January 2011

Everybody knows the mule is a stubborn creature, but Nobel Prize author William Faulkner of Mississippi saw other attributes as well. Shortly before he died, in 1962, Faulkner wrote a rollicking comedy entitled The Reivers and had this to say about the animal:

A mule which will gallop for a half-mile in the single direction elected by its rider even one time becomes a neighborhood legend; one that will do it consistently time after time is an incredible phenomenon. Because, unlike a horse, a mule is far too intelligent to break its heart for glory running around the rim of a mile-long saucer. In fact, I rate mules second only to rats in intelligence, the mule followed in order by cats, dogs, and horses last—assuming of course that you accept my definition of intelligence: which is the ability to cope with environment: which means to accept environment yet still retain at least something of personal liberty.

It was a one-man campaign from the start. Without Henry Agard Wallace there would have been no Progressive Party in 1948. He made it almost a religious revival. With his Calvinistic devotion to duty, his determination to bring the Lord’s work into politics, he gave his platform of planned economy the fervor of a camp-town meeting. He laced his speeches with biblical quotations, calling the wrath of the prophet Isaiah upon President Harry Truman’s get-tough policy with Russia: “Woe to those that trust in chariots.” His “Gideon’s Army” (as he called it after the Old Testament warrior) had to save the nation from its plunge toward war. It had to restore the dreams of the New Deal. And in doing so Wallace was convinced he had to rebuild the wartime “popular front” even though Communist support became the heaviest cross he had to bear.

Two hundred years ago, the American people had already declared their Independence. But as they had discovered quickly, it was one thing to declare it and another to secure it. Since July, the Continental Army had been driven from New York and the Hudson River and clear across New Jersey. It had been beaten wherever it had tried to make a stand. Now a few thousand men were left, huddled against the cold on the Pennsylvania shore of the Delaware River, short of food and clothing, waiting in misery for their enlistments to expire. “I think,” wrote General Washington in despair, “the game is pretty near up.”

But then came Christmas night, 1776, a desperate plan of surprise counterattack, Marbkhead boatmen ferrying the army back across the ice-choked river, and exhilarating victory at Trenton. The capture of the Hessian garrison there, and the triumph at Princeton a few weeks later, saved the American cause at the last hour and persuaded many faint hearts—soldiers and civilians—to fight on.

To the brothers George and Jacob Donner the way to California seemed clear and simple. Both in their sixties, solid and well-to-do thanks to their own hard work, but beginning now to feel their age and the long Illinois winters in their bones, the two men sat in the glow of the hearthfire that winter of 1845-46 and turned again the wellthumbed pages of The Emigrants’ Guide to Oregon and California . With the snow piled outside and the Sangamon River lying frozen in its bed, the brothers read with wonder the book’s description of a golden land. In California, winter was warmer than summer, said the author—one Lansford W. Hastings. Hollyhocks and sweet william bloomed at Christmastime. Clover stood five feet high and the cattle never had to be fed or housed. “Here perpetual summer is in the midst of unceasing winter; perennial spring and never failing autumn stand side by side, and towering snow clad mountains forever look down upon eternal verdure.”

Occasionally the quiet testimony of another era forces us, in the old-fashioned phrase, to count our blessings. Benefits fought for and painfully won in an advancing society quickly become rights to be taken for granted—the right to receive aid from the government when we are unemployed or unemployable; the freedom of children from ceaseless labor in their growing years; the eight-hour workday and the minimum wage; the right to protection for farms, homes, and savings; the right to get financial and medical help in our old age. We accept these rights so naturally that they become assumptions, seldom examined until some witness from the past—even the quite recent past—jolts our consciousness.

In our June, 1976, Postscripts we told of a Captain Jonathan Walker who had the letters SS—for Slave Stealer—branded on the palm of his right hand in 1844 for trying to help some slaves escape to the West Indies from Florida. From Mr. Jonathan Eyler, sports editor of the Muskegon, Michigan, Chronicle , comes this further information:

Captain Walker moved to Muskegon near the end of the Civil War and quietly lived out the remainder of his life operating a small fruit farm in a suburban area called Lake Harbor.

He died on April 30, 1878, at the age of eighty and was buried in Evergreen Cemetery. On August i of the same year thousands gathered for the dedication of a granite shaft [see picture] purchased and shipped to Muskegon by the Greek missionary Photius Fisk, who later became a famous chaplain in the U.S. Navy.

Parker Pillsbury, a noted abolitionist, delivered the address, saying: “Slave Savior” is the interpretation of that branded hand now silently moldering in the dust at our feet.

Last August we ran a short feature comparing President Ford’s 1975 automobile collision with a 1902 accident in which Teddy Roosevelt’s carriage was rammed by a streetcar. We said that “Roosevelt’s minor abrasions soon disappeared,” but Robert C. Kimberly, a Baltimore physician, disagrees:

Mr. Roosevelt was thrown some thirty feet, receiving an injury to his left leg and bruises to his face. He cut short his tour and returned at once to Oyster Bay. The bruises about his face healed rapidly, but the injury to his leg did not. Osteomyelitis developed, requiring an operation at Indianapolis on September 23rd and a second operation a few days later in Washington to drain a sub-periosteal abscess. Roosevelt had to conduct the coal strike negotiations from a wheel chair the second week of October and, while he was able to go bear hunting in Mississippi in November, the old Rough Rider was unable to mount a horse until six months after the accident.

It is difficult not to think of Benjamin Franklin in a purely American setting. After all, this Philadelphia printer who—with little formal schooling—became a remarkable scientist, inventor,writer, philosopher, politician, and statesman was quite as distinctively American as the turkey he proposed for our national symbol. D. H. Lawrence called him “the real practical prototype of the American.” One thinks of him, pen in hand, sitting around a large table with others of the Founding Fathers, ready to sign the Declaration of Independence or some other momentous document; or scribbling furiously in the Philadelphia office of his Pennsylvania Gazette ; or—yes—flying a kite above the green hills of home during an electric storm.

Recently discovered documents have revealed that during the period between the two world wars America was seriously considering the possibility of a major war with Great Britain and her dominions.

A year ago, Lawrence Larsen of the University of Missouri-Kansas City found in the Kansas City Federal Archives and Records Center a report entitled “United States’ Army 1919 Contingency Plan to Defend North Dakota Against an Unspecified Invader From Canada.” The plan was drawn up by R. T. Ward, the Kansas City district head of the Army Corps of Engineers, who, familiar with the old saw about the best defense, recommended the invasion of Canada by American troops jumping off from Sweet Grass, Montana, and Northgate, North Dakota.

H. Barber of New Port, Oregon, an honest-to-God old hobo and one of the last of a great breed, saw Clark Spence’s “Knights of the Fast Freight” in our August issue: I am from Southern 111. Had the Cotton Belt & Missouri Pacific for a play ground plus the Mississippi River, not many kids are that lucky. The whistles started getting to me at a very early age. Any way folded my books & decided to explore the places I’d read about in the geography & History books, have never been sorry for one minute of my decision. Learned more from the first six months on the road than my seven yrs. in school.

Guess my first trip from St. Louis to Denver was by far the most interesting, rode #79, a hot shot out. Was at 9:05 in the night, was shot at, it made me think about going back home but decided to make it to Denver one way or another. The trip was worth the danger when I saw those snow capped mts. for the first time.