"Sharp, quirky, and occasionally nettlesome", Walking the Berkshires is my personal blog, an eclectic weaving of human narrative, natural history, and other personal passions with the Berkshire and Litchfield Hills as both its backdrop and point of departure. I am interested in how land and people, past and present manifest in the broader landscape and social fabric of our communities. The opinions I express here are mine alone. Never had ads, never will.
"Bloggers, blogs and posts may be nominated in multiple categories. Individuals may nominate any number of specific blogs, bloggers or posts, even in a single category, as long as the nominations include all the necessary information (names, titles, URLs, etc).
Nominations will be open through November; judges will make the final determinations in December. The winners will be announced at the American Historical Association Annual Meeting in early January 2009; winners will be listed on HNN and earn the right to display the Cliopatria Awards Logo on their blog."
These are interesting times, and though the old Chinese curse may be apocryphal and there are enormous challenges ahead, what happened last night was truly extraordinary.
My neighbor across the street voted for the first time in her life yesterday. She is in her mid 20s, divorced with two children. She said she had never voted before because she didn't feel she knew enough about the issues of the candidates to make an informed choice. This time, she put the time in, watched the debates, listened and learned, and got involved in heated political discussions with her friends and family. She said she felt that this election was so important, that the issues at stake had such potential impact on her children's future, that she had to overcome her fear and vote. She was nervous and excited as she packed her two children into the car and drove to the polling station.
I took Emily and Elias to the polls with me before school. There was a large minivan parked beyond the 75 foot exclusion zone around the polling station with huge signs on it showing voters how to select the write-in candidate for state representative in our district. The 63rd district seat, long held by Democrat George Wilber, was suddenly vulnerable because the representative abruptly resigned a couple weeks ago, after it was revealed that he paid a woman $100,000 in 2002 to quiet accusations that he had sexually molested her for a number of years decades before, starting when she was 12. I did not explain to the them the circumstances of his departure, but it did give me the chance to explain how a write-in candidacy works, while also observing that it helps to have a simple name to spell if voters have to write it in. William Riiska jumped into the race with only a week to campaign and managed a strong showing despite the double "i", but in the end the seat went as expected to the Republican challenger John Rigby.
From a conservation perspective, the return of Chris Murphy (D) to Congress by a double-digit margin is good news, but so is the return of Andrew Roraback (R) to the State Senate, and to a legislature where Democrats have a super-majority in both houses.
Obama took every county in Connecticut last night. Litchfield County was the closest contest, with a 51%-47% decision and a margin of just over 4,000 votes.Connecticut Local Politics has a compelling analysis of the Obama effect in the defeat of Chris Shays, who lost the last New England Republican seat in the House of Representatives by about 7,000 votes last night in Connecticut's 4th District.
John McCain and President Bush demonstrated a commendable graciousness in what must have felt like a stinging defeat and repudiation. It is a proud moment for Americans, even though the future is uncertain and four centuries of racial division are not washed clean by an event even as unprecedented as the election of a black man to the highest office in the land. Nonetheless a wall has come down, and for good or ill, we are entering a new chapter in our society.
We cannot all be at the top of our class, even if - as in Lake Wobegon - all our children are above average. How you answer the question; "What prevents everyone from being a success in America" determines where your values lie and is a good predictor of your politics.
"A simple "Thank You" from the people who benefit from the largesse (of my taxes) would be nice." - JPMcT
"I am tired of being castigated for being successful -- of being told that I don't "deserve" what I've worked for." - Anon 7:15
"a lot of this depends on whether you believe that people who consume more than they produce, over the course of their lives, are failures or not. My own view is that they are failures. In some cases it may not be their fault, but that does not make it any less so. " -Tigerhawk
Who says the election is not about values? You cannot have a discussion about the economy or the direction we are heading as a country and as a society without confronting what each of us values and how we see the world and our place in it. The three excerpts from previous comments at Tigerhawk, above, struck me as illustrative, and prompted this post.
The issue of whether 'those who have not' feel entitled to benefits subsidized by 'those who have' is all about those values. I can appreciate that those who have made a financial success of themselves could resent being told that they are selfish takers and not doing useful, even highly beneficial service to society. I can also understand how those who never asked for anything, toughed it out, and either were successful financially or were not not but are never going to be the beneficiaries of an "entitlement" program would resent those who are subsidized by our taxes and who (may or may not) believe they are entitled to such subsidy. There are, of course, entitlement expectations of some who inherit wealth but produce nothing of their own that get resented in the other direction. Such fortunes, by design or default, tend to decline in the next generation.
To JPMcT - Ingratitude and expectations of entitlement are a galling combination. So thank you. I mean it. But, then, I pay my taxes too, so thank me. Neither of us, however, is the face of the benefits of our taxes to those who receive them. Do you thank inadequate impersonal government bureaucracies, like Medicare, when your medical practice is the beneficiary?
Ingratitude from those who benefit from our taxes has the feel of a strawman to me, though I am aware such examples exist. It is not a very long jump from there to redistribution, that old Socialist canard. That, in turn, has the whiff of reparations about it in America, and that quickly brings us to matters of race and whether the sins of the fathers shall be visited down the generations or whether we have any obligation to attempt to redress old wrongs (financially or otherwise). There is no sword for this particular Gordian knot, so instead we have a wedge.
Some like TH may conclude that such people are failures (as he says) whether it is their fault or not. I respectfully would reply to my friend and cousin that he is missing the distinction between quantifiable value that produces things that economists understand, and qualitative but nonetheless measurable values that add greatly to society (not to mention family) but may not be personally remunerative. Could I make more money as the attorney I could certainly have chosen to become? Certainly. But that is not the value measure I would place on the impact of my work or the societal values it serves. I work for conservation non-profits and do not consider the product of my labor or the rewards I receive for it to be adequately captured in a simple ratio of consumption over production.
I will also point out that when my wife stayed home as the primary caregiver for our two children, she deeply resented that her unpaid work was socially undervalued despite its tremendous value for our family. In fact, measured purely economically we would have been more "productive" had there been two significant wage earners instead of just me. There is nothing wrong with day-care, but the sort of people and citizens our children are becoming, in part because of the supportive home environment we strive to provide, represents anything but "failure".
Sacrifice for a greater good may not balance the books, but it can balance the scales. That is why soldiers risk their greatest personal asset in battle, and why we support our churches and other charities. That is also why, according to Hobbes' Social Contract, we give up some of the freedoms of the state of nature to be part of the state of man. Pure individual freedom is anarchy and a threat to all. Ask the Somalis - aside from the warlords and pirates - how they like living in a failed state. This society admires those who grab their bootstraps and pull. In his nomination acceptance speech, Barack Obama described the flip side of this value:
"Out of work? Tough luck, you are on your own. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own boot straps. Even if you don't have boots you are on your own."
Again, whether you believe personal lack of resources is a personal failure or not says a lot about what you value and by extension what government policies and taxation you feel are appropriate and whether social change is desirable or necessary. What may keep us from sharing more values are the conclusions we draw about what should be done.
A long overdue effort to remember and commemorate the men who served in the 29th Connecticut Volunteer Infantry Regiment (colored) during the Civil War made the papers last week. The Litchfield County Times ran a lengthy piece, describing the service and sacrifice of more than 80 free men of color in this regiment who enlisted from northwest Connecticut towns, which then as now had a very small population of non-white residents.
"Some of the Litchfield County towns and families of black soldiers were hard-hit by the war, suffering the deaths of more than one soldier. Canaan, for instance, sent four men to the 29th and only one returned alive. Of those, Lynn Royce died before he ever left the New Haven encampment, succumbing on Jan. 1, 1864, while James Royce, died eight months later in Beaufort, S.C. In Colebrook, six black men marched off to war and four failed to return. Elias and Samuel Hickok died five months apart while serving in the South."
Just beyond my office in Cornwall bridge is the rural Calhoun Cemetery, with stones dating from before the Revolution. Yesterday I walked through the graveyard and found a marker for at least one man who had served in the 29th CT. Josiah Starr enlisted as a private in Company C. and mustered out with a sergeant's stripes. His stone is beside another from the Starr family that also bears a flag, but i could not find a record of service for what looks to be Abel C Starr in the Civil War soldiers and sailors database maintained by the National Park Service. Four men with the surname "Starr" served in the 29th.
These men were not the only black veterans from Cornwall whose markers I found, however. Connecticut initially set out to raise 2 colored regiments, but by June, 1864 the four companies of the 30th Connecticut C.V.I. were dispatched to Virginia and combined with other companies to form the 31st U.S. Colored infantry. David Hector enlisted in Company D. According to his gravestone he died in 1881 at the age of 76, making him an old man (for the time) during his term of service. The 31st U.S.C. Infantry served with distinction and were part of the terrible assault on the Crater in the trenches at Petersburg. At the Crater, CT members of the 31st lost 17 k, 44 w, 14 missing and 4 captured. During its term of service, the regiment lost 3 officers and 48 enlisted men killed and mortally wounded and 1 officer and 123 enlisted men by disease.
In another part of the Calhoun Cemetery is the stone of Charles S Western, who served with the 11th Regiment U.S. Heavy Artillery (colored) in the garrison of New Orleans. It was organized from the 14th Rhode Island Heavy Artillery (colored), and somewhere along the line Charles Western enlisted.
In all there are 12 veterans of the Civil War whose stones I was able to find in the Calhoun Cemetery, and 1/3 of them were those of colored veterans. Of the rest, one had toppled face forward but was in the Sawyer plot and had a foot stone with the initials L.S., leading me to believe it marks the resting place of Lewis Sawyer. Like many other white Cornwellians (and 6 veterans altogether whose remains lie in this cemetery), Sawyer served in the 19th Connecticut Infantry - "The Litchfield Regiment" - which was later designated the 2nd CT Heavy Artillery. Elsewhere in the graveyard I found other members of his company who did not survive the war, including Herman E Bonney who died in Philadelphia on June 28th, 1864 and another who died in Washington on July 19th, 1864. A third, George W Page, was killed at Ceder Creek on October 19th, 1864 and Sgt. Albert E Robinson died in Baltimore on March 26, 1865.
The impact of these losses on rural Connecticut communities was deeply felt, but what of the small African American communities within them? How did it affect the few black families in Colebrook when 2/3 of the men who served in the 29th CT from that town failed to return?
The four veterans of colored regiments buried in the Calhoun cemetery lie in scattered graves that form a line about halfway across the middle of the graveyard. In the 1800s, this marked the back line of the cemetery. Set apart even in death, their comrades rest in the corners of dozens of burying grounds across the Litchfield Hills.
I have been an unabashed Civil War buff for 30 years. I got bitten by the bug in the 4th grade, to such an extent that my social studies teacher asked me to teach this period of history to our class; imagine how that went to the head of a ten year old! In the 6th grade, I began a Gettysburg cyclorama in newsprint that took two years to finish. Some of my fondest memories are family trips to Virginia battlefields. I was briefly a teenage reenactor. I know which ancestors participated in the war (North and South) and have a keen interest in their experiences.
If you looked at the bookshelves in our house - and there are many - you would find the Civil War section dwarfs all other historic periods (though the Africa section, reflecting 4 years spent in Namibia, is a respectable second). I have outed myself to you all as a collector of high-end Civil War toy soldiers. If, when I was in college, I had considered going forward with a PhD, it undoubtedly would have dealt with this era.
I will always have an interest in the history of the United States during the 1860s and an affection for the subject of the Civil War. I have gradually come to realize, however, that the nature of that attraction is changing. For all my delight in the minutia of the past, and my capacity to retain and relate vast amounts of historical data and statistics, I find as I grow older that my first obsessive love of the history of the American Civil War has mellowed to a fond regard rather than a fierce and abiding passion. I am not sure that the label "buff" still applies.
By way of example, consider this blog's archive category for the American Civil War. There are some fine posts in there, but of late the Civil War has been mentioned only in passing and not as a central feature. In all there are now 38 posts of mine that make reference to the American Civil War. That is 38 out of 856 posts since this blog began. Compare that to the posts that relate to the American Revolution. There have been 37 of these in this year alone, and 64 all told. Clearly, I have a more recent interest in the topic, but what else is going on?
A fresh interpretation still has the power to challenge and inspire. At the moment I am finding more that challenges and inspires in the reading, writing and research I am doing on Revolutionary America. Perhaps this says as much about me and my broadening interests as it does the state of scholarship in these periods. Part of this shift in emphasis can be explained by the rich archival material I inherited in 2003 relating to branches of my family with prominent members of the Revolutionary generation. As an historian as well as a genealogist, I find fertile ground in this era with fewer furrows preceding me than with the massively discussed and documented Civil War period. There is more elbow room for a pioneer, more details about the events of the Revolution that are known to fewer people. It is a bit like those hardcore birders who several years ago got into identifying lepidoptera and dragonflies. It was something fresh to do in tandem with the initial interest and activity.
Part of it, though, has to do with significance of these events. Both the American Revolution and the American Civil War are imbued with myth in modern memory, and it is interesting to compare where we are in our national conversations about the Founders and our founding with how we understand and remember that great tectonic rift in the American psyche with the Civil War at its epicenter.
Invoking the Founders - "what would George do? " - is a distinctive feature of our national politics, and divining the intent of the Framers of our Constitution as important as legal precedent in our judicial philosophy. In popular imagination, we tend to look at the creation of our independent democracy as if it were either miraculous or inevitable, and at those who brought our nation into being as peerlessly farsighted. The achievement was great indeed, but the Founders were very human and whether by design or default, our Independence was neither assured nor the greatest of long shots.
We do not re-fight the American Revolution the way so many of us grapple with what Faulkner calls "the instant when it's still not yet two oclock on that July afternoon in 1863": the moment available "(f)or every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it." I am unaware that the British rehash "what might have been" had the American War of Independence gone their way. The descendants of Tories exiled in Canada are proud of their loyalist roots but there it ends. The descendants of those loyalists who remained in America are assimilated into the national identity.
The American Revolution, unlike the American Civil War, is not an open wound for those who were defeated. We do not stare out over the Battlefield of Cowpens yearning for victory for our loyalistancestors who fought there. We do not, as a rule, have passionate arguments over what books are available at the visitor center at Saratoga as happens today at Gettysburg, or whether battlefield interpretation adequately honors the memory of those on both sides who fought there (though perhaps we should). What is unsettled about the Revolution is not how we reconcile and remember the war and its consequences, but rather "whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure" and how we moderns understand what it will mean to form "a more perfect union."
Lincoln stood in the center of that maelstrom in the Cemetery at Gettysburg and invoked the past to look forward.
"It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth."
I think, in the end, that Lincoln's words get to the heart of what I appreciate about history today, and what may have changed from when I was ten years old. I still love the details. I still delight in new discovery (and sharing new knowledge). But even as my heart thumps and I yearn to join in the play whenever I get around reenactors (those of earlier periods as well as 19th Century), my historical interest looks both ways. I believe our understanding of the past informs our future, a future that is neither predestined nor predetermined. Whether it will actively inform the choices we make or merely provoke reaction depends on us.
The African National Congress, South Africa's ruling party, has issued a strongly worded statement condemning repression of democratic rights in Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabe. Meanwhile, the President of South Africa, Thabo Mbeke, who lost control of his own party last December, has remained silent. In neighboring Namibia, the Prime Minister Nahas Angula voiced concern last week about the upcoming runoff elections in Zimbabwe and called for increasing the number of observers.
Since then, of course, the opposition leader has pulled out of the elections and fled to the Embassy of the Netherlands in the wake of surging violence and police action against members of his party. Namibia has not condemned Mugabe's regime either, and its Defense Force Chief has just returned from a 4 day trip to Zimbabwe where he assured the Zimbabwean media:
"The relationship between Namibia and Zimbabwe is growing from strength to strength. We share so many things. We have so many things in common. We would want to build on that relationship,"
What southern Africa nations share with Zimbabwe, in addition to a common history of liberation struggle and instability during the Cold War / Apartheid years, are complex economic dependencies, most significantly with regard to access to electrical power. This month Namibia doubled its power imports from Zimbabwe.
"[In March],Nampower advanced US$40 million to Zimbabwe to assist with the refurbishment of four electricity generating units at its coal-fired Hwange Power Station in return for a guaranteed supply of 150 megawatts for the next five years.
NamPower's managing director Paulinus Shilamba said the rehabilitation of the first unit has been completed, allowing for the increased power production.
Shilamba said the utility was not concerned that the deteriorating situation would affect Zimbabwe's ability to honor the agreement despite the power station being plagued with breakdowns and a shortage of parts in the country.
"They (Zimbabwe) have been very good in fulfilling their commitment and we have a lot of confidence in these guys," Shilamba said."
Even as many world powers call for the isolation of Zimbabwe, including a unanimous vote of the UN Security Council which said that "a free and fair election was impossible if violence and intimidation continued", Russia, China and South Africa blocked stronger language in the UN measure that would have recognized opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai as "the legitimate president, until another fair election can be held." China and South Africa are Zimbabwe's biggest trading partners, and both are heavily invested in the regional economy.
There is also a strong sensitivity in southern Africa to interference in the affairs of sovereign nations. Namibia, Angola and Zimbabwe overcame these qualms as participants in the The Second Congo War, which was as much a scramble for resources as an expression of solidarity and regional alliances. Some of this reticence is cultural; with the exception of leaders like Nelson Mandela and Julius Nyerere, there is not a strong tradition of former African leaders making a successful transition to senior statesmen. Some of it comes from looking over their shoulders. And some of it is ideological - resistance movements that become ruling parties after achieving Independence are used to identifying external threats and avoiding turning the lens on internal shortcomings.
Alan Little of the BBC cautions his readers today; "Do not underestimate the psychology of Africa's liberation tradition." This tradition is also what makes this e-mail letter from a South African to Zimbabwean refugees who have suffered a murderous backlash in his own country so telling:
"...I have been pondering whether to write this email or not, but mainly because I was ashamed of what this beautiful countries (sic) of ours has become.
In your country: My democracy was conceived when the MK soldiers fought alongside the ZIPRA forces in what was known as the Wankie Campaign in 1967. My brothers and sisters were looked after in Lusaka and they were given shelter. The blood of my brothers and sisters were spilled in Maputo in what was known as Matola raid on January 31, 1981 and your government gave them a state burial. The blood of my people was spilled in Maseru in what was known as the Maseru Massacre and your government gave them a state burial. The foundation of my democracy was laid in Mongoro Tanzania in 1969 in what was known as the Morogoro resolution. Your country gave my people land for them to be educated at Solomon Mahlangu Freedom College (SOMAFCO) in Mazimbu Tanzania. My soldiers were trained in Uganda, Lusaka, Angola, Mozambique, Algeria, Libya, Cuba, Russia. They fought in Cuinto Canhavallo alongside their Angolan, Namibian as well as the Cuban comrades in Angola. My democracy was delivered in Harare when the Harare Declaration was signed with the support of the Frontline States. my Movement's Congress was held in your country in 1985 in Kitwe, Zambia.
Your people protected, clothed and loved my movement. My people's struggle became your own struggle. Not once did you call them with derogatory names. Not once did you burn my brothers and sisters and not once did you say they are taking your jobs and women.
But most importnatly, I have a home in Harare at pastor Murefu's house, Zimbabwe. I have a home in Lilongwe at Cyprian's house, Malawi. I have a home in Kenya at Levi Nyambati's house. I have a home in Lusaka, Chipata, Mapanza as well as Livingstone with the BBalo and the Mutare family respectively, Zambia. My brother is lying in Mapanza, Zambia. I have a home in Mozambique at Pastor Nhantumbo's family (May his soul rest in peace). I have a home in Ivory Coast as well as DRC Kinshasa with Vincent Tohbi. I am married to the grand daughter of the Sena people in Malawi, Mozambique as well as Zimbabwe. My wife's maternal grandparents are in Swaziland.
My brothers, I apologize to you, your friends and your families for the barbaric action that you see in our country. I apologize to Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Machel, Tongoara, Mwalimu Nyerere, Aostinho Nehto, Mondlane, etc. I apologize on behalf of my leaders as well as my people that this is not who we are and this is not what makes us. I apologize and I would like to tell you that this is not the view of my country, but the thuggery elements in our society who will use and drag our name in mud to achieve their evil deeds. I would also like to assure you that our government as well as the members of our society at large, are working hard to root out these elements in our society.
We apologize because this is not who we are.
I hope you will find it in your hearts to open your doors and not to let these barbaric actions come between our friendship and all the wonderful things we have shared. My home is your home and I trust and believe that your home will remain my home. This I write from my heavy heart and i truly apologize on behalf of my firends, my family as well as all South Africans.
Freddy Tshikala, South African"
The return to the bad old days of regional instability and the specter of burning necklace victims once more in the townships have shaken people like Mr. Tshikala and those like him who were raised in a culture of pan-African resistance where "an injury to one is an injury to all." They grieve for what Zimbabwe has become under Mugabe, their former comrade and supporter. But they also grieve for what they have become, as nations and people who by their actions and inactions are now complicit in the repression of those who stood by them when the oppressor was always external and not one of their own. Finding their courage and helping their leaders find theirs is the best hope for Democracy in the region.
Here is an image with much to tell about matters of race and memory in contemporary America. I am confident that just a few years ago, its subject matter - a black American soldier menacing a fallen white enemy with a bayonet - would have been deemed too provocative and risky for a venerable manufacturer of high end toy soldiers to bring to an American market. Yet last year, the 115-year-old W. Britains company did just that.
True confessions time, here. I am a collector of matte finished toy soldiers in this scale and from this company, though I concentrate on the American Civil War period and not, as it is known in the international collector trade, the American War of Independence. This is a reflection of the expense of this hobby and lack of display space rather than lack of interest in other periods. Sometimes I think the ideal job for me would be dioramist in residence at some well endowed and indulgent museum. I've had this interest since I was in kindergarten.
I was prompted to think about this two-figure set from Britains AWI range while engaged in this thread at Civil War Memory. Kevin Levin's special area of interest is Petersburg's Battle of the Crater. He and some of his readers drew attention to the utter absence of the many black soldiers who fought there from depictions of this battle marketed by Conte Collectibles, another high end toy soldier company and one I have patronized in the past. Conte also has an extensive plastic play set business and its Civil War range represents the Crater. Although Conte has produced four excellent African American figures from the colored 54th Massachusetts infantry regiment, none of these are reproduced in plastic and are not included part of the 192 figures in its Crater play set, or Conte's other two plastic play sets compatible with this item.
Another true confession. I own hundreds of these matte finished ACW toy soldiers after a decade of collecting, and yet I have yet to purchase either Conte's 54th MA figures or the few (inferior) sculpts of this unit produced a number of years ago by W. Britains when it was under different ownership. It is not that I do not like them - Ken Osen, who now is head sculptor for W. Britians, did the Conte figures and they are excellent - but there was always another group of toy soldiers that I wanted more, and I rationalize waiting on these because there were fewer situations when I could deploy them in a diorama, as colored troops came into active service at the midpoint in the war. Since this collection is a substantial drain on my discretionary income, I've had to make hard choices about what investments to make.
These justifications don't really cut it. I don't have the space to set up the dioramas of my dreams and the figures are many ranks deep in an upstairs bookcase in my home. At the very heart of the matter, this collection is an expensive adult hobby playing out a boyhood fantasy, and none of my toy Civil War soldiers (or playmates) back then were black, either. Except for a brief period when I was a teen-aged Civil War Reenacter in a Confederate cavalry troop based in upstate New York, my orientation has always been toward the Union perspective. But I am still left with a quandary and second guessing my excuses.
I cannot speak for others who collect these kinds of figures. I do know that the ACW period tends to do well in markets East of the Mississippi and has less of a draw elsewhere. I can only assume that the vast majority of collectors are male and with sufficient disposable income to lay out the considerable sums required every year to feed this rather addictive habit. The only colored regiment from the American Civil War that the general public is aware of is the 54th Massachusetts, made famous by the movie "Glory", and that is why it alone is represented in the small number of figures available that depict black soldiers. And though I am an exception, as a rule there is far more interest both the reenacting and the toy soldier collecting communities in confederate subject matter.
The American War of Independence, on the other hand, has a stronger international market for toy soldier collectors, particularly in the British Commonwealth. I do not know the sales generated for W. Britians by the three figures of the 1st Rhode Island Light Infantry, a unit brigaded with the New Jersey troops commanded by my ancestor Elias Dayton at Yorktown, but they clearly were seen as appropriate subject matter. The light company of this regiment, which these figures actually depict, was part of Lafayette's command and fought in the assault of Redoubt #10 along with my ancestor Aaron Ogden. The regiment had several segregated companies of black, mulatto and Indian soldiers, thought African American soldiers were integrated in some regiments and militia companies during the war. Others fought for their freedom in British and Hessian units.
Collectors of British military figures, particularly those depicting the Victorian era, are accustomed to depictions of Tommy Atkins facing racially diverse adversaries. W. Britains has a new Zulu War line in both traditional glossy and matte finish that looks to be extremely popular with collectors. The Zulu line in particular takes great pains to accurately depict the various regiments in Cetshwayo's' impis without round-eyed caricature. I would love to collect these figures, but I do not. I stick with the American Civil War. It is not worth risking a divorce by expanding my habit to other periods and the size of my collection thereby.
So we come back to the question of why the Civil War regiments on my shelves are still monochrome when there are several appropriate figures available to represent those African Americans who fought in blue? And would spending the $90 bucks or so it would take to rectify that omission really buy me indulgence? I am sure it is not so simple, though I am left uneasy about its implications. What we learn from our innocent play as children creates assumptions and blind spots that even as reflective adults we may not readily recognize. When I played "Civil War" as a boy, I did so in my own image. Perhaps it is that simple. All I know for sure is that this stuff is hard.
My adviser in graduate school gave me some very good advice when she told me that you may never feel finished with what you write, but the time comes when it is done with you. I may have reached that place for now in this series on matters of race and memory. I certainly do not have a way of wrapping it all up in a satisfying conclusion, and it would have been hubris indeed to think that this could be done in a few blog posts, however thoughtful.
This same adviser taught me to be wary of conclusions based on partial understandings. There are too many examples of polices, programs, and strategies that fail to address the root causes of a problem by only treating a symptom, or fail to appreciate the synergy among a multitude of causal factors. Ethnicity in America is far more complex than the dynamics of black and white that I chose to write about here. The same is true at the very least for class, creed, politics and gender.
Yet it is also important to act, to make a decision and adapt in a timely fashion to new information and changing circumstances. If you do this without a framework for understanding these changes you can only muddle through. There may be significant implications for making the wrong decision, but worse still is to fail to decide at all.
There is a difference between being able to discriminate and discrimination. One may question the basis for our judgments, but not the fact that we value one thing more highly than another. Cultural sensitivity does not require that we accept human rights abuses that are the norm elsewhere. Self awareness requires facing up the legacy of such abuses at home.
I believe that people act, even if unintentionally, within an arena of choice that is unique to their experience and circumstances. The same applies to institutions, which are essentially repetitive patterns of behavior. We are not always rational actors, dispassionately weighing costs and benefits, incentives and threats: otherwise Wall Street would be a very boring place and no one would remember Shakespeare. You cannot blame externalities alone for the circumstances you face. But nor can you blame the victim while being silent about the crime and its legacy.
They tried something different in South Africa after apartheid, an experiment that has yet to run its course. The idea that truth and reconciliation was not only possible but to be actively sought and sustained is a revolutionary one. I have seen a small part of its impact and I still am left with more questions than answers. Still I believe that talking about the past and accepting our individual and collective responsibility for what we make of it in the present is a prerequisite, if we are ever to reconcile memory and denial, guilt and accountability, what we came from and what we can hope to be.
Writing this series of posts on race and responsibility came on me quite unexpectedly, and I am not at all sure where it may lead. I wanted to talk through some of what it prompts me to think and feel, and so I called my father. I wanted to ask him about one of his experiences during the Civil Rights era, when he was an Episcopal seminarian in Massachusetts and one of his activist classmates was murdered in Alabama.
Religion is not a regular topic of conversation in our family. Both of my parents came from families of faith, and yet neither my sister nor I was raised in a particular denomination, or even went to a formal church. I attended an Episcopal boarding school and a Quaker college, but in neither case were these decisions based on their religious character. Today Dad composes and orchestrates choral music that reflects a deeply individual and organic faith. I have vivid childhood memories of the Martin Luther King service he would hold in the school chapel, back in the days when he was a headmaster and before there was a National Holiday, that featured Stevie Wonder's Happy Birthday and my father's clear tenor singing Abraham, Martin and John:
Anybody here seen my old friend Martin? Can you tell me where he's gone? He freed lotta people but it seems the good they die young I just looked around and he's gone.
Dad holds a B.D. from what is now Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, but chose not to be ordained at graduation. I asked him if his choice was influenced by the death of his fellow seminarian and what he drew from that experience.
My father replied that the decision not to get ordained was made practically before he went to Seminary. While a Yale undergraduate, he studied religion and was a deacon with chaplain William Sloane Coffin, Jr. Bill Coffin was Dad's lifelong mentor, and the one who encouraged him to apply for the seminary fellowship because it offered the space to engage with the very questions of spirituality and social justice that made my father question whether he should become a minister. Dad went on to say that the murder of his classmate in 1965 "confirmed in my mind that the church had to get out of its sanctuary and that as a layman I could do more...and people should speak from the position of faith to do so."
Dad describes his own growing activism and the late night conversations with his fellow seminarians in which "we were honing our positions and our hearts on what had to be done." He remembers his classmate Jonathan Daniels as a complex man, and totally non-violent. "I was in a very different place than he was, in terms of active activism and spirituality" he told me. "In his liturgical way he could sing the Magnificat and feel as if that was his calling, a true Epiphany, and I wasn't there yet. I was studying religion rather than living it the way he was. I was much closer to the activism, on the verge, but there were too many easy rationalizations for not going down to Selma. They weren't about self-protecting - I was not as concerned about personal harm, though perhaps I should have been - but felt I had obligations at school...When he went to Selma with the 1st wave, a couple of seminarians went with him..."
Jonathan Daniels responded to Martin Luther King's March 7th, 1965 call for clergy of all faiths to come down and support their efforts of voting rights marchers in Alabama. Realizing that a brief visit by outsiders was not a sufficient expression of solidarity, he and fellow seminarian Judith Upham returned to Cambridge only long enough to request permission to return to Alabama for the rest of the semester. After taking his exams in May, Daniels went back a third time to continue his work integrating a local Episcopal church, living with a black family while he tutored school children and helped register black people to vote.
He and a group of nearly 30 protesters were arrested on August 13th, 1965 while picketing white-owned stores in Fort Deposit, Alabama. All but five juvenile members of the group were held in the Hayneville jail for a week in incredibly cramped, fetid conditions until they were released but without transport back to Fort Deposit. Daniels, along with a Catholic priest and two young black women, walked down the street to Varner's Grocery Store to get soft drinks, and were met on the steps by Tom L. Coleman, a state highway department engineer and unpaid special deputy who confronted them with a shotgun. According to one of the young women with them, Ruby Sales, Coleman shouted at them; "Get off my goddam property before I blow your goddam brains out, you black bastards!" He then leveled his shotgun at her, and Daniels pulled her aside as Coleman fired, killing him instantly. Priest Richard F. Morrisroe grabbed the other two young people and ran, taking a second blast to his lower back which critically injured him.
The killing shocked the Episcopal Church. It came two weeks after President Johnson signed the National Voting Rights Act into law, and just days after the Watts Riots in Los Angeles that officially left 34 people killed (28 African Americans), 1,072 people injured, and 4,000 people arrested. Lyndon Johnson's White House tapes record a conversation he had with his chief civil rights aide Lee White about a request for assistance to help the Daniels family bring their son's body back home to Keene, NH. My father was a pallbearer at the funeral on August 24th, and recalls linking arms along with Stokeley Carmichael.
Dad told me that he remembers preaching at chapel that fall - by then the killer had been acquitted of manslaughter - and that his sermon grew out of Matthew 10:34 "Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword." Dad called it "the hard realistic message that change would not come without sacrifice." Peace and social justice work continues to be a central part of my father's life and a formative example for my own.
This conversation was a great gift to both of us. We got into some of the racial themes I've been exploring these last few days, and particularly how we remember and internalize the past. "Memory and denial are kissing cousins", said my father. He said the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel are embedded in his heart:
"In regard to cruelties committed in the name of a free society, some are guilty, while all are responsible."
The difference between guilt and responsibility is a key distinction for me. I believe that is where we will pick up the thread tomorrow.
One evening around our cooking fire in southern Africa, the Environmental Shepherds of ≠Khoadi ||Hôas Conservancy got to talking about animals, and in particular the ones that we thought we most resembled. I remember that Harry chose the tiny pearl spotted owl as his personal totem, but what stands out from the rest was what the one African woman in our number had to say. Landine !Guim said she was a baboon. Had we been in America, I would have been appalled, given the horrible slur that this analogy signifies in our society. Landine surprised me with her explanation. "I am like that one" she said in her halting English, "because I am always looking under rocks to see what is there."
There are some very heavy rocks out there.
For the last couple of days, I've been looking under stones, thinking hard about how our racial values and attitudes get internalized and overcome. Does what we come from predetermine who we are or can hope to be, or are we truly masters of our own destinies? The problem with this kind of polemical choice lies in its assumptions about the nature of the problem, grounded in the old nature v. nurture dichotomy. I'm afraid a deeper understanding and any conclusion is going to require a far more complex hypothesis.
I recently heard conservative intellectual and Hoover Institution Senior Fellow Shelby Steele speaking on the radio about African American racial masking", and particularly the bargain it makes with liberal white guilt. Take a few minutes to listen.
It has been a long while since I've had my self perception on matters of race challenged so directly, and I confess there is part of me that wants to reject the message by discrediting the messenger. Shelby Steele is that most uncomfortable of liberalism's critics, a conservative African American, someone who challenges the multicultural narrative of mainstream progressives and whose motives we naturally suspect. Challenges to our deeply held beliefs and assumptions do not come from those who agree with us. They frequently come from those who once held the same beliefs, and somewhere along the way broke ranks with the dominant view.
Steele asserts that the primary focus of the civil-rights era was a legitimate quest to remove racial barriers. In the shift to the black-power era, Steele sees a paradigm shift, away from racial uplift and agency, where blacks assume responsibility for themselves, to a "race is destiny" mode. As the counterculture merged with the civil-rights movement, America was exposed for its racial hypocrisy and, consequently, lost its moral authority. Here, "white guilt" became the moral framework for America. Steele argues that liberal whites embraced guilt for two reasons: to avoid being seen as racists and to embrace a vantage point where they could mete out benefits to disadvantaged blacks through programs such as affirmative action. Steele believes blacks made a deal with the devil by exchanging responsibility and control over their destiny for handouts. He sees a deficiency in black middle-class educational achievement, further raising questions about claims of lack of equal opportunity. Despite these omissions, the cultural analysis of America's loss of moral authority for its exposed racism has resonance today.
I do not know whether I can accept Steele's premise, but I also know I cannot afford to reject it out of hand. I am going to have to engage more deeply with what he has said and written, as well as with his critics, and I am going to have to take a giant step outside my mind, gain a bit of altitude, so I can test Steele's hypothesis againsts at my own understanding and experience.
I grew up at a progessive boarding school headed by my father in the Hudson Valley of New York. The academic community that nurtured me was very non racial and yet only minimally diverse in terms of race. There was a rich life of the mind in our family, and strong examples demonstrated by both of my parents that each of us has intrinsic worth, and that one person is inherently no better or worse than another. Particularly in our formative years, my younger sister and I were treated with great equanimity, and I believe as a result developed a mutual appreciation for the talents and abilities of the other without having to compete for our parents' attention or validation.
There is no denying that ours was a priviledged upbringing. In the prep school environment, the headmaster occupies a unique social position that influences not only the economic lives but also the home lives of every member of the community. My playmates might have been the children of the maintenance staff or of senior faculty members, but though I was initially unaware of it, the fact that I was the headmaster's son was not lost on their parents. Dad and I had a heart to heart when I was nearing High School age about the challenges of being the son of the headmaster as well as a student, and it must have been a relief to him when I said the idea of boarding school sounded good to me and I was looking forward to going somewhere else.
I attended the local public school until 7th grade, when the positive benefits of being connected to people of different socio-econmic backgrounds and with deeper community roots were outweighed by a precipitous decline in the quality of the education provided. Issues of class, rather than race, were most apparent in the schools I attended, but then, there were only a couple of African American families in the towns where I grew up, and fewer than 11 black students at the boarding school I attended. This did not cause me to doubt my own values and attitudes about race until college, when one day I found myself filling out a survey that arrived in my student mailbox from a campus alliance of persons of color inquiring into my experience of racial diversity. The more questions I answered, the more uncomfortable I became, for there was little in my upbringing, in the near absense of persons of color, to suggest that my own beliefs about racial equality were anything other than empty intellectualism.
When I was an undergraduate English Major, I wrote my senior thesis on William Faulkner and an idea I had that those stories he set in the Native American past were a means of getting a fresh perspective on the all consuming issue of race in which he as a white southern male was deeply implicated. My subsequent years in Africa had that effect for me.
I made myself a promise when I decided to go to Africa after college to teach English in newly-independant Namibia. I made myself promise not to try and become a "good white man" in Africa to compensate for the painful legacy of racial injustice in my own country and my own position of priviledge within it. I also accepted responsibility not to take a tour through the lives of others, not to expect absolution or take advantage of the very flattering role that the situation offered me as a priviledged English-speaking white male to be catered to as a patron who held the keys to economic and social advantage.
It is well that I was deliberate in my approach to this new experience and the lives of people who would be impacted by that choice. For the first and only time in my life I was a minority, though one with special status and priviledge that in some ways parallels my childhood as the son of the headmaster. I was the subject of great interest but also held at a distance, with people initially wearing the mask of what they wanted to appear to me. It took months and years of shared experience living together for those masks to start to lift.
During our last years in Namibia, my wife remarked to me after a visit from officials from a development NGO to the community where we lived and worked that our African friends treated these visitors far more gently and with more open expressions of friendship than they now did with us. I replied that that was because our relationship with the community had changed, and they could risk challenging, offending and being more open with us than they could with these others.
People have many layers, of course, and wear multiple masks. Matters of race and class and gender identity coexist and play off each other. We show different sides in different situations. We are not color-blind, but can we hope to be more self-aware about what we project on others, and what we expect of ourselves? More on that in a future post.
