Allotment: How the 1887 Dawes Act disrupted Native American cultures

Henry Laurens Dawes

Presented to the Club by Martin C. Langeveld on Tuesday evening, May 26, 2015 (that Monday being a holiday)

One of the founding members of this club in 1869 was Henry Laurens Dawes, born in Cummington in 1816. He graduated from Yale University in 1839 and became a teacher in Greenfield, where he also edited the Greenfield Recorder.

In 1842 he was admitted to the bar and opened a law practice in North Adams, maintaining his interest in journalism by editing the North Adams Transcript.

From journalism he moved into politics, being elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1848, 1849 and 1852, to the state Senate in 1850, and to the Massachusetts Constitutional convention in 1853.

He then served as U.S. district attorney for Western Massachusetts from 1853 to 1857, when he was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives and served there for 23 years until 1875.

That year, Dawes was elected by the Massachusetts General Court as United States Senator from Massachusetts, to succeed Charles Sumner, who died in office. He served in the Senate until 1893, and died in Pittsfield in 1903 at the age of 86.

A friend of Abraham Lincoln, he served as a pall bearer at Lincoln’s funeral.

In the House, Dawes figured prominently in the passage of anti-slavery and Reconstruction measures during and after the Civil War, as well as in tariff legislation, the establishment of a fish commission, and the establishment of a system of daily weather reports, which was a forerunner to the United States Weather Service.

He took a great interest in the development of the American West, supporting the creation of Yellowstone National Park and funding for geological surveys of that area. His son Chester Dawes served on the survey team, and the first boat to appear on Yellowstone Lake was named the Annie, purportedly after Dawes’s daughter Anna.

He was also an ardent supporter of the Transcontinental Railroad, influenced, perhaps, by a gift from Congressman Oakes Ames of 2,000 shares of stocks in the Credit Mobilier of America railroad construction company. Ames was subsequently censured for his vote-buying largesse.

Among the two Monday Evening Club papers that have survived among the Dawes papers housed in the Library of Congress, one reflects his interest in Western and frontier matters — it is about the fur seals of Alaska. The other, an 1889 presentation entitled “The Winter Before the War” covers the period immediately before the Civil War, including Dawes’s personal recollections of Charles Sumner, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Francis Adams, General Winfield Scott and others.

But if Dawes were here presenting his own biography, he would write at the top his list of accomplishments and interests that he was a friend of the Indian. In the Senate he served as chairman of the Committee on Indian Affairs, and his signature achievement was the passage, in 1887, of the General Allotment Act of 1887, generally known as the Dawes Act.

While Dawes, until his death, believed that the Allotment Act was the right course for U.S. Indian policy, it is clear today that the allotment had disastrous consequences, still being felt today, for the economic, social and cultural well-being of the Indians.

To understand the environment that brought about the Dawes Act, we need to look at the roots of American Indian policy in the early years of the American republic. A long series of Indian Wars that began in colonial days and continued until 1890 was instrumental in pushing Indian populations westward to the Great Plains, confined to reservations. The presence of this aboriginal population remained a thorny problem, especially as mining resources were discovered in the West, railroad companies began plotting routes through Indian reservations, and white settlers began eyeing Indian territory as potentially valuable agricultural land. At the same time, social reformers and missionaries sought to come up with a solution for “civilizing” the Indians — improving their educational attainment and motivating them to become productive citizens. The goal was assimilation. And collective ownership of reservation lands by the tribes was seen as an obstacle to that goal. Individual land ownership would motivate the Indians to better their situation, it was thought.

As early as 1792, George Washington’s secretary of war, Henry Knox, suggested that individual, rather than collective ownership of land would benefit the Indians. The United States, he said in a speech sent to an Indian group, “would be greatly gratified with the opportunity of imparting to you all the blessings of civilized life, of teaching you to cultivate the earth, to raise corn; to raise oxen, sheep and other domestic animals; to build comfortable houses, and to educate your children, so as ever to dwell upon the land.”

Thomas Jefferson, as president, told a delegation of Indian chiefs in 1808: “Let me entreat you . . . on the land now given you, to begin to give every man a farm; let him enclose it, cultivate it, build a warm house on it, and when he dies, let it belong to his wife and children after him.”

Throughout the first half of the century, the adoption of severalty, or individual land holdings, was discussed as the goal. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs wrote in 1838: “Unless some system is marked out by which there shall be a separate allotment of land to each individual . . . you will look in vain for any general casting off of savagism. Common property and civilization cannot co-exist.”

Treaties made with some of the Indian tribes during this period did provide for individual allotments of land on a small scale, and in 1875, Congress extended homesteading privileges to Indians.

The movement toward allotment was accelerated by a group known as the Friends of Indians, which counted Senator Dawes as a member and leader. From 1883 to 1913, they met annually at the Mohonk Mountain House in New Paltz, New York, as guests of the proprietor, Albert K. Smiley, a member of the Board of Indian Commissioners. These gatherings became known as the Lake Mohonk Conferences, and they included wealthy and influential men and women who had access to Congress and to the President. They were driven by philanthropy and by strong desires to spread the blessings of Christianity to underdeveloped peoples.

In pursuing this goal, we can now see, they were relentlessly ethnocentric. Most aspects of the Indian cultures, they believed — languages, religious beliefs, common ownership of land, and aboriginal lifestyles — were incompatible with modern civilization and had to be changed.

The 1884 Lake Mohonk Conference called for providing Indians with an education that would be in English, to the exclusion of native tongues, that would teach them industrial skills, and that, above all, would be a Christian education.

By 1886, the conference was advocating strongly for a system to permit individual ownership of land. One speaker, Prof. C. C. Painter, put it this way: 

I would at once break down the reservation walls and let civilization go in; I would secure the Indians for the present inalienable possession of sufficient land, by personal title, for the use of each one; I would sell the remainder for their benefit, and in place of the agent's irresponsible will make them subject to the laws and give them their protection; I would give them without delay citizenship with all its privileges and duties.

Dawes himself gave the 1886 conference a legislative update, in which he expressed the realistic expectation that granting private ownership of tracts of land would not solve the problem by itself, and that the government should also invest in education for the Indians. But he seems to have been driven by the idea that without allotment, the Indians would soon have nothing at all, saying: 

Our work must be done now and without delay, for the greed for the Indian's land is growing every day, and it is as impossible to resist it under the forms of our Government as to stop the flow of the river. We may guide and direct it, but we cannot stop it. We are blind, we are deaf, we are insane if we do not take cognizance of the fact that there are forces in this land driving on these people with a determination to possess every acre of their land, and they will lose it unless we work on and declare that the original owner of this land shall, before every acre disappears from under him forever, have 160 acres of it where he shall be fitted to become a citizen of the United States and prepared to bear the burdens as well as share the rights of our Government. 

Not everyone agreed with the civilizing aims espoused by the conference and built into the Dawes Act. Many pointed to the Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) who lived in what was then called the Indian Territory, which later became Oklahoma. The Act exempted those tribes from allotment because they had already established a variety of the elements of civilization, including centralized governments, a rule of law, commerce, and education. But they worked their lands in common, and hunted in groups for buffalo. The exemption for the Five Tribes may also have been influenced by white cattlemen who had secured extensive grazing privileges from those tribes.

The most realistic criticism within Washington came from the minority report of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, which stated:

However much we may differ with the humanitarians who are riding this hobby, we are certain that they will agree with us in the proposition that it does not make a farmer out of an Indian to give him a quarter-section of land. There are hundreds of thousands of white men, rich with the experience of centuries of Anglo-Saxon civilization, who cannot be transformed into cultivators of the land by any such gift.

Colorado Senator Henry M. Teller vigorously opposed allotment, calling an earlier allotment effort “a bill to despoil the Indians of their lands and to make them vagabonds on the face of the earth.” Teller and other critics also pointed out that in reservations where small-scale allotments that had taken place under treaties since 1845, the land had gradually been dissipated, removed from Indian ownership, in all but a few cases. Opponents in the minority of the House Committee in 1880 also pointed out that the passage of legislation and the issuance of deeds was not likely to change the fact that: 

. . . from the time of the discovery of America, and for centuries probably before that, the North American Indian has been a communist. Not in the offensive sense of modern communism, but in the sense of holding property in common. . . . This communistic idea has grown into their very being, and is an integral part of the Indian character. From our point of view, this is all wrong; but it is folly to think of uprooting it . . . through the agency of a mere act of Congress or by the establishment of a theoretical policy. 

What about the Indians themselves? Some favored allotment, and petitioned for it. Federal Indian agents working among the tribes typically reported that their charges favored allotment as a way to prevent their removal from their lands. But the notion that after allotment they were expected to settle down into an agricultural lifestyle was not well understood. Some tribes were explicit in their opposition, sending memorials to Congress outlining their concerns. The Creeks, Choctaws and Cherokees wrote that “the change to individual title would throw the whole of our domain into the hands of a few persons.” The Senecas, in a resolution, pointed out that under their communal system, “No Indian, however improvident and thriftless, can be deprived of a resort to the soil for his support and that of his family. There is always land for him to cultivate free of tax, rent or purchase price.”

But Dawes and his supporters believed that allotment was precisely the solution that would prevent the Indians from losing their all their land, and to prevent abuses, Dawes proposed a 25-year restriction during which the recipients of allotments would not be permitted to sell or encumber their land.

The options were stark, Dawes told the Mohonk Conference.

That he will pass away as an Indian I don't doubt, and that very rapidly. It will be into citizenship, and into a place among the citizens of this land, or it will be into a vagabond and a tramp. He is to disappear as an Indian of the past; there is no longer any room for such an Indian in this country; he cannot find a place. The Indian of the past has no place to live in this country. . . . Something stronger than the Mohonk Conference has dissolved the reservation system. The greed of these people for the land has made it utterly impossible to preserve it for the Indian. He must take his place where you have undertaken to put him, or he must go a vagabond throughout this country, and it is for you and me to say which it shall be. He cannot choose for himself, and he does not know where the ways are.

Even ethnologists, who today would be the first to defend tribal rights and autonomy, largely toed the allotment line. John Wesley Powell, director of the Bureau of American Ethnology, wrote: “No measure could be devised more efficient for the ultimate civilization of the Indians than one by which they could successfully and rapidly obtain lands in severalty.”

And so, in what became essentially an act of faith by the “friends of the Indian,” land and citizenship were the tenets that became embodied in the Dawes Act the following year. As signed by President Cleveland, the act provided:

1. A grant of 160 acres to each family head, 80 acres to each single person over 18 and to each orphan under 18, and 40 acres to each other person under 18.


2. The deeds to these properties were to be held in trust by the government for 25 years, during which time the owners could not sell or encumber their property.


3. Indians were to choose their land within 4 years, or thereafter the government would select it for them.


4. Every Indian accepting an allotment would be granted citizenship, along with any Indian who had left their tribes and adopted “the habits of civilized life.”

The Lake Mohonk conferees applauded the bill, but urged greater attention to the educational goals they espoused. Later in 1887, their report urged: “The work of education, which has been heretofore desultory, individual, fragmentary, denominational, must be made systematic, harmonious, organic, Christian."

It urged the various educational and missionary entities working among the Indians to “act as one body representing one great constituency, and combining their various energies to one great end, the Americanizing, civilizing and Christianizing of the aborigines of the soil.”

A federal Indian educational program, funded through the Bureau of Indian affairs, instituted a system of boarding schools, many of them in the East, to which Indian children were brought. Typically, the long hair of the boys was cut, all the students were made to wear uniforms, education was in English and Anglo-centric, and discipline was strict. They also received English names, were forbidden to speak their native languages even among themselves, and were required to attend Christian services and encouraged to convert. Graduation rates were abysmal: during a 24-year period at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania beginning in 1879, out of 10,000 students who enrolled, only 158 graduated.

By 1902, there were 6,000 students in about 25 boarding schools in 15 states and territories. In fact, the Indian boarding school system continued to grow until attendance peaked at about 60,000 in the 1970s. Since that time, more enlightened Indian self-determination policies have resulted in decentralization of education back to tribal areas, and the reintroduction of education in aspects of Native culture.

In the grammar schools Indian children attended on reservations before going to boarding schools, Americanization was the goal. In one of his reports the Commissioner of Indian Affairs urged:

Schoolrooms should be supplied with pictures of civilized life, so that all their associations will be agreeable and attractive. The games and sports should be such as white children are engaged in, and the pupils should be rendered familiar with the songs and music that make our home life so dear. . . . If they persist in remaining savages the world will treat them as such, and justly so . . . . The school itself should be an illustration of the superiority of the Christian civilization.

But the system for educating young Indians did not extend to any form of adult education, such as instruction in how to farm their land, which gave Dawes cause to worry, in 1890, that the allotment policy was moving forward too quickly. He asked the Mohonk Conference:

What have we done to prepare these people for their new home and for their new state? Hardly anything can any of you call to mind, —anything that the Government, that the friend of the Indian, that anybody, has done to prepare an allottee for life on his allotment. . . . I sometimes think you had better abandon the allotment altogether and keep him where he is, unless this is done.

By 1897, 60,000 Indians had been allotted land, but there were only 272 farming instructors on the payroll of the Indian Service to teach them how. As a consequence, only about 5 acres per allotment, on average, were actually being cultivated by Indians, and the typically allottee could count on only a few hours of coaching per year.

The Indians were caught between two competing forces: that of the idealist friends of the Indian, who promulgated allotment in the belief that this policy would naturally drive the Indian to adopt the American culture of individualism and competition, and on the other side, the land-seeking settlers and business enterprises who saw allotment as a way to break down the reservation system and take land away from the Indians.

There is no evidence that the railroads or other western land seekers directly sought to influence the passage of the Dawes Act. Presumably those interests were happy enough to let the philanthropic and Christianizing arguments carry the day. But, the railroads did get into the Dawes Act a provision that the Act could not be 

. . . so construed as to affect the right and power of Congress to grant the right-of-way through any lands granted to an Indian, or to a tribe of Indians, for railroads or other highways, or telegraph lines, or the public use, or to condemn such lands to public uses, upon making just compensation.

It did not take long for Congress to begin granting such rights of way through Indian Lands, with multiple railroad grants sailing though Congress annually throughout the rest of the 1880s and 1890s. And railroads were not the only ones interested in western lands.

Generally, the reservations had significantly more land than was necessary to provide allotments to all who qualified for them. So Congress passed enabling legislation to permit agreements with tribes providing for the sale of surplus land. Under these agreements, by 1891, 20 million acres had already been sold out of Indian hands. The Commissioner estimated that of the 116 million acres of Indian land covered by the Dawes Act, only 30 million acres were actually required to provide allotments to all the Indians who qualified for them, and that rest could be sold off for $66 million — the interest on which, he calculated, at 5 percent, would be sufficient to pay for all the costs of Indian education, and the principal could gradually be used to help develop the allotments.

The process of selling “surplus” lands progressed rapidly. Of the 155 million acres of Indian reservation lands in 1881, by 1900 only 78 million acres remained. Of that, 5.4 million acres had been issued in allotments, the rest was still held in common by the tribes. With this rapid shift, some began to anticipate that before long, the government’s oversight over the Indians could end, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs could close up shop.

It was the job of the Indian agents on the reservations to gently persuade and educate Indians into accepting allotments. But in some cases, this was done with considerable pressure, and sometimes there was strong pushback. For example the Osages were reported in 1890 to be nearly unanimously opposed to allotment, on the basis that they were simply not ready for it and that in any case their land was most suitable for use as common grazing land. The common thread among tribes expressing opposition was that allotment would break up their tribal solidarity and destroy their hunter-gatherer lifestyle.

Some of the reformers recognized this problem. For example, Rev. Thomas Riggs, a missionary to the Dakotas, told the 1890 Mohonk Conference:

We have tried to turn hunters into farmers. We have tried this not only in a good country where it would be difficult enough to teach agriculture to an Indian, but on the plains, in regions where out of five years, we may possibly have a good crop one year.

Besides the lack of coaching in agricultural skills, the government allocated virtually no funds to assist allottees in the purchase of seed and farming implements. The appropriation for this purpose in 1888 was $30,000 to cover 3,568 allotments. This was cut in half after a few years and between 1893 and 1900 no funds were provided at all for this purpose. Private philanthropy was applied, but was wholly insufficient to meet the need.

Defects in the Dawes Act itself become apparent, as well. The twenty-five year period restricting allotments from being sold or encumbered became problematic, because it meant that no state could levy taxes on allotments. Consequently, states refused to provide funding for roads and education in the Indian lands.

To address these various problems, by 1889 Congress was at work to amend the Act to permit Indians to lease out their allotments, for example to white ranchers. Dawes himself was of two minds about this. He wanted to see the allotment experiment through, and told the conference that a leasing provision 

. . . would speedily overthrow the whole allotment system. The Indian would at once seek to let his land, and relieve himself from work; and there would be whites so ready to take possession that all barriers would soon be broken down … The Indian would abandon his own work, his own land, and his own home, which we have talked about as the central pivot in our attempting to civilize the Indian.

But before expressing those concerns to the Conference, Dawes had already introduced leasing legislation, which was endorsed by both the Mohonk Conference and the Indian Rights Association. As passed, the new law permitted leases of allotted lands for periods of up to five years for farming and grazing, and up to ten years for mining. The bill also increased the size of allotments for Indians who were not heads of households, with the idea that a family of five Indians, receiving five allotments, could live and farm on one and lease out the other four.

The leasing of allotment proceeded slowly, at first, but gradually picked up. By the year 1900, out of 58,594 allotments granted, 7,574 had been leased, and the pace was accelerating. Only 10,835 families were actually living on, and cultivating their allotments. By 1916, 2.3 million out of the 6.4 million acres granted in allotments were in the hands of lessees.

There was rampant abuse in the leasing system. For example, one shrewd operator rented 47,000 acres from the Winnebagoes for eight to 25 cents per acre, and then sublet them to farmers for up to two dollars per acre. Among some tribes, nearly all of the allotted land went into leasing: for example, the Pawnees in 1898 were cultivating 1,443 acres and leasing 36,784; the Tonkawas were cultivating 75 and leasing 11,200. While there were opposite, more positive results elsewhere, clearly this outcome is not what Dawes and all the reformers had in mind when the general allotment policy was originally conceived just a dozen years earlier.

Indian agents who were on the ground in reservations began to understand the Indian cultural pressures that were at odds with the allotment concept, although they continued to advocate for the policy. A report by the agent to the Cheyennes and Arapahoes in 1895 illustrates the cultural clash inherent in the efforts to change the culture of the Indians: 

The most common and pernicious custom among them is the habit of visiting their relatives and friends and eating their substance . . . . Their lavish hospitality militates against the accumulation of wealth by individuals. Tribal visiting keeps alive old customs and should be abolished.

 Another agent to the Shoshones wrote, “Like all barbarians, they are communists, and are loath to take up individually any untried pursuit.”

Another unforeseen consequence of the allotment policy is referred to as fractionation. As the original 25-year holding period expired, Congress passed a variety of measures extending the period in instances where the government deemed the holders incapable of managing their holdings, and passed special Indian probate laws that divided ownership collectively among the heirs of the original allottee, with the title held in trust by the federal government. So if the holder of a 160-acre allotment died with four heirs, each heir would receive a one-fourth interest in the full property, rather than 40 acres apiece. This served to protect the integrity of whatever farm enterprises might have been on the land, but ultimately got very complex, with instances of parcels that had hundreds of fractional owners, each receiving a pittance from the leasing income. In 1986, one tract bringing in $1,080 in annual lease income and valued at $8,000 had 439 owners receiving a variety of tiny shares of the income. The cost of handling the accounting for this tract by the Bureau of Indian Affairs was about $17,000 per year. By 2003, the ownership of this tract had grown to 550 persons, and the cost of accounting was $42,000.

Currently [2015] there are still about 250,000 individual owners of some 3 million fractionated interests in allotted lands. The Bureau of Indian Affairs maintains an Indian Lands Consolidation program that is gradually unraveling the ownership of fractionated parcels by buying them and turning them over to tribal ownership.

The allotment policy itself officially ended in 1934 with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (although it continued in Alaska until 1993). This law, sometimes referred to as the Indian New Deal, sought to reverse the goal of assimilation, and to permit tribes to continue their traditions and culture. It also provided for self-governance of reservations, including the right to manage land and mineral assets.

It is beyond the scope of this history of the allotment policy to go into the further consequences of American Indian policies, but it should be noted that the general economic situation of Native Americans living both on and off reservations still lags significantly behind the rest of the country. Unemployment rates and alcoholism on reservations are high. In 2012, the median income of Native American households was $35,310, compared to a median $51,371 for the entire nation. The Native American poverty rate is 29.1 percent, versus 15.1 percent for the country as a whole. At 82 percent, the Native American high school graduation rate lags behind the national average which is 90 percent. On the other hand, today cultural traditions are being rebuilt, with a significant percentage of Native American students learning their tribal languages, history and culture.

Dawes himself is memorialized in Pittsfield in the name of Dawes Avenue, and the former Dawes School. Dawes, the Dawes Act and the influence of the friends of the Indians are not well-regarded by historians. No biography of Dawes has every been published, but the Dawes papers at the Library of Congress amount to 64 boxes of correspondence, speeches and other records, including an unfinished biography by his daughter — potentially a trove that could shed much new light on the origins of the allotment policy.

In any case, had our esteemed member, Senator Dawes, espoused a more enlightened approach to solving “the Indian problem,” how might things be different today?

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In memoriam: Kim Burbank

We are saddened by the death of Kelton Miller Burbank ("Kim"), who was a member of the Club for nearly 50 years, from 1964 until 2013, and an honorary member for the last few years. Our condolences go to his widow, Hedy, and to his extended family. The Club will miss Kim.



The following is Kim's obituary:



Kelton Miller Burbank died peacefully in his home in New Ashford, Mass. on June 29th, 2015.



He is survived by his loving wife, Hedy Harris Lipez Burbank; his three children, Kelton M. Burbank, Jr., (Betsy Burbank), Brooke E. Burbank, (Blake Wood), and Joshua G. Burbank, (Miriam Preus); his brother, John Burbank, (Ouissa Fohrhaltz), his sister, Donna Burbank Eckhardt, (Alan Eckhardt); his two step-children, Sydney J.Lipez and Zachary H.Lipez, (Zohra Atash); and his three grand-daughters, Phoebe Lan Burbank, Katherine Xian Burbank and Samara Preus Burbank.



He was beloved by all and will be deeply missed. Kim, as he was affectionately known, was a lifelong Berkshire County resident, and practiced law in Pittsfield until 2012. He was a graduate of the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, CT and received his Bachelor of Arts from Williams College in 1956, before graduating summa cum laude from Harvard Law in 1959. He was a law clerk to Justice Harold P. Williams of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court for a year before becoming an associate at the Boston Law firm Choate Hall & Stewart. After a year he left Boston to return to the Berkshires where he lived for the rest of his life. In 1961 he joined the firm of Cain, Lewis and Humphrey, and in 1963 became a partner at Cain, Hibbard and Myers. In 1984 he opened his solo practice where he continued practicing until his retirement at the age of 78.



Kim served on the board of numerous Berkshire County non-profits and arts organizations where he donated countless hours of his legal skills, including the Berkshire Natural Resources Council, the Pittsfield YMCA, the Elizabeth Freeman Center, (which assists and counsels victims of rape and domestic violence), the Audubon Society, the Family and Children Service of Berkshire County, the Berkshire branch of the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Housatonic River Watershed Association, Shakespeare & Co., South Mountain Assoc. and many, many others. He also happily served as a Selectman of the town of New Ashford for nine years.



Kim was an avid skier in his youth and well into middle age. He was captain of the Williams Swim Team. His passion for swimming continued throughout his life and he swam competitively at the master's level where he won several events when he was in his 60s. Kim had a wide variety of interests, including but not limited to, hiking, playing tennis, bird watching, reading poetry, and completing the New York Times crossword puzzle (in ink) before anyone else arose.



He loved the Berkshires not only for their intrinsic beauty, but for the ready access to art museums, lectures, musical and theatrical performances, and he attended as many cultural events as he could. His chief passion was gardening. He spent the majority of his free time digging in the dirt, pulling weeds, and planting vegetables, flowers and shrubs. Kim enjoyed nothing better than to spend the entire day in his garden, coming in at dusk covered from head to toe in the dirt he so loved.



In 1999 the Berkshire Natural Resources Council dedicated a trail on Yokum Ridge in his honor for the then "30 years of mostly anonymous but invaluable service" in ensuring the preservation of vast swatches of land throughout Berkshire County. Kim continued his work for BNRC until his passing. The past president of BRNC noted that the overwhelming portion of Kim's work for BNRC had been without charge, in keeping with his generous nature and dedication to land preservation.



In 2000 he was fortunate enough to reconnect with an old friend, Hedy Lipez, and shortly thereafter the two of them began their life together, traveling the globe and attending peace rallies as necessary. They married in 2003 and their travels brought them to Zambia, Scotland, Costa Rica, Cuba, England, the Galapagos Islands, and Thailand. In May of 2005, they undertook the "great road trip", and drove across the country to see Kim's kids in Seattle. In 2007 they discovered Bisbee, Arizona where they ultimately purchased a cottage that was to bring them much joy together.



Kim's friends and family will always think of his smile, kindness, generosity, vast knowledge of the unexpected, and his invariable modesty. His many merits were hidden under a barrel. Of all the many varied roles in which Kim served, none gave him more pleasure than that of Pop-Pop to his three beautiful grand-daughters. He will be fondly remembered as having one or all of them perched on his lap, with a book open and a smile on his face.

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Jazz for the Journey

Photo by Pedro Ribeiro Simões, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the club by James Lumsden on Monday evening, March 23, 2015

Introduction

The brilliant American singer-songwriter, Carrie Newcomer, recently wrote that, “some of us come into this world with a note safety pinned to our shirts saying, ‘This one belongs to the song.’ For us music is as necessary as air or water. We live it, breathe it, drink it, dream it and chase it all our lives. For us there are moments when the song feels like the closest thing we'll ever know in this world to true communion.” Such is the case in my life whether the song starts in hardass rock and roll, gentle acoustic folk song, chant, string quartet, gospel or jazz: I was born to make music – and do not feel complete until “I’ve got the music in me.” (Bias Boshell, “I’ve Got the Music in Me,” 1973 performed by Kiki Dee.)



Knowing this, however, people continue to ask me, “Why are you so focused and concerned about jazz?” Specifically, what drives your current emphasis on a spirituality of jazz? The short answer is found in Ted Gioia’s stirring book, A History of Jazz, where he speaks of jazz as “an art music with the emotional pungency of a battle cry.” (p. 209) But such a brilliant quip only communicates with the cognoscenti– those who already know how to read between the lines of culture and spirit and do their own simultaneous translation – and I am not interested in musical Gnosticism.



Rather, I want to be clear why the music matters – to me – as well as the wider community. So this is one attempt to articulate a context for celebrating jazz: why it matters to me, what is going on with the music as an art form and some of the implications I find in both the sounds and feelings it evokes. The impressionistic jazz pianist, Bill Evans, said, “It bugs me when people try to analyze jazz into an intellectual theorem. It’s not – it’s a feeling.” Then he adds:

My creed for art in general is that it should enrich the soul; it should teach spirituality by showing a person a portion of himself  that he would not discover otherwise… a part of yourself you never knew existed. (http://jazz-quotes.com/artist/bill-evans/)

For me – as a person of faith who is also a musician – jazz is a uniquely American cornucopia of challenging contexts that creatively link the world of art to the hustle of the street. It is simultaneously cerebral and sensual. And it is grounded in a life and death struggle to redeem suffering with beauty, spirit and imagination. It is “an art music with the emotional pungency of a battle cry.” Louis Armstrong said, “You blow who you is.” Art Blakey said, “Jazz washes away the dust of everyday life.” And Dave Brubeck said, “There is a way of playing safe, there’s a way of using tricks and there’s the way I like to play which is dangerously, where you’re going to take a chance on making mistakes in order to create something you haven’t created before.”



Over the years I have discerned three essentials for those who want to appreciate jazz:  syncopation, the rhythm of call and response and improvisation. When players bring their unique gifts, wounds, cultures and discipline to these three commitments, something stunning can take place.  Count Basie said that jazz improvisation is actually classical composition ginned-up to the speed of life. Conversely, traditional composition is improvisation slowed down so that it can be captured and imprinted on a solid page. Jazz guitarist, Bill Frissell, my favorite jazz guitarist, gets it right:  jazz is a place “where anything is possible – a refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together in safety – and anything can happen. We are only limited by our imaginations.”

Personal Context

In keeping with the importance the musicians of this art form place upon personal expression, let me first note the origins of my own jazz experience before unpacking the essentials of jazz appreciation. I am uncertain about the first jazz song I encountered. It could have been Henry Mancini’s theme song to the 1958 TV show, “Peter Gunn.”

But it might also have been the slightly undercover version of Gershwin’s “I’ve Got Rhythm” that was buried under the magic of America’s first prime time cartoon show, “The Flintstones.” Other early sightings would include “The Stripper “recorded by David Rose in 1958 and released in 1962 by MGM Records; Mancini’s “Theme to the Pink Panther” released in 1964; and Louis Armstrong’s version of “Hello Dolly” in 1964.  These were all pleasant, middle of the road, jazz influenced hits that extended into the 60s the creativity and popularity of jazz that was born in the 40s and 50s.



Clearly my heart was captured by jazz when the British band, Sounds Orchestral, reworked Vince Guaraldi’s 1962 composition, “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” into a 1965 Top Ten recording of the same name.

Guaraldi had first composed this tune to flesh out an album based on the music of Antonio Carlos Jobim: "Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus."  Jobim, you may know, was one of the 20th century‘s most important jazz composers. As a Brazilian guitarist who helped popularize bossa nova (“new trend” in Portuguese) he left his mark on jazz masters like Oscar Peterson, Stan Getz and Herbie Hancock. With the staggering success of pop-rock’s “British Invasion,” the musical landscape was ripe for a jazz-meets-Beatlemania sound that combined syncopated rhythms with a melancholy melody. At three minutes and 20 seconds, “Cast Your Fate” evoked a sense of longing, a quest for solitude and a toe tapping familiarity that fit the mood of a nation encountering a cultural revolution. Ten months later, Guaraldi was back in my world with the songs he created for the “Peanuts” special on CBS:  “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” That same year, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto won a Grammy for their interpretation of Jobim’s “Girl from Ipanema” and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass took the world by storm with “Whipped Cream and Other Delights.”  By 1966, the brilliant Cannonball Adderly – one time side man for Miles Davis and former music teacher from Georgia – had a massively popular hit with Joe Zawinul’s soul jazz masterpiece: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy.”

Three other early jazz-infused influences shaped my developing tastes including Van Morrison’s early 1970s work on: “Moondance,” “Tupelo Honey” and “St. Dominic’s Preview” – as well as both Herbie Mann and the Modern Jazz Quartet. I loved the soulful, cool sounds of jazz – especially with a groove.  And, truth be told, these early influences still shape my preferences. Over time I’ve matured and ripened, but I have no interest in jazz that aspires to the recital hall or simply strives to recreate the sounds of the 1930s and 40s. Rather, I  agree with journalist Ralph Ellison (author of The Invisible Man, who began his career as a jazz critic for Down Beat magazine) when he insisted that jazz must always keep one foot firmly planted in the world of the dance hall  and the other in the blues:

The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one's aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically… In those days it was either live with music or die with noise, and we chose rather desperately to live. (Living with the Music: Jazz Writings)

I need to feel the music I am playing – it needs to be incarnated – not overly abstract or esoteric. My current favorites include the cool geniuses of the 50s – Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk – the playful soul masters of the 60s and 70s – Herbie Hancock, Joni Mitchell and Dave Brubeck – as well as more contemporary artists of the 21st century like Bill Frisell, Joshua Redman, the Cinematic Orchestra and Esperanza Spalding. And let me note that I am still crazy after all these years about both Gil-Scott Heron and Bud Powell, too.



Now please note that although my preferences and roots are highly subjective, they are essential to state at the start of this analysis.  For in jazz appreciation as in liberation theology, praxis and context are as important as action and reflection.  Such is the gift of post-modern criticism, too:  we are, as Feuerbach said, what we eat.  Our roots shape and define what we see and trust. So at the outset I want to be clear – especially for the jazz critics among us – that my foundation and perspective on jazz begins with pop and blues.  If you were raised on the sounds of Goodman, Dorsey and Ellington, you might start in a different place – and use different audio examples.  Again, let’s be clear:  I know that my subjective influences will shape all that follows.  C’est la vie, c’est la guerre, c’est la jazz.

Three Jazz Essentials

That said, I believe that there are three essential commitments to understanding and appreciating jazz of any era or style: syncopation, call and response and improvisation. The freedom and discipline of jazz requires a playful approach to each – and each essential must be woven into the fabric of the identity of the band (and community) and the soul of the audience. You see, you can’t really play jazz all by yourself. That is called practice – or wood sheddin’ – because jazz needs partners and allies – players and audience – give and take. Allies help us go from the obvious to the innovative. Partners help us learn how to listen and then respond with compassion and creativity. And give and take keeps it real and immediate. Together players and audience spontaneously create touch stones to help us back on track when we lose our way. The community of sound provides nourishment and refreshment so that everyone involved has strength for the journey.



The first insight about syncopation in jazz is that it is essentially a feeling. Dizzy Gillespie wrote in his book To Bop or Not to Bop that jazz is essentially a rhythmic thing – and if you don’t get the rhythm right – then your music won’t swing. Duke Ellington made it explicit: “It don’t mean a thing, if you ain’t got that swing!  So one way of describing syncopation is playing on the offbeat: it is finding and then emphasizing something in the rhythm of the song that is always real but mostly just below the surface. It cuts beyond the obvious and pushes us towards new ways of moving. Syncopation is what you feel when you move or dance to the groove – it is what helps you experience the music with your senses rather than simply notice it or think about it.  What’s more, playing, feeling and honoring the offbeat is how we move from the abstract to the embodied – the place where the idea becomes real – it is how the song becomes useful and meaningful in our everyday lives because it moves us! It touches us. It awakens our senses.



Syncopation starts with the offbeat - and the more you notice the offbeat in jazz, the more you become open to the offbeat in others things like people, spirituality, politics, food, culture and all the rest. The offbeat in jazz is wedded to the blues – and the dance floor – where it began. And while the way syncopation is used in contemporary jazz is increasingly more sophisticated that in the early days, it always reconnects to the offbeat of the blues lest the music lose touch with real people and the pulse of their lives.  So consider these audio examples:

• Most of us start to hear a song with the melody – and that’s a fine place to begin – but the melody in only one dimension. After following the melody, try to feel were the drummer and bass player put the beat. And for the really adventurous, try to tap out the beat with your hand on your leg or table.


• We’ll start with Cannonball Adderly’s “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” – it feels like the blues or Black gospel – it has a steady back beat. Can you feel it?


• Now try the wild rhythms of Turkey that Dave Brubeck learned while in the Army in his masterpiece: “Blue Rondo a la Turk.”

Syncopation, for the jazz musician, is a way to bring our personal off beats up to the surface so that we can follow its unique groove in a playful way. This is the first commitment.



The second is the rhythm of a call and response. Because jazz has its roots in New Orleans – a place saturated in the experience of the African American slave church – it is not surprising that a lot of songs take up the structure, rhythm and ebb and flow of a slave preaching event. Here’s the background: on the Sabbath a lay preacher would share a reading from the Scriptures by memory and then offer his or her insights while the gathered congregation encouraged greater truth and passion by offering shouts of joy or sorrow, words of hope and encouragement -- even correction and sometimes songs, too.



Much the same thing happens in a great deal of jazz where first the piano plays a tune and then the trumpet responds to the call. Or a vocalist sings a riff and the band plays back a response. Or the drummer makes a sound and then leaves a silent hole as a response that pushes the song into greater creativity.



This call and response, rhythm and sound structure in jazz is not only grounded in the African American church tradition – even the most secular jazz artists use it – but is also a uniquely American principle in our democracy. Winton Marsalis, director of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, is explicit on this point: the call is given and the players and community are asked to respond as equals. There is no hierarchy in the call and response groove. There is patience, of course, and timing and beauty; but all who hear the call can respond with encouragement, correction or challenge.



Marsalis likes to say that it is not coincidental that America’s only true musical art form, jazz, should also mirror our democratic aspirations.  At the heart of American democracy, he says, we not only play with syncopation, we honor the call and response rhythm of a balanced life.  First we learn to listen – then we learn to wait rather than react – and then we respond but only if we have something creative or interesting to say.  Jazz call and response is not about filling the space with selfish noise, but honoring what the traditions started by sharing your own unique gift. Like Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie before him, Marsalis is a profound ambassador for both jazz and democracy: listening, waiting and refusing to merely react are crucial to both.



That’s why jazz musicians insist that the key discipline to playing well and creatively with others begins with listening. They understand that because anything is possible in a song, they do not sound off first – they do not rush to fill the silence – nor do they insist on their own way before the call is even offered. And God forbid they walk all over someone else’s playing and improvisation. First, they listen for the call.  Jazz cats call this waiting and listening honoring the tradition. It involves lots of practice in private and then lots of patience on the band stand. Nobody likes a bully or a braggart when you’re blowing tunes – so listening is primary. One writer put it like this:



Contingency – the possibility that things could be other – is not a thing to be minimized, feared, controlled, resisted or eliminated in jazz. Jazz musicians play with it, on it and off it. They embrace it. It is what brings a heightened anticipative tension to every performance – among and between the players – and between the players and the audience. No one is quite sure where things are going to go… (because the call and response) of the unknown is embraced and entered into.

Waiting allows a given call the room to mature; it gives the response the space needed for discernment, too. And then after enough listening – and some authentically sacrificial waiting and discernment – the people want to hear back from you – but not in a reactionary way. What the jazz response requires is for you to share your own unique gift to the song creatively and beautifully. 

Jazz believes that we all have something special to offer even if we don’t yet know what it is. Simultaneously, it insists that nobody wants to hear you simply repeat another’s gift: your response to the call must be unique; it must honor the tradition and then make it new and beautiful. Here are two examples:

• Listen to how John Coltrane plays with this principal in “Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music. First he states the old way – honors it – and then makes it new.


• Art Blakey actually captures the tradition’s call and the congregation’s response with his arrangement of Bobby Timmon’s classic: “Moanin’.”

First there is syncopation – the swing – then there is call and response – listening, waiting and creating something unique and new out what is old.



Then there is improvisation which marries these first two commitments into a playful third. Duke Ellington used to say that improvisation is composition in the moment; some cats do it in their studio, others on the bandstand. But all types of composition require a great deal of private practice.  Jazz artists call this “wood-shedding “where you work out the kinks in private.” Wynton Marsalis insists, however, that you never play jazz in the wood shed. Jazz is always played in a group for an audience.  And in that group you listen and respect one another, give and take and respond to what’s happening in each moment and then try to help everyone involved make the best music possible – including the audience.



Bill Frissell put it like this: more than any other type of music, jazz is a place “where anything is possible – a refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together in safety – and try anything they want and nobody gets hurt.  It’s a place where anything can happen together and we are only limited by our imaginations.”



That is what keeps the music fresh and fun and always real. Jazz theologian Robert Gelinas writes that:

Improvisation is what allows jazz to exist in a continual state of renewal.  In jazz, the same old song seems like a new song every time it is performed because it is a music of traditions and freedom. Much of the fun comes from hearing how new artists will take old standards and make them fresh as they add their own voices… (for) in jazz improvisation is expected… when you take the stage, you are there, in part, to take the risk of composing in the moment – and that is one truth about improvisation. (Finding a Groove, p.33) 

Let me unpack this last essential before sharing a musical example:

• First, improvisation is not standing up and playing whatever you want to however you want whenever you want – that is chaos – and it is selfish.  In jazz, what you compose on the spot has to fit and move with the flow.  The jazz artists of the 50s hated the Beat Poets like Ginsberg and Kerouac mostly because these poets didn’t practice. They didn’t work out their kinks in private. They thought improvisation was license to say and do whatever they felt like, but improvisation is never selfish or chaotic.


• Second, improvisation is not unbridled freedom without awareness of the consequences; rather, it is “the desire to make something new out of something old” coming from two Latin words – im and provius – meaning “not provided or not foreseen.” (Gelinas, p. 33)


• And third, improvisation plays with form treating it with respect but never becoming trapped by its limitations.  Think of what the masters of Be-Bop did to the Great American Song book of the 40s and 50s.  First they mastered the old form – that’s the respect.  Then they changed the tempo - or extended the bridge ad infinitum – or inverted the harmonies in non-traditional experiments – there’s the freedom. Chord substitutions and structural transformations can shift the feel and sound of a song dramatically. 

One scholar put it like this:

Improvisation requires creativity for jazz is not about copying but about creating – and creating not just one time but every time.  Improvisation is about playfulness and curiosity, experimentation and adventure… all within the boundaries of tradition and freedom.  (It is reputed that the great Louis Armstrong – one of the art form’s true geniuses – said, “Look we ALL do ‘do re me’ but YOU have to find the other notes for yourself.”  

You have to improvise. So here’s an example by the vocalist Measha Bruggergoman:

• She takes a tune from the new American song book, Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and plays with it.


• Notice how she changes both honors the original but adds her own unique chord substitutions and melody alterations to make it a folks song into a sophisticated work of art.

Conclusion

These three distinct but inter-related commitments – syncopation, the rhythm of call and response and the playful in the moment composition of improvisation – each try to make something new from out of an older tradition:



Jazz presses forward into a new future, offering an intercultural horizon of hope.  The racial and cultural difference and blending typical of jazz culture also points to the possibility of a racially and ethnically reconciled community.  The musical “creolization” does not fit the black-white binary that served the interest of the status quo and in that jazz is subversive.  (Hetzel, p. 17) Jazz points us towards the possibilities of life – personally, artistically, spiritually and politically – and that is an exciting way to live. As the Hebrew prophets made clear: without a vision, the people perish.  Jazz helps me discern the possibilities for vision in real time in a way that is respectful, beautiful and democratic. And that’s why I love it.

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Never On Sunday: A visit to one of the Club's antecedants

"The Dinner Party" by Henry Sargent, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Presented to the Club by Ronald Trabulsi on Monday evening, April 27, 2015

A few years ago, Ann and I were wandering through Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts when we noticed a handsome painting of a group of 18 men at what was clearly a nineteenth century dinner table, attended by two man servants. We jokingly commented that it looked like an historical version of our Monday Evening Club.

Well, be careful about speculation! Some research showed that the painting was of a dinner meeting of Boston’s Wednesday Evening Club.  The artist was Henry Sargent, a Boston artist who was born in 1770 and died in 1845. The painting was done in 1821.  Sargent’s paintings are known for giving intimate glimpses of Boston’s homes in the early 19^th century and this painting certainly does.

All this, of course, then led to curiosity about the Wednesday Evening Club of Boston – and that is the subject of my talk tonight for it is a fascinating look at our forebears and the similarities with our Club that make for what seemed to me to be a captivating story.

Fortunately, for us, a committee of Club members was appointed in 1857 to “consider all and sundry matters appertaining to the interests of the Club,” and much of the following comes from this committee’s report.  

As originally instituted in 1777, the Club consisted of nine members, all bachelors in their twenties. 

Three were from each of the professions of Law, Medicine, and Divinity.

The founding members in 1777 were as follows (and I include them because several of the names are familiar). The lawyers were Israel Keith, Thomas Dawes and George Minot. The physicians were Thomas Welsh, Nathaniel Appleton, and William Greenleaf. And the clergy were John Eliot, John Bradford, and William Greenough.  John Quincy Adams, Charles Bullfinch, and Oliver Wendell Holmes were later members.

Thomas Dawes, entering the Club as a lawyer, was of particular interest to me because, of course, of Henry L. Dawes, a founding member in 1869 of our Club.  I was not able to trace the family connection but I strongly suspect it exists. Thomas Dawes (and my house is just off Dawes Avenue in Pittsfield) was a patriot who fought in the Revolution.  His house was plundered by the British when they evacuated Boston in 1776. After the war he lived next door to John Adams and he worked primarily as an architect and designed many notable Boston buildings. He also held several state government positions and was a good friend of John Hancock.

The first expansion of the Club was about 1800 with the addition of three Merchants. Then in 1830 or so two or three other gentlemen were added whose occupations did not fit any of the categories.  They were called Gentlemen at Large. In 1836 there was another enlargement by adding one to each of the occupational categories, as well as the at-large, for a total of 20 members. It was noted by the Committee in 1857 that there had never been a strict adherence to the membership rule so that by 1857 there were 23 members.

When it first began in 1777 the Club met year round, but with the introduction of the railroads bringing increased travel and the custom of spending the summer in the country, meetings were suspended in July and August.

The meetings were weekly, starting on the third Wednesday in October and continuing until the Wednesday preceding the last Wednesday in May, with approximately thirty meetings a year.

The assignment of weeks was alphabetical, but hosts could exchange with each other for more convenient dates.  The custom also was that the host could invite one or two friends.

The Committee also noted that graduation from Harvard College was originally a condition of membership and that this condition was once considered “as immutable as the laws of the Medes and Persians.” But the Committee’s report goes on to note “this condition was originally intended to intimate simply that the Club should be composed of persons of education and generous culture; and as Harvard College was at the time of founding of the Club the chief, almost the only, source of this culture to the people of this community, the condition took this form. But this relation between Harvard College and our community no longer exists. Our city has become more metropolitan, the place where a large portion of the talent and culture of New England concentrates. Through the growth of our city there may be frequent inducements to disregard this membership condition in the future.”

The report goes onto say “If in the ranks of professional distinction and literary culture the sons of Harvard cannot hold their own in this community, it is not desirable that they should hold it in this Club by an exclusive condition.  Your Committee therefore thinks this condition should be suffered to sink into oblivion, should, in fact, be considered extinct.” So there! (Yale must have felt encouraged.)

The Committee of 1857 next turned its attention to the question of adding new members since “we can easily name a number of distinguished or agreeable gentlemen (I’m not sure that’s an either/or proposition) whom it would be pleasant to have associated with us.” Furthermore the Committee wanted the Club to be large enough so there would be fifteen to eighteen at every meeting. But there was no interest in making so large as to “lose its harmony of spirit and character, and the feeling of intimate acquaintance and strong personal regard now produced by its limited number.”

The final recommendation concerning membership was to enlarge the Club to twenty-five. Without altering the character of the Club this would enable the adding of two or three gentlemen “in the meridian of life, whom we should be glad to have associated with us, and also to do what is perhaps more necessary – to increase the youthful element in the Club by the election of gentlemen who are, by a score of years or more, the juniors of the present members.”

So far as meetings went, this diligent Committee carefully specified that “the person at whose house the Club meets shall be expected to be ready to receive at half-past eight o’clock; and the supper, which shall be simple and without meats, may be served at any time after half-past nine, and is always to be served by ten o’clock.”

Thus ends the report of the 1857 Committee, but further research at the Boston Public Library (and a thank you to the librarians there) turned up a report written by the Club’s then secretary, Samuel Kirkland Lothrop, about the Club’s Centennial Celebration in 1877.

Lothrop was a noted New England clergyman – a Harvard graduate, thank heavens, pastor for forty-two years of the Brattle Square Church in Back Bay Boston. He was also a member of the Boston School Committee for thirty years.

Incidentally, the Brattle Square Church began in 1698 as Congregationalist. It moved into a new building in 1772 designed by our architect friend Thomas Dawes. John Hancock gave one thousand pounds toward its construction. Early parishioners included John Hancock, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren, John Adams, and Abigail Adams. (Clearly these instigators of the American Revolution were close acquaintances.) The Church became Unitarian in 1805 and dissolved in 1878.

The connectedness among all these people is fascinating and the temptation to keep researching and digressing goes on and on.

But, back to the Club’s Centennial celebration in 1877.

In thinking about an appropriate commemoration it was found difficult to find a theme because the Club “has not aimed at action or influence outside of itself, and has done nothing but give a large amount of pleasure to its members and no small increase of that intellectual improvement which comes from intercourse with intelligent and cultivated minds.”

It was noted that members, past and present, included one President of the United States (John Quincy Adams), two Ambassadors to the Court of St. James, one Associate Justice of the Supreme Court (Holmes), four other noted court justices, two members of the Senate, and four members of the U.S. House of Representatives – one of whom was speaker, two speakers of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, and three Mayors of Boston.

One of the first questions to be settled was the date for the celebration. The first meeting of the Club had been June 21, 1777, according to the diary of John Quincy Adams. However, June 21, 1877, would fall on a Thursday which in the Committee’s words would “do violence, so far as the day of the week is concerned, to the whole history, usage, and name of the Club.

It also seemed inconvenient to celebrate in June when so many would be away from the City for the summer, particularly since Harvard’s graduation in 1877 did not fall close to June 21.

So, with marvelous practicality it was decided that there probably had been some weeks of preparation before the first meeting and therefore it would be reasonable to consider May as the real beginning of the Club and have the celebration in that month.

Having imaginatively resolved that weighty question, attention turned to the mode of celebration.

There was thought of a dinner at the Parker House or some other hotel with a prominent member as speaker to furnish the “intellectual and literary treat of the occasion.” That idea was speedily abandoned.

To quote from the report: “A dinner of thirty or thirty-five gentlemen [obviously no women] is of necessity rather stiff and formal, not to say sometimes a very stupid and tiresome affair, affording little liberty or opportunity for any real free, unconstrained social intercourse, and is therefore entirely incongruous and out of harmony with the habits, customs, and usages of this Club at ordinary meeting. It was felt that the members of this Club, if they found themselves seated at a long table with a magnificently variegated bill of fare before them would feel, as a Club, so queer and strange and out of place, that they could not possibly have a good time together.”

So it was decided that the Centennial meeting would be held at the home of their member Nathaniel Thayer, 70 Mt. Vernon Street. (He was a noted banker, railroad developer, and philanthropist – Thayer Hall at Harvard is one example of his generosity.)

Guests were to assemble punctually at eight o’clock. After fifteen minutes for gathering, there would be a member to speak from each of the traditional membership categories in the Club.

Half an hour would be given to each with the understanding that “however entertaining, instructive, or eloquent, the person designated to speak may be, he is not to occupy the whole of the half hour, but much so restrain himself as to leave eight or ten minutes so that others might put in a word if the spirit prompts.”

After the speeches the guests adjourned to Mr. Thayer’s dining room where, our faithful secretary noted, “it was soon determined that the ice cream had not melted, not the oysters grown cold, though it was a full hour beyond our usual time for partaking of these refreshments.”

And so this Club whose existence had spanned that of the United States, and whose members had significantly participated in the major events from the Revolutionary War, to the writing of the Constitution, to the War of 1812, the Abolitionist Movement, through the Civil War celebrated its one-hundred years.

The celebration was summarized by the secretary thusly: “Everyone who had been present felt it had been a goodly gathering, and cherished the conviction that they had been loyal to their ancestry, had done justice to the memories of the founders and fathers of their association, and had launched the Club upon its second century under auspices whose quickening influences would bear it onward to the close of the century, making it in the future, as in the past, an honorable and useful element in the social life of Boston.”

And the odd postscript to this talk tonight is that reasonably diligent research has found no further reference anywhere to the existence of the Club.

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La Moria Grandissima: the Black Death of the 14th Century

Presented to the Club by David T. Noyes on Monday evening, Dec. 1, 2014

Current news reports are filled with alarms of the Ebola virus. In the recent past, we have been warned about SARS, AIDS, Mad Cow Disease, Lyme disease, and multiply drug resistant bacteria such as MRSA. But tonight, I’d like to take you back 670 years to the mid fourteenth century to the most infamous scourge of all time—La moria grandissima. This is what the medieval Europeans called the Great Mortality, medieval Muslims named the Year of Annihilation, and modern history refers to the Black Death.



First, some definitions. The incidence of a disease is the number of new cases of a disease that occur over a defined time period. An epidemic, then, is defined as occurring when the incidence of a disease escalates beyond what would normally be expected in a given population.  The term pandemic means that a given disease has extended to more than one continent.



There are Common Source Epidemics, usually coming from a contaminated water or food source. This was the case of the cholera outbreak seen in Haiti after the catastrophic magnitude 7.0 earthquake in January of 2010. Or many of you may recall the Pittsfield, Massachusetts “Beaver Fever” Giardiasis outbreak over the three months beginning November, 1985 through January of 1986, when there were 703 confirmed cases of the disease originating from the contaminated City reservoir. (As an aside, Harold Hutchins did a paper of the same title that year—but, true to Monday Evening Club tradition, the subject turned out to be a discussion of the pre-American Revolution trapping industry in the upper Midwest!)



But, the topic tonight is Host-to-Host Epidemic. These are infections that are transmitted from person to person—either directly (such as the common Flu) or through a vector. A vector is an organism that serves as the intermediary, transmitting agent of the pathogen (such as mosquitoes, fleas or ticks).



The reservoir is the organism that sustains a pathogen for the long term. In this case, consensus is that the Plague originated amongst marmots living along the steppe in Central Asia in what is now Kazakhstan, the Gobi desert of China and the northern Himalayas. Marmots are related to prairie dogs and are part of the squirrel family. They burrow and live in underground nests. They weigh 6 to 15 pounds and their fur is widely prized for its use in making warm, attractive clothing.



Enter the vector.  In this case it’s the Indian rat flea, Xenopsylla cheopsis.  As with mosquitoes, only the female bites the host and can spread the infection. This flea seems to prefer rodents, which is why it so easily spread from the marmot population to the ubiquitous Black rat, Rattus rattus. But as the local domestic rat community dies off, the fleas’ alternative become whatever warm blooded mammal is in the vicinity.



The black rat likely first evolved in India, sometime before the last Ice Age, 2.6 million years ago. It can weigh four to twelve ounces and has incredible powers of reproduction. It is also know for its agility. It can jump three feet from a standing position, fall from a height of fifty feet without injury, scale a vertical wall, and squeeze through a hole as small as a quarter of an inch. The word rodent derives from the Latin verb, rodere, meaning “to gnaw.” Rattus can eat its way through lead pipe and adobe brick.



And what makes the flea such a vicious and effective vector? In an uninfected flea, the blood it withdraws from its host goes directly to its stomach, satisfying its hunger. But in an infected flea, plague bacteria build up in the foregut, producing a blockage. This means that no blood is reaching the stomach so the flea, chronically hungry, bites constantly. Because undigested, infected blood can’t get through the blockage in the foregut, the flea proceeds to vomit plague contaminated blood as it bites one host after another, thereby spreading the disease. Considering that fleas can jump several feet, the rapidity of the spread of infection is easily explained.



Also, this flea can survive for six weeks off a host—on clothing or food shipments for example—long enough to travel hundreds of miles by sea or overland.



It is also interesting to note that there are over thirty-one different flea species capable of transmitting plague. (By comparison, of all the mosquito genera, only the Anopheles is capable of transmitting Malaria).



Of course, not all diseases become epidemics. As old hosts die off or become immune, the microbe requires new hosts to continue reproducing. It’s possible, then, that in a small town everyone could acquire the disease in such a short time that the process could die out. Historical records seem to indicate that in human populations, the critical mass is about 250,000 people. Thus major epidemics do not seem to occur until cities expand to this density.



Plague is caused by a rod shaped Gram negative bacterium—Yersinia pestis.  It is so toxic that as little as one organism can result in infection.  It has been said to be able to kill most mammals, including camels and lions. But there are also a number of animals resistant to the infection including black bear, skunk and coyote. Most of the time Yersinia pestis and the rodent kingdom live in a state of uneasy coexistence. Animals continue to get sick and die, but there are enough partially resistant rodents to sustain the bacterial population in the community. This phenomenon is termed enzootic.



There are three human manifestations of plague:

A bubo

1. Bubonic Plague is the most common. Within a two, to six day incubation period, the classic bubo, which is a large rapidly expanding growth, appears. A bite in the lower extremities will likely result in the bubo appearing in the groin. Upper-body bites will result in buboes under the arms or on the neck. These can be quite large, severely painful, and physically deforming. Often, victims described hearing a squishing, gurgling sound coming from the bubo as though some alien life form were alive within them.



The buboes may spontaneously rupture and then drain an especially foul smelling fluid. Medieval chroniclers referred to this as the stench of the Black Death.



Contemporary accounts also describe agitation, confusion, staggering gait, high fever and delirium.



This form of plague, if untreated, carries a mortality of 60 percent. The few survivors were quite fortunate in having an immune system capable of handling the bacteria.

Blackened feet of a victim

2. Septicemic Plague occurs when the bacteria proceed to the blood stream. Under these conditions, the blood vessels break and leak blood under the skin turning it deep purple or black--hence the origin of the term “Black Death.” These were known as “God’s tokens” because their appearance meant the victim had developed a fatal case of plague. The untreated mortality for this form of the disease is 100 percent and usually occurs within three to seven days.



3. Pneumonic Plague is the most virulent form of the disease. As the victim begins coughing a bloody froth, the aerosol droplets are highly infectious directly from person to person, avoiding the need for any vector at all. This form carries a 100 percent mortality rate as well—often within hours of developing the cough.



Common nursery rhymes, which have been handed down through the centuries reflected the times:

Ring around the rosies,
A pocket full of posies
Ashes, ashes!
We all fall down.

Rosies refer to rosary beads—an effort to ask for divine intervention against the disease. Posies suggest the need for flowers to mask the terrible smell. Ashes were all that was left of a burnt corpse. And to fall down, of course, meant to die.



The mystery of what causes plague was finally discovered in 1894 during a reemergence of the disease in China (sometimes referred to as the Third Pandemic).  Alexandre Yersin, for whom the bacterium is named, was a protégé of Louis Pasteur. He was sent to Hong Kong at the request of the French government to investigate the disease outbreak. He was the first to identify that: “the pulp of the buboes always contains short, stubby bacilli." And perhaps as importantly, he discovered that the same bacteria were present in rodents, thereby outlining, for the first time, a possible method of transmission.

             

So, let’s set the stage for early 14th century. Sometime around 800, Europe entered what’s known as the “Little Optimum”—a period of global warming. Average temperatures increased by over one degree Celsius. Warm weather turned even marginal farmland to productive use. England and Poland became wine-growing countries.  As agricultural productivity increased, living standards rose, and populations increased dramatically. Between 1000 and 1250 the population of Europe tripled. The Continent contained at least 75 million people. It would take four to five hundred years for parts of Europe to regain those population levels following the catastrophe of the Black Death.



Furthermore, as populations grew, trade flourished.  In the year 1000, an Italian merchant had virtually no chance of doing business in England. By 1280 a trader could travel a reconnected European land route through Flanders or through Germany to the Baltics. Or, by water via Gibraltar, to the busy port of London. From the bustling ports of the two rival sea powers of the time, Venice and Genoa, merchant vessels travelled to Alexandria, Aleppo, and Tyre (southern Lebanon), searching for sugar, camphor, ivory, ebony, wax, ambergris, or muslin.



Genghis Kahn, whose name translates as “Emperor of Mankind,” had conquered China and Central Asia in the previous century. His children and grandchildren inherited the Mongol Empire for the Tartars, including all of China, most of Russia, Central Asia, Iran and Iraq. They set up a communications network consisting of messengers capable of traveling 100 miles a day for weeks on end and slower commercial caravans and armies marching to and fro across vast distances. These maneuvers helped to hold this vast empire together.



The recently publicized exploits of Marco Polo informed Europeans of opportunities for buying treasured goods imported via the Silk Road trade route to the Far East. Thus, merchants were inspired to sail through the Bosporus, and on to the Crimean peninsula in southern Russia so as to have access to caravans bringing goods from the cities of Samarkand, Merv, and the emerald city of Hangchow.



But early in the 14th century, the weather changed dramatically throughout the Continent and Asia. Known as the “Little Ice Age”, this change created hardship conditions including scarcity of food resources throughout Europe and central Asia. It is generally thought that what is now referred to as the Black Death, originated near Lake Issyk Kul, Kyrgyzstan, which was a bustling trading center along the route to China. This hypothesis suggests that the Tartar herdsmen were forced out of their traditional pastureland by the climate change in a desperate search for new grazing land. They found themselves on the northern steppe, exposed to the endemic marmot population with its plague carrying bacteria. From the herdsmen, the plague would have spread to Arab, Italian, or Central Asian merchants, Tartar soldiers, or Chinese laborers.



And so the rise of the Mongol Empire and the burgeoning development of the global trading economy, allowed Y pestis to overcome the vast distances and small populations that had previously provided a firewall to its global spread. Each oasis resting spot for caravans likely had a supporting cast of fleas and rats attracted by the abundance of foodstuffs needed to satisfy hundreds of travelers and their horses



From here eastbound travelers could pick up the fast road to China (an eight to twelve month trek); westbound travelers found their way back home via Caffa (now Feodosiya) on the Crimean peninsula.



In 1266, when the Genoese first arrived in southern Russia, Caffa was a small fishing village. Eighty years later, seventy to eighty thousand people called Caffa home. Items for trade included silks from Central Asia, Sturgeon from the Don River, slaves from the Ukraine, timber and furs from the Russian forests to the north. The deep water port was perfectly situated to take advantage of the burst of globalization. And the legendary Genoese mariners were happy to provide the skills required to bring these goods to the West. The port of Caffa was held under a grant from the Mongols.



This arrangement was highly advantageous to the Mongols as it provided a direct link to Italy’s largest commercial center and encouraged trade across all corners of their vast empire. However, tensions and disagreements were a common feature of the commercial relationship, arising predominantly from their religious differences. The Italians were devoutly Christian and the Mongols had been practicing Islam since the 1200s. Furthermore, the Mongols considered the Genoese haughty, proud, and duplicitous.



In 1343 at the Crimean town of Tana, on the mouth of the Don River, tensions turned to violence. A fight broke out between locals and the Italians that left one Muslim dead. Faced with the threat of execution by the Mongols, the Italians fled to Caffa. Here they were given sanctuary. The people of Caffa refused to let the Tartars in and, in the face of such defiance, the Mongols decided to lay siege to the city.



By 1346, the first reliable accounts of plague appear in Russian reports on the western shore of the Caspian Sea. Within a year the disease arrived at the Crimean Peninsula. When the Tartar army suddenly found itself succumbing to this strange, new disease in huge numbers, it resorted to catapulting the infected corpses into the besieged city, in what is thought to be the first incidence of germ warfare! It was written that: “rotting corpses tainted the air, poisoned the water supply and the stench was so overwhelming that hardly one man in several thousand was in a position to flee the remains of the Tartar army.”



By the spring of 1347 the dying and decimated Tartar army faded back into the hillsides, leaving the remaining, living Genoese finally free to sail from the harbor of Caffa, bringing the pestilence of the Black Death with them. Europeans had no way to know that they stood on the edge of the most lethal catastrophe in recorded history.



Any ship leaving the Crimea had to pass through the Dardanelles and stop at Constantinople—the wealthiest city in Christendom. Thus, sometime in the early summer of 1347, the plague bearing Genoese arrived in the harbor. By the fall of that year there were reports that the city was becoming emptier and emptier as the number of graves increased. Some contemporary estimates suggest that 90 per cent of the city population perished. Royalty was not immune — Ioannes IV, the Byzantine emperor, lost his 14-year-old son to the disease.



From here the plague followed the trade routes. One strain swung northward through Greece, Bulgaria and Romania. A second went southward toward Egypt and the Middle East. A third found its way to Cyprus. And a fourth to Sicily, which is where Plague enters the historical record in Europe.



A local Franciscan Friar, Michele da Piazza, wrote: “In October 1347 twelve Genoese galleys put into the port of Messina.” Apparently, nothing about the vessels seemed suspicious. But almost immediately people began to fall ill. And in ways that no one in Messina had ever seen before. Friar Michele described: “a sort of boil…the size of a lentil, erupted on the thigh or arm, then the victims violently coughed up blood, and after three days of incessant vomiting for which there was no remedy, they died. And with them died not only everyone who had talked to them, but also anyone who acquired, touched, or laid hands on their belongings”.



Messina quickly expelled the Genoese, but it was too late. The contagion had been set loose. These merchant ships were captained by men of innate greed who had personal financial stake in the cargoes they were carrying. And so, despite holds full of dead and dying sailors, their ships continued to sail from port to port selling their wares—spreading disease along the way.



It was the Venetians who developed the process of quarantine—derived from the Italian word for forty. They made ships stay in a restricted area of nearby islands for forty days as a means of clearing their crew for arrival. Of course, forty was a completely made up number and probably derived from multiple biblical references.



It took all of two months for the disease to travel the eighty-one kilometers from Pisa to Florence where the Black Death is well described. One author wrote: “such was the multitude of corpses that huge trenches were excavated in the churchyards in which the new arrivals were place by the hundreds, stored tier upon tier like ships’ cargo till the trench was filled to the top.” Another described the pattern as layering bodies like layering cheese on lasagna. In an age when nothing moved faster than the fastest horse, the Black Death spread throughout the entire European Continent in just a few years.



Sometime in the summer of 1348, the plague jumped the English Channel from Calais to Weymouth, either by soldiers returning from the Hundred Years War or with the aid of commercial shipping vessels. By the following year, half of the English population had perished.



As the plague spread eastward across France, Germany and Switzerland in the summer of 1348, people began to believe that the mortality was a Jewish plot. Christians claimed they were dying because their wells were being contaminated with Jewish plague poison. Plague was not a vengeful act of God or of infected air, but of an international Jewish conspiracy aimed at achieving world domination.



Between the summers of 1348 and 1349, huge numbers of Jews were exterminated. Some were marched into public bonfires, others burned at the stake. Still others were beaten to death or stuffed into empty wine casks and rolled into the Rhine. In some localities, killings were preceded by show trials, but often Jews were killed simply as a preventative measure.



As we have seen so many times over the centuries, blameless, innocent Jews became scapegoats because of superstition, ignorance and fear.



Multiple factors contributed to the rapid spread of the Black Death.



The Great Famine, the collective name for the crop failures associated with the dramatic weather changes of the early 1300s, was devastating throughout the region.  A half million people died of starvation in England, and 10 to 15 percent of the population of Flanders and Germany succumbed for lack of food. Thus young children from this era, who did survive, would have been in their forties and fifties at the time of the Black Death. Their immune systems, likely permanently impaired by the poverty of their nutrition, made them much more susceptible to the disease.



Population centers were producing much more garbage than they could dispose of. The situation was exacerbated by the influx of peasants forced off surrounding countryside by crop failures and loss of pastureland. They brought their livestock with them adding to the unsanitary conditions. Pigs, cattle, chickens, goats, and horses roamed city streets as freely as they did the countryside. Workers in outdoor slaughterhouses would simply pour the blood and offal of their carcasses into the gutters of the city streets where they plied their craft. Of course, this led to an explosion in the population of black rats.



Another urban polluter was the full chamber pot. No one wanted to walk down two flights of stairs, especially on a cold or rainy night. Medieval citizens were supposed to shout: “Look out below!” three times before draining the pots contents out the window. The stench of the city streets was notorious.



Personal hygiene was likewise a contributing factor to the spread of plague. The Greeks considered cleanliness a virtue, and the Romans thought hygiene so important that their public baths looked like temples.  Yet, somehow, early Christians considered bathing a vice. St. Benedict said: “To those who are well, and especially the young, bathing shall seldom be permitted”. Saint Francis of Assisi considered God’s water too precious to squander on bathing. Undressing and changing clothing were also infrequent. One can imagine how easy it was for fleas to thrive under these circumstances.



Yet another factor underlying the spread of plague was war. Few centuries have been as violent as the fourteenth. In the decades before the plague, the Scots were killing the English; the English, the French; the French, the Flemings; and the Italians and the Spanish — each other! In those savage decades, the nature of battle grew bloodier, civilians were attacked more frequently and property destroyed more routinely — all helping to make the medieval battlefield and soldier more efficient agents of disease. Larger armies produced larger concentrations of dirty men and debris, which, in turn, attracted larger populations of rats and fleas.



Not only did the plague seem to strike out of nowhere, but it caused death on a scale that no one had ever seen, no one had ever even imagined was possible. Death not in the hundreds or thousands — but in the hundreds of thousands — in fact millions. Today the Earth’s population is 7.1 billion. The equivalent loss of life calculates to 2.8 billion people! Or, more parochially, the current population of Berkshire county is 130,000 people — so the equivalent loss of life would be 52,000 people dead in this county alone!



According to the Foster Scale, a measure of human disaster similar to the Richter Scale, the medieval plague is the second greatest catastrophe in recorded history. Only World War II produced more death, physical destruction, and emotional suffering says the Canadian Harold D. Foster, the inventor of the scale. Harvard historian David Hebert Donald also ranked the Black Death high on the list of history’s worst catastrophes. However, the greatest tribute to the destructiveness of plague comes from the Atomic Energy Commission which used the medieval pestilence to model the consequences of all-out global nuclear war. According to the commission’s Cold War-era study of thermonuclear conflict, of all recorded human events, only the devastation of the Black Death comes the closest to mimicking “nuclear war in its geographical extent, abruptness of onset, and scale of casualties.”



But this is ancient history, I hear you saying. The Black Death couldn’t repeat itself. We have vaccinations for such deadly diseases as Yellow Fever, Measles, Anthrax, and Influenza. Small Pox has been eradicated from the planet (except for the reserve samples held by the CDC in Atlanta and the Research Institute for Viral Preparations in Moscow—oh, and the six vials of virus accidentally discovered unprotected at the NIH this past summer). Yet, we continue to squander antibiotics thereby promoting resistant bacteria. Might we someday not have any effective drugs to treat such infections? And just suppose, that as the unheard-of-before AIDS virus emerged in 1980, that it could be transmitted by a mosquito. Or imagine that the Ebola virus mutates so that it can be transmitted by airborne particles like the common cold. This is really nothing more than Darwin’s evolution in action. It’s certain to happen sometime—will Medical Science be up to the challenge before it’s too late?



Material for this essay was derived from the following sources:

The Great Mortality by John Kelly

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

Plague and Peoples by William McNeill

Viruses, Plagues, and History by Michael Oldstone

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