Events close at hand are hard to judge without the proportion time lends. But two stupendous failures of science and technology in 1986, the tragedy of the space shuttle Challenger and the disaster at Chernobyl, are clearly history of major consequence. If nothing else, they surely must mark an end to the hubris of those who see mankind as master of the universe. (The explanations of what happened refer often to human error, as if there were any other kind.)
Real progress there has been, in much of everyday life. Anyone who doubts this need only imagine—or recall—a visit to a 1930s dentist. The prospects for many old American cities are noticeably improved. Countless items in common use—from cameras and home computers to cars and running shoes—are far superior to what was previously available. College enrollment is up. Life expectancy keeps increasing..
Still, much of the history of recent decades has been a lesson in limitations. Vietnam painfully demonstrated the limits of American power. We have seen our environmental blunders bring appalling consequences, not just for seabirds and river systems, but for ourselves. The poisoning of the Missouri town of Times Beach with dioxin is but one example.
We have known little but disappointment and frustration in trying to solve the problems of crime and drugs. We have an educational system that produces high school graduates who have no idea where Egypt is or in which half of the century World War I occurred.
Real earnings for middle-income families, the majority of Americans, are declining. Economic gains for black Americans have fallen far short of the promise of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A census study shows that white Americans have accumulated eleven times the assets of blacks and that nearly a third of black households have no wealth at all.
In the world at large, there are now more dictators than in 1936. Nor has genocide been confined to the Nazis. In Cambodia, following the victory of the Khmer Rouge in 1975, as many as two million people were murdered. To the long list of assassinated world leaders that began with Mohandas Gandhi in 1948 has now been added the prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme.
These are the sobering facts of our much reported, but imperfectly understood, present. What will future historians make of it all? Maybe little of this will figure as large as we might expect. Maybe the critical event of the era will be the rise of Islam or the new theory that all matter is composed of strings. Or maybe it will be something going on about which we know no more than was known of Peenemunde in 1936.
Quite possibly it will be our own flourishing numbers—the human population of the world, which in the summer of 1986 passed the five billion mark—and such consequent problems as the ravaging of irreplaceable resources. It is estimated that the tropical rain forests of the world are being destroyed (mostly to make room for agriculture) at the rate of an area the size of Nebraska every year, and since these forests are home to more species of terrestrial life than anywhere else, their destruction could in the long run be among the most tragic of mistakes.
Who and what have affirmed the human spirit in this fifty years of unprecedented change?
Roosevelt, in peace and in war; Churchill, as few leaders ever have (“The nation had the lion’s heart. I had the luck to give the roar,” he said on his eightieth birthday); Anne Frank, whose The Diary of a Young Girl, the great book of World War II, will be read as long as there are books; Rosa Parks, who refused to get up and move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on December 1, 1955; Polish Solidarity leader Lech Walesa; the unmanned spacecraft Voyager II, a product of the human mind that departed earth nine years ago, traveled three billion miles, and in January 1986 succeeded in photographing the planet Uranus, in the dark, while moving at a speed of about forty thousand miles an hour; and Niels Bohr, who had a horseshoe nailed over his front door for luck and who, when questioned by a skeptical colleague on whether he believed in such superstition, responded, “Oh, no, but I am told that it works even if you don’t believe it.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Recommended Itinerary
IONCE KNEW an able and accomplished man who had been fired from his first job after college because his employer decided he was deficient in positive attitude. “You’ll never go anywhere,” he was told as he departed. Unable to find another job, he spent the next several months seeing the world and, remembering the old employer and those parting words, he took particular pleasure in sending him a postcard from each stop along the way, from one foreign capital after another, to let him know just how far he was going.
I want you of the graduating Middlebury class of 1986 all to go far.
I want you to see Italy—Florence, in particular—at least once in your lifetime. I hope you can spend an hour in front of the great, five-hundred-year-old Botticelli at the Ufizzi, The Birth of Venus. Do it for the unparalleled pleasure of it, but also so you will have the experience to draw on whenever overtaken by the common hubris of our time, which is that our time outranks all others in all attainments.
I hope by the time you are my age you will have been to Edinburgh, little Edinburgh, and walked its stone streets and read its great thinkers and considered their impact on our own Founding Fathers.
Go to Palenque—Palenque, the stupendous Mayan ruin in the beautiful Mexican province of Chiapas. Climb the long stairway of the central pyramid-tomb to the very top and, with the main palace and other monuments spread before you, try to keep in mind that what you are seeing is only a fraction of what once was and that all of it was built under the rule of one man who lived more than a thousand years ago, a king called Pacal, a name virtually unknown to North Americans, except for a handful of scholars, yet plainly one of the most remarkable leaders in the whole history of our hemisphere. He had to have been. You need only see Palenque to know that.
I hope you go to Italy and Scotland and to places like Palenque because I think you will afterward see and understand your own country more clearly. That is an old idea, I know—that the country you learn most about by traveling abroad is your own—but then some old ideas bear repeating.
But you must also go please to Monticello. Walk through the vegetable garden that Jefferson carved out of the south side of his “little mountain.” Tour his extraordinary house, see his trees, enjoy the view, so much of which still looks as he saw it. But pay particular attention to the vegetable garden and remember what it tells you about patriotism.
It is eighty feet wide and one thousand feet in length. He grew no fewer than 450 varieties of vegetables, fruits, nuts, and herbs. Four hundred and fifty varieties! The garden was begun in 1774, which makes it older than the United States. He was constantly experimenting, trying “new” vegetables like okra and eggplant and Arikara beans brought back from the Lewis and Clark expedition. He grew fifteen varieties of peas alone.
In his perfect hand in his garden diary he recorded all that he planted there, where, when, and the time it came to his table. He considered agriculture a science to be taken seriously. But his patriotism was also involved. “No greater service can be rendered any country,” he once said, “than to introduce a new plant to its culture”—that from the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence!
Patriotism in a plant. How different from what the Hollywood impresarios have in mind for their centennial tribute to the Statue of Liberty.
Your travels should take you through the great heartland of Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas. And you must get off the interstates. You must ride the side roads where the small towns are, and the farmland, where main streets are boarded up and you soon grow tired of counting the abandoned farms because there are so many. What kind of people are we if we turn our backs on the land and the people who have worked it for so long in all seasons?
Go to eastern Kentucky. See with your own eyes what the strip miners are doing, still, for all the ballyhoo about reclamation. The reports you have read about reclamation are largely lies. Go see the rape of the land that continues every day, not in far-off, who-gives-a-damn-about-it, good-for-nothin
g, backwoods hillbilly Kentucky, but your Kentucky, your country.
Look at people when you travel. Talk to people. Listen to what they have to say.
Imagine a man who professes over and over his unending love for a woman but who knows nothing of where she was born or who her parents were or where she went to school or what her life had been until he came along—and furthermore, doesn’t care to learn. What would you think of such a person? Yet we appear to have an unending supply of patriots who know nothing of the history of this country, nor are they interested. We have not had a president of the United States with a sense of history since John Kennedy—not since before most of you were born. It ought to be mandatory for the office. As we have a language requirement for the Foreign Service, so we should have a history requirement for the White House. Harry S. Truman, who never had the benefit of a college education but who read history and biography and remembered it, once said, “The only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.”
If nothing else, seeing the country should lead you to its past, its story, and there is no part of your education to come that can be more absorbing or inspiring or useful to your role in society, whatever that may be. How can we know who we are and where we are going if we don’t know anything about where we have come from and what we have been through, the courage shown, the costs paid, to be where we are?
Put Antietam on your list. Go to Antietam in Maryland and stand on the hillside near the old whitewashed Dunker church and try if you possibly can to imagine what happened there that terrible day, September 17, 1862. Once, last summer, sitting in a garden restaurant in Washington with a friend from out of town, she told me how moved she had been by her visit to the Vietnam Memorial. Had I seen it? she wanted to know. I said I had. I had gone the first time late in the afternoon of a day spent at Antietam.
“What is Antietam?” she said. She is a graduate of one of our great universities. She is an editor of the op-ed page of one of our largest, most influential newspapers. It was a bright summer afternoon and people at the adjoining tables were all happily eating and chatting.
“Antietam,” I said. “Maybe you know it as Sharpsburg.” She hadn’t any idea of what I was talking about. I said there are 57,000 names on the Vietnam Memorial and the Vietnam War lasted eleven years. At the Battle of Antietam in one day there were 23,000 casualties. In one day. It was not just the worst, bloodiest day of the Civil War; its toll in human life exceeded that of any day in our history. It happened hardly more than an hour’s drive from where we were sitting, and she had never heard of it.
I feel so sorry for anyone who misses the experience of history, the horizons of history. We think little of those who, given the chance to travel, go nowhere. We deprecate provincialism. But it is possible to be as provincial in time as it is in space. Because you were born into this particular era doesn’t mean it has to be the limit of your experience. Move about in time, go places. Why restrict your circle of acquaintances to only those who occupy the same stage we call the present?
For a lift of the spirits walk over the Brooklyn Bridge, one of the surpassing masterworks from our past and as strong and enduring a symbol of affirmation as I know. There is something wonderful about a bridge, almost any bridge, but it is our greatest bridge.
Or go to a tiny graveyard on the Nebraska prairie north of the little town of Red Cloud and look about until you find a small headstone. It reads “Anna Pavelka, 1869-1955.”
By every fashionable index used to measure success and importance, Anna Pavelka was nobody. Three weeks ago my wife Rosalee and I were among several hundred visitors who arrived in a caravan of Red Cloud school buses to pay her homage. Who was she and why did we bother?
She was born Anna Sadilek in Mizzovic, Bohemia, present-day Czechoslovakia, in 1869. In 1883, at age fourteen, she sailed with her family to America to settle on the treeless Nebraska prairie in a sod hut. Some time later, in despair over the struggle and isolation of his alien new life, her father killed himself. As a suicide he was denied burial in the Catholic cemetery. They buried him instead beside the road and the road makes a little jog at the spot there still.
Annie afterward worked as a “hired girl” in Red Cloud. She fell in love. She left town with a railroad man she hoped to marry, but was deserted by him and forced to return. She bore an illegitimate child. Later, she married John Pavelka, also of Bohemia, who had been a tailor’s apprentice in New York, a city man, and who knew little of farming. She ran the farm and she bore him, I believe, eleven more children. She spent her life on the farm there on the prairie.
And that’s about all there is to the story—except that she adored her children and her farm and she was also known to a younger woman from Red Cloud named Willa Cather who transformed her life into a very great and enduring American novel called My Antonia. The Antonia of the story—the Anna Sadilek Pavelka of real life—was a figure of heroic staying power. But it is her faith and joy in life, her warmth that matter most. “At first I near go crazy with lonesomeness,” says her city-man husband at the close of the novel, remembering his first years in Nebraska, “but my woman is got such a warm heart.”
Anna Pavelka reaches out to us because of what Oliver Wendell Holmes called “the transfiguring touch” of Willa Cather’s art, because of what she, through Willa Cather, says about the human spirit.
Take the novels of Willa Cather when you go to Nebraska. Bring Faulkner when you’re going south. Take Cather, Faulkner—take books wherever you go. Read. Read all you can. Read history, biography. Read Dumas Malone’s masterful biography of Jefferson and Paul Horgan’s epic history of the Rio Grande, Great River. Read Luigi Barzini’s books on Italy and America. Read the published journals of those who traveled the Oregon Trail. Read the novels of Maya Angelou and Robertson Davies; read Wendell Berry, Wallace Stegner, and the poems of Robert Penn Warren. As much as you have read in these four years, it is only the beginning. However little television you watch, watch less. If your experience is anything like mine, the books that you read in the next ten years will be the most important books in your lives.
When to go? Always a question. I think of a comment by the late George Aiken about the pruning of trees. “Some say you shouldn’t prune except at the right time of year,” he said. “I generally do it when the saw is sharp.”
George Aiken, of Vermont, as I hope you know, was one of the best things that ever happened to the United States Senate. Wherever you go, don’t forget Vermont. Don’t forget this lovely town and these mountains and the people who live here.
Go with confidence. Prize tolerance and horse sense. And some time, somewhere along the way, do something for your country.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Simon Willard’s Clock
SIMON WILLARD was never a member of Congress in the usual sense. Simon Willard of Roxbury, Massachusetts, was a clockmaker early in the nineteenth century and he did it all by hand and by eye.
In cutting his wheel teeth [reads an old account], he did not mark out the spaces on the blank [brass] wheel and cut the teeth to measure, but he cut, rounded up and finished the teeth as he went along, using his eye only in spacing, and always came out even…
It is doubtful if such a feat in mechanics was ever done before, and certainly never since.
The exact date is uncertain, but about 1837, when he was in his eighties, Simon Willard made a most important clock. I will come back to that.
On a June afternoon in 1775, a small boy stood with his mother on a distant knoll, watching the Battle of Bunker Hill. Seven years later, at age fourteen, he was a diplomatic secretary at the court of Russia’s Catherine II; at twenty-eight, minister to the Hague. He was minister plenipotentiary to Russia at the time of Alexander I. He saw Napoleon return from Elba. He was a senator, secretary of state, and finally president. He had seen more, contributed more to the history of his time than almost anyone of his time.
But then, as no former president ever had, John Quincy Adams
returned here to the hill to take a seat in the House of Representatives, in the Twenty-second Congress. Adams was thrilled at the prospect. “No election or appointment conferred upon me ever gave me so much pleasure,” he wrote in his diary. And it was here that this extraordinary American had his finest hours.
He took his seat in the old House—in what is now Statuary Hall—in 1831. Small, fragile, fearing no one, he spoke his mind and his conscience. He championed mechanical “improvements” and scientific inquiry. To no one in Congress are we so indebted for the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution. With Congressman Lincoln of Illinois and Corwin of Ohio, he cried out against the Mexican War, and for eight long years, almost alone, hooted and howled at, he battled the infamous Gag Rule imposed by Southerners to prevent any discussion of petitions against slavery. Adams hated slavery, but was fighting, he said, more for the unlimited right of all citizens to have their petitions heard, whatever their cause. It was a gallant fight and he won. The Gag Rule was permanently removed.
Earlier this year, at the time of the inaugural ceremonies, I heard a television commentator broadcasting from Statuary Hall complain of the resonance and echoes in the room. What resonance! What echoes!
John Quincy Adams is a reminder that giants come in all shapes and sizes and that, at times, they have walked these halls, their voices have been heard, their spirit felt here. Listen, please, to this from his diary, from March 29, 1841:
The world, the flesh, and all the devils in hell are arrayed against any man who now in this North American Union shall dare to join the standard of Almighty God to put down the African slave trade; and what can I, upon the verge of my seventy-fourth birthday, with a shaking hand, a darkening eye, a drowsy brain, and with all my faculties dropping from me one by one, as the teeth are dropping from my head—what can I do for the cause of God and man…. Yet my conscience presses me on; let me but die upon the breach.
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