SALT: Suggestive Accelerative Learning & Teaching

Photo: "Classroom" by Robert Baxter, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by Robert M. Henderson on Monday evening, January 30, 1984

Plain old table salt, our most common and most used seasoning. Salt, sodium chloride, or the other well-known salts such as potassium or magnesium chloride, have extensive use in industrial, commercial and food usage.

We have salt water in the great majority of the waters found her on planet Earth, salt lakes by the dozen, Salt Lake City, Salt, the fifth of the six cities of Judea. And then we get down to some of the esoteric uses of the word.

To salt a mine, for example, is to artificially enrich, more often than not to do so in a fraudulent manner.

“Old Salt” – immediately we think of the one seaman or skipper.

“Pour salt into the wound” – if done, literally, hurts like the dickens, and if figuratively, means making a bad situation worse.

“A salty remark – with the number of such remarks passed around in this illustrious group over the years, I need not say more.

And then there are Salt I and Salt II, the never fully implemented arms control agreements that certainly deserve some attention on our part today.

Such statements as “You’re the salt of the earth” reminds us that salt was rare and valued. Our word “salary” comes from the Latin word “salaria” — salt, which was used as compensation at one time. 

However, the S A L T that I wish to discuss with you tonight is Suggestive Accelerative Learning and Teaching. SALT. I believe that this SALT may become as valued as seasoning salt has been throughout the course of history.

Suggestive Accelerative Learning and Teaching is a technique that increases the rate of learning by a factor of somewhere between three and ten times normal. My initial interest in this matter was highly selfish. If we could teach our children three times as fast as we now do, we could teach the same amount of learning with one-third the number of teachers, one-third the number of facilities. In essence, the amount of expense I would need to pay for education, my own, my family’s, and my share of the taxes dedicated to schools and education, could be reduced by two-thirds or more. Just as a matter of reference, my out of pocket expenses for educating five children up through their Bachelor Degrees is in the neighborhood of $200,000. I roughly calculated that my taxes due to education expenses were well over $70,000 over the past 20 years. Together, these amount to $270,000. If I could have the same amount of learning for one-third that amount, I would have some $180,000 in my pocket. These numbers certainly are of sufficient magnitude to be of interest. We can only speculate what would happen if we did not reduce our education expense, but got children that were three times or ten times smarter for the same money. I, for one, do not particularly begrudge spending all those dollars for education, but, let there be no doubt in anyone’s mind, I would be greatly pleased if I had three times the results or, even better, ten times the results.

I am also interested in increasing my own learning ability. If the same ratios apply, I could learn a foreign language in 80 hours rather than 240 hours. If the factor is ten times, then I could learn this language in 24 hours. My investigation to date of these systems of expanded learning have convinced me that so-called normal learning capacity can be greatly accelerated. Maybe the best way to begin is to give you some of the history and development in this field.

My investigations indicated the present development of the techniques have come from a number of widely divergent sources. Interesting enough, they all stem, in some degree, from Yoga, Zen and other oriental (sic) techniques of body and mind control.

Yoga and Zen technically were expanded over the years, but it was not until this century and only in the early 1930s that new uses of mind and body control really came into being. In 1930, autogenics, the conscious control of involuntary body functions like heartbeat and metabolism, was developed by a German psychiatrist, Johannes H. Schultz, and used in Europe for treatment of stress diseases.

In Spain, Dr. Alfonso Caycedo developed sophrology, a combination of yoga and autogenics which is now commonly used in Europe.

In 1960, Dr. Raymond Abresol, a dentist and lover of sports, began to develop holistic sports training for amateurs, tennis players and skiers. In 1967, the Swiss Olympic ski coach began to use sophrology, and in 1968 the previously unexciting Swiss team took three medals in the Olympics in Grenoble, and in 1972, three new medals in Sapporo, Japan. When doctors tested the effect of sophrology on athletes, they reported that it improved precision of movement, economized energy expenditure and controlled posture.

The Iron Curtain countries used sophrology and autogenics long before the western European countries caught on to the idea. The Soviets discovered that brawn plus brain equals a winning combination. Due, in large part to the technique of mind determining athletic success, Russia won 47 gold medals in the 1976 Olympics in Montreal and a very small country, East Germany, won 40. The Soviet sport scientists believed that the average athlete realizes but half his performance ability if brain power isn’t used. When you teach the brain to command the body, all the organs and the emotions are materialized to work together in the most effective way. Three-way-training – the athlete, coach and mind trainer – are used in Russia today. The Russians have expanded its uses for ballet and music.

In 1972, Dr. A.G. Odessky, a psychiatrist, put together an everyday guide to master autogenics for all Russians. Odessky believes it can be used by everyone to perform at their best whether in sports, arts, chess of the professions. At the same time, he also used autogenics extensively in psychotherapy as a remedy for many phobias, neuroses and obsessions. The autogenics created by Dr. Odessky are useful in increasing capabilities in  many fields, but an added effect is the sense of well-being and enjoyment in the process of achieving. The image of success many of us remember is the triumphant poise of Vasily Alexayev hoisting 564 pounds of iron to gain the gold medal for Russia. For many years, a 500-pound lift was an impenetrable weight. Alexayev’s trainers used mind training and suggestion, telling Alexayev that he would lift his world record, 499.9 pounds. He did, and when they weight the bar, it showed him it really weighed 501.5 pounds. He made rapid strides then – up to the 564-pound mark. The secret of the Soviet training is to eliminate thought of past failures or mistakes and concentrate solely on the successful outcome.

American athletes began to look at the possibilities of mind training. Charles Tickner upset the Soviet defending champion in figure skating in 1976 using a mental program. Tickner relaxed himself every morning and repeated confidence building words for a few minutes before going out on the ice. Jack Nicklaus claims that his success came from practicing concentration and using visualization. He claims his shots are 50 percent mental picture, 40 percent set-up and 10 percent swing. He visualizes the ball where he wants it to end up. He then traces the ball on its trajectory even down to how it lands on the spot. Those of you who play golf, I am sure, have a place on a course where you seem to repeat the same error: put the ball in the water, hit a tree or land in a less desirable spot. Regardless of any correction you make, your imagination of previous shots wins out.

Autogenics is a means to the end for athletes by keeping motivation high, eliminating anxieties of fear of failure.

The Asians excel in acrobatics, aikido, Kung Fu and martial arts because of their combined total mind/body approach to sports. Recent pictures of life in China show the daily exercising of all Chinese in the graceful controlled movements that use both body and mind. In Stockbridge, our new tennis pro introduced warm-up exercises of yoga before teachings classes to children and adults.

Dr. Hannes Lindermann believed that autogenics helps athletes perform but can be equally important to promote the performance of business professionals and laborers by increasing one’s capacities and health. By health, he means more than the state of being where nothing is wrong but means the ability of have healthy, undamaging relationships with others and society. Business organizations in Germany like our Chamber of Commerce, run autogenic programs. German business people who have used it regularly report increased creativity, and decreased absenteeism, accidents and better health and interpersonal relationships. As with many inventions or innovations, it is always difficult to determine just who came up with the idea. But in the accelerated learning field, there is one man who appears to have made the biggest contribution. Dr. Girogi Lozanov, a Bulgarian psychiatrist, is the man. Dr. Lozanov began to study the nature of man and, as others, found that we only use a fraction of our brain power. Through is investigation of creative and intuitive areas of the mind, he speculated the average human could develop super memory and develop learning with ease. The deepest roots of his system lay in Raja Yoga, mental yoga, Zen and autogenics. Dr. Lozanov’s application was the innovative thing.

He uncovered some of the biological secrets that led to expanded potentials. His search convinced him that we already have supermemory, but that we cannot recall what we store away. We have a built-in natural tape recorder in our heads. Lozanov believed that every experience , sight, sound, smell, taste is registered in the brain even when we have consciously forgotten the experience. Lozanov also believes that the brain is recording information perceived intuitively and telepathically. Dr. Lozanov was most interested in human potential but what brought his concentration on supermemory was the numerous cases of over-pressed students near collapse who had developed tension diseases and neuroses. He realized that you could, through techniques from Raja Yoga, have painless surgery and painless childbirth. Why not painless learning? Suggestology treatments given to students suffering from exam anxiety improved memory and decreased tension. He also found, as he opened up the mind for supermemory and healing powers, that this seemed to free the mind for clairvoyance and telepathy, called psi information. Using his extensive background in yoga, sleep learning, Zen, autogenics, suggestopedia and parapsychology, he put together a new method of accelerated learning. The basic parameters of his system were quite simple and the results quite exciting. 

1. He knew that people learn faster when physically in a slowed-down state: that, as body rhythms slow, the mind becomes more effective. His approach was to reach this slowed down state in a fully conscious manner rather than in sleep or a trance.

2. He was well aware of the left side/right side brain technology. Simplistically, this concept theorizes that the left side of the brain has to do with the logical, rational and analytical thinking, and the right side has to do with intuition, creativity and imagination. His efforts were directed toward getting not only both sides of the brain working together but also the conscious and subconscious body actions all synchronized in simultaneously.

3. Music was a key ingredient in his technique, and music of a special type. He found that the 50 to 60 beat per minute Baroque music was ideally suited for this purpose. He used music to calm the body rather than hypnosis or sleep.

4. He started his classes with de-suggestion or self-image therapy. He believed that we are bombarded from birth with the idea that we are limited in learning ability and achievement. A good example is the simple use of chapters in school books suggesting that there is a limit to the assigned learning. He also believed that the teacher must create a positive, authoritative, supportive atmosphere. Rapport between teacher and student is important.

Lozanov’s accelerated learning process is quite different from our commonly used methods. Our present methods stem chiefly from John Dewey, who certainly was a great educator and has permanently left his mark in this world. Accelerated learning adds by taking away fear, self- blame and the self-image of limited capabilities. Accelerated learning taps the unused 90 percent of our brain power and has indeed proven three to ten times learning speed with high retention. An important side effect is the minimal stress on the students involved.

In the early 1960s, Lozanov publicly announced he could improve memory 50 percent. That, with his tension free learning system, a student – young, old, brilliant, learning-disabled, educated or uneducated – could earn a new language in a month and a year later show a high retention. In succeeding years, his system has been challenged many times, but his system, by 1972, had been adapted in all schools in Bulgaria. In 1970, after extensive publicity of the system, the Bulgarian government restricted Western visits to observe the system. If persons were allowed in, they were shown only half the process. Not even the staffs in the schools knew the whole program. Finally, in the late 1970s, Lozanov himself was restricted to the country and no longer is allowed to lecture in the Western world.

Gradually, parts of the method have come together and have begun to be used in North America. One reason it has taken so long is because of the misinformation arising from the Communists’ politics. The Communists didn’t want to aid and abet us in finding the exact method and we were purposely led into believing that the techniques could not be adapted in North America.

An example was the Canadian government desired to use suggestology as a solution for their bilingual problem. The Canadians sent people to explore the system in Bulgaria and obtained only portions of the method. The Canadian program failed miserably, and thinking they had tried the real suggestopedia, they cast it aside.

The three main psychological blocks to accelerated learning are:

1. The critical/logical block – Logical skepticism of the “it can work for others but never for me. I’ve never learned easily in my life.” Everyone has a learning “norm” suggested by society and experiences.

2. The intuitive/emotional block – Due to previous failures, a person may have an emotional low evaluation of his ability.

3. The ethical/moral block – Conditioning has long been prevalent that learning has to be hard and a bore. The “you don’t get something for nothing” idea.

Now I would submit to you tonight that if we, as a country, can overcome these psychological blocks to accelerated learning, and if we dedicate ourselves to refining, improving and implementing these programs, some very exciting results will be achieved.

Already some exciting things are happening. There are at least several hundred core units operating in the United States these deal with the commitment of students gifted, normal and learning-disabled, in fact.

My first exposure to super learning was through Ann, a friend and neighbor of my daughter in Arizona. Ann is now a teacher specialized in accelerated learning technique for training mentally retarded persons. The technique she uses was developed at UCLA. They found, by slowing down the pace of the presentation to longer intervals, low IQ children learned almost as effectively as their bright counterparts.

Introducing the program into the remedial reading class for the Huntley Hill Elementary Schools in De Kalb County, Georgia produced dramatic gains of almost a year’s reading ability in a few weeks. Eighty percent of the class of twenty students gained a year or more of reading ability in twelve weeks, a 4:1 speed-up.

In Spain, Dr. Espinosa led an accelerated learning program with learning-disabled youngsters with severe motor coordination. They were performing physical exercises with highly increased skill and their IQs soared after several months of body/mind training. Espinosa won an international gold medal in pediatrics for these achievements.

In the USA a Society for Suggestology Alternative Learning and Teaching – SALT for short – has been formed. One operates out of Des Moines, Iowa. They publish a regular newsletter.

Reports from teachers across the country published by SALT have established that the system has moved far beyond language training. For instance, Naval Weapons Systems, noted as being truly dull, a course was learned at double speed by students using accelerated learning at Iowa State University.

In Bloomsburg State College in Pennsylvania, a teacher began to used accelerated learning to teach science. In the first year, out of three semesters of students, 84.6 percent got A’s and in the second, 82.9 percent. His students learned scientific facts and remembered them – all without stress.

One Canadian experiment has reported excellent results. Domtaq Corporation used a program put together by two doctors experienced in accelerated learning they report more than doubled their employees speed in learning French.

It is my considered opinion that if we did indeed refine and improve the known existing accelerated learning technique program and used due diligence in the implementation thereof we would:

1. Highly motivate a vast majority of students to attain measurably higher educational levels. Gifted students would be freed up to advance as fast as they might want and would be given ample opportunity to broaden their education into other fields. Normal students would achieve much higher levels of education; the SAT scores would show a marked improvement. The learning-disabled students would have a much higher chance of becoming a viable person in society. And all of this will be done with much less stress upon the students. Boredom among students will be reduced along with delinquency.

2. From the teachers’ standpoint, there will be a greater joy in teaching as the mundane chore of the necessary rote learning will be done by recordings and assisted by computers.

3. From a taxpayer’s standpoint, a good share of the tax money spent for education will be directed toward improvement of the programs and techniques. In essence, the teaching effort in total will become more efficient.

4. A final embodiment will be a freeing up of mind power that will permit rapid and large progress in all fields of endeavor. I predict this progress will exceed our wildest expectations.

In closing, I would only say that you may take this presentation with a grain of salt, but I do hope that there is more than a little meat in it.

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Centennials: The Transcontinental Railway and the Monday Evening Club

The ceremony for the driving of the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah on May 10, 1869; completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad. At center left, Samuel S. Montague, Central Pacific Railroad, shakes hands with Grenville M. Dodge, Union Pacific Railroad (center right). Photo by Andrew J. Russell.

Delivered to the Club in November, 1969 by Roger Linscott, at the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the Club

The year 1869 was notable for at least two historic evens — the driving of a golden spike at Promontory Point, Utah, to complete the first transcontinental railway system across the United States, and the establishment, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, of the Monday Evening Club. Contemplating these two great happenings — the one so freighted with significance for the development of the American West, the other so freighted with significance for, if not the nation, at least that small part of it which gathered here tonight — it occurred to me the other day how delightful it would be if one could find some common link to bind them together and thus fashion the basis for a centennial paper to fit the title which Joe Nugent [Club secretary] had fed to his hungry printing press a week earlier. A common bond between Promontory Point and Pittsfield seemed highly unlikely; but in desperation one tries anything, so off I went to the Lenox Library Saturday to find out what its archives might be able to provide.

The quest — to my happy surprise — proved fruitful. It developed that a leading, if somewhat accidental, figure in the dramatic ceremonies that marked the meeting of East and West at Promontory Point on May 10, 1869, was the Reverend Dr. John Todd, pastor of the First Congregational Church of Pittsfield. And Dr. Todd, I discovered from a parenthetical sentence in a letter which he wrote to a friend shortly after his return from that historic occasion, was a charter member of the Monday Evening Club.

But more about Dr. Todd later. First let us look at the background of the events that earned Dr. Todd of the Monday Evening Club his footnote in history. For they were dramatic events, and historically momentous ones. Indeed, May 10, 1869, is a commonly described by historians as the most significant single date in the record of the American West.

In 1860, the vast region between the Mississippi Valley and California — a region comprising almost half the total area of the United States — was, for the most part, a howling wilderness, occupied mainly by some 300,000 untamed Indians and of millions of buffalo. Thirty years later all this was changed. The Indians had been systematically decimated and subjugated; the enormous buffalo herds had been wiped out; the frontier was gone, and a solid band of rapidly growing states stretched across the continent. It was the transcontinental railroad system, more than any other development, which brought this astonishing transformation about.

Ever since the 1830s, men had dreamed of constructing a railroad that would span the continent. Two visionaries in particular — Asa Whitney, the New York merchant, in the 1840s, and Josiah Perham, a rich Bostonian in the 1850s — exhausted their fortunes in efforts to secure federal legislation and financial backing for the scheme. What blocked every attempt during this period was North-South rivalry. The Southerners wanted a route that would start west from New Orleans or Memphis, linking California to slave states. The Northerners wanted a route to start west from St. Louis or Chicago. It was the Civil War that finally gave Washington the opportunity to end the argument, and a convincing excuse for financing so daring an undertaking. The secession of the South eliminated from Congress the legislators who had held out for a Southern route at the same time that it made imperative the establishment of a communication link that would keep California loyal to the Union. In 1862, Congress passed and President Lincoln signed the Pacific Railway Bill, incorporating two railroads — the Union Pacific, which was to build west from Council Bluffs, Iowa, and the Central Pacific, which was to build east from California until the two should meet. More to the point, Congress gave the two companies a right of way across the public domain, all the timber, stone and earth needed for the undertaking, twenty sections of land with every mile of road constructed — that came to a total of 24 million acres — and, in addition, a credit ranging from sixteen to 48 thousand dollars per mile, depending upon the nature of the terrain. And the bonds were to be guaranteed by the federal government.

Enticed by these liberal terms, the promoters who undertook the actual building of the Union Pacific were not idealistic visionaries like Whitney and Perham. Rather, they were hard-headed promoters interested in profits and unhandicapped by patriotism. Chief among them were two men, both figures of great force but somewhat easy virtue. One was Oakes Ames, a wealthy Massachusetts congressman and a manufacturer of shovels (it was commonly said that an Ames shovel “was legal tender in every part of the Mississippi Valley.”) The other was Thomas Durant, and up-and-coming New York financier. (And here, incidentally, we run into another Berkshire angle; for Durant was born and brought up in Lee, Massachusetts, where the Durant family still thrives today.) In any event, it was Durant’s ingenious idea to purchase a controlling interest in a Pennsylvania corporation known as Credit Mobilier of America, a title borrowed from a banking institution in France. The stock of his Credit Mobilier was split up between the directors of the Union Pacific, which Durant served as vice-president, and Credit Mobilier was then made the construction agent for the railroad. In other words, the directors of the Union Pacific proceeded to contract with themselves to build the railroad, and at a price calculated to exhaust the Union Pacific’s resources. Altogether, the cash or equivalent amounted to $75 million. With this setup, there was no urge whatsoever for economy in the construction of the Union Pacific. From the day it was born, the double-jointed money-making machine worked perfectly. As the tracks of the Union Pacific pushed onward across the Great Plains, the Credit Mobilier collected the enormous bounty granted to the line from the public purse and domain. Mile upon mile, the railroad was systematically stripped of its cash, which reappeared almost simultaneously as dividends for the happy stockholders of Credit Mobilier. It was, as Congressman Oakes told his colleagues in the House, “a diamond mine.” To stave off investigation — which finally took place some years later after the damage had been done — the officers of Credit Mobilier distributed free stock to key senators and congressmen and even to Schuyler Colfax, then vice president of the United States.

That was the story on the Eastern end of the deal. In California, the men who organized and ran the Central Pacific followed a course that was equally larcenous but a bit more discreet. By acquiring a controlling interest in the Central Pacific before its huge potential was fully comprehended by bigger financiers, four Sacramento merchants of no great means — Collins Huntington, Charles Crocker, Leland Stanford and Mark Hopkins (not to be confused with the William College president of the same name) got in on the ground floor. They proved to be a remarkably shrewd and effective team; so much so that they all came out of it millionaires many times over. One reason was that they set up their own version of Credit Mobilier — an outfit called the Contract & Finance Company — and made a contract with themselves to build the Central Pacific Railroad. A congressional committee subsequently estimated that the construction company was paid $121 million for $58 million worth of work; but this is uncertain because the Central Pacific’s books happily disappeared in a fire of mysterious origin just as the investigation was getting underway. At any rate, Stanford put aside enough so that, among other benefactions, he was able to give $30 million for the establishment of the university that now bears his name. Huntington left an estate of $75 millions. And Hopkins, though he died relatively young before the Central Pacific had come to full flower, was able to leave his widow well enough fixed to supplement her Nob Hill mansion with a $2 million summer home in the center of Great Barrington — so called Searles Mansion on Main Street which is now owned by the Home Insurance Company of New York. [Since the mid-1980s it has housed the John Dewey Academy.]

Because of the opportunity to make such vast fortunes from construction before any track was open to the public, the promoters on both sides of the transcontinental railroad pushed the work at a furious pace, each seeking to lay as many miles of track as possible before the two lines met. A herculean task confronted them. Some 1700 miles of track had to be laid through a wilderness of prairie, mountain and desert inhabited only by hostile Indians. On the Union Pacific side, the actual construction was directed by General Grenville Dodge, one of the greatest engineers of his day, with a labor force made up of Irish workers and veterans from the Union and Confederate armies who were quick to exchange picks for rifles when Indians appeared. There was no real base of supplies. All material had to be brought up the Missouri River, which was open for navigation only a few months in the year, or hauled in wagons across the plains. Even the railroad ties had to be brought from great distances, as the only timber available along most of the right of way was cottonwood, which was unsuitable for this purpose. For Durant, who was given virtually dictatorial powers by the Union Pacific Board of Directors, speed became an obsession. He spent most of his time on the line and said that sometime he did not remove his clothes for a week. At times, in its haste, the railroad borrowed money in the East at rates as high as 18 or 19 per cent. And in pushing the line far beyond the bounds of civilization without waiting for at the slower pace of the settler and the security which his protection afforded, it often became necessary for half the total number of workmen to stand guard and thus reduce the working capacity of the construction force — notwithstanding which, hundreds were killed by Indians.

On the western side, the engineering faced problems by the Central Pacific were even more formidable. There were no roads over the Sierras, so thousands of tons of equipment, including massive locomotives, were hauled in giant sleds over the snowdrifts. Food, powder, supplies of all kinds, followed the same perilous route. Roadways had to be blasted out of cliffs and bridges thrown over gorges; in the space of 60 miles, fifteen tunnels were bored through the mountains. When snow threatened to halt all construction, the ingenious engineers built 37 miles of snow sheds, and under these the work went on.

The cost of material and transportation was appalling. Congress had specified that the track must be laid with American-made rails. This forced the builders to place their orders in northern factories which, during the early years of construction, were swamped with requisitions for war material, and to ship the finished products in vessels which were compelled to run a rigid blockade maintained by Confederate cruisers. Eight to ten months were required for these runs to San Francisco Bay via Cape Horn, and at one time the Central Pacific had 50 ships chartered just for this purpose. Freight charges and marine insurance rates rose to fantastic figures. But Huntington, operating out of New York as the Central Pacific’s procurement agent, kept the supplies moving at top speed to his partners in California, despite every effort by telegraph, steamship, stage and express companies to obstruct the building of the road.

Initially, labor was the biggest problem of all, since few workmen felt disposed to shovel dirt for the Central Pacific when gold could be had for far less tedious digging along the streams of California. In desperation, Charles Crocker, the partner in charge of construction, suggested Chinese labor, only to be told that building a railroad was a he-man’s job, not a task for light-weight rice-eaters. “Well,” said Crocker, “those same rice-eaters built the Great Wall of China. I guess they can dig grades for an American railroad.”

His guess was accurate. An initial crew of 50 Chinese recruited in Sand Francisco performed so well that 2,000 more were enlisted in short order; and when the possibilities of San Francisco’s Chinatown were exhausted, Crocker began importing from across the Pacific until he had an army of 10,000 Orientals at work.

On both the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, at each stage of the progress, a movable town was erected, pleasantly dubbed by the workmen “Hell on Wheels,” where an army of cooks, sutlers, harpies and gamblers assembled to serve, entertain and fleece the brawny sons of toil. Typical of these instant communities was Benton, Nebraska, which sprang into being 700 miles west of Omaha when the Union Pacific reached that point in August of 1868. A new city of tents blossomed almost overnight into a metropolis of vice. A daily newspaper, five dance halls, and 23 saloons began going at top speed. The heart of the city was “The Big Tent,” a canvas-covered emporium that specialized in liquor and games of chance. Brass bands, operating on day and night shifts, lured cash customers to faro, roulette, poker and monte tables that were available at all hours and at any stakes. A garish mahogany and plate-glass bar, 100 feet long and specially imported from St. Louis, occupied the position of honor across the middle of the tent; and since the street in front was merely a bed of alkali dust a foot deep, the half-strangled customers who fought their way through the white clouds into this delectable oasis proved highly profitable customers. The local aristocracy ranged from bordello proprietors and frock-coated professional gamblers to the Union Pacific laborers who shoveled shallow graves for the victims of the strenuous night life. Benton was, to put it mildly, a lively city; yet its uproar ceased as dramatically as it began. When the Union Pacific reached Wasatch, several hundred miles to the west, and set up a new advance base there, the city called Benton died in a night. Special trains conveyed the surviving citizens to the new instant city, and thick layers of alkali dust blotted out the underground homes of the more peaceful dead they left behind.

The last lap of the race between the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific, staged in the second half of 1868 and the early months of 1869, became an American saga. Daily newspapers carried the score as a front-page feature, telling eastern readers in daily telegraphed reports how many miles of track the Union Pacific had laid in the previous 24 hours. From one to two miles was the average in 1868, but with the end in sight, new records were set. The Union Pacific’s Irishmen performed what seemed an impossible feat by laying six miles of rails in one early spring day of 1869. The Central Pacific’s Chinese saw this achievement and raised it a mile; whereupon the Union Pacific three days later laid seven and one-half miles. At that point, Crocker of Central Pacific came back with the statement that he could lay ten miles of rails in a single working day, and Durant of Union Pacific wagered $10,000 that he could not. The wager was covered, and the appointed day, April 29, Crocker’s Chinese army, trained to the precision of machines by long experience, tackled the job at the stroke of 7 a.m. By 7 p.m., they were 56 feet over the ten-mile requisite, having moved more than four and one-third million pounds of material in less than eleven hours. They had placed 25,800 ties in position and strung 3,520 rails weighing nearly 600 pounds each — not to mention handling more than 7,000 plates, 14,000 bolts and 55,000 spikes, Durant paid his bet, and the feat still stands as a world’s record. [Actually, the record was broken the following year during the construction of the Kansas Pacific Railroad.]

A few days later, the Chinese and Irish vanguards had their historic meeting at Promontory Point. Workmen from both camps laid ties and rails in the open space between the ends of the Union Pacific and the Central Pacific lines. They stopped a rail’s length apart, and in the intervening space three more ties were laid: one of polished California laurel, one of silver from Nevada’s fabulous Comstock lode, and one of iron, silver and gold, from Arizona. Two locomotives were brought head to head. An assemblage of dignitaries, who had hurried to the scene from East and West, took their places amid a huge throng of workmen to witness the driving of the last spike — a spike of pure gold contributed by California.

And now the Rev. Dr. Todd of Pittsfield’s First Congregational Church re-enters our story. He was there at Promontory Point that day, rather by chance than by design. An exceptionally able and popular pastor, Dr. Todd had served the First Church well for many years — he was then 68 — and an appreciative congregation had raised the money to present him with a trip to California. Chance placed the minister and his party on the train which eventually became the first to cross the continent; and when the railroad officials learned that there was a clergyman aboard they persuaded him, with little difficulty, to contribute a note of piety to the rather raucous celebration by offering the invocation.

Detail of a larger photo taken during the invocation by Dr. Todd (with full white beard in center of photo). Standing next to him, with the full white sideburns, is Thaddeus Clapp of Pittsfield, who was traveling with Todd on a trip to California. Clapp was also a member of the Monday Evening Club.

There was more than a little irony in this, because Dr. Todd was noted as one of New England’s more impassioned temperance advocates, and the audience he addressed that day was composed largely or brawling construction workers who were notoriously bibulous even by the sodden standards of the Old West. “Later-day representations of the ceremonies at Promontory Point,” writes Lucius Beebe “have come to invest it in motion pictures, pageants and idealized art with a quasi-religious respectability and stateliness of preposterous proportions. Historians of the Cambric-tea school are pleased to depict the completion of the railroad as a symbolic meeting of the East and West in the cause of progress and good works. But the record, both from the photographic evidence and the accounts of what few coherent witnesses were present attest that Promontory Point was a thunderous drunk whose convulsions included almost everyone present and lasted several days. The classic photograph made on a wet place by Colonel Charles R. Savage of Salt Lake City, official photographer of the railroads, does not so much depict the pilots touch head to head as it does what appears to be two section hands in amiable dispute over an outsize bottle. In idealized recreations of the scene, the flagon of red-eye is now and then amazingly changed to a small American flag. When it came time for vice president Durant of the Union Pacific to smite the ceremonial golden spike, such was his state of exhilaration that the ceremonial sledge hammer failed to connect and the job finally had to be accomplished by a less august mechanic. Other photographs show a grateful multiplicity of bottles in evidence, and newspaper correspondents to a man were enthusiastic over the inexhaustible sideboard resources of Central Pacific president Stanford’s private car.

Drunk or sober, however, it was a great event, and recognized as such by a proud nation. When the golden spike was finally driven, the simple word “Done” flashed out over the telegraph instruments at the scene, starting a nation-wide celebration. President Grant received the message in the White House. Chicago staged a parade four miles long. The Old Liberty Bell rang out in Philadelphia. The “Te Deum” was sung in New York’s Trinity Church. San Francisco could not wait for the actual ceremony, but organized 48 hours prematurely a colorful three-day celebration during which every business house in town locked its doors and the saloons on Kearny Street never closed. The awe at the completion of such a fabulous engineering feat proved infectious even overseas. “When I think,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson, “how the railroad has been pushed through this unwatered wilderness and haunt of savage tribes…how at each stage of construction, roaring, impromptu cities full of gold and lust and death, sprang up and then died away again; how in these uncouth places pigtailed Chinese pirates worked side by side with border ruffians and broken men from Europe, talking together in mixed dialect, mostly oaths, gambling, drinking, quarreling, and murdering like wolves…and then when I go on to remember that all this epical turmoil was conducted by gentlemen in frock coats and with a view to nothing more extraordinary than a fortune and a subsequent visit to Paris, it seems to me as if this railway were the one typical achievement of the age in which we live…If it be romance, if it be contrast, if it be heroism that we required, what was Troy town to this?”

Now back once more to the Rev. Dr. Todd, to return our story to its starting place. Whether or not his rather puritanical nature was scandalized by the revelry at Promontory Point, we don’t actually know; but we can infer it from the fact that while he lectured and wrote about his experience in California after his return to Pittsfield in the summer of 1869, he seems to have made no mention whatever of his role in celebrating the marriage of East and West. No reference to it can be found in the volume of his letter which was edited by his son and published some years after his death in 1873.

In that volume, however, I find a letter to a fellow clergyman, dated November 29, 1869, which comments on the new chapel at the First Church and then goes on to say: “We have a literary club here, limited to twenty-five, all graduates but one or two. We meet every Monday night; hence its name — the Monday Night Club. It meets at the members houses in turn, with an oyster and coffee entertainment at half-past nine. It does well — that is, the eating does.”

A rather cryptic remark, that last one; but let it pass. No doubt we can feel a bit flattered that his membership in this club seemed to him worthier of mention than his participation in what others might think an even more memorable event of one hundred years ago.

 

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Darwin's theory: Hard to swallow, then and now

Presented to the Club by Roger Linscott, about 1981

A century and a half ago, in the year 1831, a young divinity student of 22 set sail from England on a voyage to South America. Twenty-eight years later, after prolonged study and soul-searching, he wrote a book based upon his observations there. The world – certainly the world of science – has never been the same since.

The young man, of course, was Charles Darwin, and the book was The Origin of the Species. When he embarked on his historic voyage, he had already abandoned a proposed career in medicine, after fleeing in horror from a surgical theater in which an operation was being performed on an unanesthetized child, and was a rather reluctant candidate for the clergy, a career deemed suitable for the younger son of an English gentleman. An indifferent student, Darwin was an ardent hunter and horseman, a collector of beetles, mollusks and shells, and an amateur botanist and geologist. When the captain of the surveying ship H.M.S. Beagle, himself only three years older than Darwin, offered passage to any young man who would volunteer to go without pay as a naturalist, Darwin eagerly seized the opportunity to escape from Cambridge. Five years later, he returned to an inherited fortune, an estate in the English countryside, and a lifetime of independent study that radically changed mankind’s view of life and of our place in the living world.

To understand the extraordinary genius of Darwin’s theory of evolution, it is useful to look briefly at the intellectual climate in which it was formulated. Aristotle, the world’s first great biologist, believed that all living things could be arranged in a hierarchy – a ladder of nature in which the simplest creatures had a humble position on the bottommost rung, mankind occupied the top, and all other organisms had their proper places in between. Until the end of the century, most biologists believed in such a natural hierarchy; but whereas Aristotle thought that living organisms had always existed, the later biologists believed, in harmony with the teachings of the Old Testament, that all living things were the product of a divine creation. They believed, moreover, that most were created for the service or pleasure of mankind. Indeed, it was pointed out, even the lengths of day and night were planned to coincide with the human need for sleep.

That each type of living thing came into existence in its present form — specially and specifically created – was a compelling idea. How else could one explain the astonishing extent to which every organism was adapted to its environment and to its role in nature? It was not only the authority of the church but also, so it seemed, the evidence before one’s own eyes, that gave such strength to the concept of special creation.

Actually, it was geologists, more than biologists, who paved the way for overturning this concept. During the latter part of the 18th century, there was a revival of interest in fossils, which previously had been collected only as curiosities, regarded as stones that somehow looked like shells. The English surveyor William Smith, born 50 years before Darwin, was among the first to study the distribution of fossils scientifically. Whenever his work took him down into a mine or along canals, he carefully noted the order of the different layers of rock and collected the fossils from each layer. He eventually established that each stratum, no matter where he came across it in England, contained characteristic kinds of fossils.

Smith did not interpret his findings, but the implication that the present surface of the earth had been formed layer by layer over a very long period of time was unavoidable. This was a brand-new idea. Christian theologians, by counting the successive generations since Adam (as recorded in the Bible) had calculated the maximum age of the earth at about 6,000 years, and no one had ever thought in terms of a longer period. Yet the world described by William Smith was clearly a very ancient one. A revolution in geology was beginning; earth science was becoming the study of time and change, rather than a mere cataloging of types of rocks. As a consequence, the history of the earth became inseparable from the history of living organisms, as revealed in the fossil record.

Although the way to evolutionary theory was being prepared by the revolution in geology, the time was not yet ripe for a parallel revolution in biology. The dominating force in European science in the early 19th century was Baron George Cuvier, a French aristocrat who was the founder of vertebrate paleontology, or the scientific study of the fossil record. An expert in anatomy and zoology, he applied his special knowledge of the way in which animals are constructed to the study of fossil animals, and was able to make brilliant deductions about the form of an entire animal from a few fragments of bone. We think of paleontology and evolution as so closely connected that it is surprising to learn that Cuvier was a staunch and powerful opponent of evolutionary theories. He recognized the fact that many species that once existed no longer did – but he explained their extinction by postulating a series of catastrophes. After each catastrophe, the most recent of which he declared to be Noah’s Flood, new species filled the vacancies. Louis Agassiz, the great Harvard scholar and America’s leading 19th century biologist, was a similarly devout opponent of evolution. He contended that the fossil record revealed 50 to 80 total extinctions of life and an equal number of separate creations.

But the person who most directly influenced Darwin was Charles Lyell, a geologist who was twelve years his senior and whose books Darwin took with him on the Beagle. On the basis of his own observations, Lyell opposed the theory of catastrophes as an explanation for the creation of new species. He believed that the slow, steady and cumulative effect of natural forces had produced continuous change in the course of the earth’s history; and since this process is demonstrably slow, its results being barely visible in a single lifetime, it must have been going on for a very long time. Lyell was not an evolutionist. But what Darwin’s theory needed was the concept of vast amount of time – and it was time that Lyell gave him. The discovery that the earth was very ancient was the snowball that started the whole avalanche.

This, then, was the intellectual climate in which Charles Darwin set sail from England in 1831. As the Beagle moved down the Atlantic coast of South America, through the Straits of Magellan and up the Pacific coast, Darwin traveled the interior. He explored the rich fossil beds of South America, with the theories of Lyell fresh in his mind, and collected specimens of the many new kinds of plant and animal life he encountered. He was impressed most strongly by the constantly changing varieties of organisms he saw. The birds and animals on the west coast were very different from those on the east coast, and even as he moved slowly up the west coast, one species would give way to another.

Most interesting of all to Darwin were the animals and plants that inhabited the small, barren group of islands known as the Galapagos, off the coast of Ecuador. The islands had been named by the Spanish after their most striking inhabitants, the giant tortoises, some of which weight 220 pounds or more. Each of the islands has its own type of tortoise, and sailors who took these tortoises on board and kept them as a convenient source of fresh meat on their sea voyages could readily tell which island any particular tortoise had come from. Then there were groups of finchlike birds, thirteen species in all, that differed from one another in the sizes and shapes of their bodies and beaks, and particularly in the type of food they ate. In fact, though clearly finches, they had many features seen in completely different types of birds on the mainland.

From his knowledge of geology, Darwin knew that these islands, clearly of volcanic origin, were much younger than the mainland. Yet the plants and animals of the islands were different from those of the mainland, and in fact, the plants and animals of different islands of the archipelago differed from one another. Were the living things on each island the product of a separate special creation, Darwin wondered – or was it possible that from an original paucity of birds in the archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends? This problem “continued to haunt him.”

Darwin was a voracious reader. Not long after his return to England, he came across a short but much talked-about sociological treatise by the Reverend Thomas Malthus, which first appeared in 1798. In this book, Malthus warned, as economists have warned frequently since, that the human population was increasing so rapidly that it would soon be impossible to feed all the earth’s inhabitants. Darwin saw that Malthus’s conclusion – that food supply and other factors hold populations in check – is true for all species, not just the human species. For example, Darwin calculated that a single breeding pair of elephants – which are among the slowest breeders of all animals – would, if all their progeny lived and reproduced the normal number of offspring over a normal life pan, produce a standing population of 19 million elephants in 750 years. Yet the average number of elephants remained the same over the years. So, although this single breeding pair could have, in time, produced 19 million elephants, it did, in fact, produce only two. But why these particular two? The process by which the two survivors are, so to speak, “chosen,” Darwin called natural selection.

Natural selection, according to Darwin, was a process analogous to the type of selection exercised by breeders of horses, cattle or dogs. In the case of artificial selection, we humans chose individual specimens of plants of animals for breeding on the basis of characteristics that seem to us desirable. In the case of natural selection, the environment takes the place of human choice. As individuals with certain hereditary characteristics survive and reproduce, and individuals with other hereditary characteristics are eliminated, the population will slowly change. If some horses were faster than others, for example, those would be more likely to survive, and their progeny, in turn, might be faster, and so on.

According to Darwin’s theory, these variations among individuals of a species, which occur in every natural population, are wholly a matter of chance. They are not produced by the environment, not by a creative force, not by the unconscious striving of the organism. In themselves, they have no goal or direction, It is the operation of natural selection over a series of generations that gives direction to evolution. A variation that gives an animal a slight advantage makes that animal more likely to leave surviving offspring. Thus, a giraffe, say, with a slightly longer neck has an advantage in feeding, and so is likely to leave more offspring than a giraffe with a shorter neck. If the longer neck is an inherited trait, some of these offspring will also have long necks, and if the long-necked animals in this generation have an advantage, the next generation will include more long-necked animals – and so on, until, finally the population of short-necked giraffes will have become a population of longer-necked ones, thought there will still be variations.

The extraordinary thing about Darwin’s formulation was not so much his espousal of evolution — which was an idea that had at least crossed other scientific minds before his – but rather, the crucial role he gave to chance variation as the great triggering mechanism of the evolutionary process – the thread that links together all the diverse phenomena of the living world. Species arise, he said, when differences between individuals within a group are gradually converted into differences between groups as the groups become separated in space and time.

It was a truly revolutionary concert that, in one fell swoop, brought biology out of the Middle Ages – out of the realm of theology and into the realm of science.

It also profoundly influenced our way of thinking about ourselves. With the possible exception of the storm that raged about Copernicus and Galileo, no revolution of scientific thought has had as much effect on human thought as this one. The major reason is, of course, that evolution is in flat contradiction to the lateral, fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. The new astronomy had made it clear that the earth is not the center of the universe or even our own solar system. With Darwin, the new biology required acceptance of the proposition that, like all other organisms, we too are not created for any special purpose or as part of any universal design but instead rose in the course of the earth’s long history from earlier and more primitive forms.

The heretical dimensions of this proposition may explain why almost three decades elapsed between Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle and his publication of the Origin of the Species.

Two years after his return to England, he read the essay by Malthus, and in 1842 he wrote a preliminary sketch of his theory, which he revised in a 230-page manuscript in 1844. There is little doubt that he realized the magnitude of his accomplishment. On completing the revision, he wrote a formal letter to his wife requesting her, in the event of his death, to publish it – but then, with the manuscript and letter in safe-keeping, he turned to other work, including a four-volume treatise on the natural history of barnacles. For more than twenty years after his return from his voyage, Darwin mentioned his ideas on evolution only in his private notebooks and in letters to a few scientific colleagues.

In 1850, urged on by his friends Charles Lyell and botanist Joseph Hooker, Darwin set to work slowly preparing a manuscript for publication. In 1858, some ten chapters later, he received a bombshell in the form of a letter from another English naturalist, Alfred Russell Wallace, who was working in the Malay Peninsula and had corresponded with Darwin on several previous occasions. Wallace presented a theory of evolution that almost exactly paralleled Darwin’s own. Tossing in bed one night with a fever, Wallace had had a sudden flash of insight. “I saw at once,” he recollected, “that the ever-present variability of all living things would furnish the material from which, by the mere weeding out of those less adapted to the actual conditions, the fittest alone would continue the race.” Within two days, Wallace’s 20-page manuscript was completed and in the mail.

When Darwin received Wallace’s letter, he turned to his friends for advice, and Lyell and Hooker, taking matters into their own hands, presented the theory of Darwin and Wallace at a scientific meeting just one month later. Their presentation received little attention at the time, but for Darwin the floodgates were opened. He finished his long treatise in another few months, and the book was finally published. The first printing of 1,250 copies sold out the same day.

Why Darwin’s long delay? His own writings, voluminous thought they were, shed little light on this question. But perhaps his background does. When Darwin embarked on the Beagle, he was a devout Christian who did not doubt the literal truth of the Bible and did not believe in evolution any more than did the other English scientists he had met and whose books he had read. When he achieved his Malthusian insight a few years later, he was still in his 20s. He held no professional position, but he had acquired the admiration of his colleagues for his work aboard the Beagle. He was not about to compromise a promising career by promulgating a heresy that he might be unable to prove to their satisfaction. Perhaps more important, his wife, to whom he was deeply devoted, was extremely religious. In short, it seems reasonable to suppose that Darwin, as has been the case with others, found the implications of his theory difficult to confront.

Nor it is any wonder that he shrank from those implications for so long. Once the earth and its living inhabitants are seen as products of historical change, the theological philosophy embodied in the great chain of being ceases to make sense; the fullness of the world becomes not an eternal manifestation of God’s bountiful creativity but an illusion. For most of the world’s history, the vast majority of species on earth today did not exist and considerably less than one per cent of those that did exist do so today. If evolution has occurred, and if it has proceeded from the entirely natural causes Darwin envisioned, then the adaptations of organisms to their environment, the intricate construction of the bird’s wing and the orchid’s flower are evidence not of divine design but of the struggle for existence.

Moreover, and this may be the deepest implication of all, Darwin brought to biology, as his predecessors had brought to astronomy and geology, what has been termed the sufficiency of efficient causes. No longer was there any reason to look for final causes and goals. To the questions “What purpose does this species serve? Why did God make tapeworms?” the answer is, “To no purpose.” Tapeworms were not put here to serve a purpose, nor were plants, not plants, nor people. They came into existence not by design but by the action of utterly impersonal natural laws.

This was an exceedingly hard pill for most people to swallow – and it still is. The fact that the earth is not the center of the universe, though once considered heresy, is now accepted by the vast majority of mankind. The fact that man is descended of apes is not. Almost uniquely among the great scientific formulations of history, Darwinian theory remains a subject of bitter controversy more than a century after his death – not among biologists, who accept it with virtual unanimity, but among ordinary people who cannot bring themselves to face the possibility of a world that operates without a grand, divinely guided design.

Indeed, the hullabaloo over Darwinism is currently more intense – at least in the United States – than it has been since the 1920s when Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan battled the issue in Dayton, Tennessee, at the celebrated Scopes trial. Leading the attack today are the so-called Creationists, who are mostly spokesmen for fundamentalist religious groups – but their popular support is wide and deep. In a recent Gallup Poll of cross-section Americans, nearly half of the respondents agreed with the statement: “God created men pretty much in his present form at one time within the past 10,000 years.” Thirty-eight per cent of the respondents agreed with an alternative statement: “Man has developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process, including man’s creation.” A mere nine per cent accepted a third choice – that man had developed from less advanced forms of life without diving intervention. Another public poll, published in Christian Century several years ago, similarly reported that approximately half the adults in America continue to believe that “God created Adam and Eve to start the human race.”

Armed with this kind of public support, the Creationists in recent years have been zeroing in on the public school system, particularly in the South and Southwest – not with the demand that the teaching of evolution be banned (which was the issue in the Scopes trial) but with the seemingly less dogmatic demand that Creationist doctrines should be given equal time with Darwinian theory in all science classrooms. They have been remarkably successful in this endeavor. In Dallas, Atlanta, and Chicago, not to mention countless smaller cities, school committees have yielded to the equal-time pressure. And perhaps more disturbing, national textbook publishers – whose profits depend on producing books that will be marketable in every part of the nation – have been soft-pedaling Darwinism in their biology texts or specifically including Creationism as an alternative and co-equal doctrine.

“Where will we be,” asks Stephen Jay Gould, the eminent Harvard biologist, “if any pressure group can win, by legislative fiat, the ordered inclusion of its favorite doctrine into school curricula?” It’s a good question. One is reminded of Lyndon Johnson’s story about the earnest young pedagogue who, in the depths of depression, applied for an opening as a science teacher in a backwater town in Texas. Confronting the local school board at his interview, he was asked by the grim-visaged chairman: “Do you teach that the earth is flat or that the earth is round?” The young man looked from face to face without seeing a hint of enlightenment. “Well,” he said, “I can teach it either way.”

The notion that one can teach the great unifying theory of modern biology “either way” is no less absurd.

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Exorcising toxic Trump: An intentional alternative in our back yard?

Hancock Shaker Village — photo by Massachusetts Office of Tourism, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 9, 2020 by William P. Densmore



I’ve been thinking a lot about furniture lately as my sisters and I assess the provenance and best disposition of fine furniture in our parents’ Worcester home. We’re learning that “dark furniture” isn’t very valuable anymore. Kind of like the stock market after today, and quite out of our individual control so not to worry. But thinking about furniture and value inevitable leads to the mass-market tag line for the Shakers furniture. Excellent, simple, stripped of vanity and excess — furniture.



But it is not Shaker furniture on my mind for tonight. Rather, I wish to digress in perhaps contrarian fashion to a set of difference considerations about the Shakers — their status as the longest running intentional community in America — an effort at utopia which has tested a set of values in many respects relevant not only to contemporary American society but as well perhaps to some of the attributes of the culture which occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.



Fifteen years ago I spent six months working at Hancock Shaker Village. Like most people, I knew about furniture and celibacy and that was about it. I learned somewhat more, but ever since I’ve wanted to spend a chunk of time digging into Shaker values and practices.  This talk is the result and it stems from sit-down interviews last month with five Shaker experts — and an admittedly fast literature review.



What I will highlight, using with attribution the words of my interviewees as well as published authors is this: The Shakers can teach our contemporary politicians, and maybe Donald Trump, much about gender equity, caring for “others,” housing and economic security and the management of dissent. Seventy-five years before emancipation, and 150 years before suffrage, Shakers were already practicing social, sexual, economic and spiritual equality. For the most part, the Shakers just lived their politics, although in 1852, Shaker elder Frederick Evans was proselytizing that women should have the right to vote.



There are multiple sources — from Wikipedia to scholarly volumes, to fill in the basic Shaker history so I’ll rewrite to a few sentences. Factory worker “Mother” Ann Lee and her husband arrive near Albany, N.Y., in 1774 from Manchester, England and after several frustrating years begin to attract converts to her Protestant-offshoot idea of a community that sees women as a natural representation of God after the death of Jesus. The three tenets: celibacy, confession and community. At its peak, the Shaker movement involved 6,000 members and followers at 19 sites from Kentucky east to Maine; only two (or is it three) members remain — at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.



Before declining, Shaker societies were organized around “families” with 20 to 150 members of each non-biological family and a total of two to 11 such families in each geographic society.



Scholars generally agree that Shakers grew (and prospered mightily) through about 1840 when a slow decline began as many male members — the “brothers” — found better work and life outside the community. Because Mother Ann believed chastity to be a necessary part of the faith, Shakers could only maintain communities by taking in new families, children or individuals. The Hancock Bishopric declined and in 1959-1960 the property was sold to what has become Hancock Shaker Village, a living-history museum.



Filmmaker Ken Burns wrote for his 1984 PBS video special, “Hands to Work, Hearts to God,” what I found to be the most elegant summary of the Shakers and here is a small part of it. Burns wrote that by the mid-1800s:

The Shakers were suddenly appreciated as successful communitarians when Americans became interested in communities, as successful utopians when America hosted a hundred utopian experiments, as spiritualists when American parlors filled with mediums and with voices from other worlds. They invented hundreds of laborsaving devices from the clothespin to the circular saw, which they shared without patents (some of these machines launched brilliant industrial careers for the men who borrowed them), nor were they frightened of useful inventions . . . They were admired and derided, imitated for their successes and ridiculed for their eccentricities. And they are enduringly appreciated for their contribution to American crafts and architecture

With thanks to Ken Burns, that’s the basic history and story line. Let’s now focus on these five aspects which, as I say, seem to teach us to varying degree about our political moment in ways I’ll assert.

1. Gender relationships


2. Caring for others, and the infirm


3. Housing and economic security


4. Focusing on quality, and science


5. Managing dissent

GENDER RELATIONSHIPS 



When it comes to gender relationships and society, perhaps we might invite Elizabeth Warren’s input, or perhaps some of the many women who have described relationships with Mr. Trump. I think its fair to sale we have some work to do in figuring how we value and engage women in leadership in America. The Shakers have much to teach here.



Glendyne R. Wergland of Dalton is one of the four Shaker experts I spoke with last month at HSV. Her 2011 University of Massachusetts Press book, Sisters in the Faith, draws together document research to show — as one reviewer has written — that Shaker communities achieved a remarkable degree of gender equality at a time when women elsewhere still suffered under the legal and social strictures of a traditional patriarchal order. In so doing, Wergland finds, the reviewer writes, that the experience of Shaker women served as a model for promoting women’s rights in American political culture.



Deborah E. Burns is an editor at Storey Communications in North Adams and the author of the 1993 Shaker Cities of Peace, Love and Union: A History of the Hancock Bishopric, which she took three years to write at the request of HSV’s first president and lead founder, Amy Bess Miller. Burns was one of the people I sought out for guidance on interpreting the Shakers for contemporary America. Burns believes the equality of women with men in managing and holding leadership roles in the Shaker church was a reason for its balance and stability during the growth years “in a way that we just never have had in our country.” When men slowly drifted away from Shaker societies in the late 19th century, a greater proportion of women stayed, Burns says, because for them, the stability of Shaker living was as good or better than the outside world. “The communal system and the segregation of sexes took a lot of clutter out of the brain,” Burns says.



University of Alabama-Huntsville history professor Suzanne R. Thurman expands on this view in an excerpt from her book, O Sisters Ain’t You Happy, published in 2002:

Attacking the patriarchal basis for most of American family life, the Shakers cleared the way for a new society where relationships were built on love and choice, not duty and obligation, and where traditional female characteristics were upheld as normative for society . . . . women took on positions of responsibility, made choices about their bodies and their lifestyles, and were empowered by Shaker religious practices. 

Prof. Thurman says Shaker women understood the community-building features of communal, non-biological families, that still well-nurtured and educated adopted children or children of other members. As Burns reports in her scholarship, the evidence was that Shaker-raised children tended to be excellent students, their schools in Hancock were praised and sought by non-Shaker parents. Continues Prof. Thurman:

[A]s the Shakers and their reformer counterparts debated the merits of life in community and life in the biological family, as they analyzed and discussed what constituted the “best” and most “normal” kind of relationship, they touched on issues that have vexed human society for centuries. The Shakers came down squarely on the side of . . . the transforming power of communal life.

CELIBACY, CHOICE , CLIMATE AND POPULATION



Because much focus is on celibacy when we consider the Shakers, on the grounds that it was a sort of “failure mode” for the survival of the community, I’ll mention that briefly here by saying there are contrarian views. The Shakers themselves wrote that most people left communities not because of sex but because they found it in other ways hard to put aside self-interest in favor of community interest. By not bearing children, Shakers could be sure that anyone in the faith had chosen to be there. If Shakers were recruiting converts today, they could also make the argument that celibacy is a possible rational choice in a world that scientists — apparently not Mr. Trump — see as threatened by climate change and overpopulation.



Scholars Elisa J. Sobo and Sandra Bell, (writing in their book, Celibacy, Culture and Society: The Anthropology of Sexual Abstinence (2001) report that around 1900 some Shaker writers also . . .

. . . Maintained that celibacy (specifically as freedom from marriage), was an important inducement to women to enter membership, first, because marriage sometimes licensed the physical and sexual abuse of women; second, because abstention from marriage facilitated community, and therefore egalitarian, property ownership. They argued that when women are given the opportunity to eschew economic dependence on men, they become men’s equal in all spheres of life.

HEALTH IN BROADEST SENSE



In Shaker communities there was health-care for all, a lesson for today’s society. As well, there was a focus on healthy eating and living — something Shaker societies might have been better able to enforce than we are today.



Here are three examples:

1. HSV and other sites have examples of adult-size cradles, potty chairs and other accessibility and mobility devices for the elderly. 


2. Dwelling houses had areas designed as “infirmaries” and the social covenant included care for infirm and elderly members according to need. There brethren who functioned in roles as doctors.


3. When members were sick, it was understood that other members of the community would take on their work until they recovered. 

Thus, unlike 30 million Americans with no health insurance, and millions without sick pay, a sick or infirm believer could rest, receive care and attention for as long as needed, without worry of financial loss or neglect to the duties of the farm. As for Covid-19 — Burns says there are no accounts of any contagions sweeping a Shaker community, but there are accounts of infirmaries taking in people with flu or pneumonia-like symptoms.



Shakers grew and profitably sold medicinal herbs — they made their own herbal tinctures. Some Shaker orders willingly adjusted food preparation to members who chose a vegetarian diet, wrote June Sprigg in her 1975 book, By Shaker Hands. Children studied physiology, a weekly hot bath was encouraged.



Sprigg added:

To keep themselves healthy, the Shakers used wisely all four earthly elements for their heavenly goal — air, fire, water and earth. Translated into health terms, that meant good ventilation; the use of static electricity as the latest in rheumatism treatment; extensive and progressive plumbing systems; and a sensible diet, herbal medicines, and for the most part no liquor or tobacco. Besides these measures, Shakers slept at least seven hours nightly and exercised not only in their work but in their worship, too [by dancing producing a healthy sweat]. 

HOUSING AND ECONOMIC SECURITY



Housing, homelesslness and economic security loom large as American issues, especially for millennials. For Shakers, these were off the table as concerns. Once a person had stayed long enough in a Shaker community to want to join the faith, they turned over all of their assets but in exchange for doing the community’s work, they were sheltered and fed.  In their own way, Shakers also addressed homelessness; they took in people in need, including widows and orphans. They sheltered and fed fugitive slaves. One might assume that they would be inclined to operate today as welcoming communities for able-bodied and committed immigrants.



Among the scholars I spoke with, one observed that millennials and retirees in the Berkshires and elsewhere are now considering alternate living arrangements, and micro-communities of like-minded people to help with gardening, household responsibilities childcare and bills. What might be learned about the mechanics and challenges of co-housing as practiced by the Shakers, this scholar asked? In the Shaker community construct, your children would be taken care of by brethren and sisters, and you could “age in place” with similar care. Another scholar asked: With the world’s resources now seen as finite, will it be necessary to think of housing and living in less individualistic fashion?



Said one of my interview subjects at HSV:

Millenials are thinking more broadly about how we can live together, in smaller spaces, more sustainably, holding possessions longer so we can consume less. We are rethinking our worldmaking, creating a landscape more intentional and sustainable, in its essence very Shaker. They built a world and a vocabulary for themselves like no other community in this country.

Intergenerational mixing in intentional communities is an ideal spawned by the Shakers (and other communal societies) that should be re-imagined, says Deb Burns. When might the campus of a recently closed college be envisioned for such a purpose, she suggests, balanced in age and genders.





FOCUS ON QUALITY — AND SCIENCE



Until the Industrial Revolution took hold, an important Shaker ethic contributed to their economic prosperity — a focus on quality in everything they made. Shaker brethren who traveled the countryside selling their packaged seeds were eagerly awaited because the seeds’ were clean and reliable. Furniture and devices built more than 200 years ago in dwellings and work buildings still work today. But eventually, scholars say, the ability for factories to turn out goods faster and cheaper became a competitive challenge to the ethic of high quality.



Yet the Shakers actually believed in science, and used inventiveness to maintain their admired position in agriculture and related fields for as long as possible.  Shaker elders considered whether to permit the introduction of labor- and time-saving devices. After initial caution — requiring a six-month period of consideration when a new such idea was offered — they ultimately decided their faith accepted that useful inventions should be encouraged even though they might impact lifestyle. They did not patent some early inventions. Paraphrasing the Wikipedia entry:



Their industry brought about many inventions like Babbitt metal, the rotary harrow, the circular saw, the clothespin, the Shaker peg, the flat broom, the wheel-driven washing machine, a machine for setting teeth in textile cards, a threshing machine, metal pens, a new type of fire engine, the common clothes pin, the first screw propeller, a machine for matching boards, numerous innovations in waterworks, planing machinery, a hernia truss, silk reeling machinery, small looms for weaving palm leaf, machines for processing broom corn and ball-and-socket tilters for chair legs.





MANAGING DISSENT



In reviewing five aspects of the Shakers that I suggest may be relevant to our current culture and politics, I come to the final one — the management of dissent. How might this compare with contemporary politics?



One scholar says that the Shakers viewed men as representing power and women as representing wisdom. It must have been wisdom which defined what would happen when a Shaker community resident need to be dismissed. The problem was managed through constant attempts at rehabilitation, scholars say. Sometimes breathren or sisters would leave the community, only to be welcomed back. Most the time, they would leave with abundant food of gifts. In extreme case, they might have their personal effects removed to the street, however. Sometimes an individual Shaker would challenge the authority of elders, and such charismatic leaders could be asked to leave, or be ejected. “It was very tense and anxious,” says Deb Burns. “But that’s what it was, trying to give the person a chance.”





SHAKERS — NOT APART FROM US



I want to wrap up with three views about why the Shakers matter, and with a poem.



First, the Shakers were in many ways not so different from the rest of us, from other people of their era, writes Joseph Manca, a Rice University art-history professor in a new work of scholarship published just last year by University of Massachusetts Press and entitled: Shaker Vision: Seeing Beauty in Early America. He writes:

In many ways, Shakers lived sensuously: They ate well, they swam regularly in their ponds and lakes and in the ocean, and they danced and sang ecstatically. They viewed landscapes, watched sunsets, pretty rains, rainbows, comets . . . enjoyed the sight of green fields, snow-covered ground and the colors and shapes of fruit on vines and limbs . . . enjoyed pretty faces and bodies, marveled at freaks of nature and admired well-made and colorful buildings.

Second, even if a day comes when the last Shaker is gone, their societies will continue to influence American thought, writes College of the Holy Cross Prof. Joanne Pierce, in her reflection “Why the legacy of Shakers will endure,” published at The Conversation online in 2017. She cites values of cleanliness, honesty, frugality, economy efficiency, quality, simplicity, hard work, debt avoidance and humility affecting social reform, agriculture, technology and innovation. She continued:

[The] Shakers’ rejection of ‘the world’ does offer us today some insightful reflections on contemporary issues such as their pacifism when confronted by terrorism; their mutual love and respect in the face of gender and racial divisions; and their cheerful blending of prosperity and simplicity as a response to the wasteful nature of many materialistic cultures.

Third, in 1977, then-Williams College President John W. Chandler wrote the foreword for Shaker Literature: A Bibliography compiled and annotated by Mary L. Richmond, published by Shaker Community Inc., distributed by University Press of Nebraska, Chandler wrote:

The alienating character of modern work, and questions about the potential for extended non-biological family communities as possible superior to nuclear, biological families drive contemporary interest in the Shakers, Chandler suggests. “Similarly, the Shaker denial of private ownership in favor of communal property attracts those who believe ownership to be a root cause of social injustice.

Chandler wrote that for all these reasons, and for the Shakers commitment to sexual balance their place in history is secure.



There is an untitled poem by Shaker Mary Whitcher, of the Canterbury, N.H., site, in the 1993 Penguin Book Simple Wisdom: Shaker Sayings, Poems and Songs. I read it now as advice to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue:

Be slow to anger, slow to blame,

And slow to plead thy cause.

But swift to speak of any gain

That gives thy friend applause.

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The Past Is Never Dead: On intergenerational trauma

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, January 13, 2020 by Erik Bruun



1. The Damnedest Thing I Ever Saw



Seventy years ago my grandfather, Henry Ashton Crosby, was sitting in a New York City subway. He had recently returned to the United States after serving as a front-line officer during World War II. He was a gracious and polite man, so when an elderly woman got into the crowded subway car, he stood up to offer his seat. Just then another man scooted behind him to take the seat. My grandfather snapped.



He swung around, picked the man up and threw him through the subway window, smashing glass everywhere. The police arrived. After learning that he was a combat veteran, they let him go.



“That sort of thing used to happen all the time after the war,” my stepfather Player Crosby explained to me when I was a boy, delighted to have such chivalry in my family. I mean, what a grandfather!



Two overriding memories come to mind when I recall him.



One was his sparkling eyes. They absolutely lit up when he saw me after an extended absence as he shook my hand firmly and vigorously. He looked at me as if I was the most exciting person he could imagine seeing at that moment. It left such an impression that I try to mimic his enthusiasm when I see young people who I have not seen for a while.



This was a fantastic trait that all six of his children inherited. When you were in his presence you felt as if you were not just seen, but a source of complete delight. Your life felt special. He loved people and people loved him, as the hundreds who attended his standing-room-only funeral when he died at the age of 87 would attest.



The second memory was as a 10-year-old visiting him on summer vacation in Franconia, New Hampshire. I cannot remember what prompted it, but we were on the porch and he started talking about a patrol he led on the Western Front during World War II.



"We were walking through the forest and the Germans fired an .88-artillery shell," he said as if he was recalling a good tennis shot. "It took the head clean off of some poor bastard. He kept walking for another 20 or 30 steps before he fell over. The damnedest thing I ever saw."



2. Old Blood and Guts



General George S. Patton's Third Army landed in France in July 1944, several weeks after the D-Day invasion on June 6. The German Army had pinned Allied Forces on to the Normandy Peninsula for nearly two months in what was known as the Battle of the Hedgerows.



During World War I, Patton was a tank officer, known for his courage, flair and flamboyance. Between the wars he stayed in the Army and for a time was the national polo champion. When the Second World War started, Patton led successful campaigns in Northern Africa and Sicily, but US high command was cautious about giving Patton too much responsibility. Known as "Old Blood and Guts", Patton famously slapped and sent back into combat two American soldiers in Sicily who suffered from battle fatigue. He called them cowards.



But Patton’s Third Army lead the breakout from Normandy. Patton was not just aggressive. He was smart. His staff headquarters had the highest proportion of intelligence officers in Europe, most were focused on coordinating air force support for attacking tanks. The combination of armored columns, close air cover, and radio communication was extremely effective.



On August 1, Patton's army launched its attack, bursting through German lines and advancing every day until his tanks literally ran out of gas 30 days and 400 miles later near the French town of Metz, about 20 miles from the German frontier. A few weeks later, the Third Army's Fourth Armored Division repulsed the largest German tank attack on the Western Front at the Battle of Arracourt and in December, Patton's 4th Armored Division again played a crucial role, this time in the Battle of the Bulge.



The Third Army went on the offensive in February deep into Germany.  Progress was so fast that orders from Central Command to capture towns, cities and bridges often came after Patton's men had already seized them. "Do you want me to give it back," Patton responded after he was ordered to bypass a well-fortified town that he captured the day before. All told, the Third Army engaged in continuous combat for 281 days, crossed 24 major rivers and captured 12,000 towns and cities. The 3rd Army killed 50,000 men, wounded three times that number, and accepted the surrender of nearly 1.5 million soldiers.



3. Wartime Memoirs



Forty years later, my grandfather wrote a 170-page unpublished memoir of his experience of those campaigns. As executive officer of the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion of the 4th Armored Division, he had command control in one of three attack battalions in the most aggressive allied force of World War II. The battalion's casualty rate, including replacements, was 400 percent. Of the 1,000 soldiers in the battalion who landed in France in July, only 30 of whom were still fighting when the Germans surrendered with one officer still amongst them — Major Crosby, awarded three Purple Hearts for injuries suffered in combat, as well as four Silver Stars and two Bronze Stars for valor under fire.



The memoir is a series of stories. Where he was when he learned that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Weekend visits with his wife. His burning anger at the sadistic commanding officer Colonel Albert Strock who wouldn’t give him leave to see his two sons (Ashton and Player) in the U.S. but later broke down into tears when he came under fire in France. Funny tales abound about food, getting soaking wet, and a chance encounter with an officer who asked him his name so he could recommend him for a medal. "My God," the officer said, "you're my godson."



And then there are stories like this early in his combat experience:



"We continued through the orchard and rounded up six or eight Germans. One, about 6' 4", had a pair of field glasses hanging around his neck. I reached for his field glasses and he pulled back, my gun went off. The round hit him in the stomach. he said in English, "You shouldn't have done that; I've surrendered." He then fell down. I apologized and ran off to find a medic.. When I returned, he was gone. I still have the field glasses — an excellent Wetzlar. I also still have the 45."



Thirty pages are devoted to the assault of a single town called Baerendorf that he cites as an example of a typical day of fighting. He led two columns that suffered an artillery barrage, hand-to-hand combat and a counterattack to capture the town. Forty American soldiers were killed under his command that day, one of several small battles he oversaw as leader of this particular task force. In early November the task force started with 750 men and 17 tanks. A month later there were fewer than 100 men and only two tanks.



He reports about his own men after the fight for Baerendorf ended: "I saw a group of B Company soldiers with their rifles pointed at Major Hughes. I asked what was going on and was told that Major Hughes had pulled a wounded B Company man on top of himself to protect himself from German artillery fire. The men were about to execute him. I should have let them! I took Hughes, put him in my quarter-ton, put my 45 in his ear and told him if he blinked I'd blow his bloody head off." When the major was subsequently told he would face a court martial "Hughes collapsed on the floor and became hysterical, drooling and frothing at the mouth."



4. So Deeply Does Vision Carve on the Mind



Battle fatigue is as old as combat.



"Some people in the past, when seeing fearful sights, have lost their presence of mind at the instant," wrote Georgias of Leontini in the fifth century BC of soldiers in the Peloponnesian War. "Fear extinguishes and casts out the mind. Many have succumbed to groundless distress, great malady, and incurable insanity, so deeply does vision carve on the mind images of action seen."



Just experiencing war’s violence is often shocking enough to induce traumatic injuries with no obvious physical cause. You have not been hit by a sword, bullet or shrapnel, but you are struck blind, get terrible headaches, lose physical control of yourself, suffer cardiac problems, lose your appetite, or become depressed or anxious. The industrialization of war dramatically increased incidents of such transient madness.



In World War I "shell shock" was an epidemic problem in all armies. Some believed it was a physiological reaction to the undetectable impacts of passing artillery shells or the result of some underlying condition that combat--most specifically an artillery barrage--triggered. In France, doctors emphasized electric shock treatment. Germany built villages to send the nervously ill to perform menial work tasks as a form of therapy, along with other bizarre treatments such as barking military orders or blaring the national anthem at sleeping men to try to shock them back to normalcy. England built hospitals back home to treat the unhinged with various psychological and psychoanalytical treatments.



The English neurologist WHR Rivers emphasized the lack of control men felt in battle. He wrote "Combat induced an internal conflict between the emotion of honest fear and their sense of duty as men," adding that "three assumptions about personal invulnerability were shattered: seeing the world as meaningful, as comprehensible, and seeing oneself in a positive light."



Tending to hundreds of thousands of men for shell shock led to a scientific understanding that mental illness could be caused by circumstances and thus the popularization of psychology. But scientific recognition is not the same as military reform. The stigma of becoming unhinged remained a fixed feature of the American military, including my grandfather's memoir. At one point he recounts the fate of his fellow company commanders who landed in France with him. Four out of eight, he wrote, were "relieved for cowardice." The other four were killed. Among the staff officers, he describes Major Hughes as an "abject coward" even though he had fought for three months prior to his breakdown at Baerendorf.



In World War II the term changed from shell shock to battle fatigue, reflecting the military's reluctance to accept that trauma could permanently impact a soldier's psyche, as if a good man will come back to health after a short rest.



This was not a completely groundless conclusion as relieving men from front line duty sustained their fighting capacity. A person can only tolerate for so long combat's explosive noise, sleep deprivation, the random and violent death and injury of your friends and colleagues, as well as the moral dilemma of killing people. Experience revealed that after 60 days of constant combat, 98 percent of people go mad. With proper rest and relief from battle, you could extend a soldier's capacity to fight to between 80 and 400 days.



5. The Battle of the Bulge



On December 16, 1944, 300,000 German soldiers launched a surprise attack at the Ardennes Forest to try to break through American lines to Antwerp to split allied forces in two, cut off the supply line for the isolated northern troops and induce them to surrender. Hitler took a desperate gamble to break the American-British offensive. The Battle of the Bulge was the largest battle in U.S history involving more than 500,000 American soldiers, 67,000 of whom were killed, wounded or captured.



Located immediately to the south of the attack, the Third Army suspended its own offensive and swung 90 degrees to the north. The 4th Armored Division was assigned to fight through armored SS divisions to relieve the besieged village of Bastogne, a key crossroad defended by American soldiers. The 53rd Armored Battalion led the way.



My grandfather was recovering in a French farmhouse from illness and exhaustion after his month-long command of the temporary task force described earlier when the Battle of the Bulge started. He and his reconstituted task force were ordered north into Belgium to relieve Bastogne. Famed wartime photographer Robert Capa joined the unit for the six-week battle. I remember my grandfather telling us that Capa "was the craziest person I ever met." Life magazine published a Capa photograph of Major Crosby accepting the surrender of a German artillery observer with his hands in the air, "just to his rear and out of sight is a German major whom I'd just shot in the ass," he recalls in his memoir.

American solders at Bastogne had repulsed wave after wave of brutal armored German assaults. Both sides considered Bastogne as the linchpin of the German drive to Antwerp. By late Christmas night, my grandfather's task force had reached the outskirts of the town. Against his commanding officer's orders, he led a night attack.



"We started off, about 2:15 a.m., down a single two-lane country road leading to Bastogne.… The road ran through a patch of woods and strewn along the road for about 10 yards was a bunch of German mines. As the lead half-track reached the mines, the night erupted in tracer fire as dozens of machine guns and rifles started firing at the column. A private named Hendricks jumped out of the first half-track and started throwing the mines to the left side of the road. The fire was murderous--he cleared away all the mines, was not even scratched, and the column roared through at about 20 mph, firing wildly in all directions. We emerged from the woods, spread out in extended formation and rolled into Bastogne at top speed on 26 December, past groups of startled German artillerymen and infantry wondering what the hell was going on. By morning, the narrow road was secured and we had relieved Bastogne."



6. "Death Had Become Meaningless"



The memoir describes the air raids on Bastogne as his most terrifying experience up to that point, but the entire next five months of combat represent a descent into hell. Atrocities and death abound.



At the Battle of the Bulge, the officer who turned out to be my grandfather's god father was taken prisoner with several colleagues. German SS troops stripped and tied them to beams in a farmhouse then burned it to the ground, incinerating everyone in it. This was done in reprisal for a similar atrocity committed by American soldiers from the same division earlier in the war. He describes a Belgian village scene in which two children are screaming in terror outside their demolished house. Inside there is a Christmas tree with their parents lying dead in front of it.



On February 27, he was with his division command staff in a farmhouse when German artillery struck. An explosion threw him 20 feet from the building. "I staggered into the house and met an appalling sight," he wrote. "Captain Volz, our signals officer, was lying on the hallway floor with both his legs blown off above the knees. Next to him lay Sgt. Curtis, holding the two stumps of his legs. Sgt. Curtis said to me, "Are you all right, sir?" This was almost more than I could take. Curtis hadn't yet realized the extent of his injuries nor yet felt the pain. At the foot of where the stairs had been lay Murdock--scalped. There were three or four dead on the floor and in the adjacent room. Almost everyone left was wounded. I was furious. Our Command Post had been practically wiped out. A host of soldiers and officers who had been with me for four years were dead or badly wounded."



Enraged, he charged into the nearby town to try to find and kill the German who had signaled to artillery to bomb the headquarters. He went into a church where 200 women, children and old men were shrieking from the German bombardment. "I came to my senses and walked out of the church before I started shooting them," he wrote.



In another instance, Americans entered a German town called Koblenz where civilians hid in their cellars. American tank fire hit the town church, which erupted into flames, prompting the civilians to emerge from hiding. "Water bucket gangs of old men, children, and women formed to try to quench the flames, assisted by a hand-pulled and hand-worked pump. Then some sadist called in artillery-time fire. Time fire explodes the projectile about 20 feet above the target and rains down a deadly dispersion of jagged pieces of steel, ripping and shredding everything in its path. The village burned to the ground as we watched, with a good one half of the villagers dead or mutilated--and we cheered."



In another German village he witnessed a friend and fellow officer get killed right in front of him by a sniper. "We'd been in constant combat at this time for nine months and death had become meaningless. [John] Finnegan had been my roommate, a good close friend for four years yet when someone asked me the name of the Captain of A Company who'd been killed earlier in the day, I couldn't remember his name."



7. The past is never dead. It is not even past. 



The International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma has this to say about the legacy of combat trauma.



"Posttrauma symptoms can have a profound effect on the manner in which a trauma survivor relates to others, including, perhaps most significantly, family members. Survivors are markedly changed by their experiences. The psychological impact of trauma is well established in a variety of survivor populations. These posttrauma symptoms include (1) experiencing the trauma through flashbacks, nightmares, and persistent thoughts; (2) cognitive and phobic avoidance of trauma-related stimuli; (3) hyperarousal symptoms of irritability, startle response, and sleep disturbance. It is easy to understand how survivors’ numbing of responsiveness, social withdrawal, and irritability, with episodic outbursts of rage, can make it difficult for them to maintain interpersonal relationships. In turn, children of traumatized patients may be affected directly or indirectly by their parents’ posttrauma symptoms."



My grandfather may not have suffered shell shock or battle fatigue, but he suffered post traumatic stress disorder symptoms. I mean, how could he not? When the war ended, he remarried a Red Cross nurse who he had met while fighting in Europe--Letitia Jones ("Aunt Letty" to me). The two of them had four children together.



"People have no idea how much he suffered," she said shortly after he died, talking about his nightmares in which he woke up screaming in a cold sweat.



Letty shared the memoirs with all six of Tersh's children, including Player, who gave me his copy almost immediately upon receiving it twenty years ago. I read it, was deeply impressed and then asked Player if he had read it. I was shocked by his response.



"No. I will never read it!" he said in a fury that I had never seen in him before. It was stunning. "My father failed at everything he did other than that. He was a failure as a man and as a father."



According to researchers of intergenerational trauma, the emotional numbing, detachment and avoidance that many combat veterans experience may directly impact on the veteran’s parenting ability by diminishing the capability to interact with the child and develop a meaningful relationship.



I will quote from a paper by two Israeli psychologists Rachel Deckel and Hadass Goldblatt entitled "Is there Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma? The Case of Combat Veterans' Children."



"The main mechanisms of direct transmission that is described by psychodynamic approaches are projection and identification. Fathers with PTSD have difficulty containing their emotions, and their attempts to mitigate their pain lead to passive use of projection mechanisms, where severe emotions such as persecution, aggression, shame and guilt are split and projected onto their children. As result, the children may identify with the projected parts of their fathers' emotions, and perceive his experiences and feelings as their own. These unconscious processes can make it difficult for the child to form a separate self and may result in the development of symptoms that replicate the disturbances of the father such as social isolation, guilt and detachment."



The authors write about a veteran's function and engagement in the family unit.



"The main symptoms of PTSD reflect difficulties in regulating proximity and distance from the event and therefore may contribute to problems in attachment and intimacy, thus reducing the father's involvement in family activities. Normal development in childhood and adolescence requires regulating distance/closeness from the parents to enable formation of a separate identity. Fathers who have difficulty regulating distance/closeness from their traumatic memories might also find it hard to properly regulate distance/closeness from their children. The father's physical presence and psychological absence or ambiguous loss, as well as the difficulty involved in understanding and explaining his behavior, might cause lack of appreciation and disappointment among the children. In these cases, the father is part of the family but only fulfills partial functions. The persistence of such ambiguity over a prolonged period can lead to emotional distress. Consequently, family members experience a confusion of boundaries, which is manifested by transferring the father's roles to the mother and/or the children."



I believe that this description of intergenerational trauma is true and goes well beyond a single generation. As William Faulkner put it more succinctly "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

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