BOB'S BITS

[Stanley]

MACAULEY

From my early youth I have read with delight those histories which exhibit Liberty in its most exalted state, the annals of the Roman and the Greek republics. Studies like these excite that natural love of Freedom which lies latent in the breast of every rational being. Catharine Macauley, in the foreword to the first volume of her History of England (8 vols., 1763-1783).

To write such a history was an audacious undertaking for a young woman in George III’s England. And she kept at it, through a short but happy marriage and a long widowhood. Along the way, Macauley considered who rightly belonged to that class of “every rational being.” As she wrote her history and observed the events of her own times, she concluded that “every rational being” included all adult persons, male or female, rich or poor, aristocratic or of the common herd. So she qualified as a radical democrat--and a well-read one. One of four children of John Sawbridge and Dorothy Wanley, born on April 2, 1731, Catherine Macauley inherited her share of two banking fortunes, which helped, and even more to the point read voraciously through her family library. That became a lifelong habit and was the main source of her self-confidence. When, newly married, she started on her History, she went to the then new British Museum to read the correspondence of King James I and his lover-confidante the Duke of Buckingham. The librarian thought much of it too racy for a young gentlewoman, to which Catherine is said to have replied “Phoo!” She read all the letters, not to gather evidence of their sexual liaisons, but to establish them as co-conspirators against the cause of English liberty. She continued on that course throughout all her History, then continued it with a subsequent volume (written in epistolary form) in which she dismissed the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 as an inglorious compact between a still-too-powerful crown and a grasping, easily manipulated political class. So it’s not easy to see Macauley as a “whig” historian, though many do. The American and then the French Revolution offered better hopes, and she entered upon the pamphlet wars of the time in hopes of real progress in empowering “every rational being” to assume their proper place in government. So it is as well to see Macauley as a political philosopher, certainly not ‘just’ an historian. Her advocacy of the American cause put her at odds with England’s governing consensus. Her early support of the French Revolution brought her into open conflict with the patron saint of conservatism, Edmund Burke. Macauley was not a majoritarian democrat. Better civil education was needed to bring the many-headed up to speed. Nor was she a feminist. But there’s evidence that Catherine Macauley’s radicalism (and her gender) inspired such as Mary Wollstonecroft and Mercy Otis Warren to examine the gender implications of radical egalitarianism. As for Macauley, her contributions to the process ended with her death, at 60, after her celebratory tour of the new republic across the Atlantic. ©

[Stanley]

BURROUGHS

How far are we from home? John Burroughs, March 29, 1921.

Those are John Burroughs’ last words, uttered on his Pullman car in eastern Ohio. They figured prominently in the New York Times’ obituary which appeared the next day, nearly filling a page of the paper’s March 30 edition. John Burroughs was indeed on his way home, returning to his beloved ‘Riverby’ on the west bank of the Hudson, near Roxbury. He’d been born near there, on April 3, 1837, the seventh of ten children. His parents farmed marginal land, high up from the river, looking towards the summits of the Catskills. But it remained “home” to Burroughs, who as a child found solace in nature and then, as an adult, became a world-renowned writer on nature and natural history. He was, accordingly, resistant to formal schooling. But he read widely and was inspired to write about the land and its wildlife. He took as his models Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays and John James Audubon’s Birds of America, and so worked to sometimes competing goals. Burroughs aimed for accuracy, and yet also for beauty, meaning, even regeneration. His first writings, submitted to James Russell Lowell’s Atlantic magazine, were thought to be plagiarisms from Emerson. But as he continued he found his own voice, and that voice found a great response in a nation which was beginning to realize that its great progresses (westwards and citywards) had been in some respects destructive of nature and debilitating to humans. Burroughs’ writing was further improved by his literary partnership with Walt Whitman (in Civil War Washington, DC) and then by his admiration for William Dean Howells’ literary realism. In the process Burroughs gathered a reading public. His many books on nature sold well enough to enable him to return to Roxbury and build his “by the river” retreat right on the Hudson. That was his HQ, but Burroughs ventured forth often to enjoy outings with other naturalists, notably John Muir in Calfornia, and with eminent nature lovers too. Easily the most eminent of these was Teddy Roosevelt, who’d found his own regeneration in the Dakota badlands, but there were others. Among friends who announced their intentions to attend John Burroughs’ funeral were Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and E. H. Harriman. It was an odd fan club, and today John Burroughs has somewhat faded from view, at least as a great naturalist. But in his time and for his time, he was. I most admire his insistence (in attacking the likes of Ernest Thompson Seton) that nature writing should be realistic, not suffused with human literary tropes and plot lines. For St. Louisans, it’s interesting that one of our most expensive private schools, founded two years after Burroughs’s death, was named after him. It was a coeducational institution, non-sectarian and aimed at ‘progressive’ schooling. Its cofounder was Edna Fischel Gellhorn, radical feminist, and one of its first graduates was her daughter Martha. Among its classrooms is a 40-acre tract of Missouri woodlands given by Leo Drey, another pretty odd bird, a Jewish lumberman and ardent conservationist. John Burroughs might have approved. Henry Ford’s views are not recorded. ©

[Stanley]

ANGELOU

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings,
I know why the caged bird sings!

--From “Sympathy,” by Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1899.

1899 was the mid-point in a bad time, as the white south set about undoing the core result of the Civil War through its varied and brutal “Jim Crow” laws and local ordinances. That effort continues still, if in different forms, witness Donald Trump’s bizarre effort to outlaw the law by countermanding (by executive order!!) the 14th Amendment to the American Constitution. So Dunbar knew too well “why the caged bird sings.” So, too, did Maya Angelou, who chose the line, and the poem, as the motif or theme of her autobiography, She was born in unpromising circumstances, as Marguerite Annie Johnson, in the racially segregated city of St. Louis on April 4, 1928. In the course of a very long life (she died in 2014, aged 86) Marguerite-Maya conducted street cars, worked as a prostitute, danced with Alvin Ailey, acted with James Earl Jones, reported for an English-language paper in Cairo (that’s Egypt, not Illinois), produced broadcasts at Radio Ghana (and served as an administrator at the University of Ghana), cut an album of calypso music (as ‘Miss Calypso’), and worked on civil rights issues with both Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. (this last a neat trick in itself). And all that was before she was 40. Then, on her 40th birthday, Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, an event which focused her frenetic energy on writing. For by now (well before, indeed) Marguerite Johnson was Maya Angelou, a name she took from her brother’s nickname for her and from her first husband, a Greek sailor. She knew “why the caged bird sings,” and so, now feeling free, she sang. Her autobiography may be her most lasting contribution, beginning with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and running through six more volumes. There were also a couple of pretty famous poems that had a ‘this is my story: listen to me’ ring to them, including the one (“On the Pulse of Morning”) read at President Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993. Eventually, Angelou’s story of herself ran to seven volumes. It seems a lot, just for one life. But even without the poetry we might say that Maya Angelou earned every word in them. And so the caged bird sang. ©.