year after their sudden change of fortune. (That's assuming they have roughly similar baselines of cheerfulness to begin with.) This morning, I hope to unpack the mystery of why this is so.

But first, I’d like to thank Rev. Fred Wooden and the Fountain Street community for inviting me to share some thoughts with you. Aware of the eminent men and women who have preceded me in this pulpit, I come here in humility and won’t take the approach of a guest speaker in a church across town who began by saying, “There are many ways to worship God – you in your way, and I in His.”

As a historian, I have developed some expertise in the American presidency. A couple of my friends kid me, saying that I’ve specialized in answering questions that people don’t ask. This morning I will depart from the usual expectation and address a question that is either in the foreground or background of your mind: How to be happier?

We ask the question in every stage of life. It is just one of those existentials. As mortals we are aware that every day brings us closer to the end of our time. So we want to get life right; we want our portion of happiness; so we chase after it in all kinds of things -- in people or nature, in adventure or habit, in myth or philosophy, in ritual or addiction, in therapy or worship, in new cars or new houses, in new spas or sprees at the mall.

We see a Niagara of ways this obsession with happiness inundates us: In shelf after shelf of self-help books generated by our therapeutic culture; in a cottage industry of so-called happiness coaches; in the Gallup Organization’s world poll in which more than a half-million people have participated when asked about their state of happiness and satisfaction; in the University of Chicago’s General Social Survey that’s been coming out since 1972; in the World Database of Happiness out of Rotterdam. (See http://worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl/) In preparing for this morning, I was surprised to see the number of TED talks devoted to the topic.

So we are all thinking about it. You want it. I want it. They (out there) want it. The evidence is that Homo sapiens – which is Latin for “people are weird” – have been thinking about happiness seriously and systematically for at least 3,000 years. And yet – and yet – is it not striking that there is so little agreement? There is no consensus on defining happiness. There is no consensus on the qualitative difference between relatively enduring states of happiness vis-à-vis relatively temporary experiences of pleasure. There is no consensus on how to achieve this state of flourishing and wellbeing. There is not even a consensus whether happiness should be one of the ultimate goal of our efforts. Moreover, when you read the sages, prophets, and philosophers of the last 3,000 years -- then consider your own life – happiness has a surprising quality that often violates our everyday experience and common sense.

Chinese ideogram of happiness

A Personal Survey

I began inquiry into happiness when, as director of the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies, I searched out the link between happiness and leadership. My hypothesis was that happy people make better leaders and better followers than unhappy people, so I did two things: I thought about what I had picked up about happiness from others, and then I looked at what psychologists and social scientists had to say in scholarly studies. What did I learn from reflection on others' experience with happiness?

1. Let’s start with individuals who practice the dominant religion of our culture, Christianity. During the Cold War, I taught German students in a Gymnasium. Some of my students were from Eastern Europe or traveled to see family there. From them I learned about the reality of Christian martyrdom. These students told me of relatives behind the Iron Curtain who had been physically and psychologically tortured yet, at the height of their agony, experienced a beatific vision of union with Christ that filled them with peace and joy. Try to get your mind around torture as a source of happiness.

2. When I lived in Colorado, I used to visit my sister at a Taoist commune, Still Point, and listen to talks by Gia-Fu Feng. A disciple of Lao Tzu, Gia-Fu had journeyed from China to Big Sur to Colorado and taught about the Taoist tradition of wu wei that emphasized natural harmony in all our thoughts and actions. We could only be happy if we did not try to be happy, but surrendered our ego and lived effortlessly in harmony with the nature of things. Try to get your mind around surrendering your individuality as the way to happiness.

3. When I talk to my cousin Christopher Clowery, now called Heng Sure, an ordained Buddhist monk and director of the Berkeley Buddhist Monastery, he helps deepen my understanding of “nirvana,” a concept built from two Sanskrit words indicating the “blowing out” of a candle or the fire of desire, greed, anger, and ignorance, so as to make one free of suffering. From my sister Pam, an ordained Buddhist nun now named Jin Hai, I learn that Buddhism is a religion without God and that its disciples surrender their ego (their distinction as individuals) to release themselves from Vesuvian desires. Try to get your mind around being happy by not wanting to be happy.

4. When I was a senior in high school, I practiced Transcendental Meditation and learned from Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the Vedic tradition that happiness is only attained in a transcendent state called “cosmic consciousness” when one’s being is absorbed into a larger reality like a raindrop falling into the ocean. Again, in such a tradition there is no being like our Western God, and no privileging of the individual. Try to get your mind around the idea that being a raindrop in the ocean is your happiness.

5. When as a teenager I hitchhiked to Taliesin and Taliesin West to learn more about Frank Lloyd Wright and a life of creativity and good work, I discovered that the Fellowship at Taliesin sought not happiness so much as satisfaction. Satisfaction was found in the integrity and intensity of one's work. Try to get your mind around the thought that laboring is the source of your happiness.

6. As an undergraduate, I read Elizabeth Kübler-Ross on death and dying, and discovered that a surprising number of people had their peak experience of happiness during the process of dying. I have since looked at David Casarett's work, Last Acts, and spoken to many families with a loved one in hospice care, and they speak of the peace and reconciliation their loved one experiences when the body begins to shut down. Try to get your mind around the awareness of dying as your happiness.

The examples in this little survey violate our common sense as Americans, do they not? We normally don’t associate happiness with persecution, loss of personality, extinguished desire, unceasing work, and the process of dying. On the contrary, we learn to pursue happiness in power, profit, pleasure, privilege, performance, prestige, and pride in getting our way.

General Social Survey (University of Chicago)

Flummoxed by all the unconventional ways people claimed to experience happiness, I next turned to the social scientific literature, starting with the General Social Survey conducted by the University of Chicago since 1972. It is one of the most thorough studies of happiness ever undertaken in the U.S., and it consistently shows that:

Climate has hardly anything to do with one's happiness. Hard as it is to believe, people in Michigan are basically as happy as people in California.
Americans grow happier as they grow older.
My generation, baby boomers, are not as content as other generations.
African Americans are less happy than whites.
Men are less happy than women.
The happiness of a people waxes and wanes from era to era.

Arthur Brooks

I also looked at the work of the behavioral economist Arthur Brooks, author of Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America – and How We Can Get More of It. He sought the sources of happiness in our values, behavior, lifestyle, culture, and even public policy. Brooks used U of C’s General Social Survey and research into identical twins separated at birth. He found that seven elements are particularly important in the calculus of happiness.

Having good DNA is essential. Genetics accounts for 50-80 percent of our baseline cheerfulness. That should not make us despair. We can work with the other 20-50 percent that is not genetic, so it’s important to get our values, behavior, and lifestyle right.
Practicing a religion is important. It turns out that 30-40 percent of our proclivity to worship is genetic, and the rest is environmental, so you should choose a church whose doctrines you believe are true and that provides a rich, regenerating experience.
Having good friends and meaningful relationships is also important to enjoying life (en-joy-ment – literally, being in a state of joy).
Giving voluntarily to others increases our well-being.
Having pathways of opportunity to fulfill our potential is important to our flourishing.
Having the feeling of earned success beats the alternative.
And -- here is the darker side -- perceiving that we are relatively better off than our neighbors makes us feel better. Whether it's a bigger car, nicer house, prettier yard, more prestigious job, or more successful children, we like to compare how we are doing with others.

Notice that winning the lottery did not make the list?

Brooks has also looked into very specific demographic slices. He discovered, for example, that the average age a man feels most miserable is 44 years old. That’s when:

his wife figures out he a bore;
a strong divergence emerges between his sense of success and his earning power;
and his kids turn into teenagers!

Daniel Kahneman

After reading Arthur Brooks, I turned to Daniel Kahneman, the Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He asks, why is it that people can go through an experience and not think they are happy, but then remember the experience as a happy one? The converse, too. People can go through an experience convinced that they are happy, but remember it as an unhappy time. Kahneman concludes that there are two psychological selves at odds within us, and they confuse experience and memory. There is a difference between being happy in your everyday life – in your current experiencing self – and being happy about your life in the narrative you keep. When we reconstruct our past, we are choosing not so much between experiences, as between memories of experiences. And when we look toward the future, we look at what we are about to go through as anticipated memories. We are beings that consume memories. Thus we are constantly negotiating between these two selves.

The Founders and Happiness

Remember my saying a few minutes ago that happiness has a surprising quality that often violates our everyday experience and common sense? In my research, one of the surprises came from something familiar -- the American founding. It was Thomas Jefferson and America's original "greatest generation" that set culture on a new course when they declared that all human beings had the inalienable right to the "pursuit of happiness." It has been said -- by David McCullough and Jacob Needleman, among others -- that that phrase in the Declaration of Independence has done more to shape the sensibilities of the modern age than any other.

About one year ago, I was asked to teach a class on the American founding. During the months I prepared, I reexamined the founders – George Washington, John and Abigail Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Mercy Otis Warren -- and I was struck by how differently they defined happiness compared to definitions that are current today. Their definition sought to integrate private and public happiness. Nowadays we tend to think of happiness as a private good. We have lost the sense of "public happiness," but it was much on the minds of the founders in their debates over what qualities of citizenship Americans should possess, and what kind of republic America should be. Allow me to elaborate.

The founders' notion of private happiness is foreign to postmodern sensibilities. Their sense of well-being was informed by Aristotle and Cicero, who believed that happiness was inseparable from virtue. The starting point for any understanding of human flourishing is that we must obey our informed conscience. If you have a bad conscience, you cannot be happy. If you are a slave to your passions, you cannot be happy. John Adams expressed this stern idea when he defined happiness as the ability to do what one ought. Where there is no virtue, there is no happiness. No abstract virtue, this. For many of the founders -- people of the Enlightenment though they were -- virtue was inseparable from religion. Performing the rituals that were pleasing to God -- being in right relation to God -- was essential to human flourishing.

The founders' notion of public happiness also seems foreign to postmodern sensibilities, but it was based on balancing two great traditions in our Western heritage: the civic republican tradition that emphasized duties, and the natural rights tradition that emphasized (what else?) rights. The former stretched back to ancient Greece and Rome, while the latter was traceable to the European Middle Ages. The founders managed to balance both of these living traditions -- the civic republican tradition that stressed each person's duties to community, and the natural rights tradition that underscored the inalienable rights each person enjoys before the state. If there is too much emphasis on duties, the citizen lives unhappily in an authoritarian state. If there is too much emphasis on rights, the atomized citizen lives unhappily in anarchy, licentiousness, or narcissism. One current of conversation at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was about achieving this balance of rights and duties in the "common wealth." (Think about that word.) If the behavior and habits of citizens reflected the balancing of rights and duties, then individuals had a chance to live integrated -- and thus relatively happy -- lives in community. But balancing the two is the key to the integration, and thus to the happiness.

The founders comprise one of the greatest generations of political leadership in any time and any place. No utopians, they were realistic about the pursuit of happiness. Essential to well-being were virtue in one’s private life and a judicious balance of rights and duties in one’s public life. The founders, I believe, got it right. In the end, they afforded me the best case studies for my hypothesis that happy people tend to make better leaders and followers than unhappy people.

Conclusion

I teach the founders. I believe that young Americans should learn from them. But it is difficult to do so because the founders lived in a different time, place, and mentality. They did not know a world transformed by industrial, urban, or high-tech revolutions, nor the radical ideas of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Einstein. We face challenges of integration that they did not. Perhaps that is why, for many of us, happiness remains elusive. It is not just a mood, not just a fleeting spike of dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. Because it cannot be grasped by the prefrontal cortex alone, it remains a mysterious and irreducible state of being.

And yet, somehow, we know happiness when we experience it in ourselves, and we sense it when we see it in others. It’s people living their passion – building a boat, writing a symphony, educating their child, growing flowers in their garden -- but it's more. I believe the pursuit of happiness is linked to a primordial urge deep within us. It's a mythic return to Eden as the vestibule to the Heaven that awaits. This urge leads humans in all cultures and in all eras to redeem their time and to sanctify their place.

In reality, of course, we never find Eden on Earth. But we should not despair. As Denis Waitley observed, even though happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed, happiness is the spiritual experience of living every possible moment with love, grace, and gratitude.

To love, grace, and gratitude let us say “amen”!

LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL

Below are some resources out the various traditions of happiness that I consulted while preparing these remarks:

Confucius on Happiness

here, here and, with a lot of modern psychology added, here.

Ancient Greeks and Romans on Happiness

See the following sites: on Aristotle, on Aristotle's ethics, on Socrates' view of happiness, the great debate, on Cicero's view of happiness

St. Thomas Aquinas: "Happiness is the conscious possession of a good."

Scottish Enlightenment Thinkers on Happiness

Francis Hutcheson portrait and prose on happiness here.

Darrin M. McMahon book here.

Daniel N. Robinson article here.

America's Founding Generation on Happiness

John Adams on the link between happiness and virtue: The happiness of the individual is the end of man. The happiness of society is the end of government. Upon these points, all speculative politicians, divines, and moral philosophers will agree. All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue. Confucius, Zoroaster, Socrates, Mahomet, not to mention Jewish and Christian authorities, have agreed in this. ~close paraphrase of John Adams, letter to George Wythe, 1776

Where did Thomas Jefferson's notion of the "pursuit of happiness" come from? One of the few books annotated by Jefferson was Essays on the Principles of Morality and Natural Religion, written by the Scottish moral philosopher, Lord Kames (1696-1782), a leader of the "moral sense" school that argued that human beings had an inner sense of right and wrong. Lord Kames, also known as Henry Home, provided the philosophical foundation of the phrase, "pursuit of happiness," which was included by Jefferson as an inalienable right of mankind in the Declaration of Independence. ~paraphrase from the Library of Congress's Jefferson collection

Happiness -- the product of civic virtue and public duty: As a scholar well-versed in the ideas and ideals of the French and English enlightenments, Jefferson found his greatest inspiration in the language and arguments of English philosopher John Locke, who had justified England's "Glorious Revolution" of 1688 on the basis of man's "natural rights." Locke's theory held that government was a contract between the governed and those governing, who derived their power solely from the consent of the governed and whose purpose it was to protect every man's inherent right to property, life and liberty. Jefferson's theory of "natural law" differed in that it substituted the inalienable right of "the pursuit of happiness" for "property," emphasizing that happiness is the product of civic virtue and public duty. The concept of the "pursuit of happiness" originated in the Common Sense School of Scottish philosophy, of which Lord Kames was the best-known proponent. ~from the Marine family website

Religion, morality, and knowledge are three essential components of the happiness of a people. From Article 3 of the Northwest Ordinance: Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Happiness linked to holiness. The Continental and Confederation Congresses were the first national governments of the United States. The majority of men who served in Congress believed that the "public prosperity" of a society depended on the vitality of its religion. Nothing less than a "spirit of universal reformation among all ranks and degrees of our citizens," Congress declared to the American people, would "make us a holy, that so we may be a happy people."

David McCullough links happiness and education in the thought of Adams and Jefferson: I think we need history as much as we need bread or water or love. To make the point, I want to discuss a single human being and why we should know him. First off, he is an example of the transforming miracle of education. When he and others wrote in the Declaration of Independence about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," what they meant by "happiness" was not longer vacations or more material goods. They were talking about the enlargement of the human experience through the life of the mind and spirit. They knew that the system of government they were setting up would not work if the people were not educated. "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization," Thomas Jefferson wrote, "it expects what never was and never will be."

George Will

"America was born in recoil against an overbearing executive's 'repeated injuries and usurpations' (the Declaration of Independence); modern conservatism was born in reaction against executive aggrandizement, first by Franklin Roosevelt, then by his acolyte Lyndon Johnson....

"The idea of American exceptionalism is obnoxious to progressives, who, evidently unaware of the idea's long pedigree (it traces to Alexis de Tocqueville) and the rich scholarship concerning the idea, assume it is a crude strain of patriotism. America, Tocqueville said, is unique because it was born free -- free of a feudal past, free from an entrenched aristocracy, and [free from a] established religion.

"The American Revolution was a political, not a social, revolution; it was about emancipating individuals for the pursuit of happiness, not about the state allocating wealth and opportunity. Hence our exceptional Constitution, which says not what government must do for Americans but what it cannot do to them.

"Americans are exceptionally committed to limited government because they are exceptionally confident of social mobility through personal striving. And they are exceptionally immune to a distinctively modern pessimism: It holds that individuals are powerless to assert their autonomy against society's vast impersonal forces, so people must become wards of government, which supposedly is the locus and engine of society's creativity." ~George F. Will, "A Congress that Reasserts Its Power," Washington Post, January 16, 2011 [at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/14/AR2011011404663.html]

Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988).

Robert Hamowy article here.

History of Political Ideas article here.

Arthur M. Schlesinger, "The Lost Meaning of 'The Pursuit of Happiness,'" William and Mary Quarterly 21:3 (1964).

Naomi Wulf, "Liberty, (the Pursuit of) Happiness, and the Anxious Democrat: Conflicting Views of Liberalism in the Early Republic," Cercles 17 (2007).

Freud on Happiness

Carmelo Scudari PDF here, here, here,

Finally: http://www.happiness-project.com/

American Founding -- John Adams 5

2011-07-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

Why the Fame?

Given John Adams's liabilities -- his prickly personality, several career setbacks, and the inconvenient fact that his presidency was shoehorned between that of eminent Virginians -- it is hardly surprising that his revival came so late -- 200 years after his retirement from public life. I'd argue that it is not justifiable to give all the credit to David McCullough and HBO. It is true that Adams needed people to plead his case before the bar of public opinion, but there was a good case to champion because of the man himself. Adams himself deserves the fame that Americans now accord him because of his decisive response to the challenging times in which he lived, as well as because of his good character, hard work, intelligent writing, ability to judge character, and vision for our nation. Let's examine these half-dozen elements in more detail.

birthplace of Abigail Smith Adams

1. The grand stage It's a truism that's lost none of its truth: "the times make the man." A person is more likely to be famous if by accident of birth he lives in heroic times and if by accident of geography he is close to the action. The American founding was a threshold in the human experience, changing the human estate forever. Adams was born in 1735, near Boston. He was nearing forty years of age when hostilities commenced at Lexington Green and Concord Bridge, near Boston. Harnessing his considerable moral and intellectual virtues, Adams seized opportunities to lead during the crisis with Great Britain. The accidents of history and geography put a man leaving his youth and entering his best years in the cockpit of revolutionary tumult then gripping Massachusetts.

I cannot help but add the "accident" of a great marriage to those of time and place. The Adamses were exceedingly fortunate to have found and married one another.

Adams, like Jefferson, read Plutarch's Lives in the original Greek

2. Classical education Adams's lifelong reading of the classics also prepared him for fame. His teachers were Thucydides, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Tacitus, Cicero, Suetonius, Plutarch, Jesus, and St. Paul. Each ancient teacher grounded him in the understanding that fame is a social state that is not inherited but earned. If earned, it should be based, above all, on the fineness of one's moral character. Honorable living, courage amid danger, prudence in decision-making, temperance in the face of temptation -- all these virtues are the result of a lifetime of moral discipline. They become more evident when living in challenging times, and when life-and-death decisions have to be made.

Adams knew that fame could be fickle, and he knew not to confuse fame with celebrity. He would be appalled by today's celebrity culture that has confused celebrities with heroes. Adams would have scoffed at the way people seek to break into 24/7 media coverage with 15 seconds of insipid notoriety.

John Trumbull's "Declaration of Independence," in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda, captures not the Fourth of July, but the presentation of the document to the Second Continental Congress on July 2nd, after legal separation from Britain had been achieved. Adams, appropriately, is the delegate in the middle of the picture -- on the left among the five founders who are submitting the Declaration of Independence to the chairman. Jefferson is the tallest of the group, and Franklin is on the right.

3. Ambition Adams was ambitious to make something of his life. As a young person he thought he might be happy as a farmer. But the more he learned about himself, the more he set his shoulder to the wheel of ambition. His rise from humble beginnings was impressive -- from the Braintree house to scholar at Harvard, to teacher, to law apprentice, to small-town lawyer, to delegate to the Continental Congresses, to diplomat, to constitution maker, to Vice President, to President of the United States, to elder statesman. At each stage in his career he performed his duties with integrity and intensity. In the Continental Congress, for instance, he served on 90 different committees -- more than any other congressman -- and chaired 20 of them. His work on behalf of our country meant long periods of time when he could not be with Abigail and his children, or tending his farm in Braintree. His diligent study and hard work insured that what he said and what he did made genuine contributions to his country. In Paris, his hard work probably saved him from many a temptation [McCullough 236-37]! More, his sense of duty made him stoical in the face of difficulties. He wryly observed that, "No man who ever held the office of president would congratulate a friend on obtaining it."

4. Master stylist Adams was a serious student of the English language, and his attention to the ancient liberal art of rhetoric helped him become a forceful writer. Writing, he admitted, was a self-imposed discipline. "I have a great Deal of Leisure, which I chiefly employ in Scribbling, that my Mind may not stand still or run back like my Fortune," he once wrote. He became one of the most prolific and quotable of the founding fathers, spitting out quips ready-made for Bartlett's. Some of the best quotations from America's original "greatest generation" came from Adams's quill. A good example: "Facts are stubborn things," uttered by the young attorney when he courageously defended the British soldiers on trial for the Boston Massacre in 1770. Years later, contemplating his frustrations with the do-nothing Continental Congress, he supposedly complained (revealing a wit worthy of comparison with Mark Twain's): "In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, two are called a law firm, and three or more are called a congress."

One Great Founding Mother: Abigail Adams

Lasting fame is built on evidence of greatness. Americans are fortunate to have access to two great letter exchanges, both involving John Adams. His writing gives us insight into the most interesting aspect of the human person, the inner life. The letters reveal how his mind worked and how his character responded to challenges. The 1,160 letters he and Abigail exchanged offer a treasure-trove to posterity, yielding rich insights into the politics, mores, and domestic life of the era. These exchanges with his "Dearest Friend" are all the more rewarding to read because of Abigail's insightful observations and powerful intellect, the match of her husband's.

In addition, the famous Adams-Jefferson correspondence, resumed after more than a decade of chilliness between the second and third presidents, offers insights into the religious, philosophical, and historical dimensions of the American founding.

Also notable are the letter exchanges between John Adams and his good friend, Dr. Benjamin Rush. The correspondence of these two minds of the Enlightenment tended to probe the power of the irrational in human affairs [Joseph Ellis, Founding Brothers, 215].

5. Judge of character Adams also deserves fame because he was an estimable judge of character. He pushed for George Washington to serve as the commander of the Continental army, persuaded Thomas Jefferson to write the Declaration of Independence, and nominated John Marshall to be chief justice of the United States. Not bad calls, these.

6. The American idea Finally, Adams richly deserves fame as a patriot because he got the American idea right. There is a good reason to call him our greatest philosopher president. For one thing, he was no woolly thinker seduced by the gauzy utopian schemes of French salons. Rather he held to a clear vision of what citizens of the new republic must be to thrive in a hostile world of fallen human beings.

Here it is worth saying a word about Adams's religious beliefs, which were complex and deserve more space than I can here devote to the topic. Privately, Adams was not an orthodox Christian, as we understand the term today. Theologically he was not a Trinitarian. He was a Unitarian who yet called himself a Christian and "followed" Christ. Students are confused by the fluidity of meaning, but I point out that Adams followed Christ in much the same way that Buddhists follow the Buddha (understood to be a man and not a god). In his public life Adams was like a flying buttress: supportive of more orthodoxly Christian churches but content to be outside of them. He believed in Providence, which mostly consisted of the laws under which God had created the world (so the human duty, if the goal was to prosper, was to learn these laws and act in accordance with them). Nor did Adams have any doubt that religion was necessary to the survival of the new republic. As he famously put it, "We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other" [Adams to the Military, October 11, 1798].

Adams got the American idea right in other key ways. When we look at the spectrum of ideas among the founders, he took the via media, convinced that the center must hold. On the one hand, he distanced himself from radical revolutionaries like Thomas Paine and his cousin Sam Adams, rejecting anything like pure democracy. "Remember democracy never lasts long," Adams advised John Taylor in 1814. "It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide." On the other hand, his energetic temperament as well as his grounding in history and first principles led him away from the more pacific instincts of founders like John Dickinson. When the time came to move decisively for independence, Adams had already thought it through and was able to shape the course of events.

A keen student of history and political theory, Adams also understood the nature of republican government. It was not just anti-monarchical, nor just a democracy expressed through elected representatives. Properly understood, a republic was a form of government that balanced the three historically dominant classes of power: rule by the one (monarchy), rule by the few (aristocracy), and rule by the many (democracy). The tensions among these three groups is what Adams and others exploited to articulate the separation of powers. Thus the monarchic impulse would find expression in the Presidency; the aristocratic impulse, in the Senate and Supreme Court; the democratic impulse, in the House. Power was further attenuated in a federated polity that did not over-concentrate power in the national capital but respected civil society's "little platoons" found at the local level as well as the traditional prerogatives of villages, townships, counties, and states. Above all, power must never accrete to one ruler. Human nature was too corruptible to trust any man or woman with too much power. "They define a republic to be a government of laws, and not of men," wrote Adams in Novanglus No. 7 (March 6, 1775).

Finally, Adams got the American idea right by articulating a wise conception of happiness. He brooded quite a lot on human flourishing. Perhaps his broadest utterance on the topic is found in Thoughts on Government: "We ought to consider what is the end of government before we determine which is the best form," wrote Adams. "Upon this point all speculative politicians will agree that the happiness of society is the end of government, as all divines and moral philosophers will agree that the happiness of the individual is the end of man.... All sober inquirers after truth, ancient and modern, pagan and Christian, have declared that the happiness of man, as well as his dignity, consists in virtue" [Thoughts on Government, 1776].

This statement strikes modern sensibilities as too Puritanical. Nowadays we only think about happiness as a private good. And over time, that private good has tended to degenerate into narcissism, into the calculus of I-me-mine. Today we pursue happiness in power, profit, pleasure, prestige, preeminence, progress, and pride in getting our way.

But Adams held to a deeper understanding of happiness that sought to integrate its public and private dimensions. Although Americans today have lost sight of "public happiness," it was much on the minds of the founders when they deliberated over what qualities of citizenship Americans should possess, and what kind of republic America should be. Allow me to elaborate.

Adams's notion of private happiness was informed by Aristotle and Cicero, who believed that well-being was inseparable from virtue. Most fundamentally, we must obey our informed conscience. If you have a bad conscience, you cannot be happy. If you are a slave to your passions and drives, you cannot be happy. Adams expressed this stern idea when he defined happiness as the ability to do what one ought. Where there is no virtue, there is no happiness. And as we have already seen, virtue for Adams was inseparable from religion. Performing the rituals that are pleasing to God -- being in right relation to God -- is essential to human flourishing.

Adams' notion of public happiness was also informed by ancient traditions of our Western heritage: the civic republican tradition that emphasized duties, and the natural rights tradition that emphasized (what else?) rights. The former stretched back to ancient Greece and Rome, while the latter was traceable to the European Middle Ages. Adams managed to balance both of these living traditions -- the civic republican tradition that stressed each person's duties to community, and the natural rights tradition that underscored the inalienable rights that each person enjoys before the state. If there is too much emphasis on duties, the citizen lives unhappily in an authoritarian state. If there is too much emphasis on rights, the citizen lives unhappily in anarchy or licentiousness, or both. If the proper balance could be struck -- if the behavior and habits of citizens reflected the proper balance of rights and duties, then individuals had the chance to live integrated, and thus relatively happy, lives in community.

In sum, happiness for Adams was inseparable from religion, virtue, education, civic participation, and -- and marrying a good wife. He was fortunate to have a peerless spouse in Abigail. In the end, perhaps it was her excellent influence that helped make John Adams worthy of the fame that he craved, and that posterity has finally bestowed upon him.

* * *

This essay is the fifth and last in a series on John Adams. The Adams series served as the basis for my talk accompanying the exhibition, John Adams Unbound, organized by the Boston Public Library and the American Library Association. The talk was given at the Loutit District Library, Grand Haven, Michigan, on June 30, 2011.

This Adams series is posted on July 2 because he thought that was the day our country's independence should be pondered and celebrated.

For more on presidents and leadership, see http://www.allpresidents.org/.

American Founding -- John Adams 4

2011-07-02T12:47:00.000-07:00

His Rotundity -- His Own Worst Enemy

Like any public figure who lives into his nineties, Adams experienced his share of setbacks -- more than a few of his own making. Isn't one of the most difficult things any of us learns is how to deal with our own personality and its liabilities? Adams fessed up that he had a difficult personality. He could be his own worst enemy -- ironic given that he once wrote Abigail a letter cataloging all her faults!

Examining the numerous liabilities of his personality, biographer John Ferling observes, "Adams struck many people as vain, irritable, irascible, supercilious, and tactless. He maintained a stiffly formal and aloof demeanor, what one acquaintance called a habitually 'ceremonious' manner.... Abigail once scolded him for his tendency to indulge in 'intolerable forbidding expecting Silence' while in the midst of a conversation; 'tis impossible for a Stranger to be tranquil in your presence'" [Ferling 170].

Moreover, he nursed a tendency toward brooding pessimism. As he revealed to his diary on the eve of the Second Continental Congress -- the Congress that would declare independence -- "I wander alone, and ponder. I muse, I mope, I ruminate. We have not men fit for the times. We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune -- in everything. I feel unutterable anxiety" [McCullough 23].

Adams also had a hot temper. He managed to keep his outbursts confined to private conversations, but there was widespread conjecture that he might be emotionally unstable. One of the most egregious outbursts occurred the only known time Adams demeaned a subordinate to his face. In the presidential mansion one day he dressed down an aide, James McHenry, unjustly accusing him of scheming with Hamilton to bring Adams down. Then came the volley of insults. He frothed that that "foreigner," Hamilton, was "the most restless, impatient, artful, indefatigable, and unprincipled intriguer in the United States, if not the world." "The bastard brat of a Scotch peddler” had a “superabundance of secretions which he could not find whores enough to draw off.” Finally Adams decried “the profligacy of his life; his fornications, adulteries and his incests.” Such a surprising outburst, this, that McHenry later wrote down what happened in letters to friends and family. He ventured that the second president of the United States was "actually insane" [McCullough 538-39].

Besides a penchant for being his own worst enemy, there were situations that arose which Adams thought might do harm to his reputation.

1. At great risk to his young law career, Adams defended the Redcoats who were involved in the Boston Massacre because he believed that the law rather than popular passions should rule Massachusetts.

2. Adams's two terms as Vice President were frustrating for a man of his restlessness, vigor, brilliance, and vanity. Complaining to Abigail, he opined, "My country has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived." After eight years of biding his time, a lesser man might have given up and gone home.

3. The four Alien and Sedition Acts as well as the so-called Midnight appointments to the judiciary -- on the eve of Jefferson taking office -- made Adams look thin-skinned, unprincipled, and unpresidential.

Scumbag: James Calender

4. Perhaps his most bitter setback was losing the White House to Jefferson in the Election of 1800. Adams despaired that his reputation could ever recover from such an ugly campaign. We think politicking is a dirty business today, but we forget that it was even dirtier in the early republic. In 1800, Jefferson and his allies roused an unprincipled journalist, James Callender, to attack Adams's character in the Richmond Examiner. The sitting president was accused of being a monarchist, a warmonger, and even a hermaphrodite who had "neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." Callender especially wanted to drive home the impression that Adams was insane with rage. He spread the unfounded rumor that Adams once became so enraged he ripped off his wig, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it [McCullough 536-37].

It gets worse. Callender, with Jefferson's blessings, accused Adams of importing two mistresses shortly after being elected president in 1796. Ridiculous rumor, of course, but in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, this was a serious allegation. One of the mistresses supposedly was from France, the other from Germany. As Alf Mapp humorously puts it, "While retaining the French charmer ... Adams supposedly had returned her rival to her native Germany. The Pennsylvania Germans were incensed, not so much by reports of sexual immorality as by the thought that the president would reject a fräulein while holding fast to a mademoiselle [Mapp 55]. Because Adams couldn't carry Pennsylvania, he wasn't reelected, and to Adams, this further robbed him of respect.

* * *

This essay is the fourth in a series on John Adams. The Adams series served as the basis for my talk accompanying the exhibition, John Adams Unbound, organized by the Boston Public Library and the American Library Association. The talk was given at the Loutit District Library, Grand Haven, Michigan, on June 30, 2011.

This Adams series is posted on July 2 because he thought that was the day our country's independence should be pondered and celebrated.

For more on presidents and leadership, see http://www.allpresidents.org/.

American Founding -- John Adams 3

2011-07-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

The Thorn of Fame

John Adams has finally gotten the fame he craved, but it was a long time coming over a rough road. Already as a young man he tortured himself thinking about a future without fame. Historians don't need to speculate on this point because he and his wife Abigail seemed to write down everything. Because of the thousands of letters they left us, we know John Adams's inner life better than the inner life of any other founding father. We know, apropos of this talk, that he thought he should be famous, once declaring that the "Times alone have destined me to Fame" [Ferling 170].

Yet the quest for fame was a thorn in his side. As David McCullough put it, as a young man "John Adams was not a man of the world. He enjoyed no social standing. He was an awkward dancer and poor at cards. He never learned to flatter.... There was no money in his background" [19]. Everything he earned -- from respect in the courtroom, to readership in the newspapers, to leadership in Philadelphia -- he had to work hard at. He knew that fame can be fickle and fleeting. For that reason, he feared posterity would not pay him sufficient homage.

Moreover, he was eaten up with envy when he thought of the more illustrious founders of his own day. Given his Puritan New England heritage, Adams knew envy was one of the seven deadlies, but he seemed helpless before the green-eyed monster. Even when Adams was the runner-up to George Washington in our first national election, he still felt green with envy. One year after that election, in a letter to Benjamin Rush, Adams railed: "The history of our revolution will be one continued lie from one end to the other. The essence of the whole will be that Dr. Franklin's electrical rod smote the earth and out sprang General Washington. That Franklin electrified him with his rod -- and henceforward these two conducted all the policy, negotiations, legislatures, and war."

Adams gold coin

Adams's hunger for fame stands in stark contrast to the easy-going attitude of a later president, Ronald Reagan, who quipped: "There is no limit to what you can accomplish if you don't care who gets the credit." Lacking Reagan's insouciance, Adams yearned for the credit. But here's the good news. If Adams didn't get enough of it in his own time, he perhaps is finally satisfied with the credit he receives today. Looking down on us (for he believed in eternal life), this stubborn man would likely be happy to concede how wrong he was about posterity. Americans have been lionizing him since the Second World War.

* * *

This essay is the third in a series on John Adams. The Adams series served as the basis for my talk accompanying the exhibition, John Adams Unbound, organized by the Boston Public Library and the American Library Association. The talk was given at the Loutit District Library, Grand Haven, Michigan, on June 30, 2011.

This Adams series is posted on July 2 because he thought that was the day our country's independence should be pondered and celebrated.

For more on presidents and leadership, see http://www.allpresidents.org/.

American Founding -- John Adams 2

2011-07-02T12:31:00.000-07:00

Rising Tide

Tides do rise, and John Adams's reputation started to rise a half century before McCullough's biography. In 1953 Russell Kirk canonized John Adams in his magnum opus, The Conservative Mind, arguing that of all the patriot founders, it was our second president who best understood history, constitutions, and the consequences of ideas. Kirk realized Adams's intellectual achievement was one key to any fame posterity would confer.

Two decades later the musical 1776 came out, and it was not Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin in the limelight, but the brainy delegate from Braintree, Massachusetts, who took center stage. In the movie that followed, Adams's irritability was turned into a clever device to make him more human and approachable than he otherwise would be.

Also during the Bicentennial celebration, PBS aired a 13-part series called the Adams Chronicles that presented 150 years of the family's history and fetched many Emmys.

And then McCullough's masterpiece came out in 2001 and brought about a historiographic revolution, a paradigm shift in the way we regard America's founding fathers. Adams waxes, Jefferson wanes. As of this writing (June 2011), according to amazon.com, McCullough's Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Adams is the 9th-most-purchased book on the American Revolution, and the 14th-most-purchased book on US presidents. And the HBO production based on McCullough's book is the 4th-most-purchased miniseries on the site.

The book's splash caused more than a ripple. The historian Gordon Wood, who is currently editing a collection of Adams's papers for the Library of America series, observes that Washington and Jefferson got only one volume each of their writings, whereas Adams is getting four volumes.

And the U.S. Treasury has issued a John Adams gold coin honoring the 2nd president, an unwitting double-entendre for his "currency."

* * *

This essay is the second in a series on John Adams. The Adams series served as the basis for my talk accompanying the exhibition, John Adams Unbound, organized by the Boston Public Library and the American Library Association. The talk was given at the Loutit District Library, Grand Haven, Michigan, on June 30, 2011.

This Adams series is posted on July 2 because he thought that was the day our country's independence should be pondered and celebrated.

For more on presidents and leadership, see http://www.allpresidents.org/.

American Founding -- John Adams 1

2011-07-02T05:55:00.000-07:00

America's greatest philosopher president

Once Forgotten Founding Father and Philosopher President Makes a Comeback.... Why?

Ten years ago, David McCullough told audiences something that still has the capacity to surprise us. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author said that he initially intended to write a joint biography of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. At first his concern was that Adams could not hold his own next to Jefferson. But the more research he did, the more his concern shifted. At some point he realized that Jefferson could not hold his own next to Adams, so he decided to devote the biography to our second rather than to our third president. As the distingished historian Pauline Maier notes, "McCullough's biography of Adams inevitably has a lot to say about Jefferson, but on virtually all points of comparison between the two men, Jefferson comes in second."

High recommendation, that, and arguably so. John Adams's public life makes for a compelling story. Consider the number of firsts that he is associated with during the early days of the republic. He was:

the lead author of the oldest constitution in the world still in use (that of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, dating from 1780);
the first vice president of the United States;
the first president who lived in the White House;
the first president who was challenged for re-election, indeed, the only president in U.S. history who was challenged by the sitting vice president (Thomas Jefferson);
the first one-term president (because he lost to Jefferson);
the first commander in chief who had to direct major military operations off U.S. territory (the Quasi War that was fought against the superpower of the day, France, in the Caribbean Sea);
adapting Plato's term, "philosopher king," let us also call Adams our first "philosopher president" -- the best we have ever had.

All of these points make Adams worthy of admiration, but the last point makes him worthy of the fame he coveted and that we posthumously confer on him. And yet, from my experience in the classroom, I am not certain that most Americans are aware of his intellectual achievements.

One of the greatest first ladies, Abigail Adams

I will come back to the intellectual achievements of our philosopher president later in these remarks, but first let's remind ourselves that, in the pre-David-McCullough world, John Adams was our "forgotten founding father." If you go to Washington, DC -- the city of great monuments to presidents -- there is not a single statue of John Adams. His absence in Statuary Hall is especially conspicuous in light of the statue of his cousin, Samuel Adams, and the marker where his son, John Quincy Adams, died at his desk. There is not a single statue of him in Philadelphia, even though he was the most ardent defender of independence at the Second Continental Congress. There is not a single statue of him at the U.S. Naval Academy, even though the first vessels of our permanent U.S. Navy were launched during his administration. The most prominent statue of him you'll find is in his hometown of Quincy (Braintree), Massachusetts; yet even this memorial was erected just a few years ago, after McCullough's biography.

"Dearest Friend" -- John to Abigail, September 14, 1774

Adams himself predicted that he would be the forgotten founding father. To Benjamin Rush, he wrote with mock humility, “Mausoleums, statues, monuments will never be erected to me. I wish them not. Panegyrical romances will never be written, nor flattering orations spoken, to transmit me to posterity in brilliant colors. No, nor in true colors. All but the last I loathe” [John Adams to Benjamin Rush, March 23, 1809].

Why the neglect relegating Adams to the founding fathers' back bench? One explanation is that his presidency was shoe-horned between two very dominant figures -- George Washington, the indispensable man who became a legend in his lifetime, and Thomas Jefferson, who was not keen on rehabilitating Adams publicly. Moreover, Jefferson and his party enjoyed longevity in contrast to the Federalists, who would soon die out as a political force. Jeffersonians set the nation's political agenda for more than two decades following the Adams administration. For many decades, the New Englander got lost in a Virginia crowd.

And even though John Adams's son, John Quincy Adams, won the White House in 1825, he also was a one-termer. The Adams name again went into decline because Andrew Jackson booted JQA out of the White House in 1829. The succeeding "Age of Jackson" was not friendly to the Adams brand. As a consequence, the reputations of our 2nd and 6th presidents suffered in the popular imagination.

* * *

This essay is the first in a series on John Adams. The Adams series served as the basis for my talk accompanying the exhibition, John Adams Unbound, organized by the Boston Public Library and the American Library Association. The talk was given at the Loutit District Library, Grand Haven, Michigan, on June 30, 2011.

This Adams series is posted on July 2 because he thought that was the day our country's independence should be pondered and celebrated.

For more on presidents and leadership, see http://www.allpresidents.org/.

Geography, the joy of place

2011-06-30T09:03:00.000-07:00

Garden of Eden, by Thomas Cole

An offbeat definition: Geography is more than an academic discipline. A geographic presence of mind disciplines you to live in the present, and to know and enjoy the place where you are. It is thus the source of happiness -- hence the notion of geography instilling the "joy of place." This awareness of place, this awakening to place, is very Buddhist. To be alive to place is the source of great happiness.

Humans have the primordial urge to return to Eden, so they try to see glimpses of Paradise everywhere they are. Beautiful landscapes are a vestibule of the Heaven that awaits them. They thus sanctify place and redeem time. The discipline of geography is a way of "finding" God, not in place, but through place. This primordial urge to return to Eden, to our original home, is very Jewish. To see unexpected beauty in a place -- for example, in a brilliant sunset -- is another source of happiness.

There is often the desire to strike out into the unknown, yet with the confidence that, if we follow the rules of the road, it will lead to a better place, one we've not been to before. Fixing our compass on a better place in the future is a very Christian aspiration. This hope in a better place in the future is another source of happiness.

I. Journeying ... and the joy of geography

A great tradition of literature of travel, sojourneying, combines the joy of geography with the joy of words: Homer's Odyssey, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Dante's Divine Comedy, Steinbeck's Travels with Charlie, Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, William Least Heat Moon's Blue Highways)

Robert Pirsig in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (pp. 1-2):

"We are in an area of the Central Plains ... heading northwest from Minneapolis toward the Dakotas. This highway is an old concrete two-laner that hasn’t had much traffic since a four-laner went in parallel to it several years ago.... I’m happy to be riding back into this country. It is a kind of nowhere, famous for nothing at all and has an appeal because of just that.

Tensions disappear along old roads like this.... Chris and I are traveling to Montana with some friends riding up ahead, and maybe headed farther than that. Plans are deliberately
indefinite, more to travel than to arrive anywhere. We are just vacationing. Secondary roads are preferred. Paved county roads are the best, state highways are next. Freeways are the worst. We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on 'good' rather than 'time' and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes."

II. Geographical awareness heightens one's sense of irony, and irony can be a source of joy, producing a wry smile. Geographic irony includes:

Mouth of a river emptying into the Indian Ocean in Mkambati Nature Reserve, Pondoland, South Africa

1. The notion of the "mouth" of a river. It is a bad analogy to the human mouth because it gets it all backwards. We usually associate the mouth with the nourishment that is taken in. But the mouth of a river relentlessly discharges its watery nourishment from its "alimentary canal" -- its system of tributaries -- to an estuary that feeds land and marine life.

The Father of Cool: Willis Haviland Carrier

2. Modern air conditioning. Coolness was invented in the Northeast. Yet it made possible the flight from the region of its birth to the South and West. Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Phoenix, San Antonio -- these megalopolises would never have grown so large without the New Yorker's invention. The modern air conditioning system that Willis Haviland Carrier (November 26, 1876 – October 7, 1950) invented in Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to a quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, marked the birth of air conditioning because of the addition of humidity control, which led to the recognition by authorities in the field that air conditioning must perform four basic functions: (1) control temperature, (2) control humidity, (3) control air circulation and ventilation, and (4) cleanse the air.

The United States in the 1860s, during the Civil War

3. The "West" was not so west prior to and during the Civil War. Culturally it was loaded with meaning that had been imported from the North and South. Remarkably, both Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis were born in the western state of Kentucky, less than 50 miles from one another. Missouri had the third most battles of any state involved in the Civil War (after Virginia and Tennessee). Farther west still, Bleeding Kansas was the dress rehearsal for America's bloodiest war. The Civil War was entangled in the question over the expansion of slavery into the West much more than many Americans realize.

American geography combines with American history and politics to equip our minds to deal with complexity, and untangling complexity can be a source of joy:

The joy of complexity: Illinois

So many places are more complex and interesting than we’ve been taught in school. We take it for granted that a state like California is diverse physically and culturally. But Illinois? It is called the “Prairie State,” whose landscape is often regarded as boring by people zipping across I-80. It is anything but. Waterfalls in the cliffs and rock outcrops above the Illinois River; high bluffs overlooking the Mississippi; hummocky karst landscape around Carbondale -- a little digging and you discover that Illinois is much more than a prairie. True, the Illini prairie peninsula intrudes from the west. But the diverse botany of the state inspired a University of Chicago scholar, Henry Cowles, to pioneer the development of ecology in the 1890s with his studies of plant succession.

Geologically, the state's foundation rocks vary from those of the Great Lakes Basin to those of the Gulf Coastal Plain.
Geomorphologically, glaciated in the northeast, with moraines, but unglaciated in the northwest, in the driftless area.
Ecologically, oak-hickory forests in the north, bald cypress in the south.
These physical southern connections are reinforced by a host of other southern links. LaSalle unites the area to Louisiana in the contest for empire.
The Mason-Dixon Line splits the state in two – the line is just five miles south of the state capitol building in Springfield.
Illinois is regarded, properly, as a northern state. It was a free state that remained in the Union during the Civil War. After all, it is the “Land of Lincoln,” and Ulysses Grant called it home. Yet the southern third of the state has a southern feel and people speak with a southern accent because immigrants came in from Kentucky, across the Ohio River to the east.
Illinois -- considered "western" in the early 1860s -- was important as a Civil War staging area at Fort Defiance.
Chicago (big, new, modern) and Cahokia (relatively big, ancient, extinct) and places in between that cling to existence, places like Cairo (whose hopes have been dashed, but see the SIU proposal).

Great Plains geography 5

2011-06-28T19:11:00.000-07:00

The High Plains, where they have escaped the bulldozing effect of continental glaciers, are hardly flat, as this rolling landscape in South Dakota shows.

As I drive from east to west on I-70 from Missouri into western Kansas, or on I-80 from Iowa into western Nebraska, or on I-90 from Minnesota into western South Dakota, here are some three-dozen things that I observe as the road leaves the scattered forests and tall-grass prairie of the Midwest and stretches into the High Plains:

Because short grasses replace tall grasses and trees, the horizon seems to stretch farther and farther away.
The 360-degree horizon is flat, but the middle ground and foreground are not necessarily so. In South Dakota, for example, north and east of the Missouri River, much of the land has been planed by continental glaciers and is thus flat. South and west of the Missouri River, the land escaped continental glaciation and therefore can be quite rolling. Some think the velvety hummocky landscape looks like a great golf course. The same could be said for the Flint Hills and Smokey Hills of Kansas, and the Sand Hills of Nebraska.
Periodically, one encounters fantastic geologic formations like Nebraska's Chimney Rock, or Colorado's Pawnee Buttes, or North and South Dakota's Badlands. These whimsical landforms break the monotony of an otherwise expressionless horizon.

James Nedresky's photographs capture the land best.

There are a surprising number of prairie ponds, sometimes lined with rushes and cattails, sometimes not.
In the summer heat you can conjure larger and larger mirages on the highway up ahead.
Exits are farther apart; there are more signs warning drivers, "Next Exit __ Miles"
At the higher elevations, the August air smells sweeter.
My nose and lips begin to crack in the thinner, drier air.
The atmosphere is clearer, so I can see the outline of clouds at an impossibly far distance -- more than 100 miles away.
In an afternoon summer shower, the sun is apt to shine during a brief cloudburst.
Because of blizzards, there are barricades at the on-ramps of highways and in some places across the lanes (e.g., on I-80 at Mile 238 between North Platte and Kearny).
Because of drifting snow, there are long stretches of snow fences.
There are more signs announcing the conservation district one is in.
There seem to be as many John Deere dealerships as car dealerships.
In August, the corn becomes noticeably shorter.
You can see lots of crop dusters -- often biplanes -- flying low over the corn.
There are more center pivot irrigation systems, especially for corn and sugar beets.
Wheat and sunflowers replace corn and soybeans as the miles mount. Usually it's winter wheat.
Trees are limited to bottomlands and windbreaks around houses and fields. Cottonwoods line streams. There is an occasional Russian olive.
There are more and longer barbed-wire fences.
There are more windmills of the old-fashioned kind. Nowadays there are huge wind-harvesting machines, and big trucks carry the propellers along interstate highways as "oversized loads."
There are more pickups and more drivers wearing cowboy hats.
There are more cowboys and references to cowboys in billboards.
There are more saddlery shops.
There is a higher percentage of Indian names.
There are more black angus cattle and some red angus cattle, too.
There are more feedlots.
You see more corrals with pretty horses in them.
Museums are more apt to display the long-barreled Colt 45.
Towns become like tree islands amid a sea of grass. One can make out the boundaries of the town from a fair distance. The skyline provides welcome vertical relief from the unending horizon. Towering over the town are a great white grain elevator, silver silos, a water tower or two, and perhaps a church steeple.
You can see long black trains in the distance, usually carrying coal.
And there is only one place in the world where you can see all the billboards announcing the approach of Wall Drug Store!

You can infer a lot from what you observe as you head west. For instance:

The greater number of billboards sporting gun and ammo ads tell you that this is Second Amendment country. Don't even think about interfering with the libertarian spirit out West.
The homesteads are often far from surface water. Geologically this suggests the existence of great aquifers; legally it suggests the doctrine of prior appropriation of water rights.
The tourist tee-pees you see by the side of the road echo the time when they were the indigenous shelter of Plains Indians, who made them from buffalo hides.

Tee-pees made from buffalo hides were the indigenous shelter of High Plains Indians.

What have I failed to observe or forgotten to note?

buffalo in South Dakota

Great Plains geography 4

2011-06-26T10:49:00.000-07:00

The loneliness of the land: Rick Dunn's photograph of the Pawnee Buttes, east of Fort Collins, Colorado. Although Colorado is regarded as the Rocky Mountain state, almost half of it extends into the Great Plains. (See Rick Dunn's essay that accompanies this photo.)

The best synonyms for the "Great Plains" are "High Plains" and "western sea of grass." James Fenimore Cooper referred to the region as "the Great Prairies west of the Mississippi" [The Last of the Mohicans, 1826, Introduction]. Other synonyms are sometimes used in popular parlance but they don't work well:

Misleading characterization 1: Great Plains = Great American Desert
The Great Plains go through periodic droughts that seem to turn the region into a wasteland. West Texas is experiencing such a drought as I write. [See article here.] But humans have also contributed to the catastrophes of the last 150 years, especially because of the over-extension of grazing and of deep plowing. As a result, ordinary drought cycles such as occurred in the second half of the 19th century were magnified during the first half of the twentieth century. One catastrophe was the so-called Dust Bowl. Such catastrophes are relatively rare. In most years since Anglo-American encroachment, the Great Plains have received adequate rainfall during the growing season to support a harvest of wheat. The eastern part of the region is wetter, an ecological garden, a veritable breadbasket. So where did the term, "Great American Desert," come from? In 1819 President James Monroe sent an American explorer named Stephen Long to explore the west. He trekked through the Great Plains in a dry spell and believed the land was inhospitable, and so labeled the region west of the 98th Meridian the Great American Desert. The moniker lasted from the 1820s to the 1870s. It's another way an early president of our nation had a surprising impact, this time on the perception of the Great Plains.

Major Stephen Long's 1820 map of the "Great American Desert." The Great Plains comprise the easternmost third of the arid Great American Desert and Great Basin.

Dust Bowl

Misleading characterization 2: Great Plains = the prairie
It would be more accurate to say that the Great Plains = shortgrass prairie. As the map below shows, the vast prairies of North America are not coterminous with the Great Plains but extend considerably to the east of the region. At the time of Columbus, the famous "prairie wedge" speared east of the Mississippi River into Illinois. In addition, there were numerous prairies islands east of the Mississippi River. But Illinois's prairie wedge and the prairie islands farther east should not be considered High Plains. Note on the map below the curious extent of prairie in Michigan, where tallgrass prairies thrived in glacially deposited, sandy, outwash plains in Newago County where the Muskegon River flows. Eventually it morphed into the so-called Big Prairie Desert because of the extent of sand and sparce vegetation. It is misleadingly regarded as the largest "desert" east of the Mississippi River.

Extent of indigenous shortgrass prairie (light green), mixed prairie grasses, and tallgrass prairie (dark green) at the time of Europeans' arrival in the Americas. A safe generalization is that the eastern extent of the Great Plains began where the tallgrass prairie ended. The climate is wetter where the tallgrass prairie thrives, and drier where the shortgrass prairie grows.

Misleading characterization 3: Great Plains = Tornado Alley
Children who see the classic, The Wizard of Oz, know Kansas has killer tornadoes. Among Great Plains states, Oklahoma is even more torn up by twisters than Kansas is. But the farther north and west one travels on the High Plains, the more rare tornadoes are. Indeed, the northern Great Plains are one of the safer places to live east of the Rockies if you are lilapsophobic.

The U.S. has at least four Tornado Alleys. The one on the Great Plains goes from north-south -- down through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. An even deadlier alley straddles the Deep South -- extending east-west across Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, Arkansas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma. Note that the Great Plains state of Oklahoma is the junction of these deadly Tornado Alleys. But the farther north one goes on the High Plains, the rarer tornadoes are. Boston, Massachusetts, has far more tornadoes than Billings, Montana.

There are far more night twisters in the Deep South's Tornado Alley than in the Great Plains' Tornado Alley.

Misleading characterization 4: Great Plains = Corn Belt

Although the Corn Palace is in Mitchell, South Dakota, corn only thrives in the bottomlands and irrigated tracts of the High Plains. True, the eastern part of the Great Plains has the climate, soil, and water to grow robust harvests of corn. Yet the High Plains are better known for spring and winter wheat. They are really part of the wheat belt because wheat can withstand arid conditions better than corn can. And because wheat grows here, there are cattle -- lots of cattle. Great Plains wheat sustained the long cattle drives after the Civil War. Not many people know that Theodore Roosevelt spent time as a cattleman on the Great Plains. Retreating from civilization after the deaths of his wife and mother on Valentine's Day, 1884, TR resigned from the New York Assembly and went to Dakota Territory where he invested in two ranches and worked as a cowboy.

Corn grows well in the eastern parts of the Great Plains, as well as in the bottomlands of the High Plains, but the region is better known for wheat and the cattle fattened by it.

Misleading characterization 5: Great Plains = Midwest
For the practical needs of the classroom, teachers break down the Continental U.S. into manageable chunks of states. Somewhat arbitrarily, they have drawn a line around a bloc of 12 states in the north-central part of the nation -- from Ohio and Michigan in the east to Kansas and North Dakota in the west -- and labeled them "the Midwest." Only four of the Great Plains states are technically in the Midwest: North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. Even these states have more of a western than a midwestern feel, what with their rodeos and rangeland the closer one gets to the Rockies. The High Plains also extend into three states of the Southwest -- Texas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico -- as well into three states of the Mountain West: Colorado, Wyoming, and Montana. So the Great Plains stretch across three somewhat artificially designated regions. Depending on the place, one can feel the tug of the Midwest, West, and Southwest in the grasslands.

From the perspective of elementary geography textbooks, the Great Plains spread across three major geographic provinces. The Great Plains include the westernmost states of the Midwest (in red) -- North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas. This western sea of grass also stretches into parts of the Southwest and Mountain West.

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SOURCES

For the Internet source of each photograph, map, and illustration used in this essay, click on the image.

Additional sources that I consulted are available through the hyperlinks in the text, or below.

For a bibliography of Great Plains geography, consult http://libguides.emporia.edu/content.php?pid=60124

Oklahoma is discussed at http://digital.library.okstate.edu/encyclopedia/entries/G/GR015.html

Theodore Roosevelt, cowboy
"I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota."

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This photo-essay is part of a series on Great Plains geography.

Great Plains geography 3

2011-06-25T10:15:00.000-07:00

The High Plains: You know 'em when you see 'em.

Comparing the seven maps that follow shows the challenge of defining the Great Plains. The first map is the most vague; the last map, the most specific. Nevertheless, each map locates the region's boundaries differently, especially its soft eastern margin that merges into the lower Central Plains and tall grass prairie.

The Interior Plains, which make up half of the Continental U.S., are divided into two parts: the Central Plains/Lowlands to the east and the Great Plains to the west. The boundary between the two parts is not distinct. But this summation holds true: The Central Lowlands' rich soils have made the region famous as America's breadbasket; the Great Plains' sea of grass became legendary for trail drives, ranches, and the cowboy cattle empire. Also the Great Plains are considerably higher in elevation than the Central Lowlands. Viewed from the Mississippi River Valley at, say, St. Louis, the plains are a plateau of sedimentary rock that rises gently west to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. At Denver, Colorado, the land is one mile high.

This depiction of the Great Plains shows a huge rural expanse covering almost one-forth of the Continental U.S. Lying astride the 100th meridian, the Great Plains extend over all or parts of ten states west of the Mississippi River and are part of the vast Interior Plains physiographic province.

Indigenous grassland biomes on the Great Plains include the steppe-like short grass prairie (light green) and mixed grasses between the 100th and 98th parallels. The tall grass prairie to the east (dark green) is often used to distinguish the eastern boundary of the Great Plains from the Central Lowlands. However, there are hardly any remnants of tall grass prairie left.

Another map of the North American prairie. The short grass prairie is in yellow.

Geomorphically, the Great Plains are much more complex than most Americans realize.

Visit the U.S.G.S. site http://tapestry.usgs.gov/physiogr/physio.html for a remarkable topographic map of and map key to the physiographic regions of the United States. Geologically, the High Plains, as the term suggests, are composed of numerous layers of relatively horizontal sedimentary rock that slopes gently east from the Rockies toward the Missouri-Mississippi rivers. But erosion has produced complex terrain (geomorphology), especially near larger rivers. Among the landforms on the High Plains are plateaus, mesas, buttes, hogbacks, bluffs, badlands, loess formations, moraines left by continental glaciers, and driftless plains that largely escaped glaciation. Depending on where one puts the boundaries of the region, elevations range from 7,000 feet in Colorado (the Black Forest) to under 1,000 feet in North Dakota (along the Red River) and Texas (Edwards Plateau).

This map of the grasses, crops, and other vegetation of the Great Plains extends farther east than the geologic and most geographic depictions of the Great Plains; the coniferous patch in South Dakota represents the Black Hills. Note that the region's boundaries, viewed from the perspective of agriculture and land use, extend into Mexico and Canada.

A consortium of scholars at the University of Michigan, Colorado State University, and University of Saskatchewan has defined the eastern boundary of the Great Plains with a concession: "The only agreement on this boundary is that no authoritative line exists. Numerous people have attempted to define this border in both physiographical and cultural terms, using such demarcators as the 100th, 98th, 95th, and 88th meridians; the Missouri, Arkansas, and Mississippi rivers; and various levels of annual rainfall. Our boundaries depend on a combination of climatic, topographical, political, and cartographic criteria, and are ultimately drawn along county borders. According to these definitions, the Great Plains region contains about 475 counties in twelve states."

As land use maps suggest, the Great Plains have the lowest population density east of the Rockies; in many places fewer than 2 inhabitants per square mile live there. One keenly experiences the loneliness of the land in eastern Montana, eastern Wyoming, and the western Dakotas in the U.S., and great stretches of Alberta and Saskatchewan in Canada. Their rural feel contrasts with significant cities around the perimeter of the Great Plains that serve as the region's entrepots: Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Kansas City, Omaha, Sioux Falls, Fargo, Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Calgary, Cheyenne, Fort Collins, Greeley, Boulder, Denver, Colorado Springs, Pueblo, San Antonio, Austin, and Waco. There are also significant cities within the Great Plains, but on average they are smaller than the perimeter cities. The interior cities include Moose Jaw, Regina, Billings, Minot, Bismarck, Rapid City, Pierre, Lincoln, Wichita, Abilene (Kansas), Topeka, Amarillo, Lubbock, Midland, Odessa, Abilene (Texas), and Roswell.

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This photo-essay is part of a series on Great Plains geography.

Great Plains geography 2

2011-06-24T10:04:00.000-07:00

Jefferson & Trains

In a land whose reference is the horizon, it is difficult to grasp dimensions. These western grasslands, no respecter of the longest international boundary in the world, extend north into Canada's Prairie Provinces. If you were to drive from southwest Texas to north Alberta, you would cover some 2,400 miles and never have left the Great Plains. If you were to travel from the eastern Dakotas to the Montana Rockies, you'd journey some 700 miles and never have left the Great Plains.

Jefferson anticipated western land rushes.
The township & range aided surveyors
and expedited property claims.

Because the region was settled by Anglo-Americans after the Civil War, it boggles the mind that one of America's founding fathers would have a lasting impact on the landscape of the Great Plains. But Thomas Jefferson's imposition of the township-and-range survey system -- first on the Old Northwest, then by extension on the Louisiana Purchase -- became the measure of the West. It was the most expeditious way for surveyors to deal with land rushes. From the air, you can see the rectangular layout -- mile after mile of straight rural roads going north-south or east-west -- Etch-a-Sketch lines, as Alicia Rebensdorf puts it. It makes for a seemingly endless checkerboard. As a result, most of the boundaries of the states and provinces in the Great Plains have no correspondence to physical features like rivers, watersheds, or continental divides. Rather, their boundaries are straight-line parallels and meridians. Colorado and Wyoming in the U.S., and Saskatchewan in Canada, are entirely creatures of parallels and meridians. The same holds for many county boundaries in the region. (By the way, Utah is the only other state or province whose boundaries are solely parallels and meridians.)


Railroads, east-west "streams of steel" that replaced river transport, had a great influence on settlement patterns and even the shapes of Great Plains states.

Consistent with the Jeffersonian grid imposed on the Louisiana Purchase, most Great Plains states are rectangles that are elongated on an east-west axis. Why elongated? The answer lies in the development of a dramatic new mode of transportation that took off in the middle of the 19th century, railroads. Linking far-away markets between the Atlantic and Pacific, continental railroads replaced waterways in the arid West as the most expeditious way to move people and goods across the land. The Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 kick-started the laying of rails and dreams of new settlements. Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and North Dakota are each 3 degrees latitude "high" and approximately 7 degrees longitude "wide" because of the east-west movement of people and goods on this sinuous stream of steel.

Most of the states in the Great Plains, moreover, cover a similar extent of land. Why? It goes back to Jefferson's idea of equality regarding national expansion. The new states were to be equal republics not just politically but also geographically. In the world's first great republic, western states would not be colonies dependent on the older states in the East or Midwest.

Given the region's size and diversity, even a bevy of specialists with Ph.D.'s cannot do the landscape justice. Consider all the ways the various disciplines attempt to describe, define, circumscribe, and manage the Great Plains:

The township & range grid --
Jefferson's lasting legacy to the region.

Geographers shoehorn the Great Plains into the westernmost physiographic province of North America's interior plains. A rural hinterland, the plains slope east from the foothills of the Rockies toward the Mississippi River. This great expanse of plateau is carpeted with prairie grasses and filled with an array of cultural and natural surprises -- like the fact that a continental divide cuts across the land, separating the watershed of Hudson Bay from that of the Gulf of Mexico. The basic land-use pattern of the land is the square grid -- township and range -- established by Thomas Jefferson to deal judiciously and expeditiously with land rushes.
Geologists chisel into its limestones, sandstones, shales -- layer upon layer of sedimentary rocks formed from the outwash of the Ancestral Rockies -- strata laid down over millions of years on the floor of a long-vanished sea. Continental glaciers pushed as far south as the Upper Missouri River Valley, where North Dakota is today.
In this big sky country, climatologists describe the region in shorthand -- Dfa, Dfb, Cfa, and Bsk from the Köppen-Geiger climate classification system -- summarizing the extremes of winter and summer, wetness and drought, that are experienced in the interior of a large continent that lies in the lee of a great cordillera. Periodic droughts, blizzards, white outs, and tornadoes are the culprits that descend from the west.
Hydrologists have plenty to concern themselves in this arid land. Chill, east-flowing rivers -- the Missouri, North and South Platte, and Arkansas -- cascade out of the Rockies onto the Great Plains. Other rivers have names that evoke a colorful past -- the Yellowstone, Cache la Poudre, Republican. There is also the northern Red River that heads toward Hudson Bay, and the vast Ogallala Aquifer that has been tapped to extend farming west. Surprising to people unfamiliar with the region, there are thousands of natural lakes in the Great Plains -- many thousands. The Nebraska Sand Hills alone have more than 1,400 natural lakes. When levees of the Army Corps of Engineers fail, or when reservoirs and riverbanks overflow in the spring, catastrophe strikes as it did in many Missouri River communities in the spring and summer of 2011. Minot, North Dakota, on the Souris River made the evening news day after day after day.
Ecologists have a field day with all the prairie environments. This is the land "where the buffalo roam." In remnants of the tall grass prairie, grasses grow as high as a man. In the short grass prairie, a person has a 360-degree view of the horizon. Antelope and prairie dogs populate the landscape. Slim ribbons of trees along the rivers extend the range of America's eastern forests into the west.
Foresters -- yes, foresters -- have for more than a century experimented with ways to bring hardy trees into this hardscrabble land. Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt were interested in establishing pine plantations in the Sand Hills of Nebraska. Throughout the region, field windbreaks were established after the Dust Bowl, accentuating the township-and-range grid on the landscape.
Soil scientists have made careers studying and managing the deep, rich soils of the region, like the black chernozems that have developed over thousands of years. Continental glaciers only invaded the Great Plains that stretch northeast of the Missouri River, plowing the land in their path and dumping rocks and soil in heaps on the edges of the glaciers. These mixed soils support bountiful crops of wheat. Unfortunately, because of deep plowing and overgrazing, much Great Plains soil has ended up in the Mississippi River delta. For the agricultural economy of the region to remain economically viable, soil conservation is a must.
Agricultural economists see the land's value to local communities, as well as to our nation's GDP and world trade. The tallest buildings in a region are telltale signs of the industries that dominate the economy, and on the plains, it is the grain elevator, standing proud and white over hundreds of High Plains hamlets, towns, and small cities. Hard red winter wheat is actually the region's gold; it is the primary bread wheat of the United States, dominating croplands from Texas to South Dakota.
Anthropologists and archaeologists have discovered some of the oldest Paleo-Indian sites in North America, at such sites as Clovis and Lindenmeier. The lifeway of Plains Indians changed dramatically when the Spanish brought the horse back to North America. Cheyenne and Apache warriors became the finest cavalry in the world.
Historians have a rich harvest of Western and Spanish Borderlands history: conquistadors like Coronado, the Santa Fe Trail, the trappers and traders of European empires, Louisiana Purchase, Lewis and Clark, the landmark year 1862 (Homestead Act, Pacific Railroad Act, Morrill Act, Dakota uprising), territorial settlement, cattle drives, gold rushes, sodbusters, exodusters, republican constitution making, statehood, boom-and-bust cycles, the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, the homefront during World War II, etc.
Americanists have all sorts of wonderful things to study in the culture of the region, from the kitsch along Route 66 to the exodusters, African Americans who left the South after Reconstruction to take up homesteading in Kansas and Nebraska.
Demographers examine the pulsing expansion and contraction of the "frontier" in the Great Plains.
Recalling the days when Kit Carson and other pathfinders trekked through the region, today guides exploit the possibilities for cultural tourism in the region.
People searching for solutions to our nation's energy demands are investing in wind energy (think T. Boone Pickens) and shale gas wells.
As a presidential historian, I have studied how our U.S. presidents have put their scent on the land and erected monuments to democracy on this western sea of grass. I have explored the impact this land had on them. Theodore Roosevelt said, "I never would have been president if it had not been for my experiences in North Dakota." (This and other surprising presidential connections to the Great Plains will be explored in a forthcoming essay, but first it is necessary to give a sense of place.)

Albert Bierstadt was the greatest romantic painter of the West, especially where the High Plains delighted sojourners with a panorama of the Rockies. One of Colorado's "fourteeners" is named in the painter's honor.

Every region has its peculiar constellation of challenges and concerns. On the Pacific Coast, for example, people have to worry about "the Big One" -- an earthquake so powerful it changes the tilt of the earth's axis -- as well as about drought exacerbated by Santa Ana winds, fast-spreading brush fires, landslides that can bury neighborhoods, and the prior appropriation of water rights; they also have to deal with immigration issues more than most of the nation. In the Great Lakes states, people have a different set of worries -- about exotic species invading the Great Lakes, the decline of the auto and auto-supply industries, and ethanol subsidies ending for corn. What are the challenges and concerns on the Great Plains? Many are weather-related: floods, tornadoes, droughts, soil erosion, and the depletion of easy water from aquifers would top many lists. In many counties there is also population decline and a brain-drain that worries people tuned into the decline of the region. Many hamlets and small towns are on the verge of extinction.

On the other hand, every region has its ensemble of strengths. The Great Plains have abundant energy resources. Take Billings, Montana, which sits amid the largest coal reserves in the United States as well as large oil and natural gas fields. The communities of the Great Plains hang together, and their students test well in school, making the region an attractive place to raise a family. During the most recent recession, several Great Plains states actually weathered the tough times well. Texas, Montana, and the Dakotas, for example, had some of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. The High Plains states are doing lots of things right.

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This photo-essay is part of a series on Great Plains geography.

Great Plains geography 1

2011-06-23T12:12:00.000-07:00

Stephen Weaver 's photograph of an archetypal Great Plains scene -- sunset over a rolling sea of grass.
Sand Hills of western Nebraska

"North Dakota is a punch line.... I'm surprised, then, driving up out of the Black Hills and along the Etch-a-Sketch lines that are North Dakotan roads, to find the state sorta pretty." ~Alicia Rebensdorf, Chick Flick Road Kill, pp. 103, 106.

The Place

A Photo-Essay on the Geography of the Great Plains

Even though hardly anyone believes it, I will say it anyway: The Great Plains are beautiful. To go one further: They are hauntingly beautiful, the stage for rich legends and historical memories in the American imagination. To snub it as mere "flyover country," or to complain that it is "monotonous" on roadtrips, is to miss Edenic panoramas of earth and sky. One of my favorite cliches to debunk is that Kansas is flat and boring. Have you ever been to eastern Kansas -- the rolling landscape that was the scene of Bleeding Kansas, our dress rehearsal for the Civil War? Or to the Dakota badlands, where Theodore Roosevelt withdrew from civilization to be a cowboy after his wife and mother died? Have you ever stood on the High Plains of Colorado and felt the thrill of a blue norther' bearing down from the western sky -- an allusion made famous in the beloved Ian Tyson rodeo song, "Someday Soon," performed by Judy Collins?

James Nedresky's photo of Kansas's Flint Hills, late spring

For one photographer's paean to the High Plains, especially as an unparalleled aesthetic experience, take a look at Rick Dunn's website. His pictures and words are those of a true believer who had formerly snubbed the High Plains to chase after images of mountain landscapes.

You know the Great Plains when you see them -- or do you? The natural and cultural history of the region is so rich that geographers resort to staggeringly diverse criteria to grasp it. In truth, this western sea of grass is as elusive as quicksilver. Except in the west where the grasslands slam into the Rockies, most of the region's boundaries are as distinct as fog.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the Dakota Badlands

The whole business of defining the Great Plains is complicated, as geographer Alan Lew has shown in his online textbook. The complications multiply when, in popular parlance, such terms as "prairie," "Tornado Alley," "Midwest," and "Corn Belt" sometimes overlap with "Great Plains," but each of these terms can be misleading. Especially misleading is the moniker, "Great American Desert," which the explorer Stephen Long used to characterize the region. That christening dominated the popular imagination for a half century from the Era of Good Feelings (early 1820s) to the beginning of Reconstruction (late 1860s).

The Yellowstone River cuts through eastern Montana.

Self-disclosure: I have always felt a spiritual connection to the Great Plains, perhaps because I was conceived in Kansas, born in Texas, raised in the Lone Star State, and spent my young adulthood in Colorado. During the first 32 years of my life, rarely was I far from the western sea of grass. My sensibilities were largely shaped by the big sky, limitless panoramas, prairie plateaus, and down-to-earth cowboy culture of a remarkable landscape. In 1983 my first book was published about -- what else? -- the Colorado Piedmont, a significant part of which includes the stretch of plains at the foot of the Rockies between Fort Collins and Pueblo. See Gleaves Whitney, Colorado Front Range: A Landscape Divided (Boulder, 1983).

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This photo-essay is part of a series on Great Plains geography.

Leadership Essentials at the Meet & Greet

2011-06-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

I've attended a lot of meet-and-greets and have watched a lot of people work a room well. Below are my Top Ten pointers for walking into an event with confidence and making the most of the opportunity to build your social capital:

10. Before the event, do your homework. As with any successful endeavor, a little preparation can go a long way. If possible, get a list of the people who are planning to attend the event. Has anybody been elected to something? Awarded something? Written something? Made it into a newspaper article in a positive way? Whom do you already know well? Whom do you want to know better? Whom do you want to meet for the first time to try to establish a rapport? Also as part of your homework, read a good newspaper the day of the event so that you are up on the latest, and find something (or think of something) perceptive to say about current events. It also doesn't hurt to have a recent Jay Leno or Jon Stewart joke at the ready.

9. On the way to the event. No matter what mood you're in, put your game face on. As Daniel Goleman has explained in his work on emotional intelligence, our brain has "mirror neurons" that help shape the mood of those with whom we come into contact. So set a positive tone from the start. Always be ready to give a friendly greeting to colleagues and strangers walking in from the parking lot to the event. Introduce yourself and slip them your business card. Be the type of person who converges on a gathering not with the attitude of, "Here I am!" but, "There you are -- and I cannot wait to get to know you!" Etiquette tip: Be sure to put your name tag on your right lapel, so that it is easier for the person you're meeting to look from the handshake to your lapel.

8. Know how to work the room. Don't stand in one place as though you were holding court. It looks stuck up. Mix and mingle. Remember not to approach two people huddled in conversation because it may be confidential. If you've done your homework, you know some topics that will interest several people at the event. Be a good listener. Remember that your pleasant face has two ears and one mouth, and that's about the right proportion of communication when socializing with purpose. Etiquette tip: Put the business cards you receive in your right coat pocket. Keep your own business cards in your left coat pocket so that you can take a card out while shaking hands.

7. Be prepared to play your commercial. Don't you like the creative TV commercials that premier during the Super Bowl? When you are casually telling people what you do, introduce your cause with a short, snappy mini-presentation. Some people call it the 30-second "elevator speech."

How do I say this without sounding cynical? Okay -- I'll let Joel Bauer say it: "You need to stand out above the crowd. You need to differentiate and position yourself uniquely in a world where most people are interchangeable, forgotten before they even begin." So put serious thought into your presentation, from the design of your business card, to your face-to-face conversation, to the follow-up literature you send to your new contacts.

6. Be a connector. Look for ways to connect people with common interests. Introduce people who do not know each other. Etiquette tip about the order of introductions: First introduce the lesser known person to the better known person ... then vice versa.

5. Temperance. If you decide to drink alcoholic beverages, limit your intake. Before a meal, do not drink more than one glass of alcohol. You don't want to become silly and make a fool of yourself. Have only one additional glass, at most, with food. Some people -- potential employers and partners -- care how you handle liquor. You do not want to make a bad impression.

4. Mindfulness. If you have the chance to open the door for someone, do so. If there is food, remember some basics. At the table where people are eating, be mindful of others' needs -- e.g., pour water for others. Do not begin eating until everyone has been served. If there is a host or hostess at the table, let them signal when it's okay to eat by letting them take the first bite. Just be considerate. Etiquette tips: Pass dishes from left to right. Remember to use silverware from the outside, in. Break bread into bite-size pieces. When you raise a stemmed glass for a toast, always hold the glass by the stem so that it chimes when it comes into contact with other glasses.

3. If called upon to speechify.... You might be asked to say a few words to the entire group. If this is a possibility, prepare a little talk. Just remember that if you are the only thing between people and their food, you'll want to be succinct. You could start by saying, for example: "Advice for a good speech. First, you want to start strong. Second, you want to end strong. Third, you want to keep the start and finish as close together as possible." Or you could say that you will "be brief, be bold, and be gone." Or you could begin with, "Today is your lucky day: I forgot my prepared remarks, so I'll have to keep it short." And then deliver on your promise to be succinct. Always always always remember to thank people in your remarks. People like being recognized and feeling appreciated.

2. Assess. Before the event concludes, ask yourself if you genuinely connected with somebody and made a new friend or deepened a partnership. Are there new possibilities to advance your mutual interests? Take a mental note of anything that you should write down or research in the near future.

1. Follow up. Thank you note? Business letter to explore further opportunities? People with whom to connect on LinkedIn or to friend on Facebook? You want to make sure the meet-and-greet added to your short-term and long-term social capital.

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Remember that there are pros who teach networking and social skills so that you can go to any event with confidence. One of our colleagues associated with the Hauenstein Center's Cook Leadership Academy is mentor Jennifer Maxson, the practice group leader with Varnum Consulting, Grand Rapids, Michigan.

For more information, contact the Hauenstein Center for Presidential Studies at http://www.allpresidents.org/.

Henry Ford's Boundless Practical Imagination

2011-05-30T06:59:00.000-07:00

Because the job description of "leader" requires men and women to make tough decisions, they often become controversial figures, loved or loathed. Partisan accounts magnify their traits until they become bigger-than-life characters – their white shades brighter, their gray shades darker, than in the rest of us. These exaggerations compensate for the ultimate unknowability of human beings. The task of untangling the motives of another person becomes all the more difficult because, to survive public scrutiny, leaders often develop a tough hide and case-hardened personality. All these factors influence what biographers can accurately say about them. It is thus up to discerning researchers to detect hidden agendas, score settling, and ideological bias from the Left or Right. To learn what really makes a leader tick, it pays to search out the most objective accounts available.

Two years ago, the Detroit Historical Society put on display one of the most controversial leaders of the twentieth century, native son Henry Ford. Their leadership exhibit confronted head on the raft of contradictions inside this one complex individual. On the one (positive) hand:

“Henry Ford was perhaps the most famous man in the world during the first half of the twentieth century. He was greatly admired for bringing the Model T Ford to the masses and for providing good-paying jobs to immigrants and African Americans. He was also an innovator in many areas outside of the automobile industry.

“Many of Ford’s innovations radically changed the lives of working class people. By developing mass-production methods at his Highland Park plant, Ford lowered the price of a Model T Ford and produced a ‘car for the multitude.’ His path-breaking $5 a day pay (1914), which was double what factory workers earned at the time, enabled unskilled workers to enter the middle class.

“In a revolutionary move, Ford offered jobs at his River Rouge plant in Dearborn to African-American workers in the 1920s, where they toiled side-by-side with white workers and received equal pay. Ford became the single largest employer of African-Americans in the United States.”[1]

Edsel Ford

On the other (negative) hand:

“Henry Ford was one of the most reviled men in Detroit and Michigan, mainly because of his treatment of his employees, his vehement opposition to labor unions, his political views, and his abusive treatment of his top managers, including his son, Edsel. Ford ran his automobile company in an extremely rigid and autocratic manner, routinely firing subordinates with no warning or explanation.

“In order for Ford’s workers to receive his famous $5-a-day pay rate, they had to prove themselves ‘worthy’ to inspectors of the Ford Sociological Department, which gave Henry Ford paternalistic control over his employees. To prevent his employees from forming labor unions, Ford created the Ford Service Department, a small army of strong-armed thugs who used violence and intimidation to prevent unions from developing in Ford’s factories.

“Ford didn’t shy away from making political statements. Through articles published in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, Henry Ford made anti-Semitism ‘respectable’ in the 1920s. In 91 consecutive issues, his paper blamed Jews for all of the world’s ills, a barrage that exposed Ford’s radical views and forever marked him as anti-Semitic. He also opposed American involvement in both world wars, yet secured lucrative military contracts once war was declared, leading some to view him as opportunistic.”[2]

In short, Ford’s complex character provides apprentice leaders with a case study that can teach much.

Henry Ford’s leadership best expressed itself in a boundless imagination -- an imagination that helped launch the so-called automobile revolution that in turn would be the catalyst for other major changes in the 20th century. It is difficult to overestimate the impact of Henry Ford on our modern world when it’s realized that he was active in so many areas: (1) In perfecting the moving assembly line – to six feet per minute – he raised mass production to a level that would make products affordable and ubiquitous to most citizens, thus changing our material world. (2) In paying much higher wages than was the norm, he helped workers enter the middle class, thus creating the blue-collar aristocracy that really could pursue the American dream. (3) In envisioning River Rouge, he created an entire industrial ecology – a totalist project that affected social organization, geography, etc. – on a scale never before seen. River Rouge was more than extending the logic of the assembly line; it was an Olympian feat, transgressing boundaries where only the gods had hitherto dwelled. (4) And in driving the automobile into the center of modern life, Henry Ford

- transformed the layout of cities,

- helped Americans conquer the vast spaces of their country both physically and psychologically,

- allowed individual men and women to make social as well as geographic declarations of independence,

- and even changed dating and courtship rituals, since young couples could escape the well-supervised Victorian parlor and sexualize the relationship much sooner.

Aerial view of the River Rouge complex south of Detroit.

Little wonder that Henry Ford is considered one of the most influential men in human history.

As with all good stories, there is a context to Henry Ford's too. The 1890s were a pivotal decade in our nation’s history. Hardly breaking a sweat, the U.S. fought a war against Spain and found it had become an international empire. But the seeds of a different kind of empire were being sown – a technological, economic empire. (Walter Lippmann had seen it coming.) Automobiles were fundamental to the transformation. In 1895 only four horseless carriages were on America’s streets. In 1917 there were almost five million; the new automobile was pioneering the way to “mass production” and dramatically changing social mores.

How did it happen? Men like Henry Ford came along, with remarkable imagination and passion and technical know-how. Ford was one of the pioneers of American “big business.” While he did not invent the assembly line, his way of manufacturing Model T’s took cotton gins and hog butchering to the next level. Ford tells us that his assembly line developed out of the “disassembly lines” that Chicago meat packers had developed in the 1870s, especially by Gustavus Swift and Philip Armour in Chicago [Divine 524-25]. And competitor Ransom Olds in Lansing, Michigan, adopted the assembly line, and in 1904 rolled out 5,000 Olds Runabouts.

Ford was indebted to all these pioneers yet would take the assembly line to the next level and thus change the auto industry and American manufacturing along with it. When you look at his humble beginnings, you could hardly have imagined. He had tried farming and hated it. In the 1890s he worked as an engineer for Detroit’s Edison Company but spent his spare time designing internal combustion engines and mounting them in horseless carriages. That is passion. In 1896, Ford produced a two-cylinder, four-horsepower automobile, the first of the famous line that bore his name. In 1903 he and several partners formed the Ford Motor Company. It would transform the business.

By the mid 1920s almost half of all the cars produced in the world were Model T’s, which Ford had been building since 1908.[3]

Postscript: Ford’s story unfolded in the last hundred years. Yet as I write these words, the American automobile industry is in crisis – in need of bold, creative vision to reinvent itself. In need of a new Henry Ford. One of the tragedies of the American story is how Detroit lost its imagination, vitality, and preeminence in shaping the world. Just one hundred years ago, Detroit was the Next New Thing. It was the technological frontier, the Silicon Valley of its day, forward looking, a young person’s laboratory of opportunity. The nascent auto industry was exciting. It attracted people of imagination and practical intelligence. The automobile changed the look of our cities, where we lived, how we worked, even the way we courted. Automobiles were mini declarations of independence. They gave ordinary people, for the first time, the means to challenge traditional limits of time and space. So it was revolutionary and it was chic. The birth of the auto industry was the beginning of a great American romance, and no man is more central to this romance than Henry Ford.

[1] “Hero?” in Hero or Villain? Metro Detroit’s Legacy of Leadership, Detroit Historical Society museum exhibit, 2009.

[2] “Villain?” in Hero or Villain? Metro Detroit’s Legacy of Leadership, Detroit Historical Society museum exhibit, 2009.

[3] Greg Grandin, Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City (New York: Henry Holt, 2009), p. 1.

The Most Dangerous Man in America

2011-05-26T12:24:00.000-07:00

On May 26, 2011, WGVU hosted a program on the downtown campus of GVSU. Serving on the panel with me were Dr. Daniel Ellsberg, Congressman Pete Hoekstra, and Cooley Law School Professor Devin Schindler. The audience was first shown a 30-minute excerpt from the documentary film, The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. I then gave the panel's opening statement, based in part on the following talking points.

1. Bravo to WGVU for hosting this event about the Vietnam War era. Polls today reveal that too many people -- especially younger people who have no memory of the War -- are not in possession of the most basic facts:

1/3 of Americans do not know who won the war.
1/5 think we fought on the side of the North Vietnamese.

2. The Most Dangerous Man in America (what Kissinger once called Daniel Ellsberg) is a highly sympathetic portrait of the first person prosecuted under the Espionage Act of 1917 for leaking government secrets to a newspaper. The Obama administration, by the way, has been prosecuting five people under the Espionage Act for leaks to the media -- more than all previous administrations combined.

3. The documentary raises questions about the constitutional duties of public servants and the moral duties of citizens. In this modern-day morality play, Richard Nixon, as usual, is the villain. On college campuses, there are usually snickers when Richard Nixon's words and image come up, and to an extent it is understandable -- the man was his own worst enemy. Yet the historian in me wants to see an honest airing of the issues. Whatever side one takes regarding the Vietnam War and the unrest in the 'Sixties, this evening let's avoid the tendency to demonize and caricature the other side. Let's be open to expanding our awareness and understanding. History that merely ratifies our prejudices or demonizes our opponents does not take us very far.

4. My first reaction to the documentary is to feel more sympathetic to Daniel Ellsberg than my parents did. They wanted him shot for treason. Dr. Ellsberg: Even if I have serious questions about some of your actions, let me assure you that the only shot from me will be out of a good bottle of scotch that we should share.

5. My second reaction to the documentary is to smile at Americans' innocence. In the 'Sixties and early 'Seventies, we still expected our leaders to tell the truth. It's a lovely quality, however naive. I don't think it has been the reality or even the expectation in other world powers. During wartime lying is considered de rigueur. Prime Minister David Lloyd George said in the First World War -- I paraphrase -- We have one set of figures to fool the public, one set of figures to fool the Cabinet, and one set of figures to fool ourselves. During the years leading up to the Second World War, Winston Churchill had it on good authority that Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin was deliberately lying to the British people and to the world when he said that the Luftwaffe was not reaching parity with the RAF [Martin Gilbert, Churchill. A Life, pp. 537–38].

6. My third reaction is that I wanted the documentary to show more context.

6 (a). Take Nixon's popularity. Polls of the American people conducted during the Vietnam War showed substantial support for the Nixon presidency. From mid-1971 to January 1973, Nixon's overall job approval rating went up -- after publication of the Pentagon Papers. According to Gallup polls, by the time of his second inaguration in January 1973 -- 19 months after the public learned of the Pentagon Papers -- Nixon's approval rating hit 66 percent: 2/3 of Americans thought the president was doing a good job. (Of course, over the next year and a half his approval rating would plummet precipitously, and by August 9, 1974, he was forced to vacate the presidency.) Now, as Daniel Ellsberg is quick to point out, the Pentagon Papers cover America's involvement in Vietnam from 1945-1967 -- before Nixon was in the Oval Office. And yet Ellsberg wanted Nixon's lies to be exposed by extrapolation and implication if not outright. It didn't happen by the Election of 1972.

6 (b). What about the Gallup poll question of Nixon's handling of Vietnam? On the eve of publication of the Pentagon Papers, a little more than 40 percent of respondents approved of Nixon's handling of Vietnam. 19 months after the New York Times and others began publishing the Pentagon Papers, approval of Nixon's handling of Vietnam zig-zagged up and peaked in January 1973 at 58 percent. During the 19 months following publication of the Pentagon Papers, disapproval of Nixon's handling of the Vietnam War zig-zagged down from about 45 percent to 33 percent. Correlation is not causation, but here is the biggest surprise of all. Aggregate polling shows that "Young people were more likely to support the war at the beginning, when it was popular, and more likely to support it at the end, when it was not." Again, the Nixon administration is not in the Pentagon Papers, but any reasonably suspicious citizen would likely assume that he was lying about the war as much as his predecessors did. Ellsberg wanted Nixon to be punished for his lies. It didn't happen by November 1972.

6 (c). As Marvin Gaye famously asked, "What's going on?" Why the support for President Nixon and his handling of Vietnam when the number of casualties mounted, and especially when documents proved that Nixon's four predecessors had been lying to the American people about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, and when the inference was that Nixon must be lying too. (Ellsberg knew it.) A big part of the answer -- and I would have appreciated more in the documentary regarding this context -- is that Americans were worried about the spread of communism. Today we forget how tense the world was during the Cold War. In the 50 years between the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) and Secretary Robert McNamara commissioning the "Pentagon Papers" (1967), many events contributed to tension and insecurity in the West:

Central and Eastern Europe went communist after the Second World War, with liberation movements brutally suppressed in Berlin, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia.
China went communist in 1949.
Khrushchev bellowed at Western diplomats in 1956: "We will bury you" -- an allusion to Marx's statement at the end of Chapter One of the Communist Manifesto.
John F. Kennedy had warned of a growing missile gap between the U.S. and U.S.S.R. during the 1960 presidential campaign.
The Berlin Wall went up on August 13, 1961.
Cuba in our hemisphere -- off the coast of Florida -- became communist in 1959 through violent revolution.
The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 kept tensions high.
American children were drilled in the civil defense strategy, Duck and Cover!
Middle-class Americans started building bomb shelters.
Laos was in danger of going communist from the mid 1950s on, and North Vietnam did, leading to a proxy war between the U.S. on one side, and the U.S.S.R. and "Red" China on the other.
If you looked at the spreading red on a world map, the Domino Theory did not seem implausible to many, many Americans.
Studies like The Haunted Wood, by historian Allen Weinstein and former KGB agent Alexander Vassiliev, detail the extent to which Soviet spies infiltrated the U.S. government during the early Cold War. It was a real problem that made Americans jittery in a nuclear age.

6 (d). Another context: Go back more than 70 years before the Pentagon Papers were published. Once Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt set the U.S. on the path to empire, the national government would take on a 24/7 foreign policy. World War I, World War II, and the Cold War added to the burden and necessarily enlarged the power of the presidency at the expense of the Congress (justified constitutionally since he is the commander-in-chief). Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it the "imperial presidency." You can trace this development in Congressional debates. As the years passed, a greater percentage of time was taken up with foreign as opposed to domestic affairs.

6 (e). The growth of the "imperial presidency" helps us better understand the Nixon presidency itself. The 37th president and all the president's men leveraged fear of communism into greater executive power. In the documentary, you saw Bud Krogh suggest that Nixon believed that there was an ongoing national security crisis -- it amounted to a rolling Red scare -- and only the "imperial presidency" could keep Americans safe. As a result, according to Krogh, there was "a collapse of integrity of the first order" in an administration that had grown defensive and paranoid.

6 (f). I should mention one final context (although there are numerous others): the American tradition of civil disobedience:

Thoreau famously taught us about civil disobedience more than a hundred years before the Nixon administration. He argued that Americans should not pay taxes when the nation's policies aided and abetted evil. Citizens should not permit government to overrule or lull their conscience into acquiescence when moral and constitutional principles are at stake. People have a duty not to cooperate with government when it tries to make them an agent of injustice. Thoreau was motivated by his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War.
Gandhi and Martin Luther King tutored us in satyagraha -- Truth Force -- nonviolent resistance to a government that is violating a people's rights.
Less heroic is the more orthodox path for somebody working in government. If you develop qualms about a policy, you go through proper channels and try to keep your complaint within the Department by talking to your superiors or to the legal counsel within the Department or perhaps to the Inspector General.
A person could also opt to resign and throw himself into the political process to influence the outcome of the next election.
Believing that the imperial presidency is a menace to the republic, someone could opt to take the papers to another branch of government. Ellsberg did approach U.S. senators (e.g., Fulbright, McGovern) who ultimately turned him down because they were politicians who wanted strength in numbers. But Alaska Sen. Mike Gravel took the Papers and read them from the floor of the U.S. Senate. As stipulated in Article I, Section 6, of the U.S. Constitution, he was immune to prosecution for what he said on the Senate floor. Gravel made sure what he read was entered into the Congressional Record. Having already "stolen" the Papers, Ellsberg could have stopped there, but he did not.
Daniel Ellsberg chose a riskier and more controversial path -- one even he suspected was illegal. He took the Pentagon Papers to the Fourth Estate. He shone a light on what he perceived to be evil, with the hope of shaming people into changing. There are respectable precedents for exercising this option going back to the famous trial of John Peter Zenger in 1735, and principled opposition to the Alien and Sedition Acts. But the problem with using the "fourth branch of government" is: Who elected them? Since when did we entrust national security decisions to journalists and editors? Such an extra-constitutional remedy was tested in Ellsberg's case. His was the first time the Espionage Act of 1917 was brought to bear against someone who leaked government secrets to the press.

7. Once Daniel Ellsberg secreted a copy of the Pentagon Papers out of the filing cabinets of the Rand Corporation (1969), and gave copies to people in influential positions, several major sectors of American life sprang into action and insured that there would be a public debate:

The fourth estate used its front pages and editorial pages -- beginning with the New York Times on June 13, 1971. (But who elected them? We cannot have an ad hoc foreign policy made outside the executive branch and U.S. Senate. Chaos would ensue. Besides, are the media truly competent to judge U.S. foreign policy. Isn't this dicey?)
Members of the U.S. Senate took up the gauntlet -- above all, Alaska Senator Mike Gravel -- and insured that many of the Papers would be in the Congressional Record.
Lower courts and then the Supreme Court took up the case.
The private sector took up the gauntlet when an independent book publisher, Beacon, published parts of the 7,000-page Pentagon Papers.
Even conservative opponents of Daniel Ellsberg, like William F. Buckley Jr, who thought he gave aid and comfort to the enemy, nevertheless hosted highly visible debates that gave Daniel Ellsberg a platform to make his case. (See the Firing Line debate that took place on July 25, 1972.)

8. So the system in a sense "worked." A whistle-blower was exonerated. America's institutions did their job to insure there would be a public debate over the so-called imperial presidency and its unconstitutional acts. Given our tradition of civil disobedience, and given the tense conflict inside American society in the late 'Sixties and early 'Seventies, Ellsberg achieved one of his goals: Citizens were informed of a succession of presidents who had lied to the Congress and to the public, and who had likely acted unconstitutionally.

9. So in 1971 the nation experienced the tension between two camps. In the one camp was the majority of the American people who, based on the information they had, understandably wanted to defend themselves against what they perceived to be an aggressive enemy; they wanted to stop the spread of communism in the Cold War. In the other camp were war protesters who vehemently opposed what they considered to be an illegal proxy war in Southeast Asia, a war that administration after administration had lied about. They sought greater transparency in government, and the veto power that comes from changing public opinion.

10. Daniel Ellsberg thought he could force the administration's hand. But in the documentary, you see how disappointed he was that more citizens did not take the Pentagon Papers to heart and turn vigorously against the war after they were published. Au contraire, in the short term, voters re-elected Richard Nixon in the landslide election of 1972. Again: What's going on?

- a growing fatigue with all the upheaval and unrest?

- or maybe a majority thought Ellsberg was treasonous?

I would be interested in knowing how Daniel Ellsberg explains the rising support for Nixon and his handling of the Vietnam War during the 19 months following publication of the Pentagon Papers.

11. What surprised me as I was preparing for this evening and querying colleagues is the depth of feeling to this day among Americans who remember the early 'Seventies and were politically active then. To some, Daniel Ellsberg is an extraordinarily courageous man, a beacon who four decades later raises critically important questions about the constitutional duties of leaders and the moral duties of citizens. To others he remains a thief and a traitor who betrayed his country by stealing sensitive documents and giving aid and comfort to the enemy.

12. This episode in U.S. history 40 years ago moves us to ask a host of questions that are central to our civic republican traditions. I would hope that students who see the film explore these questions.

Even Ellsberg concedes that there is a need for operational, tactical, and strategic secrets. So to what extent do we permit a closed "society" to operate inside an open government?
In a nation with a 24/7 foreign policy, what are the limits of the “imperial presidency”? When is official deception justified? What are the limits of transparency in government when it comes to foreign policy and foreign operations?
What are the limits of a free press under the rule of law?
What are the limits of our civic republican tradition? If a citizen who has worked on a policy decides that that policy is immoral, when is whistle-blowing defensible? When, by contrast, does whistle-blowing reveal too much in the public square? [At the very least, if people will die as a result.]
Is it moral courage or opportunism to choose the form of civil disobedience Daniel Ellsberg did? When is it ethical for a consultant to publish confidential papers that do not belong to that consultant?
Ellsberg seemed headed toward conviction. Was he "saved" when Nixon overreacted and created the Plumbers who would break into his psychiatrist's office?
What role did Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers play in the downfall of Richard Nixon?

13. Final thought: Winston Churchill observed that, in the end, war doesn't determine who is right -- only who is left to write about it.

* * *

P.S. -- Toward the end of our panel discussion, Dr. Ellsberg wondered aloud if documents will be leaked that reveal U.S. frustration with the war in Afghanistan. I replied that those documents were leaked long ago. Our libraries are filled with stories of empire after empire that set its sights on Afghanistan but failed to conquer her people -- not the Romans, not the British, not the Soviets. The only conqueror who succeeded in winning the hearts of the Afghan people was Alexander the Great, arguably the most brilliant general who ever lived. But he did not subdue Afghanistan by force of arms. He took Afghanistan by marrying a Bactrian princess, Roxane, the daughter of Oxyartes. Take it from a general who knew what he was doing in Afghanistan. His best strategy ever, as co-panelist Devin Schindler quipped, was to "Make love, not war."

"The Wedding of Roxane and Alexander the Great," by Sodoma

World History - the 5 Big Things

2011-05-23T15:00:00.000-07:00

It has been said that there are two kinds of students. Those who hate history, and those who really hate history. Let me play the contrarian. I'd wager that young people who have the chance to grapple with the world's most powerful forces and learn about the men and women who made the world we live in do not hate history.

But apparently historians have not done a good job making the point. Although the U.S. dominates the world, most of our freshly minted college grads wouldn't dominate international tests measuring knowledge of the world. Americans can and should do better. We send treasure, troops, and things around the globe. We are at war in two countries in the Middle East. We are part of a number of international alliances and organizations -- the UN, NATO, World Bank, G6/8/20, etc. China, the UK, and Germany bankroll our debt. A number of foreigners are buying American real estate and equity in U.S. corporations. We should not be ignorant of the peoples who have such estimable influence in, and over, our nation.

College graduates are, by definition, citizen-leaders. At Grand Valley we say that students are educated "to shape their lives, their professions, and their societies." To be responsible citizen-leaders who can participate knowledgeably in civic discussions and make informed votes in the board room and voting booth, there are five Big Things history can help you know about our world: (1) the impact of threshold events that changed humankind forever, (2) the engines of historical change, (3) the universals in the human condition, (4) the rise of modernity in Western civilization, and (5) America's place in history and in the world. The effort to master this material is intrinsically rewarding and will take you far on the path to becoming a liberally educated citizen.

FIRST SEMESTER

1. THRESHOLDS "Recorded history" is two things -- (a) the past itself for the last 5,500 years, and (b) our chronicling, descriptions, analysis, interpretations, and debates about the past. In this second sense, history is not about the tedious memorization of names and dates. History is a great conversation -- about you. It starts with asking, Who are you? and Where did you come from? Grappling with these two questions may lead you to ask another question, Where are you going? As you debate these questions, as your understanding grows, you will find yourself creating a bigger and bigger narrative about yourself and others. The more you think about others and where they came from, the more historically minded you become. All good historical narratives shed light on beginnings, things that change, things that stay the same, meaningful moments, redemption, and endings.

Drawing from David Christian's work in Big History, we first examine threshold events, the biggest passages that humankind has experienced. Threshold events forever alter the human condition. They introduce greater complexity in our lives. Between great thresholds like the agricultural and industrial revolutions are numerous "turning points" that decisively change a people's existence -- e.g., the invention of democracy, printing press, voyages of discovery, etc. Typically these turning points do not have to be reinvented.

Threshold events and turning points require different scales to measure time -- from eventful moments, to a day, to a season, to a year, to a human life, to a nation's existence, to a species' existence, even to geologic time. The different scales give us necessary perspective.

A course in world history requires that we become familiar with major religions and mythic systems, and I would argue that religion and myth provide a valuable if unscientific scale that puts our minds in the largest manageable framework of all, helping us fit everything meaningful to human life between the act of creation and the end of time. Religion and myth do not use the currency of "clock time" -- the Greek sense of chronos -- the unit adoped by industrial peoples. Time in religion and myth is more closely associated with "readying" and "ripening" -- the Greek sense of kairos -- the flow of time among an agricultural people. History is not religion nor is it myth. But these three ways of organizing our understanding of the world -- history, religion, and myth -- give human beings insight into beginnings, things that change, things that stay the same, meaningful moments, redemption, and endings.

To get an initial feel for threshold events and turning points, it is useful to plot them chronologically on a timeline. At the start of the semester, I like giving students a brief overview of all the major turning points plotted on a timeline. As a class we return to this timeline frequently. If students can keep the major turning points in mind, they will not lose sight of the forest for gazing at a tree. The following are some thresholds (in boldface type) and turning points that occurred before 1500 A.D. Page numbers are keyed to one of the resources we shall use in this class: Craig, Graham, Kagan, Ozment, Turner, The Heritage of World Civilizations, 8th ed.:

Ziggurat in the Middle East

mastering fire: our human ancestors mastered fire before the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens appeared. Evidence from colder parts of Europe indicates that this threshold occurred at least 400,000 years ago. The effect of cooking may have been to make our gut smaller and our calorie-hungry brain larger.
the appearance of anatomically modern Homo sapiens in Africa, the cradle of humankind; studies comparing human beings and higher animals (e.g., chimps who use language and wage war)
cultural "big bang"; Afro-Eurasian cave paintings; differentiation between brain and mind begins
Agricultural or Neolithic Revolution after the retreat of Pleistocene glaciers. The cultivation of plants is probably begun by women; settlement -- an invented lifestyle; invention of pots to store food, and thus the appearance of large-scale organized theft, another name for war. The Agricultural Revolution was arguably the most important revolution ever in the human experience and accounts for more than 50 percent of our lifeways today. We will also explore Gerda Lerner's thesis about the origins of patriarchy.
invention of civilization. These first civilizations are agricultural civilizations. The rise of Sumer, Egypt, India, and China are on great rivers, not coasts. This was the Bronze Age. Civilizations are fragile: in all, 25 of 30 have fallen, according to Arnold Toynbee. Egyptian continuity vs. Mesopotamian change; invention of epic poetry -- e.g., Epic of Gilgamesh praises wise men of Uruk for their city planning [Guelzo 2].
invention of what Victor Davis Hanson calls the "Western way of war," a controversial thesis about a far-reaching cultural innovation of the Greeks between 700-600 B.C. This way of war sought the decisive frontal engagement with the enemy, bringing to bear maximum force in a concentrated and frightful encounter. Because this approach to warfare is not found earlier or elsewhere, it helps explain why the Greek/Western way of war has proven so much more lethal than the combat techniques of other cultures. This way of war would lead to battles that forever changed the human estate, so it is a threshold event. (Behind the question of the "Western way of war" is an even more basic question -- Is war genetic, and if so, is it DNA destiny or merely a proclivity, or is war a learned cultural trait?)
invention of empire; and Homer's warnings about empire in the Iliad.
"Axial Age" (Karl Jaspers), which occurs after the "tutorial" of a long dark age in Greece, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. In this course, we stretch Jasper's chronology to include Hebrews (monotheism), Greeks (reasoning through answers), Indians (Vedic traditions and Buddhism), Chinese (Confucius, Lao Tsi), and Hellenized Jews (prophets and the invention of ethical history); religious, ethical, and intellectual developments; the remarkable 6th century B.C.E. "India's greatest contribution to world civilization was the Buddhist tradition" (p. 61). Jesus and Paul invent Christianity. Ponder the fact that these ancient religions and worldviews are not irrelevant but still dominate the religious and philosophic outlook of the majority of human beings living today.
first thallasocracy, Crete
first democracy, war-loving Athens
first republics, war-loving Rome ... and Carthage, which practiced child sacrifice by roasting them in tophets
Alexander the Great and the idea of one dominant, cosmopolitan, worldwide culture (For an analogy today, think of Coca-Cola, Levis, jazz, Hollywood, Mac, and computer games.)
Rome -- significant as both a city and an empire, culturally inspired by Alexander the Great; also, Rome is the last empire to unite Europe
rise of China
Silk Road(s) and the idea and reality of globalization
fall of the Western Roman Empire (Edward Gibbon and others)
Rise of the last three civilizations -- Byzantium, Islam, Christendom
Christendom as a clashing, creative synthesis of (1) Judeo-Christian spiritual aspirations, (2) Greco-Roman philosophical quests, and (3) Anglo-German political arrangements. This synthesis nourished the seedbed out of which the most powerful civilization -- the West -- ever would grow. See Christopher Dawson; also Russell Kirk, Roots of American Order.
Crusades (humankind's first mass social movement, as H. G. Wells asserted?)
Ghengis Khan -- world's greatest conqueror
Italian communes keep republican polities alive
Magna Carta and the beginning of political rights (such as due process) and of Parliamentary rule to check the power of the monarch
Gutenberg's printing press. NB: Printing with movable type on paper reduced the cost of producing a book by orders of magnitude compared with the old-fashioned ones handwritten on vellum. A Bible required vellum made from 300 sheepskins and untold man-hours of scribe labor. Before printing arrived, a Bible cost more than most European houses to build. There were perhaps 50,000 scribe-produced books in all of Europe in 1450. By 1500 there were 10 million books. When you have that much of anything suddenly in demand, a revolution is afoot.
Italian and Northern Renaissances, led by numerous clerics who rejected Scholasticism
Muslim blockade of overland routes to the Orient, leading to European frustration
European voyages of discovery at the dawn of the modern age; the Columbian Exchange (Alfred Crosby), the most far-reaching manipulation of nature since the Neolithic Revolution; contemporary Chinese voyages -- the threshold that wasn't
the beginnings of modernity and of the gap between the West and the Rest

The Buddha --
Indian civilization's greatest gift to the world

It turns out that c. 1450 is an important date not just in Western Europe, but also in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and China. So it is a natural watershed in world history. Anticipating some threshold events after 1450, students might add:

commercial revolution; reintroduction of slavery in the West
Machiavelli on what is; not necessarily what should be
Reformation
Scientific Revolution
Enlightenment
Glorious Revolution of 1688
American Revolution -- a revolution not made, but prevented?
French Revolution -- tearing down the ancien regime; but to what degree was it truly successful?
Industrial Revolution I & II; steam, railroads, telegraph, electricity, chemicals, assembly lines; replacing kairos with chronos; increasingly complex organizations in cities.
end of chattel and debt slavery with breathtaking speed in the West
colonization of Africa and Asia
urbanization
World War I, World War II, Cold War, fall of the Berlin Wall
women's rights spread
Era of space exploration; human beings walk on the Moon
World wars that weakened the West; Bandung; decolonization; closing of the European era in world history; Civil Rights in the U.S.
globalization of goods, services, and ideas
personal computers, the digital revolution, Wikipedia, and the democratization of knowledge
What thresholds are you living through now?

For what it's worth, it is fascinating to play the parlor game, What if? Some thresholds almost did not happen. What if, at the Granicus River, the Persian cavalryman Spithridates had finished his death blow against Alexander the Great, cutting short his brilliant career? What if Cleitus the Black had not intervened in the split second before it was too late? No Hellenistic Age?

Grappling with thresholds on a timeline will help you intelligently address two of the most important questions you'll ever encounter: What is it to be human? What is it to be Western?

2. CHANGE We need to acquire a sense for why some things change, and other things stay the same. Continuity and change are bread-and-butter themes for historians. The thresholds noted above are both indicators of wholesale change and catalysts for further change. A thematic sampling of "engines" of historical change:

The first observation is that not all civilizations welcomed or embraced change -- e.g., there were long periods in which ancient Egypt, China, Islam, and Christendom did not. In early modern Europe, for a variety of reasons, a revolutionary transformation would occur: There would be a new attitude toward change itself. Apparently for the first time in human history, a civilization would embrace change for its own sake, and the West would become different from the Rest. Change would become the new norm. The revolutionary attitude toward change would itself become an engine of historical change. The attitude is embodied, for example, in open-ended scientific inquiry, Darwinism and other new philosophies of Becoming (as opposed to Being), Madison Avenue, and the early auto industry. Despite a culture's attitude toward change, in the end, change happens.
religion (Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Christopher Dawson, on what puts the "cult" in culture; Arnold Toynbee, Study of History); civilizational mission. The founding of a new religion, or the revitalization of that "good old religion," is a powerful engine of establishing a civilization and/or changing one that already exists.
the quest for material security and betterment through long-distance trade; cultural exchange; migration, globalization, manipulation of nature (p. 434)
battles, wars, and the lust for power -- domination over nature and over others -- the libido dominandi (Herodotus on Xerxes whipping the Hellespont on his way to Hellas; Thucydides; Alexander the Great's quest to conquer the world although he couldn't conquer himself; Machiavelli.) Consider how decisive battles can be in just a few hours and over a few square miles. On the outcome of these "crucibles of history" hangs the fate of entire peoples, nations, and civilizations.
revolution
the quest to be free
leadership of significant individuals
the intellectual quest, winning the debate, changing the climate of opinion (e.g., William Wilberforce eventually wins the debate over slavery); ideas and ideology. Does a culture value intellectual openness and inquiry? Periods in which diverse ideas were more openly debated include Hammurabi's Babylon, 4th-5th century Greece, republican Rome, imperial Rome, China's Sung Dynasty, the Moorish caliphate in Syria and Egypt, medieval Cordoba, the Italian Renaissance, the founding of the great constitutional polities of the modern age, and throughout much of modernity.
natural catastrophes They can be geologic: the civilization in Crete was obliterated due to a volcano, earthquakes, and accompanying tsunami. They can be biological: epidemics like the Bubonic plague swept across Europe in the 14th century and wiped out 1/3 of the population, with enormous social, economic, and political consequences. They can be climatic: the little ice age shortened the growing season in Europe during the Middle Ages, arresting civilizational progress.
other causes of the decline or declension of civilizations, leaving a void -- experienced, for example, by the periodic dynastic contractions that occurred in Chinese history, or the contraction of the Roman Empire in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. The void invites migration and introduces other significant changes throughout a region.
frustration
self-preservation
As this inquiry demonstrates, historians frequently ask about change vs. continuity. Yet, in the human family, are there Permanent Things, aspects of our quest that do not change (T. S. Eliot's term)? For example, can you think of any values that are universal across time and place?

Eugene Delacroix, "Liberty Leading the People"

Grappling with the engines of change will help you develop the habit of thinking like a historian, which will equip you to handle diverse cultural situations and to think more rigorously.

3. UNIVERSALS IN THE HUMAN CONDITION Two-dozen additional topics of universal significance to the human estate that the study of world history informs.

The problem of presentism. How do we view the past, on our terms or its terms -- or some combination of both? On what basis do we make sound ethical judgments about people who lived in the past and who have not shared our civilizational experience? (Examples: Jewish stoning, Aztec human sacrifices, Sub-Saharan female circumcision, English court whipping boys, African slavery, Hindu custom of sati.) Are there any practices of our civilization that future cultures will judge harshly? This is a variation of the debate between historical relativism and philosophical/ethical absolutes.
The pursuit of happiness. What is happiness (centered on the personal or the public and communal)? How is it achieved? See my July 17, 2011, blog post, "Happiness," especially the discussion of the American founders. ...At the end of Sophocles' play, Antigone, the chorus instructs us in the happiness we seek. Happiness is (my paraphrase) not power, profit, prestige, pleasure, or pride in getting our way. The main ingredients of happiness are virtue and wisdom. How do we become virtuous and wise? For most of us, punishment and suffering pound the foolishness out of us. Suffering schools us until we learn the lessons we need to live the good life. Experience teaches that wisdom mostly comes from keeping a clear conscience, worshipping God rightly, and learning from mistakes, our own and others'. If we are mindful of these things, we have a shot at being happy. We are smart about "the pursuit of happiness." ... I also believe the pursuit of happiness is linked to a primordial urge deep within us -- it's a mythic return to Eden as the vestibule to the Heaven that awaits. This leads humans in all cultures to redeem their time and sanctify their place.
What is a great man/great woman? Heroes, saints, and leaders. What criteria would you use to rank the greatest human beings who have ever lived? Who are the heroes, saints, or leaders you know?
Consider how leadership traits and styles change with a new threshold. Publius led in a much different way at the founding of the Roman Republic than did the overbearing Etruscan kings who preceded him. Also, did not the American founding end leadership in this part of the world by conquest and dynastic succession, and instead cultivate men and women who had more ability to listen, cooperate, compromise, and accommodate others in a democratic culture?
Why did humankind's greatest teachers never write their teachings down? Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Muhammad. This lacuna has led to interpretive challenges. Can you imagine how our interpretation of the New Testament might change if ever archaeologists discovered Aramaic "transcriptions" of Jesus' teachings?
Search out simultaneity in any given period; ponder that mystery -- e.g., the Chinese and Europeans set out on major voyages in the same century, but with very different results.
Causation and the post hoc fallacy; also, correlation is not causation.
Knowledge (of one thing) versus higher-order understanding (of an additional thing, leading to comparison and thus depth of insight). World history empowers you to acquire understanding by juxtaposing civilizations.
With understanding comes the higher order of thinking analogically, comparing events, leaders, situations, and civilizations mutatis mutandis. Why did so many early civilizations, for example, build pyramidal structures (Sumerians, Egyptians, Aztecs, Mayans, Incas)?
Wisdom: It is hard to read textbook chapters about past civilizations. To focus on the value of a distant civilization that is otherwise difficult to relate to, what is the wisdom that that civilization added to the collective wisdom of the species? It was purchased through dear experience. How does that wisdom apply to you personally?
Globalization's first manifestations -- Persian Empire, Roman Empire, Han Dynasty, Silk Road
Tension between local or regional lifeways and global forces
Quest for the Third Rome
Does any given nation or civilization have a mission beyond its boundaries that is consciously expressed or implicitly understood? How does such a mission manifest itself? Buddhism and Christianity are missionizing religions. Islam spread aggressively in the 7th-8th centuries. Christendom launched the Crusades. Was a clash of civilizations inevitable? Or -- compare the purpose of Spain's voyages of discovery with that of China's voyages. Or -- does our nation or civilization have a "mission"? (Orestes Brownson thought so.)
What happens when a people have their history altered or erased by a totalitarian ruler? Isn't one of the first things a dictator wants to do is throw a people's politically incorrect past down the "memory hole" -- a term from George Orwell's distopia, Nineteen Eighty-Four; recall that the protagonist, Winston Smith, works for the Ministry of Truth! If the past is destroyed or forgotten, then a people cannot remember better days when patriot heroes threw off similar dicators, or when able leaders with sound principles sustained them through tough times and empowered them to stand proud among the nations of the earth.
Eric Hobsbawm wrote of the reinvention of tradition or invention of meaning when surveying something from the past. In ancient times, Nubian rulers reinvented the grandeur of Egypt's Old Kingdom by building pyramids of their own. Some sects of the Protestant Reformation tried to reinvent the experience of the early church. Historical reinactors at Colonial Williamsburg and Civil War battlefields literally reinact the past to keep it "alive." Are there examples of the invention or reinvention of tradition in your life?
Related to the totalitarian obliteration of politically incorrect history on the one hand, and the reinvention of traditions on the other, is selection. Of all that happened in the past, historians must choose what themes, events, people, and details to construct a narrative from [Guelzo 1]. Tough-minded professionalism and honesty are required. Military history, for instance, has fallen out of favor. But how much violence do we do to the past if we refuse to talk about battles and wars because we fear that it will militarize students [Fagan 1]?
Role of geography: In the 1790s Immanuel Kant described geography as the “foundation of history,” and considered the two of them basic to all inquiry because they “fill up the whole span of knowledge; geography that of space, history that of time.” See Kant’s Physische Geographie [1802] in Tim Unwin, The Place of Geography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992), pp. 70-73. Is geography destiny, merely a stage, or something in between? (See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.)
Why do civilizations arise? Greater control over the natural environment, its processes and threats? Economic efficiencies? Religious inspiration? Power in the possibilities of hegemony or empire over other cultures? Male dominance that seeks to establish patriarchy?
Why do civilizations decline and fall? Rome's fall has been paradigmatic and contemplated over the centuries. In what ways might our American civilization show signs of decadence and decline? What can be done about it?
Students should seek out multiple accounts and diverse viewpoints (if they exist) of an event and know how to evaluate the quality of the evidence. What historical evidence is available to us to construct an accurate, insightful narrative of the past? For example, if we want to know how ancient wars were conducted, say, among the rival city-states of Sumer in the 3rd millennium, we must find and interpret the evidence: (1) human remains with signs of lethal trauma, especially in mass graves; (2) carvings and paintings of battles, such as on the Vulture Stele; (3) discovery of weapons, shields, and chariots; (4) defensive structures like walls and moats surrounding communities; (5) writing that includes inventory lists and narratives of what happened; maps and bird's eye views of the action.
What are the limits of the Western mind's grounding in the Enlightenment in dealing with non-Western cultures, especially those that transmit their stories orally instead of in writing, as in Africa? Does Western thinking bias what we see and hear?
Hilaire Belloc wrote that "Europe is the faith." We Westerners tend to identify Christianity with Western civilization. But this is a narrow view that a world history course challenges and corrects. Increasingly the West grows secular and Christianity is identified with developing peoples in Africa and Latin America. See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom.
What should we preserve from our past? Should some changes be opposed even if they seem progressive? Introduce UNESCO's World Cultural and Natural Heritage sites, accessible here.
Debate over whether history, as a discipline of inquiry, belongs more to the social sciences that are concerned with predicting the behavior of larger populations, or to the humanities that are concerned with unpredictable, singular occurrences in the human condition -- the wild card. To what degree should historians rely on the explanatory power of both methods?
History as tender-minded celebration of one's nation (Herodotus and Xenophon) vs. history as tough-minded analysis of causation (Thucydides)
What does history reveal about human nature -- for example, the seemingly universal differences between men and women? A common exercise at marriage encounters is to ask women, "On a sinking ship, who would you save first, your spouse or your child?" 95 percent of women would save their child first. When asked the same question, 95 percent of men would save their spouse first, figuring they can conceive again! This response holds cross culturally; it's as true in Africa as it is in the U.S.
Are women almost universally oppressed? 80 percent of the world's work is done by women; 10 percent of the world's income is earned by women; 1 percent of the world's property is owned by women; 1/2 of the world's population does not have the right to vote, and most of them are women; 65 percent of the world's illiterate people are women; 1/2 of the world lives on less than $2/day; 1/6 of the world lives on less than $1/day.
Luck. What if? Historians sometimes ponder what might have been. This exercise is valuable for showing how fragile, how contingent, our way of life is. E.g., a single battle can take place in a few hours on a few acres, yet dramatically change a nation or civilization. What if the battle had gone the other way? E.g., Soon after Alexander the Great crossed into Asia, in the very first battle at the Granicus River, he was almost killed. A Persian cavalryman named Spithridates stunned Alexander with an blow to the head. The Persian had raised his sword to finish off the dazed general when Cleitus the Black suddenly chopped off his smiting arm -- and Alexander was saved to become the greatest general ever, one whose conquering armies bequeathed to the world the Hellenistic idea of the cosmopolitan empire. Later, Rome tried to fulfill the dream.... What if William was not the conqueror and had lost at Hastings? What if Washington had lost at Brooklyn? Napoleon had won at Waterloo? Lee had won at Gettysburg? Hitler had won at Stalingrad? Eisenhower had lost on D-Day? We'd be living in a different world.
Organizing principles of a culture/civilization. It is useful to try to discover such a thing. For example, if you seek to understand the worldview of Roman Catholic medieval Europe, you could do no better than to read Christopher Dawson, Russell Kirk, or John Senior. They explain why the cult -- the cultus -- is the basis of culture. They thus help us understand the origin and rise of certain civilizations. John Senior, a founder of the famous Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas, condensed the organizing principle of Christendom in a striking passage. According to his student, Robert Wyer, "He understood that Christian culture is the seedbed of the Faith. Though the Faith can (and does) endure amidst a culture antithetical to it, it cannot flourish under such conditions. Archbishop Lefebvre, in a statement Dr. Senior loved to recall, told him, La messe est l’Eglise ["The Mass is the Church"]. In The Restoration of Christian Culture, Dr. Senior elaborated on this most important truth preserved by the courageous archbishop:
"'Whatever we do in the political or social order, the indispensable foundation is prayer, the heart of which is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect prayer of Christ Himself, Priest and Victim, recreating in an unbloody manner the bloody, selfsame Sacrifice of Calvary. What is Christian culture? It is essentially the Mass. That is not my or anyone’s opinion or theory or wish but the central fact of 2,000 years of history. Christendom, what secularists call Western Civilization, is the Mass and the paraphernalia which protect and facilitate it. All architecture, art, political and social forms, economics, the way people live and feel and think, music, literature ―all these things when they are right are ways of fostering and protecting the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. To enact a sacrifice, there must be an altar; an altar has to have a roof over it in case it rains; to reserve the Blessed Sacrament, we build a little House of Gold and over it a Tower of Ivory with a bell and a garden round it with the roses and lilies of purity, emblems of the Virgin Mary ―Rosa Mystica, Turris Davidica, Turris Eburnea, Domus Aurea, who carried His Body and His Blood in her womb, Body of her body, Blood of her blood. And around the church and garden, where we bury the faithful dead, the caretakers live, the priests and religious whose work is prayer, who keep the Mystery of Faith in its tabernacle of music and words in the Office of the Church; and around them, the faithful who gather to worship and divide the other work that must be done in order to make the perpetuation of the Sacrifice possible–to raise the food and make the clothes and build and keep the peace so that generations to come may live for Him, so that the Sacrifice goes on even until the consummation of the world.'
"Elsewhere, Senior explained that not all of these elements of civilized human life have to preach the Faith explicitly, but they should echo it in their order and beauty, and even (especially!) in their simple elegance...."
Other fundamental tensions and struggles: between generations, the old and the new, civilization and nature, core and periphery, innovation and conservation, etc.


Why did Rome fall? Ruins at Tyre.

Grappling with these topics of universal significance to the human estate will take you far on the path to becoming a liberally educated citizen.

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SECOND SEMESTER

4. MODERN WEST You need to be able to understand modernity, give an account of why it arose in the West, show how the gap between "the West and the Rest" came about, and discuss not only the causes but the various consequences of that gap. Premodern and modern thresholds should be depicted chronologically on a timeline. A sampling of topics:

See the brief list of post-1500 thresholds on the first-semester timeline.
Note the nature of the civilization that gave modernity birth and give students a chronological sense of its elements: Christendom is a merging, clashing synthesis of (1) Judeo-Christian spiritual aspirations, (2) Greco-Roman philosophical quests, and (3) Anglo-German political arrangements. This synthesis created the seedbed out of which the most powerful civilization ever would grow. (See Russell Kirk, Roots of American Order.)
Might the rise of modernity in the West be explained in part by the notion that there is more social tolerance for boundary transgressions in the West compared to the Rest? (See Daniel Bell, Romanes lecture at Oxford University on boundary transgressions.)
Might the rise of modernity in the West be explained in part by the notion that there is more social tolerance for paradigm shifts in the West compared to the Rest? (See Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.)
decentralizing authority: Protestant Reformation and North Atlantic revolutions
Wars of Religion, Westphalia, and the international order
state and imperial competition
four paths to the scientific revolution: Arabic learning and Western monotheism, voyages of discovery that promote a greater field of observation, and (prompted in part by wars of religion) Enlightenment freedoms
invention of the calculus, one of the most powerful mathematical tools ever
industrial might and military power
the social revolution that results from the Industrial Revolution: the rise of the modern middle class and challenge of the working poor
post French Revolution rise of ideologies expressed in isms: nationalism, liberalism, conservatism, anarchism, communism, fascism, ultramontanism, etc.
alienation (Copernicus, Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, Durkheim)
The Little Ice Age was contemporaneous with the rise of modernity in the West. Is any causation at work?

3 national responses to modernity: embrace it as Japan did; reject it as the Taliban do; or find some selective accommodation as Egypt did
clash of civilizations? Islam and the modern West; changing nature of war
rise of the BRIC nations

Newton's Principia -- one of the texts that launched the European Enlightenment

[Where opportune, revisit the two-dozen topics of universal significance introduced in the previous semester.]

Puccini's Madame Butterfly -- emblematic of the dominant West over the passive or submissive Orient

Grappling with modernity will enable you intelligently to address another of the biggest questions that you will ever encounter: What is it to be Western? And -- What is it to be modern? Grappling with the additional topics of universal significance to the human estate will take you far on the path to becoming a liberally educated citizen.

5. UNITED STATES You need to be able to understand your nation, the United States, in a global, historical context. A sampling of topics:

Compared to other nations, what is exceptional (as expressed in de Tocqueville's thesis), and what is typical, of America? For example, our origins are not mythic, tribal, or ethnic as with most other nations; our origins are deliberative and constitutional, based on debating the idea of what a republic should look like. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the first Federalist Paper, our nation was created out of conscious choice, deliberation, and debate over ideas.
roots and shoots of our civilization
The founders' thought brought together two major streams of thought: the civic republican tradition of antiquity, Renaissance humanism, and certain Whig thinkers that emphasizes the individual's duties to his community; and the natural law tradition of William of Occam, John Locke, and the Enlightenment that emphasizes the community's duty to the individual.
the founders as latter-day Roman republicans
the critique of the founders in recent years -- e.g., Ray Mark Rinaldi, "Pennsylvania Exhibit Exposes Washington's Cruel Secret," Cincinnati Examiner, July 10, 2011.
the fear of direct democracy and small republics
America and empire
factors in the rise of the imperial presidency; implications
how did the rise of America change the nature of leadership?
The Pulitzer Prize winning biographer of Thomas Jefferson, Dumas Malone, once told journalist Hugh Sidey, "So much of recorded history is about the struggle of individuals and families to feed themselves. That changed dramatically in this country. The greatness of this country was rooted in the fact that a single farmer could produce an abundance of food the likes of which the world had never seen or imagined and so free the energies of countless others to do other things." Sidey believes that it's the greatest story never told.
We Americans are a bundle of contradictions between the desire for the new, the Next Big Thing, the latest fashion ... and clinging to the old. I will prove why in a classroom exercise.

Grappling with this Big Thing called the United States will enable you intelligently to address another of the key questions: What is it to be American? You can better answer the question about being an American once you have some basis of comparison, which comes from world history. It's like the experience of learning a foreign language, which most students find helps consolidate their understanding of English grammar.

The U.S. at night

CODA History is not a spectator sport. History should be engaged here, now. We started with David Christian's concept of Big History, but we should not neglect our own back yard, our own region, our "local history," to learn more about ourselves and others. Following is a framework for asking better questions of a region or metropolitan area that you are interested in.

Define a region. What are the distinctions between, say, the urban core and the rural periphery? Between civilization and nature? Between old and new?
Landforms: Given the fundamentally opposing forces of tectonics vs. climate and gravity, why does this region's land look the way it does?
Why did people come here? Were different groups competing for the same resources? What were the groups' cultural norms as they affected each other and the region's natural resources?
Why did people stay here? (When did people begin settling permanently here? Who were they? Were there successive waves of different peoples? Why did they come when they did? What were the decisive resources -- economic, ecologic, geographic, political, social, aesthetic, spiritual -- that people valued, and what were the overlapping ecological resources they harnessed?)
What names did various people give to the things of this region?
When challenges mounted (Arnold Toynbee's notion), when decline threatened, how did they respond (again, Toynbee)? Did people fail, move away, or stay and reinvent themselves and their region?
What individuals made a difference to the region's fortunes? What were their leadership traits? What was their leadership style? (Great Man theory)
What groups made a difference to the region's fortunes? What was in their cultural outlook?
What threshold events (David Christian's Big History) changed the human estate in this region and when did they occur?
What constitutions, laws, and local, state, national, or international policies have made a difference to the region's fortunes? To what extent did larger markets and globalization shape the economic decisions in the region?
What institutions made a difference to the region's fortunes?
What accidents of geography and history made a difference to the region's fortunes?
Are there analogies that present telling similarities/differences between this region and another comparable region of the earth, and do such analogies help us think usefully about the future of the region?

World History - ancient Egypt

2011-05-22T19:41:00.000-07:00

The great limestone pyramids -- royal tombs for pharaohs and their families -- were sited on the west bank of the Nile since Egyptians associated death with sunset, and future resurrection with sunrise. And you thought it was just cowboys who ended the story by "riding into the sunset."

Today in the United States, people take it for granted that our economy and culture are supposed to change, to progress. Americans are conditioned to expect the Next Big Thing. We eagerly await medical and technological advances that make material life better. In our postmodern iCulture, the most anticipated events are the annual unveiling of Apple's latest toy, the roll out of concept cars, and the latest round of Super Bowl commercials. As Penn's Walter McDougall has opined, we are a "republic of hustlers." With the exception of Coca-Cola and Kleenex, product lines that do not change seem destined for the ash heap of history.

Our attitude toward change is not the norm. Modern civilization is not the norm. Change for its own sake was not universally embraced by our ancestors or by other civilizations. Most early civilizations were so conservative that their rulers suppressed change. Ancient Egypt is Exhibit "A" of a governing elite who, generation in and generation out, resisted change. Egypt's religion, governance, and art remained essentially static for almost 3,000 years -- a staggering length of time spanning almost 3/5's of all humankind's experience with civilization. (China's civilization has endured even longer.)

Indeed, Egypt was already ancient by the time Alexander the Great came to be crowned pharaoh there, and by the time Julius Caesar and Cleopatra began their torrid love affair on a boat on the Nile.

Egypt's Geography

Egypt is the gift of the Nile. ~Herodotus

There is an unusually close relation between Egypt's history and geography. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus famously observed that Egypt is the gift of the Nile [History 2:5]. The Nile is the longest river in the world; it is also the most audacious since it flirts with extinction by daring to meander through the second largest desert in the world, the Sahara. (The largest desert in the world, measured by low annual precipitation, is the continent of Antarctica.)

The fact that Egypt was one of the world's first civilizations is mostly explained by the Nile River. Its annual floods carpeted broad floodplains with rich soil. Moreover, pharaohs had extensive irrigation canals dug, making it possible to direct water to the best farmland after the floodwaters receded. The annual supply of fresh floodwaters kept the soils from building up too much salt in an otherwise torrid environment. Wheat, flax, and other crops thrived.

The river also provided hundreds of miles of easy transportation north of the cataracts to its outlet in the Mediterranean Sea.

The combination of annual floods, irrigation works, and replenished soil made food surpluses possible in most years. (But not in all years: The story of Joseph and his brothers, at the end of the Old Testament Book of Genesis, describes a drought that brought suffering to Egypt.) The fact that the river is easily navigated meant that food could be shipped where needed at home, or exported to support troops or allies abroad.

Speaking of troops: Thanks to its geography, Egypt's national security was much enhanced by the barriers surrounding it. Few early civilizations had the "moats" Egypt did. Seas to the north and east, barren deserts insulating the Nile Valley, a long series of cataracts south of Aswan -- all provided natural defenses against the designs of invading armies. The combination of dependable food surpluses plus significant barriers around its heartland set the stage for Egypt to become one of the most long-lasting civilizations in history. Egypt was already nearly 3,000 years old when Alexander the Great came to be crowned pharaoh, and older than 3,000 years when Julius Caesar and Cleopatra began their love affair on the Nile.

To put such mind-bending antiquity in perspective: When Julius Caesar and Cleopatra toured the wonders on the Nile, the pyramids were as remote in time from them ... as David and Goliath are from us.

The friendly geography not only helps explain Egypt's rise, but also certain qualities of its gods and culture. With food surpluses, Egypt's population could grow larger than neighboring peoples in the Middle East and Mediterranean. When Athens and Rome were still obscure villages, Egypt had already become one of the mightiest nations on earth, counting more than 7 million people along the Nile corridor. For some 3,000 years, this "gift of the Nile" could support a king, coterie of priest, and standing army that were freed up from devoting energy to herding or farming. Because of its large, full-time army, Egypt could -- and did -- bully its neighbors for thousands of years.

There are three major geographic frontiers or boundaries in Egypt.

(1) Most obvious is the land-sea boundary, formed where the northeastern part of the African continental plate meets the Mediterranean Sea to the north and the Gulf of Suez and Red Sea to the east.

(2) The Egyptians made a distinction between the fertile Nile floodplain (black land) called Kemet, and the inhospitable desert (red land) called Deshret, stretching to the east and west. Each year the rains near the Equator in central Africa feed the Nile's extensive tributaries, causing the downriver stretch to rise over its banks and inundate the floodplain. The river crests in September and October and, once the silty waters recede, they leave behind fertile soils.

(3) The Nile's 4,100 mile course makes it the longest river in the world -- a rare north-flowing river at that. Only a portion of the Nile is associated with ancient Egypt. The source of the White Nile near Lake Victoria and the source of the Blue Nile in the Ethiopian highlands, near the Equator, were not historically under Egyptian rule. Nor was the confluence where the White and Blue Nile meet, at Khartoum, typically under Egyptian control; historically Khartoum was associated with Nubia. The stretch of the Nile associated with ancient Egypt lay between Aswan and the Mediterranean Sea. Aswan, the ancient frontier town where the green floodplain of the Nile narrows to the riverbanks, is built alongside the granite bluffs that loom over the water. Upper Egypt describes the area north of Aswan where the Nile Valley narrows. Lower Egypt mostly includes the delta that fans out in the Mediterranean Sea.

Fourth Cataract of the Nile, in ancient Nubia (today Sudan)

The river is easily navigable from Aswan to the Mediterranean, a stretch of 750 miles. It was arguably the greatest freeway in the ancient world for transporting people and goods. Today one can see lateen-sailed feluccas glide along the river.

Navigation is much more difficult above Aswan, where the six classical cataracts hinder shipping. These six cataracts and many lesser rapids churn the waters of the Nile between Aswan and Khartoum. Historically, this is the land of the Nubians, who often influenced Egyptian history. Again, geography matters.

South of Aswan, the cataracts or rapids made navigation difficult in ancient times and even for a modern British army, discussed here, with vivid passages by a young Lieutenant Winston Churchill, included below:

Winston Churchill in the Hussars

The best description of cataracts comes from The River War, written in 1899 by Winston Churchill, then 25 years old. The book details the exploits of the British in 1896 through 1898 to return to the Sudan after they were chased out by the Sudanese people in 1885. The British tried to reconquer the Sudan by steaming in gunboats up the Nile, so they were very interested in how the water flowed through the cataracts. They knew that the only time that ships could move upstream through the cataracts was during the summer flood, and then only with great difficulty. Churchill describes the Second Cataract (now submerged beneath Lake Nasser) as being about 9 miles long and having a total descent of sixty feet. The river flowed over successive ledges of black granite. During the summer floods, the Nile flowed swiftly but with an unbroken surface, but the granite ledges were exposed when the annual flood abated. During this time, Churchill reported that the river tumbled violently from ledge to ledge, its entire surface for miles churned to white foam. There are several other small cataracts between the Second and the Third Cataracts (Churchill shows cataracts near Semna, Ambigol, Tanjore, Okma, and Dal) but none of these posed any problems to the British moving upstream. According to Churchill, the Third Cataract is "a formidable barrier." There is smooth water for 200 miles upstream from this in all seasons.

The Fourth Cataract lies in the Monassir Desert, and Churchill reported the following about this portion of the Nile: "Throughout the whole length of the course of the Nile there is no more miserable wilderness than the Monassir Desert. The stream of the river is broken and its channel obstructed by a great confusion of boulders, between and among which the water rushes in dangerous cataracts. The sandy waste approaches the very brim, and only a few palm-trees, or here and there a squalid mud hamlet, reveal the existence of life." The British gunboats El Teb and Tamai in 1897 attempted to go up the river at the Fourth Cataract, but in spite of being helped by 200 Egyptians and 300 tribesmen, the Tamai was swept downstream and almost capsized in the great rush of water. Four hundred more tribesmen were assembled to help the El Teb, which was capsized and carried off downstream.

The great pyramids in Egypt were constructed of limestone. Nubian leaders also wanted to build pyramids like their great neighbors to the north. But Nubian pyramids were smaller and did not have burial chambers deep inside. The Nubians did not have the excellent limestone building material that the Egyptians had.

Speaking of Nubians, the woman's name "Candace" comes from the Nubian word for "queen."

Egypt's leaders (including a shout out to at least three great Hebrews)

It was not just geography that propelled a great riverine civilization out of prehistory. It was also leadership. As Egyptologist Bob Brier takes pains to demonstrate in Great Pharaohs of Ancient Egypt, the nation produced leaders who, at critical times, successfully confronted the challenges that sent other civilizations into decline. Narmer, Sneferu, Hatshepsut, Ramses the Great -- collectively these leaders were able to keep their civilization alive for more than 3,000 years -- an almost impossible feat unmatched by any other people on earth but the Chinese.

The Hebrews Joseph, Moses, and Aaron should also be counted among the great leaders of Egypt. Joseph, a man of great integrity, was a visionary governor and strategic planner who saved Egypt from starvation. Moses was rescued from the Nile River as an infant and grew up as an Egyptian prince. He became one of humankind's greatest lawgivers when he led his people out of Egypt in the Exodus, the most referenced event in the Old Testament. The Exodus was the mother of all freedom marches. Lasting some 40 years, the Exodus was only made possible by the strong leadership of Moses and his brother Aaron.

What were some of the qualities that these remarkable leaders possessed?

1. Egypt's pharaohs and governors made the most of the geographic advantages of the insulated Nile Valley. They understood how to harness the forces and rhythms of nature -- the annual floods that crested each September and October, the renewal of the soil, the potential of water transportation.

The pharaoh smiting his enemies.

2. Egypt's leaders were not passive but assertive and often aggressive toward their neighbors. The pharaohs and governors enjoyed peace through strength; compared to Mesopotamia or the Levant, few conquerors in the ancient world had the resources and/or audacity to cross the sea or the desert to take on such a mighty nation. But the pharaohs did not just sit back and wait for foreign armies to test their resolve. With their large standing army, pharaohs routinely led their armies into foreign lands to bully and dominate them -- with great success, we should note. That's what pharaohs and their armies were supposed to do. In Egyptian art, the smiting stance is the archetypal way warring pharaohs are depicted.

3. Pharaohs and governors also had a keen sense for continuing what worked. Aside from Akhenaten, it was rare for a pharaoh to be charmed into innovation when it came to the three basic institutions of Egyptian society: religion, the army, and the monarchy. They avoided change when possible, and they certainly eschewed change for its own sake. The proof that their conservative approach worked? Continuity served them well for some three millennia -- longer than any other civilization but the Chinese. For purposes of comparison, if we date the origins of Western civilization back to the Merovingians, who built up their culture on the ruins of the fallen Roman Empire in the west, then our civilization is about 1,500 years old -- just halfway around the track compared to the Egyptians.

Egyptian religion

Ever since I was a boy, I have read that the Nile's benign, predictable behavior had an impact on Egyptian religion and culture. The Nile gave rise to kinder, gentler gods than those of, say, Mesopotamia, where the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were more violent, unpredictable, and challenging to live with. I will leave this interesting point of comparison for the ethnographers to settle.

The big point for me is that Egyptians did not believe in reincarnation (except in the case of the Apis Bulls), but in resurrection. Did this affect the thinking of Jesus, who spent his early childhood in Egypt?

Osiris, the father of civilization, with his sister and wife, Isis

The central myth in Egypt is that of Isis and Osiris -- sister and brother, wife and husband. According to legend, they came to teach Egyptians the arts of civilization made possible, first, by farming and herding. Egypt then became the font of civilizations around the world (a classic ethnocentric story). The soap opera started when Osiris was slain by his evil brother Seth, who had fallen in love with Isis but could not have her. Seth symbolized deserts, storms, and chaos. Isis, distraught over the loss of her brother, took the form of a bird and hovered over him, causing him to be resurrected. They then conceived a child-god named Horus. Thereupon Osiris became the god of the dead because he is the first being to resurrect.

Firsts

The Egyptians invented papyrus -- the origin of our word "paper."

They were the first, according to Herodotus [History, 2: 4], to create a solar calendar based on 12 months.

Hellenistic Egypt under the Ptolemies

One of the Seven Wonders of the World: the Lighthouse in Alexandria's harbor

When Egypt was conquered by Alexander the Great, the Macedonian brought with him a civilization that embraced something radically new. Egypt was in for a shock. The people of the Nile River Valley had never experienced any cultural transformation like it. From Thales of Miletus to Ptolemy I, the Greek spirit, open to new ideas, spread into the Egyptian court and the new city of Alexandria. Ptolemy I's example is particularly striking because when he ruled Egypt, it was already a 3,000 year-old civilization; the pyramids he toured were more than 2,000 years old. Ptolemy brought an entirely new spirit to the land of the Nile. At Alexandria, he (1) commissioned the world's then-largest library that housed 700,000 papyri and humankind's first think tank; (2) engineered a harbor to hold 1,200 ships, and (3) erected a lighthouse that guided ships from as far away as 30 miles. In all these projects, Ptolemy exuded Hellenism's openness to the world. That spirit would powerfully reemerge in the European Renaissance some 1,700 years later.

The Ptolemies were the successors of Alexander the Great in Egypt. They continued the Egyptian tradition of intermarrying. Often the kings married their sisters to keep power in the family.

Alexandria was the city to the Greeks and had a population of about 300,000. They didn't mingle with the Egyptians. Everything to the south was agrarian and called "Egypt," which had a population of about 7 million. Alexandria was the administrative center of the country with a large bureaucracy.

The Greeks in Alexandria loved their books, their papyri. They wanted every book in existence. Anytime a ship came into the harbor, the library would send somebody to search the ship for any books that were not already among the 700,000 in the collection. If they found a new book, a scribe would copy it. Then the library would keep the original and give the copy to the ship.

The Last Ptolemy and Pharaoh -- Cleopatra VII, the Cleopatra

Cleopatra, one of the most fascinating women who ever lived, became queen of Egypt at the age of 18. Although her passion was to unite the world under Egyptian rule -- or at least the Greek-speaking world, as Alexander had -- she instead earned the dubious distinction of being the last pharaoh of Egypt. After her death, Egypt was incorporated as a Roman province. Her end is ironic considering her efforts to reach out to her people and restore their greatness. She was (1) the only Ptolemy who bothered to learn Egyptian, (2) the only Ptolemy who respected Egypt's traditional religious customs and tried to revive them, and (3) she remained allies with the powerful Romans for as long as she could, as her father did. But history is written by the victors, and Cleopatra chose the losing side in a Roman civil war. The Romans on the winning side did not characterize her favorably, but as a femme fatale.

Rome's political interest in Egypt was strategic -- controlling the Nile delta meant controlling the southeast Mediterranean Sea. Rome's economic interest in Egypt was its breadbasket. The banks of the Nile supplied Rome with dependable quantities of grain. Rome's historic interest in Egypt was as a rich supplier of the imagination. Rome was built of mud bricks, but Egypt was built of stone and had many ancient temples and pyramids.

Queen Cleopatra is forever associated with three Roman leaders, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, and Octavian. Cleopatra and Julius Caesar's boat tour up the Nile is a love story for the ages. Going south past Giza, Thebes, and Aswan, he was blown away by the sights. He had never seen such intimations of immortality -- in the stone temples, towering pyramids, and well-preserved mummies. Sharing such heady experiences along the Nile, the couple became enamored with each other, and by the time they reached Aswan, Cleopatra was pregnant. She gave birth to Caesarion, "Little Caesar." Even though he was married to Calpurnia, Caesar returned to Rome determined to summon Cleopatra and Caesarion to him. When they came to Rome he put them up in a villa just outside the city. This act raised Roman eyebrows, but he outraged the republicans in the Senate by placing a statue of Cleopatra dressed as the goddess Isis in a Roman temple. It made the Senate think that Caesar wanted to rule Rome as a god. So much for his profession of republican virtues. They plotted his death and assassinated him on the Ides of March. Queen Cleopatra, alone in a hostile city, faced a situation not unlike that of Isis, after she lost Osiris. She managed to escape with her son back to Egypt.

Antony (Henry Wilcoxon) and Cleopatra (Claudette Colbert)

But it was Cleopatra's affair with Marc Antony that both Plutarch ("Marc Anthony") and Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra) made immortal. Marc Antony, prior to his encounter with Cleopatra, was a no-nonsense general with many battles to his credit. Had he worked with Octavian to restore order to Rome, he could have had a good life. But once he succumbed to Cleopatra's flirtations, it was only a matter of time before his life began to waste away. Neglecting his duties, Marc Antony first lost his self-control, then his war, then his army, then his life. The story of the fall of one of Rome's greatest generals is a cautionary tale for powerful men in all times and places. It seems that Cleopatra did not love him so much as she loved her ambition for empire -- he just did not realize it. Cleopatra made Marc Antony a tool. He could not see that the queen was driven to make Egypt great again, and she sought to do it by uniting the Greek-speaking world under Egyptian rule. Perhaps an opportunity would present itself to conquer Rome even. The ambition of this remarkable stateswoman recalls the glory of Alexander the Great, and it anticipates the rise of Byzantium. For a delightful account of Marc Antony and Cleopatra's love affair, listen to classicist Rufus Fears.

When the last of the Roman triumvirs, Octavian, defeated Marc Antony's navy at Actium and brought his army to heel near Alexandria, the star-crossed lovers began to run out of options. In despair Antony ran himself through with a sword. He died in Cleopatra's arms, and now she was alone. If Queen Cleopatra lived, she would be humiliated by Octavian by being displayed in a triumph before the mocking Roman public -- an unacceptable option for a pharaoh. If she died, the dream of reviving Egypt would die with her -- but at least she would cheat Octavian out of his triumph. She arranged to have a viper hidden in a basket of figs. Once it was sneaked into her apartment, she committed suicide through its venomous bite.

Historians have speculated what would have happened had Marc Antony defeated Octavian at Actium (as he nearly did) and in subsequent battles. If Antony had dominated Rome and taken Cleopatra back to the city as his queen, then both Egyptian history and Roman history would have turned out much differently, and European history, too. There would have been no "Age of Augustus."

Roman Egypt

Jesus lived in Egypt when it was a Roman province. What did he see of Egyptian civilization? What did he learn about Egyptian history and myth? What would he have thought, for example, of the resurrection myth of Osiris?

* * *

Questions

From the perspective of world history, what thresholds and turning points did ancient Egypt contribute to humankind's betterment? [one of the four original riverine agricultural civilizations, irrigation channels, papyrus for writing]

Every civilization has a "genius" and contributes something significant to humanity. What was the genius of Egyptian civilization? [There are several possible answers: (1) Egyptian leaders mastered continuity, retarded change; (2) they wonderfully adapted to and used the natural environment; (3) they had a different vision of the afterlife than others -- they believed not so much in reincarnation as resurrection, and the pyramids and books of the dead are emphatic statements about anticipating the resurrection of human life -- a precursor to Christian teaching.]

What wisdom did the Egyptians give to humankind? [Greeks credited Egypt with being the font of their civilization]

Why does Shakespeare conclude Antony and Cleopatra (Act V, scene 2) with this observation by his rival Octavian?
"She shall be buried by her Antony: / No grave upon the earth shall clip in it / a pair so famous."

What Egyptian history, literature, and myths would Jesus have learned when he spent his childhood there?

What traits does a succession of leaders need to keep a civilization going 3,000 years? [understanding the best of the culture and having the ability to teach it to the rising generation and thus carry it forward; adapting successfully to challenges]

World History - after 1500 everything changes

2011-05-21T15:07:00.000-07:00

iPod -- postmodern chic

Around 1500 A.D. the world changed. It began to change in more ways and with more intensity than at any previous time in history. Today in the U.S. most people take it for granted that life and culture are supposed to change, to progress. Americans like the Next Big Thing to come along, eagerly anticipating the medical, technological, and automotive advances that make material life better.

But our modern civilization is not the norm. Change for its own sake was not universally embraced by our ancestors or other civilizations. Most early civilizations were so conservative that their rulers suppressed change. Ancient Egypt's religion, governance, and art remained essentially static for some 3,000 years -- a staggering length of time spanning almost 3/5's of all humankind's experience with civilization. China's worldview, bureaucratic elite, and linguistic continuity allowed dynasty after dynasty to govern relatively unaltered for thousands of years, until 1911 -- a still more staggering stretch that spanned almost 4/5's of all humankind's experience with civilization.

These pyramids at Giza were already "older than dirt" -- 2,200 years old -- when Alexander the Great conquered Egypt and was crowned pharaoh

As civilizations go, Romanesque and Gothic Christendom -- the foundation of modern Western civilization -- developed relatively late. It grew up in the western part of the Eurasian landmass on the ruins of the western Roman Empire. During most of the Middle Ages, Europe's leaders accommodated change, but usually only reluctantly. Century after century, the three social orders wanted life to go on much as it had for their ancestors. In this respect, medieval Europe was not much different from Egypt, China, and other great civilizations of premodern times.

Noteworthy (because it is the exception that proves the rule) is the one ancient civilization that embraced change, classical Greece. From Thales of Miletus to Ptolemy I, the Greek spirit was relatively open to new ideas. Ptolemy I's example is particularly striking because he ruled Egypt -- already a 3,000 year-old civilization when he arrived; the pyramids he toured were more than 2,000 years old. Ptolemy brought an entirely new spirit to the land of the Nile. At Alexandria, this Hellenistic ruler (1) commissioned the world's then-largest library that housed 700,000 papyri and humankind's first think tank; (2) engineered a harbor to hold 1,200 ships, and (3) erected a lighthouse that guided ships from as far away as 30 miles. In all these projects, Ptolemy exuded Hellenism's embrace of the world. That spirit would powerfully reemerge in the European Renaissance some 1,700 years later.

What Made the West Different?

In a word, it was modernity. But the origins of modernity need to be unpacked to make any sense.

The Renaissance is the name we give to an era in Western civilization lasting from the 15th to the 16th centuries, when new winds began to stir. Blowing across the western Eurasian landmass, these winds made Europe ripe for transformation. What happened in the late Middle Ages to make the West diverge in fundamental ways from its own past and from other civilizations? Why was it Europe that initiated the changes that would transform all humankind? Many factors came into play.

1. The most fundamental factor of all was the nature of the civilization itself. Western Christendom was a cultural mix that brought together (a) Judeo-Christian spiritual aspirations; (b) Greco-Roman philosophical quests including the Hellenistic spirit noted above; and (c) Anglo-Saxon-Germanic political arrangements. The rich elements from these diverse civilizations mixed, reacted, clashed, and catalyzed a new cultural chemistry. This new cultural chemistry matured into the seedbed that would nourish the most powerful civilization on earth. Christopher Dawson explores the West's seedbed in Understanding Europe, as does Russell Kirk in The Roots of American Order. Thomas Jefferson celebrated the Saxon ingredient in the remarkable second paragraph of A Summary View of the Rights of British America.

Mont St. Michel -- an organic expression of Gothic civilization

2. The tension and competition that arose within Christendom's numerous nations nurtured societies that tolerated diversity (and as we saw above, classical Greek civilization was a particularly important element in the mix). European society was more tolerant of boundary transgressions and paradigm shifts than societies in the past and in other civilizations had been. Because of history and geography, Europe had more competing states and institutions than any comparable place on earth. If a man's idea did not resonate in the Church, then perhaps it found a home in the state, and vice versa. If the prince of one state did not like an idea, then the prince of a nearby state might. Thus, the freedom to experiment and change became more normative in the West -- more so than anywhere else on the planet. Think of Columbus of Genoa (Italy), whose idea of sailing west he tested with the monarchs of Portugal and England before landing a commitment from the Spanish monarchs of Aragon and Castile. Also think of the Renaissance humanist Erasmus, who was equally at home in Paris, Louvain, Cambridge, and Basel. The social openness to new ideas (even to the point of boundary transgressions and paradigm shifts) explains why so many revolutions -- commercial, religious, scientific, intellectual, industrial, political -- could take root in the West after 1500.

Kuhn's important study of paradigm shifts

3. Frustration can be a source of historical change. A powerful trigger of modernity was Europeans' frustrated desire to trade with the East. In American history classes I bring in a pepper shaker and joke that this is what started it all. Europeans wanted Asian pepper. But in the late Middle Ages, Muslims made overland trade between Europe and Asia increasingly difficult. After centuries of lagging behind Muslims, Europeans weren't going to take it any more. In the fifteenth century they finally had the combination of technology, capital, curiosity, confidence, missionizing zeal, and competitive drive to seek alternative routes to India and the Orient, bypassing Muslim middlemen who had monopolized traditional land routes. Having to sail thousands of miles around Africa to India and back spurred advances in nautical technology. Early successes engendered a can-do spirit. So the voyages of discovery would contribute to the transformation, first in Europe's port cities, banking centers, and dynastic houses, then throughout the broader culture.

4. In the case of Europe's domination of the Western Hemisphere, epidemiology reveals a critical factor. Europeans had numerous herd animals; the Indians did not. Such animals migrated throughout Europe after the retreat of Pleistocene glaciers, finding the climate and food supply amenable to their survival. Europeans followed the animals -- pigs, horses, cattle, sheep, and goats serving as their roving Walmart -- and domesticated them. Because of these herd animals, Europeans built up immunities to the diseases that would ravage large populations of (biologically speaking) defenseless Indians. Using contemporary accounts and historical analysis, historians estimate that 50-90 percent of aboriginal Americans died as a result of smallpox, cholera, typhus, and other diseases that large numbers of Europeans had developed antibodies to. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond writes persuasively of Europe's grain crops and herd animals making a difference in the rise of human inequality in the modern age.

5. Europe's geography is not often emphasized, but it was another important ingredient in the rise of the West over the Rest. Geographically, Europe was always something apart -- not just apart from Muslims, Indians, and Chinese to the east. Geomorphically, too, Europe was different from the rest of the Eurasian landmass of which it is an extension. To see why, look at the globe. The western fifth of the great Eurasian landmass (from about 30 degrees latitude east to the Prime Meridian) starts to break up into numerous peninsulas and islands that are separated by relatively narrow seas, channels, bays, and straits. Europe has a highly irregular coastline in which sizable bodies of water penetrate well into the interior of the continent. Think of the Aegean, Adriatic, North, and Baltic seas, as well as the English Channel and Dardanelles-Bosporus. Furthermore, large rivers -- the Rhine, Rhone, Danube, etc. -- make communication between the interior and salt water ports easy.

Europe, the westernmost extension of Eurasia, is broken into numerous peninsulas and islands. No comparable landmass on earth is so interpenetrated by water.

European geography with all its peninsulas and islands (not to mention mountain ranges) also encouraged the formation of numerous competing states in relatively close quarters. It's why Italy has a peninsula to itself, as do Greece and Denmark. It's why Spain and Portugal are identified with the Iberian Peninsula. It's why Norway and Sweden are identified with the Scandinavian Peninsula. It's why the United Kingdom is an island unto itself. It's why the Irish aspire to be the sole occupants of their own island. As noted above, these numerous island and peninsular nations also set the stage for leaders to compete with one another in an international arena. The monarchs and princes who tried to outdo one another were another catalyst of change.

I do not subscribe to geographic determinism, but the numerous peninsulas and islands practically guaranteed that Europeans would be a water people. European geography encouraged people to meet their needs by communicating and trading with each other over the narrow bodies of water that separated them.

ancient Greek transport ship

No comparable land mass on earth is so interpenetrated by water as is Europe -- not Africa, not Asia, not Australia, not South America, nor North America -- all of which have smoother coastlines ... though there is one faint comparison in my part of the world. The eastern part of North America presents a geography somewhat similar to that of Europe, with the Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, Hudson River, St. Lawrence River, Great Lakes, and Chicago portage to the Mississippi all affording access deep into the interior of the continent. One hundred years ago, Michigan school children were taught that the Great Lakes amounted to a kind of Mediterranean Sea in the heart of North America.

The Industrial Revolution transformed the West's economy, society, and landscape. Humankind had never experienced any similar transformation. The Industrial Revolution powered the West over the Rest.

6. Risk-taking leaders also played a critical role, for they had the imagination to see new possibilities in the voyages of discovery, accumulation of capital, and advances in technology. Collectively they built up the military capacity of the West to subdue the Rest. Fundamental to the process was the new attitude toward change itself. As the West's leaders embraced the new attitude toward change, they set off a chain of events that would have more far-reaching effects on humankind than anything since the Neolithic Revolution. With explosive energy, the West began increasing its wealth in a commercial revolution, enlarging its understanding of nature in the scientific revolution, empowering its manipulation of physical processes in the Industrial Revolution, retooling its thinking in the Enlightenment, and dominating the rest of the world through westernization. However it spread -- whether by adoption or by force -- westernization led to the globe's transformation. Like it or not, it's the feature story of the modern age.

7. At this point we arrive at another factor, this one more speculative than the others. It involves the development of the European imagination. All the coastlines in the westernmost part of Eurasia encouraged Europeans to build boats, feed themselves from the riches of the sea, and trade with neighboring lands. But I believe it did more. I believe it accustomed people to look not just inward to the interior but outward on the open water. Gazing out at the open sea, a people's imagination will play on the infinite possibilities of the distant horizon (actually 17 miles out). The broad horizon becomes the basic unit of the imagination. This experience is unlike that of the original riverine civilizations -- Sumer, Egypt, India, China -- where peoples made their living from the earth and looked to a small hinterland for material security.

Psychologically, a distant horizon on the open sea incites wonder and restlessness. What's out there? Who's out there? What are people doing on the other side? Isn't this why we are attracted to sea coasts? We are suspended in wonder before the other, the infinite. Our mind, daydreaming, is mesmerized by the rhythmic surf. Here in the Great Lakes State we have this experience when we go to the sand dunes on Lake Michigan on a clear day and look west toward Chicago and Wisconsin. Looking out over Lake Michigan makes me think about Europeans through the ages. More than any other peoples on earth, Europeans are Homo viator, sojourners.

on a Greek ship, c. 530 B.C.

A geography and a culture that support sojourning will also encourage a people to embrace change. But -- change to what end?

Three Paradigmatic Stories

There are three great stories that Western culture has absorbed to define our restlessness, curiosity, and sense of wonder. One is from a Greek epic poem, one is from a Roman epic poem, and one is from Hebrew sacred scripture.

Replica of Odysseus's ship

In Homer's Odyssey, Odysseus cannot rest until he builds a boat to sail back home, to Ithaca, the place that for him is the source of what is true, good, and beautiful.

In Virgil's Aeneid, Aeneas leaves a Troy devastated by war, sails west on the Mediterranean, and founds a new people and a new city, Rome -- in the imagination of many, a symbolically significant home called the "Eternal City."

In the Exodus, Moses leads the Hebrews to the Promised Land, the land of milk and honey -- a journey that in part retraces the steps of Abraham and the Patriarchs, a journey that leads them back toward Eden where the first humans knew perfect truth, goodness, beauty, and love.

Pilgrims sojourn, they seek change -- sometimes with a changeless end in mind.

We Continue to Search for Eden

After 1500 A.D. these three stories became paradigmatic in the Western imagination. They symbolize European restlessness, the quest for something better. I'd allow that the perennial human search is for the true, the good, and the beautiful.

Albert Bierstadt, Oregon Trail

Our American experience with immigrants and on the frontier are latter-day iterations of this ageless impulse to sojourn West to find a better life. As a people we have enshrined our places of natural beauty and sublimity in a peerless collection of parks. We Americans restlessly continue the search for Eden.