AutobiographyOfFukuzawaYukichi.Kunshi . . . by phaedrus: In my life with the boisterous and free-living students, and after I was married, even in associating with various men of the world, I always kept myself within the prescribed limit of the well-behaved man. Yet I was not “puritan” or moralist—I knew quite well the inside life of the hidden quarters of our society. By simply listening to my friends talking together, I could easily learn about things I had never seen. There are people whom we call ''kunshi'', “bigoted saints,” who are good through fear and the stupid inability to act. They, of course, resent the immoral behavior of others who give free play to their desires. These persons complain when no one is present to refute them, but they are too afraid to come near any actual encounter with the less virtuous world. So they go around frowning on life and shunning friendships. On the contrary I never hesitated to talk on any subject with my friends, and often made fun of
AutobiographyOfFukuzawaYukichi.WeCannotDoAnythingWithoutPrecedent . . . by phaedrus: Now I was ready to go to Osaka. And in applying for a permit to leave home, I was to use a most ridiculous subterfuge. While my brother was living, I cian could go anywhere at any time with only his sanction, but now that I had become the head of the family with certain duties to the lord, I had to obtain a permit for going “abroad.” I wrote my petition without consulting anyone, for I knew better than to talk to my relatives. When I submitted the petition, the friendly secretary spoke to me privately. “This will not be accepted,” he said gravely, “because in this clan there has not been any precedent of a samurai leaving his duty for the purpose of studying *Ran-gaku* (Dutch learning).” “Then what shall I write?” I inquired. “Well, you might say that your purpose is the study of gunnery. That has a precedent.”
AutobiographyOfFukuzawaYukichi.ReligiousEmpiricism . . . by phaedrus: One day when I was twelve or thirteen years old, I ran through the room in one of my mischievous moments and stepped on some papers which my brother was arranging on the floor. Suddenly he broke out in disgust: "Stop, you dunce!" Then he becan to speak solemnly. “Do you not see what is written here?” he said. “Is this not Okudaira Taizen-no Tayū—your lord’s name?” “I did not know it,” I hastily apologized. “I am sorry.” “You say you did not know,” he replied indignantly. “But if you have eyes, you should see. What do you think of trampling your lord’s name under foot? The sacred code of lord and vassal is . . ."
AutobiographyOfFukuzawaYukichi.AccordingToTheConventionAmongTheWarriorClass . . . by phaedrus: I was always unconcerned with the way of society, and it was my inborn nature to act always in my own way. Since all the samurai of small means kept no servants, they were obliged to go out and do their own shopping. But according to the convention among the warrior class, they were ashamed of being seen handling money. Therefore, it was customary for samurai to wrap their faces with hand-towels and go out after dark whenever they had an errand to do. I hated having a towel on my face and have never worn one. I even used to go out on errands in broad daylight, swinging a wine bottle in one hand, with two swords at my side as became a man of samurai rank. “This is my own money,” I would say to myself. “I did not steal it. What is wrong with buying things with my own money?” Thus, I believe, it was with a boyish pride and conceit that I made light of the mock gentility of my neighbors.
AutobiographyOfFukuzawaYukichi.TheFirstShockIReceivedOnComingToTheCity . . . by phaedrus: For any work in metals it is very necessary to have a good file; I had a difficult time in making one for myself. I knew how to make an ordinary file from a steel bar, after a fashion, but the fine file for sharpening saws was beyond my art. Years later, when I first came to Yedo, I was surprised at the sight of a boy, an apprentice to a blacksmith, making a saw-file. I still remember the place. It was at Tamachi on the right-hand side of the street as I entered the city. The boy had the file on a piece of leather on an anvil, and was chiseling away at very fine notches as if he never realized there was any wonder in it. I stopped and watched him, thinking what a great city of industry this must be where even a youngster could make a saw-file such as I myself had never dreamed of making. This was the first shock I received on coming to the city.
AutobiographyOfFukuzawaYukichi.NumbersTheToolOfMerchants . . . by phaedrus: My father was really a scholar. And the scholars of the time, different from the Western scholars of today, disdained to spend any thought on money, or even to touch it. My father always longed for a quiet scholarly life with his books and the noble philosophy of the ancient sages. Yet he was forced to attend to the most worldly affairs, for it was his duty as treasury overseer to associate with merchants, and to count money, and to negotiate loans for his lord. Sometimes when his lord was in difficulty, my father had to bargain with the rich men like Kajimaya and Kōnoike of Ōsaka. In this work he was unhappy, and so when it came to bringing up his children, he tried, it seemed to me, to give them what he thought was an ideal education. For instance, he once sent them to a teacher for calligraphy and general education. The teacher lived in the compound of the lord's storage office, but, having some merchants' children among his pupile, he naturally began to train them in numerals: "Two times two is four, two times three is six, etc." This, today, seems a very ordinary thing to teach, but when my father heard this, he took his children away in a fury. "It is abominable," he exclaimed, "that innocent children should be taught to use numbers—the tool of merchants. There is no telling what that teacher may do next."
AnEncouragementOfLearning.CannotBeMadeToAdvance . . . February 25, 2022, at 09:55 PM by phaedrus: Since the Meiji Restoration, talented men in government offices have devoted their considerable abilities to national problems. But because of certain unavoidable obstacles in their path, progress has been slower than expected. The chief obstacles have been the ignorance and illiteracy of the people. The government well understands what these obstacles are, and is accordingly promoting learning, clarifying the law, and instructing the people in ways to engage in business enterprises. It has both given advice to the people and taken the initiative itself in certain enterprises. Still, while it has been trying all possible means, the results have not been successful up to now. In fact, the government is as despotic as before, and the Japanese people continue to be stupid, spiritless and powerless. The slight progress made is out of all proportion to the energies and money spent for it. Why is this? In the last analysis, it is because the civilization of a nation cannot be made to advance solely through the power of the government. Some people are saying that it is only a temporary expediency to use governmental means to manage the stupid people until they have sufficiently developed their intellectual and moral levels to be able to enter the stage of modern civilization on their own. This theory is easy to enunciate but difficult to realize in practice. Since time immemorial, the people of the whole country have suffered under despotic rule which did not allow freedom of expression. They stole security by deception, and escaped punishment by telling lies. Fraud and subterfuge became necessary tools of life; injustice and insincerity became daily routine. No one felt ashamed and no one asked questions. Honor fell to the ground and disappeared with the wind of the times. How, then, did men have time to love their country? Trying to correct these evil tendencies, the government would brandish its false authority all the more to intimidate and reprove them. But forcing them to be sincere only had the contrary effect. The situation was like using fire to extinguish fire. In the end, the superior and inferior strata of society had grown further and further apart to form separate spiritual mind-sets.
AnEncouragementOfLearning.NationalIndependenceThroughPersonalIndependence . . . February 25, 2022, at 09:53 PM by phaedrus: In the Sengoku Period, when Imagawa Yoshimoto of Suruga led an army of several tens of thousands against Oda Nobunaga, he was ambushed by Nobunaga at Okehazama. Nobunaga then routed Yoshimoto’s headquarters and beheaded him. The army of Suruga scattered like frightened spiders. They fled without a clash of arms. The then prestigious government of Imagawa of Suruga collapsed in a day and disappeared forever. Two or three years ago, the French emperor Napoleon III was captured by Prussia at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian war. But the French not only did not abandon hope, they fought back with even greater spirits. They fought with their very blood and guts. After holding firm for several months, a treaty was finally signed, and France had survived. Her fate was entirely different from that of Imagawa. What is the reason for this difference? It is because the people of Suruga were entirely dependent upon Yoshimoto alone. Their status was that of guests who did not regard Suruga as their own native province. In France there were many patriotic citizens, each of whom took the responsibility of the nation’s crisis upon himself and fought for his own land without needing to be persuaded by others. This made the difference between ancient Suruga and modern France. Judging from this case, we can infer how, in a crisis calling for national defense, those who have the spirit of independence will exhibit deep concern for their country, in contrast to those who have not.
AnEncouragementOfLearning.TheInstrumentsOfLearning . . . February 25, 2022, at 09:14 PM by phaedrus: Athough it is essential to know letters to study, it would be a great misunderstanding of the nature of learning to think that it only consists in reading books, as people have thought from ancient times. Letters are the instruments of learning; they are like the hammers and saws used to build a house. Although hammers and saws are indispensable tools for building a house, a person who only knows their names but not how to build a house cannot be called a carpenter. For this reason, a person who only knows how to read letters but does not know how to discern the principles of things cannot be called a true scholar. Such a person is like a man who is said to have read the Confucian Analects but does not understand it. In like manner, a person who has learned to recite the Kojiki by heart but does not know the present price of rice must be called ignorant in practical studies. A person who has mastered the inner meaning of the Chinese Classics and Histories but does not understand the ways of buying and selling, and is quite incompetent in business dealings, must be said to be a failure in the art of book-keeping. And a person who, after years of hard study and huge outlays of money, becomes proficient in Western studies but is unable to make his own private living, is out of touch with learning pertinent to the current of the times. Such people may be called mere wholesalers of letters. In merit and capacity they are not different from food-consuming dictionaries. They are useless to the nation, and parasites on the economy. Therefore, household management, book-keeping, staying abreast of the trends of the times are also forms of learning. What is the reason for understanding learning exclusively in the sense of reading Japanese, Chinese, and Western books?
AnEncouragementOfLearning.AWesternProverb . . . February 25, 2022, at 09:13 PM by phaedrus: Today even employment in government service is open to men of character and talent among the formerly nonsamurai groups. Therefore they must be aware of their own personal dignity and place a high value on it, not acting in a base manner. But again, there are no individuals more pitiable and despicable than the ignorant and illiterate. The height of ignorance is to be shameless. When such people, through their own ignorance, have fallen into poverty and are hard pressed by hunger and cold, they recklessly hate the rich around them instead of blaming their own stupidity. In the extreme, they form cliques and mount rebellion and insurrection to press their demands. Such solutions can be said to be shameless as well as law-defying. If people who relied on the laws of the realm to preserve their own security and to conduct their own businesses were to follow only those laws which suited their purposes while breaking those which did not accord with their selfish ends, would not the former and latter practices be contradictory? In addition, there are cases of people secure in fortune and from respectable families who know how to amass wealth, but do not know how to educate properly their own children. Since their young have not been properly educated, it is no wonder that they are ignorant. They gradually sink into idleness and dissipation, and there are not a few who in short order ruin the family estate of their ancestors. The method of rational persuasion is useless to control such stupid people. The government is forced to use power to intimidate them. It is because of this that a Western proverb says that there must be a harsh government over stupid people. It is not that the government is harsh; the stupid people have invited this misfortune upon themselves. Conversely, it is reasonable that there should be good government over good people. Therefore in Japan, too, we will have this kind of government if the people are this way. If the morality of the people sinks below its present level and ignorance and illiteracy increase, then the laws of the government must correspondingly become harsher. Conversely, if the people pursue learning, understand the principles of things, and follow the way of modern civilization, then the laws of the government will also become more generous and compassionate. The severity or leniency of the law will naturally be in proportion to the virtue of the people. Who would cherish a harsh government, and dislike a good one? Who would not pray for the wealth and prestige of his own nation? Who would tolerate the contempt of foreign nations? These are ordinary feelings of human nature.
AnEncouragementOfLearning.DeferenceToAGovernmentOfficial . . . February 25, 2022, at 09:09 PM by phaedrus: As a case in point, while it is natural that we show deference to a government official, this is not because of the dignity of that person’s status. He is accorded that respect only because he performs that important role through his talent and virtues, and because he deals with weighty laws for the sake of the people. It is the laws which have dignity, not the man. Everyone knows about the notorious processions of the shogun’s tea vessels along the Tōkaidō during the period of the Tokugawa shogunate; not only the tea vessels, even the shogun’s hunting hawks had greater dignity than men. Travelers along the highway had to get off the road at the coming of the shogun’s horses. Everything to which the shogun’s use was attached, down to the stones and tiles, was invested with awe and dignity. While the people hated these things in their hearts since time immemorial, they naturally perpetuated these practices. Both high and low observed these terrible customs. In short, this was not because of the dignity of the laws or the intrinsic value of those things. It was because the government used craven methods to swell their prestige, and thereby to make men cower, and to prevent their freedom. They were false and vainglorious practices. Today such wretched institutions and customs have all been abolished throughout Japan. Therefore people should be relieved and if ever they harbor any feeling of injustice against the government, they will not have to swallow their resentment and hate the government in silence. They can seek out the office or authorities concerned, quietly lodge their complaints, and discuss them openly. If their case is in accord with natural principle and human feeling, they should not hesitate to fight for it even at the risk of their lives. These are now the “responsibility” of the citizens of the nation.
AnEncouragementOfLearning.PracticalLearning . . . February 25, 2022, at 09:05 PM by phaedrus: In essence, learning does not consist in such impractical pursuits as study of obscure Chinese characters, reading ancient texts which are difficult to make out, or enjoying and writing poetry. These kinds of learning may be useful diversions, but they should not be regarded as highly as the Confucian and Japanese Learning scholars have esteemed them since ancient times. Among the Confucian Learning scholars, those who have been skilled in practical matters have been few indeed. Rare also has been the chōnin who, if he was well versed in poetry, was also successful in business. Consequently we still observe that thoughtful townsfolk and peasants, when they see their own children concentrating on books, fear as good parents that they will eventually bring the family fortune to ruin. This is not without reason. And it proves that such forms of learning are ultimately without practical value and will not serve daily needs. Such impractical studies should be relegated to a secondary position. The object of one’s primary efforts should be a practical learning that is closer to ordinary human needs. For example, a person should learn the 47-letter kana syllabary, methods of letter writing and of accounting, the practice of the abacus, the way to handle weights and measures, and the like. And there is much additional knowledge to be acquired. Geography is the guide to the climates not only of Japan, but of the many countries of the world. Physics is the science which investigates the properties and functions of the myriad things of the universe. History books chronicle in detail the conditions of the countries of the past and present. Economics explains the financial management of self, family, and the state. Ethics expounds the natural principles of personal moral cultivation and of social intercourse. For the purpose of studying each of these areas, a person should investigate translations of Western books. In many cases he can use kana. But a lad who is young and talented in letters should be taught to read in the Western languages. By grasping the practical matters of each science, which vary in subject matter and content, he can search for the truth of things and make them serve his present purposes. The above-mentioned subjects are ones common to mankind, matters which everyone should have an interest in, irrespective of rank or position. After acquiring learning in these areas, individuals can go on to do their duties or manage their family businesses, with independence redounding to the individuals, families, and the nation alike.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.HowTrumpWon . . . November 27, 2020, at 12:06 PM by phaedrus: Politicians, anxious for votes in tumultuous times when tried-and-true themes seem to carry little resonance, tend, like a bard or Martin Luther King, Jr., to keep their ears firmly to the ground to assess what moves the constituents whose support and enthusiasm they need. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first campaign for the U.S. presidency, at the beginning of the Great Depression, is a striking case in point. At the outset of the campaign, Roosevelt was a rather conservative Democrat not inclined to make promises or claims that were radical. In the course of the campaign, however, which was mostly conducted at whistle-stops, owing to the candidate's paralysis, the Roosevelt standard speech evolved, becoming more radical and expansive. Roosevelt and his speechwriters worked feverishly, trying new themes, new phrasings, and new claims at whistle-stop after whistle-stop, adjusting the speech little by little, depending on the response and the particular audience. In an era of unprecedented poverty and unemployment, FDR confronted an audience that looked to him for hope and the promise of assistance, and gradually his stump speech came to embody those hopes. At the end of the campaign, his oral "platform" was far more radical than it had been at the outset. There was a real sense in which, cumulatively, the audience at the whistle-stops had written (or shall we say "selected") his speech for him. It wasn't just the speech that was transformed but Roosevelt himself, who now saw himself embodying the aspirations of millions of his desperate countrymen.
Main.HomePage . . . September 25, 2020, at 11:01 PM by phaedrus: * [[InfluentialConspiracies]] * [[AbUrbeCondita/]]
AbUrbeCondita.Preface . . . August 02, 2020, at 01:20 PM by phaedrus: Whether the task I have undertaken of writing a complete history of the Roman people from the very commencement of its existence will reward me for the labour spent on it, I neither know for certain, nor if I did know would I venture to say. For I see that this is an old-established and a common practice, each fresh writer being invariably persuaded that he will either attain greater certainty in the materials of his narrative, or surpass the rudeness of antiquity in the excellence of his style. However this may be, it will still be a great satisfaction to me to have taken my part, too, in investing, to the utmost of my abilities, the annals of the foremost nation in the world with a deeper interest; and if in such a crowd of writers my own reputation is thrown into the shade, I would console myself with the renown and greatness of those who eclipse my fame. The subject, moreover, is one that demands immense labour. It goes back beyond 700 years and, after starting from small and humble beginnings, has grown to such dimensions that it begins to be overburdened by its greatness. I have very little doubt, too, that for the majority of my readers the earliest times and those immediately succeeding, will possess little attraction; they will hurry on to these modern days in which the might of a long paramount nation is wasting by internal decay. I, on the other hand, shall look for a further reward of my labours in being able to close my eyes to the evils which our generation has witnessed for so many years; so long, at least, as I am devoting all my thoughts to retracing those pristine records, free from all the anxiety which can disturb the historian of his own times even if it cannot warp him from the truth. The traditions of what happened prior to the foundation of the City or whilst it was being built, are more fitted to adorn the creations of the poet than the authentic records of the historian, and I have no intention of establishing either their truth or their falsehood. This much licence is conceded to the ancients, that by intermingling human actions with divine they may confer a more august dignity on the origins of states. Now, if any nation ought to be allowed to claim a sacred origin and point back to a divine paternity that nation is Rome. For such is her renown in war that when she chooses to represent Mars as her own and her founder's father, the nations of the world accept the statement with the same equanimity with which they accept her dominion. But whatever opinions may be formed or criticisms passed upon these and similar traditions, I regard them as of small importance. The subjects to which I would ask each of my readers to devote his earnest attention are these - the life and morals of the community; the men and the qualities by which through domestic policy and foreign war dominion was won and extended. Then as the standard of morality gradually lowers, let him follow the decay of the national character, observing how at first it slowly sinks, then slips downward more and more rapidly, and finally begins to plunge into headlong ruin, until he reaches these days, in which we can bear neither our diseases nor their remedies. There is this exceptionally beneficial and fruitful advantage to be derived from the study of the past, that you see, set in the clear light of historical truth, examples of every possible type. From these you may select for yourself and your country what to imitate, and also what, as being mischievous in its inception and disastrous in its issues, you are to avoid. Unless, however, I am misled by affection for my undertaking, there has never existed any commonwealth greater in power, with a purer morality, or more fertile in good examples; or any state in which avarice and luxury have been so late in making their inroads, or poverty and frugality so highly and continuously honoured, showing so clearly that the less wealth men possessed the less they coveted. In these latter years wealth has brought avarice in its train, and the unlimited command of pleasure has created in men a passion for ruining themselves and everything else through self-indulgence and licentiousness. But criticisms which will be unwelcome, even when perhaps necessary, must not appear in the commencement at all events of this extensive work. We should much prefer to start with favourable omens, and if we could have adopted the poets' custom, it would have been much pleasanter to commence with prayers and supplications to gods and goddesses that they would grant a favourable and successful issue to the great task before us.
AbUrbeCondita.AbUrbeCondita . . . August 02, 2020, at 01:19 PM by phaedrus: Text from [[http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/txt/ah/Livy/ | here]], with better styling. (:pagelist group=AbUrbeCondita list=normal fmt=#title:)
TwoCheersForAnarchism.InstitutionalNeurosis . . . June 23, 2020, at 12:45 AM by phaedrus: Page moved to TwoCheersForAnarchism.InstitutionalNeurosis from TwoCheersForAnarchism.TheAuthoritarianAndHierarchicalCharacteristicsOfMostContemporaryInstitutions
TwoCheersForAnarchism.TheDistasteForThePettyBourgeoisie . . . June 23, 2020, at 12:42 AM by phaedrus: The distaste for the petty bourgeoisie also has, I believe, a structural source: one that is shared by the erstwhile socialist bloc and large capitalist democracies. The fact is, almost all forms of small property have the means to elude the state's control: small property is hard to monitor, tax, or police; it resists regulation and enforcement by the very complexity, variety, and mobility of its activities. The crisis of 1929 that led to Stalin's headlong campaign to collectivize was precisely the failure to appropriate sufficient grain from the smallholding peasantry. As a general rule, states of virtually all descriptions have always favored units of production from which it is easier to appropriate grain and taxes. For this reason, the state has nearly always been the implacable enemy of mobile peoples - Gypsies, pastoralists, itinerant traders, shifting cultivators, migrating laborers - as their activities are opaque and mobile, flying below the state's radar. For much the same reason states have preferred agribusiness, collective farms, plantations, and state marketing boards over smallholder agriculture and petty trade. They have preferred large corporations, banks, and business conglomerates to smaller-scale trade and industry. The former are often less efficient than the latter, but the fiscal authorities can more easily monitor, regulate, and tax them. The more pervasive the state's fiscal grasp, the more likely that a "gray" or "black" informal and unreported economy will arise to evade it. And it goes without saying that the sheer size and deep pockets of the largest institutions guarantee them a privileged seat in the councils of power.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.TheDesireForAutonomy . . . June 23, 2020, at 12:40 AM by phaedrus: The desire for autonomy seems so powerful that it can take quite perverse forms. In factory settings, where the assembly line is fine-tuned to reduce autonomy to the vanishing point, workers manage nonetheless to steal back autonomous time for "horseplay" as an expression of independence. Auto workers on the line at River Rouge rush to get ahead so they can find a corner to doze in or read or to play a dangerous game of rivet hockey. Workers in socialist Hungary stole time to make "homers" - small lathe pieces for themselves - even when they had no earthly use for them. In a system of work devised to exterminate "play; the workers refuse this objectification and boredom, asserting their autonomy in creative ways.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.BigBoxStores . . . June 23, 2020, at 12:39 AM by phaedrus: The petty bourgeoisie provided services, like the smile of the shopkeeper, that simply cannot be purchased. Jacobs noticed that on virtually every block there was at least one shopkeeper with long hours whom residents asked to hold their apartment keys for out-of-town relatives and friends who would be using their apartment briefly while they were away. The shopkeeper provided this service when asked as a courtesy to his customers. It is impossible to imagine a service like this being provided by a public agency. It is surely the case that "big box" stores can, owing again to their clout as buyers, deliver a host of manufactured goods to consumers at a cheaper price than the petty bourgeoisie. What is not so clear, however, is whether, once one has factored in all the public goods {the positive externalities) the petty bourgeoisie provides-informal social work, public safety, the aesthetic pleasures of an animated and interesting streetscape, a large variety of social experiences and personalized services, acquaintance networks, informal neighborhood news and gossip, a building block of social solidarity and public action, and {in the case of the smallholding peasantry) good stewardship of the land-the petty bourgeoisie might not be, in a full accounting, a far better bargain, in the long run, than the large, impersonal capitalist firm. And, although they might not quite measure up to the Jeffersonian democratic ideal of the self-confident, independent, land-owning yeoman farmer, they approach it far more closely that the clerk at Wal-Mart or Home Depot. One final fact is worth noting. A society dominated by smallholders and shopkeepers comes closer to equality and to popular ownership of the means of production than any economic system yet devised.
AlbionsSeed.ThePuritanInventionOfTheAlarmClock . . . May 25, 2020, at 12:20 PM by phaedrus: In most cultures, attitudes toward work are closely connected to conceptions of time. The people of the Bay Colony were no exception. For a Puritan, time was heavily invested with sacred meaning. Fundamentally, it was “God’s Time” as Samuel Sewall called it: “God’s Time is the best time, God’s way the best way.” A central idea in this culture was that of “improving the time,” in the seventeenth-century sense of “turning a thing to good account.” Time-wasting in the Bay Colony was a criminal offense. As early as 1633 the General Court decreed: No person, householder or other, shall spend his time idly or unprofitably, under pain of such punishment as the court shall think meet to inflict; and for this end it is ordered, that the constables of every place-shall use special diligence to take knowledge of offenders in this kind, especially of common coasters, unprofitable fowlers and tobacco takers, and to present the same. A year later, the Court fined two men the heavy sum of twenty shillings each for “misspending their time.” The Puritan magistrate Samuel Sewall was infuriated by the wasting of time, and still more by its profanation. When he observed two men playing “idle tricks” on April Fools’ Day he angrily upbraided them:
AlbionsSeed.ThePopistConceitOfTheExcellencyOfVirginity . . . May 25, 2020, at 12:59 AM by phaedrus: Sex among the Puritans was very far from being puritanical in the popular sense. Copulation was not a taboo subject in seventeenth-century Massachusetts, as it later became in the nineteenth. It was discussed so openly that the writings of the Puritans required heavy editing before they were thought fit to print even in the mid-twentieth century. But sex in Massachusetts was distinctly puritanical in another meaning. The sexual attitudes and acts of the Bay colonists were closely linked to religious beliefs. Where controlled regional comparisons can be made by a quantitative method, we find that their sexual behavior was distinctly different from the non-Puritan colonies. At the same time, Massachusetts sex ways were remarkably similar to prevailing customs in East Anglia, as distinct from other parts of England. The Puritans never encouraged sexual asceticism. They did not value chastity in the Roman Catholic sense as highly as other Christians did. The Boston minister Samuel Willard explicitly condemned “the Popist conceit of the excellency of virginity.” John Cotton wrote that “women are creatures without which there is no comfortable living for man: it is true of them what to be said of governments, that bad ones are better than none.” Puritans also commonly believed that an intimate sexual bond between husbands and wives was an important and even a necessary part of marriage. Correspondence between Puritan husbands and wives often expressed their love for one another in strong sensual terms. John Winthrop and his wife Margaret wrote often in this way: “My dearly beloved wife,” he began, “ … my heart is at home, and specially with thee my best beloved … with the sweetest kisses and pure embracings of my kindest affection I rest thine. …” Sexual relations within marriage were protected by the Puritans from the prying eyes of others, and surrounded with as much privacy as was possible in that culture. A court in New England indicted a man because “he could not keep from boys and servants, secret passages betwixt him and his wife about the marriage bed.” Sex outside of marriage, however, was regarded very differently. The Puritans followed the teachings of the Old Testament in believing that adultery was a sin of the deepest dye. They defined an adulterous act in the conventional way as extramarital sex involving a married woman (not necessarily a married man), but punished both partners with high severity. Their criminal codes made adultery a capital crime, and at least three people were actually hanged for it in the Puritan colonies.
AlbionsSeed.PuritanFamilyOrder . . . May 25, 2020, at 12:54 AM by phaedrus: So important was the idea of a covenanted family in Massachusetts that everyone was compelled by law to live in family groups. As early as 1629 the Governor and Deputies of the colony ordered that: For the better accommodation of businesses, we have divided the servants belonging to the Company into several families, as we desire and intend they should live together. … Our earnest desire is, that you take special care, in settling these families, that the chief in the family (at least some of them) be grounded in religion; whereby morning and evening family duties may be duly performed, and a watchful eye held over all in each family … that so disorders may be prevented, and ill weeds nipped before they take too great a head. The provinces of Connecticut and Plymouth also forbade any single person to “live of himself.” These laws were enforced. In 1668 the court of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, systematically searched its towns for single persons and placed them in families. In 1672 the Essex County Court noted: Being informed that John Littleale of Haverhill lay in a house by himself contrary to the law of the country, whereby he is subject to much sin and iniquity, which ordinarily are the companions and consequences of a solitary life, it was ordered … he remove and settle himself in some orderly family in the town, and be subject to the orderly rules of family government.
AlbionsSeed.ACityUponAHill . . . May 25, 2020, at 12:50 AM by phaedrus: Within East Anglia, the Puritan movement was strongest in the small towns whence so many migrants left for Massachusetts. Of Colchester (Essex) one Puritan leader said that “the town, for the earnest profession of the gospel, became like unto a city upon a hill, and as a candle upon a candle stick.” That passage from St. Matthew, however inappropriate it may have been to the topography of East Anglia, was often used by Puritans to describe the spiritual condition of this region. When John Winthrop described his intended settlement in Massachusetts as “a city upon a hill,” he employed a gospel phrase that had become a cliché in the communities of eastern England.
AlbionsSeed.FashionsOfHistory . . . May 25, 2020, at 12:49 AM by phaedrus: The organizing question here is about what might be called the determinants of a voluntary society. The problem is to explain the origins and stability of a social system which for two centuries has remained stubbornly democratic in its politics, capitalist in its economy, libertarian in its laws, individualist in its society and pluralistic in its culture. Much has been written on this subject—more than anyone can possibly read. But a very large outpouring of books and articles contains a remarkably small number of seminal ideas. Most historians have tried to explain the determinants of a voluntary society in one of three ways: by reference to the European culture that was transmitted to America, or to the American environment itself, or to something in the process of transmission. During the nineteenth century the first of these explanations was very much in fashion. Historians believed that the American system had evolved from what one scholar called “Teutonic germs” of free institutions, which were supposedly carried from the forests of Germany to Britain and then to America. This idea was taken up by a generation of historians who tended to be Anglo-Saxon in their origins, Atlantic in their attitudes and Whiggish in their politics. Most had been trained in the idealist and institutional traditions of the German historical school. For a time this Teutonic thesis became very popular—in Boston and Baltimore. But in Kansas and Wisconsin it was unkindly called the “germ theory” of American history and laughed into oblivion. In the early twentieth century it yielded to the Turner thesis, which looked to the American environment and especially to the western frontier as a way of explaining the growth of free institutions in America. This idea appealed to scholars who were middle western in their origins, progressive in their politics, and materialist in their philosophy. In the mid-twentieth century the Turner thesis also passed out of fashion. Yet another generation of American historians became deeply interested in processes of immigration and ethnic pluralism as determinants of a voluntary society. This third approach was specially attractive to scholars who were not themselves of Anglo-Saxon stock. Many were central European in their origin, urban in their residence, and Jewish in their religion. This pluralistic “migration model” is presently the conventional interpretation.
AlbionsSeed.ThePuritanNuclearFamily . . . May 25, 2020, at 12:47 AM by phaedrus: Like most of their contemporaries, the Puritans thought of the family as a concentric set of nuclear and extended rings. But within that conventional idea, they gave special importance to the innermost nuclear ring. Strong quantitative evidence of this attitude appeared in their uniquely nuclear naming customs. As we shall see below, the Puritans of Massachusetts gave high priority to the descent of names from parents to children within the nuclear family. This naming strategy was unique to the Puritans, and very different from other cultures in British America. Similar tendencies also appeared in customs of inheritance, which were more nuclear in New England than in other American colonies during the seventeenth century. One study of 168 wills in Newbury, Massachusetts, for example, found that only 6.5 percent left bequests to a niece or nephew, and 3.0 percent to other kin. None whatever bequeathed property to a cousin—a pattern different from the Chesapeake colonies. The same nuclear pattern also appeared in the composition of households. By comparison with other colonies, households throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut included large numbers of children, small numbers of servants and high proportions of intact marital unions. In Waltham, Massachusetts, for example, completed marriages formed in the 1730s produced 9.7 children on the average. These Waltham families were the largest that demographic historians have found anywhere in the Western world, except for a few Christian communes which regarded reproduction as a form of worship. But they were not unique. In many other New England towns fertility rates rose nearly as high, and the number of children was larger than French demographer Louis Henry defined as the biological maximum in a normal population. The number of servants in New England, however, was very small—less than one per family. At any given time, most households in this region had no servants at all—a pattern very different from the Chesapeake and Delaware colonies. In short, the New England household more closely coincided with the nuclear unit, and the nuclear family was larger and stronger than elsewhere in the Western world. The strength of the nuclear unit was merely one of many special features of New England families. Another was a strong sense of collective responsibility for maintaining its individual integrity. The people of the Bay Colony worked through many institutions to preserve what they called “family order” and “family government” within each nuclear unit. Other cultures also shared these concerns, but once again Puritan New England did things in its own way, with a special intensity of purpose. The selectmen and constables of each town were required by law to inspect families on a regular basis. Where “good order” broke down within a household, their task was to restore it. In nuclear families that were persistently “disorderly”—a word that covered a multitude of misdeeds—the selectmen were required to remove the children and servants and place them in other homes. Thus, in 1675, Robert Styles of Dorchester was presented for many sins, and ordered to “put forth his children, or otherwise the selectmen are hereby empowered to do it, according to law.”
BroEndocrinology.BroEndocrinology . . . May 17, 2020, at 11:10 PM by phaedrus: ! Obesity This is because the normal pattern of weight gain might not be to slowly accumulate very small amounts each day, but rather to be weight stable for protracted periods, interspersed with periods of gross imbalance during which most weight gain occurs. For example, weight gain during the holiday season in the United States (from Thanksgiving in November until the new year) is significantly higher than during the rest of the year (Yanovski et al., 2000) and is matched by seasonal variation in food intake (de Castro, 1991), although other studies have shown no change in overall weight but an increase in fatness over the same period (Hull et al., 2006). ... The UK Department of Health, for example, recently convened an expert working group to quantify the magnitude of weight change and energy imbalance in the UK population, concluding that the average weight gain was 6.7 kg [14.8 lbs] over 10 years and that the daily energy imbalance necessary to generate this was about 25 kJ/day. The conclusion that is often drawn from these weight gain and energy balance calculations is that our bodies must therefore contain an exquisitely tuned system that controls our intake and expenditure with incredible precision to maintain our body mass at an almost constant level. From a treatment perspective, it is probably this tuning system that has made the pharmacotherapy of obesity such a challenge with regards to efficacy. [[https://dmm.biologists.org/content/4/6/733 | source]] !! Leptin
TwoCheersForAnarchism.ToEscapeNotice . . . April 05, 2020, at 12:19 AM by phaedrus: The sort of lawbreaking going on here is, I think, a special subspecies of collective action. It is not often recognized as such, in large part because it makes no open claims of this kind and because it is almost always self-serving at the same time. Who is to say whether the poaching hunter is more interested in a warm fire and rabbit stew than in contesting the claim of the aristocracy to the wood and the game he has just taken? It is most certainly not in his interest to help the historian with a public account of his motives. The success of his claim to wood and game lies in keeping his acts and motives shrouded. And yet, the long-run success of this lawbreaking depends on the complicity of his friends and neighbors who may believe in his and their right to forest products and may themselves poach and, in any case, will not bear witness against him or turn him in to the authorities.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.HighlyElaboratedOrder . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:39 PM by phaedrus: Like the city official peering down at the architect's proposed model of a new development site, we are all prone to the error of equating visual order with working order and visual complexity with disorder. It is a natural and, I believe, grave mistake, and one strongly associated with modernism. How dubious such an association is requires but a moment's reflection. Does it follow that more learning is taking place in a classroom with uniformed students seated at desks arranged in neat rows than in a classroom with un-uniformed students sitting on the floor or around a table? The great critic of modern urban planning, Jane Jacobs, warned that the intricate complexity of a successful mixed-use neighborhood was not, as the aesthetic of many urban planners supposed, a representation of chaos and disorder. It was, though unplanned, a highly elaborated and resilient form of order. The apparent disorder of leaves falling in the autumn, of the entrails of a rabbit, of the interior of a jet engine, of the city desk of a major newspaper is not disorder at all but rather an intricate functional order. Once its logic and purpose are grasped, it actually looks different and reflects the order of its function.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.ATypicalEastGermanFactory . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:39 PM by phaedrus: The planned economies of the socialist bloc before the breach in the Berlin Wall in 1989 were a striking example of how rigid production norms were sustained only by informal arrangements wholly outside the official scheme. In one typical East German factory, the two most indispensable employees were not even part of the official organizational chart. One was a "jack-of-all trades" adept at devising short-term, jury-rigged solutions to keep machines running, to correct production flaws, and to make substitute spare parts. The second indispensable employee used factory funds to purchase and store desirable nonperishable goods (e.g., soap powder, quality paper, good wine, yarn, medicines, fashionable clothes) when they were available. Then, when the factory absolutely needed a machine, spare parts, or raw material not available through the plan to meet its quotas and earn its bonuses, this employee packed the hoarded goods in a Trabant and went seeking to barter them for the necessary factory supplies. Were it not for these informal arrangements, formal production would have ceased.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.ArchitecturalModels . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:37 PM by phaedrus: Looked at from this angle, the standard practice of urban planning and architecture suddenly seems very bizarre indeed. The architect and planners proceed by devising an overall vision of the building or ensemble of buildings they propose. This vision is physically represented in drawings and, typically, in an actual model of the buildings proposed. One sees in the newspapers photographs of beaming city officials and architects looking down on the successful model as if they were in helicopters, or gods. What is astounding, from a vernacular perspective, is that no one ever experiences the city from that height or angle. The presumptive ground-level experience of real pedestrians-window-shoppers, errand-runners, aimlessly strolling lovers-is left entirely out of the urban-planning equation. It is substantially as sculptural miniatures that the plans are seen, and it is hardly surprising that they should be appreciated for their visual appeal as attractive works of art: works of art that will henceforth never be seen again from that godlike vantage point, except by Superman.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.WhenToPlantCorn . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:36 PM by phaedrus: Vernacular measurement is only as precise as it needs to be for the purposes at hand. It is symbolized in such expressions as a "pinch of salt," "a stone's throw; "a book of hay," "within shouting distance." And for many purposes, vernacular rules may prove more accurate than apparently more exact systems. A case in point is the advice given by Squanto to white settlers in New England about when to plant a crop new to them, maize. He reportedly told them to "plant corn when the oak leaves were the size of a squirrel's ear." An eighteenth-century farmer's almanac, by contrast, would typically advise planting, say, "after the first full moon in May," or else would specify a particular date. One imagines that the almanac publisher would have feared, above all, a killing frost, and would have erred on the side of caution. Still, the almanac advice is, in its way, rigid: What about farms near the coast as opposed to those inland? What about fields on the north side of a hill that got less sun, or farms at higher elevations? The almanac's one-size-fits-all prescription travels rather badly. Squanto's formula, on the other hand, travels well. Wherever there are squirrels and oak trees and they are observed locally, it works. The vernacular observation, it turns out, is closely correlated with ground temperature, which governs oak leafing. It is based on a close observation of the sequence of spring events that are always sequential but may be early or delayed, drawn out or rushed, whereas the almanac relies on a universal calendrical and lunar system.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.OneCouldBargainWithATradeUnion . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:31 PM by phaedrus: The great policy shifts represented by the institution of unemployment compensation, massive public works projects, social security aid, and the Agricultural Adjustment Act were, to be sure, abetted by the emergency of the world depression. But the way in which the economic emergency made its political weight felt was not through statistics on income and unemployment but through rampant strikes, looting, rent boycotts, quasi-violent sieges of relief offices, and riots that put what my mother would have called "the fear of God" in business and political elites. They were thoroughly alarmed at what seemed at the time to be potentially revolutionary ferment. The ferment in question was, in the first instance, ''not institutionalized''. That is to say, it was not initially shaped by political parties, trade unions, or recognizable social movements. It represented no coherent policy agenda. Instead it was genuinely unstructured, chaotic, and full of menace to the established order. For this very reason, there was no one to bargain with, no one to credibly offer peace in return for policy changes. The menace was directly proportional to its ''lack'' of institutionalization. One could bargain with a trade union or a progressive reform movement, institutions that were geared into the institutional machinery. A strike was one thing, a wildcat strike was another: even the union bosses couldn't call off a wildcat strike. A demonstration, even a massive one, with leaders was one thing, a rioting mob was another. There were no coherent demands, no one to talk to.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.IrishDemocracy . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:29 PM by phaedrus: One need not have an actual conspiracy to achieve the practical effects of a conspiracy. More regimes have been brought, piecemeal, to their knees by what was once called "Irish democracy," the silent, dogged resistance, withdrawal, and truculence of millions of ordinary people, than by revolutionary vanguards or rioting mobs.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.ASenseOfCivicResponsibility . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:27 PM by phaedrus: Judging when it makes sense to break a law requires careful thought, even in the relatively innocuous case of jaywalking. I was reminded of this when I visited a retired Dutch scholar whose work I had long admired. When I went to see him, he was an avowed Maoist and defender of the Cultural Revolution, and something of an incendiary in Dutch academic politics. He invited me to lunch at a Chinese restaurant near his apartment in the small town of Wageningen. We came to an intersection, and the light was against us. Now, Wageningen, like Neubrandenburg, is perfectly flat, and one can see for miles in all directions. There was absolutely nothing coming. Without thinking, I stepped into the street, and as I did so, Dr. Wertheim said, "James, you must wait." I protested weakly while regaining the curb, "But Dr. Wertheim, nothing is coming." "James; he replied instantly, "It would be a bad example for the children." I was both chastened and instructed. Here was a Maoist incendiary with, nevertheless, a fine-tuned, dare I say Dutch, sense of civic responsibility, while I was the Yankee cowboy heedless of the effects of my act on my fellow citizens.
TwoCheersForAnarchism.AnarchistCalisthenics . . . March 07, 2020, at 06:26 PM by phaedrus: Outside the station was a major, for Neubrandenburg at any rate, intersection. During the day there was a fairly brisk traffic of pedestrians, cars, and trucks, and a set of traffic lights to regulate it. Later in the evening, however, the vehicle traffic virtually ceased while the pedestrian traffic, if anything, swelled to take advantage of the cooler evening breeze. Regularly between 9:00 and 10:00 p.m. there would be fifty or sixty pedestrians, not a few of them tipsy, who would cross the intersection. The lights were timed, I suppose, for vehicle traffic at midday and not adjusted for the heavy evening foot traffic. Again and again, fifty or sixty people waited patiently at the corner for the light to change in their favor: four minutes, five minutes, perhaps longer. It seemed an eternity. The landscape of Neubrandenburg, on the Mecklenburg Plain, is flat as a pancake. Peering in each direction from the intersection, then, one could see a mile of so of roadway, with, typically, no traffic at all. Very occasionally a single, small Trabant made its slow, smoky way to the intersection. Twice, perhaps, in the course of roughly five hours of my observing this scene did a pedestrian cross against the light, and then always to a chorus of scolding tongues and fingers wagging in disapproval. I too became part of the scene. If l had mangled my last exchange in German, sapping my confidence, I stood there with the rest for as long as it took for the light to change, afraid to brave the glares that awaited me if I crossed. If, more rarely, my last exchange in German had gone well and my confidence was high, I would cross against the light, thinking, to buck up my courage, that it was stupid to obey a minor law that, in this case, was so contrary to reason. It surprised me how much I had to screw up my courage merely to cross a street against general disapproval. How little my rational convictions seemed to weigh against the pressure of their scolding. Striding out boldly into the intersection with apparent conviction made a more striking impression, perhaps, but it required more courage than I could normally muster. As a way of justifying my conduct to myself, I began to rehearse a little discourse that I imagined delivering in perfect German. It went something like this. "You know, you and especially your grandparents could have used more of a spirit of lawbreaking. One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay 'in shape' so that when the big day comes you will be ready. What you need is 'anarchist calisthenics.' Every day or so break some trivial law that makes no sense, even if it's only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you'll keep trim; and when the big day comes, you'll be ready."
OurSouthernHighlanders.OwnershipOfSpace . . . November 22, 2019, at 11:22 PM by phaedrus: We might expect such fiery individualism to cool gradually as population grew denser; but, oddly enough, crowding only intensifies it in the shy backwoodsman. Neighborliness has not grown in the mountains—it is on the wane. There are to-day fewer log-rollings and house-raisings, fewer husking bees and quilting parties than in former times; and no new social gatherings have taken their place. Our mountain farmer, seeing all arable land taken up, and the free range ever narrowing, has grown jealous and distrustful, resenting the encroachment of too many sharers in what once he felt was his own unfenced domain. And so it has come about that the very quality that is his strength and charm as a man—his staunch individualism—is proving his weakness and reproach as a neighbor and citizen. The virtue of a time out-worn has become the vice of an age new-born. ...
OurSouthernHighlanders.TheCorsicans . . . November 22, 2019, at 11:08 PM by phaedrus: In Corsica, when a man is wronged by another, public sentiment requires that he redress his own grievance, and that his family and friends shall share the consequences. “Before the law made us citizens, great Nature made us men.” “When one has an enemy, one must choose between the three S’s—''schiopetto, stiletto, strada'': the rifle, the dagger, or flight.” “There are two presents to be made to an enemy—''palla calda o ferro freddo'': hot shot or cold steel.” The Corsican code of honor does not require that vengeance be taken in fair fight. Rather should there be a sudden thrust of the knife, or a pistol fired point-blank into the enemy’s breast, or a rifle-shot from some ambush picked in advance.
OurSouthernHighlanders.ExcellentChancesToPayOffOldScores . . . November 22, 2019, at 11:03 PM by phaedrus: Feuds spread not only through clan fealty but also because they offer excellent chances to pay off old scores. The mountaineer has a long memory. The average highlander is fiery and combative by nature, but at the same time cunning and vindictive. If publicly insulted he will strike at once, but if he feels wronged by some act that does not demand instant retaliation he will brood over it and plot patiently to get his enemy at a disadvantage. Some mountaineers always fight fair; but many of them prefer to wait and watch quietly until the foe gets drunk and unwary, or until he is engaged in some illegal or scandalous act, or until he is known to be carrying a concealed weapon, whereupon he can be shot down unexpectedly and his assailant can “prove” by friendly witnesses that he acted in self-defense. So, if a man be involved in feud, he may be assassinated from ambush by someone who is not concerned in the clan trouble, but who has hated him for years on another account, and who knows that his death now will be charged up to the opposing faction.
OurSouthernHighlanders.TheMartin-ToliverFeud . . . November 22, 2019, at 11:02 PM by phaedrus: In Rowan County, Kentucky, in 1884, there was an election quarrel between two members of the Martin and Toliver families. The Logans sided with the Martins and the Youngs with the Tolivers. The Logan-Martin faction elected their candidate for sheriff by a margin of twelve votes. Then there was an affray in which one Logan was killed and three were wounded. As usual, in feuds, no immediate redress was attempted, but the injured clan plotted its vengeance with deadly deliberation. After five months, Dick Martin killed Floyd Toliver. His own people worked the trick of arresting him themselves and sent him to Winchester for safe-keeping. The Tolivers succeeded in having him brought back on a forged order and killed him when he was bound and helpless. The leader of the Young-Toliver faction was a notorious bravo named Craig Toliver. To strengthen his power he became candidate for town marshal of Morehead, and he won the office by intimidation at the polls. Then, for two years, a bushwhacking war went on. Three times the Governor sent troops into Rowan County, but each time they found nothing but creeks and thickets to fight. Then he prevailed upon the clans to sign a truce and expatriate their chiefs for one year in distant States. Craig Toliver obeyed the order by going to Missouri, but returned several months before the expiration of his term, resumed office, and renewed his atrocities. In the warfare that ensued all the county officers were involved, from the judge down. In 1887, Proctor Knott, Governor of Kentucky, said in his message, of the Logan-Toliver feud: “Though composed of only a small portion of the community, these factions have succeeded by their violence in overawing and silencing the voice of the peaceful element, and in intimidating the officers of the law. Having their origin partly in party rancor, they have ceased to have any political significance, and have become contests of personal ambition and revenge; each party seeking apparently to possess itself of the machinery of justice in order that it may, under the forms of law, seek the gratification of personal animosities.
OurSouthernHighlanders.MilkSickness . . . November 22, 2019, at 08:20 PM by phaedrus: A more mysterious disease is “milk-sick,” which prevails in certain restricted districts, chiefly where the cattle graze in rich and deeply shaded coves. If not properly treated it is fatal both to the cow and to any human being who drinks her fresh milk or eats her butter. It is not transmitted by sour milk or by buttermilk. There is a characteristic fetor of the breath. It is said that milk from an infected cow will not foam and that silver is turned black by it. Mountaineers are divided in opinion as to whether this disease is of vegetable or of mineral origin; some think it is an efflorescence from gas that settles on plants. This much is certain: that it disappears from “milk-sick coves” when they are cleared of timber and the sunlight let in. The prevalent treatment is an emetic, followed by large doses of apple brandy and honey; then oil to open the bowels. Perhaps the extraordinary distaste for fresh milk and butter, or the universal suspicion of these foods that mountaineers evince in so many localities, may have sprung up from experience with “milk-sick” cows. I have not found this malady mentioned in any treatise on medicine; yet it has been known from our earliest frontier times. Abraham Lincoln’s mother died of it.
OurSouthernHighlanders.AMatterOfTaste . . . November 22, 2019, at 08:12 PM by phaedrus: Running barefooted in the snow is exceptional nowadays; but it is by no means the limit of hardiness or callosity that some of these people display. It is not so long ago that I passed an open lean-to of chestnut bark far back in the wilderness, wherein a family of Tennesseans was spending the year. There were three children, the eldest a lad of twelve. The entire worldly possessions of this family could easily be packed around on their backs. Poverty, however, does not account for such manner of living. There is none so poor in the mountains that he need rear his children in a bark shed. It is all a matter of taste.
OurSouthernHighlanders.TheMountainCodeOfConduct . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:58 PM by phaedrus: And here is another significant fact: as regards personal property I do not know any race in the world that is more honest than our backwoodsmen of the southern mountains. As soon as you leave the railroad you enter a land where sneak-thieves are rare and burglars almost unheard of. In my own county and all those adjoining it there has been only one case of highway robbery and only one of murder for money, so far as I can learn, in the past forty years. The mountain code of conduct is a curious mixture of savagery and civility. One man will kill another over a pig or a panel of fence (not for the property’s sake, but because of hot words ensuing) and he will “come clear” in court because every fellow on the jury feels he would have done the same thing himself under similar provocation; yet these very men, vengeful and cruel though they are, regard hospitality as a sacred duty toward wayfarers of any degree, and the bare idea of stealing from a stranger would excite their instant loathing or white-hot scorn. Anyone of tact and common sense can go as he pleases through the darkest corner of Appalachia without being molested. Tact, however, implies the will and the insight to put yourself truly in the other man’s place. Imagine yourself born, bred, circumstanced like him. It implies, also, the courtesy of doing as you would be done by if you were in that fellow’s shoes. No arrogance, no condescension, but man to man on a footing of equal manliness. And there are “manners” in the rudest community: customs and rules of conduct that it is well to learn before one goes far afield. For example, when you stop at a mountain cabin, if no dogs sound an alarm, do not walk up to the door and knock. You are expected to call out Hello! until someone comes to inspect you. None but the most intimate neighbors neglect this usage and there is mighty good reason back of it in a land where the path to one’s door may be a warpath. If you are armed, as a hunter, do not fail to remove the cartridges from the gun, in your host’s presence, before you set foot on his porch. Then give him the weapon or stand it in a corner or hang it up in plain view. Even our sheriff, when he stopped with us, would lay his revolver on the mantel-shelf and leave it there until he went his way. If you think a moment you can see the courtesy of such an act. It proves that the guest puts implicit trust in the honor of his host and in his ability to protect all within his house. There never has been a case in which such trust was violated.
OurSouthernHighlanders.PublicSentimentInTheMountains . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:45 PM by phaedrus: The real trouble was that public sentiment in the mountains was almost unanimously in the moonshiners’ favor. Leading citizens were either directly interested in the traffic, or were in active sympathy with the distillers. “In some cases,” said the Commissioner, “State officers, including judges on the bench, have sided with the illicit distillers and have encouraged the use of the State courts for the prosecution of the officers of the United States upon all sorts of charges, with the evident purpose of obstructing the enforcement of the laws of the United States.... I regret to have to record the fact that when the officers of the United States have been shot down from ambuscade, in cold blood, as a rule no efforts have been made on the part of the State officers to arrest the murderers; but in cases where the officers of the United States have been engaged in enforcement of the laws, and have unfortunately come in conflict with the violators of the law, and homicides have occurred, active steps have been at once taken for the arrest of such officers, and nothing would be left undone by the State authorities to bring them to trial and punishment.”
OurSouthernHighlanders.WhatClassOfPeopleDoesTheInforming . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:41 PM by phaedrus: One day I asked a mountain man, “How about the revenue officers? What sort of men are they?” “Torn down scoundrels, every one.” “Oh, come, now!” “Yes, they are; plumb onery—lock, stock, barrel and gun-stick.” “Consider what they have to go through,” I remarked. “Like other detectives, they cannot secure evidence without practicing deception. Their occupation is hard and dangerous. Here in the mountains, every man’s hand is against them.”
OurSouthernHighlanders.TheEconomicsOfMoonshining . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:37 PM by phaedrus: In 1862 a tax of 20 cents a gallon was levied. Early in 1864 it rose to 60 cents. This cut off the industrial use of spirits, but did not affect its use as a beverage. In the latter part of 1864 the tax leaped to $1.50 a gallon, and the next year it reached the prohibitive figure of $2. The result of such excessive taxation was just what it had been in the old times, in Great Britain. In and around the centers of population there was wholesale fraud and collusion. “Efforts made to repress and punish frauds were of absolutely no account whatever.... The current price at which distilled spirits were sold in the markets was everywhere recognized and commented on by the press as less than the amount of the tax, allowing nothing whatever for the cost of manufacture.” Seeing that the outcome was disastrous from a fiscal point of view—the revenue from this source was falling to the vanishing point—Congress, in 1868, cut down the tax to 50 cents a gallon. “Illicit distillation practically ceased the very hour that the new law came into operation; ... the Government collected during the second year of the continuance of the act $3 for every one that was obtained during the last year of the $2 rate.” In 1869 there came a new administration, with frequent removals of revenue officials for political purposes. The revenue fell off. In 1872 the rate was raised to 70 cents, and in 1875 to 90 cents. The result is thus summarized by David A. Wells: “Investigation carefully conducted showed that on the average the product of illicit distillation costs, through deficient yields, the necessary bribery of attendants, and the expenses of secret and unusual methods of transportation, from two to three times as much as the product of legitimate and legal distillation. So that, calling the average cost of spirits in the United States 20 cents per gallon, the product of the illicit distiller would cost 40 to 60 cents, leaving but 10 cents per gallon as the maximum profit to be realized from fraud under the most favorable conditions—an amount not sufficient to offset the possibility of severe penalties of fine, imprisonment, and confiscation of property.... The rate of 70 cents ... constituted a moderate temptation to fraud. Its increase to 90 cents constituted a temptation altogether too great for human nature, as employed in manufacturing and selling whiskey, to resist.... During 1875-6, highwines sold openly in the Chicago and Cincinnati markets at prices less than the average cost of production plus the Government tax. Investigations showed that the persons mainly concerned in the work of fraud were the Government officials rather than the distillers; and that a so-called ‘Whiskey Ring’ ... extended to Washington, and embraced within its sphere of influence and participation, not merely local supervisors, collectors, inspectors, and storekeepers of the revenue, but even officers of the Internal Revenue Bureau, and probably, also, persons occupying confidential relations with the Executive of the Nation.”
OurSouthernHighlanders.HistorySays . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:35 PM by phaedrus: I was calling on a white-bearded patriarch who was a trifle vain of his historical learning. He could not read, but one of his daughters read to him, and he had learned by heart nearly all that lay between the two lids of a “Universal History” such as book agents peddle about. Like one of John Fox’s characters, he was fond of the expression “hist’ry says” so-and-so, and he considered it a clincher in all matters of debate. Our conversation drifted to the topic of moonshining. “Down to the time of the Civil War,” declared the old settler, “nobody paid tax on the whiskey he made. Hit was thataway in my Pa’s time, and in Gran’sir’s, too. And so ’way back to the time of George Washington. Now, hist’ry says that Washington was the Father of his Country; and I reckon he was the greatest man that ever lived—don’t you?” I murmured a complaisant assent. “Waal, sir, if ’t was right to make free whiskey in Washington’s day, hit’s right now!” and the old man brought his fist down on the table.
OurSouthernHighlanders.DistillersOfNecessity . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:33 PM by phaedrus: Up to the year 1791 there had been no excise tax in the United Colonies or the United States. (One that had been tried in Pennsylvania was utterly abortive). Then the country fell upon hard times. A larger revenue had to be raised, and Hamilton suggested an excise. The measure was bitterly opposed by many public men, notably by Jefferson; but it passed. Immediately there was trouble in the tall timber. Western Pennsylvania, and the mountains southward, had been settled, as we have seen, by the Scotch-Irish; men who had brought with them a certain fondness for whiskey, a certain knack in making it, and an intense hatred of excise, on general as well as special principles. There were few roads across the mountains, and these few were execrable—so bad, indeed, that it was impossible for the backwoodsmen to bring their corn and rye to market, except in a concentrated form. The farmers of the seaboard had grown rich, from the high prices that prevailed during the French Revolution; but the mountain farmers had remained poor, owing partly to difficulties of tillage, but chiefly to difficulties of transportation. As Albert Gallatin said, in defending the western people, “We have no means of bringing the produce of our lands to sale either in grain or in meal. We are therefore distillers through necessity, not choice, that we may comprehend the greatest value in the smallest size and weight. The inhabitants of the eastern side of the mountains can dispose of their grain without the additional labor of distillation at a higher price than we can after we have disposed that labor upon it.” Again, as in all frontier communities, there was a scarcity of cash in the mountains. Commerce was carried on by barter; but there had to be some means of raising enough cash to pay taxes, and to purchase such necessities as sugar, calico, gun powder, etc., from the peddlers who brought them by pack train across the Alleghanies. Consequently a still had been set up on nearly every farm. A horse could carry about sixteen gallons of liquor, which represented eight bushels of grain, in weight and bulk, and double that amount in value. This whiskey, even after it had been transported across the mountains, could undersell even so cheap a beverage as New England rum—so long as no tax was laid upon it. But when the newly created Congress passed an excise law, it virtually placed a heavy tax on the poor mountaineers’ grain, and let the grain of the wealthy eastern farmers pass on to market without a cent of charge. Naturally enough, the excitable people of the border regarded such a law as aimed exclusively at themselves. They remonstrated, petitioned, stormed. “From the passing of the law in January, 1791, there appeared a marked dissatisfaction in the western parts of Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. The legislatures of North Carolina, Virginia and Maryland passed resolutions against the law, and that of Pennsylvania manifested a strong spirit of opposition to it. As early as 1791, Washington was informed that throughout this whole region the people were ready for revolt.” “To tax their stills seemed a blow at the only thing which obdurate nature had given them—a lot hard indeed, in comparison with that of the people of the sea-board.” Our western mountains (we call most of them southern mountains now) resembled somewhat those wild highlands of Connemara to which reference has been made—only they were far wilder, far less populous, and inhabited by a people still prouder, more independent, more used to being a law unto themselves than were their ancestors in old Hibernia. When the Federal exciseman came among this border people and sought to levy tribute, they blackened or otherwise disguised themselves and treated him to a coat of tar and feathers, at the same time threatening to burn his house. He resigned. Indignation meetings were held, resolutions were passed calling on all good citizens to disobey the law, and whenever anyone ventured to express a contrary opinion, or rented a house to a collector, he, too, was tarred and feathered. If a prudent or ultra-conscientious individual took out a license and sought to observe the law, he was visited by a gang of “Whiskey Boys” who smashed the still and inflicted corporal punishment upon its owner.
OurSouthernHighlanders.ALeafFromThePast . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:30 PM by phaedrus: %center%Thae curst horse-leeches o’ the Excise %center%Wha mak the whisky stills their prize! %center%Haud up thy han’, Deil! ance, twice, thrice! %center%There, seize the blinkers! [wretches] %center%An bake them up in brunstane pies
OurSouthernHighlanders.AdministeringTheLawWithPromptitude . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:15 PM by phaedrus: One day there came a ripple of excitement in our settlement. A blockader had shot at Jack Coburn, and a posse had arrested the would-be assassin—so flew the rumor, and it proved to be true. Coburn was a northern man who, years ago, opened a little store on the edge of the wilderness, bought timber land, and finally rose to affluence. With ready wit he adapted himself to the ways of the mountaineers and gained ascendancy among them. Once in a while an emergency would arise in which it was necessary either to fight or to back down, and in these contests a certain art that Jack had acquired in Michigan lumber camps proved the undoing of more than one mountain tough, at the same time winning the respect of the spectators. He was what a mountaineer described to me as “a practiced knocker.” This phrase, far from meaning what it would on the Bowery, was interpreted to me as denoting “a master hand in a knock-fight.” Pugilism, as distinguished from shooting or stabbing, was an unknown art in the mountains until Jack introduced it. Coburn had several tenants, among whom was a character whom we will call Edwards. In leasing a farm to Edwards, Jack had expressly stipulated that there was to be no moonshining on the premises. But, by and by, there was reason to suspect that Edwards was violating this part of the contract. Coburn did not send for a revenue officer; he merely set forth on a little still-hunt of his own. Before starting, he picked up a revolver and was about to stick it in his pocket, but, on second thought, he concluded that no red-headed man should be trusted with a loaded gun, even in such a case as this; so he thrust the weapon back into its drawer, and strode away, with nothing but his two big fists to enforce a seizure. Coburn searched long and diligently, but could find no sign of a still. Finally, when he was about to give it up, his curiosity was aroused by the particularly dense browse in the top of an enormous hemlock that had recently been felled. Pushing his way forward, he discovered a neat little copper still installed in the treetop itself. He picked up the contraband utensil, and marched away with it. Meantime, Edwards had not been asleep. When Jack came in sight of the farmhouse, humped under his bulky burden, the enraged moonshiner seized a shotgun and ran toward him, breathing death and destruction. Jack, however, trudged along about his business. Edwards, seeing that no bluff would work, fired; but the range was too great for his birdshot even to pepper holes through the copper still.
OurSouthernHighlanders.ProhibitionRaisedThePrice . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:12 PM by phaedrus: Blockade whiskey, until recently, sold to the consumer at from $2.50 to $3.00 a gallon. The average yield is only two gallons to the bushel of corn. Two and a half gallons is all that can be got out of a bushel by blockaders’ methods, even with the aid of a “thumpin’-chist,” unless lye be added. With corn selling at seventy-five cents to a dollar a bushel, as it did in our settlement, and taking into account that the average sales of a little moonshiner’s still probably did not exceed a gallon a day, and that a bootlegger must be rewarded liberally for marketing the stuff, it will be seen that there was no fortune in this mysterious trade, before prohibition raised the price.
OurSouthernHighlanders.TheLawIsUnjust . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:08 PM by phaedrus: Our terms moonshiner and moonshining are not used in the mountains. Here an illicit distiller is called a blockader, his business is blockading, and the product is blockade liquor. Just as the smugglers of old Britain called themselves free-traders, thereby proclaiming that they risked and fought for a principle, so the moonshiner considers himself simply a blockade-runner dealing in contraband. His offense is only ''malum prohibitum'', not ''malum in se''.
OurSouthernHighlanders.ThisMoonshiningBusiness . . . November 22, 2019, at 07:06 PM by phaedrus: And it chanced (or was it chance?) that I had no more than finished supper, that evening, when a man called at my lonely cabin. He was the one that I knew best among my scattered neighbors. I gave him a rather humorous account of my reception by Madame Kirby, and asked him what he thought she was yelling about. There was no answering smile on my visitor’s face. He pondered in silence, weighing many contingencies, it seemed, and ventured no more than a helpless “Waal, now I wonder!” It did not suit me to let the matter go at that; so, on a sudden impulse, I fired the question point-blank at him: “Do you suppose that Tom is running a still up there at the head of that little cove?” The man’s face hardened, and there came a glint into his eyes such as I had noticed in Mistress Kirby’s. “Jedgmatically, I don’t know.”
OurSouthernHighlanders.SharingTheSpoils . . . November 22, 2019, at 06:58 PM by phaedrus: The mountaineers have an odd way of sharing the spoils of the chase. They call it “stoking the meat,” a use of the word stoke that I have never heard elsewhere. The hide is sold, and the proceeds divided equally among the hunters, but the meat is cut up into as many pieces as there are partners in the chase; then one man goes indoors or behind a tree, and somebody at the carcass, laying his hand on a portion, calls out: “Whose piece is this?” “Granville Calhoun’s,” cries the hidden man, who cannot see it. “Whose is this?” “Bill Cope’s.” And so on down the line. Everybody gets what chance determines for him, and there can be no charges of unfairness.
OurSouthernHighlanders.BearsIsAlmostHumanAnyhow . . . November 22, 2019, at 06:58 PM by phaedrus: “Fellers,” he added feelingly, “I wish t’ my legs growed hind-side-fust.” “What fer?” “So ’s ’t I wouldn’t bark my shins!” “Bears,” remarked John, “is all left-handed. Ever note that? Hit’s the left paw you wanter look out fer. He’d a-knocked somethin’ out o’ yer head if there’d been much in it, Doc.” “Funny thing, but hit’s true,” declared Bill, “that a bear allers dies flat on his back, onless he’s trapped.”
OurSouthernHighlanders.TheInterpretationOfDreams . . . November 22, 2019, at 06:53 PM by phaedrus: “Fellers, you want to mark whut you dream about, to-night: hit’ll shore come true to-morrow.” “Yes: but you mustn’t tell whut yer dream was till the hunt’s over, or it’ll spile the charm.” There ensued a grave discussion of dream-lore, in which the illiterates of our party declared solemn faith. If one dreamt of blood, he would surely see blood the next day. Another lucky sign for a hunter was to dream of quarreling with a woman, for that meant a she-bear; it was favorable to dream of clear water, but muddy water meant trouble. ... “Waal, who dreamt him a good dream?” “I did,” affirmed the writer. “I dreamt that I had an old colored woman by the throat and was choking dollars out of her mouth——”
OurSouthernHighlanders.Ginseng . . . November 22, 2019, at 06:42 PM by phaedrus: An interesting crop in our neighborhood was ginseng, of which there were several patches in cultivation. This curious plant is native throughout the Appalachians, but has been exterminated in all but the wildest regions, on account of the high price that its dried root brings. It has long since passed out of our pharmacopœia, and is marketed only in China, though our own people formerly esteemed it as a panacea for all ills of the flesh. Colonel Byrd, in his “History of the Dividing Line,” says of it: “Though Practice wilt soon make a man of tolerable Vigour an able Footman, yet, as a help to bear Fatigue I us’d to chew a Root of Ginseng as I Walk’t along. This kept up my Spirits, and made me trip away as nimbly in my half Jack-Boots as younger men cou’d in their Shoes. This Plant is in high Esteem in China, where it sells for its Weight in Silver.... Its vertues are, that it gives an uncommon Warmth and Vigour to the Blood, and frisks the Spirits, beyond any other Cordial. It chears the Heart, even of a Man that has a bad Wife, and makes him look down with great Composure on the crosses of the World. It promotes insensible Perspiration, dissolves all Phlegmatick and Viscous Humours, that are apt to obstruct the Narrow channels of the Nerves. It helps the Memory and would quicken even Helvetian dullness. ’Tis friendly to the Lungs, much more than Scolding itself. It comforts the Stomach, and Strengthens the Bowels, preventing all Colicks and Fluxes. In one Word, it will make a Man live a great while, and very well while he does live. And what is more, it will even make Old Age amiable, by rendering it lively, chearful, and good-humour’d.” Alas that only Chinamen and eighteenth-century Cavaliers could absorb the virtues of this sovereign herb! A successful ginseng grower of our settlement told me that two acres of the plant will bring an income of $2,500 to $5,000 a year, planting 100,000 to the acre. The roots take eight years to mature. They weigh from one and a half to four ounces each, when fresh, and one-third of this dried. Two acres produce 25,000 roots a year, by progression. The dried root, at that time, brought five dollars a pound. At present, I believe, it is higher. Another friend of mine, who is in this business extensively, tried exporting for himself, but got only $6.50 a pound in Amoy, when the U. S. consul at that port assured him that the real market price was from $12.60 to $24.40. The local trader, knowing American prices, pocketed the difference. In times of scarcity many of our people took to the woods and gathered commoner medicinal roots, such as bloodroot and wild ginger (there are scores of others growing wild in great profusion), but made only a pittance at it, as synthetic drugs have mostly taken the place of herbal simples in modern medicine. Women and children did better, in the days before Christmas, by gathering galax, “hemlock” (leucothoe), and mistletoe, selling to the dealers at the railroad, who ship them North for holiday decorations. One bright lad from town informed me, with evident pride of geography, that “Some of this goes to London, England.” Nearly everywhere in our woods the beautiful ruddy-bronze galax is abundant. Along the water-courses, leucothoe, which similarly turns bronze in autumn, and lasts throughout the winter, is so prolific as to be a nuisance to travelers, being hard to push through.
OurSouthernHighlanders.ThisContinualMoving . . . November 22, 2019, at 06:39 PM by phaedrus: Even in our new region many of the fields suffered quickly from erosion. When a forest is cleared there is a spongy humus on the ground surface that is extremely rich, but this washes away in a single season. The soil beneath is good, but thin on the hillsides, and its soluble, fertile ingredients soon leach out and vanish. Without terracing, which I have never seen practiced in the mountains of the South, no field with a surface slope of more than ten degrees (about two feet in ten) will last more than a few years. As one of my neighbors put it: “Thar, I’ve cl’ared me a patch and grubbed hit out—now I can raise me two or three severe craps!”
OurSouthernHighlanders.PuritanOrCavalier . . . November 22, 2019, at 06:39 PM by phaedrus: The mountaineers of the South are marked apart from all other folks by dialect, by customs, by character, by self-conscious isolation. So true is this that they call all outsiders “furriners.” It matters not whether your descent be from Puritan or Cavalier, whether you come from Boston or Chicago, Savannah or New Orleans, in the mountains you are a “furriner.” A traveler, puzzled and scandalized at this, asked a native of the Cumberlands what he would call a “Dutchman or a Dago.” The fellow studied a bit and then replied: “Them’s the outlandish.”
TheArtOfNotBeingGoverned.TheLastEnclosure . . . October 30, 2019, at 07:06 PM by phaedrus: Seen from the state center, this enclosure movement is, in part, an effort to integrate and monetize the people, lands, and resources of the periphery so that they become, to use the French term, ''rentable''—auditable contributors to the gross national product and to foreign exchange. In truth, peripheral peoples had always been firmly linked economically to the lowlands and to world trade. In some cases, they appear to have provided most of the products valued in international commerce. Nevertheless, the attempt to fully incorporate them has been culturally styled as development, economic progress, literacy, and social integration. In practice, it has meant something else. The objective has been less to make them productive than to ensure that their economic activity was legible, taxable, assessable, and confiscatable or, failing that, to replace it with forms of production that were. Everywhere they could, states have obliged mobile, swidden cultivators to settle in permanent villages. They have tried to replace open common-property land tenure with closed common property: collective farms or, more especially, the individual freehold property of liberal economies. They have seized timber and mineral resources for the national patrimony. They have encouraged, whenever possible, cash, monocropping, plantation-style agriculture in place of the more biodiverse forms of cultivation that prevailed earlier. The term enclosure seems entirely appropriate for this process, mimicking as it does the English enclosures that, in the century after 1761, swallowed half of England’s common arable land in favor of large-scale, private, commercial production. ... The hegemony, in this past century, of the nation-state as the standard and nearly exclusive unit of sovereignty has proven profoundly inimical to nonstate peoples. State power, in this conception, is the state’s monopoly of coercive force that must, in principle, be fully projected to the very edge of its territory, where it meets, again in principle, another sovereign power projecting its command to its own adjacent frontier. Gone, in principle, are the large areas of no sovereignty or mutually canceling weak sovereignties. Gone too, of course, are peoples under no particular sovereignty. As a practical matter, most nation-states have tried, insofar as they had the means, to give substance to this vision, establishing armed border posts, moving loyal populations to the frontier and relocating or driving away “disloyal” populations, clearing frontier lands for sedentary agriculture, building roads to the borders, and registering hitherto fugitive peoples. On the heels of this notion of sovereignty came the realization that these neglected and seemingly useless territories to which stateless peoples had been relegated were suddenly of great value to the economies of mature capitalism. They contained valuable resources—oil, iron ore, copper, lead, timber, uranium, bauxite, the rare metals essential to the aerospace and electronics industries, hydroelectric sites, bioprospecting and conservation areas—that might in many cases be the linchpin of state revenue. Places that long ago might have been desirable for their deposits of silver, gold, and gems, not to mention slaves, became the object of a new gold rush. All the more reason to project state power to the nethermost reaches of these ungoverned regions and bring their inhabitants under firm control. Occupying and controlling the margins of the state implied a cultural policy as well. Much of the periphery along national borders of mainland Southeast Asia is inhabited by peoples linguistically and culturally distinct from the populations that dominate the state cores. Alarmingly, they spill promiscuously across national frontiers, generating multiple identities and possible foci of irredentism or secession. Weak valley states have permitted, or rather tolerated, a certain degree of autonomy when they had little choice. Where they could, however, all states in the region have tried to bring such peoples under their routine administration, to encourage and, more rarely, to insist upon linguistic, cultural, and religious alignment with the majority population at the state core. This meant, in Thailand, encouraging, say, the Lahu to become Thai-speaking, literate, Buddhist subjects of the monarchy. In Burma it meant encouraging, say, the Karen to become Burmese-speaking Buddhists loyal to the military junta. Parallel to policies of economic, administrative, and cultural absorption has been the policy, driven by both demographic pressure and self-conscious design, of engulfment. Huge numbers of land-hungry majorities from the plains have moved, or been moved, to the hills. There, they replicate valley settlement patterns and sedentary agriculture, and, over time, they demographically dominate the dispersed, less numerous hill peoples. The combination of forced settlement and engulfment is nicely illustrated by a series of Vietnamese mobilization campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s: “Campaign to Sedentarize the Nomads,” “Campaign for Fixed Cultivation and Fixed Residence,” “Storm the Hills Campaign,” and “Clear the Hills by Torchlight Campaign.” ...
Projects.Florilegium . . . October 30, 2019, at 05:47 PM by phaedrus: oh, nvm, can't link that without it appearing in the category even on the main page... sigh
ElephantInTheBrain.TruthAndLoyalty . . . September 28, 2019, at 01:24 AM by phaedrus: We don't consider it "loyal" for an employee to stay at a company when it's paying her twice the salary she could make elsewhere; that's just calculated self-interest. Likewise, it's not "loyal" for a man to stay with his girlfriend if he has no other prospects. These attachments take on the color of loyalty only when someone remains committed despite a strong temptation to defect. Similarly, it doesn't demonstrate loyalty to believe the truth, which we have every incentive to believe anyway. It only demonstrates loyalty to believe something that we ''wouldn't'' have reason to believe ''unless'' we were loyal.
ElephantInTheBrain.ArabianBabblers . . . September 27, 2019, at 10:28 PM by phaedrus: The alpha male ... almost never tries to replace the ''gamma male'' from guard duty; instead the alpha directs all of his competitive energies toward the beta. ... Even more damning is the fact that babblers often ''interfere'' in the helpful behaviors of their rivals, for example, by trying to prevent them from feeding the communal nestlings. This makes no sense if the goal is to benefit the group as a whole. So if these activities aren't altruistic, what's the point? What's in it for the individual babbler who competes to do more than his fair share of helping others? The answer, as Zahavi and his team have carefully documented, is that altruistic babblers develop a kind of "credit" among their groupmates—what Zahavi calls ''prestige status''. This earns them at least two different perks, one of which is mating opportunities: Males with greater prestige get to mate more often with the females of the group. A prestigious alpha, for example, may take all the mating opportunities for himself. But if the beta has earned high prestige, the alpha will occasionally allow him to mate with some of the females. In this way, the alpha effectively "bribes" the beta to stick around. The other perk of high prestige is a reduced risk of getting kicked out of the group. If the beta, for example, has earned lots of prestige by being useful to the group, the alpha is less likely to evict him. Here the logic is twofold. First, a prestigious beta has shown himself to be more useful to the group, so the alpha prefers to keep him around. Second, by performing more acts of "altruism", a babbler demonstrates his strength and fitness. An alpha who goes beak-to-beak with a prestigious beta is less likely to win the fight, and so gives the beta more leeway than he would give a beta with lower prestige.
ElephantInTheBrain.WhyNotBeHonestWithOurselves . . . September 26, 2019, at 02:29 AM by phaedrus: Why can't we be honest with ourselves? The answer is that our thoughts aren't as private as we imagine. In many ways, conscious thought is a rehearsal of what we're ready to say to others. As [Robert] Trivers puts it, "We deceive ourselves the better to deceive others." ... Human beings are self-deceived because self-deception is useful. It allows us to reap the benefits of selfish behavior while posing as unselfish in front of others; it helps us look better than we really our. Confronting our delusions must therefore (at least in part) undermine their very reason for existing. There's a very real sense in which we might be better off not knowing what we're up to.
DaysOfRage.Epilogue . . . August 30, 2019, at 02:16 PM by phaedrus: Eighteen members of the FALN served lengthy prison sentences for their roles in the group’s two campaigns. In the mid-1990s a clemency campaign drew the support of former president Jimmy Carter and ten Nobel Laureates. In 1999, with his wife, Hillary, seeking the support of Hispanic voters for a senatorial campaign in New York, President Bill Clinton offered clemency to sixteen of those imprisoned; all but two accepted. Both the House and the Senate passed measures condemning Clinton’s action, which remains controversial in conservative circles to this day. Marie Haydee Torres, who (along with her husband) was not offered clemency, was released after serving almost thirty years, in 2009; today a friend says she lives in Miami. Carlos Torres was released from an Illinois prison in 2010. A crowd of five hundred supporters held a celebration in Chicago; an even larger crowd welcomed him on his return to Puerto Rico. Oscar López remains in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. He comes up for parole every few years. His supporters—and there are many in the Puerto Rican and radical communities—campaign for his release. In 2014 the Puerto Rican Day Parade in New York honored him as a “Puerto Rican patriot” who “was not convicted of a violent crime.” Of all those who went underground during the 1970s, few have gone on to more productive lives than alumni of the Weather Underground. Other than those who became involved with Mutulu Shakur, only Cathy Wilkerson served prison time, all of eleven months, on explosives charges related to the Townhouse. Most resumed more or less normal lives. Wilkerson remains a math instructor in the New York schools; she lives in Brooklyn with her longtime partner, the radical attorney Susan Tipograph. Ron Fliegelman worked as a special-education teacher in the New York schools for twenty-five years, retiring in 2007; today he and his wife live in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and are raising a son. Mark Rudd is a retired community college teacher in Albuquerque and gives talks about the sixties. Howard Machtinger lives in Durham, North Carolina, where he has worked as a high school teacher and at the University of North Carolina; he remains active in education reform efforts. Jonathan Lerner is a writer in New York. Russell Neufeld practices law in Manhattan. Robbie Roth taught social studies at Mission High School in San Francisco. Clayton Van Lydegraf died in 1992. Annie Stein died in 1981. Mona Mellis died in 1993. Several Weather alumni have risen to respected positions in their professions with very few knowing what they did in the 1970s. After attending law school, Paul Bradley, the pseudonym for one of Dohrn’s right-hand men, went on to a twenty-five-year career at one of the nation’s most prominent law firms. Today he lives in the Bay Area, where he advises a small start-up company or two; no one outside his family and other alumni has any clue that he spent years placing bombs in San Francisco–area buildings. Leonard Handelsman, a Weatherman in the Cleveland collective, went on to a distinguished career in psychiatry, becoming a full professor at Duke University, where he was medical director of the Duke Addictions Program. According to his longtime friend Howard Machtinger, who gave a eulogy when Handelsman died in 2005, no one outside his family knew of his life in the underground. Obituaries celebrated him only as a noted psychiatrist. Another Weatherman mentioned in this book became an accountant at a Big Four accounting firm in Vancouver. Today he is retired and active in local charities; he is not named here because of legal concerns. Another alumnus heads a children’s charity in Ohio, where an Internet biography indicates he has been appointed by three governors to sit on state task forces. Bernardine Dohrn has been a clinical associate professor of law at Northwestern University for more than twenty years. She has been active in efforts to reform the Chicago public schools and in international human rights activities. She has never disavowed her years as a Weatherman. Jeff Jones and Eleanor Stein were finally arrested in Yonkers, New York, in 1981 after the FBI received a tip on their whereabouts during the Brink’s investigations. Jones received probation on old explosives charges and became an environmental writer and activist in upstate New York, where he and Stein live today. Stein received a law degree from Queens College in 1986 and is today an administrative law judge with the New York State Public Service Commission. Michael Kennedy, who represented certain of Weather’s leaders, is today one of the most prominent attorneys in New York. Kennedy, who has served as a special adviser to the president of the United Nations General Assembly, lives with his wife, Eleanore, in a sumptuous apartment overlooking Central Park. Thanks to one of his old marijuana clients, he also happens to own High Times magazine.
DaysOfRage.HowThePuertoRicanRadicalsGotTheirInstitutions . . . August 28, 2019, at 08:44 AM by phaedrus: The key to the FALN’s early success was help provided by the National Commission on Hispanic Affairs and its director, Maria Cueto. Described as a quiet, determined single woman, Cueto refused to talk to investigators and to the end of her life refused to discuss the FALN. Years of investigation created suspicion, but found little concrete evidence, of her involvement. But her attorney was Elizabeth Fink, and after Cueto’s death, in 2012, Fink confirmed her onetime client’s key role in the FALN. According to Fink, it was Cueto who arranged to name a half-dozen FALN members, including Oscar López and Carlos Torres, to positions on the NCHA’s board, which allowed her to quietly pay them thousands of dollars in Episcopal Church monies that, in essence, funded the FALN’s birth. “Maria was the quartermaster of the FALN, the person who arranged the money, the travel, the person who arranged everything, who made everything happen,” Fink recalls. “The church had this special house in Greenwich, Connecticut, and I know the FALN had meetings there. Remember, Maria was doing all this with the FALN at the same time she was running this amazing social-action ministry, helping Hispanics.” Cueto and the NCHA, however, were only half the equation. Without dynamite and the expertise to use it, the FALN would never have sprung to life. For that it turned to its allies in the Weather Underground. Law enforcement for years speculated that Weather had played a role in the FALN’s formation. According to Charles Wells, a longtime member of the NYPD bomb squad, bombs built by the Weather Underground and FALN were of identical design. All of them, he explains, featured a single screw set into a clock at the “9”; the bomb detonated when the minute hand struck the screw. But the concrete evidence of Weather’s involvement came from its own bomb guru, Ron Fliegelman. “We gave them the training,” he acknowledged during a September 2012 interview. “We did that, sure. Was it me? I shouldn’t say. I don’t want to go there.” By Thanksgiving 1976, with the startling disclosure that nearly a dozen suspects had some kind of affiliation with its NCHA charity, the headquarters of the Episcopal Church became the unlikely epicenter of the FALN investigation. Church officials initially gave the FBI free rein. In a search of the NCHA’s basement office agents found a receipt taped to the bottom of Maria Cueto’s desk. It was for a Smith Corona typewriter. Agents knew that the FALN’s communiqués had been typed on a Smith Corona. They hustled to the Brooklyn store that sold the machine but found nothing of use; the name on the receipt was an alias. The FBI lab had determined that the communiqués had been photocopied on a Gestetner copy machine; a search of Gestetner’s records indicated that such a machine had been sold to the NCHA in 1974, on the eve of the first bombings. It was now being used by another office, and it would take a round of subpoenas to get it. Lou Vizi, meanwhile, met with the church’s top bishops and found them happy to furnish the NCHA’s financial records. He sensed they were intimidated by Cueto and her people, whose political leanings were far to the left of their own. “They were appalled,” Vizi remembers. “These were very nice people who had been stampeded into this charity stuff by their own guilt. The church treasurer got all the records for me, but they were a mess. He said, ‘We tried a thousand times to use proper accounting methods with these people, and every time higher-ups would say, “Don’t come down too hard, we don’t want any problems.”’ So no one was paying too much attention to where the church’s money was going, there were no receipts for a lot of this.”
DaysOfRage.TheNeedsOfTheDelegates . . . August 28, 2019, at 08:31 AM by phaedrus: Jennifer Dohrn delivered an opening address ''[for the Hard Times Conference, a Weather Underground front group]'' calling on the delegates to devise a new agenda for the Left that would empower and protect the working class. “We have to develop a program for the working class as a whole in this period to fight the [economic] depression,” she said. It was soon clear, however, that the conference’s organizers, who were all white, did not fully comprehend the needs of the delegates, who weren’t. “I was almost lynched by a group of vegetarians because I hadn’t provided enough nonmeat meals in the cafeteria,” Neufeld recalls with a shudder. “There were a lot of little things like that, stuff I just didn’t understand. Every time something went wrong, I was constantly being accused of being a racist. That was just devastating to me. I felt I was fucking up, like my head was just going to explode.” Much of the conference work was done in breakout groups, and by Saturday it was clear that many of them had little interest in the conference’s agenda. A Black Caucus formed, and word soon spread that it was none too pleased with the emphasis on “working class” issues over black issues. A feminist caucus arose as well and was just as incensed at the lack of attention being paid to women’s issues. “Jeff Jones wanted these people ordered and controlled, and there was just no way,” Neufeld says. “My pushback [to him] was to respect the process, that people had opinions, that they couldn’t be ordered around.” The ominous rumblings finally broke into the open during the closing session, when black delegates spent nearly an hour excoriating the organizers as racists and demanding that any new radical coalition be run by blacks. By nightfall confusion reigned. “I don’t think [Jeff] initially appreciated how bad it was,” Neufeld says. “In fact, I know he didn’t. And it was bad. Very bad.” By that evening it was clear there would be no radical coalition for Weather or anyone else to control. Recriminations began the next morning, when thirty PFOCers gathered in a member’s Chicago apartment. “That’s when I first heard some of the non-Weather people start saying things like ‘Where did this whole conference idea come from?’” recalls Lerner. “They were finally starting to smell the rat.”
DaysOfRage.TheOnlyCureForSymbioneseDysfunction . . . August 28, 2019, at 08:20 AM by phaedrus: Back in San Francisco violent arguments broke out, all exacerbated by ongoing sexual tensions within the group. Everything came to a head one long night at the Geneva Avenue apartment when, amid clouds of cigarette smoke, half-eaten pizza crusts, and beer and wine bottles, Harris announced that the only cure for the SLA’s dysfunction was black leadership. He proposed approaching a paroled San Quentin inmate they knew and asking him to take over. The newcomers hated the idea, afraid to bring in outsiders. As Harris and Kilgore screamed at each other, Emily Harris lamented the loss of the clarity DeFreeze had brought to the “old” SLA. Kilgore’s response provided an unwitting epitaph for the group: “That’s all a bunch of crap! What did the old SLA ever accomplish? You killed a black man, kidnapped a little teenaged girl and robbed a bank. What the hell did that amount to?” Finally, with half the group screaming and red-faced and the other half in tears, Harris shouted, “That’s it! It’s all over!” He and Emily were going in search of black leadership. The others could do as they pleased. The next day the Harrises rented an apartment on Precita Avenue in Bernal Heights, not far from San Francisco General Hospital. And just like that, with no good-byes, they were gone.
DaysOfRage.TheSoledadBrothersDefenseCommittee . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:42 AM by phaedrus: On January 16, after a television report that the grand jury had ruled the deaths “justifiable homicide,” the Soledad inmates took their revenge. A young, inexperienced guard named John Mills was alone on the floor of Soledad’s Y Wing, where Jackson was housed. A group of inmates grabbed him by the throat, beat him up, and threw him over a third-floor railing. Mills struck the concrete floor below with a thud, tried to rise, then fell dead. The cell block exploded in cheers. Jackson and two other inmates were detained, placed in solitary, and charged with Mills’s murder; as a serial offender, Jackson faced the gas chamber. The case of the “Soledad Brothers,” as the three were soon dubbed, would have a profound impact on the California prison system, the Left, and ultimately the underground. The key figure was a radical attorney named Fay Stender, who agreed to represent Jackson after she made a name for herself as Huey Newton’s co-counsel in his murder trial. A plain woman with a smoldering sexuality, Stender was utterly entranced by the black inmates she represented. Although married with two children, she would enter into a sexual relationship with Jackson, as she had with Newton. She was a genius at public relations. As she’d done with Newton, she intended to put the entire white “system” on trial by portraying Jackson as an innocent victim being persecuted for his revolutionary beliefs. Enlisting white activists from across California, Stender formed the Soledad Brothers Defense Committee, which soon blossomed into a full-blown bureaucracy with seven subcommittees and a Who’s Who of radical-chic supporters, including Jane Fonda, Pete Seeger, Allen Ginsberg, Tom Hayden, and a striking UCLA professor named Angela Davis. The committee turned Jackson into a cause célèbre for the radical Left, pumping out a stream of posters, pamphlets, buttons, bumper stickers, and fund-raising letters while staging bake sales, poetry readings, and art auctions. The Grateful Dead even played a benefit concert. Under Stender’s guidance, George Jackson emerged as the living symbol of everything the Bay Area Left yearned for: strong, black, prideful, masculine, and undeniably sexual. John Irwin, who was called to testify for Jackson’s defense, noticed how naïve and starstruck Stender and her supporters were. “It was mostly women who were doing the organizing,” he told the writer David Horowitz years later. “They had each picked their favorite Soledad Brother and were kind of ooh-ing and ah-ing over them, like teenagers with movie stars. I couldn’t believe it.”
DaysOfRage.ConvictCultism . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:39 AM by phaedrus: That jailed criminals would link up with the underground movement had long been foreseen. The rhetoric of violent revolution had found hundreds, perhaps thousands, of eager adherents inside U.S. prisons from its first utterances in the mid-1960s. Nowhere did prisoners pore over Debray and Che and Marighella more avidly than in California, where their interest attracted the notice of those who wanted a revolution just as badly: white radicals in San Francisco, Oakland, and especially the college city of Berkeley. This unlikely alliance, between charismatic black inmates and adoring white radicals, provided the underground with the long-sought messiah it ardently sought, thereby prolonging the life of a movement that had been on its last legs. Ironically, the figure who paved the way for all this was a white man, Caryl Chessman, a convicted rapist who, during the 1950s, launched a tireless legal and literary assault on the California prison system from his cell at San Quentin. What began as a stream of writs and lawsuits evolved into a series of best-selling memoirs in which Chessman put the prison system’s brutality on trial. By the time he was finally executed, in 1960, he had drawn clemency appeals from such liberal icons as Eleanor Roosevelt and Norman Mailer. During the 1960s hundreds of California inmates mimicked Chessman’s tactics, churning out thousands of clemency petitions and memoirs of their own—so many that as late as 1967 inmates on San Quentin’s Death Row were punished if discovered attempting to write their life stories. ... For apocalyptic revolutionaries, who had long sought a constituency to rise up and fight alongside them, black inmates seemed to represent the Holy Grail. Weatherman, after all, had invested thousands of hours attempting to rally working-class youth, high school students, and black liberals and had earned little in return but snickers and shrugs. Finally, in California’s toughest prisons, radicals found what appeared to be a loyal following. By 1968 black inmates were reported to be forming clandestine chapters of the Black Panthers and a hard-core Marxist group called the Black Guerrilla Family, both of which operated extensive, secret Marxist political-education groups, including courses on revolutionary theory and bomb making. In 1971 a House subcommittee identified the most popular books requested by black inmates as The Autobiography of Malcolm X, H. Rap Brown’s Die Nigger Die, and Cleaver’s Soul on Ice. It was Cleaver, starting in 1968, who loudly and repeatedly began predicting that black inmates would soon rise up and form the leading edge of the revolution. This kind of talk produced something approaching rapture in a certain brand of white revolutionary, to the point that, in a phenomenon the author Eric Cummins terms “convict cultism,” by the early 1970s “convicts who were released from California prisons frequently enjoyed instant hero status in radical organizations.” As a Movement radical named Betsy Carr put it, “I was completely fascinated with [black inmates]—the glamour, the bizarreness. It was my Hollywood. I’d never discussed anything with any of them, just watched in total awe.” By 1971 scores of Bay Area radicals were volunteering and protesting at California prisons. More than a few of the black inmates they befriended, however, turned out to be opportunists who parroted Marxist philosophy in hopes of luring their new white friends into helping them make parole or, in extreme cases, escape. The classic case came in October 1972, when several members of Venceremos, a leading Bay Area activist group, ambushed a car transporting a black prisoner named Ronald Beaty outside Chino’s California Institute for Men. A guard was killed in the ensuing gunfight. Their plan, authorities learned later, was to form guerrilla training camps in the California mountains, from which they would launch the long-awaited revolution in American cities. These hopes were dashed, however, when Beaty was recaptured. He not only implicated much of the Venceremos leadership; he also said he had only pretended to be a revolutionary to gain his freedom.
DaysOfRage.AMovementWithNoInstitutions . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:13 AM by phaedrus: What most interested Cleaver, and the subject he returned to again and again in his transatlantic phone calls, was the need to establish an aboveground network to support the BLA. Guerrilla units could not survive long, he knew, without donations, without volunteers to serve as couriers and press agents, without community support. A Panther named Bernice Jones was keeping the old Seventh Avenue headquarters open in Harlem, but as police pressure skyrocketed after the May attacks, many volunteers simply melted away. Those who remained came under relentless surveillance and harassment from the FBI and NYPD. By the summer there would be fewer than a dozen people working with Jones. “Everyone is just too scared,” Lumumba Shakur complained in one call to Algeria. “They all running and hiding in fear.” ... The BLA’s most pressing problem, however, was a lack of aboveground support, something Cleaver and Sekou Odinga in far-off Algiers constantly harped on. Other than Right On!, whose next issue wouldn’t appear until August, there was none. Barely a dozen people now manned the Panthers’ Seventh Avenue storefront as their every move was tracked by the NYPD and the FBI. Both searched for links to the underground, but other than the intermittent calls to Algeria, all monitored by the FBI, there were none to be found. The calls, in fact, only revealed the tensions among those few volunteers still supporting Cleaver. At one point, Lumumba Shakur and the Right On! editor, Denise Oliver, got into a bitter argument. “I hit her in the titty!” Shakur crowed to Odinga in Algiers. Cleaver was forced to intervene. With no donations, the BLA cadres turned to armed robbery. Their targets, as Dhoruba Moore’s experience demonstrated, were black social clubs and drug dealers; almost all these robberies are lost to history. “There were actions all over the five boroughs,” recalls Blood McCreary. “There were people in the drug business who were setting up others for us to move on. We raised a lot of money that way, and we were letting them know that drugs would not be tolerated anymore.”
DaysOfRage.LeaderlessCells . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:11 AM by phaedrus: With the Panther split in February 1971, Cleaver’s dreams seemed to be coming true. After years of calling for guerrilla warfare in the United States, militant Panthers began flocking to New York to take arms. Policemen were murdered. Communiqués were issued. Given his role as a beacon of revolutionary violence, one might have expected Cleaver to anoint himself chairman of the BLA. He didn’t. In fact, Cleaver ordained that the BLA would have no leader. Not him. Not anyone. Under guidelines set by Cleaver and Don Cox, the BLA’s structure would be the exact opposite of the Weather Underground’s. Where Weather cadres did nothing without direction from leadership, Cleaver and Cox wanted BLA units to operate independently, with no central coordination whatsoever. A system of autonomous cells, Cox reasoned, would be much harder for the government to subdue; a single leader could be defeated with a single arrest. This sounded fine in theory; in practice it led to anarchy. “I never understood the concept of an organization without leadership,” recalls Brooklyn BLA member Blood McCreary. “I always thought that was going to be difficult, and it was. When we got into the field, we were supposed to be autonomous, and you’d be two or three cells trying to do their own thing. I remember once two cells showed up to rob the same bank. It happened outside the Bronx Zoo, at a Manufacturers Hanover. So not having leadership, that was a problem.” A decentralized structure, however, had the added virtue of distancing Cleaver from BLA violence. The Algerian government, while happy to host revolutionary groups, made clear to all of them it would not condone acts of violence initiated on its own soil; worse, from Cleaver’s point of view, were hints that the government might be warming to a U.S. government more than a little interested in Algerian energy reserves. In practice this meant that while Cleaver spent day and night proselytizing bloody revolution, he seldom if ever mentioned the Black Liberation Army by name, much less publicly condoned its acts. His position in Algiers was too insecure. Rather than speak over an international phone line he suspected—correctly—that the FBI had tapped, Cleaver laid out his initial plans for the BLA in a set of “voodoo” tapes, which his favorite courier—a striking young Puerto Rican radical named Denise Oliver—brought to New York.
DaysOfRage.ConcentrationCamps . . . August 28, 2019, at 07:06 AM by phaedrus: Algiers in the summer of 1969 was perhaps the perfect place, and the perfect moment, for Eldridge Cleaver. Since winning its bloody war for independence from France in 1962, the government had forged close relations with the Soviet Union and allowed scores of revolutionary groups, from Angola to Palestine, to maintain offices in its diplomatic community. A London paper termed Algiers in 1969 the “headquarters of world revolution.” Cleaver, figuring he could demand an embassy too, invited any number of other Panther fugitives to join him. A half dozen followed suit, including a trio of California skyjackers; Donald Cox of “radical chic” fame, a Panther field marshal fleeing a murder indictment in Baltimore, who arrived in May 1970; and Sekou Odinga, who with two other Panthers reached Algiers via Havana three months later. Cox became Cleaver’s aide-de-camp, Odinga his unofficial No. 3 man. It took a full year of on-and-off negotiations, however, for the Algerian government to approve official recognition of the “international section” of the Black Panther Party. While waiting, Cleaver embarked on a series of trips, leading Panther delegations to the Soviet Union, China, North Vietnam, and his personal favorite, North Korea, where he spent two months. In Algiers, Cleaver rented a spacious apartment in the Pointe Pescade section, where he gave frequent interviews. Finally, in June 1970, Cleaver received the Algerian government’s formal recognition, which came with a monthly stipend, identification cards, the right to obtain visas, and, best of all, the Panthers’ own embassy, a white two-story villa in the suburb of El Biar previously used by the North Vietnamese. Cleaver held a press conference to announce it all, telling reporters the “Nixon clique had begun to group the black people in concentration camps, escalating repression to the level of overt fascist terror against those who dare resist the oppression of the diabolical system under which the blacks of the United States are suffering. We reject the temple of slavery, which is the United States of America, and we intend to transform it into a social system of liberty and peace.”
DaysOfRage.HowTheWeathermenGotTheirMoney . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:49 AM by phaedrus: One of the great mysteries of the Weatherman story involves the sources of its funding. Of the half-dozen largest underground groups active during the 1970s, it was one of only two that did not resort to armed robbery to raise money. Many have assumed that because a number of prominent Weathermen were the children of wealthy families—Bill Ayers and Cathy Wilkerson are often cited—they lived off donations from family and friends. While some families did help, money remained a chronic problem for many Weathermen. In San Francisco, Jeff Jones and the cadres he was responsible for lived on $1,200 a month and kept to strict budgets. At various times the FBI launched probes into traveler’s-check and credit-card scams it suspected the organization was using for money, but nothing ever came of them. In fact, the single largest source of funding appears to have been donations from Movement sympathizers. Most gave willingly; others, it appeared, had to be persuaded. “I remember this one guy they targeted in Brooklyn, a rich guy, Fred something, his father founded [a toy company],” recalls Elizabeth Fink. “They find out he has like twenty-five grand. So they have this party, eight or nine people, all of them Weatherman or connected to the underground. Fred is the only one not in the underground. He just thinks they’re fun. I don’t know what happened, but the next morning I heard they got every cent of that money, all twenty-five grand.” Among Weatherman’s financiers, by far the most important single source of money was a group of radical attorneys in Chicago, New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Almost all belonged to the National Lawyers Guild, a network of left-wing lawyers founded in 1937 as an alternative to the American Bar Association. “Money? It was the lawyers, all of it,” says Ron Fliegelman, a sentiment echoed by several other Weather alumni. Of the dozen or so attorneys mentioned as key supporters, only a handful will admit helping out. One is Dennis Cunningham, then a Chicago attorney who represented Black Panthers. “I gave them money, sure, and I raised even more,” he says. “Without the lawyers, I’m telling you, they couldn’t have survived.” “You gotta understand, honey, we were lawyers, but we were revolutionaries in our hearts,” says Elizabeth Fink. “We didn’t have the balls to go underground, you see, but those who did, they were our heroes. You can’t believe the excitement of helping the underground, the romance of it, the intrigue. It was enthralling, and addictive. Any of us—Dennis, me, a bunch of us—we would’ve done anything for these people. Money, strategy, passports, whatever it was we could do, you just did it. This was the revolution, baby, and they were the fighters. But a lot of what they did, you know, was because they had attorneys like Dennis and me and a lot of others aboveground helping out.”
DaysOfRage.TheHustonPlan . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:45 AM by phaedrus: On Friday, June 5, 1970, four days before the attack on NYPD headquarters, President Nixon summoned J. Edgar Hoover and CIA director Richard Helms to the Oval Office, along with the chiefs of the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nixon was furious. Everywhere he looked, the antiwar movement seemed to be turning increasingly violent. The deaths at Kent State were still fresh in the air. Weatherman had now declared war; its first attacks were promised any day. This had gone far beyond the Townhouse and random bombings. The president lectured Hoover and the others that “revolutionary terrorism” now represented the single greatest threat against American society. He demanded that the four agencies assemble a concerted, overarching intelligence plan to defeat its spread. At the FBI, Hoover’s No. 2 man, Bill Sullivan, already had such a plan well in hand. The following Monday, June 8, he convened the first of five meetings intended to tear down the walls between the FBI, the CIA, and their brethren, lift all restrictions on domestic intelligence gathering, and clear the way for all four agencies to institute every dirty trick in the FBI’s old playbook: illegal break-ins, unilateral wiretapping, the opening of mail, even inserting informants into undergraduate classrooms. They called it the Huston Plan, after Tom Charles Huston, the twenty-nine-year-old Nixon aide who championed it alongside Sullivan. When Huston relayed the plan to Nixon on July 14, the president said he approved. There was just one problem: J. Edgar Hoover was dead set against the Huston Plan. The old man had grown exceedingly cautious in his last years, fearful his legacy would be tarnished if the rampant illegalities he had ordered over the years burst into view. He had never liked working with the CIA and had rarely done so; he didn’t want anyone, especially the FBI’s institutional rivals, knowing the Bureau’s secrets. But his main objection was the question of blame if this ever became public. Nixon had given only verbal approval. Hoover, who had no idea that Sullivan had already cleared FBI offices to engage in almost all these illegal tactics, had no doubt he and the FBI would take the fall. Hoover had something else to hide: the Bureau’s near-total inability to learn much of anything about Weatherman and other violence-prone radicals. With the loss of Larry Grathwohl, the FBI didn’t have a single informant anywhere near Weatherman—not one. Nor did it any longer have any useful wiretaps. As a result, the Nixon administration was badly misreading Weatherman’s status. No one at the FBI had any idea that the Townhouse had left the group in shambles. In fact, the startling explosion in the heart of New York City left senior officials believing exactly the opposite: that Weatherman constituted as dire a threat to national security as any the United States now faced. In the FBI’s nightmare scenario, Weatherman would lead thousands of long-haired demonstrators into a campaign of sabotage and assassination. Without informants, FBI agents across the country had first tried traditional investigative methods, interviewing Weatherman family and friends. This got them nowhere. A few agents were allowed to grow their hair long and linger at demonstrations, but it would take months if not years before they could be expected to infiltrate Weatherman or its allies. The fact was, the FBI had never attempted to root out an underground group like Weatherman. The legality of the tactics under consideration—or already under way—was unclear; no court, for instance, had yet ruled whether wiretaps could be installed without a court order. “Can I put an informant in a college classroom?” William Dyson, the agent put in charge of Weatherman cases, recalls wondering. “Can I penetrate any college organization? What can I do? And nobody had any rules or regulations. There was nothing.”
DaysOfRage.TheSpiral . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:31 AM by phaedrus: ''(Then the bombs went off early -- in Wilkerson's father's house, which she'd 'borrowed' for the Weathermen.)''
DaysOfRage.WhatKindsOfActionsWereAuthorized . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:19 AM by phaedrus: Outside the leadership, there was widespread confusion as to what kinds of actions were authorized (as there was for decades afterward). There would be bombings, everyone assumed, but what kind? “There was so much macho talk, you know, like the Panthers, ‘Off the pigs,’ ‘Bomb the military back into the Stone Age,’” recalls Cathy Wilkerson. “But did that mean we were actually going to kill people? I never really knew.” Bill Ayers and others would later insist there were never any plans to harm people, only symbols of power: courthouses, police stations, government buildings. The handful of Weathermen who crossed that line, Ayers claims, were rogues and outliers. This is a myth, pure and simple, designed to obscure what Weatherman actually planned. In the middle ranks, in fact, it was widely expected that Weathermen would become revolutionary murderers. “My image of what we were gonna be was undiluted terrorist action,” recalls Jon Lerner. “I remember talking with Teddy Gold about putting a bomb on the [Chicago railroad] tracks at rush hour, to blow up people coming home from work. That’s what I was looking forward to.” In fact, what constituted a legitimate target for a Weatherman bombing was the topic of sensitive discussions among the leadership at Flint. It was during these talks, according to Howard Machtinger and one other person who were present, that the leadership agreed that they would, in fact, kill people. But not just any people. The people Weatherman intended to kill were policemen. “If your definition of terrorism is, you don’t care who gets hurt, we agreed we wouldn’t do that,” recalls Machtinger. “But as to causing damage, or literally killing people, we were prepared to do that.” According to one side of the argument, says Machtinger, “if all Americans were compliant in the war, then everyone is a target. There are no innocents. That was always Terry and JJ’s argument. But we did have a series of discussions about what you could do, and it was agreed that cops were legitimate targets. We didn’t want to do things just around the war. We wanted to be seen targeting racism as well, so police were important.” Military personnel were ruled to be legitimate targets as well.
DaysOfRage.TheUnderground . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:16 AM by phaedrus: By 1970, thanks to the influx of deserters and draft dodgers, the underground had taken on a decidedly left-wing flavor. An armed robber who escaped from a Midwestern prison that year was startled to find how Movement sympathizers had transformed life on the run. Sitting in New York’s Washington Square, he sang their praises to a New York Times reporter: The Movement people are fabulous. They have a real underground that takes care of you. No matter where I went they made sure I had something to eat, they introduced me to others, they made me feel safe. . . . I’ve only been here three weeks now, but I feel completely different from all the other times I’ve been on the run. It’s not a hassle like it was alone. I’m part of a community. The underground is much bigger than you’d think. It’s all around. I could go from place to place for weeks and there’d always be a place I could stay and people to take care of me. . . . Whether you call us criminals or radicals, we’ve all been [screwed] by society, we’re all on the lam together.
DaysOfRage.SexAsAFormOfIdeologicalActivity . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:06 AM by phaedrus: Many of the brightest SDSers, including several who would achieve prominence in Weatherman, swung by that autumn to crash, drop acid, and ogle Dohrn as they listened to JJ’s rambling, amphetamine-fueled soliloquies on Che and Debray and every other revolutionary topic imaginable. ... “Power doesn’t flow out of the barrel of a gun,” Rudd snarled at Dohrn during one Weather Bureau meeting. “Power flows out of Bernardine’s cunt.”
DaysOfRage.TheWeathermenGetMacho . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:05 AM by phaedrus: Few outside Weatherman itself thought that any of this, especially the Days of Rage, made much sense. When Mark Rudd met with leaders of the group that organized the largest mass protests of the era, the National Mobilization Committee—the “Mobe”—they adamantly refused to join forces, arguing that street fighting and battling police were counterproductive. The Panthers too thought the Days of Rage a bad idea. The Chicago Panthers’ charismatic young leader, Fred Hampton, held shouting matches with Dohrn and other leaders; the Panthers refused to help, and Hampton actually went public with his opposition, calling the Days of Rage “Custeristic.” Inside Weatherman, especially in its male-dominated upper reaches, the surest way to lose face was to share these doubts. JJ set a macho tone, and a number of those who trailed in his wake, including Bill Ayers, Terry Robbins, and Howie Machtinger, were short young men who seemed to compensate by adopting façades of arrogant swagger, scoffing at anyone who dared question Weather dogma; several of them had begun carrying guns. When Rudd made the mistake of questioning the Days of Rage, Ayers and Robbins snorted. “How could you succumb to that liberal bullshit?” Robbins demanded. “We’ve got to do it. It’s the only strategy to build the revolution.” As Rudd wrote later, “The scene plays in my memory like a grade-B gangster flick. Billy looks on in smirking contempt as Terry dismisses me with a flick of his ever-present cigarette. ‘How could you be so weak?’ That settled it.”
DaysOfRage.TheNewLeftCoalition . . . August 28, 2019, at 06:02 AM by phaedrus: A crystallization of all JJ’s pet ideas, the paper didn’t just draw parallels between American student protests and the Third World guerrilla campaigns sprouting up around the world: It judged them all part and parcel of a single titanic global struggle between oppressed minorities and the agencies of U.S. imperialism. In other words, Mark Rudd hadn’t just acted like Che at Columbia; he was, in fact, Che’s comrade in arms. But the genius of JJ’s argument was that it allowed white radicals to portray themselves as allies of these oppressed minorities by rallying behind the one group whose leaders—from Martin Luther King to Huey Newton—the JJs of the world adored even more than Che Guevara: American blacks. “I think in our hearts what all of us wanted to be,” former SDS leader Cathy Wilkerson recalls, “was a Black Panther.” Wars like Vietnam came and went, but it was only the brewing revolution of American blacks, JJ prophesied, that had the potential to destroy the country. Every white revolutionary, he argued, was duty-bound to become 1969’s version of John Brown, the Civil War−era antislavery zealot. “John Brown! Live like him!” became JJ’s rallying cry. What this meant in reality was, like most protest-era rhetoric, open to interpretation. In the minds of apocalyptic radicals like JJ, white American protesters were destined to become Che-style guerrillas in the streets of America, rallying blacks and the white working class to a bloody revolution. ... The SDS convention took place at the Chicago Coliseum on Wednesday, June 18, 1969; nearly two thousand people attended. The Weathermen arrived as part of the larger RYM—Revolutionary Youth Movement—caucus, but both were consumed with the battle against their archrivals, PL. (The basic difference between the two groups was that PL adopted a Maoist philosophy of focusing on “workers,” while Weatherman put its emphasis on the “oppressed,” especially blacks.) The convention’s first two days were consumed with the trappings of student-leftist gatherings, angry speeches, PL chants against RYM, RYM chants against PL, even fistfights. The turning point came on Friday night, when a delegate from the Black Panthers took the microphone and read a statement that condemned PL as “counterrevolutionary traitors” who, if their ideological positions did not change, “would be dealt with as such.” It amounted to an ultimatum from the Panthers, whose approval every SDS leader sought like lost gold: Dump PL or else. PLers tried to drown out the Panthers, chanting “Read Mao” and “Bullshit!” When RYM supporters chanted the Panther slogan, “Power to the People!” PLers shouted back, “Power to the Workers!” Fistfights broke out. On stage, Mark Rudd called for a recess. As he finished, Dohrn rushed to the rostrum, eyes ablaze, and shouted that it was time to decide whether they could remain in the same organization as those who denied human rights to the oppressed. Anyone who agreed, she announced, should follow her. And with that, Dohrn and the leadership marched into an adjacent arena to decide what to do next. The RYM caucus and its allies, maybe six hundred people, talked there for three hours, then resumed discussions Saturday morning. The debates lasted all that day. Finally Dohrn, pacing between a set of bleachers, delivered a slow, deliberate speech that detailed the case for expelling PL from SDS. “We are not a caucus,” she concluded. “We are SDS.” And with that, a vote was taken: By a five-to-one margin, PL was expelled. The leadership, led by Dohrn and Bill Ayers, then drafted a statement listing the reasons why. Around eleven everyone filed back into the main hall, and Dohrn strode to the rostrum. For twenty minutes she laid out every PL sin, real and imagined, terming the group reactionary, anticommunist, and “objectively” racist. When she announced PL’s expulsion, chaos ensued. PLers chanted “Shame! Shame!” Dohrn led the RYM caucus out of the auditorium, leading their own chants: “Power to the People!” and “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh!” By Sunday confusion reigned. The PLers, refusing to acknowledge their expulsion, elected their own SDS leadership. At a church across town, the RYM caucus elected theirs, all prominent Weathermen: Mark Rudd as national secretary, Bill Ayers as education secretary, Jeff Jones as the interorganizational secretary. By Monday morning there were, in effect, two functioning SDSes, but everyone understood that Weatherman had carried the day, in large part because its members had taken control of the national office in the days before the convention. Possession is nine-tenths of the law; Weatherman possessed the national office, and so it possessed SDS.
DaysOfRage.BringingDownTheIndustrializedWest . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:56 AM by phaedrus: “We actually believed there was going to be a revolution,” remembers a Weatherman named Paul Bradley.* “We believed the world was undergoing a massive transformation. We believed Third World countries would rise up and cause crises that would bring down the industrialized West, and we believed it was going to happen tomorrow, or maybe the day after tomorrow, like 1976. We really thought that would happen. I know I did.”
DaysOfRage.TheBeginningOfTheRevolution . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:54 AM by phaedrus: Calvert’s call [for a "truly revolutionary movement"] struck a chord, as did the slogan he coined that swept the Movement that winter of 1966−67: “From protest to resistance.” At least initially, no one was entirely sure what “resistance” meant. But out on college campuses, students quickly provided the answers. All through the first half of 1967, protesters who once silently carried signs began confronting authority. When a district attorney tried to confiscate copies of a student literary magazine at Cornell, a crowd of angry students sold it in brazen defiance; when six were arrested, others surrounded the police car and freed them. At Penn State student protesters occupied the president’s office until he provided information about the university’s practice of releasing student-organization lists to Congress. But it was SDS itself that propelled by far the largest resistance movement: to the military draft. The first draft-resistance groups began springing up in early 1967 and were soon widespread, many students openly burning their draft cards or wearing a popular SDS button: NOT WITH MY LIFE YOU DON’T. This kind of open defiance to government authority, along with disclosures of U.S. bombing of North Vietnamese civilians, drew tens of thousands of young people into the Movement even as its intellectual leaders, especially in SDS, began musing about ever more militant ways to confront the government. Protests alone, they could see, were no longer enough. ... One of the most striking characteristics of radical thought during the late 1960s was the flash-fire speed with which it evolved: An idea could be introduced, accepted, popularized, and taken to the “next level” in a matter of months, sometimes weeks. And so it was with the path of “resistance.” No sooner had the broader Movement plunged into the realities of draft and other resistance than the keenest thinkers began pondering what came next. Defying the government was giving way to confronting the government. And there was only one place to go, intellectually, once the government was confronted. It was Greg Calvert once more who first put it into words, at least publicly, in a front-page article in the New York Times in May 1967. The article, which attempted to take stock of student-resistance activities, suggested that violence was the Movement’s logical next step, a contention it supported with a quote that Calvert quickly recanted: “We are working to build a guerrilla force in an urban environment.” No other student leader seconded it, and because it suggested a tactic few in SDS had even considered, much less approved, it was broadly renounced. But not by everyone. The intellectual cat was now out of the bag...
DaysOfRage.TelevisionRadicalization . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:49 AM by phaedrus: To begin to understand all this, one needs to understand the protest movements of the ’60s, and to understand that turmoil, one must at least glance at the decade that produced all those angry young activists: the 1950s. For much of white America, the ’50s was a time of suffocating conformity, when parents born during the Depression and empowered by winning a “good war” taught their children that America represented everything that was right and true in the world. These were the “happy days,” when a booming economy sent wealth soaring and children, born by the millions, grew up in homes where every family seemed to have two cars in the driveway, a stereo cabinet, and, in fifty million homes by 1960, a television. How happy were Americans? When a 1957 Gallup poll asked people whether they were “very happy, fairly happy, or not too happy,” an astounding 96 percent answered very or fairly happy. “The employers will love this generation,” University of California president Clark Kerr said in 1959. “They are not going to press many grievances . . . they are going to be easy to handle. There aren’t going to be riots.” And then, as if overnight, things changed. More than anything else, it was the pictures young Americans began seeing on those new televisions in 1960—of stoic Southern blacks dragged away from all-white lunch counters, of black protesters being beaten bloody by red-faced Southern deputies—that laid the groundwork for the white protest movement. The violence and injustice itself was shameful enough, but it was what those pictures said about America, about what an entire generation of young people had been taught, that felt like a betrayal. America wasn’t a land of equality. It wasn’t a land of the good and the just and the righteous. It was all a lie.
DaysOfRage.DeclineOfTheBlackPanthers . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:48 AM by phaedrus: It was King’s death and the image of brave Panthers seeking to avenge it that cemented the party’s national reputation. For the first time many blacks who had resisted the martial calls of Black Power began to believe that white violence must be met with black violence. Emissaries arrived in Oakland from New York and dozens of other cities, all clamoring to start their own Panther chapters. In a matter of months, party membership went from hundreds to thousands; by late 1968 there would be Panther chapters in almost every major urban area. From a managerial point of view, it was chaos. A Central Committee was supposed to impose some kind of structure, but for the moment, Panther headquarters exercised little sway over these new affiliates. It was, in some respects, the apex of the party’s influence; looking back, there is no denying that the Panthers’ “heroic” age was already passing. In September, after a two-month trial marked by rancorous demonstrations, Huey Newton was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two to fifteen years. Bobby Seale was indicted for taking part in demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention that August, becoming one of the “Chicago Eight.” Eldridge Cleaver, released on bond after the April shootout, spent the rest of 1968 “campaigning” for president and promoting Soul on Ice. After refusing to appear for a court date on November 27, he vanished; some said he had fled to Canada, others to Cuba. The next month a weary Stokely Carmichael boarded a freighter for a self-imposed exile in Guinea. “The revolution is not about dying,” he observed. “It’s about living.”
DaysOfRage.EldridgeCleaver . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:44 AM by phaedrus: Sentenced to prison for rape, first at San Quentin and later at Folsom, Cleaver (like Malcolm) read voraciously, joined the Nation of Islam, and became a leader in the state’s burgeoning prison movement, pushing for books and classes in African history. In 1965 he wrote a radical Bay Area attorney named Beverly Axelrod, who took up his case. She gave some of Cleaver’s letters to editors at Ramparts, who enjoyed them so much that they promised to hire him, as they did, when Axelrod managed to secure Cleaver’s release, in December 1966. Cleaver, who became Axelrod’s lover, said years later that he had been romantically “gaming” her in a cynical bid to gain his freedom. At Ramparts, Cleaver became an instant celebrity, by far the most prominent black radical in the Bay Area. Angry, sometimes funny, and frequently sexual, his letters and articles portrayed Cleaver as a kind of cross between Malcolm and Barry White, an angry, charismatic lover man with his own revolutionary spin on hoary black stereotypes. Cleaver viewed blacks as sexual supermen, envied by whites and too often rejected by uppity black women. And, like Huey Newton, he argued that the most genuine “revolutionaries” were those who were most oppressed: black prison inmates and gangbangers—an idea that appealed strongly to white radicals yearning for a taste of black authenticity. Unlike Stokely Carmichael, Cleaver embraced white radicals, who adored him. They flocked to Black House, a kind of Black Power salon Cleaver co-founded, where he held court with every Movement figure who visited San Francisco. Cleaver’s rise would be capped in 1968, when his letters and Ramparts articles were packaged into a memoir, Soul on Ice, an international bestseller that sold more than two million copies in just two years. Critics hailed Cleaver as a powerful new literary talent, a symbol of black political and sexual repression. The New York Times named Soul on Ice one of the ten best books of 1968.
DaysOfRage.RiseOfTheBlackPanthers . . . August 28, 2019, at 05:42 AM by phaedrus: Few protest groups in U.S. history have risen to national prominence as quickly as the Panthers: They went from an idea in Huey Newton’s head to the front pages of major newspapers in a scant seven months. Part of this was luck, part the enormous appeal to beleaguered urban blacks of the Panthers’ message to police: Kill a black man, they warned, and retribution will follow. But the crucial factor in the Panthers’ meteoric rise was Newton’s genius for media and street theatrics, as demonstrated from their first confrontations with authority to the costumes they donned, black leather jackets, powder-blue shirts and turtlenecks, and especially the black berets they wore in honor of Che Guevara. Unlike other black-militant groups springing up that year, the Panthers not only sounded badass; they looked it. In its first hundred days, the party consisted only of Newton, Seale, and a dozen or so of their friends. With little fanfare, they secured their first guns, learned how to use and clean them, opened a storefront office at Fifty-sixth and Grove in Oakland, and began their patrols, cruising the streets until they found a black citizen being questioned by police, typically at a traffic stop. The Panthers would step from their car, guns drawn, and remind the citizen of his rights; when a shaken patrolman asked what the hell they were doing, Newton, who had taken law school classes, told him of their right to bear arms. The Panthers generated curiosity and then, after a tense confrontation outside their office in early February 1967, respect. An Oakland policeman stopped Newton’s car; Seale and others were with him. At first Newton politely showed his driver’s license and answered the officer’s questions; he had his M1 rifle in clear view, Seale his 9mm. In short order three more patrol cars arrived. A crowd began to form. Up and down the street, people poked their heads from apartment windows. When an officer asked to see the guns, Newton refused. “Get away from the car,” Newton said. “We don’t want you around the car, and that’s all there is to it.” “Who in the hell do you think you are?” the officer demanded. “Who in the hell do you think _you_ are,” Newton replied.
AutobiographyOfBenjaminFranklin.PlanForAttainingMoralPerfection . . . July 02, 2018, at 06:26 PM by phaedrus: In reality, there is, perhaps, no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself; you will see it, perhaps, often in this history; for, even if I could conceive that I had compleatly overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility. !! A great and extensive project Having mentioned a great and extensive project which I had conceiv'd, it seems proper that some account should be here given of that project and its object. Its first rise in my mind appears in the following little paper, accidentally preserv'd, viz.: Observations on my reading history, in Library, May 19th, 1731. "That the great affairs of the world, the wars, revolutions, etc., are carried on and effected by parties.
AutobiographyOfBenjaminFranklin.Junto . . . March 08, 2018, at 01:32 PM by phaedrus: And William Coleman, then a merchant's clerk, about my age, who had the coolest, clearest head, the best heart, and the exactest morals of almost any man I ever met with. He became afterwards a merchant of great note, and one of our provincial judges. Our friendship continued without interruption to his death, upwards of forty years; and the club continued almost as long, and was the best school of philosophy, morality, and politics that then existed in the province; for our queries, which were read the week preceding their discussion, put us upon reading with attention upon the several subjects, that we might speak more to the purpose; and here, too, we acquired better habits of conversation, everything being studied in our rules which might prevent our disgusting each other. From hence the long continuance of the club, which I shall have frequent occasion to speak further of hereafter. !!! The subordinate clubs
AmericanJesus.ThomasJefferson . . . January 02, 2018, at 03:01 AM by phaedrus: Jefferson (1743-1826) was born and raised an Anglican, and he never formally renounced that connection. But as a boy, he began to question fundamental Anglican tenets, including the doctrine of the Trinity. After immersing himself in theological works by Enlightenment rationalists, he considered jettisoning religion altogether in his late teens. But works by the British Unitarian Joseph Priestley, particularly ''An History of the Corruptions of Christianity'' (1782), ''An History of Early Opinions Concerning Jesus Christ'' (1786), and ''Socrates and Jesus Compared'' (1803), convinced him that he did not have to choose between religion and reason, faith and common sense. Priestley, whom Jefferson befriended after the scientist-turned-theologian came to the United States from Engalnd in 1794, prided himself on approaching religious questions in the light of reason and common sense. He built his theological system, however, on what can only be described as a myth. According to that myth, the religion of Jesus was as simple as it was sublime. It affirmed one God, taught the afterlife, and insisted on moral living. But beginning with Paul and the writers of the Gospels, later Christians hijacked his simple religion, overlaying it with complex dogmas and empty rites. The solution to this problem was to get up a new coup. In the distant past, Christianity had overthrown Jesus; now it was time for partisans of Jesus to overthrow Christianity. In his private writings on religion, Jefferson followed Priestley closely. He praised Jesus as "meek, benevolent, patient, firm, disinterested, and of the sublimest eloquence," and his system of morals as "the most perfect and sublime that has ever been taught by man." Then he blasted "the corruptions of schismatising followers, who have found an interest in sophisticating and perverting the simple doctrines he taught, by engrafting on them the mysticisms of a Grecian Sophist, frittering them into subtleties, and obscuring them with jargon, until they have caused good men to rejecct the whole in disgust, and to view Jesus himself as an imposter." Jefferson's list of these corruptions was long, extending to dogmas such as original sin, the virgin birth, the atonement, predestination, salvation by faith, transubstantiation, bodily resurrection, and above all the Trinity. ... The only interests such Trinitarian sophistries served were the interests of entrenched priests and ministers, who played the same villainous role in Jefferson's spiritual world that kings occupied in his republican politics. In an effort "to filch wealth and power to themselves," Jefferson wrote, these tyrants had perverted the pure morals of Jesus into "an engine for enslaving mankind." The antidote to this illness, Jefferson argued, was a religious revolution as radical as the events of 1776: a repudiation of the spiritual slavery of creeds and rites and a return to the pure, primitive teachings of Jesus. So far this was pure Priestley. But in at least one important respect, Jefferson was more radical than his Unitarian friend. He rejected Priestley's Socinian position that God had empowered Jesus to perform miracles and even to rise from the dead. Miracles, Jefferson insisted, were an affront to the demands of reason and the laws of nature, and Jesus had performed not a one. ... Jesus was, in Jefferson's words, "the first of human Sages." ... Though remembered today as a champion of the separation of church and state, Jefferson shared with virtually all of his contemporaries the view that no society could survive without a shared system of morality, and that "no System of morality however pure it might be" could survive "without the sanction of divine authority stampt upon it." ...
Site.StyleSheetApostaxe . . . December 06, 2017, at 11:13 AM by achmizs: #wikitext p + p { text-indent: 2em; } margin: 2.5em 0 1em 0; }
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.FeynmanGetsHypnotized . . . December 06, 2017, at 05:09 AM by phaedrus: When it was time to get up and go off the stage, I started to walk straight to my seat. But then an annoying feeling came over me: I felt so uncomfortable that I couldn't continue. I walked all the way around the hall....
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.HowTheBoardOfEducationSavedTwoMillionDollars . . . December 05, 2017, at 02:13 PM by phaedrus: There were two books that we were unable to come to a decision about after much discussion; they were extremely close. So we left it open to the Board of Education to decide. Since the board was now taking the cost into consideration, and since the two books were so evenly matched, the board decided to open the bids and take the lower one. Then the question came up, "Will the schools be getting the books at the regular time, or could they, perhaps, get them a little earlier, in time for the coming term?" One publisher's representative got up and said, "We are happy that you accepted our bid; we can get it out in time for the next term."
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.FeynmanReadsABlueprint . . . December 05, 2017, at 10:32 AM by phaedrus: How do you look at a plant that isn't built yet? I don't know. Lieutenant Zumwalt, who was always coming around with me because I had to have an escort everywhere, takes me into this room where there are these two engineers and a ''loooooong'' table covered with a stack of blueprints representing the various floors of the proposed plant. I took mechanical drawing when I was in school, but I am not good at reading blueprints. So they unroll the stack of blueprints and start to explain it to me, thinking I am a genius. Now, one of the things they had to avoid in the plant was accumulation. They had problems like when there's an evaporator working, which is trying to accumulate the stuff, if the valve gets stuck or something like that and too much stuff accumulates, it'll explode. So they explained to me that this plant is
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.FeynmanBecomesAMechanicalEngineer . . . December 05, 2017, at 10:27 AM by phaedrus: Near the end of the summer I was given my first real design job: a machine that would make a continuous curve out of a set of points—one point coming in every fifteen seconds—from a new invention developed in England for tracking airplanes, called "radar." It was the first time I had ever done any mechanical designing, so I was a little bit frightened. I went over to one of the other guys and said, "You're a mechanical engineer; I don't know how to do any mechanical engineering, and I just got this job." "There's nothin' to it," he said. "Look, I'll show you. There's two rules you need to know to design these machines. First, the friction in every bearing is so-and-so much, and in every gear
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.TheMindreaderAndTheSalesman . . . December 05, 2017, at 09:53 AM by phaedrus: My father and I went to Atlantic City where they had various carnival things going on outdoors. While my father was doing some business, I went to see a mindreader. He was seated on the stage with his back to the audience, dressed in robes and wearing a great big turban. He had an assistant, a little guy who was running around through the audience, saying things like, "Oh, Great Master, what is the color of this pocketbook?" "Blue!" says the master. "And oh, Illustrious Sir, what is the name of this woman?" "Marie!" Some guy gets up: "What's my name?"
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.ADifferentBoxOfTools . . . December 05, 2017, at 09:51 AM by phaedrus: One thing I never did learn was contour integration. I had learned to do integrals by various methods shown in a book that my high school physics teacher Mr. Bader had given me. One day he told me to stay after class. "Feynman," he said, "you talk too much and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So I'm going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk again." So every physics class, I paid no attention to what was going on with Pascal's Law, or whatever they were doing. I was up in the back with this book: Advanced Calculus, by Woods. Bader knew I had studied Calculus for the Practical Man a little bit, so he gave me the real works—it was for a junior or senior course in college. It had Fourier series, Bessel functions, determinants, elliptic functions—all kinds of wonderful stuff that I didn't know anything about. That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign—it's a certain operation. It turns out that's not taught very much in the universities; they don't emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing integrals. The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn't do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else's, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.Hypnosis . . . December 05, 2017, at 08:36 AM by phaedrus: A week before the demonstration the man came to practice on us, to see if any of us would be good for hypnosis. I knew about the phenomenon, but I didn't know what it was like to be hypnotized. He started to work on me and soon I got into a position where he said, "You can't open your eyes." I said to myself, "I bet I could open my eyes, but I don't want to disturb the situation: Let's see how much further it goes." It was an interesting situation: You're only slightly fogged out, and although you've lost a little bit, you're pretty sure you could open your eyes. But of course, you're not opening your eyes, so in a sense you can't do it. He went through a lot of stuff and decided that I was pretty good. When the real demonstration came he had us walk on stage, and he hypnotized us in front of the whole Princeton Graduate College. This time the effect was stronger; I guess I had learned how to become hypnotized. The hypnotist made various demonstrations, having me do things that I couldn't normally do, and at the end he said that after I came out of hypnosis, instead of returning to my seat directly, which was the natural way to go, I would walk all the way around the room and go to my seat from the back.
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.TheMetaplastCorporation . . . December 05, 2017, at 08:31 AM by phaedrus: A few years later I was in Los Alamos, where there was a man named Frederic de Hoffman, who was a sort of scientist; but more, he was also very good at administrating. Not highly trained, he liked mathematics, and worked very hard; he compensated for his lack of training by hard work. Later he became the president or vice president of General Atomics and he was a big industrial character after that. But at the time he was just a very energetic, open-eyed, enthusiastic boy, helping along with the Project as best he could. One day we were eating at the Fuller Lodge, and he told me he had been working in England before coming to Los Alamos. "What kind of work were you doing there?" I asked. "I was working on a process for metal-plating plastics. I was one of the guys in the laboratory." "How did it go?"
SurelyYoureJokingMrFeynman.FeynmanLearnsItalian . . . December 05, 2017, at 08:28 AM by phaedrus: I thought it was a great idea. I would say 'A te! A te!" back—gesturing, of course. Then, as I gained confidence, I developed my abilities further. I would be riding my bicycle, and some lady would be driving in her car and get in the way, and I'd say, "PUzzia a la maLOche!"—and she'd shrink! Some terrible Italian boy had cursed a terrible curse at her! I call back, "RONte BALta!", returning the greeting. He didn't know I didn't know, and I didn't know what he said, and he didn't know what I said. But it was OK! It was great! It works! After all, when they hear the intonation, they recognize it immediately as Italian—maybe it's Milano instead of Romano, what the hell. But he's an iTALian! So it's just great. But you have to have absolute confidence. Keep right on going, and nothing will happen.
Site.LocalTemplates . . . December 01, 2017, at 01:42 AM by phaedrus: (:pagelist group={$Group} fmt=#titlecaseeverything count=6:)
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.JoeMurrayBecomesARepublican . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:46 AM by phaedrus: Among these lesser captains I soon struck up a friendship with Joe Murray, a friendship which is as strong now as it was thirty-three years ago. He had been born in Ireland, but brought to New York by his parents when he was three or four years old, and, as he expressed it, “raised as a barefooted boy on First Avenue.” When not eighteen he had enlisted in the Army of the Potomac and taken part in the campaign that closed the Civil War. Then he came back to First Avenue, and, being a fearless, powerful, energetic young fellow, careless and reckless, speedily grew to some prominence as leader of a gang. In that district, and at that time, politics was a rough business, and Tammany Hall held unquestioned sway. The district was overwhelmingly Democratic, and Joe and his friends were Democrats who on election day performed the usual gang work for the local Democratic leader, whose business it was to favor and reward them in return. This same local leader, like many other greater leaders, became puffed up by prosperity, and forgot the instruments through which he had achieved prosperity. After one election he showed a callous indifference to the hard work of the gang and complete disregard of his before-election promises. He counted upon the resentment wearing itself out, as usual, in threats and bluster. But Joe Murray was not a man who forgot. He explained to his gang his purposes and the necessity of being quiet. Accordingly they waited for their revenge until the next election day. They then, as Joe expressed it, decided “to vote furdest away from the leader”—I am using the language of Joe’s youth—and the best way to do this was to vote the Republican ticket. In those days each party had a booth near the polling-place in each election district, where the party representative dispensed the party ballots. This had been a district in which, as a rule, very early in the day the Republican election leader had his hat knocked over his eyes and his booth kicked over and his ballots scattered; and then the size of the Democratic majority depended on an elastic appreciation of exactly how much was demanded from headquarters. But on this day things went differently. The gang, with a Roman sense of duty, took an active interest in seeing that the Republican was given his full rights. Moreover, they made the most energetic reprisals on their opponents, and as they were distinctly the tough and fighting element, justice came to her own with a whoop. Would-be repeaters were thrown out on their heads. Every person who could be cajoled or, I fear, intimidated, was given the Republican ticket, and the upshot was that at the end of the day a district which had never hitherto polled more than two or three per cent of its vote Republican broke about even between the two parties. To Joe it had been merely an act of retribution in so far as it was not simply a spree. But the leaders at the Republican headquarters did not know this, and when they got over their paralyzed astonishment at the returns, they investigated to find out what it meant. Somebody told them that it represented the work of a young man named Joseph Murray. Accordingly they sent for him. The room in which they received him was doubtless some place like Morton Hall, and the men who received him were akin to those who had leadership in Morton Hall; but in Joe’s eyes they stood for a higher civilization, for opportunity, for generous recognition of successful effort—in short, for all the things that an eager young man desires. He was received and patted on the back by a man who was a great man to the world in which he lived. He was introduced to the audience as a young man whose achievement was such as to promise much for the future, and moreover he was given a place in the post-office—as I have said, this was long before the day of Civil Service Reform.
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.RooseveltBreaksIntoPolitics . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:44 AM by phaedrus: At that day, in 1880, a young man of my bringing up and convictions could join only the Republican party, and join it I accordingly did. It was no simple thing to join it then. That was long before the era of ballot reform and the control of primaries; long before the era when we realized that the Government must take official notice of the deeds and acts of party organizations. The party was still treated as a private corporation, and in each district the organization formed a kind of social and political club. A man had to be regularly proposed for and elected into this club, just as into any other club. As a friend of mine picturesquely phrased it, I “had to break into the organization with a jimmy.” It was over thirty-three years ago that I thus became a member of the Twenty-first District Republican Association in the city of New York. The men I knew best were the men in the clubs of social pretension and the men of cultivated taste and easy life. When I began to make inquiries as to the whereabouts of the local Republican Association and the means of joining it, these men—and the big business men and lawyers also—laughed at me, and told me that politics were “low”; that the organizations were not controlled by “gentlemen”; that I would find them run by saloon-keepers, horse-car conductors, and the like, and not by men with any of whom I would come in contact outside; and, moreover, they assured me that the men I met would be rough and brutal and unpleasant to deal with. I answered that if this were so it merely meant that the people I knew did not belong to the governing class, and that the other people did—and that I intended to be one of the governing class; that if they proved too hard-bit for me I supposed I would have to quit, but that I certainly would not quit until I had made the effort and found out whether I really was too weak to hold my own in the rough and tumble. The Republican Association of which I became a member held its meetings in Morton Hall, a large, barn-like room over a saloon. Its furniture was of the canonical kind: dingy benches, spittoons, a dais at one end with a table and chair and a stout pitcher for iced water, and on the walls pictures of General Grant, and of Levi P. Morton, to whose generosity we owed the room. We had regular meetings once or twice a month, and between times the place was treated, at least on certain nights, as a kind of club-room. I went around there often enough to have the men get accustomed to me and to have me get accustomed to them, so that we began to speak the same language, and so that each could begin to live down in the other’s mind what Bret Harte has called “the defective moral quality of being a stranger.” It is not often that a man can make opportunities for himself. But he can put himself in such shape that when or if the opportunities come he is ready to take advantage of them. This was what happened to me in connection with my experiences in Morton Hall. I soon became on good terms with a number of the ordinary “heelers” and even some of the minor leaders. The big leader was Jake Hess, who treated me with rather distant affability. There were prominent lawyers and business men who belonged, but they took little part in the actual meetings. What they did was done elsewhere. The running of the machine was left to Jake Hess and his captains of tens and of hundreds.
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.AcquiringFearlessness . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:43 AM by phaedrus: When a boy I read a passage in one of Marryat’s books which always impressed me. In this passage the captain of some small British man-of-war is explaining to the hero how to acquire the quality of fearlessness. He says that at the outset almost every man is frightened when he goes into action, but that the course to follow is for the man to keep such a grip on himself that he can act just as if he was not frightened. After this is kept up long enough it changes from pretense to reality, and the man does in very fact become fearless by sheer dint of practicing fearlessness when he does not feel it. (I am using my own language, not Marryat’s.) This was the theory upon which I went. There were all kinds of things of which I was afraid at first, ranging from grizzly bears to “mean” horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid. Most men can have the same experience if they choose. They will first learn to bear themselves well in trials which they anticipate and which they school themselves in advance to meet. After a while the habit will grow on them, and they will behave well in sudden and unexpected emergencies which come upon them unawares. It is of course much pleasanter if one is naturally fearless, and I envy and respect the men who are naturally fearless. But it is a good thing to remember that the man who does not enjoy this advantage can nevertheless stand beside the man who does, and can do his duty with the like efficiency, if he chooses to. Of course he must not let his desire take the form merely of a day-dream. Let him dream about being a fearless man, and the more he dreams the better he will be, always provided he does his best to realize the dream in practice. He can do his part honorably and well provided only he sets fearlessness before himself as an ideal, schools himself to think of danger merely as something to be faced and overcome, and regards life itself as he should regard it, not as something to be thrown away, but as a pawn to be promptly hazarded whenever the hazard is warranted by the larger interests of the great game in which we are all engaged.
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.TwoKindsOfSuccess . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:43 AM by phaedrus: There are two kinds of success, or rather two kinds of ability displayed in the achievement of success. There is, first, the success either in big things or small things which comes to the man who has in him the natural power to do what no one else can do, and what no amount of training, no perseverance or will power, will enable any ordinary man to do. This success, of course, like every other kind of success, may be on a very big scale or on a small scale. The quality which the man possesses may be that which enables him to run a hundred yards in nine and three-fifths seconds, or to play ten separate games of chess at the same time blindfolded, or to add five columns of figures at once without effort, or to write the “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” or to deliver the Gettysburg speech, or to show the ability of Frederick at Leuthen or Nelson at Trafalgar. No amount of training of body or mind would enable any good ordinary man to perform any one of these feats. Of course the proper performance of each implies much previous study or training, but in no one of them is success to be attained save by the altogether exceptional man who has in him the something additional which the ordinary man does not have. This is the most striking kind of success, and it can be attained only by the man who has in him the quality which separates him in kind no less than in degree from his fellows. But much the commoner type of success in every walk of life and in every species of effort is that which comes to the man who differs from his fellows not by the kind of quality which he possesses but by the degree of development which he has given that quality. This kind of success is open to a large number of persons, if only they seriously determine to achieve it. It is the kind of success which is open to the average man of sound body and fair mind, who has no remarkable mental or physical attributes, but who gets just as much as possible in the way of work out of the aptitudes that he does possess. It is the only kind of success that is open to most of us. Yet some of the greatest successes in history have been those of this second class—when I call it second class I am not running it down in the least, I am merely pointing out that it differs in kind from the first class. To the average man it is probably more useful to study this second type of success than to study the first. From the study of the first he can learn inspiration, he can get uplift and lofty enthusiasm. From the study of the second he can, if he chooses, find out how to win a similar success himself. I need hardly say that all the successes I have ever won have been of the second type. I never won anything without hard labor and the exercise of my best judgment and careful planning and working long in advance. Having been a rather sickly and awkward boy, I was as a young man at first both nervous and distrustful of my own prowess. I had to train myself painfully and laboriously not merely as regards my body but as regards my soul and spirit.
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.PresidentialExerciseRegimen . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:43 AM by phaedrus: While in the White House I always tried to get a couple of hours’ exercise in the afternoons—sometimes tennis, more often riding, or else a rough cross-country walk, perhaps down Rock Creek, which was then as wild as a stream in the White Mountains, or on the Virginia side along the Potomac. My companions at tennis or on these rides and walks we gradually grew to style the Tennis Cabinet; and then we extended the term to take in many of my old-time Western friends such as Ben Daniels, Seth Bullock, Luther Kelly, and others who had taken part with me in more serious outdoor adventures than walking and riding for pleasure. Most of the men who were oftenest with me on these trips—men like Major-General Leonard Wood; or Major-General Thomas Henry Barry; or Presley Marion Rixey, Surgeon-General of the Navy; or Robert Bacon, who was afterwards Secretary of State; or James Garfield, who was Secretary of the Interior; or Gifford Pinchot, who was chief of the Forest Service—were better men physically than I was; but I could ride and walk well enough for us all thoroughly to enjoy it. Often, especially in the winters and early springs, we would arrange for a point to point walk, not turning aside for anything—for instance, swimming Rock Creek or even the Potomac if it came in our way. Of course under such circumstances we had to arrange that our return to Washington should be when it was dark, so that our appearance might scandalize no one. On several occasions we thus swam Rock Creek in the early spring when the ice was floating thick upon it. If we swam the Potomac, we usually took off our clothes. I remember one such occasion when the French Ambassador, Jusserand, who was a member of the Tennis Cabinet, was along, and, just as we were about to get in to swim, somebody said, “Mr. Ambassador, Mr. Ambassador, you haven’t taken off your gloves,” to which he promptly responded, “I think I will leave them on; we might meet ladies!”
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.AModestProposal . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:42 AM by phaedrus: I have never been able to sympathize with the outcry against prize-fighters. The only objection I have to the prize ring is the crookedness that has attended its commercial development. Outside of this I regard boxing, whether professional or amateur, as a first-class sport, and I do not regard it as brutalizing. Of course matches can be conducted under conditions that make them brutalizing. But this is true of football games and of most other rough and vigorous sports. Most certainly prize-fighting is not half as brutalizing or demoralizing as many forms of big business and of the legal work carried on in connection with big business. Powerful, vigorous men of strong animal development must have some way in which their animal spirits can find vent. When I was Police Commissioner I found (and Jacob Riis will back me up in this) that the establishment of a boxing club in a tough neighborhood always tended to do away with knifing and gun-fighting among the young fellows who would otherwise have been in murderous gangs. Many of these young fellows were not naturally criminals at all, but they had to have some outlet for their activities.
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.BuckFever . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:42 AM by phaedrus: With dangerous game, after a fair degree of efficiency with the rifle has been attained, the prime requisites are cool judgment and that kind of nerve which consists in avoiding being rattled. Any beginner is apt to have “buck fever,” and therefore no beginner should go at dangerous game. Buck fever means a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity. It may affect a man the first time he has to speak to a large audience just as it affects him the first time he sees a buck or goes into battle. What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must, by custom and repeated exercise of self-mastery, get his nerves thoroughly under control. This is largely a matter of habit, in the sense of repeated effort and repeated exercise of will power. If the man has the right stuff in him, his will grows stronger and stronger with each exercise of it—and if he has not the right stuff in him he had better keep clear of dangerous game hunting, or indeed of any other form of sport or work in which there is bodily peril. After he has achieved the ability to exercise wariness and judgment and the control over his nerves which will make him shoot as well at the game as at a target, he can begin his essays at dangerous game hunting, and he will then find that it does not demand such abnormal prowess as the outsider is apt to imagine. A man who can hit a soda-water bottle at the distance of a few yards can brain a lion or a bear or an elephant at that distance, and if he cannot brain it when it charges he can at least bring it to a standstill. All he has to do is to shoot as accurately as he would at a soda-water bottle; and to do this requires nerve, at least as much as it does physical address. Having reached this point, the hunter must not imagine that he is warranted in taking desperate chances. There are degrees in proficiency; and what is a warrantable and legitimate risk for a man to take when he has reached a certain grade of efficiency may be a foolish risk for him to take before he has reached that grade. A man who has reached the degree of proficiency indicated above is quite warranted in walking in at a lion at bay, in an open plain, to, say, within a hundred yards. If the lion has not charged, the man ought at that distance to knock him over and prevent his charging; and if the lion is already charging, the man ought at that distance to be able to stop him. But the amount of prowess which warrants a man in relying on his ability to perform this feat does not by any means justify him in thinking that, for instance, he can crawl after a wounded lion into thick cover. I have known men of indifferent prowess to perform this latter feat successfully, but at least as often they have been unsuccessful, and in these cases the result has been unpleasant. The man who habitually follows wounded lions into thick cover must be a hunter of the highest skill, or he can count with certainty on an ultimate mauling. The first two or three bucks I ever saw gave me buck fever badly, but after I had gained experience with ordinary game I never had buck fever at all with dangerous game. In my case the overcoming of buck fever was the result of conscious effort and a deliberate determination to overcome it. More happily constituted men never have to make this determined effort at all—which may perhaps show that the average man can profit more from my experiences than he can from those of the exceptional man.
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.TakingUpBoxing . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:38 AM by phaedrus: Having been a sickly boy, with no natural bodily prowess, and having lived much at home, I was at first quite unable to hold my own when thrown into contact with other boys of rougher antecedents. I was nervous and timid. Yet from reading of the people I admired—ranging from the soldiers of Valley Forge, and Morgan’s riflemen, to the heroes of my favorite stories—and from hearing of the feats performed by my Southern forefathers and kinsfolk, and from knowing my father, I felt a great admiration for men who were fearless and who could hold their own in the world, and I had a great desire to be like them. Until I was nearly fourteen I let this desire take no more definite shape than day-dreams. Then an incident happened that did me real good. Having an attack of asthma, I was sent off by myself to Moosehead Lake. On the stage-coach ride thither I encountered a couple of other boys who were about my own age, but very much more competent and also much more mischievous. I have no doubt they were good-hearted boys, but they were boys! They found that I was a foreordained and predestined victim, and industriously proceeded to make life miserable for me. The worst feature was that when I finally tried to fight them I discovered that either one singly could not only handle me with easy contempt, but handle me so as not to hurt me much and yet to prevent my doing any damage whatever in return.
AutobiographyOfTheodoreRoosevelt.TheVirtuesAndVicesOfIndividualism . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:36 AM by phaedrus: I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself. But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which by complacently excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose. It also keeps alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone. But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism of the Dark Ages.
Main.WikiSandbox . . . November 30, 2017, at 07:02 AM by phaedrus: (:template Templates.Test foo='hello':)
Meta.Apostaxe . . . November 30, 2017, at 06:36 AM by phaedrus: [[Category: Apostaxe]]
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