Say Goodbye To Our Town

Say Good Bye To Our Town

“Our Town” was the first song Iris Dement wrote, a ballad to the disappearing small towns across much of the country. America has always had a love affair with small towns, usually through the big screen eyes of Hollywood, but we’ve enough great novels written on the subject, after all, hasn’t everyone read Main Street by Sinclair Lewis? Perhaps if you’re over the age of sixty you took the time to enjoy the writing. There were other such novels about our disappearing American settings. And who could forget that Pulitzer Prize wining play by Thornton Wilder? It was also made into a movie with a very young William Holden. Never heard of it? The score for the film version was written by Aaron Copeland. Never heard of him either? Well, say goodbye to Our Town, the sun’s sinking fast.

I am not here to write about nostalgia although I will write about the past, write about our histories, notice the plural. We can go on the internet, the new media, I really don’t know what to call it except recycled videos dressed up in new clothes. Almost everybody and their brother has a presence on the internet at one place or another, all what is called social media and all featuring influencers, the new profession paid through advertisements or subscriptions. And these are all very talented individuals, just ask them. At the turn of the previous century they would have been called vaudevillians, most living in what were little more than flop houses (very, very cheap hotels with hot and cold running bedbugs), and barely making enough for a scanty meal a day. Talent then was barely worth a nickel. But I hear tell some of these social influencers make a good middle class living, just like to old timers who became successful as entertainers to larger audiences. As I said, I will write about our histories and of ‘Our Towns”, past and present. It takes an old geezer like me to do it, the young have no sense of history.

Since our schools, the exalted educational system the various teachers’ unions and the National Educational Association, and a host of other Alphabet organizations have failed to provide instruction on how ‘We” as a nation evolved I suppose I should begin with a few insights. Most immigrants to America (in the early days of the colonial system) were, for the most part, penniless and often worked as indebted servants, although the term slave would have been a better fit for most of them. The period of indentured servants was usually fixed at seven years although longer periods were not unknown and certainly not rare. If the owner of the servant complained that the servant had not lived up to the conditions that period of enslavement would be lengthened until the debt was judged paid in full. And the servant could buy the debt but this was a rarity. My own family came from Scotland in 1724 into the port of Boston and traveled as far north as Maine to settle. Other Clan members went south of Virginia and through the Cumberland Cap where they carve out their own settlements. Still others headed west through New York and into Ohio Territory. Very few European citizens ever immigrated to the Colonies unless they were desperate and still later as many decades passed few in Europe though America all that desirable.

Immigrants found the colonial cities filled but expanding, the local farmland ever expanding westward, and so most employment opportunities were of an agricultural nature. Few European who came had trades they had practiced in their home country but for many to spindle and spinning wheel were familiar enough for women while a strong back would suffice for manual labor for men. One came to build a new life in a new country that was still under construction. Now what most of our vaunted public school teachers do not know and therefore cannot teach is that for the first twenty years or so the local governments were communitarian, no, not communist, there is a difference. Sometimes we associate the Shaker movement with socialism but they really were communtarians, sorry socialists, you’re wrong. If you don’t know what it is, go look it up.

But America has always been a country established by the constant move of population from the eastern coasts ever westward. Now sure, some people took a shortcut around the horn and found themselves in either LA or San Francisco, but that’s another story. The establishment of small farms in the northeastern part of the colonies was due to soil conditions, rich soil but full of rocks, big and small, hence one of the favorite building materials for houses, barns, and fences. The mid-Atlantic states had better soil with far fewer rocks and being more southerly climate wise, could produce a wider range of crops. By the time one reached the Carolinas, the agricultural selection had changed to crops such as rice, sugar cane, indigo, cotton, and tobacco. With the vast tracts of pine forest, one could also produce pine tar and other naval stores. Georgia did some of that on its narrow coast but its red clay was planted mostly in cotton and some tobacco in the northern part of the state. From Virginia south we saw the normal crops for local food consumption although the northern and western part of the state produced large crops of corn, wheat, and oats. Virginia produced far more tobacco than cotton. At this time, there were no states where cattle production became an export to other states.

What about roads, you say. Well, what about them. If we rank countries as to how civilized they happen to be by their road systems, Italy is number one on the list thanks to their ancestors, the Romans. Those ancient people were really great at road building and managed to build many in France and a few in England. Ah, but the French understood the need for roads far better than the English. There is literally no place in England that is more than forty miles from the sea, therefore most goods traveled by boat. At one time the English and the Irish alike built canals to facilitate commercial transportation but it was the French who elevated road and canal building to an art form. A look at the map of France shows the river waterways for transportation, but to connect them one needs roads and then a few canals as well. In fact, one can travel across France in almost any direction by canal and river. The French also learned that placing trees along the sides of the roads only served to keep them from drying out after the rains, something neither us nor the English ever understood. The only roads that were paved in the early days were the streets in the center of larger cities, otherwise it was all dirt. And don’t forget the ditches by the side of the road, seems we hadn’t concerned ourselves with proper sewage removal. My god, we were a filthy place. Every residence in town had an outhouse, public houses may or may not have had such conveniences, and the farms, well, that was up to the owner. Of course some enterprising individuals would ‘build’ a road and charge a toll for its use. A piked pole or turn style was place across the entrance and would be moved aside when the toll was paid. This gave us the two different names for main thoroughfares, Turnpikes and toll roads. Often these roads through the more rural areas were little more that logs split in half and placed on the ground and covered with dirt. Newer models used thick planks instead as sawmills came into being.

Transportation was a national weakness since most longer distance transportation was done by boat. These were coastal vessels that handled both cargo and passenger making the seaports the most important, the most population congested, the most industrial (what industry there was at the time), and the most financially important of all colonial cities. Fishing ports also doubled as shipping ports. Farm produce was often carted to these ports or cargo floated down rivers and large streams for transportation to larger cities. But then came two developments that changes the accepted way of doing things. First as the need grew for greater transport capabilities there was a concurrent rise in industrialization. Coal was being mined in central and western Pennsylvania while the demand increased greatly along the seaboard. Finished woolen and cotton goods needed to be transported into the hinterlands for sale to an increasing agrarian population while that same population need to transport corn, whet, and oats to the seaboard. First came the digging of canals and then the construction of railroads. Funny things happen when you build canals and railroads, people build homes and then small towns and then even small cities next to them. Hotels, restaurants, and other businesses spring up. The building of ‘Our Town” occurs.

Me And Bobby McGee

Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose, nothing don’t mean nothing, Honey, if it ain’t free. Ah, our more modern attempt to divine the secrets of philosophy. Like Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life we all have our own idea of what philosophy is suppose to be, or so we think. We Americans are so woefully unaware there are so many different schools of philosophy, we marvel at such a thought. Well, don’t feel so ignorant on the subject, things aren’t that much different on the European continent. Oh, they’ve all heard about Descartes but few can tell you more that something about dualism or the mind body problem. But if I were to tell you that this country was founded on two competing philosophies you might look at me funny. Rather than list all the names of those many philosophers who had an effect on our founding of this great nation, almost all of them you would immediately forget, let me try to explain why we may wish to know who they were and what they tried to do.

Mankind has for eons tried making sense out of this world. It has the irritating habit of wanting to change more frequently than we’d like and it would be damn nice if it , well, explained itself. But god was the more clever one than us and left made this reality self-explanatory, or so we thought. So our first thought is “Damn fools and philosophers, god must have loved them because he made so many of them. Every civilization has had its ‘wise men’ sit around sipping a few beers and trying to make sense of what they see and hear and feel. You laugh but Plato tells us Socrates would host wine drinking parties for his philosopher friends and the rule was that when it was your turn, you would drink a bowl of wine punch and then deliver your oration. Not that no one does this anymore, I’m sure they do, but when one is a young student this seems to be a natural habit at the university.

Religion played a very strong role in the formation of our early colonies and while John Winthrop and Roger Williams were the leading thinkers of their day, their focus was on religion and how it related to the daily lives of the individuals. For the most part both held that religious tolerance was the more important value rather than trying to achieve religious homogeneity (everyone believing the same). Many on the left have asserted that the New England colonies were essentially theocracies but that was never the case. No, American philosophy could be divided into two different halves, the first being the theology of the Reformed Puritan Calvinism influenced by the Great Awakening as by the Enlightenment natural philosophy, the second being the Native American Natural Philosophy. That certainly was a mouthful, but to put it more simply in both England and the Americas religion played a very strong part in the everyday lives of most people. The beginning of what we could call the scientific revolution had begun with the likes of Newton, Descartes, Francis Bacon, John Locke, etc., and provided a counter to the heavy authority wielded by the nobility and their religious leaders.

While Europe would remain embroiled in religious conflicts, those European and English religious dissenters would choose to travel to an unknown shore for the purpose to believe and worship as they liked and, here’s the big part, grant that right to those who came after them. As a people, we have a long history of not marching to the tunes of other nations. The two leading developers of our American philosophy were Samuel Johnson who helped introduce the European enlightenment ideas into out thinking and Jonathan Edwards, who through his ideas of Christian Platonism and empiricist epistemology (the study of how we know what knowledge we know) would bring to metaphysics the fundamental category of Resistance, or what we might call an unwillingness to change for the sake of change. These two men also caused the buying of books from England written by the Scottish Enlightenment authors. And quite a few sons of men of means went to universities in Scotland and learned from many of the writers, bring back not just the libraries but the ideas of moral philosophy that guided the Scottish enlightenment.

What was this Scottish Enlightenment to which I so often allude? Simply put, it was how the Scots invented the modern world. If you were to go to Wikipedia you would see the names most mentioned with the beginning of the study of science as a real discipline with networks of many individuals working in concert for advances. The English were too busy consolidating the gains from their latest civil wars to pay much attention to science, philosophy, literature, and the like. It is said that the Irish saved Christianity in the Twelveth century, their monasteries were the greatest copiers of manuscripts in the world. The Scots opened the world to new learning in science, political science, the beginnings of economics (Adam Smith), moral philosophy (think ethics), literature, and even religious advancements in Christianity. David Hume and Thomas Reid would write on theories of conscious behavior and a great many other topics. Hume greatly influenced the German philosopher Kant, among others. This was the beginning of the school of Scottish Common Sense Realism. And it was also the time of Robert Burns, Scotland’s most widely know poet although now the first of the greats.

If one wanted to become a doctor one went to Edinburgh to study medicine, the center for the study of medicine and other scientific topic for the study of geology was just beginning. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia and came back not only an MD but a minor American Philosopher. John Dickinson of Continental Congress fame has been educated in Edinburgh as had other colonists of major note. The Scots influenced our early architecture and even our music. We would have to wait until the 19^th century Romanticism was developed for our next foray into the world of philosophy where we would develop great thinkers and writers. How many of you over the age of sixty ever read Walden Pond by Thoreau? He was a minor figure of that transcendentalist group. George Homes Howison would give rise to the school of pragmatism. Josiah Royce gave us Objective Realism. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margret Fuller and others contributed to transcendentalism, which emphasizes subjective experience and is a reaction against modernism and intellectualism (you might find reading Richard Hoffstadter – Anti-intellectualism In American Life interesting) in general and materialistic reductionist world view in particular. It assumes a Holistic belief in an ideal spiritual state that transcends the physical and empirical and this perfect state can only be attained by one’s own intuition and personal reflection. Remember that from approximately 1832 on we would see the rise in political extremism (much as we are seeing the same kind of political extremism today) that eventually led to the Civil War of 1860 – 1865 and the reconstruction period after that. Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution would make it to our shores during that war and promote Darwinism in America with the American William Graham Sumner and the Englishman Herbert Spenser promoting Social Darwinism.

So our history starts with our own interpretation of ‘Natural Rights’, based on a belief in a supreme god, from which rights are supposed to have come. I come to the firm conclusion that morality comes from the expression of religious belief else we will find ourselves held in the power of men without sufficient conscience for their actions. What are we to think of the behaviors of the likes of Bill Gates or George Soros? Men who have taken that Hippocratic oaths of physicians, the part that says, “Do no harm”, and yet they have subsumed their personal honor and integrity for material wealth and political power, what are we to make of them? When John Adams spoke of King George as being a tyrant he spoke of a man whose position in this world was one of duty and trust, to wit, an individual trusted with the lives of his subjects in his hands and the responsibility to do right by them. John Adams spoke for many men and women the truths he had learned from this new way of thinking, this Moral Philosophy that gave him a body of knowledge about how the world should be, ought to be if religion was to make any sense. If the will of God requires blind obedience then all God has is a bunch of robots, but it God has given us Natural Law, natural rights under that law, then we may exercise our own will and chose what we consider the good according to what we know. And like kings, we sometimes fail in our duty. But we have a choice, a chance to correct the error of our ways, it is the American Way.