1776 by David McCullough: Book 9 of 2022

 

I bought this book more than a year ago. A friend who teaches literature said he has read this book every couple of years for more than a decade.  He has read several books by David McCullough and 1776 is his favorite.  

I just finished a biography of Thomas Jefferson and decided now was the time to read about the most fateful year in American history.  The book is even better than my friend Ray led me to believe.  The story is riveting from end to end, and the end is the best. The drama of the battles for Trenton and Princeton kept me reading intently right to the final paragraph.  

The events of the year provide an arc that would make a good movie script.  The first battle of 1776 is the highest moment for America. The long seige of Boston ends when Washington puts a battery of cannon atop Dorchester Heights in one night without the British knowing what was happening.  In the evening the Heights are empty, in the morning nearly two dozen guns are emplaced behind revetments dragged up the hill by two thousand men.  

Within days the British are on the way to Halifax in defeat.

The triumph is followed by a long string of defeats in late summer in New York ending with the loss of Fort Washington with nearly 3,000 Americans captured. Several times in those campaigns, the British stopped just short of wiping out the American Army. As the year ended the bedraggled Americans were at a small fraction of the strength they started the year with. Lord Howe, the British commander decided to end the campaign and finish Washington off in the spring. 

The year almost ends with the Americans in total defeat. Then the night after Christmas, Washington personally led an attack in a blizzard across the Delaware River. The Americans defeated the 1,500 Hessians in Trenton, killing or capturing a thousand with five hundred fleeing. 

Along with the great drama of the story, is real insight into the character of the leaders, particularly George Washington.  The man who would become the first American President did not do everything right, be he carried himself with dignity in every situation. He was tireless and showed confidence in the worst situations.  And at the very worst times, as in the attack on Trenton, Washington was at the front of the attack and the perilous river crossing.  

The heroes of the story were young men. Washington was the old man of the Army at 44 years old.  Thomas Jefferson was 33 when the Declaration of Independence he wrote was read across the new nation.  Nathaniel Greene, one of Washington's best field commanders was also 33.  Colonel Henry Knox, the hero of the victory in Boston, was 25 when the British fled his guns.  One of his battery captains was Alexander Hamilton who was either 19 or 21 depending on when he was actually born, there is some doubt.  James Madison was 25 in 1776. John Adams who kept the Continental Congress focused on supporting the war had just turned 40.  

The founders of America were young men of great physical courage who fought for an ideal that has become a beacon of democracy to the world.   

In two years, I will re-read this book along with my friend Ray.

First eight books of 2022:

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Book 7 of 2022: Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power

 

In a famous toast at a White House dinner in honor of 49 Nobel Prize winners, President John F. Kennedy said, 

“I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.” 

I started this book last year and finished it last week.  I am reading The Federalist Papers along with this biography and have reached Federalist 24. After the insurrection on January 6 of last year, I wanted to read about the beginning of democracy in America as the end of democracy approaches.  

The journey has been delightful.  I knew much more about the Revolutionary War than about the politics that led to the nation founded after that war.  

Most importantly, I now can see how much Thomas Jefferson did to preserve our democracy at its beginning.  It seems strange from this far remove to see the strife in the first years of America.  Jefferson's arch rival in George Washington's cabinet was Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson saw the royalist sympathies of Hamilton and was worried he would lead America into either subservience to the English crown or in establishment of an American monarchy.  

At the moment of America's beginning in 1776, it was Jefferson, age 33, who wrote the first draft of the Declaration of Independence--a document so well and forcefully written it largely survived the debate and editing of the Continental Congress.  Although the most significant passage that did not survive debate was a resolution to end slavery with the founding of the new nation. Jefferson would try again after the war, but once the new Constitution was adopted in 1787, he never again made a serious effort to end slavery.  

Jefferson was the third President of the United States, following Washington and John Adams. Jefferson spent a lot of time in France and saw our relationship with France as crucial to maintaining independence.  In 1803, he knew that Napoleon was striving for dominance in Europe and would be ready part with territory in America. In the greatest land deal in the history of the world, Jefferson made the Louisiana purchase, pushing Congress hard to close the deal before the French changed their minds.  Jefferson acquired the vast territory for four cents per acre, a total of $15 million.  The United States of America immediately stretched to the Pacific Ocean. 

Jefferson was far from perfect, as are we all. Jon Meacham's book is clear on his flaws.  He wrote the words that inspired independence for America, he struggled to keep America from falling into monarchy or tyranny. He led America in a way that set it on a course to remain free, if imperfect. 

During his presidency, Jefferson did everything he could to keep the United States out of war. He believed that when a republic goes to war the forces of tyranny become more dangerous. The history of the Roman Republic said this clearly. The road to eventual tyranny was paved with wars. 

Certainly in the past half century, the line from the lies that kept us in the Vietnam War, followed by the Gulf War leaving Saddam Hussein in power, the War in Afghanistan, and the Iraq War all contributed to America electing a President ready to overthrow the government to stay in power.  

Jefferson kept the forces of monarchy from gaining control in the first years of the new American government.  I hope there is still time to keep those who want to establish a Mar-A-Lago monarchy from taking power.  Jefferson, alone at dinner in the White House, was smart enough to find a way to do that. 

First six books of 2022:

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Book 6 of 2022: Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

 

I wrote about this book when I read the first half of it late last year. I finished it and like it even more.   I wrote a post about the book when I had read just the first two chapters. It is here.

In this nearly 400-page book, Ferguson shows how in the past 500 years, Europe and the West went from a plague-infested, stagnant collection of petty warring fiefdoms to domination of the world.  

He makes the case in six chapters, each covering a major reason the West overtook and passed China and the Ottoman Empire: both dominant in the previous 500 years or more.  The chapters:

1. Competition

2. Science

3. Property

4. Medicine

5. Consumption

6. Work

Ferguson looks at the growth and change of each of these areas over the previous five centuries. The final chapter on Work begins with the importance of what is called The Protestant Work Ethic to the rise of the West.  He talks about the role religion played in the rise of the West and in the simultaneous decline of the Asian empires.   

In 1517 Martin Luther started the revolution that split the Christian world. That divide between the Catholic Churches and what came to be known as Protestant Churches led quickly to the freedom that allowed the scientific revolution. That scientific revolution led to the development of medicine. The end of Catholic Church dominance quickly led to the end of the feudal system, to more private property and to the revolutions that would eventually end hereditary monarchy.  

With the end of Church influence in commerce came the end of usury laws. Banking became legitimate. Consumption grew. The economies of the West flourished.

By contrast, China and the Muslim world became more unified and more oppressive in rule and religion. By the 19th Century, all of Asia from the Mediterranean Sea to the Pacific Ocean was under the sway of the West.  

Ferguson chronicles all of the horrors committed by European countries in the Americas and Africa.  He also makes clear how differences in religion and government made such a vast difference in the histories of North and South America.  

I like sweeping histories and this one is very good. I plan to read more of Ferguson in the coming year.  Next I will read his new book Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.

At the end of Civilization, published in 2011, Ferguson talks about the rise of China and the end of Western dominance.  Doom was published in 2021 with China further ascendant and America falling further into the morass of Trumpism.  I heard Ferguson talk about Doom on the Honestly Podcast with Bari Weiss. He definitely had some gloom to go with his doom. I am looking forward to hearing the details.

First five books of 2022:

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

A Healthy Culture Includes All of its History

The French flag waving in the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile on November 11

Few great cultures have been more self critical than French culture.  When revolution swept France in 1789, they even threw out the seven-day per week calendar. They invented the guillotine in 1791 and used it on their king two years later.  The French people analyze and criticize all of their long history and celebrate the best of French history.

Last year, I was in Paris on November 11. I walked around as close as I could to the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile. I saw French people from kids to people in their 80s watching the celebration of the victory of the France and their allies in World War I.  Napoleon commissioned the Arc in 1806. The design was completed the same year, but it would be three decades later in 1836 before it was completed.  

France has a long a long history of fighting wars at great cost in men and money.  The French celebrate their two millennia of history. The celebrate the great triumphs in World War I and many of Napoleons battles and other wars going back to the Roman Empire.  

The French, much better than America, accept all of their history. I worked for a French petrochemical company in the 1990s.  They thought American anguish over President Bill Clinton was amusing. No one in France is surprised when someone with the ego to stand in front of 300 million people and say "Elect me!" turns out to have some flaws.  

I am currently reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson along with the Federalist Papers.  I plan to read biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton later in the year.  The men who founded America were not perfect, but they were great, mostly very young men, who began a nation with liberty for some in the hope of liberty for all some day.  

Jefferson wrote that the American colonies should end of slavery in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 1787, Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers to persuade New York and New England to unite with the South, knowing it would mean a slavery compromise. They did the best they could in founding a new nation. 

We should honor our founders knowing they were not perfect, but strove to bring real equality and freedom into a world of monarchy and despotism.  

What they did began a new nation that would lead the free world for much of the 20th Century. Their ideas held until January 6, 2021, when a petulant monster attempted to steal the election and ended the 240-year tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

I was in London just before November 11. I got a poppy in London and a blue cornflower in Paris. I wore both on November 11. These little commemorative flowers grew in the devastated landscape where the war was fought. 

France and the United States 200 Years Ago

France in the person of Marquis de Lafayette and the troops he brought to Yorktown are the reason there is an America.  Without the French, America would have been defeated in Virginia and lost the war.  Coming to the aid of America added to the crushing debt France already had. That debt and its effects was one of the major causes of the French Revolution less than a decade later. 

Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and wrote a thousand pages about what he saw, praising self-government and the American spirit while unsparing in his criticism of slavery and the way we treated Native Americans.  His book was a call for change in France as well as the single greatest book written about America.  

Book 2 of 2022: Marie Curie--a graphic novel biography in middle-school-level French

(In past years I have written an essay about the books I read in the previous year.  As my list of books gets longer and my memory shorter, I decided to write about the books as I read them rather than 2000+ words at the end of the year.)

 

In November I visited the Institute Curie near the Sorbonne in Paris.  This book was on the shelf in the tiny bookstore inside the small museum.  I read kids books in French to keep some level of reading comprehension.  This graphic novel gave me a chance to practice French and to remember what I learned about the life of this remarkable scientist.  

I learned a lot about Marie Sklodowska-Curie's life because more than half the book is about her childhood in Poland and struggles to get to France to study physics.  When I read about her previously, it was about her research and life-saving work in World War One.  

After I finished the book, I looked up how many people have won Nobel Prizes:  962 laureates earning a total of 603 prizes (as of 2020).  Just 59 laureates are women and Marie Curie is the first.  

Just four laureates have received two Nobel Prizes:  

Linus Pauling won a chemistry prize and a peace prize.

John Bardeen won the Nobel twice in physics.

Frederick Sanger won two chemistry prizes.

Marie Sklodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics and in chemistry: the only person to be awarded to Nobel Prizes in two different fields.  She is extraordinary, even among the short list of multiple Nobel laureates.  

If you read French at all, the book is fun to read and not difficult.  

The summary on Goodreads:

Cette biographie de Marie Curie (1867-1934) retrace les principales étapes de son existence : son enfance en Pologne, sa scolarité studieuse et ses études supérieures, son arrivée à Paris, sa rencontre avec Pierre Curie, ses recherches sur le radium et ses découvertes sur les rayons X, l'obtention de ses prix Nobel en 1903 et 1911 et son engagement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

January 6, 2021, the End of Democracy in America

 

Trump horde ending democracy in America

From the beginning of my military service nearly 50 years ago, until the last my last day in the Army in May 2016, I attended dozens of change of command ceremonies. After the flag is passed the new and out-going commanders often make a speech.  Probably one in three of those speeches made a sincere nod to the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  

For the mostly conservative officers taking or relinquishing authority, they linked themselves to a 200-plus year American tradition--a hallmark of American exceptionalism.  

But that ended one year ago today when the 45th President sent a mob to overturn the election he just lost.  The coup d'etat was mere minutes from success.  Hundreds of Trump supporters were screaming to kill Mike Pence.  If they had managed to stop the vote, the election could have been thrown into the House of Representatives. That is the last possible place in which a disputed election can be decided according to the Constitution.  

With one vote per state, Trump would have taken the election.  

All of my adult life I had an implicit belief in progress in America: more rights for more people.  The racist rednecks would recede, I believed.  

With Trump's nomination and election, my belief cracked.  After Charlottesville it was shattered. With January 6, it was gone. The end of democracy was only a matter of when.  

America no longer has a tradition of the peaceful transfer of power.  I voted for Joe Biden and hoped normal order could be restored in America.  One year later, the democratic party is fighting about infrastructure and social programs and has done nothing to fix the electoral count act or secure voting.  The Republicans are running MAGA candidates all over the country to get control of election counting.  How much does voting really matter if the Republicans are in charge of counting.  

In 2016, 63 million Americans voted for a failed casino owner who played a business man on a game show.  In 2020, 74 million Americans watched a lying buffoon for four years and said they would like four more.  The people who claim most publicly to be followers of Jesus (Love your neighbor; Love your enemies; turn the other cheek) worship Trump much more fervently than they follow anything Christ ever said or did. I have read and re-read the New Testament. Few people who have ever lived are less like Jesus than Donald Trump.

January 6, 2021, was a dress rehearsal.  The command performance is three years away. In 2025, there will be no need for a mob to attack.  The criminals will be in the building. They will use the power entrusted to them by the Constitution to end democracy. 

The Roman poet Horace fought to preserve the Republic during the Civil War after Julius Caesar took power and was murdered.  The Republicans lost. Horace was wounded and lost everything.  When he recovered, he knew the Republic was gone, so he made peace with his circumstances and became a poet, living the best life he could. 

I hope to be like Horace, to do my best to preserve the Republic, and when that fails, to protect my family and live as well as possible. 

Civilization by Niall Ferguson

Civilization: The West and the Rest is the 10th of the 15 books 

Niall Ferguson has written between 1995 and 2021

 I love one-volume histories of great spans of time.  Historians who step out of the competitive academic environment and say, in effect, "This is how the world we live in came to be" are books I read and re-read with delight.  

My top three in this category are (in publication order)

Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium.  

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, who charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat. 

These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.

I am currently becoming a fan of Niall Ferguson. He was a guest on the "Honestly" podcast by Bari Weiss. The discussion was centered on Ferguson's latest book Doom but ranged across his long ouevre. I picked Civilization because it has a half millennial timeline form 1,500AD to the present, tracing the way western civilization came to dominate the world and why. 

The chapters are the reasons why the west dominated the rest. At the beginning of the second chapter, Science, Ferguson quotes Jesus saying "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's." Ferguson said the separation of Church and state is fundamental to Christian faith. 

It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.  

He also charts in detail the reasons China and the Ottoman Empire, both much stronger than Europe in the 1,400s, fell under European dominance by the 19th Century.  Tyrants who allowed the suppression of science and innovation are the reason both empires went from dominance to decline.  

I am barely into the second chapter and love the book.  If I get obsessed there are 14 more to go!

Thomas Jefferson and the First Draft of History

Thomas Jefferson: The Art of Power by Jon Meacham

There is only one actual version of the past, but there are endless interpretations of events that already happened.  

In the past year, when Thomas Jefferson was getting attacked for what he did wrong, and not celebrated for what he did right, I  told myself I had to learn more about the writer of the Declaration of Independence.  

Recently I read about the protesters in Prague reading Jefferson aloud in 1989 as they protested communism.  So I started reading both Jon Meacham's biography of Jefferson and The Federalist Papers. Alexander Hamilton wrote most of the weekly articles that comprise the case for the Constitution. But I thought it important to read them together to see what Hamilton thought so important about keeping the slave states in the union that he did not propose two Americas in 1787. 

I knew that Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence at just 32 years old. What I did not know was that the first statesman to make a public declaration for the abolition of slavery was Thomas Jefferson in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence.  

Jefferson wrote the first draft of that document, but it had to be approved by the Continental Congress. It was largely approved but about a quarter was struck out, including the anti-slavery passage. The original text is here.  

Before the Declaration of Independence, the divine right of kings was taken for granted. The Declaration of Independence said America would not follow the track nearly all of humanity followed for all of previous history.  

The freedom that Christianity promised and fucked up so badly in state churches began to become real in 1776.  It took nearly 200 years to extend freedom to all even in law, but unless the Trump Republicans throw away democracy and end what Jefferson began, America will continue to be the place the world looks for freedom. 

Without America and the people who risked their lives to found America, freedom would never have become a dream and a goal and a reality for large parts of the world.   

From 1776 to 2016, the trend in America was toward more freedom for more people.  Every other country in the world that in the same period was ruled, at oleast some of the time, by a monarch or a tyrant or totalitarian horror.  America had a peaceful transfer of power from Washington to Obama until the Trump broke the tradition.  No other country has ever done that.  

Jefferson started the 240-year march to more freedom for more people here in America and around the world.  

My Favorite Book of 2018

My favorite book of 2018: These Truths by Jill Lepore

My favorite book of 2018 is Jill Lepore's new book "These Truths: A History of the United States." At 960 pages, the book is so good it feels too short.

The most haunting section of the book is on pages 284-5 about the arrival of Charles Darwin's book "The Origin of Species" in America. Darwin’s book was published in 1859; just two years after the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court Case said people of African descent could never be American citizens.

Part of the reasoning in that decision was the belief that races were fundamentally different and, worse still, that all Black people were inferior, the descendants of the Ham, the bad son of Noah.

Henry David Thoreau filled six notebooks as he read The Origin of Species. For abolitionists like Thoreau, Darwin's book was proof that all people really are equal. And all genetic evidence since the discovery of the structure of the genome a century later in 1953 says the same.

Races of Homo sapiens differ very little from each other. More importantly, the definition of a species is the ability to produce fertile offspring. Every race of Homo sapiens on earth can have children with every other race. These children can have more children. We are all one species.

It goes without saying that the South rejected Darwin. Slave owners believed themselves superior to Blacks, and all other non-white races. In defeat, the spread Jim Crow laws across the South to disenfranchise Blacks.

Today, Charles Darwin remains the leading villain of anti-science Evangelicals and other fundamentalists. The Creation Museum in Kentucky links Darwin to every social problem in the last 150 years. But the truth is, Evolution, no matter how it is misunderstood and misappropriated, says we are all one species.

The Creation Museum and other Evangelical history blames Darwin for inspiring Nazis.  The irony is that Nazis, like Creationists, twist science to their own needs. But as to inspiration, Hitler was truly inspired by the Jim Crow South. Hitler did not originally plan extermination. The American South gave Hitler a blueprint for a society with separated races: a master race and inferior races.

Lepore also makes clear that keeping slavery was the cause of the Civil War. She tracks the increase in the price of slaves in the decade before the Civil War and shows that Louisiana and other slaves states wanted to re-open the slave trade to satisfy growing demand for slaves. Following the money shows that slavery was the center of the secessionist states leaving the union. States Rights was a lie told later.

Lepore also tells the story of Quaker dissenter Benjamin Lay. He was a minister during “The First Great Awakening” a religious revival in the 1730s. While the revivals roared through country, Lay preached against those who had faith experience, but kept the slaves they owned. Lay said all who kept slaves were Apostates, they were wasting their time proclaiming religious conversion. The Abolitionist movement began long before the country was founded. Preachers like Benjamin Lay led the fight against slavery that ended slavery in the North. In the South, slave owners found preachers to twist the Bible into a pro-slavery shape just for them.

The book covers all of American history from 1492 to 2017. It says very little about wars, but looks deeply at the history of women, minorities, religion and the social movements of the last 500 years. I am sure I will read it again.

Gas Explosion vs. Guns in Texas

In March 1937, 295 students and teachers died 

in a natural gas explosion in a Texas school 

When students in school die, the community, the state and the country search for and find ways to keep their kids safe--except when the kids are killed with guns.

In 1937 a Texas school exploded, killing 295 teachers and students.  Odorless natural gas was blamed for the tragedy. No one in the school could smell the leaking gas before the entire school disappeared in a huge explosion.  

Almost immediately, grieving parents clamored for an answer to keep kids safe in the future. Politicians went to gas producers and demanded they make natural gas leaks detectable. The answer was gas odorants: compounds make gas smell so bad that the slightest leak would be detectable by anyone. These sulfur and nitrogen-based compounds smell so bad that most people can detect them at concentrations of less than one part per million.  Sensitive folks can detect odorants at the parts per billion level. 

Problem solved in less than a year, not only for Texas, but for the entire nation. 

Today, 80 years later, Texas kids are killed and wounded in schools and churches and politicians from the same state that solved a huge crisis in the 1930s will do nothing in 2018.  

Politics, working together through government, can only solve a problem that we as a people want to solve. In the 1930s, the government and the people wanted to solve the problem that led to kids being killed in a natural gas explosion.  

In the case of guns, millions of people think their right to own dozens of guns, including guns designed for war, trumps the right of kids in school to live until graduation. Their guns are more important than the right of teachers to simply teach, not die as a human shield for their students. 

Texas during Jim Crow would not grant basic human rights to its non-white citizens, but could fight to protect kids in school.  But today the Lt. Governor of Texas is saying doors, not guns, caused the death and wounding of twenty kids and teachers.

America will never be great, it won't even be good, until gun rights are sane again. 
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