Dr. Metablog

Sons of Ham, Sons of Japheth

In Caroline Hentz's The Planter's Northern Bride (1859), Eulalia, the daughter of an New England abolitionist, has married a slaveowner and traveled with him to his home in Georgia.  Here's what she sees.  Warning: be prepared to be shocked and revolted.

"All around, far as the eye could reach, the rich rolling fields of cotton, bearing the downy wealth of the South, stretched out a boundless ocean of green, spotted with white, like the foam of the wave.  Soon returning in grand march from the fields, came the negroes, poising on their heads immense baskets, brimming with the light and flaky cotton.  Little children looking very much like walking semicolons, toddled along, balancing their baskets also, with an air of self-importance and pride.  Eulalia recollected all the horrible stories she had heard of negro insurrections, and thought what an awful thing it was to be at the mercy of so many slaves, on that lonely plantation.  When she saw her husband going out among them, and they closed round, shutting him in as with a thick cloud, she asked herself if her were really safe.  They gathered around him, eager to get within reach of his hand, the sound of his voice, the glance of his kind, protecting, yet commanding eye.  More like a father welcomed by his chlIdren than a king greeted by his subjects, he stood, the centre of that sable ring.  She had never seen him look so handsome, so noble, so good.  As she looked at her husband, standing in their midst, the representative of the fair sons of Japheth, wearing on his brow the signet of a loftier, nobler destiny, every lineament and feature expressive of intellect and power, and then at each of that dark, lowly throng, she felt a conviction that freedom, in its proudest latitude, education with its most exalted privileges, could never make them equal to him. She never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate.  Do the hundreds and thousands buried in the black coal-pits and wretched dens of Great Britain, who have never heard, in their living graves, of the God who created, the Saviour who redeemed them, pass their sunless lives in greater comfort or fuller enjoyment."

Hey, it's good to be a slave. Apparently. "Tender and affectionate????

I was aware that there were anti-Uncle Tom's Cabin novels, designed to showcase the glories of slavery, but I had never read one. The Planter's Northern Bride is supposedly one of the best of the genre.  It has the power to make you despair for the intelligence of the entire human race. Some samples:

"Merry voices singing in the fields of labour or filling up the pauses of toil...."

"The joyful songs and exhilarating laughter of our slaves...."

"The negro has an intense appreciation of beauty and grace, and feels the influence of mental superiority."

"You will see the negro, not as he is at the North, an isolated, degraded being, without caste or respectability, a single black line running through a web of whiteness, but surrounded with the socialities of life, and though doomed to labour, yet free from the cares and anxieties that rest so heavily on us."

Here are the words that Caroline Hentz puts in the mouth of one of Eulalia's slaves. 

"I tell you what, Crissy, when de nigger have good massa and good miss, dey well off.  When dey have bad massa and missis, dey bad off. Talk 'bout us being on a 'quality with white folks, no such ting.  De Lord never made us look like dem.  We mustn't be angry wid de Lord, for all dat:  He knows best, I 'spise.  Look a'me, black as de chimney back, -- dey, white as snow;  what great, big, thick, ugly lips I got, -- dere's look jist like roses.  Den dis black sheep head, what de Lord make dat for?  Dey got putey, soft, long hair, just like de silk ribbons.  Now look at dat big long heel, will you?" added Judy, putting out her bare foot in the moonshine, giggling and shaking;  "who ever saw de white lady with sich a heel as dat?  I do wonder what the Lord made us nigger for?  I spect de white dust gin out, and he had to take de black."

Slavery deformed society.  Arguments in support of slavery deformed the intellect.  The attempt to find supernatural sanction for slavery perverted religion. Slavery incapacitated the slaveholding states.  One hundred and fifty years after slavery, they have still not caught up and they are still pulling the country down.

Does Caroline Hentz believe the words that she puts on paper?  I believe she does.  I believe that she makes these observations and arguments with total sincerity.  I also believe that the kind of utterances to which she gives vent, though no longer respectable, no longer made in public, are not dead.

Lessons from R. B. Hayes

Rutherford B. Hayes, whose biography (by Hans J. Trefousse) I have just read, was a an intelligent, well-meaning, but not very imaginative president.  It's a blemish on his record that he compromised his principles and allowed ex-Confederate leaders in the southern states to install Jim Crow policies that would take a hundred years to undo.  He should have fought much harder. 

Hayes' most famous sentence dates from his 1877 inaugural address: "He serves his party best who serves his country best."  It's an admirable principle -- and one that that has been thoroughly violated by Mr. Bush and the pack of clowns and schmegeggies that he has installed to ruin our government.

After Hayes left office, he wandered to the political left.  Although as president he had intervened to crush the railroad strikes, he later came to believe (according to Trefousse) that "the taxation system was unfair, taking a much smaller share of the estates of millionaires than of ordinary people." "The real difficulty," Hayes wrote, "is that vast wealth and power reside in the hands of the few and unscrupulous.  Hundreds of laws are in the interest of these men and against the interest of the workingmen.  Lincoln was for government of the people.  The new tendency is for government 'of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.'" 

These are words of remarkable pertinence.  It woult appear that we haven't moved very far from the mark -- the more shame to us.  If Hayes had said these same words today, he would not doubt have been accused of fomenting "class warfare."  (Class warfare: redistributing money from rich to poor.  Normal state of affair (not class warfare):  taking money from the poor to give to the rich.)

Nanny State! Nanny State!

According to Charles Dickens, who visited the United States in 1842, American men were constantly masticating tobacco.  He was thoroughly shocked by the "two odious practices of chewing and expectorating" -- a habit that he found to be both "offensive and sickening."

"In all the public places of America," wrote the novelist, "this filthy custom is recognized.  In the courts of law the judge has his spittoon, the crier his, the witness his, and the prisoner his."  They all spit "incessantly."  Worse still, In the hospitals the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject there tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolor the stairs."  A further horror:  "in public buildings visitors are implored ... to squirt the essence of their plugs... into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns.  This custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning call, and with all the transactions of social life.  The stranger will find it in its full bloom and glory, luxuriant in all its alarming recklessness."

It must have been horrible.  Dickens says that every floor, staircase, carpet was disfigured with traces of "tinctured saliva."  It's hard to imagine that our revered ancestors lived in such a foul, smelly, slippery environment or that your doc would have a spittoon at his feet while he discussed your symptoms.

Eventually, there was a movement to ban public spitting, but it took almost a century before the odious custom was conquered (except on the baseball field, where it flourishes today in all its ancient glory).  There were those who resisted change, of course.  To prohibit spitting was to regulate and ultimately to deny a human freedom.  If the catchword had been invented, the right-wingers of the day would have been shouting, the way they do now when it's not the spitting but the smoking of tobacco that's in question:  "Spitters' rights!  Spitters' rights!  Nanny state!  Nanny state!"   

When Sir Simonds d'Ewes visited Paris two centuries before Dickens toured America, he was shocked to find the steps of the Louvre littered with "a thousand ordures."  Defecating in public was the French custom and a human freedom.  Eventually, however, laws and customs changed.  But I'm absolutely positive that 1640s libertarians were out there on the barricades, screaming "Shitters' rights!  Shitters' rights!  Nanny state! Nanny state!"

Favorite Royal Cognomina and Sobriquets

Reading an introductory history of Spain (I'm appallingly ignorant about the Iberian peninsula), I learned of the dark age king with the excellent name of Wifred the Hairy.  Wifred stimulated me to recall other monarchs with colorful sobriquets:  Vlad the Impaler, Ethelred the Unready, Ivan the Terrible, Charles the Fat, Edward the Confessor, Pippin the Short, Eric the Red, William the Conqueror, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Joanna the Mad, Suleiman the Magnificent.  When my learning and memory failed, wikipedia rode to the rescue:   Sviatopolk the Accursed, Ismail the Bloodthirsty, Ivailo the Cabbage, Alfonso the Chaste, Louis the Indolent, Denis the Farmer, Piero the Gouty, Fulk the Ill-tempered, Edgar the Outlaw, Louis the Pious, Eric the Priest-hater, William the Silent, Olaf the Stout, Bayezid the Thunderbolt, Garcia the Tremulous, and Alfonso the Wise.  Then I thought, how sad that in this formal age of first and last names we no longer make use of such picturesque appellations.  Let's return to the earlier tradition.  I propose, as a start, Mel the Bigot, Mike the Ear-biter, Rush the Blowhard, George the Truculent (or George the Decider), Alberto the Forgetful, and Dick the Dick.  Suggestions are very welcome. The world is all before us, where to seek. 

May 15.  Pauline Harlem, acclaimed author of The Joy of Anagrams, suggests these two:  Woody the Perplexed and Warren the Promiscuous.

May 16. Spike Schapiro comments:  "Who in the living heckola is 'Ivailo the Cabbage.'  Did you make that up, Vivian?  Do the rules of your game allow me to invent vegetable sobriquets?   Suppose I said, 'Ivana the Beet' or 'Penelope the Melon'?  Would that be amusing or pertinent?  What's the deal here?

Vivian replies:  Spike -- Ivailo the Cabbage, King of Bulgaria, was also known as "Ivailo the Lettuce" and "Ivailo the Radish."  Why would I try to deceive you?  Besides, I'm not nearly so inventive.  For more info, click  here.

Was Edward Gibbon a Replacement Child?

     By strict definition, a replacement child is one who is conceived because an older sibling has died. According to the theory, such a child is at psychological risk, especially if the dead child has not been adequately mourned.

     Because he was an oldest son, Edward Gibbon, the greatest of all modern historians and the most brilliant prose stylist in the English language, would not seem to qualify as a replacement  -- except that in his own curious manner of thinking, Gibbon “replaced” children who were born subsequent to him.

     Gibbon preened himself on his status in the family. “From my birth,” he said in his famous Memoir, “I have enjoyed the rights of primogeniture.”   But primogeniture was not so much a chronological fact as it was a pinnacle to be defended. As he conceived it, Gibbon triumphed over would-be competitors to his supremacy.  “I was succeeded by five brothers and one sister, all of whom were snatched away in their infancy.”  Toward his dead siblings, and toward the parents who endured the heart-breaking death of six of their seven children, Gibbon was unnaturally cold and mercenary.  “I shall not pretend to lament” the loss of those who would “oppress my inheritance.”  Gibbon lacked empathy in part because he felt, with some justice, that his younger siblings were favored over him by his father.  How could this be? 

     The Memoir supplies an explanation. In an age of high infant mortality, Gibbon was a very sickly child. His life was at risk and other children seemed healthier. As Gibbon himself puts it, “so feeble was my constitution, so precarious my life, that, in the baptism of each of my brothers my father’s prudence successively repeated my Christian name of Edward, that, in case of the departure of the eldest son, this patronymic appellation might be still perpetuated in the family.”  This is odd indeed.  In five separate instances, according to the future historian, a male child saw the light, and each time the child was named Edward. In one case after another, the outcome was the same. The infant who might have “oppressed his inheritance” succumbed and the heroic oldest son beat back the challenge. The first Edward therefore “replaced,” so to speak, a series of subsequent Edwards who might have superseded him.  It's not hard to imagine that a sickly child, pursued by a series of infants each christened with his very own name, would feel threatened and might rejoice rather than mourn at their funerals.

     Although Gibbon attributes the pattern of naming to his father’s “prudence,” it is obvious that the phrase "my father's prudence” is an irony that masks a true fury.  Was it prudence or was it his father's hope that the sickly child would be succeeded by an healthy one?   Hostility also shines through Gibbon's jealous account of his mother: "to preserve and to rear so frail a being [as himself], the most tender assiduity was scarcely sufficient; and my mother’s attention was somewhat diverted by her frequent pregnancies, by an exclusive passion for her husband, and by the dissipation of the world, in which his taste and authority obliged her to mingle.”  The irony of this beautiful Augustan sentence conceals infantine rage:  to translate into more forthright English, Gibbon objects that his mother conceived other children, claims that she should have preferred him to her husband, and asserts that she should have withdrawn from society to nurse him.

     To what degree Gibbon’s suppressed and ironic but still obvious anger toward his parents contributed to his peculiar temperament is difficult to say, but it is a fact that the bulk of his career was spent not only in tracing the decline and fall of Rome, the father of all European civilizations, but also in displacing an established patriarchal religion from its position of supremacy. The irony that he directed against his parents in his Memoir is the exact weapon he learned to deploy against Roman failures and against triumphant Christianity.

     In addition, there's an untidy psychological wrinkle. Gibbon’s claim that the male children who succeeded him were all named Edward is a crucial part of his indictment of his parents.  But it's an assertion that is not true and is not substantiated by parish records.  There was no endless series of Edwards.  Apparently, one succeeding child was so named but the rest enjoyed various different appellations. The most scrupulous of historians either invented or misremembered the dreadful slight that so wounded him.  What psychological mechanism caused Gibbon to yearn to be even more of a replacement child than in fact he was? 

The Holy Lance

In 1098, the crusaders were trapped inside the walls of Antioch and their mission to capture Jerusalem was gravely jeopardized.  When things were at their worst, one of the crusaders -- a Provencal peasant named Peter Bartholomew -- was visited by St. Andrew, who revealed to him that the lance with which the Roman soldier Longinus had pierced the side of Jesus was hidden in Antioch's Basilica of St. Peter.   St. Andrew informed Peter that "he who carries this lance into battle shall never be overcome by the enemy."  Bartholemew's claim met with initial skepticism because it was an established fact that the Holy Lance lay safely in the relic collection of the Byzantine emperor in Constantinople.  Nevertheless, the authorities agreed to investigate.  Twelve men dug until exhaustion at the spot to which Bartholomew pointed, but they could find nothing.  Finally, Peter himself dropped into the hole and brought forth a shard of metal.  "All across the city there was boundless rejoicing."  Suddenly invigorated by the possession of this powerful relic, their morale euphoric, the crusaders broke out of the city, overcame the armies that surrounded them, and proceeded to Jerusalem.  Some months afterward, Peter Bartholomew had another vision:  that the entire crusade  was compromised because some of its soldiers were polluted by pride or cowardice.  He announced that he himself would choose and put to death soldiers of the cross who were steeped in sin.  There was a backlash against Peter and the authenticity of the Holy Lance was challenged.  Peter decided to prove his truth in a trial by ordeal.  After fasting for several days, he ran, carrying the Holy Lance, between two piles of burning olive branches four feet high and thirteen feet long.  He was severely burned and died several days later.  The Holy Lance lost its magic and morale plummeted.  The crusaders were forced to seek an alternative.  The ingenious Raymond of Toulouse dispatched his follower Hugh of Monteil to Latakia to retrieve a fragment of the cross on which Jesus had been crucified.  In the end, the discrediting of the Holy Lance proved to be only a temporary setback.    

The facts in this and the previous essaylet come from Thomas Asbridge, The First Crusade, a New History (Oxford University Press, 2004). 

Adolf Award for Worst Person of the Century

The winner of the Adolf for worst person of the century goes to Pope Urban II. The century in question is the first one of the previous millennium, or 1000-1100. Like many other Adolf award winners, Urban perpetrated evil deeds that have continued to provoke hatred, war and suffering even to the present day.  HIs principal crime: Pope Urban fabricated a litany of Muslim atrocities in order to incite Christians to wrest Jerusalem from a “race” that he called “absolutely alien to God.”  In November, 1095, in Clermont in the south of France, Urban told an eager audience that Muslims had circumcised Christians and spread their unspeakable blood on baptismal fonts; that they had “cut open the navels of others, tearing out their vital organs” and that they had committed appalling atrocities upon women “of which it is more evil to speak than to keep silent.”  Some say that his catalogue of mutilations and barbarities was based on faulty intelligence but most think it was his own invention.  Urban did not just incite and condone warfare, he sanctified it. His crusade would be a pilgrimage--and therefore a form of penance.  Combatants who died in its course would be purified. God, it was claimed, has instituted “holy wars” so that knights might find a new path to salvation. Roughly one hundred thousand crusaders answered his call and set out for the Levant to take Jerusalem from the infidels. On the way, they warmed to their task by conducting genocidal attacks of unprecedented brutality upon the Jewish communities of the Rhineland (communities that had been in place before the advent of Christianity).  These quasi-sanctioned raids are now known as “the first holocaust.”   The passage of the crusaders to the middle East was made easier because the Muslims were divided into two factions --Shiite and Sunni -- that were perpetually at daggers drawn.  The crusaders laid siege to Antioch in October, 1099, and when they took the city, slaughtered its entire Muslim population.  In possession of Antioch, they found themselves entirely surrounded by hostile armies. But God was on their side.  The timely intervention of “countless armies with white horses… led by the saints George, Mercurius, and Demetrius“ allowed them to fight their way out of the city.  The crusaders headed south and in midsummer of 1099 besieged Jerusalem. The Muslim defenders taunted the crusaders by setting up crosses and urinating on them; in response, the Christians catapulted the bodies of captured Muslims over the walls. When Jerusalem fell, the celebration was euphoric.  The Provencal crusader Raymond of Aguilers reported that “some of the pagans were mercifully beheaded, others were tortured for a long time and burned to death in searing flames. Piles of heads, hands and feel lay in the houses and streets. Infants were seized by the soles of their feet from their mothers’ laps or their cradles, and dashed against the wall, breaking their necks.”  Covered with gore, weighed down with plunder, “rejoicing and weeping from excessive gladness," the crusaders "worshipped at the Sepulchre of Jesus the Savior.”

Although Pope Urban II died two weeks after the fall and sack of Jerusalem, there is no question but that his Adolf was well and truly earned and that his legacy lives on. 

World War II Memories

I was six years old when the war ended in 1945, so my memories are few and arise in no particular order.  I remember hearing news reports on the radio that were datelined "Moscow" -- but I confused Moscow with Bosco, a brand of chocolate syrup popular in the 1940s.  I remember that the floor of our kitchen was disfigured with an infinite number of black marks -- there was a shortage of rubber and the improvised synthetic soles disintegrated and left nasty stains.  My mother said, "We'll wait until after the war is over to replace the linoleum."  Many commodities were in short supply:  for butter there was a white oleomargerine into which a packet of orange food color was mashed to simulate a credible yellow.  There were ration books and ration stamps for gasoline and sugar and coffee and greens.  My mother was furious that Mr. Lerner, who owned the fruit and vegetable shop on 18th Avenue, sold black-market lettuces from the back of his store.  A bus driver was rude to a passenger;  my mother said:  "all the decent young men are overseas."  We all saved our nickels and brought money to school to buy war bonds.  Following government advice, my father dug up his carefully tended lawn and planted a "victory garden" of vegetables.  There were frequent blackouts: my father's friend Jack Patent sported a white hard hat because he was a warden.  My Uncle Dan, a major in the Army Air Corps, came home from the Burma border for a thirty-day furlough and showed me his captured German Luger.  We received air mail letters from him and from other soldiers with details blacked out by military censors.  I complained to my mother: "Mrs. Callery  (my first grade teacher) isn't nice to me."  My mother said, "You have to forgive her;  she's lost four of her boys in the war."  Lost?  Four of her boys?  I did not understand.  On a sunny spring day in 1945, we heard on the radio that President Roosevelt was dead;  my mother sat on the stoop and cried.  And in August of that same year, when our family was visiting someone on a lake somewhere, all of a sudden the adults who had motor boats were zooming back and forth and shouting and laughing.  I asked what was happening and my father said, "the war is over." 

Uncle Jack's tank was demolished by German cannon fire and he was the crew's only survivor.  He lived with shrapnel and with pain until the age of ninety-one.  Cousin Saul's older brother was killed in New Guinea, but Sarah, his mother, "knew" that he was alive and waited for the knock on the door or the telephone call until the end of her days. Meanwhile, the poor fellow's bones lay bleaching at Buna or some other long-forgotten battlefield.  Before the war, my mother said, we received mail from the old country -- from the many members of the Chafetz and Tomaszewski and Middlebank and Hessel families who had stayed behind.  "But after the war, nothing."  Can we, even now, bear to imagine what became of all those Malkas and Rifkas and Levs and Mendels?