Moonrise, moonset, swiftly go the years.

Moonrise on Monday evening

 

I see the moon, and the moon sees me.

 

You’ve been plenty of sunrises and sunsets on both this blog and the one dedicated to photographs, and I’m sorry to say that once again I failed to get outdoors to photograph the Northern Lights on Monday night, which apparently were spectacular. I did, however, go out one earlier time in hopes of seeing them (vain hopes) and was rewarded by a beautiful waxing moon, orange-red in the smoke from distant fires as it moved toward setting in the western sky. 

Red moon going down in the west one dark morning last week

 

Sunny and I see each other, and my friends and I find time to see each other, too.

 

My sybaritic enjoyment of locals’ summer (September) continued with another Sunday and Monday off work. I did work almost two hours Sunday morning digging up autumn olive – real work! – but then took the rest of the day off to lounge around with a book and later to meet a friend in Suttons Bay for a movie and a bite to eat. We hadn’t seen each other for a couple of months, so it was good to catch up.

 

Monday morning Sunny and I had another agility session (so sorry I can’t photograph while we’re working), and as I told my sister, I am learning a lot. Is Sunny learning a lot, too? Truthfully, I think my learning curve is much steeper than hers, as all she has to do is follow my commands and gestures, while I’m the one who has to get everything right, which gets more complicated every week. It’s more than having my dog comfortable on the equipment — jumping hurdles, going through tunnels, etc. She has no problem with any of that. But I have to guide her from one station to the next, and the course changes from one time to the next (as it does in competition), so it matters a lot which side of a piece of equipment I’m on, how and when I get there, how and when I signal to her which one comes next, and how well I do getting into position myself so I’m not in her way or misleading her unintentionally, and every week Coach Mike adds a new twist to what I do, so this sport is exercising my mind as much as Sunny’s, if not more. 

"Mom, are you as smart as I am?"

When I made an appointment to have the garage in Leland replace a burned-out headlight, I texted a friend to see if she might be free for lunch or a walk. She voted for lunch, and we spent two leisurely hours at the Cove, leisurely time made possible by the fact that everyone else wanted to sit outside by the dam, while we chose to be indoors where we didn’t have to shout over the roar of falling water to make ourselves heard. 

 

Glad to see the pay phone still in Leland, carrying its freight of memories -- 

 

Before sleep and between first and second sleep, I read. 

I read and fall asleep, then wake again sometime in what my mother called “the wee hours,” turn the light back on, and read for a while more before “second sleep,” waking for good between 5 and 6 o’clock. My current bedtime reading is a novel set (at least Book I is set) in pre-Revolutionary America, the main character a boy ready, in his own eyes, to become a man but not keen on being sent away from home to a big city in the East to study Latin and “cyphering” with a man of the cloth. After yearning for home and parents, however, he finds on his first holiday that the folks of the pine woods are painfully dull and unsophisticated compared to the “quality” he has met in the city. I stopped at the end of Book I on Tuesday morning, leaving young Johnny to his ambivalence. 

 

So far, my strong impression from this novel is of a country – our own – born divided. As Johnny travels from inland pine forest to coastal city for his education, we see various faces of 1770s America: pious Methodists suspicious of “papists”; gamesters, drinkers, and teetotalers; hoi polloi and those who take themselves to be gentry; rich and poor whites; black slaves imported from Africa; Cherokee families pushed beyond the mountains by white trappers; loyalists to the crown, trigger-happy rebels, and thoughtful folks on both sides. The Revolution had not come by the end of Book I (Johnny’s father was convinced there would be no war), and yet many divisions among Americans already existed on the bases of family background, country of origin, religion, skin color, education level, and political allegiance. E pluribus unum seems an impossible dream. Some of us still hold onto that dream.

 

The quiet morning before dawn --

 

Summer stretches out for visitors, too.

 

Northport, Michigan

People are still discovering Northport for the very first time as we drift on a summery breeze into the second half of September. “What’s it like here in the winter?” is the perennial question, to which my tried-and-true answer is, “That depends on the year.” Whatever we get for winter this time around, though, apple season is here now. 

The new look of Leelanau apple orchards --

Apples and goldenrod, anemones and the eagerly seed-making marigolds and staghorn sumac, every growing thing making the most of these days that grow shorter week by week. We need rain, but it’s hard to argue with summer – even in September, when it comes. 

 

Which Side Are You On?

When I went to work in my fields [following his marriage], I worked with more alacrity and sprightliness. I felt that I did not work for myself alone, and this encouraged me much. My wife would often come with her knitting in her hand, and sit under the shady tree, praising the straightness of my furrows and the docility of my horses. This swelled my heart and made every thing light and pleasant, and I regretted that I had not married before. I felt myself happy in my new situation, and where is that station which can confer a more substantial system of felicity than that of an American farmer…? 

-  J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer

Crevecoeur, an Anglicized Frenchman (born Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur -- and I apologize for not having the proper accent mark available to me on the program I'm using), initially began his New World life in Canada, fighting under General Montcalm until the defeat of the French on the Plains of Abraham. Then, resigning his commission, he traveled through New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut. In New York he was naturalized as a British subject and also adopted into the Oneida tribe as an honorary member. He married Mehitabel Tippett in 1769 and spent the following seven years happily farming and raising a family at home, Pine Hill, cultivating friends among his Hudson Valley neighbors, and traveling. 

But his very name — “broken heart” — perhaps presaged what was to come in the author’s life. Count seven years ahead from 1769. Crevecoeur felt himself thoroughly “American,” but to him that meant being a loyal subject of the English king. 

Susan Manning, who edited and wrote the very scholarly introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Letters from an American Farmer, calls the work “a book about identity — specifically American identity — struggling into being.” 

The book that took shape in the years before and during the American Revolution embodies the personal crisis induced by momentous political events. It is at once the fullest literary expression of America’s coming into being … and a moving exploration of the meaning of ‘revolution’ in the personality of any previously established self. 

- Susan Manning

It is easy for us to see the march of history exclusively in broad strokes: migrations, social change, important primary source documents (e.g., in this case, the Declaration of Independence), battles, treaties, etc. What gives Letters from an American Farmer its importance is not only that it was written at all and widely published but that it is a record of one man’s emotions, passions, and responses to the larger events which engulfed his life. We occasionally ask ourselves what we would have done in such-and-such a place in such-and-such a time period. More often we judge the actions of individuals in the past, forgetting to imagine ourselves in their shoes. But there is no possibility of forgetting the man and his family as we read Crevecoeur’s Letters, an epistolary-literary account of real people caught up in world-changing events beyond their control. 

So the Letters constitute a much-neglected American classic, but reading it now, during the COVID-19 crisis, when not only the United States of America but the entire world is struggling and looking for ways to maintain a semblance of normal life and find a way forward while also doing everything possible to avoid contagion in the present and “flatten the curve” (the rising curve of numbers of people infected with the virus), a year that is also an important election year in the U.S., I find added resonance in Crevecoeur’s cries of anguish.

Throughout the early Letters, the author idealizes the American experience and work ethic, particularly that of English and Scottish colonists. (Irish, not so much.) Farmers work hard and bring forth the land’s bounty, while fisherman on Nantucket and Cape Code brave the ocean to harvest subsistence and, for some, even wealth. He is full of admiration for the modest Quaker way of life but paints a picture of religious tolerance, with families of diverse faiths living side by side without acrimony. He admires also the Native Americans, calling their manners “respectable,” in sharp contrast to some of the rude European pioneers along the frontier, who live in “sloth and inactivity.” Those “back-settlers,” he remarks reprovingly, are much more in need of conversion than the Indians. But in general, he presents life along the Eastern Seaboard, on its farms and in its towns and villages, as a veritable pastoral idyll, a dream come true for the poor who fled the nobility-crushed and heavily-taxed Old World, where they had no hope of advancement.

From pastoral idyll, however, Crevecoeur descends into nightmare when he travels in the South and learns firsthand the horrors of slavery. In Charleston and in the countryside, the stories he hears and one particularly gruesome sight he sees stand in such sharp contrast with the threadbare arguments presented to him in defense of the “peculiar institution” that his very belief in God’s beneficence is shaken to the core, and he cries out from his heart —

Is there then no superintending power who conducts the moral operations of the world as well as the physical? The same sublime hand, which guides the planets round the sun with so much exactness, which preserves the arrangement of the whole with such exalted wisdom and paternal care, and prevents the vast system from falling into confusion, doth it mankind to all the errors, the follies, and the miseries, which their most frantic rage, and their most dangerous vices and passions can produce? 

As he looked about him and saw “crimes of the most heinous nature, committed from one end of the world to the other,” he could not help doubting in the existence of wise deity guiding history and ensuring progress. 

Loudly though his every feeling cried out against the evils of slavery, however, Crevecoeur himself was in no immediate personal danger as he traveled through the colonies. He was a white man, after all, an educated man, with apparently sufficient income to leave his farm in other capable hands for long periods while he traveled. A visit farther south, to self-taught botanist John Bertram in Florida, soothed for a while the agitated feelings aroused by his painful encounters in South Carolina. 

But Time is marching on, inexorably, and both Crevecoeur’s scholarly social visits and his peaceful life at home will soon be violently interrupted. The Revolution is at hand! What hope is there now for a loyal subject of the king? 

Now danger has become personal and immediate — as it was already for the slaves on those Southern plantations — and the writer now fears for the lives of his wife and children, as well as himself. Though he declares himself ready to sacrifice his own life for that of his family, staying home on the farm and helplessly waiting “the end of this catastrophe” becomes more and more unbearable. And once again the feelings that agitate his soul find expression in larger questions about the human condition.

It is for the sake of the great leaders, on both sides, that so much blood must be spilt; that of the people is counted as nothing. Great events are not achieved for us, though it is by us that they are principally accomplished; by the arms, the sweat, the lives, of the people.

Resenting historical convulsions that disrupt and even destroy ordinary, peaceful lives, at the same time he knows that he must decide. 

What must I do? … Shall I discard all my antient [sic] principles, shall I renounce that name, that nation, which I once held so respectable? … Must I be called a parricide, a traitor, a villain; lose the esteem of all those whom I love to preserve my own; be shunned like a rattle-snake, or be pointed at like a bear? 

As much as he loves England, he also sees “the powerful attraction” of the call to revolution, and he cannot help blaming the king for pursuing a course that will guarantee the shedding of so much innocent blood. He is a man caught in the middle. 

I cannot count the multitude of orphans this war has made, nor ascertain the immensity of blood we have lost. Some have asked whether it was a crime to resist, to repel, some parts of this evil. Others have asserted, that a resistance so general makes pardon unattainable and repentance useless…. What one party calls meritorious, the other denominates flagitious [criminal]. … What can an insignificant man do in the midst of these jarring contradictions…?

It is, after all, not only coronavirus that hovers outside our doors these days. There is also the unsettling and continuing political discord and paranoia, amazingly and alarming not set aside in the midst of a life-threatening pandemic. If anything, it is exacerbated. And what one side calls necessary, another calls criminal, while millions of ordinary Americans, who want only to work and live in peace within their families and communities, are caught in the crossfire. 

What will Crevecoeur do as the clamor of strife comes nearer? Will he be a “traitor” to the king or a “traitor” to the revolution? Of course, his future then is now long past, so what was his ultimate fate and that of his family? 

Don’t look for spoilers here. If we are going to learn anything from history, it is important that we hear not only competing interpretations but also individual voices of real human beings, as they lived through and experienced those distant times. We are not that different from those colonists — or those slaves — in eighteenth-century America. As did they, we work and love and hope, feel joy and fear, and the questions we ask of ourselves and of the universe have been asked by every generation that came before us.

Understanding Takes Careful Study

Considering it is such a little book (180 pages, paperback), I spent a lot of time with The Ambiguity of the American Revolution, edited by Jack P. Green. I’ve written a bit about it already but have now finished the entire book and want to say more.

The book more than repaid the attention I gave it. An anthology published in 1968 by Harper & Row, Ambiguity was one of a series called “Interpretations of American History,” put together by series editors John Higham and Bradford Perkins. If all are as good as The Ambiguity of the American Revolution, the books as a group would constitute a very well-rounded course in American history.

Jack Greene’s volume presents changing views of the American Revolution, from contemporary accounts to 1966, through representative excerpts of evolving historical thought. In histories from the late 1700s, views divide naturally into loyalist and patriot perspectives, with patriot histories emphasizing both the conservative nature of the American Revolution and its heroic figures. By the time of the late 1800s, a group of historians known as the imperial school sought a more objective reading of the past – as Greene says, “less parochial and less nationalistic.”

Herbert Levi Osgood’s essay, “The Case for the British” (actually a review of Moses Coit Taylor’s The Literary History of the American Revolution), argues that if King George III had been “tyrannical,” Parliament was equally to blame but that it did not suit the colonists’ cause to state a case against Parliament, since there were no effective guarantees against legislative action from the home country in their colony charters. “From a legal and historical standpoint...”

The colonists stood face to face with a power, possessed of authority over them that was without legal limit, which had now resolved, if possible, to procure from them a revenue.

“The language of the early charters implied the right of the home government to tax the colonists,” so that right was nothing new, and thus when new taxes were imposed the Americans had to cite the king, not Parliament, as despotic. (The king may also have had some hopes of reversing the political trend to recapture monarchical power, but Parliament was not about to let that happen.)

During the early 20^th century, a new historical perspective emerged, as scholars sought to fit the American Revolution into the tradition of European revolutions in general, with “the same patterns of internal violence, class conflict, and political and social upheaval.” This Marxist-influenced school stressed economic interests. Arthur Meier Schlesinger writes that the American moderates, “to their dismay,” realized they were outnumbered by radicals at the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. “Events had reached a stage where the extremists in both countries [emphasis added],” Schlesinger writes, “were in control.” Only war could settle the question now.

Over and over among historians the same questions arise: Was the American Revolution peaceful or violent? Radical or conservative? Inevitable or orchestrated? How important was “equality” to the Founding Fathers? Was ours really a “revolution” or something else?

The 1950s saw a movement, at least in the United States, back to an emphasis on differences between the American Revolution and revolutions elsewhere in the world. An excerpt by Louis Hartz, from his The Liberal Tradition in America (1955), takes the position that Americans in truth rebelled against very little in their (primarily English) legal and political tradition. The Americans did not throw over religion, for example, or the idea of “natural law,” and they had little or no class consciousness in the European sense. The Americans, he writes, were largely content with their lot in life, here in “the most bourgeois country in the world.” Elsewhere, revolutions were violent, bloody affairs. Not so in America.

Here’s a fascinating little thought from Hartz that stopped me in my tracks:

American political thought ... is a veritable maze of polar contradictions, winding in and out of each other hopelessly: pragmatism and absolutism, historicism and rationalism, optimism and pessimism, materialism and idealism, individualism and conformism. But, after all, the human mind works by polar contradictions [emphasis added]; and when we have evolved an interpretation of it which leads cleanly in a single direction, we may be sure we have missed a lot.

I have not discussed each author whose work is included in Greene’s anthology, although each is worth reading, and the effect of going through the different perspectives chronologically is an education in itself.

Along with stressing the uniqueness of the American Revolution, historians of the mid-20^th century also came around full circle to a recognition of the importance of ideas, seeing our country’s founding again, as did the early patriot historians, in its most rational interpretation. Gordon Wood, of the University of Michigan, appreciated the renewed insistence on ideas but was also convinced there was more to the story and allows that ours was not a “typical” revolution: Americans were not living under “tyranny” at home, and their arguments, noteworthy for rationality and moderation, seem “peculiarly an affair of the mind.” They revolted “not to create but to maintain their freedom.” And yet.... And yet....

And yet there was all that flaming rhetoric, “so grandiose, so overdrawn.” Was it mere propaganda on the part of the revolutionaries? Wood proposes to take the ideas of the American Revolution seriously but, instead of speculating on hidden motivations, to take inflammatory rhetoric as a sign that there was something “unsettled” in the apparently peaceful, orderly American colonies.

[T]here is simply too much fanatical and millennial thinking even by the best minds that must be explained before we can characterize the Americans’ ideas as peculiarly rational and legalistic and thus view the Revolution as merely a conservative defense of constitutional liberties.

As a whole, he writes, the ideas expressed by the Americans of the 1770s form what he calls a “revolutionary syndrome,” similar to ideas in 17^th-century England and 18^th-century France:

... the same general disgust with a chaotic and corrupt world, the same anxious and angry bombast, the same excited fears of conspiracies by depraved men....

The social situations were vastly different, the modes of expression surprisingly similar, indicating

... a people caught up in a revolutionary situation, deeply alienated from the existing sources of authority and vehemently involved in a basic reconstruction of their political and social order.

But why would two such different social situations (American as contrasted with French, with Puritans in 17^th-century England, with Russia, with China) give rise to a “revolutionary situation”? Social stresses, Wood speculates, may have been much more subtle in the colonies but must certainly have been present.  From there he looks at the case of Virginia and a crisis within the ruling plantation elites, their decline “already felt if not readily apparent.” Rising anxiety over their role coincided with “mounting costs of elections and growing corruption in the soliciting of votes.”

When Americans spoke or wrote, then, of “tyranny” and “corruption” and fears for their “liberty,” their sense of oppression and injury was strong, even if misplaced. Something was going on, changes were afoot, and they feared what might come next.

Here are some lines that can perhaps shed light on our own time:

For the ideas, the rhetoric, of the Americans was never obscuring but remarkably revealing of their deepest interests and passions. What they expressed may not have been for the most part factually true, but it was always psychologically true. In this sense their rhetoric was never detached from the social and political reality....

Was there a design to “reduce them under absolute despotism”? They felt it so and feared it. They lived under liberty but were afraid of losing it. Their anxiety was real.

In each period of historical writing, across the different points of view, there are important insights to be found. It was the editor’s hope that a careful survey might lead to a new perspective that would

...identify and describe the dominant thrust of the Revolution and to understand the relationship between that thrust and the many peripheral and seemingly incongruous tendencies that existed simultaneously with it.

Perhaps if we can evaluate our nation’s beginnings without entirely dismissing any point of view, if we can allow for all the “polar contradictions” with which our minds – all our minds -- work, we can begin to return to a civil national discourse with our fellow Americans. I do not mean, however, to underestimate the difficulties. One that stands out is the increasing gap between rich and poor as the “middle” migrates ever downward.

Here are some of the things that some Americans fear -- and my (incomplete) list is intentionally jumbled rather than divided into an overly simplified “two sides,” rank-ordered table:

Some of what Americans fear:

·      falling into poverty

·      social violence

·      declining support for education

·      loss of religious freedom

·      police violence
·      religious or racial discrimination
·      foreigners

·      job loss

·      losing jobs to foreigners

·      financial collapse

·      bankruptcy

·      loss of privacy

·      losing jobs to technology

·      terrorism

·      erosion of civility

·      erosion of respect for truth

·      confiscation of guns

·      loss of health

·      degraded environment

·      loss of community

·      neighborhood conflict

·      loss of American prestige

·      loss of basic freedoms

·      government surveillance

·      corporate takeover of government

·      natural disasters

·      civil war

·      civil chaos

Unsettled times? Widespread anxiety? Even those now supposedly “in power” exhibit resentment nourished by insecurity. I think again of those “polar contradictions” that Louis Hartz found in American thought:

...pragmatism and absolutism, historicism and rationalism, optimism and pessimism, materialism and idealism, individualism and conformism...

Where are we now, I wonder? Anyone certain of being absolutely right and having all the answers is doubtless guaranteed to be missing a lot of what’s going on, to paraphrase Hartz. 

But then, there’s no way we can take a “long view” of the time in which we live. That will be the future’s task. So what is our job now, as Americans? How do you see it?