Lessons from George Eastman
Free the innovators: George Eastman, not government planners, revolutionized picture taking the world over. He did for photography what Steve Jobs later did for computers: making expensive technologies accessible to the average citizen. When innovators like Eastman are freed from onerous taxation and government meddling, they improve lives by delivering greatly improved products and services, and by creating jobs.
Don’t vilify “the rich”: The cartoon stereotype of the rich man playing with his gold coins bears no resemblance to Eastman—or to most other rich people, for that matter. This self-made man employed countless thousands worldwide and was one of the most generous philanthropists of his day.
16
Fanny Crosby
Blind but Not Disabled
The most revered woman in late nineteenth-century America is someone you’ve probably never heard of: Fanny Crosby.
Though barely remembered today, Crosby earned fame and, more important, the respect of people the world over during her long life of achievement. She established a reputation for compassionate service through her charitable work in inner cities. But it was through her songwriting that she really came to prominence. Crosby wrote many popular songs but became best known for her hymns. In fact, she wrote more hymns than any other person who ever lived; many of them are still sung today. She also wrote more than a thousand poems and was a renowned public speaker.
Crosby got to know many of the most prominent figures of the era, including politicians, generals, evangelists, and singers. She probably met more U.S. presidents than any other person, living or dead. She became the first woman to address the U.S. Congress.
What made Crosby’s life so remarkable was the handicap she endured and overcame: total blindness. Her family believed that she went blind when she was six weeks old, after mistreatment for an inflammation of her eyes (though modern medical experts say her blindness was probably congenital). She inspired others with her hard work and personal initiative. Crosby was popular as much for her perseverance in the face of a horrific obstacle as for all the many good deeds she performed.
Yankee Values
Born in Putnam County, New York, in 1820, Frances Jane Crosby could trace her ancestry back to Puritans who came to Massachusetts in the seventeenth century. Throughout her life she was, biographer Edith Blumhofer notes, “animated by nostalgic pride in her forebears and uncomplicated devotion to liberty and democracy.”
That family pride shaped her character. In Her Heart Can See, Blumhofer writes of the Yankee values Crosby admired in her lineage: “independence, sobriety, thrift, morality, hard work, public service, family loyalty, unashamed patriotism, and above all, devotion to duty.” Crosby displayed all these traits in her nearly ninety-five years of life.
She would always remember how her mother encouraged her. Her mother often said that two of the world’s greatest poets, Homer and John Milton, were blind. Mrs. Crosby also told Fanny that “sometimes Providence deprived persons of some physical faculty in order that the spiritual insight might more fully awake[n].” Fanny Crosby’s Christian faith would guide and sustain her throughout her life.
Crosby also was blessed with many talents. She wrote her first poem when she was only eight. Her memory was legendary. By age fifteen, she had memorized the first five books of the Old Testament, the first four of the New (the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John), the books of Proverbs and Song of Solomon, and many of the Psalms.
Words of Wisdom from Fanny Crosby
“How many blessings I enjoy that other people don’t. To weep and sigh, because I’m blind? I cannot and I won’t.”
At the same age she became a student at the New York Institution for the Blind. During her decade there she learned to play the guitar, piano, organ, and harp. She also developed her talents as a singer.
In the 1840s, when she was in her twenties, Crosby threw herself into being a mission worker in New York. As thousands fled the city during the cholera epidemic, she stayed behind to nurse the sick. She contracted the disease herself, though she later recovered. In Satisfied: Women Hymn Writers of the Nineteenth Century, author Keith Schwanz notes that long after she had gained fame for her compositions, Crosby still thought of herself as a city mission worker.
Hymn Writer
Crosby’s first poem was published when she was twenty-one, and soon she began her prodigious output of songs. To start, her songs were mostly popular and patriotic. She transitioned into hymns during the Civil War, when the prominent composer and publisher William B. Bradbury was looking for someone to supply lyrics to his melodies. Looking back on her first collaboration with Bradbury, she recalled, “It now seemed to me that the great work of my life had really begun.”
Crosby wrote about nine thousand hymns over the next several decades, a record no one else has ever approached. She became the best-known hymn writer of her day. This was not simply because she was so prolific. She also pioneered a style that became immensely influential. Biographer Bernard Ruffin writes that before Crosby, “many hymns were staid, formal, and rather cold.” But Crosby developed “a kind of hymn, in the popular idiom, that appealed to the emotions of the worshipper.”
By the late nineteenth century, America’s Protestant churches were filled with music from the creative mind of Fanny Crosby. Some of her hymns are still well known and widely sung, from “To God Be the Glory” to “Blessed Assurance” to “Pass Me Not, O Gentle Savior.”
Crosby set a personal goal of bringing a million people to Christianity through her hymns. Whenever she wrote one, she prayed it would bring women and men to the faith, and she kept careful records of those reported to have been converted through her works.
Crosby’s influence cannot be overstated. She met every single president (in some cases after they served in the White House) from John Quincy Adams to Woodrow Wilson—an astounding twenty-one presidents in all, or nearly half of those who have held the office in our nation’s history. In honor of her eighty-fifth birthday, in 1905, churches worldwide celebrated Fanny Crosby Day. In May 1911, at age ninety-one, she spoke to five thousand people in Carnegie Hall after the crowd sang her songs for thirty minutes.
Bernard Ruffin opens his biography with a scene from late in her life. When her cab driver discovers that his passenger is Fanny Crosby, the hymn writer, the young man “takes off his hat and weeps openly,” Ruffin writes. When they arrive at her destination, the train station, the driver flags a policeman and asks him to make sure the great Fanny Crosby makes it safely to her train. The policeman, too, weeps upon meeting her.
“Blessed Providence”
Fanny Crosby died in February 1915, just a month short of her ninety-fifth birthday. She had made a remarkable impact in her long and productive life. Through her powerful example and exemplary character, she became one of the most admired women in American history.
Such a trajectory would not have seemed likely when she was starting out in life. But Crosby did not complain about her blindness. Quite the contrary. “It seemed intended by the blessed providence of God that I should be blind all my life,” she once observed, “and I thank him for the dispensation. If perfect earthly sight were offered me tomorrow I would not accept it. I might not have sung hymns to the praise of God if I had been distracted by the beautiful and interesting things around me.”
She was reported as saying that had it not been for her affliction, she “might not have so good an education or have so great an influence, and certainly not so fine a memory.”
If Crosby had only kept quiet about her faith, complained about her plight as a blind person, or declared a right to a federal handout, maybe the writers of our history texts today wouldn’t ignore her.
Lessons from Fanny Crosby
Count your blessings: Who, you might ask, could ever see blindness as a blessing? Fanny Crosby did, and her blindness never seemed to slow her down. She overcame a major handicap to gift the world with her hymns, po
ems, and popular songs. She serves as a model of character and perseverance.
Develop your work ethic: Crosby embodied the famous Thomas Edison maxim “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” She used her God-given talents to the fullest, displaying a tireless work ethic. She would often write several hymns in a single day.
17
Siegfried Sassoon
Conscience on and off the Battlefield
When you hear the term war hero, what do you picture?
Battlefield bravery—charging enemy lines in the face of incoming fire, risking one’s life to save friends, enduring injuries without complaint?
You probably don’t think of a war hero as one who sticks his neck out to oppose the very war in which he fights.
If we more readily associated heroism in war with the courageous resistance to one’s own bellicose government, the world might more often eschew the stupid and jingoistic reasons for which nations frequently shed innocent blood.
Siegfried Sassoon was a hero of both descriptions.
“The Hell Where Youth and Laughter Go”
Born in 1886 in southeast England, Sassoon was the son of an Anglo-Catholic mother and a Jewish father from Baghdad. His last name means “joy” in Hebrew. His first name might suggest a German origin, but his mother named him Siegfried because of her love of Richard Wagner’s operas. Otherwise, Siegfried’s only connection to Germany was his service to Britain in the tragically misnamed “war to end all wars”—also laughably dubbed the conflict that would “make the world safe for democracy.”
More than a century after its start, World War I remains an enigma to people everywhere. We take history courses and still ask, “What was it all about?” and “What could possibly have justified the unimaginable devastation it caused?”
Its main result was to make inevitable an even deadlier conflagration a quarter century later. Perhaps few adventures in history were more absurd in origin, outrageous in duration, and counterproductive in their consequences than the one that began when an obscure Austrian royal was assassinated in Sarajevo in June 1914.
Sassoon was not a likely candidate for future hero status: as the world stumbled into war in the summer of 1914, he was a carefree twenty-seven-year-old, a novelist and an avid cricket player. He didn’t wait to be drafted, however. In a gesture of patriotism, he joined the British Army. He was already in service with the Sussex Imperial Yeomanry on August 4 when the United Kingdom declared war on Germany. He was commissioned with the Royal Welch Fusiliers as a second lieutenant in May 1915. In November of that year, his brother was killed in the Gallipoli disaster, and days later Siegfried himself was sent to the front lines in France.
Almost immediately, he inspired the deepest confidence of the men serving under him. On bombing patrols and night raids, he demonstrated stunning efficiency as a company commander. He single-handedly stormed an enemy trench and scattered sixty German soldiers. Nicknamed “Mad Jack” by his men for his near-suicidal courage, he was awarded the Military Cross, for which the citation read: “For conspicuous gallantry during a raid on the enemy’s trenches. He remained for 1½ hours under rifle and bomb fire collecting and bringing in our wounded. Owing to his courage and determination all of the killed and wounded were brought in.”
Words of Wisdom from Siegfried Sassoon
“I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.”
One of every eight British men who served on the western front in World War I died in the trenches or in the ghastly death zones that separated them. Casualties—the wounded in addition to the killed—totaled a staggering 56 percent. Though it was the first war in which disease claimed fewer men than did combat, that may have resulted not from medical advances as much as from the ruthless precision of machine guns and shell fire and the endless, violent gridlock of trench warfare. It’s nearly impossible to convey in words the horrors soldiers witnessed, but Sassoon would be among the few who made the attempt.
Sassoon emerged as one of the best of the “war poets,” a group that included Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, Charles Sorley, David Jones, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen. These warriors came face-to-face with their own mortality, the squandering of life, the death of close friends, the failure of modernity, and the nightmare of combat. The more Sassoon experienced the agonies of those around him, the more he questioned the purpose—the very sanity—of the enterprise. Astonished at the rate of servicemen taking their own lives, he wrote the poem “Suicide in the Trenches”:
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
In winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one spoke of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
“An Act of Willful Defiance”
Three years into the war, Sassoon had had enough. “In war-time,” he wrote, “the word patriotism means suppression of truth.” After a period of convalescence from war wounds, he declined to return to duty and threw the ribbon portion of his Military Cross into the river Mersey. His conscience compelled him to write this letter to his commanding officer in July 1917:
I am making this statement as an act of willful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it. I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that the war upon which I entered as a war of defense and liberation has now become a war of aggression and conquest. I believe that the purposes for which I and my fellow soldiers entered upon this war should have been so clearly stated as to have made it impossible to change them and that had this been done the objects which actuated us would now be attainable by negotiation.
I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolong these sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust.
I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.
On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them; also I believe it may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the continuance of agonies which they do not share and which they have not enough imagination to realize.
Before the month was out, Sassoon’s letter became a sensation across Britain. It was read aloud by a sympathetic member of the House of Commons and printed the next day in London’s biggest newspaper, the Times.
The country’s military and political hierarchy debated how to respond. Sassoon might have been court-martialed and executed, but his reputation both as a poet and on the battlefield pushed the authorities in another direction. They decided he was mentally ill, deranged by neurasthenia (“shell shock”). They sent him for treatment to Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, Scotland.
At Craiglockhart, Sassoon befriended Wilfred Owen, also remanded to the hospital for shell shock. Owen later credited Sassoon as the inspiration that made him a great poet. Owen would return to the battlefield a few months later and be killed on the eve of the war’s end, but Sassoon labored to bring Owen’s poetry to the attention of the world. (The friendship between the two men is the subject of Stephen MacDonald’s remarkable play Not about Heroes.)
The psychiatrist and officer attending to Sassoon, W. H. R. Rivers, soon realized that this principled young man was in full possession of his faculties. Unable to prove that anything was
physically or mentally wrong with Sassoon, the British military released him from Craiglockhart and even promoted him to lieutenant. In July 1918, in spite of all he had endured, Sassoon volunteered to return to the western front. He hadn’t changed his mind about the war; he simply couldn’t stand the thought of not being of assistance to the men in the trenches.
Within days of returning to battle, Sassoon was wounded in the head by a fellow British soldier who mistook him for the enemy. He recovered, but that “friendly fire” took him permanently off the front. The war finally ended four months later. The death toll: more than nine million combatants and seven million civilians.
“The Pity of War”
Siegfried Sassoon lived another half century. In those postwar years he earned his living as a poet, editor, novelist, and public lecturer. He married and fathered a son. When war with Hitler came in 1939, he lamented but supported the fight, believing it a necessity brought on by the folly of the previous war.
It’s not uncommon for great issues to elicit an alteration of perspective from even the best man or woman. In time, Sassoon changed his mind regarding the stance that made him famous in 1917. In his autobiography, published in 1945, he expressed the view that fighting on until Germany was defeated seemed in hindsight to be the sounder position. That he had had such second thoughts was a fact that never took hold in the public mind, so his deeds and words during the Great War would forever define his legacy. I prefer to see him in those years as courageous and principled when under fire, no matter what form the fire took.
In 1951 he was named Commander of the Order of the British Empire by King George VI, an honor that recognizes “contributions to the arts and sciences, work with charitable and welfare organizations and public service outside the Civil Service.” He converted to Catholicism and took great comfort in his faith in his final years. He died of stomach cancer at age eighty on September 1, 1967.
Real Heroes Page 11