The Little Red Blog

A Very Big Humbug (Part Two)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat continues his deep dive into the quirky history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.}

“I heard of the sacred harp long ago back in my hometown / but I sure never thought old Daniel’d be the one to come and bring it around.” (The Band, “Daniel & the Sacred Harp”)

We should begin by reviewing Joseph Smith’s original visionary experiences.

• In 1820, the fourteen-year-old Joseph Smith was living with his family on a small plot outside of Palmyra, New York. Experiencing an adolescent crisis of faith, Joseph went into the woods by himself to pray for divine guidance. Surprisingly enough, he got what he wanted; God the Father and God the Son (Jesus) appeared and commanded Joseph not to join any of the existing churches, all of which, they said, were false. They told him to go home and to await a future vision that would reveal to him the truth.
• One night in September 1823 (200 years ago!), the previously unknown angel Moroni appeared in Joseph’s bedroom and told him of a hidden book engraved upon gold plates (tablets) which was buried somewhere in the hills outside Palmyra. The book, said the angel, contained the True Gospel of Jesus Christ and, as a bonus, the history of human settlement of the North American continent. Joseph was given a brief, tantalizing preview of the book but then was told he would have to wait another four years before the book’s exact location would be disclosed to him.
• Punctually, in September 1827, Moroni reappeared and directed Joseph to the gold plates, which were buried under a stone slab on a hill (Hill Cumorah) three miles south of the Smith family’s farm. Joseph was entrusted with the plates; he was also assigned the task of translating them with the assistance of Uma Thurman Urim and Thummim, two “seer stones” unearthed with the plates. ¹ Joseph was explicitly cautioned against translating certain sections of the book, because mankind was not yet ready for the whole revelation.

Why was Joseph Smith forced to wait seven years after his first vision of God before being allowed access to the Book of Mormon? Perhaps (though we have no evidence of this) he needed to undergo a process of purification, of studying scripture, of preparing himself spiritually, or of brushing up on Egyptian hieroglyphics, which the writing on the gold plates would be said to resemble. In fact, he seems to have spent his time helping on the family homestead, doing odd jobs for neighbors, using a dowsing rod to look for everything from water to buried treasure, and generally distinguishing himself by being completely undistinguished. By 1827, however, the 21-year-old lad was ready.

Having taking possession of the golden plates, Joseph took great pains to keep them hidden from greedy treasure-seekers, as well as from the merely curious and from skeptics hoping to debunk his tale. At various times, he hid the plates inside a hollowed-out log; in a cherrywood chest at home which he arranged to have built for just that purpose; and, on one occasion, inside a barrel of beans in the back of a wagon. Even in the safe confines of the family home, Joseph, under orders from Moroni, allowed no one else to see the actual plates, though he would occasionally let someone heft whatever container the plates were stored in so that they could affirm the weight, if not the actual contents, of said container.

The text written (engraved? chiseled?) on the plates would have been indecipherable, especially for Joseph, who was not entirely literate even in English. Fortunately, the seer stones, the Urim and Thummim, would unlock the mysteries of the Book of Mormon, and they would do so only for Joseph Smith, thus making him the sole translator of the text. Several individuals (primarily Martin Harris, Emma Smith, and Oliver Cowdery) transcribed Joseph’s oral translation as he relayed to them passages from the divinations of Urim and Thummim; those secretaries never examined the Book of Mormon, but dutifully took Joseph’s word for its contents.

The process of translation and transcription of the gold plates was, so far as I know, unprecedented, and it remains so to this day. As Paul Gutjahr understatedly notes, “Translating the plates was no easy task.” Joseph and Emma Smith, hounded by their neighbors in Palmyra who wanted to confirm Joseph’s discovery for themselves, relocated to Harmony, Pennsylvania where Emma’s family lived. They were soon joined by Martin Harris, a wealthy farmer from Palmyra for whom Joseph had occasionally worked; he was persuaded by Joseph of the plates’ authenticity (he was not, of course, allowed to see them) and he agreed to assist with translating them. As Gutjahr relates:

“The two men sat down to translate the plates, depending ever more heavily on the ‘interpreters’ [Urim and Thummim] and later a single seer stone (which Joseph had found while digging a well in 1822) to guide them. They sat at a table with a curtain dividing them as Joseph used the ‘interpreters’ to painstakingly dictate the plates’ message.² The work was so arduous, and Joseph’s claims at times so unbelievable, that Harris began to question whether Joseph was indeed translating ancient plates or simply making a fool of him and trying to swindle him out of his money. As the work proceeded, Harris repeatedly asked to see the plates, and repeatedly Joseph refused. Not even granted a glimpse of the plates, Harris began to doubt the whole endeavor.”

Those doubts were to be overcome. 

Joseph also enlisted his wife Emma and his younger brother Samuel in the task of translating the plates. “As they worked, Joseph removed the curtain between him and Emma. The plates simply sat on the table between them, although they remained hidden from view, wrapped in a linen tablecloth.” This arrangement meant that Joseph was unable to see the text he was translating, which proved only a minor inconvenience. Instead, he took to placing the seer stones inside a hat into which he peered; he would see words appearing in “bright Roman letters,” and he would then dictate twenty or thirty words at a time (“he even spelled out the more difficult names of people and places”) to his attentive scribe. According to Paul Gutjahr:

“Emma never saw the plates, but she did feel them, later reporting that they gave off a metallic sound when she thumbed them like pages in a book. Throughout the translation process, she sat in awe of Joseph’s ability to dictate such a complex work. She claimed that no other book was near him as he dictated God’s message, and she steadfastly maintained that Joseph could not have hidden such a book from her. Emma recalled that when they took breaks to eat or do chores, Joseph invariably resumed the story exactly where he had left off without referring to the manuscript they had just transcribed or to any other material.”

Emma—whose father, Isaac Hale, had once told Joseph to stop the nonsense about angels and gold plates and to find honest work instead—was as loyal a wife as any man, much less an appointed prophet of God, could have wanted. Over the years, her loyalty would be put to the test.

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Paul Gutjahr quotes are from his The Book of Mormon: A Biography.

¹ Urim and Thummim are said to be mentioned in the Old Testament; to my knowledge, there is no reference in scripture to Uma Thurman.

² The curtain was necessary because the angel Moroni had made it clear to Joseph that no one else was permitted to see the gold plates. Joseph’s secretiveness in the matter led to, shall we say, suspicions.

DIY Scripture! (Seer stones not included)

Wednesday with Pascal: "A Very Big Humbug" (Part One)

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has delved into the origins and early history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, aka Mormonism. Pascal is aware that I was born and raised just a few miles down the road from where Joseph Smith launched his faith-based enterprise; he may believe that explains my stubborn interest in religion despite my avowed atheism. In any case, Pascal may be scratching away at this subject for a while.}

According to historian Winthrop Hudson, “The first half of the nineteenth century in the United States was a time of eager expectancy, unbridled enthusiasm, and restless ferment. A new nation and a new world were being born, and to many anything and everything were possible. It was a period when a comet’s tail was said to have swept America, and everyone went a little mad.” The European Enlightenment had influenced the founders of the United States, but it had yet to work its way to the American frontier, which, in the first decades of the 19^th century, included everything west of New England and east of the Mississippi River. ¹

Today, we think of the “Bible Belt” as comprising the states of the old Confederacy and some of the adjacent Midwest states, but in the early 19^th century, religious enthusiasm in America was at its height in the “burnt-over district” of upstate and western New York:

“Across the rolling hills of western New York and along the line of DeWitt Clinton’s famed Erie Canal, there stretched in the second quarter of the nineteenth century a ‘psychic highway’. Upon this broad belt of land congregated a people extraordinarily given to unusual beliefs, particularly devoted to crusades aimed at the perfection of mankind and the attainment of millennial happiness.” ²

The area in question gave rise, in just a few decades, to such luminaries as the Fox sisters of Hydesville, New York, whose parlor pranks became the basis of Spiritualism; John Humphrey Noyes, who founded the Oneida Community (near Utica), which failed as a commune but succeeded as a business enterprise producing silverware; the Shakers, founded in England by Mother Ann Lee but transplanted to the town of Watervliet, New York in 1776, from which they spread throughout the country; and the famous William Miller and his Millerites near Dunkirk, who gave up waiting for the end of the world and became Seventh-day Adventists instead. Alongside these sects, a “Second Great Awakening” was taking place, an enthusiastic outburst of evangelical Protestant revivalism associated with preachers such as Charles Grandison Finney. In western New York in the early 19^th century, prophets, visionaries, and seers abounded.

Which brings me to Joseph Smith, pride of Palmyra, New York and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. To be clear: I do not believe for one second in the authenticity of Joseph Smith’s “visions” or of the gold plates from which he translated the Book of Mormon, a book which was nothing more than a preposterous fairytale overlaid with a Biblical veneer. I believe, in short, that the entire Mormon enterprise was a low-budget, backwoods con game that got spectacularly out of hand, leading to a religious movement that Joseph Smith, to his credit, was savvy enough to take advantage of—at least until the charade got him killed. Prior to his death, Smith had experienced over a decade of fame and influence, which, for what it’s worth, is far more than Jesus managed.

The success of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is testimony to human credulity, to the need to believe, to the power of the religious imagination, and to how communities can be shaped in part by ridicule, opposition, and even persecution, tribulations which Joseph Smith and his followers endured. As Adam Gopnik put it, the story of Mormonism “is the story of faith, not [simply] of Joseph Smith’s faith. The allegiance is to the community that nurtured you, and it is bolstered by the community’s history of persecution, which makes you understandably inclined to defend its good name against all comers. It isn’t the truth of the Book, or the legends of Nephi, that undergird Mormon solidarity even among lapsed or wavering believers; it’s the memories of what other people were prepared to do in order to prevent your parents from believing. A critique of the creed, even a rational one, feels like an assault on the community.”

Mormonism’s rise resembles the first two centuries of Christianity, filled with visions, miracles, and martyrs, thereby illustrating the maxim that history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy and the second time as farce. Allow me to cite the words of Orson Pratt, speaking about the Book of Mormon:

This book must be either true or false. If true, it is one of the most important messages ever sent from God to man. If false, it is one of the most cunning, wicked, bold, deep-laid impositions ever palmed upon the world, calculated to deceive and to ruin millions who will hear it as the word of God.

Pratt’s was by no means an objective observer; he was an early convert to Mormonism, brought into the fold in 1830 at the age of nineteen by his older brother, Parley Pratt. Orson became a prominent Mormon missionary, theologian, and member of the church’s Quorum of Twelve. He was also something of a renowned mathematician. ³

One of the now quaint 19^th-century epithets often applied to the Book of Mormon was the word “humbug,” which was synonymous at the time with “hoax” and “fraud”. Few critics thought Joseph Smith to have been delusional; they thought he was a charlatan whose new “revelations” were spun from whole cloth (or plagiarized from others' cloth). Brigham Young Jr. is said to have asked John Gilbert (the book’s original typesetter) what he thought of the Book of Mormon’s authenticity. When Gilbert replied that the book was “a very big humbug, a hoax of gigantic proportions,” Young smiled and said, “If it is a humbug, it is the most successful humbug ever known.”

However, as Paul Gutjahr has noted, “Whether the Book of Mormon is a humbug or not is something of a moot question. In the two centuries since the book’s appearance, it has attracted millions of adherents.⁴ Perhaps the book’s greatest attraction was how it provided tangible testimony that God was once again speaking to humanity.” What God had to say varied, but what His sayings had in common is that they were transmitted through Joseph Smith. Other church elders were occasionally granted revelations, but any that clashed with Smith’s were summarily rejected. Early Mormon history, as a result, is filled with heretics, false prophets, excommunications, and sectarianism. It is also filled with a good deal of bloodshed, much of it aimed at the Mormons but some of it instigated by Mormons against their perceived enemies. In this, as in so many other ways, Mormonism gives us a window into how religions are formed, how they are sustained, how they become domesticated (i.e., respectable), and what happens once their initial spiritual ardor cools down.

One ought not to push the parallels too far, but Joseph Smith of Palmyra, New York was, on the one hand, no more unlikely a prophet of God than Abraham, Moses, Jeremiah, Hosea, John the Baptist, or Jesus of Nazareth. On the other hand, if it’s true that God “writes straight with crooked lines,” He never used a line more crooked than Joseph Smith.

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¹ Thomas Jefferson’s “Louisiana Purchase” (1803) had in theory extended the frontier to the Pacific, and Lewis and Clark’s expedition would begin the process of exploration, settlement, and conquest of the inconvenient people who inhabited the territory. However, as of 1830, Chicago and St. Louis were about as far west as most Americans cared to venture.  

² Whitney Cross, quoted by Emerson Klees in Crucible of Ferment. 

³ Pratt’s life in the Mormon community was no bed of roses; his wife, Sarah, apparently caught the eye of Joseph Smith, who attempted to lure Sarah into his bed via his brand-new revelation of “plural marriages”. Rebuffed, Smith then spread the word that Sarah was having an affair with another member of the community (John C. Bennett), leading Orson Pratt to attempt suicide in 1842. He survived, although, in the long run, his marriage to Sarah did not.

⁴ Many of whom likely never read it, some of whom likely were unable to read it, and most of whom were likely attracted by the lifestyle of the community rather than by the pseudo-history so tediously detailed in the text.

Luckily, a photographer was on hand to capture the moment...

Sunday Sermon: "My Hometown"

My Hometown (Bruce Springsteen)

I was eight years old
And running with a dime in my hand
To the bus stop to pick
Up a paper for my old man
I'd sit on his lap in that big old Buick
And steer as we drove through town
He'd tousle my hair
And say, "Son, take a good look around"
This is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown
This is your hometown"

In '65 tension was running high
At my high school
There was a lot of fights
Between the black and white
There was nothing you could do
Two cars at a light on a Saturday night
In the back seat there was a gun
Words were passed in a shotgun blast
Troubled times had come
To my hometown
To my hometown
To my hometown
To my hometown

Now Main Street's whitewashed windows
And vacant stores
Seems like there ain't nobody
Wants to come down here no more
They're closing down the textile mill
Across the railroad tracks
Foreman says, "These jobs are going, boys
And they ain't coming back
To your hometown
To your hometown
To your hometown
To your hometown"

Last night me and Kate we laid in bed
Talking about getting out
Packing up our bags, maybe heading south
I'm thirty-five, we got a boy of our own now
Last night I sat him up behind the wheel
And said, "Son, take a good look around
This is your hometown"

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Source: LyricFind

Songwriters: Bruce Springsteen

My Hometown lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC

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(99) my hometown - YouTube

(99) Bruce Springsteen - My Hometown (from Born In The U.S.A. Live: London 2013) - YouTube

Note: This song was released in 1984, in the middle of the Reagan-Bush era. Although today’s right-wing populists shed crocodile tears for America’s working class, it was under Reagan that the jobs started leaving and that finance capitalism seized control of the economy. All the while, the Republican Party didn’t do a thing to stop the decline of blue-collar union jobs, busy as it was celebrating Wall Street. If you’re interested in real populism, listen to the music that Bruce Springsteen (and John Mellencamp) released in the Eighties, the decade that spawned, among other monstrosities, Donald Trump.

Books Report

In today’s report: Matthew Bowman’s The Mormon People and Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution.

First, and just to clear the air: why am I reading a book on Mormon history? Because, like Christianity, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has had an enormous impact in an amazingly short period of time. Founded less than two hundred years ago, the Mormon faith today boasts a worldwide membership of almost 20 million. If Christianity’s growth seems to have been miraculous, the growth of Joseph Smith’s “Church of Christ” (its original name) is just as impressive, especially when you consider that Joseph Smith was probably as surprised by (and unprepared for) his success as was, say, Donald Trump on Election Day in 2016.

In The Mormon People, Matthew Bowman does his best to remain neutral on such foundational questions as “Was Joseph Smith a fraud or a religious fanatic?” and “Why did anyone take Joseph Smith seriously?” The latter is more easily answered than the former; if the early 19^th-century was technically still the Enlightenment era, the contemporaneous American frontier had not been notified. While enlightened Europe critiqued religion, the American frontier was awash in it. Moreover, America’s famous “burned-out district”—central and western New York, from around Albany to as far west as Buffalo—did not just “revive” Protestant Christianity; it turned it into a menagerie of religious and spiritual enthusiasms, among which Joseph Smith’s Mormons were among the more sober, despite Smith’s risible claims and frequently outré behavior.

Bowman, who received his master’s in history from the University of Utah, gives Smith the benefit of the doubt, as seems fair when it comes to a man who founded a religion that has grown so quickly into one of the world’s more prominent (if still widely disrespected) creeds. I, on the other hand, having grown up just twenty miles or so down the road from Palmyra, New York (the town where Smith’s alleged visions and divine revelations allegedly took place) am at liberty to scoff. Golden tablets buried for over a thousand years in the hills of upstate New York, world-historic clashes of transplanted Hebrew tribes that somehow left no trace at all in either the archaeological records or in human memory, and “seer stones” (dubbed Uma Thurman Urim and Thummim) placed in the bottom of a hat to serve as the 19^th-century equivalent of Google Translate: to quote the famous skeptic John McEnroe, “You cannot be serious.”

-----------------------------------------------  

My reading Helen Rappaport’s Caught in the Revolution is merely a continuation of my fascination with all things Russian. Ms. Rappaport is a British historian who specializes in Russian history and who has written books about the Romanov family (the dynasty that ended in 1917) and about Stalin (the brutal and paranoid thug who gave Marxism a bad name). Caught in the Revolution chronicles the fate of foreign visitors to Russia who, with little or no warning, found themselves in the middle of one of one of the twentieth-century’s epochal events. The book’s cover summary sets Ms. Rappaport’s scene:

“Between the first revolution in February 1917 and Lenin’s Bolshevik coup in October, the city of Petrograd (the former St. Petersburg) was in turmoil—felt nowhere more keenly than on the fashionable Nevsky Prospekt. There, the foreign visitors who filled hotels, clubs, offices, and embassies were acutely aware of the chaos breaking out on their doorsteps and beneath their windows.”

Of all the places in which a traveler would not want to find themselves trapped, “the Russian riot, senseless and cruel” (Pushkin) would certainly be near, if not at, the top of the list. Of course, revolutionary Russia was notoriously unsafe for everyone: for Russian citizens and for the Romanovs; for the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the peasants, and the kulaks; for the intelligentsia and the clergy; for non-Bolshevik socialists, anarchists, and liberals; and, in the end, for the Bolsheviks themselves, who, under Stalin, ritually cannibalized their own Party.

I guess that's why I find Russian history fascinating: periodically, the country goes collectively insane, after which the survivors climb out of the rubble hoping to rebuild. The question, of course, is: How is that working for them so far?     

Sunday Sermon: "Nothing Was Delivered"

Nothing Was Delivered (by Bob Dylan)

Nothing was delivered
And I tell this truth to you
Not out of spite or anger
But simply 'cause it's true
Now you must provide some answers
For what you sell was not received
And the sooner you come up with them
Then the sooner you can leave

Nothing is better
Nothing is best
Take care of your health and get plenty of rest

Nothing was delivered
And it's up to you to say
Just what you had in mind
When you made everybody pay
Now I hope you won't object to this
Giving back all that you owe
But the sooner you come up with them
Then the sooner you can leave

Nothing is better
Nothing is best
Take care of your health and get plenty of rest

No, nothing was delivered
I can't say I sympathize
With what your fate is going to be
Yes, for telling all those lies
No, nothing was delivered
Yes and someone must explain
That as long as it takes to do this
Then that's how long that you'll remain

Nothing is better
Nothing is best
Take care of your health and get plenty of rest

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Bob Dylan

Nothing Was Delivered lyrics © Dwarf Music, Universal Tunes

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(85) Bob Dylan, The Band - Nothing Was Delivered (Official Audio) - YouTube

(85) The Byrds - Nothing Was Delivered ( lyrics ) Classic / Old Rock Music Song - YouTube

(85) Robbie Fulks - Nothing Was Delivered - YouTube 

Labor Day: The Issue

{The following is excerpted from a speech delivered by Eugene Debs in Girard, Kansas in 1908. Debs was running for President on the Socialist Party ticket, which he did five times, never receiving more than six percent of the vote. Interestingly, Debs' final presidential run was in 1920, while he was incarcerated in federal prison.}

“Intelligent discontent is the mainspring of civilization. Progress is born of agitation. It is agitation or stagnation. I have taken my choice.” (Eugene V. Debs)

"The issue is Socialism versus Capitalism. I am for Socialism because I am for humanity." (Eugene V. Debs)

Eugene Debs, “The Issue”:

I am in revolt against capitalism because I love my fellow men. I am against a system in which labor is simply merchandise; in which the man who works the hardest and longest has the least to show for it. If there is a man on earth who is entitled to all the comforts and luxuries of life in abundance it is the man whose labor produces them. If he is not, who is? Does he get them in the present system?

I wish to say in the broadest possible way that I am opposing the system under which we live today because I believe it is subversive of the best interests of the people. I am not satisfied with things as they are, and I know that no matter what administration is in power, even were it a Socialist administration, there will be no material change in the condition of the people until we have a new social system based upon the mutual economic interests of the people: until you and I and all of us collectively own those things that we collectively need and use. As long as a relatively few men own the railroads, the telegraph, the telephone, the oil fields and the gas fields and the steel mills and the sugar refineries and the leather tanneries--own, in short, the sources and means of life--they will corrupt our politics, they will enslave the working class, they will impoverish and debase society, they will do all things that are needful to perpetuate their power as the economic masters and the political rulers of the people. Not until these great agencies are owned and operated by the people can the people hope for any material, improvement in their social condition. Is the condition fair today, and satisfactory to any thinking man?

Such a condition as this is indefensible in the twentieth century. Time was when everything had to be done in a very primitive way, and most men had to work all their days, all their lives, to feed and shelter themselves. They had no time, they had no opportunity for a higher development, and so they were what the world calls “illiterate.” They had little chance. It took all their time and energy to feed the animal; but how is it today? Upon the average twenty men can today, with the aid of modern machinery, produce as much wealth as a thousand did a half century ago. Can you think of a single thing that enters into our daily existence that cannot be easily produced in abundance for all? If you can I wish you would do me the kindness to name it.

Man has long since become master of the natural forces and made them work for him. Now he has but to touch a button and the wheels begin to spin and the machinery to whir, and wealth is produced on every hand in increasing abundance. Why should any man, woman, or child suffer for food, clothing, or shelter? Why? The question cannot be answered. Don’t tell me that some men are too lazy to work. Suppose they are too lazy to work, what do you think of a social system that produces men too lazy to work? If a man is too lazy to work don’t treat him with contempt. Don’t look down upon him with scorn as if you were a superior being. If there is a man too lazy to work there is something the matter with him. He wasn’t born right or he was perverted in this system. You could not, if you tried, keep a normal man inactive, and if you did he would go stark mad.

Your material interest and mine in the society of the future will be the same. Instead of having to fight each other like animals, as we do today, and seeking to glorify the brutal struggle for existence--of which every civilized human being ought to be ashamed--instead of this, our material interests are going to be mutual. We are going to jointly own these mammoth machines, and we are going to operate them as joint partners and we are going to divide the products among ourselves.

We Socialists propose that society in its collective capacity shall produce, not for profit, but in abundance to satisfy all human wants; that every man shall have the inalienable right to work and to receive the full equivalent of what he produces; that every man may stand fearlessly erect in the pride and majesty of his own manhood; that every man and every woman shall be economically free. We are not going to destroy private property. We are going to so establish private property that every worker may have all the private property necessary to house and keep him in comfort and satisfy all his physical wants. Eighty per cent of the people in the United States have little or no property of any kind today. A few have got it all. They have dispossessed the people, and when we get into power we will dispossess them. We will reduce the workday and give every man a chance. We will go to the parks and we will have music because we will have time for music and inclination to enjoy it.

When we have stopped clutching each other’s throats, when we have stopped enslaving each other, we will stand together, hands clasped, and be friends. We will be comrades, we will be brothers, and we will begin the march to the grandest civilization the human race has ever known.

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Eugene V. Debs - Wikipedia

Eugene Debs is of the three most prominent figures to come from Terre Haute, Indiana, along with novelist Theodore Dreiser and NBA legend Larry Bird (who was technically from French Lick, Indiana but who starred in college at Indiana State University in Terre Haute).

Saturday Lecture:

{History is filled with fascinating details, complexities, and nuances that too often are left out of mainstream historical narratives and history textbooks. The following excerpt is from Woody Holton’s “Unruly Americans and the Oranges Origins of the Constitution”. As Holton explained, in the mid-1780’s, the American economy was in dire straits. Having declared and won its independence, America was foundering, unable to pay its debts and unable to obtain foreign credit. Farmers were particularly hard hit by debt, trade disruptions, and taxes, which led to the memorable Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts. Whose fault, however, was the farmers’ plight? While many blamed the state government—because of taxation, and because of its siding with bondholders against indebted farmers—others insisted the farmers had brought ruin upon themselves.}

________________________________________________

“The sons of liberty had become libertines.” (Woody Holton)

Woody Holton:

Were American farmers in trouble because the legislatures had failed to maintain a healthy flow of currency and then imposed excessively high taxes? Or was the real problem the Americans’ own tendency to spend more than they earned?

Noah Webster distinguished himself in the battle against plebian indolence and extravagance. It was not legislative policies that needed to be reformed, he insisted; it was the farmers themselves. At the end of the Revolutionary War, Webster began trying to rein in Americans’ spending. “Luxury rages among you,” Webster told his countrymen, "and luxury is the devil.”

Several groups of prominent Americans launched collective assaults on conspicuous consumption, forming anti-extravagance associations. The governor whose tax policies had helped stir Massachusetts farmers to revolt trumpeted his belief that the state’s distress was rooted in irresponsible consumer choices. Seventy-five state senators and representatives joined in a “solemn agreement and association” to reduce consumption of “articles of luxury and extravagance”. They affirmed that what was really “exhausting our circulatory medium” [i.e., the money supply] was “the excess use and consumption of articles of foreign manufacture”.

The anti-luxury associations of the 1780s were founded on the belief that, since it was emulation—the tendency of the poor and middling to mimic the spending habits of the wealthy—that had trapped Americans in debt, only emulation could save them. “Were the sons of affluence to deviate from the highway of wide-wasted extravagance,” a Virginia essayist declared in 1786, “the plebians of our country would, probably, more generally embrace frugality and virtue. Example,” he affirmed, “is more powerful than precept.” ¹

One writer told Connecticut farmers they could easily discharge their tax bills if they would simply drink less rum. “A stranger would think you to be a nation of Indians by your thirst for this paltry liquor,” he wrote. The same essayist urged men to “pull all the plumes from the heads of your wives and your daughters. Feathers and fripperies suit the Cherokees, or the wench in your kitchen, but they little become the fair daughters of Independent America.”

The Connecticut essayist joined in a growing tendency to pin the country’s economic decline on women. Another writer contended that farmwives “will annually spend as much money for gauze, ribbons, and other such trifling articles as would pay their taxes.” According to male authors, the woman who draped herself in luxury garments was not actually interested in increasing her comfort, just in keeping up with the neighbors or even standing “at the head of her acquaintance”. ²

While most women were castigated for exacerbating the economic downturn, others were celebrated as pointing the way to recovery. Small groups of female citizens launched ostentatious assaults upon their own extravagance. In the fall of 1785 newspapers published an extraordinary report from Boston: “Many ladies of the first character and fortune, in this metropolis, have in contemplation, in consequence of the present melancholy state of their country, to desist, the approaching season, from all public amusements; and to discourage all in their power, every species of luxury, extravagance, and dissipation.”

Women in several towns agreed to “unite their influence” and to embark upon frugality together. In November 1786, more than one hundred women in Hartford, Connecticut agreed to confront their conspicuous consumption together, signing a pledge “to dress their persons in the plainest manner”. They clearly did not agree with those who attributed the state’s economic problems to high taxes and a cramped money supply. “Our calamities,” they said, “are in a great measure occasioned by the luxury and extravagance of individuals.” Endorsing the widespread view that fashion was fueled by mimicry, they tried to divert the force of emulation into a positive direction. Their hope was the very “ladies who used to excel in dress” would now “endeavor to set the best examples” of frugality.

Men often called upon women to reform their husbands’ and sons’ habits along with their own. Since female influence had drawn men into the slough of luxury, who better to haul them out? The Andover, Massachusetts town meeting wished that female citizens “would by their engaging examples, as well as by other proper ways, devote that power of influence, with which nature has endowed them, to the purpose of encouraging every species of economy in living.”

^{___________________________________________} 

¹ Note, if you will, the existence and recognition of class distinctions ("sons of affluence" and "plebians") long before Karl Marx had even been born.  Color me shocked.

² Gender politics in the 1780s! Color me astonished.

Sunday Sermon: The Man Comes Around

The Man Comes Around (by Johnny Cash)

 

And I heard as it were the noise of thunder, one of the four beasts saying come and see and I saw, and behold, a white horse

 

There's a man going around taking names

And he decides who to free and who to blame

Everybody won't be treated all the same

There'll be a golden ladder reaching down

When the Man comes around

 

The hairs on your arm will stand up

At the terror in each sip and in each sup

Will you partake of that last offered cup?

Or disappear into the potter's ground?

When the Man comes around

 

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singing

Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum

Voices calling, voices crying

Some are born and some are dying

It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

 

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

 

Till Armageddon no shalam, no shalom

Then the father hen will call his chickens home

The wise man will bow down before the throne

And at His feet they'll cast their golden crowns

When the Man comes around

 

Whoever is unjust let him be unjust still

Whoever is righteous let him be righteous still

Whoever is filthy let him be filthy still

Listen to the words long written down

When the Man comes around

 

Hear the trumpets, hear the pipers

One hundred million angels singing

Multitudes are marching to the big kettledrum

Voices calling and voices crying

Some are born and some are dying

It's Alpha and Omega's kingdom come

 

And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree

The virgins are all trimming their wicks

The whirlwind is in the thorn tree

It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks

 

In measured hundred weight and penny pound

When the Man comes around.

 

And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts and I looked and behold, a pale horse and his name that sat on him was death and Hell followed with him.

______________________________________

Johnny Cash-The_Man_Comes Around - YouTube

Johnny Cash - When The Man Comes Around ((Original Version)) - YouTube

(from Valachi Art)

Wednesday with Pascal: What a Godawful Mess

{Caveat lector: in the wake of another of Kevin Slack's online lectures, Pascal the existential Russian blue cat is in a mood today.}

In his memorable 1970 review of Bob Dylan’s appalling album Self-Portrait, Greil Marcus began by asking: “What is this shit?”

More politely, we could recall the exasperated cries of tennis great John McEnroe: “You cannot be serious!”

Either of those quotes captures my reaction to Professor Kevin Slack’s appalling online lecture on “Civil Rights and Black Power,” a lecture that is a farrago of one-sided interpretations, tendentious readings, and oversimplifications, along with discreet omissions of anything that might contradict or even complicate Slack’s preferred narrative.  

In fact, one could compose a litany of Slack’s omissions, and I will. To wit, he omits any mention of:

• Slavery
• Jim Crow
• lynchings
• the Ku Klux Klan
• Truman’s desegregation of the military
• the Dixiecrat Party
• Southern white resistance to school integration
• the emergence of “Christian academies” and “White Citizens Councils”
• Orval Faubus
• Little Rock
• George Wallace
• Alabama
• Lester Maddox
• Ross Barnett
• Mississippi
• Selma
• Montgomery
• bombing of Southern black churches
• the murder of Emmett Till
• the murder of Malcolm X
• the murder of Martin Luther King Jr.
• Richard Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”
• Nixon’s policy of “benign neglect” of black communities
• “No one’s ever gonna out-n----- me again” (George Wallace)
• “We’ve just lost the South for a generation.” (Lyndon Johnson)
• “The white community, for the time being, is the advanced race” (National Review)

That, I would suggest, is a lot of contextual detail to have left out.

What, then, does Professor Slack cover in “Civil Rights and Black Power”? The following constitutes a reasonable precis, which I will call The Gospel of the Civil Rights Movement According to Professor Kevin Slack:

In the beginning, American Liberals supported keeping whites and blacks apart to avoid fighting between them. Liberals created restrictive housing covenants and the practice of “red lining” by banks to achieve de facto segregation. However, Liberals were caught between the rock of professing to be ‘color blind’ when it came to race, and the hard place of pushing for race-conscious policies (“affirmative action”). Basically, Liberals wanted to help people of color while pretending there was no such thing as color—silly Liberals! In the “New Deal,” FDR created the Fair Employment Practices Commission as a publicity stunt; the FEPC was a kind of Potemkin village of an agency that had no powers but symbolized Liberal opposition to discrimination in hiring. Then, in the Fifties, a liberal Supreme Court ruled that public schools had to be desegregated, but it said they could take their time getting it done, which everyone, North and South, agreed was reasonable. Americans wholeheartedly supported reasonable accommodations and equal rights for Negroes.

In the Forties and Fifties, Black Americans had made great progress, but then Liberals became radicalized, and the good times came to an end. In the Sixties, there were three Black factions in America: the “Black bourgeoisie,” the “beloved community,” and “Negroes with guns”. It was a full-time job for guilt-ridden white Liberals to pander to all three elements of the Black community; how their heads did spin!

The “Black bourgeoisie,” like bourgeoisie everywhere, imitated the (white) social and economic class above them. They tried to be white, to talk white, to act white; they straightened their hair, they minded their manners, and they favored gradual integration and incremental legal change over unruly civil disobedience and violence. At the same time, they postured as revolutionaries while combing their genealogies to see if they could qualify for membership in the DAR.

The “beloved community” was the brainchild of the notorious philanderer Martin Luther King, Jr., who envisioned a world where neither race nor marital fidelity mattered. ¹ It began as a church- and community-based movement, emphasizing legal parity and economic self-sufficiency; but King, afraid of being eclipsed by Black radicals, turned to the Left, denounced the war in Vietnam, and demanded affirmative action and a domestic Marshall Plan. He provoked violence, paradoxically, through his diabolical tactic of nonviolent civil disobedience, which forced law enforcement to beat the living hell out of protestors. Many leaders in Black communities opposed Martin Luther King, Jr. (even before they learned of his sordid sexual shenanigans). Joseph H. Jackson, for instance, a good Negro and President of the United Baptist Convention, USA, tried to keep the Civil Rights movement from tacking Left; he advised King to keep a clean nose and watch the plainclothes. King, of course, with the morals of an alley cat, refused to listen.

“Negroes with guns” was the brainchild of Robert Williams (author of a book by that title). He was soon joined by Malcolm X, Eldridge Cleaver, Huey Newton (and the News), and Stokely Carmichael. They jointly invented Black Power, SNCC, and Identity Politics; later, they kidnapped Patty Hearst and bombed the Mexico City Olympics.

Other agitators included James Cone, a Black preacher whose message was “Jesus hates Whitey”; Malcolm X, who brainwashed Cassius Clay, accused Reverend King of being an Uncle Tom, and consorted with Muslims, Communists, and Third World radicals; Stokely Carmichael, who embraced the revolutionary politics of Frantz Fanon; Eldridge Cleaver, who flew to Cuba and presented Fidel Castro with a box of exploding cigars; and the Commie terrorist Angela Davis, who was awarded tenure at the University of California.

The Sixties were a very troubled, and troubling, decade. So much went wrong!  Conservatives in postwar America tried to stand athwart History yelling “Stop the desegregation!” Alas, they were only crying in the American wilderness. Voices of reason like William F. Buckley Jr. and Barry Goldwater were drowned out by demagogues like Dwight Eisenhower—a RINO who sent federal troops into Arkansas.

Did Liberals at least have good intentions on the issue of race? No, they did not, according to Professor Kevin Slack. From FDR’s sham FEPC in the Thirties to the vague “with all deliberate speed” of Brown v. Board of Education and to welfare policies designed to keep Blacks mired in dependency, Liberals have always been virtue-signalers: white hypocrites who waved banners of tolerance while forcing blue-collar white neighborhoods and schools to desegregate but who simultaneously protected their own gated communities and sent their own children to private schools.

In closing, I take back every good thing I said last week about Kevin Slack. “Civil Rights and Black Power” is almost certainly the worst lecture I have had the misfortune to encounter; to paraphrase a man much more generous than I can bring myself to be, "Father, forgive him, for he knows not what he's talking about." If it weren’t for the fact that the Hillsdale College online course is free, I would demand my money back. As it is, I have several more lectures to endure.

_______________________________________

¹ Reading directly from FBI transcripts, Professor Slack is shocked to learn that Martin Luther King, Jr. had over forty extramarital affairs and that he participated in orgies that included rapes which he watched and cheered on. Professor Slack does not suggest that the FBI reports are in any way suspect or that they ought to be taken with a grain of salt; unlike today’s nefarious “Deep State” agencies, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was apparently on the right side of history.

1963: the aftermath of the bombing of Birmingham's 16th Street Baptist Church 

 

Wednesday with Pascal: History, Hillsdale-Style

{Pascal the existential Russian blue cat dutifully completed his assignment for the week, submitting to me his report on Professor Kevin Slack’s lecture, “Liberalism’s Rejection of Progressivism”. However, implausible as this may seem, Pascal’s submission has apparently been lost—in translation, in the Cloud, or somewhere on a flash drive or a hard drive, who knows? Pascal is understandably irate and refuses to rewrite the report. He has, however, given me permission to crib from his class notes to produce a rough summary of Professor Slack’s lecture. We can only be grateful that Pascal is being so reasonable about the situation.}

As Professor Kevin Slack explains to his audience at Hillsdale College online, 20^th-century Liberalism followed in the wake of Progressivism and exacerbated the damage already done by its predecessor (e.g., popular election of U.S. Senators, federal income tax, women’s suffrage, World War I, anarchist bombings, Palmer raids, etc.). The failures of Progressivism were to be corrected by Liberalism, which was simply Progressivism on steroids and with even less respect for democracy. Concocted by the likes of Walter Lippmann, Woodrow Wilson, and John Dewey, modern Liberalism, like ancient Gaul, was divided into three parts, which Slack identifies as Intellectual Liberalism, Quantitative Liberalism, and Qualitative Liberalism.

Intellectually, Liberalism rejected the Western philosophical tradition, abandoning the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, replacing them with the Useful, the Popular, and the Expedient. Denying the existence of “essences” and “absolutes,” Liberalism opened the door to relativism; it also doubled down on philosophical nominalism, claiming that abstractions like “Justice” and “Freedom” were merely words that signified human ideas rather than divinely crafted Platonic forms. Finally, it dismissed the wisdom of the past on the grounds that new circumstances presented new difficulties which in turn required new solutions.

Quantitative Liberalism entered the picture with the New Deal. Its adherents claimed that the new solutions needed would be provided by Experts gathered in councils, commissions, and committees through which they would structure and guide the Liberal project—that is, the aggrandizement of the central State and the corresponding diminution of the private economic sector. Bean counters uber alles! With a federal Brain Trust in charge, and with the creation of an unelected Bureaucracy which soon evolved into the Deep State, free enterprise could be dispensed with. Beginning with the New Deal, Liberalism won popular favor (and purchased votes) with housing subsidies and jobs programs; it regulated everything from prices and wages to the size of strippers’ tassels; it redistributed wealth via Social Security; it established minimum wage laws and workplace safety rules. In all, Roosevelt’s tyranny was so oppressive that hundreds of thousands of Americans chose to enlist in the military and go to war against Japan and Germany rather than submit further to New Deal totalitarianism.

After John Wayne defeated the Axis powers and Ronald Reagan liberated the German concentration camps, America could have turned from Liberalism back to the verities of Coolidge and Hoover. Instead, it handed the government over to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and his Liberal cronies (e.g., Robert Oppenheimer, Dalton Trumbo, and Alan Ginsberg). Schlesinger’s The Vital Center became the blueprint for reshaping American politics; his “horseshoe theory” held that ideologies of the Right and the Left tended to meet at the extreme, with sensible Liberals holding down the ideological center. Liberalism reigned unchallenged; even President Eisenhower conceded its inevitability, thereby inventing the American RINO. Ike's idea of Conservatism was to conserve FDR's New Deal legacy, and even to extend it; for example, he had the interstate highway system built to win support from suburban voters.

Such was the heyday of Quantitative Liberalism, according to Professor Slack; from the Thirties through the Fifties, the emphasis was on expanding the reach of government and boosting the economy. The ephemeral joys of consumerism replaced the durable satisfactions of personal virtue and ordered liberty. Americans were bought off, transformed from citizens into consumers, and then lulled to sleep in front of their television sets. The movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers was not so much a preview as it was a documentary.

In the Sixties, unwilling to rest on its laurels and having nothing better to do, Liberalism decided to undermine its own accomplishments. Having invented consumerism, Liberalism turned against it, criticizing the “affluent society” it had created; having invented the “welfare-warfare” State, Liberalism turned against the warfare aspect, denouncing the war in Vietnam. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. was replaced by John Kenneth Galbraith, who invented Keynesian economics; Michael Harrington (a Socialist) made middle-class Americans apologize for their prosperity; John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me) invented white guilt. President Lyndon Johnson, who was insecure because he was so tall and so Texan, agreed to all of Liberalism’s demands: guns and butter, civil rights, Peace Corps, Job Corps, Community Action Organizations, Medicare, Public Broadcasting, immigration reform, housing subsidies, student loans, gunboat diplomacy, etc.

And then things got bad—really, really bad. In the mid-Sixties, a new generation of Leftist radicals emerged; American college campuses, previously known for panty raids, goldfish swallowing, and other harmless hijinks, became war zones. The Marxist New Left of the Sixties will be the subject of Professor Kevin Slack’s next lecture, and of Pascal the existential Russian blue cat’s next report. My breath is bated for sure.

{Note: since I did not attend Professor Slack’s lecture and have had to work from Pascal’s notes, my report may not be entirely accurate. However, I believe it captures the tenor of the lecture; in any case, any inaccuracies are my fault and not Pascal’s.}