Concern over an apparent lack of interest in history on the part of today’s youth prompted William V. Shannon, a member of the editorial board of the New York Times, to write the following essay, entitled “The Death of Time,” for his newspaper this past summer. We commend it as a thoughtful analysis of the reasons behind that trend.
It is not astonishing that today’s high school students regard history as the “most irrelevant” subject and that, according to a [recent] story, … undergraduate history enrollment at leading colleges has dropped as much as a third in recent years.
Ignorance of history and disdain for history are symptomatic of the malaise of today’s youth culture and of the larger society which nurtured it. This malaise is the logical outcome of intellectual trends which began with the onset of the modern industrial age.
History is the accumulated burden of what men have done in past time. Time has always seemed the enemy of man since each of us is conscious of his own mortality. “I spit in the face of time that has transfigured me,” Yeats wrote.
When faith in a life after death began to wane with the Middle Ages, time became much more man’s preoccupation. Yet since most people lived on farms or in rural villages, they had no choice but to order their lives by nature’s ineluctable rhythms. It takes so much time for seeds to produce a crop, for vines to bear fruit, for animals to produce their young. Nature cannot be hurried.
With the coming of industrialism, life became geared to the artificial pace of technology. At first, that merely meant that if one worked in a factory, one had to adjust oneself to the rate of the machine.
Gradually, however, the ever-accelerating inhuman pace of technology has invaded every domain of life. The values of the factory—efficiency, speed, total use of available resources—have become the values of the home and of leisure. It is as if the time-and-motion studies of the efficiency expert took up their inexorable watch in each man’s soul.
It is not simply that we refuse to accept the traditional tyranny of time, that we are impatient and unwilling to wait. We set out unconsciously to kill time off. With incredible machines and extraordinary ingenuity, we began paring away the time needed to do different things.
The consequences are now all around us. It is illegal to drive slowly on an expressway; the law commands a minimum speed. Railroads and ocean liners decline while the jet plane races overhead.
The revolution in food processing and packaging in the last fifty years is an attempt to prove that no meal, no matter how ambitious, requires time or painstaking preparation. This revolution has already produced bread that tastes like tissue paper and is twice as soft, chickens and turkeys with the flavor and texture of cellulose, and hamburgers like plastic wafers. Everything’s premixed and freeze-dried and instant. It may not taste very good, but it saves time.
Television replaced books and radio as the dominant cultural force. It is often criticized for its violence and banality. But television’s most subtle debilitating influence is that it makes audiences passive and accustoms them to expect instant gratifications. There is not the investment of mental effort and of time which a serious book or a good newspaper requires. In thirty minutes, the news is narrated and commented upon or an entertainment is acted out. Then it is over. No waiting.
The children of the television age see politics as a happening, a demonstration, a dramatic confrontation. They do not realize how much time and effort are needed to alter the character and direction of a large, mature, complex society like the United States. When a single political drive like Eugene McCarthy’s campaign in 1968 fails, they yield to despair and declare that “the system” has failed. Their despair, like the apathy of the hippy and the alienation of many middle-aged people, is a response to a world of undirected technology and unnecessary speed.
Resenting death, we murdered time. Now, time vanquished, we lie exhausted alongside our victim. Almost too late, we see that what we have slain is not time but our sense of ourselves as humans. Left alone with our machines, we know not how to wait, to prepare, to discipline and deny ourselves. Therefore, we know not the rejoicing which comes when we have reaped and consummated and brought to fulfillment, all in good time.
To reject the past is to deprive today of its meaning tomorrow. To evade the limits and significance of time is to empty life of its limits and significance. It is that meaninglessness which pervades this age of instant gratification and instant results and permanent dissatisfaction.
THE GUILT COLLECTORS
Pondering Mr. Shannon’s essay further, it occurs to us that the young may have tuned out on the study of history in some part because what we have to say about it these days keeps changing so radically and so abruptly. At least it does on the surface, in popular literature, in the movies, and on television. The mode is so destructive that heroism has become a joke, moral courage an aberration, democracy a satire. Heroes turn into villains overnight, from Custer in the film Little Big Man to Kennedy in the Pentagon Papers. The most terrible bad actor of all, in the litany of youth, is the white man, who has been transformed into a heavy out of melodrama; in his manifold sins and wickednesses a new generation bathes in a kind of orgiastic guilt.
One of the best-selling guilts of late has to do with the American Indian, whom the new historical mode has turned into something approaching sainthood. To blow the whistle on some of this nonsense there appeared before a Western History Association conference in April, 1971, the noted senior ethnologist in the Department of Anthropology of the Smithsonian, John C. Ewers, who is also one of our contributors. We are obliged to the Western Historical Quarterly for permission to reprint the following brief excerpts from his talk, “When Red and White Men Met: Frankly, I believe there is enough blame for the sorry state of the Indian”s in the American West today so that we can all have a share of it—including those Indians who are most vocal in passing the buck for their plight to the white man. Certainly the historian is in no position to say, as did President Truman, “The buck stops here.” He can trace the origins and intentions of past policies, and he can evaluate their effects. But the historian neither conceives nor implements new policies. If it is true, as the inscription on the National Archives building down the street from my office proclaims, “The Past is Prologue,” his findings, if they are known to policy makers and administrators, may be of practical value. They may help to prevent repetitions of past errors. They may even point to some aspects of past policies that have shown some promise. We have had so many Indian policies. Surely they cannot all have been one hundred percent wrong. …
With our advantage of hindsight we know that the Spaniards were not the only whites who were not always kind to the Indians. We should know also that kindness is not enough. Some of the most kindly intentioned Indian policies failed in the long run to benefit the Indians in the ways or to the extent they were intended to help them. Doubtless the missionaries and other “friends of the In dians” thought they were acting in the best interests of the Indians when they sought to remake them in the white man’s image through such mechanisms as conversion, allotment of lands, and teaching of the three Rs. …
I do not believe that Custer died for my sins. Nor do I believe that historians or anthropologists should try to expiate their sense of guilt by rewriting the history of the American West so as to portray all Indians as red knights in breechclouts, or all whites as pantalooned devils. Nor do I see the role of the historian of Indian-white relations to be that of being kind to either party in this historic confrontation. But I do think he should study this very complex theme in both breadth and depth, consulting and weighing all the sources he can find, so that he can be fair to both sides.
A PROBLEM FOR THE GREAT WHITE LAWMAKER
Speaking of Indians, Mr. Ewers’ remarks bring to mind a story told by Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona during a speech before the Western History Association in Tucson in the fall of 1968. It goes as follows: Senator Carl Hayden … was sheriff of Maricopa County before Arizona became a state. … After the federal government had firmly imposed its restrictions against polygamy upon the Mormon settlers, some nosey person observed that the Pima and Maricopa Indians living in the desert were following this practice, which also had been commonplace in Biblical times. Charges were raised against an Indian chief living several miles from Phoenix who was known to have more than one wife. Sheriff Hayden rode out to the reservation to warn the chief against the practice. He found the man resting under a cottonwood tree while his two wives were hoeing a patch of corn. Squatting in the shade with the Indian, Carl exchanged pleasantries and offered the makings of a cigarette before finally getting around to the subject of his visit.
“The Big Chief in Washington says you can’t have two wives. That is called polygamy and it’s against the law. You’ll have to get rid of one wife.”
The Indian calmly puffed his cigarette for a moment and then called out loudly for the two squaws to come in from the field. Turning to Carl, he sent the sheriff scampering back to the city by saying: “If two wives against white man’s law, you tell ’em.”
CHANGING MODES, 1914
Complaints about changing outlooks, of course, have been with us always. One rather charming one is this short preface that the once-famous American novelist, Winston Churchill, wrote in 1914 for a new edition of his excellent historical novel, Richard Carvel.
After fifteen years of reprinting, the plates of Richard Carvel have worn out. My publishers are suggesting that I write a brief introduction for the new plates. There is still, strangely enough, a demand for the book. And the question is, how to account for the demand? For Richard Carvel must plead guilty, I suppose, to the gravest of all charges in these days—of being mid-Victorian. It was first published in 1899, when mid-Victorianism was already quite out of date.
The only justification I can offer is that when I wrote it I did not know what mid-Victorianism meant. No psychology, no sociology or economics, no philosophy, no realism, idealism or pragmatism troubled my soul, or the souls of many of my fellow countrymen. Some will say, doubtless, that this was a blessed state. The subjective process had not begun with most of us. Patriotism was- patriotism. Arms and the man! Villains were villains, and not trusts. Religion was religion, and dwelt in amity beside enlightened self-interest. The course of true love, after much turning and twisting and tumbling, fell into the lake of marital bliss. Ladies had not begun to plant bombs in St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the trial-and-error method of discovering suitable husbands was not in general vogue. In short, the pursuit of happiness had not become a riot.
There were those who found the world a bad place, who had their troubles. There were those who lay helpless on beds of pain. These, alas! still exist. Some of them wrote to me, and still write. They find Richard Carvel an escape: temporary, but still an escape. They like to think that there is still some joy in the world, though they somehow have missed it, albeit that joy is only in a book of fiction. Well, strange as it may seem, I have known happy marriages in which the spark of love miraculously lived after the marriage ceremony. I would testify to this under oath. And only the other day, in this twentieth century, I met a villain. He had a good side, undoubtedly, but nobody had helped him to develop it. The church had not affected him. But I forget. I have no business, in 1914, to be using the words “good” and “bad.” We have left all that behind us. …
IN TRANSIT
The city of Philadelphia, which artist David J. Kennedy has so winningly recaptured for us in this issue (see pages 17-32), has not always been the only place where the Liberty Bell could be viewed. In mid-June of 1903, the venerable noisemaker (below), bedecked with wreaths- including one shaped like the bell itself—was put on a special railroad flat car and transported to Boston for the 128th anniversary celebration of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Lewis S. Milts of East Hartford photographed the strange cargo as it passed through Plainfield, Connecticut, obviously much admired by a surprised public.
ALL ASHORE
September 6 was a sad day for riverboat buffs; the Alexander Hamilton, the last of the handsome Hudson River sidewheelers, made her final round-trip voyage from Manhattan to Poughkeepsie, with stops at Bear Mountain and West Point. The trip ended an era that began in 1807 when Robert Fulton steered the Clermont all the way to Albany, one hundred and fifty miles upriver, in thirty-two hours. The Alexander Hamilton ordinarily made her voyages—covering the same distance—in a leisurely day-long fashion. Built at a cost of $850,000 in 1923, the Alexander Hamilton could carry as many as four thousand passengers on holi day excursions. The more-than-338-foot-long vessel has a wooden superstructure, of a type now banned as a fire hazard by a federal law we deplore. She is to be replaced by a new twin-screw, all-steel diesel-powered vessel called, in a failure of imagination, the Dayliner, after the Day Line company that operates the pitiful remnant of Hudson River service. The Dayliner will also be capable of carrying four thousand passengers on daily voyages.
As the Alexander Hamilton completed her last trip, it was still uncertain what her future would be. The vessel may end up as a restaurant at the South Street Seaport museum in lower Manhattan (see “South Street Seaport” in the October, 1969, AMERICAN HERITAGE) . A similar fate befell her sister riverboat, the Peter Stuyvesant, which is now serving as a restaurant in Boston. Two other onceproud Hudson River steamers humbled by time, the Robert Fulton and the Chauncey Depew, are now being used as a workmen’s dormitory in Nassau and as a launch in Bermuda, respectively.
On her final voyage the Alexander Hamilton carried 2,700 passengers, among them about one hundred members of the Steamboat Historical Society. As her skipper, Captain Edward M. Grady, said: “They know they will never see her like again.” 110
THE PRESIDENT’S CHAIR
This fall Harvard inaugurated its twenty-fifth president. Taking note of that event, John T. Bethell, editor of the Harvard Bulletin, decided to recount briefly the travails of the university’s presidents over the past 334 years, often, as he did so, finding familiar themes. Herewith is the amusing minihistory by Mr. Bethell (Harvard, ’54):
When Derek Curtis Bok was installed in October as Harvard University’s twentyfifth president, tradition dictated that he sit briefly on a hallowed relic known as the President’s Chair. Knurled and knotty, crafted by some anonymous artificer of Puritan England, the chair was not designed for comfort. Luckily for the presidents of Harvard, they are only required to use it during inaugurations and on Commencement Day.
Still, the chair’s stern contours may be symbolic, for fully half of Mr. Bok’s twenty-four predecessors found the Harvard presidency irksome and uncomfortable—and said so. Even the nine or ten presidents generally regarded as great or near-great had their share of misery in the office. Two of them were actually forced out of it.
Henry Dunster, whose term lasted from 1640 to 1654, gave direction to the tiny college in its first two decades. Dunster had all the attributes of greatness, but he made the mistake of ensnaring himself in religious controversy. Although it was against the law of Massachusetts to question the practice of infant baptism, Dunster opposed it. Having broken the law, he felt it necessary to resign as president of Harvard.
John Thornton Kirkland, who had the office from 1810 to 1828, was one of Harvard’s most effective and best-loved presidents. His approach to financial administration was somewhat casual, however, and it ultimately drew down the wrath of Nathaniel Bowditch, a member of one of the governing boards. When Bowditch denounced the president’s lackadaisical bookkeeping, Kirkland quickly declared his intent to retire, and did.
Edward Holyoke (1737-69) brought the President’s Chair to Harvard from England and was the first president to sit on it. On his deathbed, at eighty, he issued a warning: “If any man wishes to be humbled and mortified, let him become president of Harvard.”
Less able men, before and after Holyoke, were thoroughly humbled and mortified. Nathaniel Eaton (1637-39), master of the college even before it was called Harvard, was summarily dismissed for flogging his students too zealously. His scapegrace career terminated in an English debtors’ prison. The promising administration (1770-73) of Samuel Locke, a bachelor, was aborted by the embarrassing revelation that the president’s maidservant was with child.
Almost from the beginning, Harvard students have worked tirelessly and mercilessly at humbling their presidents. The pomposity of Leonard Hoar (1672-75) prompted students “to Travestie whatever he did and said, and aggravate every thing in his Behaviour disagreable to them, with a Design to make him Odious.” (So wrote the none-too-agreeable Cotton Mather, then a student.) Tutors resigned, and students deserted in a body. Hoar gave up the presidency and died, it is said, of a broken heart.
Benjamin Wadsworth (1725-37), a methodical administrator but a weak disciplinarian, sweated out twelve years of almost continuous disruption. Samuel Langdon (1774-80), whose chief qualification for the presidency had been his exemplary patriotism, was driven from office by protesting students. While petitioning the governing boards for his removal, the students sent a delegation to tell Langdon that “as a man of genius and knowledge we respect you; as a man of piety and virtue we venerate you; as a President we despise you.” Langdon ruefully quit his office, and the students sped the parting guest with a subscription of money.
Josiah Quincy, whom Harvard histo rian Samuel Eliot Morison calls “the most unpopular president since Hoar,” still managed to hold out for sixteen years (1829-45). His successor was the worldly Edward Everett, former ambassador to the Court of St. James’s. Everett at first shunned the presidency as beneath his dignity—even when Professor George Ticknor urged him to take it and “defend the College against the united attacks of the Orthodox and the radicals.” Everett accepted at last, but students made his life a hell. “When I was asked to come to this university, I supposed I was to be at the head of the largest and most famous institution of learning in America,” he fussed at prayers one morning, after a night of riot. “I have been disappointed. I find myself the sub-master of an ill-disciplined school.”
Everett resigned in pique after little more than two years (1846-49). He became Secretary of State under Millard Fillmore and was the orator whose bombastic, two-hour speech preceded Lincoln’s address at Gettysburg.
Jared Sparks (1849-53) was popular with students, but he soon resigned because of “a precarious state of health.” The Reverend James Walker (1853-60) was arthritic; Morison writes that he “disliked hobbling out at night to fulfill the traditional presidential duty of quelling every’Rinehart’ in the Yard.” (To later generations “Oh, Rinehart” was a rallying cry for nocturnal hanky-panky in the Harvard Yard.) Cornelius Conway FeIton (1860-62) was beloved as a teacher, but he confided to a colleague that “there is no more comparison between the pleasure of being professor and president in this college than there is between heaven and hell.”
The Reverend Thomas Hill (1862-68) laid groundwork for significant change at Harvard and is one of the university’s most underrated presidents. But when he spoke to a freshman class on the dangers of overexertion, noting that he had once sprained a testicle while gardening, Hill was hung for good with a very undignified nickname.
Over the last hundred years Harvard’s past four presidents have fared better. Charles William Eliot, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, and James Bryant Conant were remarkably scrappy and resourceful men. Nathan Marsh Pusey, who retired last June after eighteen years in office, is a man of abiding faith and singular steadfastness. A zest for combat and a deep store of inner strength may not be the only qualifications for a successful presidency at Harvard, but they seem to help.
