Past and Present

"won’t be long now it won’t be long

till earth is barren as the moon

and sapless as a mumbled bone”

    Don Marquis

I had never heard of Midwestern humorist Don Marquis until historian Ray Boomhower shared one of his poems.  The popular columnist created such characters as the Old Soak and Archy and Mehitabel.  Boomhower found a statement where Don Marquis claimed he would “look forward to a disreputable, vigorous, unhonoured, and disorderly old age” and, if called on, would “address public meetings in a vein of jocund malice.”  Alas, he died in 1937 at age 59.

 

A special issue of Bucknell’s alumni magazine was devoted to class disruptions during “Our Pandemic Spring.”  A sidebar documented previous disruptions during the Lewisburg, PA, university’s 174-year history.  For instance, classes were suspended for six weeks in 1863 as Rebel troops advanced toward Gettysburg; 36 students took part in the momentous battle. In 1918 the Spanish flu hit Pennsylvania particularly hard; classes continued with precautions, but several football games got cancelled, including one at the last minute against Penn State. Flooding of the nearby Susquehanna River in 1936, at which time students had to be rescued by canoe, caused suspension of classes and damaged residence halls and fraternity houses. In 1970 a student strike supported by faculty in protest over the invasion of Cambodia and the Kent State killings pressured the administration into cancelling classes for the week of May 4 for teach-ins and demonstrations.

Pioneer sociologist Max Weber, who died in 1920 at age 56 of complications brought on the flu, is most famous for his two-volume text “The Protestant Ethic and the ‘Spirit’ of Capitalism (1904-1905). In New York Review Peter E. Gordon wrote:

    In the United States today one often encounters the boastful claim that its citizens are the beneficiaries of a “Protestant work ethic,” as if this explained the power of American capitalism.  But Weber offered a more tragic view.  In his estimation the religiously inspired ethic of a calling had died out long ago, a casualty of the rationalization process it helped set in motion. Capitalism, Weber argued, now runs on its own, with machine-like indifference to all spiritual values.  Meanwhile, those who are caught in its mechanism are left with little more than a sense of mindless compulsion.

    Although Weber could not have anticipated the unfolding catastrophe of climate change or the environmental ravages that have attended the process of industrialization, he understood that capitalism’s unrestrained expansion across the planet could hardly be taken as a sign of social betterment or historical progress.

above, Perry and Aggie Bailey in 1910 with Flora, Maude, Oscar, and Ethel
below, Aggie holding baby, back, middle, circa 1918

“A Rural Family Near Roselawn, Indiana, 1923-1935, by Eleanor Bailey and Hettie Bailey Abbott describes the struggles of Perry and Aggie Bailey and their children, who rented a small farm without electricity, refrigeration, or air-conditioning located west of Roselawn in Lincoln Township. The couple wed in 1899 when Aggie was 17 years old.

    Coal oil lamps were used for lighting, washing done by hand. Putting food by for winter meant a lot of work in the summer. They planted a large truck patch to grow vegetables for the family and to sell in town. The cash crops were potatoes and strawberries. The potatoes had to be bugged by knocking the bugs off with a paddle or a stick into a can of old oil.  Eggs and butter were taken to Thayer once a week to trade for flour, sugar, rice and lamp oil. Perry grew and hybridized gladiolas and shipped some orders by rail.  Beans put in gunny sacks and hung up to dry. In the winter the bags were taken down and beaten with sticks so that the beans would pop out of the shells.

    When blackberries, raspberries and huckleberries were ripe, Aggie and her children would take a horse and buggy go to the woods and pick berries to can for the winter.  Canning was done without the convenience of a ready supply of hot water. Water had to be pumped, heated on the stove, the jars washed, scalded, filled and everything went back on the stove to be boiled again. Many hours went into the work of canning food for use in the winter.  Aggie’s father, Israel Cox, would butcher a hog; after the meat was prepared, he and wife Matilda would share it with other families.

    Entertainment was square dances on Saturday night. Model T’s would bring the families to a neighbor’s barn.  After a picnic lunch, younger children would be asleep before the dancing was over. Perry Bailey played the fiddle for most of the dances. He played a few times as a guest on WLS National Barn Dance in Chicago.

    During those years of Prohibition and gangsterism, John Dillinger was robbing banks and Al Capone was spending a lot of time in south Lake County, Indiana where he had a hideout at Wildwood near Schneider, Indiana. The intersection of State Routes 10 & 55, between Thayer and Roselawn, was called “Little Chicago.” At a corner gas station bootleg whiskey or homemade beer could be purchased.  Rowdy card games took place on Saturday nights. If the FBI agents were in the area, gunny sacks would be placed on the roads as a warning to bootleggers. During the Depression, many local men took jobs cutting willows out of the road ditches when State Road 10 was paved from Lake Village to the Illinois State Line.

Ray Smock wrote:

    Person, Woman, Man, Camera, TV: These five words will be part of the narrative of Donald Trump’s late stage unraveling. He bragged to Fox News medical reporter, Dr. Marc Siegel, that he aced the Montreal Cognitive Assessment test and then lied that the doctors were amazed that he was able to do what he did. In great detail, and with no embarrassment, and only pride in his personal accomplishment, the president seemed to be acting out a caricature of himself on Saturday Night Live. The president repeated the five words several times to prove he could do it. This feat proved to him, if no one else, that he was cognitive enough to be president of the United States. He is a good five-word guy. The doctors were amazed.

    Why, after watching Trump and bearing witness to his conduct for five years now, does my jaw still drop and my eyes pop out at this man’s behavior? The dark tragedy that is the Trump Administration has no bottom to it. As dark as it is, it somehow gets darker with each passing week. I thought the nation was in free fall when Trump was elected. But I underestimated how far we would fall, and, at first, I thought we had a parachute we could open into a lovely blue sky that had the word Constitution written across it in big bold letters. The Constitution would save us.

Joe Kernan

On the day of Congressman John Lewis’ funeral service attended by three former presidents (but not Trump), I learned that former Democratic governor of Indiana Joe Kernan passed away, sparking eulogies from Democrats and republicans who knew him alike.  He 1968 Notre Dame graduate piloted a plane shot down over Hanoi in May 1972 and was a POW for eleven months. He served three terms as mayor of South Bend and became governor when Frank O’Bannon died in office. Former Gary mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson recalled flying to a campaign appearance with Kernan and his joking that on one of his previous flights, he crash-landed in enemy territory.

Since I’ve been home these past months, I have been binge-watching the eight seasons of “Homeland,” starring Claire Danes as Carrie Mathison, an intrepid, bipolar CIA agent. Watching the series finale, I realized the perfect symmetry between the first episode, when an American POW appears to have been brainwashed by ISIS terrorists but overcomes what he’d been programmed to do, and denouement, after Carrie is released from eight months of captivity by the Russians. Like the series finale of “The Americans,” I found it gratifying and full of surprises.