Armchair Travel
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Thomas Jefferson's Mixed-Race Children
You may be aware of the historical controversy over Thomas Jefferson' seven children with Sally Hemmings. Many historians, for many years, insisted he did not sire them, and even after DNA evidence was introduced, insisted they were sired by Jefferson's nephews.
We have evidence the nephews were not where they would have had to have been at key times -- they were off managing their own plantations -- and Jefferson was, but even so, imagine Jefferson sitting night after night at the dinner table with the mother of his nephews' children.
Besides that, everyone at the time knew they were Jefferson's children, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, everybody, and he never denied it. The historians who have defended his chastity over the years have pretty much made themselves look ridiculous.
I always held it against Jefferson that he did not free his own children, even in his will, but in making that judgment, I may have been losing sight of my grandmother's admonition, "Was ya there, Charlie?'
There's a brilliant article in American Heritage, June 1972, (before the definitive DNA evidence came in) by Fawn M. Bodie, which does a lot to set forth the facts in the case. And her scholarship has certainly led me to reassess my negative judgment of Jefferson.
When Sally Hemmings, at the age of 15, got pregnant by Thomas Jefferson, she was in France. She did not have to return to the United States if she didn't want to, and she knew it. Thomas Jefferson wanted her to, and he made a deal with her that her children would be freed when they were 21.
The reason the children weren't legally freed was that as free blacks they would no longer be allowed to live in Virginia. Bodie's research shows that all of Sally Hemming's children were allowed to run away and were not pursued.
Remember, Sally Hemmings was the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife. Jefferson's father-in-law had made no secret of it. Her children were three-fourths Caucasian.
That meant they were able to 'pass' as white and could stay in Virginia. For the full story, we have the wholly truthful narrative of Sally Hemmings' son.
I was wrong to judge Jefferson as I did; he was carrying out his end of a deal cemented in Paris in 1788. So always remember: If you're making a moral judgment about any family that's not your own, ask yourself, "Was ya there, Charlie?"
And while we're at it, why can people be half Italian and half Irish but never half black or even one fourth black? Just asking. ¶ 7:21 PM 1 comments
We have evidence the nephews were not where they would have had to have been at key times -- they were off managing their own plantations -- and Jefferson was, but even so, imagine Jefferson sitting night after night at the dinner table with the mother of his nephews' children.
Besides that, everyone at the time knew they were Jefferson's children, John Adams, John Quincy Adams, everybody, and he never denied it. The historians who have defended his chastity over the years have pretty much made themselves look ridiculous.
I always held it against Jefferson that he did not free his own children, even in his will, but in making that judgment, I may have been losing sight of my grandmother's admonition, "Was ya there, Charlie?'
There's a brilliant article in American Heritage, June 1972, (before the definitive DNA evidence came in) by Fawn M. Bodie, which does a lot to set forth the facts in the case. And her scholarship has certainly led me to reassess my negative judgment of Jefferson.
When Sally Hemmings, at the age of 15, got pregnant by Thomas Jefferson, she was in France. She did not have to return to the United States if she didn't want to, and she knew it. Thomas Jefferson wanted her to, and he made a deal with her that her children would be freed when they were 21.
The reason the children weren't legally freed was that as free blacks they would no longer be allowed to live in Virginia. Bodie's research shows that all of Sally Hemming's children were allowed to run away and were not pursued.
Remember, Sally Hemmings was the half-sister of Jefferson's deceased wife. Jefferson's father-in-law had made no secret of it. Her children were three-fourths Caucasian.
That meant they were able to 'pass' as white and could stay in Virginia. For the full story, we have the wholly truthful narrative of Sally Hemmings' son.
I was wrong to judge Jefferson as I did; he was carrying out his end of a deal cemented in Paris in 1788. So always remember: If you're making a moral judgment about any family that's not your own, ask yourself, "Was ya there, Charlie?"
And while we're at it, why can people be half Italian and half Irish but never half black or even one fourth black? Just asking. ¶ 7:21 PM 1 comments
Sunday, August 24, 2008
Will Rogers
I watched a movie with my folks last night called The Will Rogers Story, and I learned a lot about this most amazing American.
A Cherokee (with lots of other nationalities mixed in) born in Oklahoma when it was still the Indian Territory, he was a cowhand in Texas, Argentina and South Africa before getting a job with a Wild West Show.
With his talent for doing tricks with a lariat, he got a job on Broadway, of all places, with the Ziegfield Follies. He later became a movie star in silent films, and was even more successful in the talkies.
Then he started writing a newspaper column that was immensely successful and allowed him to travel all over the world. US presidents from Hoover to Roosevelt used to call him up to explain their policies because he had so much influence with the American people. He had the most popular newspaper column and the most popular radio show in the country.
Among his famous sayings are: "I only know what I read in the papers," "I never yet met a man I didn't like," and "Whenever Congress makes a joke, it's a law and whenever they make a law, it's a joke."
He used his success to help those in need. Whenever there was a disaster, he immediately flew there and reported on it. During the Depression he worked tirelessly to help the unemployed.
When he died in a plane crash in 1935, they say, it prompted the greatest outpouring of national grief since the death of Abraham Lincoln.
The movie ended with this tribute from Ogden Nash:
"I worked with grin and gum and lariat
To entertain the proletariat.
And with my Oklahomely wit
I brightened up the world a bit."
Sunday, August 17, 2008
Two Old Foes
¶ 12:44 PM 1 comments
When King George III of England made his choice for prime minister, he turned to someone very like himself - "round-shouldered, fat, with a puffy pig-like face" - Frederick, Lord North.
According to Richard M. Ketcham (American Heritage, June 1972), Lord North also had "an oversized tongue that thickened his speech." Together with "large, bulgling eyes, wide mouth and thick lips," this gave him what Horace Walpole called "the air of a blind trumpeter."
North's unsuccessful efforts to subjugate the rebellious American colonies are well known to history. But in his defence he was at all times doing the bidding of his august and similarly pig-like majesty, King George.
During the American Revolution, North was often opposed in Parliament by Colonel Isaac Barre, who made the famous remark that North could neither wage war nor establish peace.
North resigned as prime minister after the war, but remained a member of Parliament until his eyesight failed completely. Just before his death he met Colonel Barre, who was also blind.
"Well, Colonel," North declared, "whatever may have been our former animosities, I am persuaded there are no two men who would now be more glad to see each other than you and I."
¶ 12:44 PM 1 comments
Friday, August 15, 2008
Blueberries for Sal
If you're looking for great books to read to kids, you can't do better than Robert McCloskey. Make Way for Ducklings is legendary in Boston and Blueberries for Sal has always been legendary in my family since the title character looks exactly like my mom, Sally Hartshorne, who made me bookish.
Make Way for Ducklings is about a family of ducks in Boston for whom a Boston policeman stops traffic. Blueberries for Sal is about two moms and two youngsters who go blueberry picking and the youngsters wind up following the wrong moms.
Since one mom is a bear, this might lead to a problematic situation, but things work themselves out, as they so often do.
And for kids who are learning to read, you can't do better than McCloskey's Homer Price and the sequel Centerburg Tales. Kids love Homer and his pet skunk Aroma and the doughnut making machine that goes haywire and the 42 pounds of edible fungus that kept the settlers from starving. Adults love all this, too. It's a true slice of Americana, brilliantly written and illustrated.
My mom and I went for a walk the other day and I mentioned Blueberries for Sal. No recollection. Robert McCloskey is gone. So are Lord Byron and Keats and Shakepeare. So is Harriet Beecher Stowe, about whom my mom wrote her PhD thesis.
I worked for a time as a companion to people with Alzheimer's, but I have never seen the disease act so quickly. At one time I was looking after a guy who had written books about the chemistry of the brain and was experiencing symptoms of dementia.
He said his trouble was forming new memory. "It doesn't stick," he explained. "By the time I reach the end of a paragraph, I've forgotten the beginning." Yet he was able to tell me all about his experiences at college and his career.
With my mom the progression has been much more rapid and invasive, wiping out old memory as well as new.
So that leaves us pretty much in the present tense. We talk about the pictures we see in the clouds.
Tomorrow we're going tag sailing. ¶ 8:26 PM 1 comments
Make Way for Ducklings is about a family of ducks in Boston for whom a Boston policeman stops traffic. Blueberries for Sal is about two moms and two youngsters who go blueberry picking and the youngsters wind up following the wrong moms.
Since one mom is a bear, this might lead to a problematic situation, but things work themselves out, as they so often do.
And for kids who are learning to read, you can't do better than McCloskey's Homer Price and the sequel Centerburg Tales. Kids love Homer and his pet skunk Aroma and the doughnut making machine that goes haywire and the 42 pounds of edible fungus that kept the settlers from starving. Adults love all this, too. It's a true slice of Americana, brilliantly written and illustrated.
My mom and I went for a walk the other day and I mentioned Blueberries for Sal. No recollection. Robert McCloskey is gone. So are Lord Byron and Keats and Shakepeare. So is Harriet Beecher Stowe, about whom my mom wrote her PhD thesis.
I worked for a time as a companion to people with Alzheimer's, but I have never seen the disease act so quickly. At one time I was looking after a guy who had written books about the chemistry of the brain and was experiencing symptoms of dementia.
He said his trouble was forming new memory. "It doesn't stick," he explained. "By the time I reach the end of a paragraph, I've forgotten the beginning." Yet he was able to tell me all about his experiences at college and his career.
With my mom the progression has been much more rapid and invasive, wiping out old memory as well as new.
So that leaves us pretty much in the present tense. We talk about the pictures we see in the clouds.
Tomorrow we're going tag sailing. ¶ 8:26 PM 1 comments
Monday, August 11, 2008
Nicholas and Alexandra
For years I've been seeing Nicholas and Alexandra by Robert K. Massie at flea markets and tag sales. It sold a bajillion copies and got made into a movie, which I haven't seen but plan to. I finally decided to read it.
You've probably already read it, but if you haven't, it's a real treat. A big fat book and you're sorry when it's over. And you shouldn't have any trouble finding a copy.
It tells the tale of the last of the Romanovs, which, in the words of the Saturday Review blurb, "no novelist would dare invent."
Massie is my kind of historian. He presents a wealth of detail that helps you get to know the characters as people. Queen Victoria, Rasputin, Kaiser Wilhelm, Witte, Kerensky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin -- they're all here and I'm learning a lot about them that I never learned in history books because it's, well, personal.
In this way he reminds me of Barbara Tuchman, and that's the highest compliment I can bestow on any historian. Like JFK, I'm a big fan of Tuchman, especially The Guns of August and The First Salute.
The wealth of detail allows one to play the part of Chief Inspector Maigret, the inductive detective, who mulls over waves of seemingly irrelevant details, finds something that just doesn't fit, and figures the whole thing out.
"Aha!" you say. "On his world tour as a young man Nicholas was attacked in Japan by a fanatic with a sword and barely survived a glancing blow to the head which left a lifelong scar. This must have led to Russia's disastrous war with Japan..."
But then the young tsarevich Alexis is born and turns out to have hemophilia (like Massie's son) and the holy profligate Rasputin is able to control the little lad's bleeding (all seem to agree on this point) and gets a grip on the royal family, and it all gets so wild that any generalization of any kind just seems so simplistic and irresponsible. It happened the way it happened and like the Saturday Review says, no novelist would dare invent it.
At the climax Rasputin ingests enough arsenic to kill a team of oxen, gets shot fifteen times, and finally dies of drowning when he is wrapped in a carpet and thrown in the Neva River. And the largest empire in the world is convulsed by war and revolution. You couldn't make this stuff up, and Massie does a great job of presenting it in all its complexity. ¶ 8:11 PM 2 comments
You've probably already read it, but if you haven't, it's a real treat. A big fat book and you're sorry when it's over. And you shouldn't have any trouble finding a copy.
It tells the tale of the last of the Romanovs, which, in the words of the Saturday Review blurb, "no novelist would dare invent."
Massie is my kind of historian. He presents a wealth of detail that helps you get to know the characters as people. Queen Victoria, Rasputin, Kaiser Wilhelm, Witte, Kerensky, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin -- they're all here and I'm learning a lot about them that I never learned in history books because it's, well, personal.
In this way he reminds me of Barbara Tuchman, and that's the highest compliment I can bestow on any historian. Like JFK, I'm a big fan of Tuchman, especially The Guns of August and The First Salute.
The wealth of detail allows one to play the part of Chief Inspector Maigret, the inductive detective, who mulls over waves of seemingly irrelevant details, finds something that just doesn't fit, and figures the whole thing out.
"Aha!" you say. "On his world tour as a young man Nicholas was attacked in Japan by a fanatic with a sword and barely survived a glancing blow to the head which left a lifelong scar. This must have led to Russia's disastrous war with Japan..."
But then the young tsarevich Alexis is born and turns out to have hemophilia (like Massie's son) and the holy profligate Rasputin is able to control the little lad's bleeding (all seem to agree on this point) and gets a grip on the royal family, and it all gets so wild that any generalization of any kind just seems so simplistic and irresponsible. It happened the way it happened and like the Saturday Review says, no novelist would dare invent it.
At the climax Rasputin ingests enough arsenic to kill a team of oxen, gets shot fifteen times, and finally dies of drowning when he is wrapped in a carpet and thrown in the Neva River. And the largest empire in the world is convulsed by war and revolution. You couldn't make this stuff up, and Massie does a great job of presenting it in all its complexity. ¶ 8:11 PM 2 comments
Monday, August 04, 2008
What Makes a Great Vacation?
Everybody has their own idea of a great vacation, I guess. For my daughter Sarah and me, this year at least, it had to include a lot of theater. She's an actress and I'm an aspiring playwright.
But we also wanted to include kayaking and tennis and fresh air and splendid scenery, and we didn't want to include toll booths, subways or taxicabs.
So we headed up to New Hampshire, where kids can see great theater in their flip-flops and jelly shoes. And I do mean great theater. The actors, directors, choreographers, musical directors, costumers, everybody, they're the same folks who work on productions on Broadway, off-Broadway, and all the great regional theaters around the country.
I guess I was most impressed by the choreography. These companies have to perform on comparatively small stages, but in the productions we saw, far from scaling back the dancing, the choreographers seemed to take the small stage as a challenge, and also they seemed to want to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that every member of the company could do some serious hoofing.
I saw 18 to 20 dancers high-kicking on a 20-foot stage, gracefully and effortlessly -- don't tell OSHA. And they have to sing and act perfectly, too, and they do. I fell in love with every leading lady and was literally dazzled by the singing and dancing talent of every member of the company.
It's hard to believe that while they're performing a play for two weeks, they're also rehearsing the next one.
The first two nights we stayed at the Rosewood Country Inn in Bradford with Dick & Lesley Marquis. If you're looking for tranquility, serenity and beauty, this is where you'll find it. People get married there every weekend; that's how beautiful it is. We enjoyed it as a great place to veg out between interviews, rehearsals and performances.
Then we went to Purity Springs in East Madison, a wonderful resort where many families have been going for thirty or forty years. It's been owned and run by the Hoyt family for six generations, and since they also run a summer camp and a ski area, they know a lot about having fun.
They have swimming and kayaking and volleyball and tennis and stuff like that on site, and they're located in the Mt. Washington Valley which has every recreational opportunity anyone could ever want from hiking up Mt. Chocorua to fishing the Swift River to riding the alpine slide at Mt. Attitash.
They take a canoe trip on the Saco River every Thursday and hold a lobster bake on Purity Island. They usually send a van to the theater, but the week I was there it was a non-family presentation of Cabaret, which I loved, but I could see why they didn't send the van.
Friday morning, when I told the waitress at the dining hall that I was checking out early, she packed me a box lunch with a sandwich and cookies and grapes. How cool is that? ¶ 8:41 PM 1 comments
But we also wanted to include kayaking and tennis and fresh air and splendid scenery, and we didn't want to include toll booths, subways or taxicabs.
So we headed up to New Hampshire, where kids can see great theater in their flip-flops and jelly shoes. And I do mean great theater. The actors, directors, choreographers, musical directors, costumers, everybody, they're the same folks who work on productions on Broadway, off-Broadway, and all the great regional theaters around the country.
I guess I was most impressed by the choreography. These companies have to perform on comparatively small stages, but in the productions we saw, far from scaling back the dancing, the choreographers seemed to take the small stage as a challenge, and also they seemed to want to demonstrate beyond a shadow of a doubt that every member of the company could do some serious hoofing.
I saw 18 to 20 dancers high-kicking on a 20-foot stage, gracefully and effortlessly -- don't tell OSHA. And they have to sing and act perfectly, too, and they do. I fell in love with every leading lady and was literally dazzled by the singing and dancing talent of every member of the company.
It's hard to believe that while they're performing a play for two weeks, they're also rehearsing the next one.
The first two nights we stayed at the Rosewood Country Inn in Bradford with Dick & Lesley Marquis. If you're looking for tranquility, serenity and beauty, this is where you'll find it. People get married there every weekend; that's how beautiful it is. We enjoyed it as a great place to veg out between interviews, rehearsals and performances.
Then we went to Purity Springs in East Madison, a wonderful resort where many families have been going for thirty or forty years. It's been owned and run by the Hoyt family for six generations, and since they also run a summer camp and a ski area, they know a lot about having fun.
They have swimming and kayaking and volleyball and tennis and stuff like that on site, and they're located in the Mt. Washington Valley which has every recreational opportunity anyone could ever want from hiking up Mt. Chocorua to fishing the Swift River to riding the alpine slide at Mt. Attitash.
They take a canoe trip on the Saco River every Thursday and hold a lobster bake on Purity Island. They usually send a van to the theater, but the week I was there it was a non-family presentation of Cabaret, which I loved, but I could see why they didn't send the van.
Friday morning, when I told the waitress at the dining hall that I was checking out early, she packed me a box lunch with a sandwich and cookies and grapes. How cool is that? ¶ 8:41 PM 1 comments
One Swell Vacation
My daughter Sarah and I had one swell vacation in New Hampshire -- three plays in three days. Grueling work, but somebody has to do it. Sarah had to take off Thursday, but I got an extra day and an extra play -- Cabaret. You can read all about it on GoNOMAD once we write it all up.
On my way home through Wolfeboro, I stopped to get an iced tea, and it turns out the girls soccer team from Kingswood Regional High School was having a car wash to raise money for new uniforms.
So I got to chat with these enterprising young women and drove home with a nice clean car. If you'd like to make a contribution call Andrea L. Ogden, Director of Athletics, 603-569-8100 or go to their website.
Labels: new hampshire
¶ 1:47 PM 0 comments
