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Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site, Elverson, Pennsylvania

September 12, 2012 by Barky

Boring Built America

The National Park Service has a couple hundred small, unimposing, mundane historic sites spread all over the country. They don’t cover events of magnitude, like Pickett’s Charge or the Gold Rush or the battle of the Alamo, but they are loved by their local communities and tell important stories nonetheless. Hopewell Furnace, in rural south-central Pennsylvania, tells one such story: mundane, boring, but vital.

Hopewell was an early ironworks, a forging business operating in  the late 18th, early 19th centuries. There, you can learn how charcoal was made; how limestone was harvested; and how those two materials were combined in a blast furnace with raw ore to form iron, the metal that transformed the world. Mundane & boring? Sure. Hopewell is well-maintained, the people are pleasant, the visiting children seemed to like it, but it isn’t particularly exciting. But you know what? Boring isn’t so bad: it built and defended this nation for over 200 years now.

It shouldn’t be too great of a leap to understand that iron built America. We look at the musket-carriers of the Revolutionary War with great reverence, but if it wasn’t for places like Hopewell, there would be no iron or steel for the musket barrels, wagon wheels, and cannons. We were in the early days of being an industrial juggernaut, producing 30,000 tons a year at the beginning of hostilities. Iron built the weapons that fought off enemies, shot at brothers, and conquered new territory. But it didn’t stop there. Iron built the railroads, and the great engines that rode on them. Iron built the ocean liners that shipped our goods everywhere in the world. Iron built the buildings and skyscrapers that housed finance, engineering, science, and even religion.

Yes, it’s all very poetic. What’s not poetic is how mundane it all is. Hundreds of men crawled around in mines, breathing in noxious fumes and dust and working themselves to the bone to extract ore. Dozens more gathered wood and endured the laborious process of turning wood into charcoal. Others dug limestone from cliff faces. Then there were the oxcart drives and teamsters, hauling stuff to and fro. Awfully boring, awfully dangerous, awfully hard work, all necessary to the production of iron at Hopewell Furnace.

But that’s what built this country. Not politicians, not “captains of industry”, not wealthy elitists, nor Harvard graduates or published authors or generals or soldiers or even architects. All of those occupations are worthless without real people doing real boring, mundane, uninteresting, hard work. Even today, it’s the trades who continue to build stuff. Whether they live & work in Pennsylvania or Mexico or China, today the entire world is built by the hard working folks doing the most boring of tasks over and over and over.

Next time you’re bored, remember: boring built America. And if you’re going to do something boring & monotonous, at least make it worthwhile to someone.

[All pictures are mine and thusly copyrighted. A few more, in black & white, are here.]

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Links:

Hopewell Furnace National Historic Site

A Brief History of Iron & Steel

Pennsylvania Iron Furnace Sourcebook

Voluntary Simplicity

Google map to Hopewell Furnace

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Book Review: “FDR”, by Jean Edward Smith

July 17, 2012 by Barky

Compelling History

“Ugh, history is SOOOO boring!”

I hear ya, eighth grader! It’s not your fault. The fact is, most history writers suck. They may be brilliant historians but, by and large, they are lousy writers.

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I had my angle for my post on FDR plotted out before I wrote it. The site in question was FDR’s home, I felt the need to write about who he was rather than what he did. Yet most of my prior reading was on the latter: FDR and the Depression, FDR vs. the courts, FDR  at war, etc. There’s a lot of interesting reading there, but these isolated issues don’t give a full measure of the man. 

I knew what I needed. I needed to sit down & read a book spanning his whole life. Only that would let me understand FDR himself. But let’s be fair: writing a biography of one of history’s great figures is hard enough, but putting it in one volume while covering it well is damned near impossible. The stories of Lincoln, Eisenhower, Napolean, Gandhi, and FDR can’t adequately be covered in one volume. But I did some scrolling through Amazon’s reviews, and I found a book that had good recommendations. “FDR”, by Jean Edward Smith, might meet my need.

So how does one fit a momentous life into one volume? Well, this is my first complaint about Smith’s effort. He took a monumental, perhaps impossible, writing challenge, and wasted the entire first chapter on FDR’s family ancestry: Roosevelt’s wealthy forebears and Dutch family tree. Right off the bat, the book is as boring as the Book of Numbers! Who begat who, from wence did they come. Madness! Why bother with that stuff? It’s not really relevant. Sure, his upbringing is important (his relationship with his mother, Sarah, is crucial), but all that farfle about how his family emigrated to the U.S. and continually married their cousins? Who cares? It’s eating up valuable pages, and by doing it right up front, it’s setting a horrid tone for the book.

Then there’s Smith’s penchant to retroactively drop in characters. Out of nowhere, Smith will bring in a character who, it turns out, knew FDR since college! But wait, he already wrote about those college years.  Why didn’t he mention this person then? No, he drops him in and talks again about the past to bring us up to speed about this one guy and then gets moving along the main path again. This rubber-banding doesn’t happen too frequently (thank goodness) but when it does, it’s certainly annoying.

But here’s the worst part. Smith ends the book abruptly. “FDR died. The end.” No denouement, no nothing. Just “he’s dead.” Not even a wrap-up, or a summation, or an epilogue. Nothing but bibliography. It’s like, in the end, FDR’s life didn’t have any meaning. In reality he got a tombstone and a monument in Washington, but Jean Smith couldn’t be bothered to write another couple of paragraphs about his funeral train or the eulogy delivered by Winston Churchill. Perhaps he was as tired of writing the book as I was of reading it.

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History is A STORY. I love history, and historians love history, because it’s a fascinating story. Tell it like one! FDR’s life had all the hallmarks of a great novel: a man of privilege and bearing with a fairy-tale existence, suddenly struck with adversity. A man who learned, from that adversity, to become a leader of a troubled nation. A man who formed a powerful alliance of capitalists, monarchs, tyrants, egotists and soldiers that would go on to defeat the greatest evil of the 20th century and, when all was said and done,  would still remain as perplexed as the rest of us by that elusive thing known as love. What a story! But, sadly, told rather poorly in this case.

In this day and age, no one can go through their professional life with only one set of skills and hope for success. Doctors are learning to be business managers to succeed in their practices. Business managers are learning about databases in order to target their customers. Computer programmers are learning how to be salespeople so they can garner their next consulting gig. And historians need to learn, too. They need to learn how to write, how to craft a narrative. They need to learn about plot, and dialogue, and character development, and how to engender empathy through prose.

This is not to say historians should fabricate or embellish the story. I’m not suggesting they create Twilight: The Yalta Conference. I am suggesting they learn through their studies what narrative exists in the history that’s real, and use good writing to bring it out and make it interesting.

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Tolerance

July 2, 2012 by Barky

[Please note: this post contains strong language and extreme soapboxing. It’s also off-topic from the main theme of this blog: insights from my travels through the National Parks. Apologies to my subscribers, but I feel the need to do this.]

A Repulsive Story

The other day I heard a repulsive story. I don’t know if it’s true or an urban legend, but here it goes:

“A friend of a friend was going on vacation somewhere in the middle east. He thought it’d be funny if he put a packet of bacon in his luggage. But when they checked his luggage at the airport they found it and wouldn’t let him take it. Can you believe that shit?”

Um, WTF?? That is the stupidest thing I ever heard. Why in the world would you intentionally do something so patently offensive when traveling to a country on vacation? You would actually taunt the citizens of a country where you don’t speak the language, where you are (obviously) oblivious to their customs & culture, and where you’re (therefore) at the mercy of their generosity and goodwill? That’s like being invited to a friend’s house for dinner, walking in the front door, whipping it out and pissing on their couch. Then asking “haha, just kidding. Whatcha cooking?”

Toss on top of that the reality: that part of the world is in an immensely transformative state, one where we may not come out on top. The Crossroads of the World is at the Crossroads of History, the choices we make now can end well or can end very, very poorly. Imagine the 1979 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis x10 if you want to understand the magnitude. Read a newspaper and understand the situation. They you’ll (hopefully) understand that pulling that kind of stunt is just Ignorant (capital “I”).

Actually, in my opinion the TSA did the wrong thing. They should have happily put the bacon back in the luggage, let the dude board the plane, then make a special phone call to security at the destination airport. That asshole could then re-assess his life choices while they’re stapling electrodes to his testicles in a dank room far, far from civilization. Then the State Department can quietly put his passport documents into the shredder. Another asshole lost to the dustbin of history.

Now if this was just one of those “I heard it from a guy who knew the guy” stories, it would have ended right there. A footnote on snopes.com. But in this case, it was the storyteller who irked me. This person thought it was ridiculous for the TSA to confiscate it, that it would be funny, and after all, they just come over here to blow things up anyway.

OK, so now double WTF.

It really troubles me that people think like this. I mean, it really troubles me that AMERICANS think like this. Shouldn’t we be enlightened, at least a little bit? We think we have are the best at everything. Do we even show a little bit of insight, or thoughtfulness, or consideration, or understanding? No, we’re a bunch of arrogant, paranoid, thuggish fuckwits children.

So let’s just let this pass. There are bigots all over the place. I don’t have the strength of will to challenge them all, and my demeanor in these situations would make things far, far worse. I simply wasn’t interested in making a big stink about it. I just jotted it down in my mental notebook and turned the page.

Well, for a few days anyway.

Part Two

My mother is 78 years old and lives alone. I regularly take her out to do different things, like the movies (she loves sci-fi 🙂 ), or museums, or nature walks, or carnivals, or whatever. This past weekend, I took her on the Lady Bea, a small tour boat on the Connecticut River. It’s just an excursion, something to do, away from the TV. We’re sitting there, waiting for the boat, soaking up the sun, and a large van pulls up. About a dozen or so young women step off, most wearing hijabs. Muslims, obviously.

Now I am a human being. I have my foibles and fears. My initial, internal reaction was not positive. But I got over it without saying a word about it. I figured they were a club or something, perhaps a “women’s auxiliary” (to use an ignorant American euphemism) to a local mosque. There are Muslims living their lives in this country just fine, and they have every right to socialize wherever and whenever they want. And because the rest of us are a bunch of arrogant, paranoid, thuggish fuckwits children, it makes perfect sense they’d want to hang out with people “just like them”. It’s probably far safer and far more comfortable to do that, instead of hanging out with the rest of us who will undoubtedly try to sneak bacon into their ginger tea or something “because it’s funny”.

When we boarded the boat, it became obvious that they were tourists and not immigrants. I overheard one of their American guides explain the situation: they were students from Baghdad University, and just flew in to attend a one-month program at Smith College. Now I was intrigued, and perhaps a bit more optimistic. When an opportunity presented itself, I started to chat with their sponsor. These women were all in the country to study biological sciences in a special exchange program. It seems their country is actually trying to encourage their women to travel and learn at universities around the world.

Now this has to sink in, I think folks have to get this: an Arabic country, an Islamic country, a culture and a religion not known for kindness towards women, is actually encouraging its women to go overseas and become educated. This is outstanding! And to top it all off, they want to come here to do it. Let’s face it: as a whole, and contrary to popular belief, we did not do good things over there. Sure, we toppled their dictator, but the ensuing carnage and instability ruined their country (and I fear we have yet to see the inevitably horrific long-term consequences). Perhaps it’s not as gloomy as I think it is, perhaps there’s some hope …

Oh wait. We’re a country full of assholes who think it’s HYSTERICAL to insult, degrade, and demean those different from us, those we don’t understand, those we don’t like, or those who might share the same God as a suicide bomber or the same last name as an airplane hijacker. I suddenly felt bad for those women. I hoped they’d stay with their group and not wander on their own because we’re a society that will taunt and torment them or perhaps commit our own acts of violence & terrorism against them because “they just come over here to bomb us anyway”. I wish them well, I hope they have a good stay, and I hope they go back to Iraq and do good work.

I also hope I live long enough to see a time where the ones who are ostracized in this country are the arrogant, paranoid, thuggish fuckwits.

[Thanks for your patience. Back on topic starting next post.]

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Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site, Hyde Park, New York

June 13, 2012 by Barky

Charisma is My Dump Stat

Ever since I was a young pup, growing up in the Western Massachusetts confluence of mill towns and dairy farms, people routinely sang the praises of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. “He saved the country and the people” was the mantra. If you were a blue-collar worker, FDR was a hero. If you were a farmer, FDR was a hero. If you held degrees in the arts or sciences, FDR was a hero. His name was always spoken with reverence. “He got us out of the Great Depression”. As a kid, I never understood it, but it was taught to me from a very early age. Actually, “taught” may not even be the operative word here, it was almost genetic.

This reverent view was especially held by those who actually lived through the Depression. My grandparents – disinterested in politics otherwise – loved FDR, as did their brothers & sisters, family friends, and others of the same generation. My parents’ generation, mere tweens during the 30’s & 40’s, also spoke lovingly of the man. It’s only now, with my grandparents’ generation is 20 years dead and my parents’ rapidly disappearing, that FDR is receiving critical attention by the general public.

I find this utterly fascinating. Sure, pundits & partisans would complain about the economics of the New Deal and the court packing scandal, but FDR had to be dead 60 years before the common man started questioning his Presidency and leadership. That’s almost three generations! I can’t think of anyone short of George Washington and perhaps Thomas Jefferson who escaped such criticism for so long. The people of FDR’s time had to basically die before public opinion turned against him. Today, we decry the previous loser the day after Election Day.

How in the world does this happen? How is it even remotely possible that any leader can earn such true devotion amongst his people? His wasn’t based on fear, nor was it based on indoctrination (contrary to right-wing conspiracy theorists). The devotion FDR enjoyed was real, and true, and long-lasting. This is the real story of FDR: not the impact of his policies but the power of his charisma. Utterly fascinating!

I have many flaws. Perhaps the most striking one is my near-total lack of charisma. I’m not particularly likable, and have virtually no leadership skills. I couldn’t convince people to escape from a burning building. If I was at a picnic and implored people to not eat the botulism-tainted potato salad, a score of ambulances would be needed to cart away the doubled-over masses. To me, strong & genuine leadership qualities are as alien as an iPhone to Neanderthals. That is why I find FDR so fascinating. His charisma is akin to string theory: practically unknowable.

Here’s my own take on why Roosevelt inspired such devotion: he had the “perfect storm” of confidence, communication, competence, and empathy. His family, especially his mother, Sara, gave him a good education and instilled in him a measure of self-confidence absolutely required of a good leader. FDR was a great communicator. His speeches are the stuff of legend and they were delivered, not as oratory, but as conversation, meaning they were genuine. Was FDR competent? Sure, you could say his policies weren’t necessarily wise, but he got them done. People respect people who get things done, action is rewarded far greater than thought or bearing. And FDR did accomplish an awful lot in his 12 years as President.

So that leaves empathy. Empathy is the capacity to care about your fellow human being: to see, understand and relate to other people and their troubles. In the beginning, FDR (like most bluebloods) didn’t have much in the way of empathy. He was “upper crust”, raised in the bubble of Hudson Valley prestige and private school. He was not fit to lead the U.S., at least not in a manner to receive such a tremendous amount of public adulation. But something happened that gave him the empathy he needed to be one of the top five Presidents in history. That something? Polio. To alleviate the pain of polio (or perhaps Guillain-Barre syndrome), FDR would visit Warm Springs, Georgia. There he’d meet poor farmers and others trying to live in impoverished conditions. It’s there he learned to empathize with the common man, and where he gained the final skill required to be a strong leader.

It’s both sad and relieving that presidents like FDR are far and few between. On the one hand, we could certainly use more competence in our nation’s capitol. We are certainly sick and tired of politico-speak (the near opposite of  good communication). And empathy? If there’s a skill that’s dead in Washington, it’s empathy. That’s why our government is failing us, that’s why Congress has minute approval ratings, why our President — like the one before him — barely holds 50%, why no one trusts the courts and dissatisfaction rules the land.

But on the other hand, imagine what leaders like FDR can do. He inspired such huge devotion, devotion that lasted for decades, can you imagine what would have happened if he wasn’t an honorable man? Well, carnage, that’s what. If history has taught us anything, it’s “beware the charismatic man.” It’s the people who inspire loyalty and devotion in others who are the most dangerous.

We got lucky with FDR. We may not be so lucky with the next one.

[I did not own a camera when I visited Hyde Park. All photos are in the public domain and pulled from various sources, including those links given below].

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Links:

Home of Franklin Delano Roosevelt National Historic Site

FDR Presidential Library and Museum

FDR’s Ties to Georgia (University of Georgia site)

American Rhetoric: Top 100 Speeches

Google map to FDR’s home

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