January 2011

About to die at the untimely age of forty-four in 1883, Dr. George Miller Beard, a Connecticut physician and pioneer in neurology, remarked: “I should like to record the thoughts of a dying man for the benefit of science, but it is impossible.” And with those words, Dr. Beard passed beyond further speech. Regardless of their inner thoughts, we do at least know what many individuals uttered before giving up the ghost. Some were clear-headed, sensing perhaps that they were speaking for posterity; this may have been the case with Nathan Hale, whose well-chosen comment before being hanged is surely the best remembered of all. Others about to die were delirious, and their minds—like Robert E. Lee’s when he called for A. P. Hill to bring up his troops—wandered back over past struggles. The following are last words attributed to twenty-three Americans. Some quotations may have been dressed up a little, but not by us.

Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887): “Now comes the mystery.”

The life of a radical in the old days was hard and dangerous. He was rarely successful and tended more often to wind up badly— he was jailed, run out of town, laughed at, or, worst of all, ignored. But in modern times we have changed all that. We listen, which may be the root of the problem, and we adopt the scheme in question at once, however harebrained. The theme is “instant acceptance.” It happens steadily. Just the other day it was pants for women, and then long hair for men. One minute little Willie had a shaggy head and a wisp of a new beard, and within six months even old men were hiding their ears behind large, fluffy sideburns and their collars under gray pageboys. Somebody suggested that Ms. would be a fine form of address for the liberated woman who does not want to reveal what used to be called her “condition” as either spinster or married woman. Now mail floods into this office addressing as Ms. a great many women who previously saw no objection to being either Miss or Mrs. The surrender outruns the attack.

As Speaker of the House of Representatives in the late 1890’s, Thomas B. Reed of Maine was known as Czar Reed for his rather dictatorial manner of conducting House affairs. At the center of his public philosophy was his conviction that leadership, while it might sometimes influence, was in reality only a reflection of the public will. Speaking on this theme at Colby College m 1885, he remarked:

COMMAGER ON COLLEGES REPEATING HISTORY

Of the nearly fourteen hundred senior colleges in the United States, more than eight hundred were founded in the nineteenth century. Considering that there were only two colleges in existence in the seventeenth century (Harvard, 1636; William and Mary, 1693) and but thirty-one more were established in the whole of the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century represented a tremendous leap forward in higher education. And throughout, the American college remained a unique institution. When unrest erupted a few years ago on campuses across the nation, Professor Henry Steele Commager of Amherst (founded 1821), a member of our advisory board and a frequent contributor, saw in that uniqueness the origins of modern student discontent. He described it in an essay, “The Crisis of the University,” which appeared in the Long Island newspaper Newsday in June of 1969. The professor’s perspective is as pertinent today as it was then, and so we are herewith reprinting an excerpt with his and Newsday ’s kind permission.

Every town is a ghost town in a sense—haunted by the shades of people who were born there, and lived there, and now are sone. In America, where it is generally thoueht that the proper prelude to putting up a new buildins is tearing down an old one, towns are haunted too by the ghosts of houses, schools, stores, churches, hotels, theatres. A man of seventy can walk up Fifth Avenue in New York today and see very little of what is there because he is remembering what used to be there a half century ago, and the same is true of streets in San Francisco or Dallas.

When the original People’s Party met in national convention in Omaha in 1892, it not only denounced the abuses of power, as it saw them, in vigorous terms but also emphasized the positive virtues of sectional and factional conciliation, democracy, and equality. Both the affirmative and critical notes are sounded clearly in these excerpts from its platform.

… we meet in the midst of a nation brought to the verge of moral, political, and material ruin. Corruption dominates the ballot-box, the Legislatures, the Congress, and touches even the ermine of the bench. … The fruits of the toil of millions are boldly stolen to build up colossal fortunes for a few, unprecedented in the history of mankind; and the possessors of these, in turn, despise the Republic and endanger liberty. …

Salem, Massachusetts, is rooted deep in the stony New England heritage of America. The capacious and functional houses that ringed the common remain, superbly maintained reminders of their prosperous Yankee history. So does Nathaniel Hawthorne’s dark and brooding House of the Seven Gables, looking as if Matthew Maule’s curse could still be lurking in its secret passage. And, of course, there are Salem’s famous witches- nineteen of them hanged in 1692.

But Salem’s history is not all, not even primarily, somber. In the early 1800’s, before the advent of steam, which forced ships to seek deeper harbors to the south, Salem was a busy international port and one of the most cosmopolitan communities in America. Its doughty captains plied the Orient and Africa trades, bringing back large fortunes and endless romance.

THE JUMPY PATH TO VIRTUE

SPINNING THE WAY TO PROBITY
DEVERSION FOR THE VERY YOUNG
FOLLOWING THE TRENDY TRACK