January 2011

No one knows when man first ventured from terra firma onto ice that was less firm, and began to slide. It must have been a very long time ago, for primitive skate blades made of animal bone have been dug up all over northern Europe, and there are references to skating in ancient runic poetry. There is even an official first topple, recorded in the fourteenth century, when a Netherlands lass named Lydwina fell on the frozen Schie one brisk day and rose to become the patron saint of skaters. (This account, to be sure, is compressed, leaving out the more spiritual events for which Lydwina achieved recognition from Rome.)

Nothing is more central to the American experience than the journey of the immigrant from the Old World to the New in search of freedom, security of person, or simply his daily bread. If Carl Schurz, who arrived from Germany in 1852, found all these things in abundance, he repaid the republic in rare and precious coin: half a century of honest, devoted service. He was a crusader for abolition, a brave (if unlucky) general in the fight to save the Union, a vigorously independent United States senator, and an outstanding Cabinet officer. What doubled and trebled the value of that service was that it came at a time when probity and dedication were sorely needed, when in public life the weak and the wicked had all but pre-empted the field. As writer, editor, and lecturer, Schurz was a never-tiring advocate of reform; from the Civil War to the turn of the century he was, says his biographer, Claude M. Fuess, “the … exceedingly useful incarnation of our national conscience.”

The great man could spare exactly two minutes. Like a huge, baleful dragon he sat, not posing but confronting the camera, defying it to do its worst, gripping the polished arm I of the chair so that it looked like a gleaming pigsticker aimed at the vitals. The photographer, Edward Stcichcn, had time for two exposures; then his visitor rose, clapped a square-topped derby on his head, reached for the big black cigar he had laid aside, and departed.

Of all of the black chapters that would not appear in the history books if it were not for man’s insensitivity to the sufferings of other men, the AfroAmerican slave trade probably is the worst. Here, if anywhere, is the account of a trade that was built on unvarnished cruelty and on the almost incredible sufferings of millions of men, women, and children. We put up with it, here in America, for a great many years, because it was highly profitable—and because we did not actually see the victims and so could not feel the lash that struck their backs. It was a trade that could not have lasted one week in a truly compassionate society; it actually lasted for generations, and in the end the entire country paid a staggering price by way of atonement.

The Black Legend

The Spaniards [wrote Las Casas of the scene above] were no sooner arriv’d in the Isle of Cuba , but this Cacyque [chief] who knew ’em too well, … resolv’d to defend himself … but he unfortunately fell into their Hands [and] was burn’d alive. While he was in the midst of the Flames, tied to a Stake, a certain Franciscan Frier of great Piety and Vertue, took upon him to speak to him of God and our Religion … [The Cacyque ] ask’d the Frier whether the Gate of Heaven was open to the spaniards; and being answer’d that of ’em as were good men might hope for entrance there: The Cacyque , without any father deliberation, told him, he had no mind to go to Heaven, for fear of meeting with such cruel and wicked Company as they were; but would much rather go to Hell…

Speaking of a man who could see nothing really disturbing in the institution of human slavery, Abraham Lincoln once remarked that this person was so constituted that he could not feel the lash that landed on somebody else’s back. Only if it hit his own back could he understand that a flogging was going on.

The insensitivity Lincoln was talking about is one of the commonest and most disastrous of all human traits, because it consents to cruelty and injustice; and it consents largely because the insensitive person does not even realize that these things exist unless they touch him personally. He can live next to monstrous wrong because he does not really know that it is there; it affects another person and so he does not feel it. Society approaches a respectable level of civilization only when it develops an active spirit of compassion.

It would of course be comforting to think that this moral obtuseness was peculiar to Englishmen. It seems, however, to have been prevalent in America as well, and the cholera epidemics of the last century bring the thing into focus.

In 1832 the first epidemic of Asiatic cholera struck the United States. It was a complete mystery; no one knew what caused it or how it was transmitted, but since it passed most rapidly through areas where water and food supplies could be contaminated—and such areas were numerous in American cities of the 1830’s— it seemed likely that cholera was a natural accompaniment of filth, misery, vice, and intemperance. Loose living, in short, brought on cholera, and the man who died of it probably had himself to blame. It attacked mostly “the very scum of the cities,” and the scum would not have caught it if its members had not consented to be part of the scum.

The Feel of the Lash Poverty and Cholera Numbness on the Heart