Category: Politics

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Changing the NSCDA

When my grandmother had me proposed for membership in the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America (NSCDA) in the mid-1990s, I understood that I needed to choose one of my many notorious colonial American ancestors to qualify. My great-grandmother, grandmother, grand-aunts, mother, and mother’s first cousins had all joined through different colonial ancestors. I was already familiar with the well-researched family chart my grandmother had given my mother, which had inspired me to embark on my genealogical quest years before. By my count, I had eighteen colonial-era men listed in the NSCDA’s Register of Ancestors (ROA), and at least another ten of my male colonial ancestors met the Dames qualifications but did not yet appear on the ROA.

To my great and lasting disappointment, however, the direct ancestor I admired the most, whose influence over colonial neighbors and society was significant and reached into the two earliest New England colonies and then beyond, did not appear on the list.

She was a woman.

The NSCDA’s requirements for qualifying ancestors specified that an ancestor had to have given some significant public service to their colony, and the categories were almost exclusively limited to military service, public office holders, founders of significant colonial towns, and religious leaders. They were male, practically without exception, because only males could serve in those formal capacities, and only the signatures of the men appeared on public documents proving such service. The names of women rarely appeared in public records. It especially jarred me to realize that these men who qualified based on founding significant towns such as Providence, Rhode Island, were almost always married, but their wives were never listed as founders.

One of the female exceptions to the NSCDA’s Boys Club was my favorite ancestor’s sister, Anne Marbury Hutchinson. Anne was notorious for being prosecuted and then exiled from Boston in the winter of 1638 for having the audacity to preach to the women of Boston and even (gasp!) challenge the positions of several respected local preachers. She and Mary Dyer, another outspoken preacher, appeared on Massachusetts’s list of accepted ancestors. Anne’s sister and Mary’s friend, Katherine Marbury Scott, who moved to Providence Plantations when Anne was tried for heresy, did not appear in the ROA.

I asked about adding Katherine to the list. I’d happily prove her preaching, notoriety, and challenge to Massachusetts Governor John Endecott. I don’t recall if I only approached the Arkansas Registrar or communicated with the Rhode Island Registrar or genealogist about her. Ultimately, I was told to pick someone else. I was told that unlike Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer, Katherine didn’t famously preach, nor was she arrested, tried, or punished for her religious objections.

But she did, and she was!

To the dismay of Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop – the man who acted as her sister’s accuser, judge, jury, and executioner – Katherine influenced Roger Williams, the famous Anabaptist preacher who was the first colonial advocate for the separation of church and state. At least partly due to her influence, Williams agreed that infant baptism was inappropriate and broke from the Puritans of Massachusetts.1Winthrop, John, The History of New England from 1630-1649, Hosmer, ed., p. 297, available at https://archive.org/details/winthropsjournal00wint.

Katherine and her husband were the first known Quakers in the American colonies and spread the Quaker philosophy and practice among the populace. In her late 40s, she was imprisoned, stripped to the waist in public, suffered ten cruel lashes from a knotted whip, and threatened with hanging if she didn’t keep her mouth shut from here on out. Two of her young daughters – one only 11 years old – went to prison with her. Katherine’s crime was objecting to the mutilation of Quakers. The older imprisoned daughter later married one of the mutilated Quaker men in England.

But somehow, this wouldn’t count? Katherine – and her daughters Patience and Mary – should qualify as NSCDA ancestors because of their overt advocacy of religious freedom.

Americans universally claim religious freedom as one of the founding principles of our country. The Protestant Reformation was in full swing when religious separatists boarded the Mayflower in 1620, joined the Winthrop fleet in 1630, fled to William Penn’s Quaker utopia in the 1690s, and embraced the Great Awakening in the 1730s.

In fits and starts, and despite theocratic local governments in the New England and Mid-Atlantic colonies and parish control of government functions in Virginia and Carolina, notions of religious freedom spread and permeated all of colonial America. George Mason’s Virginia Declaration of Rights declared that reason and conviction should direct a person’s religion, not force or violence. The first item in the Bill of Rights appended to the United States Constitution includes the free exercise of religion and the freedom from government interference in religion. In 1789, France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man – heavily influenced by American ideals – maintained that “No one shall be disquieted on account of his opinions, including his religious views.”

On top of all of this, the NSCDA limited its membership to women but excluded nearly every colonial woman from their list of qualifying ancestors. Why? Did its governing leaders honestly think their entire gender had so little to offer in the colonial era? Did they not understand that no colony could succeed without women? The founders of Jamestown certainly came to understand that in short order. Even so, the NSCDA’s Register of Ancestors included very few of Jamestown’s early women. Those it did include had to be wealthy, powerful, and independent – something legally impossible under coverture laws except in extremely limited circumstances.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of this group.

In passive-aggressive protest, I let my application linger for several years. Genealogy was my hobby and passion, and I could have chosen any of the ancestors my relatives had already proven. The injustice of not accepting Katherine rankled me.

My grandmother insisted I join, and my mother badgered me to complete my application. Neither could understand why I didn’t pick someone already on the list and get the paperwork done. After all, genealogical research was my passion, and I could copy any of the applications of my many Dames relatives in short order. It wasn’t that big a deal, was it?

Yes, damn it, it was.

Bowing to their pressure, I finally decided to join based on Katherine’s husband’s recognized service. He was wealthy and influential but didn’t impress me nearly as much as she did. He seemed a solid, principled man, sure. Still, he only embodied the usual among my colonial ancestors: he was an educated landowner who bravely went to a new place to start a new life and took part in the political affairs of his community. Beyond that, he did not spark my imagination.

Two or three years ago, the NSCDA had a change of heart. At a national level, it decided to push to include more women in the Register of Ancestors. It set a goal of having 250 females included on the ROA by the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The individual colonial states set the guidelines for ancestor qualifications, though, and other than Virginia, the colonial societies seemed reluctant to widen the qualifying “service” women might have legally been able to give. Foot-dragging stymied this otherwise attainable goal.

Rhode Island, where Katherine Marbury Scott lived, finally expanded their qualifications in 2024. (I’ve been watching for it.) Other colonial states are just as slow, if not slower. For example, Eliza Lucas Pinckney still doesn’t appear on South Carolina’s list of acceptable women despite her herculean accomplishments in cultivating indigo and refining the process of extracting its dye. Because of her singular efforts, indigo became one of her colony’s three staple exports in the 18th century. Massachusetts finally expanded its list of qualifications so applicants for membership could claim Women of Distinction. The first colonial American poet, Anne Bradstreet, finally counts.

The blatant misogyny and snobbery of the organization still flabbergasts me. Are the NSCDA’s colonial societies afraid that if they expand the qualifications to include women, men who did the same important things – men of science and letters, for example – might suddenly qualify, and the “wrong sorts” will pollute the Register of Ancestors?

I have a few men of science and letters in my tree who I’d like to include, like Dr. Benjamin West of Providence, Rhode Island, a prominent man of both science and letters who never held public office, never preached, never served as an officer in the military, and wasn’t wealthy enough to join the board of organizers of what is now Brown University.

I want to claim John Perkins, who, as a youth, led the important Moravian expedition that ultimately resulted in the founding of Salem, North Carolina. He was the son of a horse thief and a notorious adulteress but became prosperous, prominent, and one of the largest landowners in 18th Century Western Carolina. Without a doubt, he represents the wrong sort for the Colonial Dames. Never mind that the murderer John Billington qualifies because he came on the Mayflower or that his fellow Mayflower passengers Edward Doty, Stephen Hopkins, William Latham, and Richard More also built impressive rap sheets in colonial America.

The Dames’ snob factor is real. Several larger southern state societies of the NSCDA actively refuse admission to genealogically qualified women, including the legacies of their current members. While such selectivity and elitism may appeal to some, it’s appalling to others. The NSCDA is a lineage society, not an exclusive country club.

Am I complicit in this snobbery and misogyny? I have been a member of the NSCDA for over two decades. I have served on the Arkansas Society’s board since 2005 and have been its Registrar or Assistant Registrar since 2013. As Registrar, I process the applications of candidates for membership. I do most of the genealogy research for our candidates myself. I am intimately familiar with the policies for qualifying ancestors. I am also intimately familiar with the snobbery.

At a Regional meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, I sat at a table with a member from Memphis. The evening’s entertainment was an actor portraying Thomas Jefferson. A notorious DNA project had recently confirmed Thomas Jefferson to be the father of Sally Hemings’s enslaved children. I remarked to my dinner companion that because of DNA technology, it would be much easier for Black women to join the NSCDA. To my knowledge, there were no Black Dames at that time.

She gave me a look of abject horror. Apparently realizing that she shouldn’t be racist, she said that such people couldn’t join because they couldn’t prove legitimate descent from the qualifying ancestor. I laughed and told her that DNA proves actual descent, and the NSCDA has never required legitimacy. Her reaction to that news made me think she was about to have a fit of apoplexy.

For years, in the password-protected section of the NSCDA website, a letter from a prominent early Dame, Clarinda Pendleton Lamar, was posted as an example of who to invite to join the Dames. Clarinda Lamar cautioned proposers to consider whether the candidate for the NSCDA was a credit to her race, her ancestors, and her community. During my first term as Arkansas Registrar, the NSCDA’s national president visited us and was present for a board meeting. At the time, two existing members had to write proposal letters to suggest a candidate for Dames membership. They had to know the candidate well and vouch for her. Our bylaws required us to read the proposal letters aloud during two separate board meetings, after which the board would vote on whether to invite the proposed candidate to apply for membership in the NSCDA. To the best of my knowledge, Arkansas has never rejected a proposal.

When we got to the proposal-reading portion of the agenda, the national president suggested reading Clarinda Lamar’s letter aloud to remind us what qualities we should look for in a candidate. After reading the “credit to her race” line, I stopped. “Well, that’s awful,” I said. Nervous laughter went around the table.

I advocated removing the Lamar letter from the website at subsequent national conferences in Washington, D.C. While most of Clarinda Lamar’s contributions to society were significant and good, that letter represented the worst of what we can be. It was patently unsuitable as the lodestar of membership. At one meeting of all the Registrars nationally, around 2016 or 2018, I repeated my request to remove it. On receiving pushback, I lifted my middle finger prominently skyward. I declared that Clarinda Lamar’s racism did not speak for me or the Arkansas Society and that having the letter there was an embarrassment. She was a product of her time, yes, but just like we stopped ignoring when people in positions of power demanded sex from their subordinates – and I specifically mentioned Thomas Jefferson and casting couches – we needed to stop ignoring racism because by ignoring it, we promoted it.

There was a general outcry, but after the meeting, several Registrars approached me privately and thanked me for pointing that out. A couple of others later admitted they had never read the letter until my words prompted them to do so, and they agreed that it should be taken down. In 2024, the National Society overhauled the website. The Lamar letter no longer enjoys publication there. Nevertheless, my beloved friend and successor Arkansas Registrar has never let me live down “the day [I] flipped off Mrs. Lamar” in front of 50 devoted Colonial Dames.

In October 2016, at another National meeting in Washington DC, I found myself seated between my counterpart in Vermont, who I liked very much and remain in contact with, and a woman from Arizona. Barack Obama was about to leave the Oval Office, and Donald Trump, the primary denier of Obama’s American citizenship, wanted his job. This Arizona woman bragging about her close personal friends the Koch brothers, stuck in my craw. I turned to my Vermont friend and suggested we ask the DC Dames if they’d reach out to the Obama sisters to ask if they’d like to join our lineage society. After all, they qualified through their father’s ancestors. I would be happy to do the genealogy research, and getting our hands on their father’s birth certificate, which would be necessary to prove their colonial lineage, was a matter of public consumption at this point. The Obama girls also had a half-Indonesian aunt who qualified because of the same lineage. We would finally integrate the Dames!

We did approach the DC Dames’ Registrar about it, but nothing ever happened. I remain ready, willing, and able to compile the applications for the Obama sisters and their paternal aunt.

I have taken other steps to make changes from within this organization. I have completed applications for NSCDA membership for women whose home societies would not let them join, and then I’ve processed transfers to their home societies. The National Society requires that transfers be automatically approved. Alabama, Georgia, and the Carolinas have all benefitted from my end-run around their blackballing town committees. I will do it again whenever I can. I can’t abide the snobbery.

Change comes from within. I can do more to challenge the Colonial Dames’ culture of elitism and snobbery as a member than I can by refusing to participate and letting it go on. I can advocate for change, I can take steps to rectify wrongs, and I can, incrementally, make it better. I do not support racism or snobbery any more than Katherine Marbury Scott supported religious oppression.

Footnotes

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Disturbing Dream

I deactivated my X/Twitter account (aka, Xitter), and the next night, I had a dream.

See, I have this nifty electric car that is not a Tesla but looks like one. My car and I were on a road trip. One of our regular overnight stops was a cave in a desert. I pulled into the cave, which I expected to be deserted, and was surprised to see a tractor parked inside. There was nothing remarkable about this tractor. It was an ordinary John Deere sort of small-ish tractor like those we often see on country roads in Arkansas during the farming season.

Curious, I walked around the tractor. Parked on the other side of it was a miniature Cybertruck. It was smaller than one of those little Datsun pickups from the 1970s but not as small as a Barbie Dream Car. Its windows had steel shades on the outside. It looked like a toy but functional. I took a picture but couldn’t get a signal to text it to [whomever]. I left the cave to get a signal to send the text.

Focused on my phone, I was startled when Diane Munzer Fisher tapped me on the shoulder. “Oh, hey,” I said. “You found me. There’s a tiny Cybertruck in the cave.” (I do not know why Diane would have been looking for me. We only ever see each other at college reunions and on social media.)

“Don’t steal it,” a male voice said. Diane and I turned to see a young man lying near the cave entrance, sacked out in a sleeping bag. We had not noticed him before, but he was only a couple of feet away. He reached out and grabbed my leg.

“Why would we steal a Cybertruck?” Diane asked, disdain dripping from her pores. No kidding, I thought, and shook my leg free.

The young man was blond, with a broad face. He looked like a blond Elon Musk. “It’s MY truck,” he said. “My dad gave it to me.”

Diane and I entered the cave. The young man followed us. We realized he was very young – in his middle teens at most. “My name is Wilder Musk,” he said.

The cave’s walls were now sheetrocked, and posters of Tesla and SpaceX employees papered the brightly lit interior.

“Wilder, huh?” Diane asked. She pointed to a poster featuring a woman. “As in, Elaine Wilder, the Chief of Technology and Development?”

“That’s my mom,” young Wilder said.

We realized that Elon had yet another child to add to the dozen or so the media knows about already. The man spreads his seed far and wide indeed.

I noticed a hair tickling my palate and put two fingers into my mouth to pull it out. It stuck on something in my throat. I started gagging and coughing.

“Let me help,” Diane said. After some wrestling and much more coughing and gagging, she pulled a gross, tangled wad of hair out. (Yuck.)

The apparent moral of the story [dream] is that Cybertrucks and the proliferation of Elon Musk cause hairballs.

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Jesus Speaks

My dear friend and neighbor laughed like a maniac when she delivered a gift to me this morning. She’s been warning me for days that she had something special for me.

At last: ANSWERS!

“Wi-thout” – just the way your preacher says it.

Naturally, I checked with Jesus on the important issues. He said, “Apartheid and genocide are evil, racism is a scourge on humanity, there’s nothing wrong with being LGBTQIA+ (in fact, it’s perfectly normal and accepted throughout the animal kingdom), abortions should be available on demand, corporations are not people, no books should ever be banned, humans are wrecking the environment, immigrants should be welcomed and refugees should be welcomed with open arms, and everyone should all ignore all mutually consensual activity involving other people’s genitals.”

Also, he reminded me that he does not now, and never has, identified as white, Republican, or Christian.

I asked a follow-up question at the request of a friend. “Why should we worship you instead of, say, Cthulhu?”

Jesus cringed.

He said, “Don’t worship me. That’s weird and stalkerish. I just want people to stop being dicks to each other.”

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Ritual Borders

Thirty years ago this week, the Berlin Wall fell. It encircled only part of the city, dividing it between East and West and serving as a metaphor for the contrasting ideologies of Eastern and Western Europe at the time.

Borders mark where one authority begins and another ends. We mark our borders with laws and signposts and walls. Sometimes, we can’t really see where the border is, but we know generally that over here is one place, and over there is another place. In 1889, 25-year-old journalist Rudyard Kipling was assigned to cover conflicts near the Khyber Pass, one of the few ways through the Hindu Kush and across the border between Afghanistan and what was then British India. Kipling described the pass as “a sword cut through the mountains” because the weather and terrain of the pass kill people. The mountains themselves were this border’s wall. The Pass lies on one of the main routes of the Silk Road that stretches across borders from Shanghai in the East to Spain in the West. In the shadow of that 10-foot-wide pass, Kipling wrote, “East is East, and West is West, and never the two shall meet.”

When British India split, the East remained India and Hindu, and the West became Pakistan and Muslim. The two shall never meet—except at the precisely choreographed “Beating Retreat” ceremony that has been performed at the Wagah-Attari border crossing for the last sixty years.

Picture this: a pair of ornate iron gates blocks passage on the road, a white line painted on the pavement between them (just like the floor of the bedroom you shared with your sister when you were eight); the black uniforms of the Pakistani Rangers trimmed in white, and on their heads, a giant black cockscomb rises at least two feet high. On the other side of those gates, Indian Border Security Forces wear khaki. Not to be outdone by the Pakistanis, they also wear giant cockscombs on their heads—in bright orange-red.

It’s the end of the day and time to lower the flags and go home. Drums beat a frantic tempo. On both sides, a master of ceremonies leads a call and response with grandstands packed with hundreds of spectators who wave flags and yell with nationalist fervor. This is a border pep rally. Machine gun-toting, sword-brandishing guards flex their muscles, grimace, and point thumbs down at their cross-border rivals. They march with giant steps and high kicks straight out of Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks. The guards on the opposite side of the gates are doing the exact same thing—same steps, same thumbs down, same silly walks. The ceremony ends with the lowering of flags and an exaggerated handshake between an Indian guard and his Pakistani counterpart.

Here’s a taste of the Beating Retreat border ritual:

And here’s a longer version. It’s quite a sight.

The Wagah-Attari border has been called the Berlin Wall of Asia. The Berlin Wall was that other place where East was East and West was West, even though “West” only meant a portion of a Western city surrounded on all four sides by East. The Wagah-Attari border may be the most uniquely ritualized one in the world, but the Berlin Wall is the standard by which all other borders are measured.

In the wake of World War II, France, the U.K., the U.S., and the Soviets each were to occupy a portion of Germany and its capital, even though Berlin lay 100 miles inside the Soviet zone of occupation. But in 1948, the Soviets tried to evict the other three allies from Berlin by imposing a land and river blockade. They cut power and stopped distributing food in the western-occupied sections of the city. The West responded with the Berlin Airlift, and the conflict between East and West ramped up.

Borders are arbitrary. They are a line drawn in sand, a mark on a map, a gate across a road. The idea is to keep things separated, to keep the bad guys out and the good guys safe.

A long time ago, on a continent far, far away, Mongol hordes regularly invaded their southern neighbors. The Southerners built a series of walls that were eventually joined into one because they were so tired of the constant invasions by those bad hombres. North is north, and south is south, and never the two shall meet in peace, right? I know this because I was once married to a man who refused to vacation north of the Mason-Dixon line, which, he firmly maintained, cut somewhere between Nashville and Louisville.

Chinese schoolchildren are taught that the Great Wall of China can be seen from space. When one of their astronauts admitted that he couldn’t see the wall despite trying hard with extra-sharp astronaut-caliber eyesight, there was some discussion of rewriting Chinese textbooks. But walls, it seems, are too important to let facts get in the way. Although China’s Great Wall can’t be seen from space, its air pollution can. Some things just don’t respect borders. 

People challenge borders. A matched pair of graves in the Netherlands sit in two cemeteries. The wife was Catholic, and her husband was Protestant, so they could not be buried in the same cemetery. They were laid to rest against the wall that divides the Catholic cemetery from the Protestant one. A stone hand reaches out from the top of each of their tombstones and clasps the hand from the other, defying the wall between them. Walls are made to be breached, and borders are made to be crossed.

Kipling’s “Ballad of East and West” starts with the western theft of an eastern horse. The theft was only possible because borders are porous. Under Soviet occupation, it turned out that many inhabitants of the Eastern Bloc preferred living in the West. Berlin’s border was very porous. Defectors found their way to Berlin and from there to the West through one of the 81 crossing points in the city.

After 15 years of defections, the Berlin Wall was built almost overnight in August 1961. Guards now simply shot people trying to cross from East to West. The Brandenburg Gate entered the collective consciousness as a symbol of freedom denied. The wall cut workers off from their jobs, prevented friends from seeing each other, and separated families. East was East and communist and totalitarian, and West was West and capitalist and democratic, and the two could not possibly coexist.

The Berlin Wall was not the first such border. In 1953, as East and West and North and South struggled for dominance in the Cold War, a line was drawn between the Koreas. Despite its name, the Korean Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, is probably the most heavily militarized border in the world. Like at Checkpoint Charlie, people in the DMZ’s no-man’s-land risk being shot on sight. 

In the 1970s, South Korea discovered four tunnels beneath the DMZ and accused the North of planning an invasion. The North hotly denied it, claiming the tunnels were coal mines. They had even blackened the walls of one tunnel to prove it. Oddly enough, the DMZ welcomes 1.2 million tourists every year, and yes, the tunnels are on the itinerary. Tourists can enter a conference room in a building that sits in both countries just to say they’ve been to the North. And there’s an observatory in the DMZ.

Unlike the Great Wall of China, the dividing line between the Koreas can be seen from space, at least at night when South Korea is as brightly lit as any other first-world country and North Korea is pitch-dark, not unlike a coal mine.

The Berlin Wall attracted tourists, too. In the summer of 1983, I went to Europe with a Eurail pass, a backpack, and a loose cadre of companions. When we arrived in Salzburg it was raining too hard for sightseeing, so a couple of the women in our group boarded a train for Berlin. They somehow got a visa to enter East Berlin. They saw a typical modern city when they got off the train in West Berlin. When they crossed to the other side of the wall, though, dull, brutalist, concrete block architecture greeted them. There were no neon signs or billboards. The people seemed as gray as the buildings. A week later, in Amsterdam, my friend Michelle was still stunned as she described the stark difference between East and West. 

East is East, West is West, North is North, and South is South, but people don’t define themselves by directions on a compass. Borders give a false impression that something significant lies on the other side. Borders sometimes may be more of an idea than a reality.

Hadestown is a relatively new musical on Broadway. It re-tells the myth of Orpheus trying to rescue his beloved Eurydice from the Underworld. Hades has put Eurydice and other unfortunates to work building a wall. Hades asks them, “Why do we build the wall?” “To keep us free,” they respond. “How does the wall keep us free?” “It keeps out the enemy.” “Who is the enemy?” “The enemy is Poverty.” Hades reminds the builders that the people on the other side of the wall want what the Underworld has: freedom–and a wall. Of course, no one is free to leave the underworld once they arrive.

The inequity of the Berlin Wall was immediately apparent to the West. Two American presidents, 25 years apart, stood before the wall and condemned it. John F. Kennedy gave his famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963. In 1987, Ronald Reagan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and spoke directly to the Eastern leaders, saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” 

Two years after Reagan’s speech, in the summer of 1989, reform and revolution spread through the Soviet Union and the satellite states of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Hungary. East Germans fled their country in droves. On November 4, 1989, half a million angry protesters filled the streets of East Berlin near the wall. To try to keep the population happy, on November 9th the East German government announced it would allow people to pass through checkpoints if their documents were in order. A journalist asked when the new rules would take effect. The government spokesperson didn’t know, so he said, “Immediately.”

But no one expected that it would just end, especially as it did—within hours. The news was broadcast at 8:00 that evening throughout Berlin. People began amassing at the wall demanding passage. At 10:45, lacking instructions and knowing that the announcement had been made, guards began allowing people through. East Germans swarmed the gates and were greeted jubilantly by West Berliners with flowers and champagne. The West claimed credit for the fall of the wall and the raising of the Iron Curtain that followed.

Saturday, on the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, some citizens of Berlin sent a gift to the people of the United States. They inscribed a 2.7-ton slab of the Berlin Wall with a letter addressed to President Trump, which closed with: “We would like to give you one of the last pieces of the failed Berlin Wall to commemorate the United States’ dedication to building a world without walls.” 

The White House rejected the gift. Apparently, our president doesn’t want a wall after all.

This post was originally a paper presented to the Æsthetic Club on 12 November 2019.

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Those Clueless Kids

I have had just about enough of people saying the 16 to 18-year-old students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida are being used by their elders for an agenda they don’t understand. It’s insulting to teenagers everywhere, and it’s insulting to yourself if you make that argument.

Why? Because when you were 16, 17, and 18, you didn’t do a damned thing unless you wanted to. I’m guessing that sometimes you even refused to do what you did want just because some adult liked the idea. Remember?

Sure, you might have grudgingly gone to church when you’d rather have slept in, or you grudgingly went to dinner at Grandma’s when you would have preferred to be with your friends, but when something really mattered to you, didn’t you stand your ground? Didn’t you push back against the adults who tried to force you?

I keep seeing the argument that these kids are far too organized to have done it by themselves, and know the talking points far too well. Let’s think about that.

Maybe – just maybe – those kids know the talking points because they are the same talking points that get trotted out whenever there is a mass shooting. These kids have lived with the horror of large-scale carnage their entire lives. They have heard the talking points and they have seen how nothing gets resolved because the politicians – the adults who actually have the power and ability to change the law – have said after every incident that “this isn’t the time to talk about it.”

And every time these kids and others just like them have buried their friends and noticed that these emperor politicians wear no clothes.

Rick Santorum’s statements that “these kids aren’t really doing anything” by speaking out and marching is one more example of a naked emperor. They are doing exactly what they CAN do. They are demanding that lawmakers take action. They aren’t old enough to be elected to office yet. When they are, watch out – they will be. And they will be the agents of the long-overdue change they demand.

And maybe – just maybe – they have had help from adults getting organized. Adults who care about the same things those kids care about: that bodies stop dropping to assault weapons, that reasonable gun laws be enacted and enforced, and that politicians who sell children for $1.05 to the NRA answer for how cheaply they value life – not to mention answering for the fact that they have sold their integrity for power.

Maybe – just maybe – those adults and even (gasp!) the kids themselves recognized that the adults weren’t the best faces for the TV interviews and to speak at the rally. Why? Because overwhelmingly, KIDS die in these mass shootings at their schools. The KIDS are righteously outraged that adults with the power to have prevented this carnage have failed to do so time and time and time again. That these adults smile smugly and say that they won’t stop selling the lives of children to the gun lobby because, you know, they NEED that blood money.

At least two adults refused to lend their notoriety to the Parkland kids because they felt the kids themselves were absolutely the best spokespeople for this travesty. Look up what George and Amal Clooney said to them. Never has “no” been said with so much love and respect and admiration.

And what do these kids think they can do, anyway? What possible examples in history can they look at to think they can effect change? Let’s consider that.

Guess how old Joan of Arc was when she led the French army to victory against the English. She was 17 at the Battle of Orleans and had already been fighting for three years – in a leadership role. A 13-year-old girl had made adults not just listen, but let her lead them into battle. She had something to say, she said it, she got the attention of the people who needed to hear it, she said it again, and she took the action she could take. She was just 18 when the British captured her and barely 19 when they burned her as a witch – a witch who dared to speak her truth to their power.

How old was Gilbert du Motier, the Marquis de LaFayette, when he came to America to help with the Revolution? Well, at 13 he was commissioned an officer in the French army. He was a major-general in the American Revolution at 19. And that, of course, was just the beginning. By Yorktown in 1781, he was confirmed beyond any doubt as a serious and able leader, and he was still only 26.

How about Alexander Hamilton? This brilliant guy was the same age as Lafayette and was one of his best friends during the six years of the Revolution. But even before the Revolution, he ran a major shipping company from the West Indies – at the age of 14. He designed the American economic structure before the age of 30. But when he was just a 17-year-old kid and wrote that famous essay that got him a one-way ticket to New York, he was already cognizant of horrific truths like the evils of slavery and the despair of poverty – truths that he championed the rest of his too-short life.

Oh, but these guys were “special.” We shouldn’t consider them. OK, let’s look for less stellar examples.

We don’t have to look far. Lots of them can be found right there in the Revolution.

James Monroe was 18 in 1776. He was a farmer. Two years before the Revolution – at the age of 16 – he and his school friends stormed the Virginia governor’s palace to seize arms for the Virginia militia. Do they want to argue that he was misled by his elders who had some nefarious plan in mind and wouldn’t have done it without their influence?

How about Nathan Hale, who was hanged by the British as a spy at 21? He was the same age as Lafayette and Hamilton and went on his first major spying mission at the age of 17. That’s right, he was the same age as those kids at Parkland when he snuck behind British lines and gathered serious intelligence for Washington. He was so unaware of what was really going on that he regretted having but one life to give for his country. But he probably didn’t really have a clue, you know?

Let’s talk about Sybil Luddington.This 16-year-old girl’s efforts dwarfed Paul Revere’s 14-mile trip to warn of the British invasion. She rode all night long, for 40 miles, to alert the militias that the Redcoats Were Coming. She just didn’t get a poem – and damn it, she deserved one. Is anyone seriously going to argue that, because of her tender years, she did not really know what she was doing or why she was doing it?

Do you know why the rebelling colonists won that war, against impossible odds and against the superpower of the day? Because KIDS thought it was important and DID SOMETHING ABOUT IT. They couldn’t remake the laws, so they made a country.

And don’t let me get started on the Civil Rights Movement or Vietnam, and the hugely important major role played by CHILDREN – people not old enough to vote, to drink alcohol or buy cigarettes, or to hold office. I’ll rant on about things like Kent State and the Freedom Riders and the Little Rock desegregation crisis, and the kids that made things happen and changed the world.

Never try to argue that teenagers aren’t perfectly capable of recognizing a problem and taking action when it matters enough to them right there in that moment.

Because I will call B.S.

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Conflating Shakespeare

High drama of worthy of Shakespeare is taking place in the presence of the Senate Intelligence Committee today.

Shakespeare would definitely have written a play about this.

It ultimately breaks down to this:

TRUMP:  Will no one rid me of this meddlesome FBI Director?

SESSIONS and ROSENSTEIN: (mount up and ride toward Canterbury)

TRUMP: He’s dead! We killed him!

ROSENSTEIN: WTF? Jeff and I just went to Rochester to tour the castle and have some pub food. We didn’t kill anyone. Although we did kind of tag somebody’s bumper in the parking lot. Sorry.

COMEY’S GHOST: I am the campaign’s spirit, doomed for a certain term to walk the night and for the day confined to fast in fires till the foul crimes done in my days of nature are burnt and purged away. But that I am forbid to tell the secrets of my prison-house, I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres, thy knotted and combinèd locks to part, and each particular hair to stand on end, like quills upon the fretful porpentine.

…But this eternal blazon must not be to ears of flesh and blood.

SENATE: That’s fine. We’ll be glad to hear what you have to say in closed session.

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Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Also, That Rapert Person.

The U.S. Constitution needs amendment. Outdated and imperfect, it lacks relevance to today’s culture and technology. More than once recently I’ve seen or heard it said that calling a national constitutional convention would be a good idea.

Brought to you by the Founding Fathers. The Founding Mothers were busy doing all the rest of the work and not getting paid for it.

There are Things To Be Fixed! We could abolish the Electoral College and dispose of icky gay marriage and slow the flow of corporate money into political arenas and require Congress to have the same health care and retirement as everybody else. Some of these proposals are mean-spirited. Others have merit. Some are just batshit clueless.

Jason Rapert’s Role

Arkansans from Eureka Springs to Little Rock to Smackover gratefully appreciate the voters of the 35th District who elected Jason Rapert to the state senate. We know Rapert as that Baptist preacher whose demonstrations of Christian love are yuger than the unpresidentedly yuge crowds at the most recent inauguration. Civil rights lawyers love him because Rapert has never encountered an unconstitutional bill he wouldn’t sponsor. Die-hard fans of schadenfreude remember his dedicated finesse as a  Wikipedia editor. We all delight in Rapert’s vigilant attention to our ethical decrepitude; he knows his fellow Arkansans aren’t moral enough to be moral all by themselves. Bless his tiny little paternalistic heart for sticking by us.

Rapert actually floated the constitutional convention idea this spring to the Arkansas legislature. He wanted, among other things, to ban abortion completely and to redefine marriage as one man and his silently servile brood mare. We expect he would have also wanted a brand new constitution to ban gay people from getting together in any way, especially on Sundays. Thankfully, the legislature shot down the idea with all those guns they decided to allow on college campuses since that always ends well.

Just, No

From a progressive and libertarian point of view, a constitutional convention is a spectacularly bad idea. Given the current number of Republican-controlled state legislatures and governors, and given that the Tea Party and Religious Right control most of those, we would not recognize the new nation that emerged on the other side of that process.  Unless, of course, we had read or watched the Handmaid’s Tale.

Unless Congress or a supermajority of states call a national constitutional convention, the only other way to amend the US Constitution is by a 2/3 majority of both the House and the Senate to approve language, followed by ratification by 2/3 of the states.

Amendment of the Constitution doesn’t come easy. Six proposed amendments to the U.S. Constitution have been languishing for years – centuries, in several cases – unloved and unratified by states despite the best efforts to pass them. Let’s take a look.

The Congressional Apportionment Amendment

This amendment was proposed along with the rest of the Bill of Rights in 1791 and is still pending before the states, believe it or not. It provided that there would be one U.S. Representative for every 40,000 people. Given the current US population of 324,118,787 people, the 8,103-member House of Representatives would resemble the Galactic Senate in Star Wars.

U.S. House of Representatives after the passage of the Apportionment Amendment
(May the Fourth be with you. )Those are all seats for multiple people, and this image was not created with a fisheye lens.

 

The Titles of Nobility Amendment

Proposed in 1810 and still pending before the states. It strips citizenship from anyone accepting titles of nobility or honors from foreign heads of state, including gifts, emoluments, offices, and pensions. We would have lost Grace Kelley and Queen Noor. The Donald would have been rendered ineligible for the presidency by operations of law, what with him accepting emoluments and thereby no longer being a US citizen. Sacrificing Princess Grace and Queen Noor would have been worth it. Losing Prince, on the other hand, not so much.

 

The Slavery Amendment, aka the Corwin Amendment

This proposed amendment says we can’t amend the constitution to abolish slavery or indentured servitude. Kentucky, Ohio, Rhode Island, Maryland, Illinois, and Virginia actually ratified this one, although Maryland and Ohio rescinded ratification and the validity of the ratification is questionable in Virginia and Illinois. Those ratifying states all acted in an effort to avoid the Civil War. Texas, on the other hand, made a go at ratifying it in 1963, nearly a hundred years after the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. So, in case we really need one, there’s another reason to hate Texas. And Texas could do what it did because, yes, this one is still pending before the states. For real.

Some assholes in Texas think this is a good idea.

The Child Labor Amendment

This would give Congress the power to say when, if, and how little children can power the engines of the industrial revolution and muck out coal mines. Only 28 states have agreed to this one so far, but Congress decided what the hell, even without the approval of the states it would go ahead and pass child labor laws anyhow. Now Baby needs new shoes and can’t get them because Baby can’t get that sweet sweatshop job Baby really wants. Damn congressional overreach!

“Breaker boys. Smallest is Angelo Ross. Hughestown Borough Coal Co. Pittston, Pa.” 1911. From RG: 102 National Child Labor Committee Photographs taken by Lewis Hine National Archives Identifier: 523384

The Equal Rights Amendment

Fuck Phyllis Schlafly. Her histrionics claimed that it shouldn’t pass because the military could draft (gasp!) women. The three remaining states needed to pass it might actually do so in today’s political climate. Nevada voted to ratify it just last month. Seriously. The brochure below is worth a read. It’s from 1941, and warns women that being independent, fully responsible adults might make them independent, fully responsible adults. Like that’s a bad thing.

Click to read full size, and click here to read the other side. It’s worth the time. Source

The DC Voting Rights Amendment

Essentially, this amendment would give the District of Columbia two US Senators, proportional representation in the House of Representatives, and participation in the electoral college. It still would not have been enough for Hillary to have won in November. However, her margin of victory in the popular vote would have been considerably higher. It makes sense to ratify this, but apparently nobody really wants a city-state. Can you imagine the “Tonight we dine in Hell!” and the “THIS is D.C.!” rallying cries on K Street and Pennsylvania Avenue? Although, having a Spartan mind-set so close to the White House might actually be kind of interesting.

My future DC Uber driver

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Ugly Food Waste

Miguel de Cervantes

We celebrated the holiday season with an abundance of food. Roasted turkeys, sweet potatoes, greens, pumpkins, cranberries, pecans, wine – it would be unthinkable to omit the wine!

Some traditional holiday foods are those we don’t eat. For instance, some great-grandmother on one side of our family passed down a recipe for fruitcake-like cookies that have a half-life of a Hostess Twinkie. Everyone nibbles on one to be polite and insists that I really don’t need to bother with them next year. We toss the bulk of these cookies into the trash come January.

Of course, nearly all of the food we ate this holiday season came from a grocery store. It was beautiful food. Kroger heaps its bins high with out-of-season and exotic produce, not to mention the seasonal fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Food no longer has a season.

We pick out only the best to take home. Marred, oddly shaped, or irregularly colored produce stays behind. We study those “sell by” dates as though they are an oracle. Every once in a while, we purge our pantries and fridges, laughing about the discovery of new life forms while sheepishly wishing we hadn’t wasted the money or that we had planned our meals a little better.

Food waste Is No Laughing Matter

One-third of all food grown for human consumption either spoils or is thrown out. Here in the United States, we waste more than that – a full forty percent of the food we grow. Half of that waste never even leaves the farm because it isn’t considered attractive enough: misshapen carrots, undersized pears, crystallized honey, apples with dimples, scarred squash, mutant strawberries, off-color tomatoes. These fruits and vegetables have nothing at all wrong with them except that we humans have assigned them a ridiculously high standard of beauty.

Conservative estimates are that people throw away 20% or more of the food they actually buy. Imagine walking out of the grocery store with four or five bags, dropping one in the parking lot, and not bothering to pick it up. That’s essentially what we do.

Ugly Food Waste is Thirsty Business

Wasting food wastes the resources that create that food. Agriculture sucks up 80% of our nation’s freshwater supply, so when food goes to waste we waste all that water too. And in some places right here in the United States, fresh drinking water is disappearing.

Consider California’s Central Valley. More than 230 different crops grow there, amounting to nearly half of America’s fruits, vegetables, and nuts. The Central Valley accounts for one-sixth of the nation’s irrigated farmland. Four trillion gallons of water a year disappear from underground aquifers and its river basins.

Desert irrigation in the Central Valley

Practically no snow has fallen in the Sierra Nevada mountains for several years, so snow melt has not replenished the Central Valley’s water supply. Groundwater levels currently sit 100 feet below average. There is no water to flow through irrigation canals. In some parts of the Central Valley, the desiccated land subsides by more than two inches every month due to a lack of water. Crops deplete not just groundwater, but deep water wells, and a third of these crops never even leave the fields because they aren’t pretty enough for grocers to stock. Meanwhile people in San Francisco, Sacramento, and Los Angeles, who depend on that same source for water to drink and to bathe in, ration it and pay steep penalties for use deemed “excessive.”

Waste from food animal production also impacts our environment. We have all probably heard that the Buffalo River watershed is threatened by a farm that needs to dispose of 7 million gallons of hog manure a year. That project involves a single large farm. Because of the pollution from this one pig farm, the Buffalo River has experienced unusual algae blooms this year. Now imagine that sort of effect on every stream in America from hundreds of thousands of animal farms.

The Environmental Impact of Food Waste

Growing and transporting all that wasted food spews out a staggering amount of carbon emissions. Wasted food is the single-largest contributor to U.S. landfills, and correspondingly to the methane emissions that result from them.

Nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers from these wasted crops have polluted the streams of the Missouri-Mississippi River systems. The second largest marine “dead zone” in the world is at the mouth of the Mississippi in the Gulf of Mexico. Fertilizers in the runoff from farms become more and more concentrated as they move downstream and collect still more fertilizers from more farms. By the time the Mississippi reaches the Gulf coast, this soupy brew causes recurrent algae blooms. Decomposing algae consume the oxygen needed to support aquatic life. Fishing boats and shrimpers have to travel farther from shore to harvest anything. The ecosystem of the polluted shores no longer sustains the wildlife it once did. The Gulf dead zone has now grown to the size of the combined states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. It is easily visible in satellite images because the toxic, hypoxic waters appear murky and brown.

Food Waste Can Beget or Resolve Food Waste

Vegetable crops are not the only wasted food. Meat raised for human consumption is wasted at an alarming rate. Twenty percent, or about twelve billion chickens, pigs, and cattle, are raised, fed, watered, and slaughtered for food but never eaten. Raising an animal from birth to table is incredibly expensive in terms of the food it eats, the water it drinks, the labor to care for it, the space it requires, the time it takes to grow, and the drugs used to keep it healthy.

We grow enormous amounts of grain to feed the animals we eat. Imagine the savings in resources, water, and pollutants if the animals we eat were fed on the food we waste. Two food consumers are doing just that: Rutgers University in New Jersey donates dining hall food scraps to a local cattle and hog farm, and MGM Resorts in Las Vegas donates food scraps from its casinos and restaurants to a local hog farm. Imagine if more businesses and farms cooperated like this.

The Cost of Food Waste

Worldwide, nearly a trillion dollars worth of food is wasted every year. In 2015 the UN’s task force on global food insecurity reported that nearly 800 million people – one-eighth of the planet’s population – are chronically undernourished. The food that currently feeds landfills could feed the 800 million hungry people in the world twice over. And we are throwing away forty percent of our perfectly edible meat, vegetables, and fruits. Poverty and logistics create food insecurity, not scarcity.

When we think of starving families, we think of places like war-torn countries and times of famine. We think of Syria, where humanitarian aid is prevented from reaching bombed-out cities. We think of Yemen, where families have to choose which children to feed and which to allow to die. We think of that Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a starving Sudanese toddler, crouched in hunger and despair as a vulture stalks her.

We don’t think of developed nations. We do not think of the fertile American South and we certainly don’t think of our own neighborhoods.

But one in every eight American families struggles to put enough food on the table. During the school year, the only meals the children in some of these families get are the ones served at school. As much as a fifth of Mississippi’s population has trouble finding affordable, nutritious food. Arkansas’s numbers are slightly better, but before we say “Thank God for Mississippi,” we should recognize that one in four Arkansas children cannot grow and develop normally because they don’t get enough to eat. Single parent families, the working poor, and senior citizens tend to not have enough food, while Pulaski County discards more than 100,000 pounds of food daily.

Reclaiming Ugly Food for the Hungry

We must put this wasted but perfectly edible food into the mouths and bellies of the people who need it. The United Nations has recognized that the right to food and water is a basic human right, and its member nations are slowly taking action.

In November Slovenia made the right to clean drinking water a constitutional right and Scotland’s Independent Working Group on Food Poverty recommended that its government make the right to food a matter of law. Such legislation will not end food insecurity or water scarcity. It would, however, mandate that the governments of these countries ensure that everyone has access to adequate and affordable food and water. Earlier this year, France passed a law banning supermarkets from throwing away or destroying unsold food, requiring them to donate that food to charities and food banks. Italy did the same. It also created tax incentives for businesses based on the amount of food donated and passed legislation to permit food slightly past its sell-by date to be donated without risk to the donor.

Non-government organizations also try to make a difference. In its first year of existence, a single company in the San Francisco Bay area rescued 350 tons of produce that had been rejected for sale in grocery stores solely for cosmetic reasons. The company donated the produce to homeless shelters and food banks and sold what it could to individual consumers.

To help address the hunger issue locally, the Junior League of Little Rock started a nonprofit organization called Potluck. Potluck collects food waste from hundreds of area food donors such as hospitals, food distributors, event centers, grocery stores, restaurants, and hotels. It redistributes its collections to food pantries, soup kitchens, and shelters. It serves several Arkansas communities, and with more help could serve more.

History’s Lessons

None of us has to waste as much food as we do. When my grandmother died more than 15 years ago, I rescued several tattered, fragile books from the shelf in her kitchen. Two of these hand-written books of recipes were over 100 years old and had belonged to her own mother and grandmother. These women who lived in Scott, Arkansas more than a century ago did not waste anything that could be eaten. They had recipes that specifically called for sour milk, bruised plums, and leftovers.

If we are foolish enough to believe that our society’s current careless attitude toward our excess food production cannot be a serious problem, let us remember that a drought between 1931-1941 desiccated the mid-section of the U.S. In the 1930s more than three and a half million people abandoned farms in the Plains states. Following Route 66, many of them ended up in California’s Central Valley. Their descendants still produce half of our domestically-grown fruits, nuts, and vegetables.

The ghosts of Joad family, the Okie protagonists of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, are watching us. After five years of desperate drought in Oklahoma, they moved to California’s Central Valley. California’s Central Valley, which has been in a state of desperate drought for five years.

Agri-business, commercial consumers, governments, and ordinary people must work together to increase the efficiency of our food supply system. Ugly food is wasted, but the impact of current levels of food waste is even uglier.

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Enlightened Ancestor: Dr. Benjamin West

I can thank my migraines for Dr. Benjamin West.

When I am anxious or don’t feel well, I often do genealogy research to take my mind off things. I have always enjoyed learning about family history, but really got bitten hard by the bug the first time I had cancer, in 1994. I was at home recuperating, on painkillers and other drugs that made concentrating difficult, and I found message boards on AOL that were all about genealogy. And my ancestors were there! I connected with some very distant cousins and compared notes. I started learning more and more about my origins.

It occurs to me that we are all the products of our parents, who are the products of their parents, who were the products of theirs, and so on. Our parents don’t just pass genetics on to us. Even when we disagree about things like politics or religion or how to raise our children, the values of our parents are distilled into us, just like the values of their parents were distilled into them. We find that professions tend to run in families – a  certain branch of the family may tend to be lawyers, writers, preachers, doctors, architects, artists, military, etc.

An obituary notice in a newspaper from 1822 led me to him. He was named as the father of one of my 5th great-grandmothers, a woman whose origins were completely unknown to me before that moment.  The man was phenomenal, and I don’t understand why every generation after him hasn’t continued to hold him up as the pinnacle of the Enlightenment. This guy’s brain was so huge and active I don’t know how it managed to stay confined in his skull.

benj-west
Benjamin West, from the Brown University Portrait Collection

Benjamin West was born in Bristol, Massachusetts in March 1730. I think of him as the Stephen Hawking of his day. His accomplishments in math and science are truly remarkable because he was an autodidact – his formal schooling lasted a whopping three months of his childhood. He was poor and had to borrow every book he read until about 1758, when he managed to find some backers to open a dry goods store. A couple of years later, he opened the first bookstore ever to grace the commercial avenues of Providence, Rhode Island. He managed to pay for the books he so desperately wanted by selling them to other people.

He married Elizabeth Smith, daughter of Benjamin Smith, in 1753 when he was 23.  They were married for 53 years and had eight children, only three of whom survived Benjamin. The 1822 death notice for his daughter, Mary Smith West (wife of Oliver Pearce), in a Providence newspaper, alerted me to him. The death notice that mentioned her father was “Dr. Benjamin West of Providence.” Mary West Pearce died in Fayetteville, NC. Her daughter, Eliza West Pearce, married Dr. Benjamin Robinson, that guy from Vermont who tested out that newfangled smallpox vaccine on his little brother and his brother’s friends and basically got run out of Bennington for his efforts. Science is strong in my family!

Benjamin West was a brilliant mathematician and astronomer. His buddies were the founders of Rhode Island College, which later became Brown University. He loved mathematics and astronomy, and conferred with some truly fantastic minds of his day. He published annual almanacs for Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Providence, Rhode Island for nearly 40 years. He didn’t have the formal schooling necessary for good academic chops, though, and before he opened that dry goods and book store, he failed at operating a school. He tutored students privately for all of his adult life.

Astronomical Genius

In 1766, something would happen that ultimately would reverse his fortunes and open some gilded doors for him. A comet appeared in the constellation of Taurus on the evening of April 9. Being a good astronomer, Benjamin took careful measurements. The next day wrote a letter to an astronomer named John Winthrop who was at Cambridge College (now known as Harvard University). He had never met or corresponded with Winthrop, but was so excited about his observation he simply had to share it.

Providence, April 10, 1766

Dear Sir:

For the improvement of science, I now acquaint you, that the last evening, I saw in the West, a comet, which I judged to be about the middle of the sign of Taurus; with about 7 degrees North latitude. It set half after 8 o’clock by my watch, and its amplitude was about 29 or 30 degrees. Nothing, Sir, could have induced me to this freedom of writing to you, but the love I have for the sciences; and I flatter myself that you will, on that account, the more readily overlook it.

I am, Sir, yours,

Benjamin West

He and Winthrop became great friends and continued to write to each other. For the rest of their lives, they would share observations about the night sky.

1769 Transit of the Planets

Johannes Kepler and Edmund Halley figured out how to apply the theory of parallax to determine the distances between astronomical bodies.  With both Mercury and Venus predicted to pass between the Earth and the Sun in 1769, astronomers worldwide were anxious to test the theory. Since this was the first really good opportunity to view the transits of both inner planets since Kepler’s original accurate prediction in 1627 of the 1631 transit, everyone in the field of astronomy was excited. Captain Cook would famously observe the 1769 transit of Venus from Tahiti while on his ill-fated circumnavigation and while bringing European diseases and disharmony to the South Pacific. At the time of the last transit of Venus in 1761, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon, who had just finished their survey of the boundary between Pennsylvania and Maryland, had traveled to the Cape of Good Hope to observe it. All of these men used astronomy as an important part of their lives – navigating the oceans and surveying the land required precise measurements, and measurements started with the stars.

benjamin-wests-1769-telescope
Telescope used by Benjamin West, at Providence, Rhode Island, to observe the 1769 transit of Venus. Ladd Observatory, Brown University

There was no telescope in Providence in 1769. Benjamin West, Stephen Hopkins (the signer of the Declaration and great-grandson of the Mayflower passenger) and the four famous Brown brothers – they were among the founders of Rhode Island College, later known as Brown University – were determined to see the phenomenon, though, so they managed to import a telescope from England at the incredible expense of 500 pounds.  They set up on the outskirts of Providence. Transit Street in Providence is named after the spot where they viewed the transit on June 3, 1769. There are photos of the telescope on the Brown University website – the school still has it.

benjamin-wests-diagram-of-the-1769-transit-of-venus
Benjamin West’s diagram of the transit of Venus, 1769, from the Ladd Observatory, Brown University

As was his habit, Benjamin West made careful measurements of the transit. He published a tract (and dedicated it to his friend Stephen Hopkins) about the event. A copy of the tract made its way to John Winthrop at Harvard, and on July 18, 1770, Benjamin West – the man with only three months of formal education – was awarded an honorary Master of Arts from Harvard. Here’s the text of the notification letter from John Winthrop:

Cambridge, July 19, 1770

Sir —

I have the pleasure to acquaint you that the government of this college were pleased, yesterday, to confer upon you the Honorary degree of Master of Arts; upon which I sincerely congratulate you. I acknowledge the receipt of your favour, and shall be glad to compare any observations of the satellites.

Yours,

John Winthrop

American Academy of Arts and Sciences: the American Philosophical Society

That same year, Benjamin West was unanimously elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia – the American colonial version of Great Britain’s Royal Society. He would meet and befriend another author and publisher of almanacs there: a fellow named Benjamin Franklin.

Benjamin West was still primarily a merchant at this time, and the Revolution was on its way. When full-blown war finally arrived, commerce dried up. He went to work manufacturing clothing for the American troops. He continued his studies and his correspondence with the other great minds, though.

Mathematics was Benjamin’s first love. In 1773 he wrote to a friend in Boston of a theorem he had developed to extract “the roots of odd powers” that was probably his greatest contribution to the field of mathematics. That’s right – he discovered a math formula that I can’t even begin to hope to understand, but other really smart people who could math really well understood it and lauded him for it. When he finally explained his theorem to other math geniuses in 1781, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences not only published it in one of their earliest journals but unanimously elected him to membership and awarded him a diploma. It was his second honorary academic degree, and he still supported by only three months of formal education. The theorem caught the attention of the European mathematical geniuses, who, giddy with discovery, also published it. Benjamin West, already pretty cool, became seriously hot stuff.

He didn’t stop at math and astronomical observations, though. One of the biographies I found explained a physics problem he cogitated upon for more than two years in conjunction with John Winthrop and a Mr. Oliver. It had to do with the properties of air in a copper tube that was then put into an otherwise airless container. The qualities of invisible gases – basically, the scientific understanding of the very concept of the physical nature and properties of “air” – were in their infancy. Our ancestor speculated about the attractive and repulsive nature of the tiny particles that made up the matter of air – what we now call its molecules – and how they would behave under different conditions. Gravity, matter, magnetism, and ultimately the behavior of the tails of comets played into his understanding of the question. This is stuff my brain simply isn’t big enough to handle.

Benjamin West’s mind was at the peak of its illuminating brilliance as the world around him heaved. His most important discoveries and writings happened as the American Revolution was about to explode.  By the end of the Revolution, he had returned to academic pursuits. He tutored students in math and astronomy. He still wasn’t rich; despite his prominence in academics he never became particularly wealthy. The well-endowed founders of what would become Brown University had not forgotten their friend, though. In 1786, he was elected to a full professorship there.

For some reason, he did not begin teaching at Brown for a couple of years. Probably because of his honors and his friendship with Ben Franklin and the rest of the gang at the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, Benjamin West was invited to teach at the illustrious Protestant Episcopal Academy there. The name of that school is familiar to members of my father’s family.  Although Benjamin West was the direct ancestor of my Arkansas-born mother, my dad, an Irish-Italian kid who grew up in the Philly suburb of Gladwyne, went to school at Philadelphia’s Episcopal Academy while his dad coached its sports teams. (Insert refrain from “Circle of Life” here.)

Brown University awarded Dr. West his first non-honorary degree, his Doctor of Laws, in 1792. He taught mathematics and astronomy there from 1788 until 1799. Then he opened a school of navigation and taught astronomy to seafaring men. Like Carl Sagan and Neil deGrasse Tyson, this man loved to teach other people the wonders of the universe.

I’m proud of him for another reason, too: Benjamin West was a member of an active abolitionist group in Providence.

I’ve found several contemporary biographical accounts for Benjamin West. They are typical of their time: purple prose and flowery metaphors abound. They all reach one conclusion: Benjamin West was a genius. He was a determinedly self-educated man who contributed considerably to the arts of science and mathematics during his lifetime. He was truly a product of the Age of Enlightenment: a self-educated, self-made man whose gifts and prominence considerably exceeded his bank account.

This discovery of my ancestor Benjamin West is exactly why genealogy research is so rewarding. And given the anxiety-provoking events of November 8, I expect to be doing a lot more of it – in between my stepped-up schedule of political activities, that is.

Bibliography:

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Book of Members  (2016 edition), p. 252. Entry for Benjamin West, elected 1781, Fellow. Residence and Affiliation at election: Providence, RI. Career description: Astronomer, Educator, Businessperson, Book of Members; American Academy of Arts & Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Leonard Bliss, The History of Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts:  Comprising a History of the Present Towns of Rehoboth, Seekonk, and Pawtucket, From Their Settlement to the Present Time (Boston:  Otis, Broaders, and Company, 1836). Google Books

Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment, Entry for Benjamin West (1730-1813), pp. 1096-1097.

Louise Hall, “Family Records: Newby Bible”, New England Historical and Genealogical Register 122 (Apr 1968):  125-128, 125.

Martha Mitchell, “Benjamin West”, Encyclopedia Brunoniana (1993).

John Chauncey Pease, John Milton Niles, A Gazetteer of the States of Connecticut and Rhode-Island:   (Hartford:  William S. Marsh, 1819), 331-333. Biographical entry for Dr. Benjamin West.  Google Books.

Unattributed, “Biography of Benjamin West, L.L.D.  A.A.S.:  Professor of Mathematicks, Astronomy and Natural Philosophy, in Rhode Island College – and Fellow of the Philosophical Society of Philadelphia, &c.”, The Rhode Island Literary Repository Vol I, No. 7 (October 1814):  137-160 (337-360).

Benjamin West Papers; Rhode Island Historical Society Library, 121 Hope Street, Providence, RI 02906.

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It’s Her Gender

Image Source: NBC News
Image Source: NBC News

When they say it’s not her gender, well, it might be her gender.

Americans love to hate Hillary Clinton, but she has been consistently rated the most admired woman in America for two decades. Why the hate in spite of all that apparent love? Is it because she has dared to shatter every glass ceiling put in her way?

They claim it’s her honesty.

It’s not. Check Politifact if you don’t believe me.

They claim it’s her conflicts of interest.

It isn’t. She can give speeches to whoever asks her to speak, including the KKK, including Wall Street, including kindergarten classes. Her family’s charitable foundation can accept donations from anyone, anywhere. Bill Clinton established the Clinton Foundation to improve the lives of people internationally.  It does good work and it has considerable bipartisan support.

They claim it’s her judgment.

Seriously? Internationally and at home, Hillary Clinton consistently ranks as the most admired woman alive.  For twenty  of the last twenty-three years, she’s been the single most admired woman in the United States. I do not suggest everyone should agree with every decision she has ever made, but come on. She’s done something right to be that popular, hasn’t she?

Her email scandal fits in this “lack of judgment” category. The press has pilloried her for doing exactly the same thing her Republican predecessors did. In fact, former Secretary of State Colin Powell  told Clinton that using a private email server was preferable to the government server in most instances.

Oh, and about Benghazi? The GOP has investigated that situation ad nauseam and still can’t find sufficient fault with her conduct, policies, or decisions. As hard as her political enemies have tried, they cannot accuse her personally of any wrongdoing.

They claim it’s her war-mongering.

Her detractors characterize Hillary Clinton as hawkish, eager to use military force. She cannot refute this point. She counseled President Obama to use military force when the country was not subject to imminent attack by any foreign entity.

Clinton voted to go to war in Iraq. She has explained her vote ad nauseam.  She cast her vote – one of a hundred Senate votes – based on the information she had at the time. That information was flawed at best and fabricated at worst. Bush lied to America and the world. Cheney manipulated for personal gain. Powell lied to the UN on their behalf. Rumsfield had no plan and didn’t listen to advisors.  None of that is Hillary Clinton’s fault, and none of it came about due to her actions. Even had she cast her vote the other way, nothing – absolutely nothing – would have changed.

That includes the use of drones. The National Security Council made the decision to use drones. As Secretary of State, Clinton was only one of the five members of that council. She could not unilaterally decide war policy. While she may have argued in favor of specific actions – the Lybian revolution during the Arab Spring, most problematically –  she did not have the final say on any of them.

Despite all of that, our international allies consider her the hands-down favorite in this race. Whether or not our citizens do, our allies understand the importance of a responsible, experienced person leading the U.S.

They claim that electing her will be politics as usual.

Maybe. Not many candidates have been more qualified for the office, and there have been none so qualified in our lifetime.

They claim that it’s time for a change.

I couldn’t agree more. Personally, I’d like to see the two-party system disbanded and a different method of electing leaders that means we won’t ever have to choose between the lesser of two evils. But in this election cycle, no other candidate but Donald Trump has a realistic shot at the office. Without getting into the reasons why – that would be another blog post entirely – it is an incontrovertible fact that we must choose between two candidates.

Perhaps the nation would be better off with a man in power who rises to the bait of a tweet. Maybe the world will be safer if a loose cannon has the nuclear codes. Perhaps someone without one iota of a clue as to how to govern should have the most powerful position in the entire world.

But I seriously doubt it.

They’ll never claim it’s her gender.

Just like they never claimed it was Obama’s race.

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