Another Candle

Some years ago I began a series of posts on charitable organizations I supported and whose signal I wanted to boost. I suppose I preferred cursing the darkness, since I only managed to light two candles (so to speak) before discontinuing the series. I think it is past time to renew that effort. Our social fabric will always need mending, and of late that fabric has seemed more frayed than usual - but perhaps also more reparable.

I’ve long been annoyed by institutions’ emptying issuance of tribal land acknowledgments, an act which seems to me like a social prayer without works. (Cf “thoughts and prayers” to victims of gun violence.) I think if one is going to admit to living on another person’s property, one should at least make an effort to pay rent. Some institutions do so; most, I think, don’t bother. 

As an individual I find that my resources are too straitened to make more than nominal compensation to Indigenous Americans; as a student of Native American history, I find it important at least to make the attempt. 

Like Scott Berg, I have made the American Indian College Fund my de facto landlord. The AICF is a thirty-five-year-old, Native-run charity that grants scholarships to about 4,000 Indigenous American students pursuing associates, bachelors, or postgraduate degrees. It also provides financial aid and training to personnel and programs at the United States’ thirty five Tribal Colleges and Universities. (All of these, by the way, are grievously underfunded. The United States government is the biggest deadbeat tenant.) The latter help develop programs in education, computer science, and language revitalization. About 70 percent of the Fund’s revenue goes to scholarship recipients, making it a reasonably efficient eleemosynary agency. Even so, the AICF can only provide aid to ten percent of applicants, so the need for its services and for donors is considerable.

In Brief: The Prettier Learning

Kalipedia, he prophesied, would soon be generally adopted and all the graces of life, genuinely good music, agreeable literature, light philosophy, instructive pictures, plastercast reproductions of the classical statues such as Venus and Apollo, artistic coloured photographs of prize babies, all these little attentions would enable ladies who were in a particular condition to pass the intervening months in a most enjoyable manner.

Thus one of the characters in Ulysses, apropos of the needs and wants of pregnant women, about which too many men have uninformed opinions. Joyce was likely referring to “Callipaedia, Or the Art of Getting Pretty Children” (1719), a translation of Claude Quillet’s versical marriage manual. The word “callipedia” itself refers to “beautiful learning,” which Joyce rendered as “kalipedia,” (good learning). 

Apparently Playmobil has this market to itself.

For all of J.J.’s snarkiness, I find this curriculum appealing, particularly as I advance in years. I am likelier to enjoy my leisure hours, such as they are, if I can fill them with old popular music, “agreeable” books, and pictures of…well, cute animals rather than prize-winning babies, but the aesthetic is much the same. Plaster cast statues of Greek gods I’ll need to leave out, as my wife and I have too much bric-a-brac as is; regrettably, Funko Pop has not, as yet, devised smaller substitutes.

Colder Connections

 

As he plied his loathsome trade in the summer of 1751, the slave-ship captain Henry Ellis paused to engage in a little scientific exploration. En route to Jamaica, in the vicinity of latitude 25 North, Ellis lowered into the ocean a sealed bucket with controllable valves, able to take and hold samples of seawater from multiple depths. To the probe’s designer Ellis reported his success in taking samples from exceptional depths, up to a mile below the surface. His findings surprised him: from a surface temperature of about 25 Celsius, the seawater rapidly chilled with increasing depth, falling to a low of 5-10 C, then rising again below 1300 meters to a maximum of 12 degrees Celsius. The deep, cold water also proved more salty than expected. A practical man - slavers weren’t idealists - Captain Ellis used the chilled water samples to refrigerate his supply of wine.

 

Slaver Ellis wasn’t conducting oceanographic investigations for a laugh. He considered himself a natural philosopher, having served as de facto science officer on an expedition to the Northwest Passage in 1746-47. After his return Ellis published a book on the voyage, describing the explorers’ reconnaissance of Greenland, trade with the Inuit, and eventual failure to find an ice-free channel beyond Hudson Bay. The voyage and book ingratiated Ellis with a number of scientifically-inclined noblemen, who doubtless helped him raise the capital for his trade in human beings. One high-born friend, Lord Halifax, later appointed Ellis royal governor of Georgia, a colony that had recently legalized slavery. Ellis helped negotiate a stable peace settlement with the neighboring Muskogee Creeks, doubtless thinking himself a humanitarian for doing so. (See Julie Sweet, Negotiating For Georgia (2005), 188 on his governorship.) Illness drove the governor from Savannah after a year, but Ellis eventually returned to American office in Halifax, as lieutenant governor of Nova Scotia.

Detail from Ellis’s 1746-47 voyage

 

The results of Captain E’s deep-sea experiment remained little-known until the 1790s, when Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, theorized that the mass of cold, salty water Ellis discovered was a current of cold seawater, analogous to the Gulf Stream nearer the surface. In the twentieth century, oceanographers concluded that both warm and cold Atlantic currents comprised a great conveyor-belt extending from the Antarctic to the Arctic, powered by heat and the transfer of salts - the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). In our own time, climate scientists have expressed concern that the accelerated melting of the Arctic and Antarctic ice caps, the flow of low-salinity water into the polar zones of the AMOC, and the disruption of thermohaline circulation will shut down the whole circuit. Since the warming Gulf Stream is part of the AMOC, this will spell pretty bad news for Europe. For parts of North America, too: the Gulf Stream deflects a substantial volume of seawater from the East Coast, and its dissipation will cause the relative sea level to rise, contributing to the inundation of low-lying communities.

 

Careful readers will note that the Atlantic Overturning currents also tie together many of Henry Ellis’s ports of call and places of residence: Greenland, whose melting ice caps now threaten to shut down the Gulf Stream, and the coastal cities of Savannah and Halifax, which are likely to experience considerable flooding if the Atlantic basin sloshes slightly westward. Ellis himself lacked the notional birds-eye view needed to make these connections, or to observe that he had helped make the Atlantic both a web of human-made connections and an avenue of human misery. If he’d made these observations, though, I doubt that they would have changed his behavior. One didn’t rise to high rank in the British Empire on the strength of humane sentiments.

Choose Your Path to…History?

I would bet that the majority of Americans my age have read at least one of the Choose Your Own Adventure novels, of which Edward Packard's Cave of Time was (more or less)* the first. I read this pathbreaking book when I was about nine years old and living in Albuquerque, a place I did not like. I found the sky too big, the desert ugly and bleak, the ubiquitous Mexican food too spicy and mushy for my amateur palate, the local people laconic and bony. I wanted to be back in the Northeast, and books, particularly fantasy books - I discovered the Chronicles of Narnia at about the same time - offered escape to a richer, more colorful, more refined environment.

 

Edward Packard, probably.

Cave of Time offered paths to a new set of realities: the worlds of the past. It was not a comforting book: the possibly endings included being eaten by a dinosaur, enslaved by Han-dynasty warriors, or choking to death on a Precambrian Earth where "oxygen had not yet been introduced into the atmosphere." Yet the various adventure paths were all exciting, and they introduced me and others to the concept of interactive literature. They became a gateway to the obsessions of my teenage years, namely role-playing and computer games. The Cave of Time probably also introduced me to the notion that reading history could, like reading fantasy or science fiction, offer an alternative to living in an unpalatable present. Though the past could prove pretty unpleasant as well.

 

* Packard had written a previous second-person, dividing-paths novel called Sugarcane Island (1976), which he published with a small press. His publisher, RA Montgomery, then took the CYOA concept to Bantam; Cave of Time was the first offering in their new series.  

This Season’s Reading Challenge

On Bluesky, where I have been spending much of my online time, I recently began taking part in a collective social-media activity: posting the covers of twenty books that “greatly influenced” me over the course of my life. The Challenge (as it were) asks participants to post their selections without comment, presumably to make our postings resonate more with people who share the same selections. As I suspect that relatively few of my blog readers frequent Bluesky, I offer below the complete list, with some added links and comments:

The Cave of Time, by Edward Packard

The 79 Squares, by Malcolm Bosse

Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Patterson

The Sword of the Spirits, by John Christopher

The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula Leguin

Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut

1066: The Year of the Conquest, by David Hogarth

Silas Marner, by George Eliot

The Peopling of British North America, by Bernard Bailyn

Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, by Immanuel Kant

The Worst Years of Our Lives, by Barbara Ehrenreich

The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell

Sandman: A Game of You, by Neil Gaiman

The Age of Federalism, by Stanley Elkins and Eric McKittrick

A Spirited Resistance, by Gregory Dowd

Them Bones, by Howard Waldrop

Cherokee Women, by Theda Perdue

Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber

Saga: Vol. 3 by Brian Vaughan and Fiona Staples

The Dawn of Everything, by David Graeber and David Wengrow 

I have reviewed some of these works here and on my other blog, the Ramshackle Vampire, in years past. Of the others I plan to say a few words in subsequent posts here at STHH.

Was Lincoln a Douche?

On Presidents’ Day it is customary to laud Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of These United States, as the greatest of all American leaders. The man saved the Union, ended slavery, told good jokes, had nice legs - what’s not to like? Historians in a recent poll affirmed their profession’s usual ranking of Lincoln as the Number One guy, well ahead of the current incumbent (No. 14) and his predecessor (No. 45). Old Abe of course has his critics, and not just among unreconstructed neo-Confederates. President Lincoln’s policy toward Native Americans - a combination of military repression and malign neglect - proved so destructive that Congress temporarily took over the conduct of Indian Affairs after Appomattox. Closer to our own time, Bobby Wilson, a member of the 1491s, assessed Lincoln’s relationship with his own Dakota nation in a short, pointed video, “Lincoln Was a Douche.” Reviewing the president's record, I kind of have to agree.

A few years ago, the organizer of a podcast called Lincoln Log asked me to offer my scholarly assessment of Number Sixteen on his show. In his invitation the podcaster asked me how Lincoln had affected my life personally, which suggested that the show’s attitude toward Mr. Rail-Splitter was not merely reverential but theological. In my reply, which I offer below, I effectively declined the invitation:     

 

“My recent scholarship endeavors to place Indigenous Americans at the center of their own stories, and to move white policy-makers toward the background…My views on Abraham Lincoln are shaped by the impact on Native Americans' lives of policies for which Lincoln, as president, bore ultimate if not always proximate responsibility.

Navajo prisoners at Bosque Redondo (Wikimedia Commons)

"The years of Lincoln's presidency were ghastly ones for tens of thousands of American Indians. Your listeners are probably familiar with the story of the Dakota Sioux* rebellion of 1862 and the 38 men Lincoln hanged for insurrection; they are probably less familiar with the hundreds of Minnesota Ho-Chunks deported after the Sioux War (even though they had nothing to do with it), and with John Pope's deadly punitive campaign against the Lakota[s]...who also had nothing to do with the Dakota rising. Lincoln was less directly responsible for the California and Arizona militias' war of extermination against the Apaches, the Colorado militia's infamous attack on the Cheyenne encampment at Sand Creek, and Kit Carson's forced removal of the Navajos to Bosque Redondo, where 4,000 people died in four years. All of these military actions occurred, however, in the course of a...war with the Confederacy which Lincoln was determined to prosecute to unconditional victory, and all occurred in regions where Lincoln or his subordinates feared that Native American warriors might become recruits or catspaws of the CSA. (Not without some justification: the Five Civilized Tribes of Indian Territory did become formal allies of the Confederacy in 1861.) I have found little to no evidence that President Lincoln intended his Western commanders to fight a frontier war with kid gloves on.

"It is worth noting that the intense, nearly genocidal character of the Indian Wars of 1862-65 generated growing criticism from white Americans. At the end of the Civil War Congress endeavored to wrest control of Indian policy away from the Executive Branch, setting up its own peace commission and initiating its own peace treaties with the Plains nations. A few years later President Ulysses Grant, taking back a leading role in Indian policy-making, called his new approach the "Peace Policy," to distinguish it from the more bellicose actions of his immediate predecessors - including Lincoln. Perhaps if he had survived his fatal trip to the theater Lincoln would have embraced a similar policy a few years earlier, but I haven't found much support for this counterfactual speculation.

"…In an interview or conversation about 'Lincoln and the Indians,' I would emphasize the experiences of Native Americans, and while I could certainly try to explain the actions of President Lincoln and his subordinates, I would not be inclined to excuse or justify them. This approach to the subject may be too pitiless for your audience. If not, I would be glad to talk with you further about taking part in an episode of your podcast.”

 

I didn’t appear on the Lincoln Log. 

I rather like Lincoln as a person, and think he did some remarkable things as president, but the responsibilities of a modern historian - to tell the truth about the past - differ considerably from those of a hagiographer or professional moralizer.

 

* I would not use this term today, as many people find it offensive.

Social Welfare as Common Sense

My cherie and I spent part of a recent drive in Florida reading and discussing Thomas Paine’s 1797 pamphlet “Agrarian Justice,” a document both of its time and surprisingly prescient. AJ’s central premise and proposals grew from Paine’s reflections on natural rights throughout the course of his career. Briefly: private property was responsible for all that was best and worst in “civilized” countries. Property rights encouraged cultivation and increased productivity, such that agrarian countries could support ten times as many people as hunter-gatherer societies of equivalent territory. On the other hand, property produced a grotesque level of inequality, such that the most “degraded” people in the world lived cheek-by-jowl with the richest. Paine’s solution to the latter problem was not to eliminate property rights and agrarian civilization altogether, but to assert that all people had a property right that governments must secure to them: their collective ownership of land’s pre-improvement value, together with an equivalent fraction of the value of personal property. (He guesstimated that each fraction was about ten percent.) He grounded these rights in the assumption that land before improvement was the common property of all, and that part of the value of personalty came from “society,” which provided the labor markets, intellectual capital, and other structures that facilitated creation of that property. Governments - he addressed himself to his fellow revolutionaries in France and his former countrymen in England - should detach these fractions from property owners by way of a tax, and return it to all citizens by way of cash payments. Paine proposed an inheritance tax as least intrusive, since dead men needed little money and their children would eventually get part of the exaction transferred back to them. As for the payments themselves, AJ proposed giving every man and woman 15 pounds (the equivalent of about $3000 today) when they reached the age of 21, a “social dividend” that would help them set up an independent household and farm; in addition, every person over the age of 50, and every disabled person below that age, would receive L10 annually for their support. It is worth noting that Paine calculated the average adult life expectancy at 51 years, and the number of younger disabled people as fairly small. Nonetheless, his proposals are viewed today (by the American Social Security Administration, inter alia) as one of the intellectual foundations of social insurance, a feature of most modern nation-states.

Citizen Paine expected the rich and powerful to oppose his tax on legacies rather than his payouts to the young and old. Two centuries of subsequent experience with the kind of social insurance program proposed in “Agrarian Justice” suggests the elite would actually oppose pensions and social dividends more than the supporting taxes. Their sticking point was and is Paine’s characterization of these payments as rights. In the Anglo-American world, at least, the upper classes have long been nervous about rights language, which might give the lower orders ideas above their station, and preferred to think instead of charity. Charity affirms the status and power of the giver and the humility and dependence of the recipient. The highborn sometimes even think of employment as a charitable enterprise: in the eighteenth century English gentleman so characterized their hiring of craftsmen and servants, and in our own time the American Republican Party, appanage of the plutocratic order, has proposed replacing Labor Day with “Job Creators’ Day,” to celebrate the generosity of management toward the plebeians. In an aside, Paine noted that the personal wealth of employers often came from their underpaying of their workers. He was, perhaps, insufficiently cynical, insofar as he could not see that the owner class preferred not to pay their workers at all, unless they could see those workers grovel for their pittance. Nor do I think he could have predicted that such attitudes would persist for over 225 years, and likely for another 225 after that.