Wisdom for the New Year from Isaac and Others

My early connection with Isaac B. Werner grew from our mutual passion for reading and our common belief in the benefits to each generation from reading the wisdom of their forefathers that can be found in books.  (See "Isaac's Library," Blog Archives 2-2-2012.)

On the last day of 1870 Isaac recorded in his journal recent purchases of books, including legal maxims, history, poetry, and art, expressing his wish for the financial resources to have purchased more.  He wrote:  "But there is nothing like patience to conquer great many things & undertakings.  Whether I really increased the value of my real estate & chattles [sic] during this last year or not, I confidently feel that I enriched my mind, satisfactory to my desire--beyond my any expectations--and in my eye that looks a fortune worth possessing--'O learn thou young man...'"

At FDR's Museum and Library

When my husband and I visited Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Museum and Library, we paused to read the words he had spoken at the dedication: "...the dedication of a library is in itself an act of faith.  To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things.  It must believe in the past.  It must believe in the future.  It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."

As a reader and a writer, I am always saving quotes about books and writing.  For many years, Salmon Rushdie lived in hiding, constantly guarded by a police team devoted to protecting him from the fatwa issued against him because of words he had written.  Rushdie was required to give himself a new name to protect his identity, and even the policemen guarding him in the privacy of his various hiding places called him by that name, training themselves never to call out his real name in a moment of carelessness.  He chose as his pseudonym a combination of the names of two of his favorite authors--Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov.  His recent book, Joseph Anton, A Memoir, describes those years of isolation, when he questioned whether his words were worthy of the sacrifices it cost not only him but also his friends and family.  For a time, he questioned whether he should have censored himself, whether he should have written fiction about a subject some found offensive, whether the writing he believed truly important actually made a difference in the greater world.  For a time he thought he had lost the ability to write anything, so crippled was he by the isolation and emotional stress.  Eventually, he found his answers and wrote these words:  "This is what literature knew, had always known.  Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be.  Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language, form, and possibility, to make the world feel larger, wider, than before."  Rushdie could not stop writing about things he believed to be important, nor could he apologize for what he had written because his story offended some--not ever, and especially, not now, in "an age in which men and women were being pushed toward ever narrower definitions of themselves."         

Milton's Areopagitica

In reaching his answer, Rushdie found a quote from Milton's Areopagitica that reaffirmed his decision.  "He who destroys a good book, kills reason itself...Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties."

Thomas Jefferson is famous for his love of books, having said, "I cannot live without books."  In fact, he loved books so much that he nearly bankrupted himself buying them!  After the British burned the Capitol in the War of 1812, it was the purchase of books from Thomas Jefferson's library that formed the core of our Library of Congress.  Jefferson's belief in the necessity for American citizens to read and study in order for the nation to prosper is expressed in these words:  "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." 

Katherine Hepburn, never one to waste words in her pithy comments stated it more simply.  "What in the world would we do without our libraries?" 

Thomas Jefferson

As Isaac Werner regarded with satisfaction the books he had studied during the previous months, he reflected on the months ahead.  "These last hours of 1870, who may see the last of 1871, only 365 days, but what changes may take place in that very short time to come.  How many a now warm beating pulse may rest motionless till then, and what [future] Shakespeare may take his life in the meantime to shine some future day, an ornament to the period.  Very nearly can I say that I enter the New Year--at least--without pressing debts, about $40.00 near at hand to liquidate, while I have also just the cost in pocket to meet same, any amount square.  While that would leave me about square and strapped--but how many would feel rich at that..."  Isaac continued by enumerating books on painting, Shakespeare, history, the Bible, Don Quixote, and Gibbon's Roman Empire that he wished to buy, including in the enumeration their prices.  He concluded by admitting that "I can't hardly spare so much money at once...but will have to take it cooly and get them by degrees."  He prioritized his wish list, writing, "The following works I long to possess, but not quite as much in a hurry as some above named, but I expect in due course of time to possess them all, and arranged in my library." 

Isaac concluded his New Year's Eve ruminations with this maxim:  "God hath provided wisdom the reward of study," words reflected a century later in FDR's belief that Americans must "learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future."

With 2014 just begun, the words of these wise people, reminding us of the importance of reading, seem particularly important!

        

Isaac's Efforts to Extend a Helping Hand

Political Cartoon from the County Capital

 

 



 

 

 



The hardships of the late 1800s in agricultural regions are difficult for today's Americans to imagine.  Farmers were grinding up the grain they had put aside for the next planting season's seed, mixing it with water to feed their starving children.  Isaac Werner wrote to the presidents of the surrounding Farmers' Alliances, urging that funds be collected from members to provide assistance to their most desperate neighbors, but nearly everyone was struggling just to care for their own families and to survive long enough to raise the next year's crops.  There were few places to turn for help, although counties did have limited funds for the most desperate.  (Click on cartoon to enlarge.)

 

Groups of these desperate men organized marches, headed for Washington, D.C. to ask for help, but many of these marches failed because the participants were too weak to walk the distance and too lacking in funds to provide food for the walkers.  A wealthy man named Jacob Coxey subsidized a march, which he called the Army of the Commonweal in Christ but which newspapers generally referred to as Coxey's Army.  Because of his financial ability to provide food and organization, Coxey and a portion of his men reached the nation's capital to ask for jobs.  They were desperately poor, not lazy beggars asking for a handout.  However, they were barred from entering the capital and Coxey and another man were arrested for walking on the grass, their pleas for work essentially ignored.

 

Shovel handle

Today, most Americans take for granted the social safety nets funded by the government.  We cannot imagine a time when a young married couple would have committed suicide as she was in labor with their first child, slashing their own throats because they were starving and felt they had no place to turn.  Yet, this story was reported in the County Capital to which Isaac subscribed.  Many of our current social programs now offering the assistance this young couple did not have are rooted in the political goals of the People's Party of the 1890s.

 

During another economic period of unemployment and widespread hardship in America, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued an order which led to the creation of the Works Progress Administration, later called the Works Projects Administration.  He entrusted its specific shaping to his close adviser, Harry Hopkins, and it is considered the most ambitious undertaking of the New Deal.

 

Old WPA shovel

Recently my husband and I were cleaning out our garage, and I took the responsibility of going through my father's old tools, cleaning them and oiling the dry wooden handles and rusty metal blades.  As I applied oil to one especially dry shovel handle, I noticed something carved into the wood.  My father often marked his tools, so as not to get them mixed up when he was working with  neighbors.  I assumed that the initials were his, until I realized that the letters were actually WPA.  When I finished with the handle and began working on the metal part of the shovel, I discovered WPA engraved into the corner of the blade. 

 

Between 1935 and 1943 the WPA provided employment for millions, paying wages consistent with the region in which the jobs were offered.  Hours were limited, and workers did not get rich--but they survived.  In addition, things like roads, government buildings, conservation projects, and public health projects benefitted citizens.  In the arts, musicians, actors, artists, and writers found work through the WPA.

 

Bottom right corner of blade see WPA

It was the approach of W.W. II and the need for employees in the war effort that diminished the need for the WPA, and Congress ended the Administration in 1943.  While it helped many Americans, it was subjected to some of the same criticisms heard today regarding our present forms of government assistance.  False and exaggerated reports were circulated about the excessive waste, and one congressman called the WPA a "seedbed for communists."  Complaints were made about politics having more to do with the distribution of projects and funding allotments than the needs of citizens in those regions.  And, just as today, needy workers were often viewed as being in their situation because they were lazy.  Even Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird reflects that sort of criticism when a local loafer is described as "the only person fired from the WPA for laziness."

 

Close-up of engraved WPA

I do not know how the WPA shovel came to be among my father's tools.  In 1935 my father would have been twenty years old, and I do know that tree belts to control wind erosion of the loose sandy loam soil were planted in our area, including one just north of my family's hereditary home.  Could that have been a WPA project?  Whether my father or anyone else in his family worked for the WPA or whether the shovel I discovered ended up in his possession in some other way, I do not know.

 

What I do know is that farmers of Isaac's time who couldn't feed their families wanted work, not handouts, and the political goals of the People's Party included government work programs in their political platforms.  Many progressive programs that have been implemented over the years have their inceptions in these People's Party ideas.  Recently, jobs to improve America's aging infrastructure were suggested to help climb out of the recession at the close of the Bush administration and to improve the current economy.  What I also know is that most living Americans cannot imagine the degree of desperation that past generations suffered, without any place to turn for help.

 

Holding that old WPA shovel in my hands reminded me of all of that!