Across the bridge: A personal reflection

Presented to the Club on Monday, February 10, 2020 by Richard L. Floyd



We will come to the bridge in my title in due time, but it is a later piece of the story I want to tell tonight, so I will begin with an important book I read last summer while I was filling in as a guest preacher for my daughter during her maternity leave.



The book was Jesus and the Disinherited by Howard Thurman. My pastor had given it to me the year before, but I hadn’t got around to reading it. It was written in 1949, which happens to be the year I was born, and it came out right before the civil rights movement really got moving in the 1950’s.



Howard Thurman, a black minister and scholar, was the Dean of Marsh Chapel at Boston University. He had traveled to India and had met Mahatma Gandhi. When Thurman asked Gandhi what message he should take back to the United States, Gandhi said he regretted not having made nonviolence more visible as a practice worldwide and he famously remarked “It may be through the Negroes that the unadulterated message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world.”



Thurman did come back with that message about non-violent resistance, and became one of the influences on one of his students, Martin Luther King, who did his doctorate at Boston University. And the Civil Rights movement did in fact employ a variety of the tactics of nonviolent resistance, such as sit-ins, bus boycotts, Freedom Rides, marches, and mass demonstrations.



In his book, Howard Thurman draws comparisons between the socio-political world that Jesus grew up in under Roman Occupation, and the American South during the Jim Crow era. In both cases powerful majorities disinherited powerless minorities through fear and the threat of violence. The regular lynching in Howard Thurman’s day and the regular crucifixions of Jesus’s day were both designed to instill terror in the disinherited minority and keep them in their place.



Howard Thurmond had learned the Bible by reading it out loud to his grandmother, who was born a slave and was never taught to read. One day he asked her why she never read from the letters of Paul. She said the slaveowners wouldn’t let black preachers preach to them, but would bring in white preachers, and it was always Paul telling them, “Slaves, obey your masters.” “That is why I don’t want to hear from Paul!” she told him.



But she also told him that the slaves would have secret church meetings in the middle of the night, and the black preachers would tell them, “You are not a slave. You are not that bad word they call you. You are a child of God. God loves you.”



In the night they heard a different story than the official day-time story of their oppressors. The stories we tell ourselves help shape our self-understanding. Our country is in an ongoing national conversation about race, and the meaning and impact of hundreds of years of enslavement and oppression.



That conversation is not an easy one, but it is a necessary one if we are going to get our national story straight. For many people that truth is so threatening and painful that they deny it. I want to share with you an experience I had recently that has influenced how I understand America’s story in regard to race. My understanding is not complete, but it has been deepened.



Early in September of last year, Martha and I went to a United Church of Christ Pension Board meeting in Montgomery, AL. I have to confess that Montgomery. AL had never been on my bucket list of places to visit. But I was pleasantly surprised. Montgomery is a bustling modern city with lots of nice restaurants and places to visit.



But what was really special about our Montgomery trip was visiting the many Civil Rights Movement sites. We spent an afternoon at the Rosa Parks museum, which tells the inspiring story of the Montgomery bus boycott of 1955. For thirteen months the black citizens refused to take city buses, and traveled by a fleet of taxis, hearses, and church buses to get to work.



I learned some things I didn’t know about Rosa Parks. I knew she was an elderly seamstress who refused to go to the back of the bus because she was tired. The seamstress part is true, but Rosa Parks was only 42 at the time of the incident. On December 1, 1955 she refused to relinquish her seat to a white passenger and the bus driver called the police, who escorted her off the bus and arrested her.



I also learned that the police couldn’t sustain the charge against her, because she hadn’t broken any law, rather she had violated a norm. There was a white section, but Parks was sitting in the row after the white section. By custom she would have given up her seat to any white person who came in after the white section was filled up, but she refused.



She was also not just some random person, but the secretary of the Montgomery NAACP, and she had recently attended a workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, for a workshop training in non-violent resistance. There were “repercussions” for her act. Repercussions were the cost of courage during the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 60’s. Rosa Parks was fired by the department store where she worked, and she received death threats for many years. Today in Montgomery there is a marker on the site where she refused to go to the back of the bus.



We also went to the “Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration,” built near the site of the market where tens of thousands of Black enslaved people were sold. The museum opened in April, 2018 and is a project of the Equal Justice Initiative. The EJI

believes that the history of racial inequality and economic injustice in the United States has created continuing challenges for all Americans, and more must be done to advance our collective goal of equal justice for all. The United States has done very little to acknowledge the legacy of slavery, lynching, and racial segregation.

Through the use of multi-media and storytelling the museum presents parts of the national story that have often been left untold.



We also visited another EJI project which opened the same day as the museum, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, informally called the National Lynching Memorial. It is hard for me to talk about this, but it is part of our national story.



Let me describe the Memorial for you. “Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror.” The memorial square has 805 hanging steel rectangles, roughly the size and shape of coffins. Each of them has the names of the counties where a documented lynching took place in the United States. Each of the steel plates also has the names and dates of the documented lynching victims (or “unknown” if the name is not known).

More than 4075 documented lynching of African Americans took place between 1877 and 1950, concentrated in 12 Southern states, but also lynching took place in several states outside the South. I saw counties in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, among others. The monument is the first major work in the nation to name and honor these victims. As you walk under these coffin-shaped rectangles the floor gradually slopes lower and lower, so the coffins seem to be rising above your head. It is absolutely chilling.



Why the date of 1877 as the start of the lynching? That was the year that Reconstruction ended and the last Union troops, who had been stationed throughout the South since the end of the Civil War in 1865, were removed from the former Confederacy.



Without these troops to protect the rights of the freed slaves, a new period began in the former Confederacy, which they ironically called “Redemption.” New measures, called Jim Crow laws, were enacted to enforce segregation and deny blacks civil rights and voting rights. Violence and the threat of violence upheld this system. Lynching was an important piece of the system. These thousands of extra-judicial murders took place without trials or due process. They were often community events that looked like a Fourth of July celebration or a Sunday School picnic. No one would ever be arrested, or if so, no white jury would ever convict.



This de facto state-sponsored violence kept free African Americans in a state of bondage for the better part of a century, and mass incarceration of young black men and voter suppression continue to this day. The ideology of white supremacy is alive and well in America. The story it tells is that blacks are inferior to whites, and so can be treated unfairly and unjustly and deprived of their rights, especially their right to vote.



And now I have to tell you about Jake Williams. Jake is the owner/operator of Montgomery Tours. Martha and I stayed an extra day to go on a bus tour with Jake of the 1965 Selma to Montgomery March. Jake was on that march with two of his older sisters when he was 12 years old.



Jake is an Africa-American man who owns his own company. He’s owned two restaurants, was a truck driver and teaches truck-driving at the local community college.



Jake grew up in Lowndes County, Alabama where his father was a sharecropper and his mother was a domestic servant who worked for a white family. Jake pointed out a cotton field where he had picked cotton as a boy. He said if he didn’t pick his quota his mother would strike him in the head. His mother got up at 4 in the morning to walk out to the highway to hitch a ride to her white family’s house, where she cleaned the kitchen and made them breakfast. She was paid $4 a day.



Jake said that the sharecropper system was better for the plantation owner than slavery. The owner provided housing and the sharecroppers bought all their food and goods from the owner’s store on credit, and they were always behind. Jake told the story about how his father got behind in his credit and the plantation owner offered to erase his debt if he would let him “have his way” with his teenage daughter. His father took a night-time job to see that didn’t happen.



Jake drove us along the March Route to Selma and we had lunch there. Selma today is a run-down town that fell on hard times when their local Air Force base was closed. We went to the church where the marchers gathered on March 7, 1965. The impetus for the march was that on February 26, an activist and deacon, Jimmie Lee Jackson, died after being mortally shot several days earlier by a state trooper, during a peaceful march in nearby Marion, Alabama.



The marchers were committed to and trained in non-violent resistance. They carried no weapons. On March 7, the marchers left Selma and headed across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The bridge is only 250 long, and it is arched so you can’t see to the other side of the Alabama River until you get to the top of the span. This became significant to the marchers since the other side of the bridge is no longer Selma, but county territory. On my trip with Jake I walked across it. I felt like I was on holy ground. That is the bridge of my title.



Selma Police Chief Wilson Baker and his officers controlled the city, but County Sheriff Jim Clark had jurisdiction outside the city. He was a hardline segregationist, who used violence to enforce the Jim Crow laws. He gathered Alabama State troopers wielding nightsticks and tear gas. He also called for every white male 22 years or older to appear to be sworn in as a posse, under an old law. These civilians showed up, many of them on horseback, with long whips and cattle prods used to herd cattle. There were about 200 of these deputies, some of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan.



When the marchers, led by now Congressman John Lewis, among others, got to the top of the bridge, they were savagely set upon by the state troopers and posse men and were driven back to the church. Jake told us that men on horseback followed the protesters right into the church.



Amelia Boynton, one of the organizers of the March, was beaten unconscious by police, and a photo of her lying bleeding on the bridge was shown nationally in the media. This day’s march is referred to as “Bloody Sunday.”



“Bloody Sunday” was the first of three marches. The second march was called “Turnaround Tuesday” on March 9, 1965. The organizers, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued a call for clergy and citizens from across the country to join them. Awakened to issues of civil and voting rights by years of Civil Rights Movement activities, and shocked by the television images of “Bloody Sunday,” hundreds of people responded to the call and came to Selma to march.



To prevent another outbreak of violence, SCLC asked for a court order that would prohibit the police from interfering. But instead of issuing the court order, U.S. District Court Judge Frank Minis Johnson issued a restraining order, prohibiting the march from taking place until he could hold additional hearings later in the week.



On March 9, Dr. Martin Luther King led about 2,500 in a brief prayer meeting on the bridge before turning them around, thereby obeying the court order preventing them from making the full march. He was much criticized for this at the time.



Many marchers felt let down, including those who had traveled long distances to participate in the march. King asked them to remain in Selma for another march to take place after the injunction was lifted.



That same evening, three white Unitarian Universalist ministers in Selma for the march were attacked on the street and beaten with clubs by four Ku Klux Klan members. The most severely injured was the Reverend James Reeb from Boston. Fearing that Selma’s public hospital would refuse to treat him, he was taken to Birmingham’s University Hospital, which was two hours away. He died two days later at University Hospital, with his wife by his side.



On March 15, President Lyndon Johnson convened a joint session of Congress, where he outlined his proposed new voting rights bill, and demanded that Congress pass it. In a presentation carried nationally on live television Johnson praised the courage of the African-American activists. He called Selma “a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom.” I was a sophomore in High School and watched his speech with my family.



A week after Reverend Reeb’s death, on March 17, Judge Johnson finally ruled with the protesters, saying their First Amendment right to march in protest could not be abridged by the state of Alabama. He wrote:

The law is clear that the right to petition one’s government for the redress of grievances may be exercised in large groups . … These rights may … be exercised by marching, even along public highways.

Judge Johnson had got the go-ahead from President Johnson after the President, knowing that Governor George Wallace had no intention of protecting the marchers, would use Federal powers to do so. President Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard, and that set the stage for the Third and Final March on March 21, the one that made it all the way from Selma to Montgomery.



This is the march Jake Williams was on with his sisters. The marchers set out protected by 1,900 National Guardsmen, and US Marshalls and members of the FBI. They walked through chilling rain and camped in muddy fields. The route of the march was on US Highway 80, known in Alabama as the “Jefferson Davis Highway.” The marchers averaged about 10 miles a day. On the second day and third day the march went through Jake’s home county, Lowndes County.



Let me tell you about Lowndes County, Alabama, a majority black county, in 1965. In the early Twentieth Century Alabama had passed some of the most restrictive voting laws in the land, with a poll tax and a literacy test. At the time of the march, the population of Lowndes County was 81% black and 19% white, but not a single black person was registered to vote. Not one. There were 2,240 whites registered to vote, a figure that represented 118% of the adult white population (in many Southern counties of that era they left white voters on the rolls after they died or had moved away).



If Jake had any anger or bitterness it never showed. He told us the story of the march in a matter of fact way. But he did tell us about what he called “repercussions” to the march.



Repercussion 1: Jake told us that few sharecroppers participated out of fear of the plantation owners, but the ones that did were kicked out of their homes, and a tent city had to be erected for temporary housing.



Repercussion 2: A black woman who ran a convenience store let the marchers camp in a field she owned. Her suppliers retaliated by denying her supplies, and her business closed.



Repercussion 3: In Montgomery on the last night of the march, the Roman Catholic bishop let the marchers camp at St Jude Catholic School field on a campus that housed the St. Jude Catholic hospital. All the white doctors quit and the hospital closed.



Repercussion 4: Viola Liuzzo, a housewife and mother of 5, traveled from Detroit, Michigan, to Selma for the march. Driving back from a trip shuttling fellow activists to the Montgomery airport, members of the Ku Klux Klan saw her with a black man in her car and chased her for miles along the highway before shooting her in the head and killing her. She was 39 years old. Jake showed us the spot along the Jefferson Davis Highway where she was murdered.



On March 25 the marchers left St. Jude and marched to the steps of the capitol in Montgomery. Dr. King had asked Governor Wallace for permission to address the crowd there, about 25,000 people, but he was refused. So, the organizers rented a flatbed truck and put a podium on it on the street at the foot of the State House. Jake drove us to the spot. It was a few blocks from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where King was pastor.



King delivered a speech known as “How Long? Not Long?” Perhaps, you know it. Let me share with you the closing paragraph (if I can get through it):

I know you are asking today, “How long will it take?” Somebody’s asking, “How long will prejudice blind the visions of men, darken their understanding, and drive bright-eyed wisdom from her sacred throne?” Somebody’s asking, “When will wounded justice, lying prostrate on the streets of Selma and Birmingham and communities all over the South, be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men?” Somebody’s asking, “When will the radiant star of hope be plunged against the nocturnal bosom of this lonely night, plucked from weary souls with chains of fear and the manacles of death? How long will justice be crucified, and truth bear it?” I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because “truth crushed to earth will rise again.” How long? Not long, because “no lie can live forever.” How long? Not long, because “you shall reap what you sow.”  “How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

On August 6, 1965 President Johnson signed the voting Rights Act that ended Jim Crow, at least in law.



What is the lasting legacy of the Selma to Montgomery March? For one thing it caught the attention of a large segment of the American public and they could no longer turn away from the reality of segregation and injustice. In the decade between the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 and the Selma march of 1965, the Civil Rights movement had been active in numerous acts of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience throughout the South. These acts had gained more and more attention from the media and the public about inequality and segregation.



Two years before Selma, in 1963, Dr. King had led an economic boycott in Birmingham, and in May a large number of children and students walked out of school and attempted to address the mayor. 959 of them, ages 6-18, were arrested. The next day more students joined the march and Bull Connor famously ordered his Birmingham police to use fire hoses and attack dogs on the children. The pictures on TV from Birmingham shocked many in the nation, and a changing public opinion allowed for the passage the next year of The Civil Rights Act of 1964.



This was a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It prohibited unequal application of voter registration requirements, and racial segregation in schools, employment, and public accommodations.



This law and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 became the landmark legislation that dismantled segregation and the Jim Crow Laws. Many felt the battle for civil rights had been won, and the election of Barack Obama in 2008 led many to speak of “a post racial America” in which the United States would be free from racial preference, discrimination, and prejudice.



Sadly, this optimism has been shown to be premature. In 1913 the Supreme Court struck down a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, that addressed voting discrimination in a 5-4 decision. States wasted little time in putting practices into play to suppress voting along racial lines.



And then there is the issue of mass incarceration. The American Civil Liberties Union says that:

Since 1970, the number of incarcerated people has increased sevenfold to 2.3 million in jail and prison today, far outpacing population growth and crime. Not everyone is treated equally in the criminal justice system. Racial bias keeps more people of color in prisons and on probation than ever before. One out of every three Black boys born today can expect to go to prison in his lifetime, as can one of every six Latino boys — compared with one of every 17 white boys. Black people are also subject to pretrial detention at a higher rate than white arrestees with similar charges and history.

In 2010 Michelle Alexander, a civil rights litigator and legal scholar, wrote “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness” in which she argues that the jailing of young black and brown men is like the Jim Crow laws, using the justice system to enforce racism.



The rise of white supremacist groups out of the shadows and into the public square in the era of Donald Trump reminds us that we haven’t arrived at a post-racial America. The killing of unarmed black people by law enforcement, and the resulting “Black Lives Matter movement are another facet of the conversation. Our United Church of Christ headquarters in Framingham had a “Black Lives Matter” banner removed and vandalized several times.



The debate about the Confederate flag and Confederate war memorials shows how much passion and consternation still exists over who gets to choose which story to tell about our national story around race.



I’d like to end with a couple of personal postscripts. The first is that Martin Luther King and other people of faith in the Civil Rights movement were big influences on me, and are part of what shaped and formed me in ways that led to my going into the ministry.



The second postscript is how my trip to Montgomery alerted me to some of my own blind spots and ways I have got the story wrong or at least incomplete. I once preached a sermon on Martin Luther King Day and afterwards one of my congregants came up to me mad as a wet cat and gave me a tongue lashing. She was from Alabama, a niece of George Wallace, and the gist of her complaint was that “you Yankees always blame the South, as if there is no racial bigotry in the North.”



She had a point. The systematic oppression of the Post-Reconstruction South under Jim Crow is not the only kind of racism there is, although it is a particularly toxic and evil form of it. But here is where I need to make a confession. I was born in the Upper West Side of Manhattan and when I was three, my parents moved us across the Hudson to suburban Bergen County, New Jersey. There I received my education from kindergarten through 12thgrade. During those years I never had a black classmate at my schools. Not one. This came home to me several years ago when I learned that Senator Corey Booker graduated from my high school. When I was there, there were no black students.



My parents were liberal Democrats, and in the Sixties, while we watched Jim Clarke and Bull Connor use violence to put down protestors of racial segregation, we ourselves were living in a segregated community. The segregation in our community was not laid down by law, as In Alabama, but by redlining, the practice of discriminatory lending practices by banks to deny mortgages to minorities based on maps of neighborhoods.



In 2017, I returned to my high school for my fiftieth reunion. One of the little towns I grew up in is largely Korean, and the marching band at the football came was majority Asian. The Congregational Church in that town is now a Korean church.



This is the multi-racial America that so many decry and find threatening. The current anti-immigrant political movement is part of this same backlash. It is estimated that our country will be majority minority by 2045 or 2050. Fewer than half of American children under the age of fifteen are white.



What will the story be that we tell ourselves about who we are as Americans? Will we remember the brave men, women, and children that risked life and limb to non-violently protest and resist their oppression at the hands of the majority? Will we come to terms with our complicated history that includes the story of enslaved people and centuries of racial injustice and bigotry? That is a conversation we need to be having. When I walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge last September in Selma, I realized how far we have come, and how far we have yet to go.

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Words to live by: The King James Bible and its legacy to the English language

Photo by Jonathan Schmid, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club by Richard L. Floyd on Monday Evening, April 28, 2014



The story I want to tell is the story of the creation of the King James Bible, and its enormous influence on the English language. For over 400 years this was the Bible for the English-speaking world, the best selling book of all time, and still the most frequently purchased translation.



It lasting legacy to English is incalculable. It is the Bible that Abraham Lincoln learned to read with, and its sounds and rhythms can be heard in his Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural Address, as it can in Melville’s Moby-Dick, the poetry of Walt Whitman, and the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.



How did we get this extraordinary work of literary art that has made such a place in the story of English? It was published in 1611, but there is considerable backstory that needs to be shared before we get there, and so we need to go way back. The English still refer to it as the Authorised Version (AV), but I will use the more popular American title, the King James Version and its abbreviation (KJV).



Our first question is, what is the Bible? The word itself comes from the Greek Ta Biblia, which simply means “the books.” That seems simple enough, but which books?



There is another whole Monday Evening Club paper that could be written about this subject, the choosing of various books for a canon, but for our purposes tonight relative to the King James Bible, “the Bible” is the following:

1. The Hebrew Bible or Tanakh, comprising the 24 books of the Masoretic Text recognized by Rabbinic Judaism. These were written in Hebrew with a smattering of Aramaic. These same books (but in different canonical order) are recognized by Protestant Christians, who follow the Hebrew canon, as the Old Testament. Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians, who followed the canon of the Septuagint, the early Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, have additional books called variously deuteron-canonicals or the Apocrypha. The King James Version put some of these books between the two Testaments.


2. The New Testament, comprising 27 books agreed on by Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Eastern Orthodox. These were all written in Koine’ Greek, which was the common Greek of the Hellenistic marketplace.

So it took a very long time for English-speaking people to get a Bible translated from the ancient original languages into their own tongue.



Tonight’s paper will tell the story of why it took so long, and how it finally happened. More importantly, I want to trace the influence that this one English translation has had on our language. On its 500th anniversary in 2011 many articles praising the KJV were written. Some of them were by atheists like Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens, who praised it as a literary work.



So this is not a paper about the religious significance of the King James Bible, although it will touch on that, rather I want to tell the story of how the language we all speak, whatever our religion, has been so profoundly shaped by it.



To tell this story we need a little European history lesson to look at the fascinating confluence of societal and technological changes that took place in the several centuries before 1611.



Before the King James Version was published in 1611 for over a thousand years in Europe “the Bible” typically meant the Vulgate, the Latin translation of Jerome and others, which dates from the beginning of the 5th century AD.



After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, which took place from the late 4th to the early 5th century, was the beginning of the so-called “Middle Ages,” a time when much of the learning and education retreated to the monasteries, where books were hand copied by monks in scriptoriums.



Literacy was uncommon, and the few who could read Latin were mostly churchmen. In medieval Europe the Roman Catholic Church played an important political function, and literate churchman were regularly employed throughout the region by monarchs and nobles to handle correspondence, translate documents, and foster statecraft. We have this embedded in our language, as a “cleric” came in time to mean not just the clergy, but any literate person, a “clerk.”



With the dissolution of the Roman Empire new societal patterns emerged. By the 9th century the feudal system had developed in Europe. Feudalism was an intricate set of political and military rules in which the holding of land was exchanged for labor or service. Feudalism consisted of three estates: the warrior nobility, the church, and the peasants. Under this arrangement the land-owning nobles developed over time into a powerful hereditary aristocracy, and the church became a wealthy landowner and powerful political broker.



These arrangements began to crack in the 13th century, when Europe experienced strong economic growth through trade, especially sea trade, and a growing mercantile class began challenging the old feudal aristocracy for wealth, power and influence.



By the opening of the 14th century there was a series of grave economic setbacks. Severe climate change threatened agriculture, causing periodic famines. The Hundred Year’s War between England and France disrupted the sea trade, further putting the economy into a long recession.



The most serious catastrophe was the plague known as the Black Death, in the mid 14th century, which so decimated the population of Europe that it took 150 years to return to pre-plague numbers. In its wake there was widespread social disorder, riots and worker strikes. The inability of the Church and the old feudal aristocracy to stem the plague lost them authority in the eyes of many.



It was in these times of disturbance and social unrest that writers such as Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio emerged, and a new interest in literature and learning flourished. In 14th century central Italy, in cities such as Florence and Sienna, we can see the earliest flowering of what became known as the European Renaissance.



By the opening of the 15th century, as the plague receded, this new class of traders and bankers grew, and with what has become known as “the rise of the middle class,” a demand for new goods, especially luxury items for the newly wealthy.



Among the luxury goods in demand were books, as literacy, previously the possession of learned clerics, began to spread to the educated middle class, and was viewed as a sign of sophistication and culture.



But books were expensive, copied by hand in the monastic scriptoriums, they were written on vellum, or stamped from woodcuts that were laboriously cut by hand and used but once.



Here is where the economic and social revolution met the technological one. Around 1439 Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith, developed metal moveable type that could be used more than once, and the printing press was born. The printing press made books cheaper to make and more widely available.



We have witnessed the growth of mass communication in our own time with the rise of mass media and the invention of the Internet. The printing press was the Internet of its time, and it changed the world, wresting sole control of information and communication away from the church and the state.



In 1455 Gutenberg produced a beautiful Bible. At 30 florins, or roughly three year’s pay for a clerk, it still wasn’t cheap. Just how many of these Bibles were printed is not known, but 48 of them have survived. There are nine here in the United States. There are two in the British museum (that you can compare on-line). But Gutenberg’s Bible wasn’t in the vernacular; it was still the Latin Vulgate, and that leads us to the next chapter of this story, the demand for Bible translations in the peoples’ common tongues.



The rising middle class wanted books in their own tongue, as national languages were emerging. Those 14th century Italian Renaissance writers and poets I mentioned like Petrarch and Boccaccio left Latin behind and wrote in vernacular prototypes of what would become modern Italian. Dante wrote his Divine Comedy in a language he called “Italian,” which was a vernacular from Tuscany.



And in England in the 14th century we have our first significant English translation. The dissident philosopher and theologian John Wycliffe had argued for a Bible in the common tongue, and in 1382 he and his associates published an English translation of the entire Bible, translated from the Vulgate.



Wycliffe is often called “the morning star of the Reformation” for his theological views, which influenced Jan Hus and Martin Luther in the 15th and 16th centuries. But the Roman Catholic Church condemned Wycliffe’s views, and those of his followers the Lollards, and his Bible was strongly suppressed. His translation pre-dates the printing press, so it was in manuscript, and few copies have survived. After Wycliffe died the church declared him a heretic, and his body was exhumed and burned.



Ironically, the scare of Wycliffe is one factor in why it took so long to get other English translations, as they became associated in the minds of “the powers that be” with heresy and dissidence against the church and monarchy. Incidentally, the phrase, “the powers that be” is itself an idiom created by the KJV (for Romans 13:1).



In 1401 Parliament codified these fears, making it illegal to publish the Bible in English, a crime punishable by death.



But, suppressed or not, the views of Wycliffe and Hus spread across Europe. In the early decades of the 16th century an Augustinian monk and university professor in Wittenberg, Germany, named Martin Luther would formulate the ideas that would eventually lead to a break with the Roman Catholic Church and mark the beginning of the Protestant Reformation.



Luther himself translated the New Testament into German in 1522, and after teaching himself Hebrew, translated the Old Testament in 1534. This translation, the Luther Bible, became widely available because of the printing press, and had a profound influence in shaping the German language. It was also an important influence on the English Protestant William Tyndale, whose English translation is the single most important influence on the King James Bible.



If there is a hero to the story of the making of the English Bible it is William Tyndale. His translation was the first English translation made from the original languages, and estimates are that over 80% of his Bible was retained by the King James translators. Because it was illegal to make an English Bible in England Tyndale had to make his Bible in secret in Antwerp.



Tyndale’s version threatened the bishops. For example, he translated the Greek presbyteros, not as “priest,” but as “senior” and in a later edition as “elder.” He translated ekklesia not as “church,” but as “congregation.” These were, in fact, more accurate translations, and represented Protestant views which were considered dangerous to established order.



Tyndale was eventually betrayed and in 1536, even as King Henry VIII was separating the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, he had Tyndale arrested and executed, as you might know if you have read Hilary Mantel’s great book about the time, Wolf Hall.



But Tyndale’s Bible, passed hand to hand against the authority of church and state, was so popular that it forced Henry’s hand, and just a year later Henry authorized the first official translation in English. A flurry of English Bibles appeared, the Coverdale Bible in 1535, the Matthews Bible in 1537, the Great Bible in 1539, the Geneva Bible in in 1560, the Bishops’ Bible in 1568, and the Douai-Rheims Bible from 1582-1610. None of these Bibles attained the standing that the KJV would, but they are all an important part of our story, because the King James translators in 1604 to 1611 would have all these translations to consult when they made their translation.



But at this point in the story a question emerges. Why did it take so long to get an English translation of the Bible? The answer to has more to do with politics and culture than with religion.



I have already touched on the association of an English translation with heresy and dissent from the Wycliffe scare.  But that was only one part of the prejudice against English. Until not too many years before 1611 the English elites had long looked down on English as a crude and inelegant language. The aristocracy frequently had their children tutored in French, which since the Norman invasion of 1066 had become the language of the nobility. English was for peasants.



And it was not merely the nobility that were prejudiced against English; it was also the universities and the church, which clung to Latin as the lingua franca of European communication and scholarship. The dons of Oxford and Cambridge might deign to talk to their servants in English, but among themselves they spoke Latin. Even when the KJV translators discussed which English words and phrases were to be chosen for their Bible, they had that discussion in Latin (and the other ancient languages.) This new English translation they were making was not for them, but for the common people.



Even in our time I experienced this reverence for Latin in the Universities. When I spent a term at Oxford in 1989 during my first sabbatical, Martha and I went to a graduation ceremony that was conducted entirely in Latin, with the audience even laughing at the appropriate time to humorous remarks. The nightly grace before dinner in the refectory at Mansfield College, Oxford, was recited from memory in Latin, as it was in the other colleges. So Latin ran deep in the academy, and even some Renaissance humanists such as Erasmus argued against the use of the vernacular, fearing it would eroded the ability of scholars to be in conversation trans-nationally.



The church, of course, had other reasons to resist a vernacular Bible, as only the Latin-speaking clergy could read and interpret it. An English translation would erode that authority, and with it social and political control of the populace.



But after Tyndale the seal was broken and the flurry of translations began. These tributaries that flowed into the King James Bible came at a particularly turbulent time in English history. While the Reformation in Europe had been for primarily religious reasons, the English Reformation began in the statecraft of Henry VIII, who left the Roman Church when the pope denied him a divorce from Catherine of Aragon, who had not provided a male heir.



Henry’s break with the Roman church left a Church of England that was neither Roman Catholic nor Protestant, and for the next century England yo-yoed between Roman Catholic and Protestant sympathies. Henry’s own sympathies remained mostly Catholic, which is why the Protestant Tyndale met with his fate.



But Henry’s daughter, Mary, was a staunch Roman Catholic and avidly persecuted Protestants. She was widely called “Bloody Mary” for the savage intensity of her persecutions. These were later chronicled in Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, a popular Protestant polemic published after Mary’s reign. During the Marian persecutions many Protestant leaders and scholars escaped to Europe.



It was these Protestant exiles that fled England for Geneva that produced the strongly Puritan Geneva Bible, about which I will say more. When Mary died at the age of 42 her half sister Elizabeth became queen, stabilized the country and enjoyed a reign that lasted over four decades.



Queen Elizabeth I was an astute politician and knew she couldn’t maintain power if these religious wars continued to tear her country apart. She sought a middle way, a moderate Protestant church. To achieve this she tolerated those who were loyal to the crown, and imprisoned or exiled the extreme Puritans on the one side, and the Roman Catholics who wanted a return to Rome on the other.



When “Good Queen Bess” died without children in 1603 the Tudor line came to an end, and her distant cousin, the Scottish King James 6th of Scotland became James I of England and began the Stuart line of monarchs. This is our King James whose name is forever attached to the Bible he commissioned.



I need to say a few things about King James. In Scotland he had reigned over a second-rate (maybe third) European power, and he had been exposed to the Puritan ethos of the (Presbyterian) Church of Scotland. But James was no Puritan. He saw England as a rich land, and on his accession began the high living and big spending associated with the Jacobean period.



But James saw himself as a peace lover and unifier. He inherited from Elizabeth a Church of England whose Puritan party, long suppressed, was deeply unsatisfied and more than impatient with the Elizabethan compromise. Elizabeth had required vestments of the clergy and had retained bishops, both signs of “popery” to the Puritans. They wanted the Reformation to be completed in England. James was met by a delegation of Puritan divines on his way from Scotland to receive his crown. They had with them a petition signed by a thousand ministers of the Church of England. He promised them a conference to hear their concerns.



The conference that took place was at Hampton Court in 1604, with James himself presiding. The Puritans surely were disappointed by their representation there, as James and his court had hand picked men mild in their views and loyal to the crown.



Nonetheless, although it isn’t in the agenda or the minutes for that meeting, when it was over a new English translation was commissioned. One has to wonder, why would James and his court accept the idea of a new Bible?



The answer is that he wanted a Bible for all the people in his new reign. The Geneva Bible of 1560, translated by the Puritan Marian exiles, was tremendously popular. It had maps and charts and marginal notes, many of them challenging the authority of both monarchs and bishops. The Puritans loved it; the bishops hated it.



So the bishops of the Church of England published their own version, the Bishops' Bible, as their rejoinder 1568. The problem with the Bishops' Bible, hastily and poorly translated, was that few bought it or used it.



James and his court wanted a unifying Bible produced by and appealing to all the parties. James himself spoke and wrote in broad Scots. No matter. He was no longer the king of a backwater, but the most powerful Protestant King in Europe. And he believed in the divine right of Kings. His new Bible was to be a sign of James’ own majesty as the King of all his people.



The plan was to pick the finest scholars in the land to be on the translation committees. And although it is true there were men of all sympathies on the committees, no one with extreme or controversial positions would be chosen. Still there were High Churchmen and Puritan scholars sitting side by side. Many of them knew each other; they had gone to university together, and though they had different views, they were an intellectual aristocracy of high learning.



There were to be six of committees of translators: two at Westminster, two at Oxford and two at Cambridge. They were to translate from the original languages, but also consult the several English translations available to them. This is part of the genius of the KJV; the translators could compare the accuracy and the sound of the work of previous translators.



And compare they did. After six years of hard work each committee brought its product to a final editorial committee of six scholars in London. They went through it line by line, listening to it as it was read out loud. They stopped only to ask questions or to make suggestions and changes. We only know this because one of the translators, John Bois, kept a diary of the proceedings. And in the 20th century some copies of their workbooks were found with notes to the proceedings.



Unlike the Puritans, who wanted the same Hebrew or Greek word always rendered as the same English word, these translators were interested in the sounds of the words and phrases. This was to be a Bible to be read aloud, a Bible to be heard, a Bible to be read in public worship.



And that is what they produced. It is hard to believe a translation made by a committee could be so beautiful, but it is, a strange and wondrous combination of Puritan light and simplicity with Jacobean ornamentation and majesty.



It contains a spare 8,000 words. In contrast, Shakespeare, its contemporary, combed through the lexicon to find a torrent of new and diverse words. But the KJV translators wanted a Bible accessible to the common people.



Ironically, this translation so much praised for its eloquence is “eloquent by accident.” (McGrath, p. 254) The idea of the Bible as literature won’t be around for centuries. And nowhere in their instructions were the translators told to make it beautiful or eloquent, only accurate.  They were more interested in truth than in beauty, but they were also fortunate to be living in a time when English had matured into an elegant living language. Their Bible was published the same year as Shakespeare’s last great work, The Tempest.



It is also the most Hebrew of English translations to that time. Unlike the translations from the Vulgate the KJV translators had the Masoretic text in front of them, and they often made literal translations of Hebrew idioms, which have become enshrined in our English tongue.



There are too many of these to cite here, but let me share some examples: “to lick the dust,” “to fall flat on his face,” “a man after his own heart,” “to pour out one’s heart,” “sour grapes,” “ from time to tome,” “pride goes before a fall,” “the skin of my teeth,” “to go from strength to strength.”



Altogether the KJV has contributed over 250 idioms to the English language. Here are just a few of them:

Am I my brother’s keeper?

Can a leopard change his spots?

Eat, drink and be merry

The apple of his eye

Signs of the times

At their wits’ end

The powers that be

Labor of love

A thorn in the flesh

The root of all evil

The fat of the land

The sweat of thy brow

To cast pearls before swine

The shadow of death

These idioms are so familiar to us that we forget they were not part of English before 1611. There is an old joke about the student who, upon finally reading the Bible, said that it was not as profound as he expected: “It’s just a bunch of clichés and well-known sayings strung together.”



The impression makes sense. When I went to seminary I discovered that many of my parents’ axioms and epigrams were from the Bible. My mother would often say, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil therof.” In seminary I learned it was from KJV of the Sermon on the Mount. It wasn’t my mother after all, but Jesus! It certainly sounds more profound to me than the NRSV’s “Today’s trouble is enough for today.” My minister daughter reports having a similar experience when she went to Divinity School. “Dad. All those things you used to say are from the Bible!”



In fact, in 2005 the famous sayings from the King James Version were extracted from Bartlett's Familiar Quotations and made into a book, which contained more than 200 pages.



One reason the KJV has had such an important influence on the shaping of modern English is its timing. It was created at the very time of the emergence of national languages in some standard form.



There was no standard English in Jacobean England. A Northumbrian could scarcely understand someone from Cornwall. The translators spoke a dialect of southeastern English, the language of London and Oxford, of Cambridge and Canterbury, and through the widespread acceptance of the KJV that became standard English.



And there was also no uniformly accepted spelling of words in the 17th century. The names of the translators themselves often have several variants. But once the translators settled on a spelling it made its way into English over hundreds of years, becoming the standard.



The words themselves, their spelling, the rhythm and cadence of their phrases created a thought-world shared by the readers throughout the English-speaking world



Yale Theologian George Lindbeck said that until recently “Christendom dwelt imaginatively in the biblical world.” “During the years of its dominance, the King James Bible was the omnipresent force in any cultural sphere that we can name—education (especially childhood education), religion, family and home, the courtroom, political discourse, language and literacy, choral music and hymns, art and literature. For more than two centuries children in England and America learned to read by way of the Bible.” (Ryken)



But should we think of it as an historical artifact? Apparently not. A recent study advised by historian Mark Noll concludes that the KJV is still the most widely read translation as well as the fastest growing in sales.



“The 55 percent who read the KJV easily outnumber the 19 percent who read the New International Version (NIV). And the percentages drop into the single digits for competitors such as the New Revised Standard Version, New America Bible, and the Living Bible.”



So concludes "The Bible in American Life," a lengthy report by the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), funded by the Lilly Foundation.



Last year's American Bible Society (ABS) "State of the Bible" report, using the pollsters the Barna Group, found that 52 percent of Americans read the King James or the New King James Version, compared with 11 percent who read the NIV.



So why don’t we all just read the King James Version? There are two very good reasons. The first is that we know so much more about the Bible than the King James translators. In the five hundred years that have passed we have many more recent and better manuscripts than they did.



We now have unprecedented access to older and better manuscripts and other texts. These can correct thousand of years of scribal errors. Perhaps a sleepy monk missed a word or a pious monk “corrected” a text he considered impious. These scribal errors would have been continually repeated in the scriptoriums.



Chief among the modern breakthroughs is the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, nearly a thousand texts, found in dry caves in the 1940’s and 50’s. To take but one example, a complete scroll of the Book of Isaiah was found in 1947 that is a thousand years older than the text we had previously. Newer and better texts give contemporary translators an advantage that the team in 1611 didn’t have.



The second reason we all don’t just read the KJV is that the English language has changed considerably in 500 years, and certain words and phrases have become unintelligible or worse, they now mean the opposite of what they meant in 1611.



As beautiful as the KJV is, there are great patches of it that are difficult or impossible for the modern reader to understand. Those of you who struggled through the original of the Canterbury Tales in school will know what the King James Bible sounds like to young contemporary ears.



Still, this Bible shaped our language as no other work, even Shakespeare, the other font from which English has drunk deeply. For hundreds of years it was the one source of English that all shared. We’ll never see such a thing again.

Bibliography

Benson Bobrick. Wide as the Waters. The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution it Inspired. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001



David Daniell. William Tyndale, A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994.



Robert McCrum, William Cran, Robert MacNeil. The Story of English. New York: Penguin, 1986, 1992.



Alister McGrath. In the Beginning. New York: Doubleday, 2001.



Adam Nicolson. “The Miracle of the King James Bible.” National Geographic Magazine, December, 2011.



Adam Nicholson. God’s Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible. New York: Harper Collins, 2003.



Leland Rykin. “How We Got the King James Bible.” The Wall Street Journal. August 26, 2011.

Read More

Under the green canopy: Hiking the Appalachian Trail the the Berkshires

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 12, 2012 by Richard L. Floyd

When I told Harold* my title for tonight’s paper he suggested it might be about a wedding! A great guess, but no, the paper is actually about my experiences of hiking on the Appalachian Trail in the Berkshires. “Under the Green Canopy” refers to the lush green foliage overhead when you are on the trail. The AT is also sometimes called the “Green Tunnel” by thru-hikers.

I first encountered the Appalachian Trail over fifty years ago in western New Jersey as a Boy Scout at camp No-Be-Bo-Sco. The camp, which is still going strong, sits alongside Kittatinny Ridge, near the Delaware Water Gap.

I went to camp there for several summers and we scouts hiked sections of the nearby AT. The trail skirts the opposite shore of Sand Pond. I have many memories of that lake; I came to camp as a beginner and learned to swim there, eventually earning my lifesaving merit badge, and when I was fourteen swam the Mile Swim there. I didn’t appreciate that the nearby trail was so special.

It was as a Boy Scout that I first learned to love hiking and camping. I know that when one thinks of New Jersey it does not conjure up pictures of beautiful forests and hills, but that is just what that part of northwestern New Jersey is like. If you don’t believe me you can visit. The camp is private, but years ago it ceded hundreds of acres to the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Park and one can hike the trails there, including a portion of the AT.

Eventually one of the Scout leaders at camp must have told me that the trail went all the way from Georgia to Maine, and that some people hiked the whole thing in one season. From then on it was a dream of mine to thru-hike the trail, a dream I long deferred and have finally abandoned now that I’ve reached the age where one likes to sleep in one’s own bed.

Nonetheless, the AT has been a valued part of my life ever since those Boy Scout days. I met up with it again when I moved to New England to go to graduate school in 1971. I hiked portions of it with my future wife in the White Mountains in New Hampshire in the early 1970’s, and later with my brother in the 1980’s.

Then when I moved to Maine Martha and I took church youth groups hiking and camping on and near Mt. Katahdin, which is the northernmost terminus of the AT. I have run across the trail here and there through the years while hiking in Connecticut and Vermont.

But it has been during these last thirty years during which I have lived in Berkshire County that I have become most familiar with the trail, especially since 2000 when my hiking life took another turn.

It happened like this. In late September of 2000 I was a spectator for the Great Josh Billings Runaground, the Berkshires’ famous fun triathlon. I had been training all year to be a participant, but the month before I took a bad tumble on my bike and was on the disabled list.

As I was sulking on the sidelines with my arm in a sling, a good friend of mine approached me and asked me how I was doing. “Terrible,” I said, “I’m jumping out of my skin for lack of exercise because I can’t ride my bike.” He replied, “Well, I belong to a hiking group and you’re welcome to come along. It’s a bunch of old guys and won’t be very challenging for somebody in as good shape as you are, but, hey, if you want to come we’re hiking tomorrow and I’ll pick you up.”

So the next day I landed with my friend at the trailhead to the AT in Tyringham, not far from Tyringham Cobble. I saw some old friends, met some new ones, laced up my boots, and off the group went at such a fast pace that I was yo-yoing off the back for awhile.

And that was my introduction to the other men’s group I belong to which has Monday in its name, “The Monday Mountain Boys” (although to be strictly factual the name didn’t come about until a year later when the wives named us).

I liked the group so much that even after I rehabbed my body and fixed my bike the following year I kept hiking with them on Mondays, and I still often do. The hikes take us all over Berkshire County, but more than any other venue we hike the Berkshire section of the AT.

Those of us who live here tend to take for granted this iconic trail that wends it’s way through the length of our county. The entire AT in Massachusetts, some 90 miles of it, is here in Berkshire County.

Its official name is The Appalachian National Scenic Trail, but everybody calls it the AT. It is (more or less) 2,174 miles long and travels the spiny ridgeline of the Appalachian Mountains. It extends between Springer Mountain in Georgia and Mount Katahdin in Maine.

It winds its way through the states of North Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. And of the fifteen states it passes through only in Massachusetts is the entire trail in a single county.

The making of the Appalachian Trail was a vast undertaking. How did such a project come to be? To answer that question we need to back up and have a little history lesson about mountain hiking and trail-making.

Our story really only begins around 1830, since hiking for recreation and leisure is a fairly recent development in the history of humankind.

The earliest settlers to this part of the country brought with them the attitudes of Europe, where mountains were viewed chiefly as obstacles to travel. In a famous example, Martin Luther kept diaries of his trip from Germany to Rome in 1510 without mentioning a word about the scenery, which would have included a good portion of the Alps. And when the first English settlers reached the Berkshires they called them “the horrid hills.”

That view was widely shared. Mountains were dangerous places afflicted with unpredictable weather, wind and rain and snow and thunder and lightning. The paucity of Indian artifacts on mountains indicates that Native Americans avoided them as well, perceiving them as places where larger powers and forces best not tampered with dwelled. During Darby Field’s historic climb of Mt. Washington in 1642 he could convince only one of his Indian scouts to approach the summit with him.

But Field’s ascent of Mt. Washington back in the 17^th century was very much an anomaly. Most of the Northeastern mountains didn’t have their first known ascent for more than a hundred years later. Mt. Mansfield in Vermont was first climbed in 1772 and Mt. Katahdin not until 1804 to give just a couple of examples.

It wasn’t until well after the Revolutionary War that men (and some women) took to the mountains in any numbers, and only during the 19^th century that hiking became a leisure pastime, and mostly (as I mentioned) after 1830.

That may surprise us since for us the mountains are so firmly fixed as sublime objects of beauty. But the “purple mountain’s majesty” of Katherine Lee Bates’ song is a product of the 19^th century imagination. Now that the land was tamed and settled, a movement arose that sought out the experience of wilderness as a retreat from urban life.

At the same time that Romanticism was taking hold in Europe, as a reaction to the harshness of the Industrial Revolution, there was in America a new aesthetic appreciation for the natural world. The mountains were no longer seen as dangerous, but as beautiful and soul refreshing. We can see this change in the writings of the time, in the essays of Emerson, the poetry of Whittier, the travel journals of Thoreau, and the idealized backwoods novels of Cooper.

These changing attitudes were soon followed by changes in transportation that made the mountains easier to reach. Where once a mountain climb was the pastime of the well to do and their paid guides, with the coming of the railroads the urban masses could now get to the country and did. Mountain tourism had begun.

By the end of the 1840’s Berkshire County had better rail service than we have today. Pittsfield was connected to the Hudson River in the west and to Springfield in the east, and in 1842 the Housatonic Railroad connected Bridgeport, Connecticut with W. Stockbridge.

The mountains became popular places to visit for leisure and recreation, and this new rail access created the fad of going to mountaintops. In the decades before the Civil War mountain vacation centers and summit houses sprang up throughout New England.

The Berkshires were something of an exception, as no major resorts were built here and there were few public accommodations. This was because it was the time when the great stately homes (called “cottages”) were being built as the wealthy came to enjoy the natural world in their own way (and with their own kind).

In many places in New England bridle paths were cut to reach the summits of mountains, and urbanites would travel by horse or carriage to see the vistas. But the summit house trend in New England ended as quickly as it began, and by the mid 1870’s many of the properties were abandoned or poorly maintained.

But hiking prevailed and more and more trails were cut throughout the region. One of the very earliest was the Hopper Trail, still in use today, which was cut to the summit of Mt. Greylock in a single day by an energetic (and obviously large) group of Williams College students in 1830.

After the Civil War hiking clubs sprang up throughout New England. An early club here in Berkshire County was the Alpine Club of Williamstown founded in1863 by Professor Mark Hopkins of Williams College. This club was coeducational from the beginning. One young member was Samuel Hubbard Scudder would later play a role in establishing the Appalachian Mountain Club in the 1870’s.

A later Berkshire hiking club was the Pathfinders or the “Leg-It” Club, based in Stockbridge and full of worthies like sculptor Daniel Chester French.

By the turn of the 20^th century a new big change was just around the corner. Just as the railroads had fueled the 19^th century hiking boom it was the coming of the automobile in the new century that finally set the stage for the building of the AT. One of the great ironies of this whole story is how decisive new transportation technologies were for changes in foot travel.

The automobile made remote trailheads easier to reach, and sadly true wilderness harder to find. The future environmental impact of greater numbers of trail users was yet unperceived, and the hiking boom continued unabated.

The auto was also instrumental in a new focus on long distance trails, and talk of connecting existing trails to make a long-distance trail began.

Many New England trails were being connected to one another to allow longer trekking, and various dreamers and big thinkers envisioned a great long trail following the spine of the Eastern mountains.

It is hard to say exactly when the AT was born, but the October 1921 publication of “An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning” by Benton MacKaye in the Journal of the American Institute of Architects is often recognized as the birth for the Appalachian Trail.

And if anyone deserves the title of “the father of the AT” it is MacKaye. He had a somewhat utopian vision for a series of work and farming camps along the ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, with a great trail connecting them, from the highest point in the North (Mt. Washington in New Hampshire) to the highest in the South (Mt. Mitchell in North Carolina). But MacKaye’s focus was not on hiking or the trail itself, but on a communitarian retreat from the city life and work.

MacKaye, a regional planner, promoted his idea within his large network of friends and colleagues in Washington, New York, and Boston.

Although MacKaye had the vision it was others who did the actual work to make the trail a reality. New York newspaper columnist Raymond Torrey organized a work crew to cut the first AT-specific miles in Harriman–Bear Mountain State Park under the leadership of Maj. William A. Welch. It was Welch who expanded the goal to “Maine to Georgia,” and designed the diamond shaped marker still in use on the trail today.

More organization was need so the first Appalachian Trail conference was convened in 1925. Their stated purpose was to organize “a body of workers (representative of outdoor living and of the regions adjacent to the Appalachian range) to complete the building of the Appalachian Trail.” An organization of that name was formed, and Maj. Welch was named its first chair.

Real headway began when a retired Connecticut judge, Arthur Perkins, and a young federal lawyer in Washington, Myron H. Avery, took charge of the efforts as a hiking-focused cause.

Perkins died in 1932, and Avery carried on the work. Avery is an important figure in this story. He led a small corps of activists, numbering perhaps 200, in identifying and blazing routes.

They established local clubs from Pennsylvania to Georgia, set standards for the trail, and published guidebooks and maps.

They also negotiated with national parks and other federal agencies for land use and rights of way. It is extraordinary that a totally volunteer effort could accomplish such an undertaking.

But it wasn’t always pretty, and Berkshire County is a good example of how difficult it was to put all the pieces together and get everybody to work together.

Massachusetts got an early start, but was one of the last states to finally complete the trail.

Benton MacKaye was from Massachusetts and his article about an Appalachian Trail in 1922 immediately inspired nature writer Walter Pritchard Eaton to outline a route through the Berkshires.

Eaton’s route was not the one we have today. It started by using existing trails on Mt. Everett and going in a northeasterly direction until October Mountain Forest, much as the trail does today. North of that, however, his trail went west, south of Pittsfield, and then went along the ridge of the Taconics all the way to Mt. Greylock. From there he proposed following the Bellows Pipe Trail rather than the ridge to its west that the trail follows today.

Eaton organized some Berkshire schoolboys to work on the trail, but the effort sputtered and didn’t get much traction until 1928 when the Berkshire Hills Conference, a tourism organization, created a three-man Trails Committee. Eaton represented the south end, Archie Sloper represented the north and Mt. Greylock, and Franklin Couch of Dalton represented the middle.

Couch was a popular civic leader who was a scout leader of a large Boy Scout troop in Dalton and the hill-towns. He was our member Charles Sawyer’s fathers scout leader. Under Couch’s leadership, from 1928 to 1931 the Berkshire Hills Conference group cut a nearly complete trail from Connecticut to Vermont.

The Williams Outing Club and a Williamstown school principal named John B. Clarke cut trails in the north. Sloper and some local Boy Scouts cut the southern flank of Greylock. Couch and his Boy Scouts cut trails around Dalton. A Pittsfield man, S. Waldo Bailey cut much of rest. But they never quite finished it.

So far this was a purely local effort, but in 1931 the Berkshire Chapter of the AMC, which despite its name was dominated by leaders from Springfield and the Pioneer Valley, started sending work crews to the AT independently from the locals. Without communication between the two groups they worked at cross-purposes, cutting different routes and even taking down markers from the other group.

As you can imagine the involvement of “outsiders” didn’t go down well and a schism ensued between the groups. Eventually, in 1931, Myron Avery from the Appalachian Trail Conference (ATC) made two trips to the Berkshires to see if he could resolve the problem.

He didn’t. He may well have made it worse. Avery may have misread the situation, but in any case he ended up siding with the Berkshire Chapter of the AMC, who were then given authority for the trail.

Spurned by the ATC, Couch and the other actual builders of much of the trail withdrew.

The Berkshire Chapter of the AMC finally completed the Trail during the years 1932 to 1935. But the alienation of the locals made it hard to get workers for trail maintenance and the Berkshire portion of trail fell into disarray.

Between 1937 and 1940 two groups stepped up to rescue the trail, the Mount Greylock Ski Club, and Metawampe, the faculty outing club of U. Mass in Amherst. (The story of this schism is told in detail in Waterman’s Forest and Crag, p. 498-503)

The story of the problems in the Berkshires hints at what it took to get the whole trail completed with volunteers. After all, the Berkshire section in only 90 miles out of more than 2000. Any of you who have served as selectman of a small town or on a church board knows what it is like to get things accomplished with volunteers. The Berkshire story is just one of many in how this monumental trail got built.

But finally the entire AT officially opened on August 14, 1937. It faced challenges from the beginning. Born during the Great Depression and in a few years came the start of World War II, when gas rationing limited travel.

The end of World War II brought opportunities to fix the trail, but also brought new challenges in the form of rapidly expanding residential and highway development.

At this time nearly half the AT was still either on roads or used rights of way on private property that newly affluent people wanted for vacation homes. The battle between public use and private property has continued throughout the life of the trail.

In 1948 Earl V. Shaffer, a Pennsylvania veteran who said he was “walking off the war,” reported to a disbelieving Avery at the ATC that he had just walked the entire length of the trail in a single journey of less than five months. Shaffer had become the first successful thru-hiker of the AT. He would do it twice more, in 1965 and in 1998, 50 years after his first time. He was 79, the oldest person to accomplish it, a record he held until 2004.

Ironically, the founders of the AT had never envisioned an individual hiking the entire trail in a single season, and had dismissed the idea as a stunt. A popular one it turns out. Now every year thousands attempt a thru hike. Only about 1 in 4 finish it, about 600 a year in the past several years.

By the early 1960’s the popularity of the trail had outrun the capacity of its volunteers to run and maintain it. Long established rights of way were being lost to development and a crisis was looming.

Another important figure in this story is Stanley A. Murray, who would become the ATC’s second-longest-serving chair. Murray worked to both reenergize the ATC (by building up its base of individual members), and also to revive the idea of the federal government’s protecting of the AT and its surrounding lands from adverse development. This was something that both MacKaye and Avery had advocated.

On October 2, 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the National Trails System Act (NTSA), creating within the national park and forest systems a new class of public lands, national scenic trails, with the AT and the unfinished Pacific Crest Trail the first to be so designated.

States were encouraged to acquire lands for the AT, and the National Park Service (NPS), with administrative responsibility for it all, and USDA Forest Service authorized to do so. The ATC soon hired its first two employees.

In March 1978, President Jimmy Carter signed into law amendments to the NTSA directing federal agencies to move forward and authorizing almost $100 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund for that purpose.

The most complicated public-land acquisition program in history was begun; NPS formed an AT Project Office and special AT Land Acquisition Office.

The ATC had to manage what would become more than 250,000 acres of public land, an estate with one of the greatest troves of natural and cultural resources in the entire national park system

In July 2005 the Appalachian Trail Conference changed of its name to Appalachian Trail Conservancy, still volunteer-based. The cooperation of volunteers with state and federal agencies has allowed the trail to flourish despite unprecedented use never foreseen by its early founders.

What began as an ad hoc enterprise by a loose collection of regional and local volunteers is today a large and efficient organization of cooperation between volunteers and agencies.

The result of which is that the AT is currently protected along more than 99 percent of its course by federal or state ownership of the land or by right-of-way. Each year an estimate of more than 4,000 volunteers contribute over 175,000 hours of effort to maintain it.

I’ve said a lot about the history and organization of the AT, but not much about the trail itself. So let me offer a highly selective and impressionistic picture of the trail as I have experienced it.

Here in Massachusetts the AT enters our southern border from Connecticut at Sages Ravine. Sages Ravine has a series of falls and cascades that are beautiful in any season, but spectacular when there has been a lot of rain or snow melt. Since most of the AT has been logged at one time or another it is rare to see old growth forest, but there is some at Sages Ravine.

This southerly most section of the trail is also one of the most challenging for the hiker, as the trail takes one over numerous rock faces, many of them during climbs. It was near here the very first day I hiked with poles that I lost my footing on a rock face and broke one of my new poles.

The trail goes through the beautiful Race Brook Falls before it climbs to Mount Race, which has lovely open views of the southern Berkshires and Connecticut. The trail then climbs to the highest peak in the southern Taconic Range, Mount Everett (2,602 ft.).

Descending from the summit the trail skirts the edge of Guilder Pond (where I usually have a swim in the hot weather) and then climbs along a rocky ridge before descending steeply to Jug End Road and down to the Housatonic River Valley. If you make this descant in the fall after a rain you are likely to slip and slide all the way down on the wet leaves.

The trail crosses Rt 7 south of Great Barrington and meanders in a general northeasterly direction through East Mountain, Beartown, and October Mountain State Forests.

There is a Shelter at Upper Goose Pond that has a caretaker during the hiking season. It was here I met a German engineer who had quit his job and come over to thru-hike the AT. North of here the trail goes over the Massachusetts Turnpike on a footbridge

The Trail goes by Finnerty Pond, where one of the weirdest of my AT experiences took place. Several of us Monday Mountain Boys were sitting on logs having our lunch when we heard someone coming towards us on the AT from the North loudly reciting what I thought was Shakespeare. The sound got louder and louder as the hiker approached until a young man finally emerged and greeted us. It wasn’t Shakespeare but “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It turns out this solo thru hiker was doing the International AT, with extensions north into Canada and South of Georgia. He carried a poetry anthology with him, and at night he would memorize poems and recite them aloud on the trail. He said, “It also alerted any black bears to his coming.”

Before the trail passes through the town of Dalton there is one of my favorite parts, from Kirchner Rd. to Grange Hall Rd. which takes you over Warner Hill, a small outcropping with beautiful views to the North and Mt. Greylock. At this point you are just East of the City of Pittsfield. I once met a couple of thru-hikers at Warner Hill who were waiting to get picked up by the sales staff at Eastern Mountain Sports at the Berkshire Mall in Lanesboro so they could buy new boots.

Another curious thing I have noticed at Warner Hill. You have to step off the AT and walk a few feet to see the nice view. Sometimes you will see thru-hikers make the turn and never look up. In fairness they are fighting time and the weather, but sometimes miss the sights.

North of Warner Hill is Kay Wood Shelter, one of the 15 huts and shelters in the Berkshire part of the AT, and named after an active AMC volunteer from Dalton who was once in a Bible study with me.

The trail goes through Dalton towards Cheshire to another of my favorites, Cheshire Cobble, a large outcropping with good views of Mt. Greylock and the Hoosic River Valley.

In the town of Cheshire the AT crosses the Ashuwilticook Rail Trail, crosses Rt 8 and climbs along the ridge of the Greylock massif before reaching the summit of My Greylock, the highest point in the state at 3,491 feet. As at Sages Ravine another rare old growth forest may be seen on parts of the Hopper nearby.

Another interesting fact about Mt. Greylock is that for thru-hikers coming from the south it is the first sub-alpine region they will have seen since  Mt. Rogers in Virginia. Mt. Greylock has a large sub alpine region, the only such forest in Massachusetts, extending down to 3,000 feet, which in the south would be far from the sub-alpine cutoff. This is a result of Mt. Greylock’s powerful prevailing westerly winds, as the summits along its ridgeline rise approximately 200 feet to 650 feet higher than any other peak in Massachusetts.

From the top of Mt. Greylock you get clear views in all directions. To the South you can see Pittsfield’s two lakes, Pontoosuc and Onota (less than a mile from my house) and Bousquet Ski Area and South Mt. To the East you can see the town of Adams and the Hoosic Range and all the way to Mt. Wachusett on a clear day. To the North you can see Williamstown and the Green Mountains of Vermont (and Mt. Monadnock in NH to the NE). To the West you can see the Taconic Range and New York State.

From the summit of Greylock the trail quickly descends to the valley within 2 miles of North Adams and Williamstown, before ascending again through the Clarksburg State Forest to the Vermont state line where it connects with the Long Trail.

The Berkshire Chapter of the Appalachian Mountain Club still maintains the trail throughout Massachusetts. Volunteer trail-masters are each assigned a portion of the trail that they are responsible for looking after. They walk the trail, noticing fallen trees, water problems, and erosion. The pick up litter and organize work groups.

Another group that looks after the trail are the AMC Ridgerunners, a group of about thirty young adults who travel the length of the AT and serve as ambassadors and educators, as well as unofficial cops with no legal authority. They use instead the “authority of the resource” to educate rather than scold the errant hiker walking off trail or washing dishes in a stream. They also carry some first aid supplies, which I have availed myself of after skinning a knee near  Mt. Everett.

What else needs to be said about the AT? Well, for one thing the trail is more frequently hiked from South to North. These northbound hikers typically begin in early April and finish in late summer or early fall. Southbound hikers typically begin in June. Northbound hikers are called NOBO (Northbound) or GAME (Georgia to Maine) and southbound hikers are called SOBO or MEGA. The entire trail is blazed with 2 by 6 inch white paint blazes. In my Boy Scout days there were metal markers, but they are rare today.

As mentioned hikers who attempt to complete the trail from end to end in one season are called “thru-hikers,” while those who complete it in separate trips are called “section hikers.” “Flipfloppers” complete the trail within 12 months using an alternate itinerary.

Thru-hikers are often given trail nicknames called trail names. These are often whimsical. A friend of mine from the Monday Mountain Boys who is wiry and a fast hiker was known as “Slimfast.”

Some people bring their dogs on the trail, but dogs are not allowed in the Smokies or in Baxter Park in Maine and must be kenneled during those portions of the trail. Guide dogs, however, are permitted and in 1990 a hiker named Bill Irwin, who is blind, hiked the trail with his dog Orient.

What is the future of the AT? To a great extent it has been a victim of its own success. The backpacking boon of the last quarter of the 20th century to our time has put more people on the trail than were ever imagined. In heavily traveled areas such as the White Mountains erosion from overuse can easily be seen. The advent of hiking poles has added new holes along the trail. Volunteers work tirelessly to maintain the trail, rerouting worn areas, limiting access to endangered portions. The tension between access to the trail and its conservation is a constant struggle.

As my story comes to an end let me put in a word that hiking on the trail is far superior to hearing a paper about it. From the hardiest thru-hiker to the most leisurely dog walker the AT offers great opportunities to get outdoors and enjoy all its benefits.

The section from Kirchner Rd. to Warner Hill can be walked in less than half an hour with one of the best views in the county. As we have seen, it took many people to put this great trail together, and it still takes many volunteers to keep it maintained. We are in their debt.

*Harold Salzmann, Club secretary

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Then, Now and What's Next: Ruminations on Time and Technology

Presented to the Club by Richard L. Floyd on Monday evening, January 25, 2010



As the first Monday Evening Club paper of a new decade I want to do some looking backward as well as gazing forward. Looking backward is not so hard, since we all have 20/20 hindsight, but gazing forward is more difficult. It was Søren Kierkegaard who once said, “Life must be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.” So let me do the easy part first and look backward, telling a couple of brief stories about two men who were born in the late Nineteenth Century, came of age in the early part of the Twentieth, and lived long lives in which they witnessed technological advances unparalleled in any other period of human history. Then I will briefly try to look forward to take some guesses about “what’s next?”

The first story is one you may have read about in the paper this past year. It is about Henry Allingham, one of the last two British soldiers to fight in the First World War. He died last July at the age of 113. He was, for one month of his life, the oldest verifiable living man on earth. Asked about the secret to his longevity he credited “cigarettes, whisky and wild, wild women – and a good sense of humor.”



Originally a Navy man, Allingham was first assigned as a mechanic, and later a spotter, to a unit that carried out anti-submarine air patrols for the newly formed RAF. Keep in mind that the Wright brothers’ first flight had been launched as recently as 1903, so airplanes were just a decade old when the Great War broke out, and this would be the first significant use of them in war. The Sopwith Schneider seaplane that Henry’s unit flew to look for German U-boats and other ships was really nothing more than a big box kite with an engine. It had to be lifted by cranes in and out of the water from a ship every time it went on a mission. The plane carried no parachute, no navigational instruments, save a map and a compass, no radio, only a carrier pigeon. To us it sounds primitive, yet at the time air flight was so new that it was cutting-edge technology. Today those fliers needn’t have risked their lives in reconnaissance missions. They could rely on satellites.

The second man whose story I want to tell is my maternal grandfather, William Ira Laffoon. I only knew “Granddaddy Bill” when he was an old man, for he turned seventy the year that I was born. He was born on October 8, 1881, and when he was a boy of eight he traveled with his family from Missouri (“Missour-ah” is how he always said it) to Indian Territory on a Conestoga wagon to participate in the Oklahoma Land Rush of 1889. The Land Rush offered 2 million acres of free public land for homesteading on a first come first served basis. The rush, or “run” as it is more properly called, began at high noon on April 22, but many of the participants had already picked out choice parcels and hid on them until the official time. These were the “Sooners.” The ones who played by the rules and went when the cannon was fired were called “Boomers.” Unlike Rome, Oklahoma City, was built in a day, for there were over 10,000 inhabitants by late afternoon of the first day of the run. My grandfather and his family were the opposite of the “Sooners,” and waited until the next day to quietly go in to stake their claim, which is how my mother came to be born in Oklahoma City.



Granddaddy Bill outlived both my mother and grandmother, and was still living on July 20, 1969, when he watched on his television set as Neil Armstrong of the Apollo 11 crew stepped onto the surface of the moon, exactly 80 years after the Oklahoma land rush. My grandfather died the following year at the age of 89.



As a boy he could scarcely have dreamed of the changes that he would see in his lifetime, especially in technology. And it is hard to imagine anyone in previous human history experiencing in the span of one lifetime such technological development as he and others like Henry Allingham did in the Twentieth Century.



Yet, today we all live such lives, and increasingly so, as the time increments between world-changing inventions and innovations gets increasingly smaller and smaller, as if the world were somehow speeding up.



Just think of the changes that have taken place in the generation since my grandfather died forty years ago. We are prone to think of the moon landing as the apogee of human achievement, but in terms of the history of technology it from a time gone by. This is dramatically brought home in that great 1995 Ron Howard movie “Apollo 13,” in which we see the space engineers in Houston making calculations on slide rules to bring the troubled ship home from the moon. When we watched it my children didn’t know what a slide rule was, since the pocket calculator, once a luxury item that now sells for next to nothing, had replaced it. And those big room-filling mainframe computers that sent the Apollo missions to the moon and back had less memory and file space than your laptop computer, or, for that matter, many iPods and cell-phones. We all live in a brave new world of dizzying technological innovation unthinkable even a generation ago.



My ruminations on time and technology require pinning down what exactly is meant by “technology,” that big word with such a slippery meaning? The ancient Greek word, techne, is often translated as “craft or art.” Another Greek word, logos, is often translated as “word,” or “something said,” and by implication, “a subject of study.” Together they provide the roots for the word “technology,” literally “the study of craft,” to mean the knowledge and use of tools and crafts. It is this knowledge of the art of making and using tools that best defines technology.



So in the span of human history technology begins with our ancestors’ use of simple tools, sticks and stones really, and continues through the developments of the ensuing centuries. Today our understanding of what constitutes “tools” has broadened to include all manner of using human knowledge to manipulate our environments, so that the term technology can be rightly used to describe work in genetics, medicine, biology, physics, and the like. I was reading yesterday in the Economist about the huge 15 billion dollar underground supercollider in Switzerland, which is expected to unlock some of the secrets of how our universe works to the physicists. It is a long way from stone tools to a supercollider but both are examples of humans using knowledge and tools to influence our environments, and so both are technology.



One of the features of technological innovation is its reliance on what has gone before. One could use evolutionary theory in biology as a rough metaphor for the way technology develops. The invention or innovation that is more useful or efficient replaces what was used before, and seldom does a new breakthrough come about in isolation from the work of predecessors.



For example, my grandfather’s family’s Conestoga wagon itself was the result of generations of accrued technological advance. Carpenters in Conestoga County, Pennsylvania, invented the clever tapered design that kept the thing from tipping over. Metallurgists had learned to fashion iron into the bands that covered the wheels. The wheels themselves were the result of an innovation first made in Mesopotamia in about the fifth millennium BCE, most likely for making pottery. The horses that moved the wagon were the result of the domestication of the wild horse around the same period. The horse and wheel together revolutionized the way people could move from place to place, including conquests by traveling armies. As people traveled they learned new techniques and practices from those with whom they interacted, and a kind of technological cross-fertilization took place, to borrow another metaphor from biology.



We take travel for granted, but for most of human history most people lived and moved and had there being within a few miles of where they were born. Changes in transportation technology changed all that. For example, Granddaddy Bill was born in Missouri, but at least according to family lore, his father Stephen was from Kentucky, and his people had been Huguenots, French Protestant refugees who had come to this country on sailing ships fleeing bloody religious persecution under Louis XIV.



In 1889 the Laffoon family was on the move again. But how did they, and the other tens of thousands of Sooners and Boomers like them who headed West, even know about the Oklahoma Land Rush?



Most likely from a newspaper, that now threatened technology. But how did the newspaper in Missouri find out about the Land Rush in Oklahoma? Most likely by a telegram, which was the result of the invention of the electric telegraph, developed by Samuel F.B. Morse in 1837. The invention of the telegraph is a good example of a new technology driving out an older one, for in 1861, when the wires for telegraphy were finally in place from coast to coast, the Pony Express, heralded just two years before as the great new advance in continental communication and mail delivery, was shut down for good.



And so it goes. The story of one technological innovation supplanting another is not new, but what once took centuries, decades or years now can happen in a very brief time, as a quick look at some of the newest innovations that didn’t even exist at the turn of the millennium will show.



As we are seeing the story of technology has been going on for a very long time. What is new is the pace of its change, so much so that the technology of the last hundred years or so constitutes one of the great revolutions in human history.



This rapidly accelerating pace of technological change in practically every aspect of our lives means that things we never dreamed of are now commonplace.



To give some personal examples let me look at the way technological advances have impacted my own life. When I became the minister of First Church in 1982 I was only the eighteenth person to hold that position, parson Thomas Allen being the first in 1764. The basics of the job haven’t changed all that much, prepare and deliver sermons, preside at worship, oversee the workings of the institution, be a presence for the good in the community, visit the congregation, marry and bury and the like.



Now I am not what is called an “early adopter,” the person that has to acquire the newest gadget as soon as it is available. I am more of a “that looks like a fun and useful thing and the price has come down” kind of guy. So I didn’t get my first personal computer until 1991, a Mac classic with 4 MB of memory, and only then because I enrolled in a doctoral program that required me to have one. So I am hardly a cutting edge technophile.



Nonetheless, by virtue of my 22-year pastorate, which encompasses multiple generations of technological advance, I marked a number of firsts among the ministers of First Church.



I was the first to use a word processor, a personal computer, a Palm Pilot, a cellular phone, a scanner, E-mail, a Power Point presentation, an e-ticket to board an airplane to name a few.



I was the first to have an MRI, orthotics in my shoes, a CD player, a VHS video recorder, a DVD player, a BluRay player, a digital camera, hearing aids with handless Bluetooth wireless capability to hear phone signals and music, a Global Positioning System in my car, an IPod, a video game, a digital picture frame, side airbags in my car, a Fast-Lane account. The list could go on and on, but you get the point.



In my first ministry after ordination, in 1975, I served two small rural churches in Maine. There was no secretary so I ran off the Sunday bulletin on an ancient hand-cranked Liberator 500 mimeo machine. I would type the copy onto a flimsy blue stencil sheet with my manual Olivetti Typewriter, ink up the drum on the machine, attach the stencil, and then turn the crank as each copy came out. If I tore the stencil I had to start all over again, or try to repair it with a glue-like substance. I hated doing it and it often went undone till late Saturday night.



I wrote out my all sermons in longhand on 4 by 6 cards, later switching to 8 ½ by 11 inch sheets of Corrasable Bond paper made by the Sheaffer Eaton Paper Company in Pittsfield, long before I had ever arrived Pittsfield [where the Eaton Paper Comapany was founded.]where that paper was packaged and distributed]. That product was wonderful, allowing you to eliminated errors with a pencil eraser. But, to illustrate my earlier point, it was driven off the market by the advent of word processors and personal computers.



By contrast I wrote this paper on my 15-inch Apple MacBook Pro laptop using Microsoft Word. My first computer twenty years ago had 4 MB, this one has 2 GB, not even that muscular by today’s standards. I ran this paper off on my Hewlett Packer OfficeJet 6500 Three-in-One Printer/Scanner/Copier. Tomorrow I will send it to Martin as a file attachment in an e-mail, and he will post it on the Monday Evening Club blog.



Which leads me to the next first for a minister of First Church of Christ in Pittsfield. I blog. Blogging is so new my spell-check underlines it every time I use it in a Word document. The term, short for Weblog, was only coined in 1997. Ten years later, the blog search engine Technorati tracked more than 112,000,000 blogs. There are certainly many more now. I have three. My main one “Retired Pastor Ruminates,” was started last March and is nearing the 9,000 visitors mark.



I am also on Facebook, a social networking site that was launched on February 4, 2004 by a Harvard sophomore, and in that short six years is now approaching 400 million users. Through Facebook I have reconnected with old friends from high school and college, some of whom I have met for lunch. I have also found out about world and national breaking news events in real time, in addition to finding out quickly about a variety of personal news from friends, such as illness or death in the family.



The widespread use of cell-phones with text-messaging capabilities is also changing the way the world works. Twitter, the microblogging and social networking service, was only launched in 2006. It limits users text-based posts, known as “tweets,” to 140 characters. Most tweets are mundane comments about what people are doing, but the social implications of such interconnectivity are breathtaking, and the immediacy of Twitter has made it a useful up to the minute communication tool. One study claims that blogs, maps, photo sites and instant messaging systems like Twitter do a better job of getting information out during emergencies than either the traditional news media or government emergency services. The study also found that those using Twitter during the wildfires in California in 2007 kept their followers, often friends and neighbors, informed of their whereabouts and of the location of various fires on a minute by minute basis.



Another example of the usefulness of Twitter is the 2008 Mumbai bombing attacks. Eyewitnesses sent out an estimated 80 tweets every five seconds, enabling the creation of lists of dead and wounded, giving out emergency phone numbers and the location of hospitals giving blood.



A year ago, when US Airways Flight 1549 had engine failure from bird strikes and had to ditch in the Hudson River, a passenger took a photo of the downed plane with her cell-phone and sent it to Twitpic while people were still evacuating the plane and long before any media arrived at the scene. It was the first picture we all saw.



Also last year NASA astronauts gave real-time reporting on Twitter of the Hubble Space Telescope repair mission.



And the most recent example of a new use for text-based communication is the quick raising of tens of millions of dollars for Haitian earthquake relief using cell-phones.



All this illustrates the power of the new information and communication technologies, and I think this is where the most stunning of the technological advances are right now and will be in the future.



When Granddaddy Bill was born in 1881 he came into a world transitioning from an agrarian to an industrial economy and society. In the years he lived we had been gradually transitioning from the Industrial Age to the Information Age. Today we are squarely in the post-industrial Information Age, especially here in the West, but also in countries that are industrializing at the same time, such as China and India.



If you think about the list of my gadgets many of them had to do with information and communication. And since my grandfather’s death in 1970 we have seen the rise of the Internet, email, the personal computer, the World Wide Web, the laptop, Multi-player online games, cellphones, MP3 players like the iPod, webcams, digital television, broadband, wireless networking, wireless headphones, GPS, Satellite radio, podcasts, Bluetooth, Digital Audio Players, Digital Video Recorders, smart-phones like the iPhone, and e-books like Kindle. [Note: Two days after I delivered this paper Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple iPad.]



And there is a new dynamic at work in the Information Age. In the past, it was defense and the massive government spending that goes into research and development that often drove the technological innovation that eventually trickled down to consumers. A good example is the Internet, which began with researchers and the military. And the space program was a great hothouse for technological innovation. The now common GPS came out of such defense and space programs, although I have it on good authority that the ones we can buy are calibrated just inaccurately enough to make them ineffective for a terrorist to use as a guidance system for a SAM missile.



But today, in a turn about, civilian technology is often being used by the military at a fraction of the cost it would take to develop it. The US Air Force recently bought hundreds of Sony PlayStation gaming platforms with the plan to link them together and make a supercomputer. And US snipers in Afghanistan are using an inexpensive iPhone application that aids in sighting targets, even calculating for the “Coriolis Effect” that allows for the earths rotation.



This blurring of the lines between civilian and military uses for technology brings up another point for rumination about the way humans utilize the knowledge and tools they develop. We have already noted that the domestication of the horse was quickly utilized for military purposes, to carry chariots and cavalry. The satellites that circle our globe and make our GPS work are used as well by farmers in France to monitor sunlight and weather to improve crop yields. But they also are used in the kind of military surveillance Henry Allingham’s unit did in a seaplane, and today they help guide the Predator drones that target and kill terrorists (and sometimes civilians) in Afghanistan and Yemen. It is no accident that the Air Force ads aimed at potential young recruits look like video games.



In the early Twentieth Century it was suggested by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler that we might more properly be called Homo Faber, “Man the Maker,” than Homo Sapiens, “Man the Wise,” since it was our control of the environment through the use of tools that best characterizes us as a species. The term Homo Faber is from antiquity; the Roman Appius Claudius Caecus wrote; “Homo faber suae quisque fortunae” (“Every person is the fabricator of his or her own destiny.”)



The philosopher Henri Bergson also referred to Homo Faber in his book, The Creative Evolution (1907), where he defines intelligence as the “faculty to create artificial objects, in particular tools to make tools, and to indefinitely variate its makings.”



So are we just advanced toolmakers, or is there something more required of us as humans? Along with techne, the ancients valued sapientia, “wisdom,” from which our species gets its biological name, but our ruminations so far raise the question, “Has our wisdom been progressing along with our knowledge?”



Would Homo Faber be a more accurate name for us than homo sapiens? Our knowledge, as we have seen, is vast and ever increasing, but what about the wisdom to use it in a manner that enhances human dignity and freedom and the well-being of the created order?



Which also raises the question of the difference between knowledge and wisdom. The difference between knowledge and wisdom has been expressed by the axiom: “It is knowledge to know that a tomato is a fruit, but it is wisdom to not put one in a fruit salad.” I would suggest that, like our technologies, human wisdom never reaches some kind of ultimate perfection. Our reach always exceeds our grasp, which should, but often does not, make us humble. Reinhold Niebuhr once wrote about this tragic quality of human striving, “Original sin is that thing about man which makes him capable of conceiving of his own perfection and incapable of achieving it.”



So I must leave it as an open question whether we have the wisdom to properly use our knowledge. But it is not a new question. The Tower of Babel story in Genesis suggests that the works of our hands can become idols when they seek to replace God as the highest good.



So our technological feats, impressive in themselves, need to be understood within a loftier perspective. In my sojourns through Europe I have seen dozen of glorious cathedrals; great works of art crafted over generations by skilled workmen. These beautiful piles are not glorious by accident but by design. They were dedicated to the greater glory of God, their lofty spires pointing heavenward. They reminded those who saw them that the works of our hands take their place under larger and transcendent purposes.



I wonder what check on human pride and vainglory holds today in a secular society entranced by its own inventions? These inventions, as we have seen, are marvels of human ingenuity and have enhanced the quality of human life for many, indeed most, of the peoples of the earth.



But they come with a price. Granddaddy Bill grew up before the internal combustion engine and the widespread use of carbon-based energy sources. The automobile was one of the great technological advances in Twentieth Century life that he knew, but what he didn’t know and we do, is that carbon gas emissions are threatening the well being, perhaps even the existence, of our planet.



This threat represents the unintended consequences of technology. The hope is that we will develop new knowledge and tools to alleviate the problems we have created, and along with them, the wisdom to use them wisely. But we have seen that the will to deal with such concerns often lags behind short-term economic and political preoccupations.



I don’t want to leave you with a dystopian dyspepsia after such a lovely dinner. I started with the stories of two old men who had seen so much impressive technological change in their lifetimes. Both were wise in their old age. Henry Allingham, the war hero, spread a message of peace, visiting graveyards in France. He confessed in his latter years that he did not realize what war meant when he signed up. He lamented the incredible and wasteful loss of life his war. He once told the BBC: “War's stupid. Nobody wins. You might as well talk first, you have to talk last anyway.”



My Granddaddy Bill was a kind and gentle man with a dry sense of humor. A pious Midwestern Protestant he read his Bible every day, and riddled his conversation with biblical references. I never heard him exhibit any prejudice toward anyone, although like all of us, he must have had some. He was a learned man who loved books, although he had never gone to college. But both his daughters did, a rare thing for women in the 1930’s, and both went on to get Master’s degrees.



Did age make these old men wise? I don’t know, but it is people like them who help me to remain ever hopeful for the future.



At the beginning of this paper, I promised a look forward and here goes. What is in store for us? I am aware of the dangers, for predictions of the future are notoriously off the mark, from Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Jules Verne’s futuristic fantasies, George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, and, of course, the Jetsons.



Nonetheless, let me take the chance. In truth, I’ve already played my hand, for I see the same kind of serial innovation that has characterized the recent past continue unabated. But I see it speeding up, because of the interconnectivity of the information age. Global cooperation will speed the development of new products. My Apple computer, an American product, was manufactured in China with parts from Japan and other countries. There will be more and more of this, so that innovation now isn’t just collaboration with the past, but with a thoroughly connected global community. This will speed up innovation and also break down, but not eliminate, national boundaries and interests.



New technologies will continue to replace old ones. It is impossible to imagine all these changes, but I’m guessing that newspapers and network television are two that will not be around for long in their present form. I expect wireless technologies to increase, and I expect more and more information to be stored in and accessed from “clouds,” remote giant servers, rather than on personal computers, making limitations of file space and memory obsolete.



I expect a revolution in biotechnology, one that is already taking place, with microbes that eat industrial waste and pollution. I see continued advances in agricultural technology that will help feed a hungry world, and in epidemiology and disease prevention and control, leading to the elimination of certain diseases. The mapping of the Human Genome will lead to many medical discoveries, and both diagnostic and surgical procedures will become less invasive and safer.



I see information technology harnessed to create smart homes, cities and highways that lower energy cost and use. Green technologies in transportation and housing will save fuel use. Electronic highway passes (like EasyPass and Fastlane) will become mandatory for all drivers from coast to coast within a couple of years, with a chip planted in your driver’s license.



China, whose economy will surpass Japan’s this year as the second largest in the world, and ours in the not too distant future, will be the great engine of technological change in this century and beyond as it brings its millions into modernity.



Along with these innovations will come challenges. One I have already mentioned, global warming. Will we have the knowledge and wisdom to fix the problems our own technologies have created?



Another is the threat of terrorism, where advanced technology puts in the hands of the angry few the power to destroy the lives of millions. Here again, the cooperation of states is critical, as well as continual attempts by the global community and all people of good will to foster a world that leaves fewer and fewer people behind economically.



And finally there remains the danger that technology will create new classes of “haves and have-nots,” as those without the access to these new technologies and the information that comes with it will be left behind.



You would be surprised, I know, if I didn’t end by saying that religious faith will play a significant role in what happens next, and whether our technology ultimately helps us or harms us. The question for religious faith is whether it will be a toxic faith that fosters hate of the other, or a large-hearted faith respectful of the other, and committed to a path that leads to human dignity and freedom, and the well-being of the created order. Time will tell.



I remain hopeful, but not Utopian. So I must close with one of my favorite quotes, also by our former neighbor, Stockbridge resident Reinhold Niebuhr: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith.”

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