Battling Abuses in the 1800s, A Series, #1

One of Isaac's favorite authors

Among the first things that appealed to me about Isaac was his love for books.  I have written about that in this blog before, but this series goes beyond prior posts.  A good place to start is to understand Isaac's (and the populist movement's) belief that education was essential.  

As a young druggist Isaac had read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, but when he read the book as a homesteader trying to make a living breaking sod for farming, he realized that what he had learned from reading Smith as a merchant had been interpreted differently from his reading as a struggling farmer. 

I have discovered from observing quotes posted online that words I interpreted to mean one thing are sometimes construed to mean just the opposite by someone else.  We all respond to information based on our own experience and the bias we have.  As  Carlow Ruiz Zafon wrote in The Shadows of the Wind, "Books are mirrors:  You only see in them what you already have inside you."

Isaac was a serious scholar and own this title

Another book that Isaac read was Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, the story of a wealthy young man struggling with insomnia, who is hypnotized to help him sleep, but like Rip VanWinkle, the young man awakens years later to a completely different world.  I had read the book years ago because it remains on many reading lists as a classic.  At that time, I read superficially, seeing it simply as an interesting tale about awakening in a changed society.  However, when it was originally published, people struggling to survive economically read it as a sort of guide to what could be a more equitable society if social changes were made.  The book was so popular during Isaac's time that Bellamy Clubs were formed around the world to encourage the sort of changes represented in the novel.

Edward Bellamy, author

Isaac also read Henry George, most famous for writing Progress and Poverty, which advocated Land Rents rather than taxes on land.  It would have eliminated owning land for speculation or investment, prohibiting the wealthy from acquiring and holding land to manipulate prices.  Collecting the land rents would, according to George, have been simpler than collecting taxes on production from the land, and would not have penalize successful farmers.

Farmers believed in the importance of learning, and they pooled their money to buy books.  Isaac gifted many of his books to their common library and built a cupboard at the school house where their books were stored.  I agree with Zafon that we see in books what we have inside us, but I also believe reading lets new light into our minds.  If we only read books and other material that reinforce what we already believe, we shut out the illumination of new perspectives.

Next week's blog will look at other books of that period with a different focus more aligned with urban issues.

A History of Futuristic Prophesies

Donnelly's Caesar's Column

A recent post mentioned the futuristic novel published by Ignatius Donnelly in 1890, describing a world war in 1988 in which workers, debased and paid barely enough for survival, revolt against the wealthy, who control everything and live luxuriously.  Written during the Populist Movement, Caesar's Column, used the populist's political anger against Wall Street, Railroads, and Corporations to fictionalize a world in which the power of the wealthy is carried to such excess that laborers revolt with apocalyptic  violence that destroys the entire social structure.  Caesar's Column was in Isaac Beckley Werner's library.

However, Isaac's library also included the futuristic novel of Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, published in 1880.  In contrast to Donnelly's novel, Bellamy imagines a happier world, in which socialist ideals have been implemented to share the nation's wealth in a more equitable way.  Women are regarded as equals of men, in fact, having been given the equal right to propose marriage.  The novel describes a young narrator who is hypnotized in 1887 and awakens in 2000 to a changed world, which he initially dislikes but eventually accepts as better than the old world in which he had lived.  The ideas in Bellamy's book were so popular that Bellamy Clubs to discuss and propagate those social changes were established around the world in the late 1800s, including 162 such clubs in the United States.

Edward Bellamy

Obviously, novels projecting the future are nothing new, whether they describe the violent social destruction of Donnelly or the utopian social fiction of Bellamy.  Recently I read the bold predictions for our future discussed at a conference in Europe.  I thought it would be interesting to compare and contrast some of those predictions for the future with the late 1800s when Isaac B. Werner kept his journal.

Most of the predictions are related to the growing capacity for Artificial Intelligence to assist or replace human input in many ways, some that we will find welcome and others we may find to be a frightening displacement of human intelligence and a major disruption of social traditions.

Prediction:  AI is already helping nurses in diagnosing cancer and it is 4xs more accurate.

Isaac:  Isaac died of an undiagnosed illness that I was able to identify more than a century later from his symptoms and activities described in his diary that were medically unknown at that time.

Prediction:  AI legal advice for basic legal questions now available offers 90% accuracy as compared to 70% accuracy of a sampling of human lawyers, and it is predicted that in the future only specialists in the law will remain in practice.

Isaac:  Isaac had a friendly relationship with local attorneys, but Populists generally grouped lawyers with the rich and powerful men they distrusted.

Prediction:  Traditional automobile companies will go out of business and cars will become, basically, computers on wheels.

Isaac:  Isaac first went into debt to buy a horse, implements, and a wagon, the transportation of his time.

Prediction:  Because people can either work from home or work as they commute in their quieter electric cars, people will move away from cities for more pleasant surroundings, and cities will be quieter.

Isaac:  In Isaac's time, many people homesteaded to escape crowded, unsanitary conditions in the cities.

Prediction:  Desalination of salt water will make fresh drinking water readily available in many places now without fresh water.

Isaac:  Wells on the prairie were dug by hand, and Isaac was often hired for that chore, using the wench he owned.  Because wells frequently became "crickety," (fouled by crickets) they often had to be abandoned.

Prediction:  A medical devise that works with your phone will take retina scans,, blood samples, and measure your breath to identify nearly any disease, giving access to medical analysis in remote places.

Isaac:  As a druggist in Rossville, IL before coming to Kansas, Isaac often dispensed medicine, including liquor for 'medical' purposes. 

Prediction:  3-D scanning devices on phones will allow shoes to be produced precisely for each individual's feet and printed at home.

Isaac:  At Isaac's estate sale, a man named Hainline bought all of Isaac's shoes and boots, apparently a size that fit him perfectly.

Prediction:  Robots will replace humans in fields, and a $100 robot will be available for even farmers in third-world countries.

Isaac:  In the beginning, before Isaac went into debt for a horse of his own to break more sod, he walked his fields with a hand planter, and after acquiring a horse to pull implements, he was still plowing and planting one row at a time.

Several of these predictions are already tested, and the issue is not whether they are possible, but rather, whether they will actually be implemented and when.  Predictions are nothing new, and they do not always come true.  But, it is certain that Artificial Intelligence has already changed the world and will continue to do so. 

These predictions were posted by Udo Gollub from Berlin, Germany from a summit he referenced. 

Isaac's Marriage Proposal

Ad from the local County Capital 

When the copy of Edward Bellamy's book, Looking Backward, arrived, Isaac Werner entered in his journal his enjoyment of reading about the main character, Julian West, who awakens in the year 2000, after having been put into a deep sleep in 1887 by a hypnotist.  When the fictional West makes his way up the cellar stairs of his former townhouse, he discovers a greatly changed world.  Isaac writes in his journal that he had to laugh out loud as West encountered baffling social changes, including the fact that women, rather than men, were the ones that extended marriage proposals in the year 2000.

The picture at right taken from the local paper to which Isaac subscribed (and in which his articles were frequently published), shows what a well-attired bride of Isaac's time might have chosen for her wedding.

What impressed Isaac about Bellamy's novel, however, were the descriptions of the amazing new world, with inventions such as credit cards, shopping malls, and electronic broadcasting imagined by Bellamy when the novel was published in 1888 that were incorporated into his futuristic world of 2000.

Edward Bellamy at time of  Looking Backward

Bellamy's novel was first published in Jan. 1888 by Ticknor and Company, but Houghton, Mifflin and Company bought Ticknor, and Bellamy had the opportunity to make revisions for their 2nd edition published that same year.  Most modern editions use the second version.

The novel was issued during the Gilded Age, when great disparity existed between the wealthy and workers like Isaac, whether farmers, factory workers, miners, or other laborers.  (See "Isaac and the Plutocrats," blog archives at 4-5-2012.)  The society of 2000 that Bellamy envisioned was a nation with full employment, material abundance, and a social structure described as "Nationalism," in which all citizens enjoyed benefits on a more equal basis.  Bellamy treated women as equals to men, sharing the nation's work and being paid equally.

Several places in Isaac's journal his belief in women's equality is expressed, so it was to be expected that he would have approved of Bellamy's gender equality society.  He would also have approved of Bellamy's ideas for reducing the social extremes between abundance and want, with opportunity unlimited for those with ambition.  Isaac was not alone in his appreciation for Bellamy's theories.  Across the nation people were forming Nationalist Clubs, the first one having been formed in Boston late in 1888.  Eventually there were more than 160 clubs established for the purpose of implementing Bellamy's political ideas from Looking Backward as a national reality.

Isaac spoke at one of the Farmer's Alliance meetings, sharing some of Bellamy's ideas.  Apparently some of the ladies in attendance decided to tease Isaac about his enthusiasm for Bellamy by challenging him to allow the single ladies of the neighborhood the opportunity of changing Isaac's marital status from bachelor to husband.  Their teasing was published in the County Capital, but Isaac made no mention in his journal of any proposals from his female neighbors!

NPS Photo of Belleamy's house in Chicopee, MA

A few years ago when we were in New England, I hoped to visit Bellamy's house, operated by the National Park Service, but hours were limited and I could not arrange a visit.  Many people alive today have never heard of Edward Bellamy.  Some of his ideas were absorbed into the People's Party, of which Isaac was a member, (See "Politics and Wealth in Isaac's Day," 10-18-2012 in the blog archives), and some of those were adopted by the Democrats, especially FDR's New Deal.  In his own time, Bellamy was widely known, and at the end of the 19th century, only Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had sold more copies.  Although Bellamy is not widely known today, reviewer Cecelia Tichi believes that "A century after its publication, Looking Backward holds its own as a work of contemporary relevance."  She concludes her review this way:  "His novel engages the continuously vexed relation in American culture between abundance and want, between work and leisure, between ambition and opportunity, and between occupation and identity.  The novel also remains compelling because, in a sense, it speaks to the alchemist in us.  For Americans have never abandoned the mission to transform a gilded nation into an exemplary golden one." (From her Introduction to the 1986 Penguin Classics edition.)

(Each year near Valentine's Day I post a blog having to do with Isaac Werner's flirtations.  If you are curious about Isaac and the ladies in his life, you may go to the archives to read my annual Valentine's blogs.)

Romance on the Prairie

From the County Capital

Touring a personal library is a lot like going through someone's family photo album.  Quote from "The Man Who Loved Books Too Much" by Allison Hoover Bartlett

 

Isaac B. Werner captured my heart when I discovered his passion for books.  Having spent nearly three years studying the lists of books in his journal and in the inventory from his probate records, and having acquired many of those books to read, I feel that I have toured Isaac's personal library and know a great deal about him. 

 

At Isaac's estate sale there were so many books to sell that not all of them could be auctioned individually, and some were boxed to be sold together.  Among the books sold was one titled "Marriage & Family," and knowing that, I am sure that Isaac never intended to spend his entire life as a bachelor.  Why else, when money was dear and he took such pains to select the books he could afford to buy, would his library have included a book about marriage?! 

 

With Valentine's Day at hand, I find myself thinking of the ladies in Isaac's life after he came to Kansas, trying to imagine someone to whom he might have wished to send a Valentine.  He did leave some clues, and one of the most intriguing involves a lady named Ellen.  His journal mentions receiving letters from Ellen or Elle Green, and he was obviously pleased to receive them and prompt to reply.  One day, however, there was a cryptic entry in his journal, "second refusal," and after that day there were no more mentions of Ellen.

 

Another possible candidate was neighbor Isabel Ross, to whom he referred in his journal as Mrs. Ross, using her given name only once.  Mrs. Ross had divorced her husband on the grounds that he was abusive to her and their four children, and following the divorce, she staked a homestead claim as a single woman on land adjacent to Isaac's timber claim.  Gradually, a friendship developed between them, and Isaac was especially kind to share corn husks for fuel and make sure her soddy was readied for cold weather.  If they came to care for each other romantically, Isaac never mentioned such feelings in his journal.

 

The most obvious infatuation he revealed was toward a young woman who came to St. John to deliver temperance lectures.  The first evening he heard her speak, he wrote in his journal:  "...heard Miss Hazelett deliver a first class prohibition speech with magic lantern views, a splendid political speech from a quite young lady probably 23 years of age a nice & good sensible talker."  A few days later he heard her speak again, this time a political speech when she ran as the Republican candidate for County Superintendent of Schools.  It may have been the only time he had something positive to say in his journal about a Republican candidate!  The following month he visited Dr. & Mrs. McCann, the couple with whom Miss Hazelett resided.  Isaac wrote:  "...paid a visit or made a call on Miss Blanche B. Hazelett at Dr. McCann's residence.  Some pleasant surroundings and agreeable company to talk to."  Unfortunately, Miss Hazelett lost the election and resumed traveling on the temperance lecture circuit, and a few weeks later the McCanns left St. John for a different city.

 

From the County Capital

Isaac was regarded as a "good catch" for the ladies.  After a visit to Isaac's farm, newspaper editor John Hilmes praised Isaac's farm as one of the finest in the area.  In that same issue of the paper, the local reporter described the abundant trees Isaac had cultivated and added:  "We think the rooster of the sand hills ought to take some fair damsel under his wings." 

 

The most outright teasing Isaac received followed his lecture at a Farmers' Alliance meeting about ideas from Edward Bellamy's book, "Looking Backward."  That book, still read today, was very popular with Populists who admired some of the social changes Bellamy described in his future world.  Perhaps Isaac mentioned one change--that it was socially proper in that future time for a woman to propose marriage to a man.  In the County Capital newspaper the week after Isaac's lecture, the local reporter teased that the eligible women of Isaac's community had discussed taking him up on that idea, and if he wasn't willing to agree to the propriety of a woman extending the marriage proposal to a man, they didn't want to hear any more talk from Isaac about Edward Bellamy and his future society!

 

Isaac lived and died a bachelor, never having need to use the information contained in his own copy of "Marriage & Family."  Yet, I believe he had not meant to live his life alone.  To read about Isaac's flirtations and marriage plans as a younger man, visit my Feb. 9, 2012 blog, "A Young Man's Fancy."