The call to arms. Of course, he is talking to a very sympathetic and shattered American
public viewing across the country. A joint session here tonight of members of the House.
Mr. Gebhardt, the gentleman from Michigan, Mr. Bonyer.
The President pro tempore on the part of that body, at the direction of that body, appoints
the following Senators as members of the committee on the part of the Senate to escort the President
of the United States into the House chamber. The Senator from South Dakota, Mr. Daschle.
The Senator from Nevada, Mr. Reed. The Senator from Mississippi, Mr. Lott. And the Senator
from Oklahoma, Mr. Nichols.
Will the members of the escort committee please exit through the chambers, through the lobby
door.
The Dean of the Diplomatic Corps.
Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, the Chief Justice and Associate Justices of the Supreme Court.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Mr. Speaker, the President's Cabinet.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
United States.
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Members of Congress, I have the high privilege and the distinct honor of presenting to you the President of the United States.
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Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, pro tempore, members of Congress, and fellow Americans.
In the normal course of events, presidents come to this chamber to report on the State of the Union.
Tonight, no such report is needed.
It has already been delivered by the American people.
We have seen it in the courage of passengers who rushed terrorists to save others on the ground.
Passengers like an exceptional man named Todd Beamer.
Would you please help me welcome his wife, Lisa Beamer, here tonight.
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We have seen the State of our Union in the endurance of rescuers working past exhaustion.
We have seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers in English, Hebrew, and Arabic.
We have seen the decency of a loving and giving people who have made the grief of strangers their own.
My fellow citizens, for the last nine days, the entire world has seen for itself the State of our Union, and it is strong.
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Tonight, we are our country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom.
Our grief has turned to anger and anger to resolution.
Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.
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I thank the Congress for its leadership at such an important time.
The whole of America was touched on the evening of the tragedy to see Republicans and Democrats join together on the steps of this Capitol, singing God Bless America.
And you did more than sing.
You acted by delivering $40 billion to rebuild our communities and meet the needs of our military.
Speaker Hastert, Minority Leader Gephardt, Majority Leader Daschle, and Senator Lott, I thank you for your friendship, for your leadership, and for your service to our country.
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And on behalf of the American people, I thank the world for its outpouring of support.
America will never forget the sounds of our national anthem playing at Buckingham Palace, on the streets of Paris, and at Berlin's Brandenburg Gate.
We will not forget South Korean children gathering to pray outside our embassy in Seoul, or the prayers of sympathy offered at a mosque in Cairo.
We will not forget moments of silence in days of mourning in Australia, in Africa, in Latin America.
Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own.
Dozens of Pakistanis, more than 130 Israelis, more than 250 citizens of India, men and women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico, and Japan, and hundreds of British citizens.
America has no truer friend than Great Britain.
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Once again, we are joined together in a great cause.
So honored that the British Prime Minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity with America.
Thank you for coming, friend.
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On September the 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our country.
Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years, they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941.
Americans have known the casualties of war, but not at the center of a great city on a peaceful morning.
Americans have known surprise attacks, but never before on thousands of civilians.
All of this was brought upon us in a single day.
And night fell on a different world, a world where freedom itself is under attack.
Americans have many questions tonight.
Americans are asking, who attacked our country?
The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as Al Qaeda.
They are some of the murderers indicted for bombing American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, and responsible for bombing the USS Cole.
Al Qaeda is to terror, but the Mafia is to crime.
But its goal is not making money.
Its goal is remaking the world and imposing its radical beliefs on people everywhere.
The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics.
A fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teaching of Islam.
The terrorist directive commands them to kill Christians and Jews, to kill all Americans, and make no distinctions among military and civilians, including women and children.
This group and its leader, a person named Osama bin Laden, are linked to many other organizations in different countries, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Islamic movement of Uzbekistan.
There are thousands of these terrorists in more than 60 countries.
They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods, and brought to camps in places like Afghanistan, where they are trained in the tactics of terror.
They are sent back to their homes, or sent to hide in countries around the world to plot evil and destruction.
The leadership of al-Qaeda has great influence in Afghanistan and supports the Taliban regime in controlling most of that country.
In Afghanistan, we see al-Qaeda's vision for the world.
Afghanistan's people have been brutalized.
Many are starving, and many have fled.
Women are not allowed to attend school.
You can be jailed for owning a television.
Religion can be practiced only as their leaders dictate.
A man can be jailed in Afghanistan if his beard is not long enough.
The United States respects the people of Afghanistan.
After all, we are currently its largest source of humanitarian aid, but we condemn the Taliban regime.
It is not only repressing its own people, it is threatening people everywhere by sponsoring and sheltering and supplying terrorists.
By aiding and abetting murder, the Taliban regime is committing murder.
And tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands on the Taliban.
Deliver to United States authorities all the leaders of al-Qaeda who hide in your land.
Release all foreign nationals, including American citizens you have unjustly imprisoned.
Protect foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers in your country.
Close immediately and permanently every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan.
And hand over every terrorist and every person in their support structure to appropriate authorities.
Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps so we can make sure they are no longer operating.
These demands are not open to negotiation or discussion.
The Taliban must act and act immediately.
They will hand over the terrorists, where they will share in their fate.
I also want to speak tonight directly to Muslims throughout the world.
We respect your faith.
It is practiced freely by many millions of Americans and by millions more in countries that America counts as friends.
Its teachings are good and peaceful.
And those who commit evil in the name of Allah blaspheme the name of Allah.
The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying in effect to hijack Islam itself.
The enemy of America is not our many Muslim friends.
It is not our many Arab friends.
Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists and every government that supports them.
Our war on terror begins with Al-Qaeda, but it does not end there.
It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.
Americans are asking why do they hate us?
They hate what they see right here in this chamber, a democratically elected government.
Their leaders are self-appointed.
They hate our freedoms, our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.
They want to overthrow existing governments in many Muslim countries such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.
They want to drive Israel out of the Middle East.
They want to drive Christians and Jews out of vast regions of Asia and Africa.
These terrorists kill not merely to end lives, but to disrupt and end a way of life.
With every atrocity, they hope that America grows fearful, retreating from the world and forsaking our friends.
They stand against us because we stand in their way.
We're not deceived by their pretenses to piety.
We have seen their kind before.
They are the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century.
By sacrificing human life to serve their radical visions, by abandoning every value except the will to power,
they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.
And they will follow that path all the way to where it ends, in history's unmarked grave of discarded lies.
Americans are asking, how will we fight and win this war?
We will direct every resource at our command, every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence,
every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war
to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.
Now, this war will not be like the war against Iraq a decade ago,
with the decisive liberation of territory and a swift conclusion.
It will not look like the air war above Kosovo two years ago, where no ground troops were used
and not a single American was lost in combat.
Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes.
Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen.
It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success.
We will starve terrorists to funding, turn them one against another,
drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.
And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism.
Every nation in every region now has a decision to make.
Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists.
From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism
will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
Our nation has been put on notice. We are not immune from attack.
We will take defensive measures against terrorism to protect Americans.
Today, dozens of federal departments and agencies, as well as state and local governments,
have responsibilities affecting homeland security.
These efforts must be coordinated at the highest level.
So tonight I announce the creation of a cabinet-level position reporting directly to me,
the Office of Homeland Security.
And tonight I also announce a distinguished American to lead this effort,
to strengthen American security, a military veteran, an effective governor,
a true patriot, a trusted friend, Pennsylvania's Tom Ridge.
He will lead, oversee, and coordinate a comprehensive national strategy
to safeguard our country against terrorism and respond to any attacks that may come.
These measures are essential.
The only way to defeat terrorism as a threat to our way of life is to stop it,
eliminate it, and destroy it where it grows.
Many will be involved in this effort, from FBI agents to intelligence operatives
to the reservists we have called to active duty.
All deserve our thanks and all have our prayers.
And tonight, a few miles from the damaged Pentagon,
I have a message for our military.
Be ready.
I've called the armed forces to alert, and there is a reason.
The hour is coming when America will act, and you will make us proud.
This is not, however, just America's fight.
And what is at stake is not just America's freedom.
This is the world's fight.
This is civilization's fight.
This is the fight of all who believe in progress and pluralism, tolerance, and freedom.
We ask every nation to join us.
We will ask and we will need the help of police forces, intelligence service,
and banking systems around the world.
The United States is grateful that many nations and many international organizations
have already responded with sympathy and with support.
Nations from Latin America to Asia to Africa to Europe to the Islamic world.
Perhaps the NATO charter reflects best the attitude of the world.
An attack on one is an attack on all.
The civilized world is rallying to America's side.
They understand that if this terror goes unpunished, their own cities,
their own citizens may be next.
Terror unanswered cannot only bring down buildings.
It can threaten the stability of legitimate governments.
And you know what?
We're not going to allow it.
Americans are asking what is expected of us.
I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.
I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute,
even in the face of a continuing threat.
I ask you to uphold the values of America and remember why so many have come here.
We're in a fight for our principles, and our first responsibility is to live by them.
No one should be singled out for unfair treatment or unkind words
because of their ethnic background or religious faith.
And I ask you to continue to support the victims of this tragedy with your contributions.
Those who want to give can go to a central source of information,
libertyunites.org, to find the names of groups providing direct help in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.
The thousands of FBI agents who are now at work in this investigation may need your cooperation,
and I ask you to give it.
I ask for your patience with the delays and inconveniences that may accompany tighter security,
and for your patience in what will be a long struggle.
I ask your continued participation and confidence in the American economy.
Terrorists attacked a symbol of American prosperity.
They did not touch its source.
America is successful because of the hard work and creativity and enterprise of our people.
These were the true strengths of our economy before September 11th,
and they are our strengths today.
And finally, please continue praying for the victims of terror and their families,
for those in uniform, and for our great country.
Prayer has comforted us in sorrow and will help strengthen us for the journey ahead.
Tonight I thank my fellow Americans for what you have already done and for what you will do.
And ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, I thank you, their representatives,
for what you have already done and for what we will do together.
Tonight we face new and sudden national challenges.
We will come together to improve air safety,
to dramatically expand the number of air marshals on domestic flights,
and take new measures to prevent hijacking.
We will come together to promote stability and keep our airlines flying
with direct assistance during this emergency.
We will come together to give law enforcement the additional tools it needs
to track down terror here at home.
We will come together to strengthen our intelligence capabilities
to know the plans of terrorists before they act and to find them before they strike.
We will come together to take active steps that strengthen America's economy
and put our people back to work.
Tonight we welcome two leaders who embody the extraordinary spirit of all New Yorkers,
Governor George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.
As a symbol of America's resolve, my administration will work with Congress
and these two leaders to show the world that we will rebuild New York City.
After all that has just passed, all the lives taken and all the possibilities
and hopes that died with them, it is natural to wonder if America's future is one of fear.
Some speak of an age of terror.
I know there are struggles ahead and dangers to face,
but this country will define our times, not be defined by them.
As long as the United States of America is determined and strong,
this will not be an age of terror.
This will be an age of liberty here and across the world.
Great harm has been done to us.
We have suffered great loss, and in our grief and anger,
we have found our mission and our moment.
Freedom and fear are at war.
The advance of human freedom, the great achievement of our time,
and the great hope of every time, now depends on us.
Today, this generation will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future.
We will rally the world to this cause by our efforts, by our courage.
We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail.
It is my hope that in the months and years ahead, life will return almost to normal.
We'll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good.
Even grief recedes with time and grace, but our resolve must not pass.
Each of us will remember what happened that day and to whom it happened.
We'll remember the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing.
Some will remember an image of a fire or a story of rescue.
Some will carry memories of a face and a voice gone forever.
And I will carry this.
It is the police shield of a man named George Howard,
who died at the World Trade Center trying to save others.
It was given to me by his mom, Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son.
It is my reminder of lives that ended and a task that does not end.
I will not forget the wound to our country and those who inflicted it.
I will not yield. I will not rest.
I will not relent in waging this struggle for freedom and security for the American people.
The course of this conflict is not known, yet its outcome is certain.
Freedom and fear, justice and cruelty have always been at war,
and we know that God is not neutral between them.
Fellow citizens,
fellow citizens, we'll meet violence with patient justice,
assured of the rightness of our cause and confident of the victories to come.
In all that lies before us, may God grant us wisdom
and may he watch over the United States of America.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Chair declares the joint session of the two houses now dissolved.
Pursuant to clause 12 of rule one, the chair declares the house in recess subject to the call of the chair.
Thank you.
And that concludes our live coverage of President Bush's address to the nation.
In about two minutes from the Senate side of the Capitol building,
the leaders of the Senate, both Democrat and Republican,
will be making a brief address to the nation to add their support to the President's remark.
And following that, we are going to be opening up our telephone lines, as we do all the time here on C-SPAN,
to get your reaction to what the President had to say tonight.
You see the phone numbers on the bottom of the screen beneath that live picture of the United States Capitol building.
Earlier today, about 40 members of the Senate, Republicans and Democrats, visited Ground Zero in New York.
It is impossible to describe the utter devastation and the feeling you get standing among the ruins.
I always thought that seeing the Twin Towers rising above New York was an inspiring sight.
But today we saw something even more inspiring.
We met some of the firefighters, the rescue workers, who continue to comb through the wreckage.
We talked to survivors and family members.
We saw men and women going back to work, children going back to school,
people going on about their daily lives with incredible courage, refusing to be cowed by terror.
If the people of New York and New Jersey can do that, surely the rest of us can do what President Bush is asking of us.
Tonight, the President asked for our unity.
He asked for our support.
He asked for our patience.
We want President Bush to know.
We want the world to know that he can depend on us.
We will take up the President's initiatives with speed.
We may encounter differences of opinion along the way, but there is no difference in our aim.
We are resolved to work together, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.
We will do whatever is needed to protect our nation.
Our mission is more urgent.
I commend the President for the work he has done in rallying the world.
We are grateful to the many nations who are standing with us tonight.
Together, we will defeat this most insidious of threats.
We will be fierce in the defense of our ideals.
We will not sacrifice the freedoms that have sustained this nation for more than two centuries.
We must not punish entire groups for the actions of a misguided few.
Just as we are united tonight against terrorism, so too must we be united against the acts of hatred
towards innocent Arab Americans and Muslims and all of those who have come to our country seeking opportunity.
Hardship and heartbreak are not new to us.
We Americans have endured great challenge and struggle, yet none has ever broken us.
Our greatness in times of trouble is what distinguishes us as a nation.
Tonight, the President has called us again to greatness, and tonight we answer that call.
Today, when the President of the United States addresses a joint session of Congress,
the leaders of the opposition party give a statement, and they respond.
Tonight, there is no opposition party.
We stand here united, not as Republicans and Democrats,
not as Southerners or Westerners or Midwesterners or Easterners, but as Americans.
I guess there are those in the world that thought this would pull us apart,
start blaming each other, and we wouldn't come to each other's aid.
Well, we saw it in New York City today.
Firemen and policemen and volunteers, men and women from all over America and other countries were there together,
working to recover from this horrible, horrible incident.
There's been a lot of sorrow, a lot of tears.
We've all grieved together because it was not New Yorkers or Pennsylvanians or Virginians
or military men and women or these volunteers that lost their lives.
It was all of us. We've all suffered.
But now we must pull together.
The Congress has already started to acting in concert with this President of the United States.
Tonight, he gave us a call to action.
He said all the right things.
He reached out to those that are grieving.
He gave a challenge to us here in America.
He asked for our patience, and he told those that would heap terror on America and the world
that we will not stand for that.
We will fight for freedom here at home and all around the world.
Some people say maybe we're waving the red, white, and blue and the flag too much on our cars
and on our homes and in our businesses and in our schools.
It's not just about the flag.
It's about those that died.
It's about those that are going to fight for freedom and to stop this reign of terror.
It's one way we can embrace those that have gone and those that are going to do the right thing.
It's not a trite phrase, and I've heard it all over America this last week.
We are together, and we ask that God bless America.
Senator Lott and Dashiell, we're speaking from the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol building
in a room that takes the name of one of the great Senate leaders of the 20th century, Mike Mansfield.
And right now you're watching the presidential motorcade making its way across the Capitol Plaza
and then down Pennsylvania Avenue back to the White House.
Our telephone lines are open, and we are welcoming your reaction to the President's speech tonight,
beginning with Richmond, Virginia.
So many more foreign nationals doing business in the World Trade Centers than we knew at the time.
And of course, when the news of the World Trade Center spread, so many people were drawn towards the site,
some inexplicably. They couldn't stay at home.
Among them, an amateur photographer named Alex Camacho, who never goes anywhere without his small camera.
And as he headed downtown, he said he didn't know what to do, didn't see anyone to help.
So he did what he always does. He took pictures. And here's what he found.
Each block that I got closer and closer to the site, it just got worse and worse.
Instead of a window that's smashed, now it's a building that's half gone.
I think the worst was just seeing all of the rescue vehicles that were all destroyed.
And I knew that the people that drove these vehicles were inside those towers.
I remember hearing the firemen saying, they found bodies.
There wasn't anything I could do. The only thing I could do was just take pictures.
Total number of survivors found in the World Trade Center rubble, five.
Number of survivors found in the last eight days, zero.
America fights back. We'll continue in a moment.
...the Congress and the high privilege...
...to help me welcome his wife, Lisa Beamer, here tonight.
...and the people that helped him.
We will not forget South Korean children gathering to pray outside our embassy in Seoul,
or the prayers of sympathy offered at a mosque in Cairo.
We will not forget moments of silence in days of mourning in Australia, in Africa, in Latin America.
Nor will we forget the citizens of 80 other nations who died with our own.
Dozens of Pakistanis, more than 130 Israelis, more than 250 citizens of India,
more than women from El Salvador, Iran, Mexico and Japan, and hundreds of British citizens.
America has no truer friend than Great Britain.
Once again, we are joined together in a great cause,
so honored that British Prime Minister has crossed an ocean to show his unity with America.
Thank you for coming, friend.
...name of their great chief.
And Cooper appropriated that and applied it to a Mohican Indian,
which was a different but related group that lived between the Hudson Valley and the Connecticut Valley.
He just liked the name, and that's why he used it.
The second part of the question has to do with whether or not the Iroquois had subjugated the Lenin-Lenape,
which is the preferred name of the Delaware Indians.
And certainly historians agree with the Lenin-Lenape that this has been misunderstood,
was not a subordination, but instead was creating a diplomatic role for the Lenin-Lenape,
a role that they played very well.
I want to mention before we run out of time in this particular segment that Dr. Vincent,
with whom I am in the Cooper Room at the Fenimore Art Museum, is a graduate of Harvard University.
Also from Cambridge University, he was a graduate of the Winter Tour Program in Early American Culture,
where he has a master's, and also the University of Delaware, where he has a Ph.D.
Dr. Vincent, we've got some pretty interesting documents here that say something about America in the late 1700s.
And what are we looking at?
These are documents signed by William Cooper. You can see his name here and here.
That's the father we're talking about.
This is the father. This is the great land speculator who created a great fortune
at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century.
And there's another document there asking the New York State Legislature permission
to dam up the Susquehanna to improve trade for the village of Cooperstown.
And as we take the next call, we'll take a look at the portrait of William Cooper,
the father of James Fenimore Cooper.
And this next call is from down the road, Cooperstown, New York. Go ahead.
Hi. My question is for Alan Taylor.
And first of all, I'd like to say what a great accomplishment Alan Taylor's work is, William Cooperstown.
I was just wondering if there is a relationship between Abner Doubleday, James Fenimore Cooper, and Elihu Finney.
I understood that Elihu Finney was one of the publishers.
And I was just wondering if they all played baseball together.
You know what, Dr. Taylor, I was wondering if we could get through two and a half hours
without mentioning baseball, and I guess it didn't happen.
Of course not. We're on Cooperstown.
Well, I think it's safe to say they never played baseball together.
I'm sorry to rain on the parade, but there's really no evidence that Abner Doubleday
came to Cooperstown and played baseball or invented baseball here.
And it's clear from James Fenimore Cooper's novel Home is Found
that he had really no use for the sister game to baseball, town ball,
as there is a scene in which Edward Effingham chases ball-playing boys away from his lawn as a bunch of hooligans.
So perhaps in his youth James Fenimore Cooper had played town ball.
But by the time he's an adult, he certainly wasn't going to get out there and play with Abner Doubleday,
which is a good thing because Abner Doubleday didn't come to Cooperstown to play baseball.
Dr. Vincent, before the next call, what is this that we're looking at?
This is one of two screens put together by the Cooper family.
It's about the life of Fenimore Cooper and his daughters.
It's got a series of prints on it, images that they like,
but they've also put some of the family manuscripts that are very interesting.
For example, here is the first letter that he wrote at the age of 11 that survived,
a letter to his father with typical 11-year-old concerns of two lambs that are dying
and a fellow who had his feet frozen.
But there's also a letter from George Washington on the left to his father with his beautiful rolling script.
Here is a letter to James Fenimore Cooper from Sir Walter Scott.
Cooper was sometimes called the American Scott, so it's a nice connection there.
And then up at the top is a letter from Lafayette.
Let's take the last call in this half of our segment on James Fenimore Cooper from Grand Junction, Colorado.
Go ahead, please. You're on the air.
Hi. I just wanted to ask a question.
How much of an influence did Sir Walter Scott have on James Fenimore Cooper writing on the spy and some of Lass of the Mohicans?
Dr. Taylor.
Oh, an enormous influence.
Previous question asked about competitors, and certainly Sir Walter Scott is the great competitor.
And his novel, Ivanhoe, is something that's especially influential on James Fenimore Cooper.
And you can see in Cooper's attempt to find ruins in the American landscape and to find drama in the colonial wars
that he is trying to claim for Americans that they do have a historic landscape and one that can lend itself to literature,
which is something that had been challenged by British critics who had suggested that America didn't have the ingredients necessary to have a great national literature.
Dr. Vincent, thanks for showing us the Cooper Room.
You're very welcome. It's a pleasure.
Thanks for all the other help you've been to us today.
You're very welcome.
We're going to continue, but we're going to take a bit of a break.
But coming up will be more with Alan Taylor.
We'll have history professor Barbara Mann to join us to talk about the legacy of James Fenimore Cooper and two descendants of the author.
We'll also be reading some of those emails that we've been taking for the last hour or so.
And as we go into this break, we wanted to show you more about the Fenimore Art Museum in which we're standing right now.
We talked to the curator to show you some of the other exhibits that are located here.
We'll be back in about ten minutes.
Just off the main foyer, we have a room dedicated to James Fenimore Cooper.
If you go in another direction, you come to our collection of American genre paintings.
These are scenes done by artists who were contemporaries of Cooper,
and they were painting mainly for patrons who felt in the mid-19th century the need to look back to an earlier, simpler time in American life.
These patrons and these artists who often lived in cities wanted and depicted scenes of American rural life as it had existed a generation or two before.
And so when you look at a genre painting that was done in the 1840s, it often includes a nostalgic look at American farm life maybe in the late 18th or early 19th century.
And we have some really premier examples of this type of art.
Tell me about Our Backyard.
Our Backyard is an exhibition that showcases our collection of American folk art.
We have one of the premier collections of this material in the United States.
And American folk art includes works of art by self-taught artists who worked in their own style and often expressed the values of their communities and their families.
They were not taught in any formal art school.
And so it includes carvers of cigar store figures.
It includes schoolgirl artists.
It includes traveling portrait painters.
And we have one of the premier collections of this work from the 18th century right up to the present.
You have some Indian American or Native American artwork.
Can you talk in general about that?
We are very fortunate that in 1993, Eugene and Claire Thaw promised their premier collection of American Indian art to the Association.
And in return for that act of generosity, the Association built a new wing and agreed to house the collection in a magnificent gallery for it to be permanently displayed.
The collection includes 700 objects, which are fantastic singular works of art from all across North America dating from prehistory to the present.
And as you come into the gallery, you can walk to the center of the gallery and you can look in every direction and see works of art from all over North America.
The gallery is arranged geographically.
And so if you look in one direction, you'll see all the American Indian cultures from the plains.
You look in another direction, you'll see all the cultures from the Northwest Coast and then the woodlands and then the American Southwest.
And so in this gallery, you get a sense of how American Indian culture and American Indian art is intimately tied to the geography and the environment from which these cultures come.
And you see works that are made from feathers, quills, beadwork, hides, just incredible craftsmanship, ceramics, wood carving.
And you get a sense that these works of art are as valid as works of art as any in Western culture.
What this collection has done is it's taken the notion of American Indian art and it's elevated it to a position equal to that of any artist that you find in American painting, in European painting.
It really is a progressive notion that these artists are worthy of consideration as very, very important artists.
What are your thoughts on James Fenimore Cooper and his impact on American history?
James Fenimore Cooper had a tremendous impact on American history.
He was a great man of letters. He helped define what is American.
He established the American natural landscape as central to that definition.
And he saw in indigenous Americans a heroism that had not previously been seen.
And so in our culture today, when we more and more begin to appreciate the contributions of cultures that traditionally have been marginal in American culture,
we can thank a man like James Fenimore Cooper for creating the intellectual climate to make that possible.
He really was one of the first to see Native Americans in a positive light and to show us that our country had a heroic past equal to that of Europe.
And so he's very important in the definition of what is American and who is American and who contributes to the notion of what it means to be an American person,
American citizen of this country and part of this culture.
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We're on the shore of Otsego Lake in Cooperstown, New York, north of New York City by a hundred
miles or so at the Fenimore Art Museum as we continue with our discussion of James Fenimore
Cooper, one of the writers in our American Writers Series that goes through the rest
of this year.
This is the place where James Fenimore Cooper had a house where now there's a museum that
features much of his life.
And we're devoting this day to his writings with an emphasis on the last of the Mohegans
and here to help us do that is Barbara Mann.
She's a noted scholar of Native American studies at the University of Toledo.
Dr. Mann, thanks for being here today.
What is the, forget the literary for the moment, what about the historical?
Was James Fenimore Cooper accurate, for example, in his depiction of the American Indians?
That's a complicated question.
He was accurate in as much as he followed the lead of John Hickwilder who was his major
source for the Native content of his novels and where Hickwilder made errors, Cooper picked
up and continued those errors.
He was actually more accurate in picking up themes of Native American political discussion
than he's been given credit for largely because critics simply don't know about Native American
cultures and history and therefore they miss the context that Cooper was setting up.
In 1826 when the last of the Mohegans came out, how was it received in terms of its depiction
of the Indians at the time and how did Indians think about it?
Well Native Americans were not asked to think about it at that time.
It's only been the last part of the 20th century that Native Americans have been invited to
review any of the things that have been said all of that time.
Native Americans have a spectrum of opinions, same as anybody else.
There's no monolithic approach or attitude concerning anyone's set of things.
In my opinion, Cooper was actually on the left, the liberal end of the political spectrum
of his day.
He was one of the people who was depicting Natives in a kindly fashion.
The mere fact that he has Chinchachuk as an absolute equal of Nati Bumpo throughout the
tales, the mere fact that Native Americans are regularly shown to be human beings with
motive and with appreciation and intelligence, including such characters as Magwa who's been
giving tremendous amount of political motive in that novel that has not been explored because
people do not know Native American analysis, for example slavery, a very important analysis.
Cooper knew about it because he'd read Hickwilder and he understood what Hickwilder was saying.
Critics tend not to know anything about it so they tend to portray Magwa as a much more
violent and vicious idiosyncratic man than he was.
He was actually operating out of a strong political analysis of colonialism.
Well I described our guest as a noted scholar of Native American studies and this is one
of the reasons.
This is a book by her called Iroquois and Women and what's the subtitle?
Dr. Ouises.
It means woman acting in her official capacity.
The women of the Iroquois League, especially all the women of the East, but especially
in the League, the women are extremely powerful in the economic, political, social and religious
spheres.
She's also co-editor of the Encyclopedia of the Iroquois and Dr. Mann is of Iroquois
descent herself from the Ohio Seneca.
Alright.
Our phone lines are open.
We continue to take your calls.
We've got some emails we want to read as we spend the rest of our time not only with Barbara
Mann but also with Dr. Alan Taylor.
Let me read for you Dr. Mann this email that we got from Richard Weiser.
He says, was Natty Bumpo based at all on Conrad Weiser, the ambassador of the colony of Pennsylvania
to the Iroquois Nation?
He's quoted in one of the writings usually included in Ben Franklin's collected works.
He came to America in 1709 when he was about 14.
His father had him live with the Mohawk Indians and so forth.
From what I've read about him he was a real life leather stocking.
Have you ever heard of this man?
Oh, of course.
He was one of the most important agents on the frontier.
He introduced Benjamin Franklin to the League and in fact he was instrumental in making
sure that Franklin knew about how the League was organized and introduced him to the chairman
of the League who said, okay, here's how our Constitution looks.
Here's what the Constitution says.
We separate power.
We admit new states on equal footing with the old.
And he ran through the organization of the Constitution of the Iroquois League.
Conrad Weiser was probably known to Cooper.
I won't say absolutely.
He was certainly known to Hekwaludan people like that.
He was a very commonly known Indian agent.
And if you knew anything about Franklin's writings or Franklin himself you were going
to run across Conrad Weiser.
Now there were an awful lot of these people.
There wasn't only one or two of them out there.
There were many possibilities.
Hekwalder himself I'm sure was a model.
He was theoretically a Moravian missionary.
But in fact he went out into the field and we're talking far into the field, western
Pennsylvania, Ohio in the 1760s.
There was nobody there of the white descent.
There were Native Americans there.
And he came at 19.
He stayed for the next 49 years in the league.
And the books that he wrote thereafter that became the sources for Cooper reflect a strong
propensity to be very Native in outlook and attitude.
Do you think that the books by Cooper had any effect on American government policy toward
the American Indian?
Well he was creating sympathy for Native Americans.
And today that's a little hard for some critics to see.
They just finger the racist statements that you find in the books.
And yes there are racist statements throughout.
But they forget that all literature of the 19th century was extraordinarily racist.
And so you can't just finger a little line here, a little line there and throw the baby
out with the bath.
You have to know what the political and historical context was.
Cooper was on the liberal left of the political spectrum at that time.
And he didn't start out to be the whipping boy of the right.
But that happened simply because he was creating sympathy through characters, not Jit Singh,
Gok Chuk and Unka, but also characters like Wadawa, Chinchak Chukot's wife, who was obviously
killed when the Delaware Mohicans were massacred in Ohio in 1782.
That was very well known at the time, a very well known massacre.
So he was actually creating all this sympathy at the same time that people like Louis Cass,
General Louis Cass and Andrew Jackson were attempting to flip up sentiment for removal.
And there was a strong political attempt to silence him, to quell this sympathy that he
was building for Native American causes.
They certainly buried Hick Wallader and they did their level best to bury Cooper too.
Let me ask Dr. Taylor to give us a quick rundown, a recap if you will, of James Fenimore Cooper.
Who was he and why are we talking about him today?
Well he was the first commercially successful American novelist and he created enduring
literary types such as the noble Indian that Barbara has been speaking of and also the
great hunter and scout, Natty Bumpo.
Let's take a look at a little bit of Fort William Henry, a figure prominently in the
novel we're featuring today.
The massacre took place there.
In your opinion, how accurate is Cooper's description of that massacre?
Well as Alan has said, that one was pretty well overblown by Cooper.
There was a great sentiment against Native Americans so obviously that was reflected
occasionally but I think that it was balanced out.
If you look for example at the ending of the Deer Slayer, the people that are destroyed
there, massacred utterly, is the Wyandotte Village.
And that's presented as a horrific event.
In fact one of the lead characters, one of the most sympathetic characters in the Deer
Slayer is Heddy Hutter and she is killed there by friendly fire no less probably from Harry
Harry.
It's presented as such a horrific event that Natty Bumpo himself needs several months.
He's post-traumatically stressed.
He can't get his thoughts right.
He's trying to survive somehow or another the horrors of what he's just witnessed which
was the destruction of this entire village.
Now if you put that up against the sorts of things that the truly racist writers who are
putting out, Robert Montgomery Byrd for example in Nick of the Woods portrays the massacre
of the Shawnee who were the villains in his novel as a jubilant event and everybody's
supposed to be yelling rah rah and experiencing great joy which is why he lingers so lovingly
over the descriptions of the horrible brutality and mutilation that the militias were meeting
out to the villages.
If you compare that kind of a description with what Cooper was actually describing you'll
see some of the difference in why Cooper was presented as that Indian lover.
Let's take our first call in this segment from Richmondville, New York.
Go ahead please.
Hi, my name is Caitlin Jones.
I was wondering how long did it take Fenimore Cooper to write the book and when did he start?
Alright.
Dr. Mann?
Dr. Taylor?
He wrote very quickly so he would write in a matter of a few months a very long novel
of on the order of 400 to 500 pages.
He did very little revising.
He just wrote spontaneously and certainly sometimes that shows but it also indicates
a free flow of ideas which is very revealing.
Dr. Mann, I want to read from chapter 11 of The Last of the Mohicans the selection you've
chosen for us and get you to comment on it.
This is a speech by I believe Magwa who says, justice repeated the Indian casting an oblique
glance of the most ferocious expression at her unyielding countenance.
Is it justice to make evil and then punish for it?
Magwa was not himself.
It was the fire water that spoke and acted for him but Mrow did not believe it.
The Huron chief was tied up before all like the pale faced warriors and whipped like a
dog.
There are all sorts of things going on there and that's one of the places where Cooper
is giving Magwa a very, very intensive political motive.
Magwa he took from Hekwalder who at one point mentioned that Magwa means Mohawk.
Now the character of Magwa was actually born to the Wyandotte Seneca nation.
The Wyandotte who had been adopted by the Seneca and it was a very large number.
He had been furthermore adopted by the Mohawk.
Now the Mohawk are the guardian of the eastern door, the Seneca are the guardians of the
western door so he was a double guardian of the people.
His whole job in the League was to resist invasion for all he was worth.
Now the League had a very strong analysis of especially colonial slavery.
They saw slavery as the engine of invasion and they resisted it in every way they could
by for example giving safe haven to any African slaves who made it up into Iroquois.
They would actually give them land and let them live there unmolested.
The slave catchers couldn't come in and take them back.
They also were very, very opposed to all the accoutrements of slavery which included as
far as they were concerned the cowhide, the whip and the concubine.
Now in the League the worst thing, the worst threat that you could possibly make is that
somebody was going to tie you to the plow and whip you to work because they knew how
the Africans were treated.
They knew exactly from the Tuscarora who came into the League in the early 18th century
about these stories and they saw for themselves what had happened.
They saw the missionaries who were coming in and converting people as not converting
them for religious purposes but actually setting them up to be enslaved because that is exactly
what happened to natives who were converted very soon and thereafter they were slaves
and they were whipped to work.
So the whip was considered an absolute symbol, the emblem of colonial slavery and slavery
was the worst thing that could happen to a nation and it happened to many nations.
It happened to the Yamasee just before the Guzkik men set their sights.
These were the slavers on the Tuscarora who came into the League at a dead run to get
away from these slavers.
They came in the whole nation all at once because they refused to be enslaved.
So the League had a huge, huge negative analysis of slavery and the whip was a symbol of it.
So when Magwa says I was whipped like a dog, he's making reference to the political analysis
of the League concerning slavery and he was, he's resisting slavery for all he's worth.
He is not going to be made a slave, he is going to defend the people and keep the people
from slavery.
Dr. Taylor, what were the politics of James Fenimore Cooper?
Well he's one of a kind.
He's someone that would find it very difficult to find other people who are exactly on the
same wavelength that he is.
He was affiliated with the Democratic Party but he wasn't an activist, he never ran for
office, he didn't participate in electioneering meetings after the early 1820s.
He was quite conservative in his social values but he basically was opposed to the Whig elite
that he saw in villages like Cooperstown that he saw as kind of manipulating the public.
What did he think of Andrew Jackson?
He admired him but he admired him as kind of an icon from a distance.
He was someone that he identified with the virtues of the early republic, of the founding
generation, of someone who was very firm and vigorous and was going to restrict the power
of government which is something that James Fenimore Cooper believed in.
But would James Fenimore Cooper being the aristocrat that he was sit down and enjoy
a dinner with Andrew Jackson?
Well I think Jackson's been a little misunderstood.
Jackson has been portrayed as the great champion of the American common man but he himself
was not a common man.
He was a very wealthy man.
He owned many slaves.
He was perhaps the wealthiest man in Nashville and he is somebody who managed to cover his
tracks very well when it came to be election time and pose as the friend of the common
people but his early career had been as a lawyer who was foreclosing on debtors.
So he's somebody that James Fenimore Cooper would have been perfectly comfortable sitting
and having a glass of Madeira with.
Let's take the next call from Westmoreland, New York.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I guess I have both a comment and a general question I'd like some of your guests to comment
on.
One is for your viewers, if they'd like to read something more of a nonfiction event
relating to the last of the Mohegan's, there's a book I recommend to a lot of people and
I think it's really well written.
It's called Betrayal, Fort William Henry and the Massacre.
It was written by a Canadian historian, Ian K. Steele.
And secondly, I was wondering if your guests might comment about the relationship of James
Fenimore Cooper and his novels, particularly the last of the Mohegan's obviously, with
the mythology that's built up about the American rifleman and how it's even crept into the
world of the academic historian and impacted history in a negative sense by creating this
great myth about American rifleman, i.e.
Alright, we'll work with that caller.
Thank you very much, Dr. Mann.
Well, I'm much more interested in the leather stocking version of it than the rifleman.
The rifle is just something that people in the backwoods had to have if they were going
to survive.
The more interesting allusion is to the leather stockings.
A lot of people don't know that.
I know you defined it as the moxon with the high leg and that's true as long as you're
talking about the native version of the leather stocking, but especially during the American
Revolution the leather stocking became something quite else because especially the raids led
by John Sullivan on Washington's orders into Seneca and Gus von Schaik and to Onondaga
and Broadhead into Ohio, Muskingum Valley where the Delaware were.
What the soldiers began doing was taking any Native Americans that they hadn't actually
killed in battle and often before they were quite dead, flaying them alive, taking the
skin from the hip all the way down to the foot, taking that skin off entirely, tanning
it and then turning that into their own chaps, leather stockings are a form of chaps.
And leather stocking came to start meaning that, these tanned Native Americans hides.
Now I don't think Natty was being presented as someone who was tanning hides.
He's actually opposed to scalping.
There's a long, long area of the deerslayer in which he makes huge speeches against scalping
and doing other sorts of corpse mutilations.
But the general standing among the public in America at that time was that they knew
perfectly well that the frontiersmen were doing this, the Indian haters were doing this
on a regular basis.
The rifle as it came to be known was simply associated with skill and being able to bag
dinner.
I don't think that that's really nearly as romantic.
Irene, now about yours.
Well, I think the questioner has an interesting point in that there does become this mythic,
superhuman marksman that is created in Natty Bumpo, which is beyond human ability and recurs
then in American popular culture and literature.
And you can think, for example, of Sergeant York in World War I who was quite celebrated.
And there was this notion that just living on the American frontier and having a rifle
made you have these abilities that were beyond any other people on earth.
So I think there's something to it.
After this next call from Spokane, I want to ask you, Dr. Taylor, about all of his other
nonfiction writing and what it says about his view of America at the time that he was
writing, both socially and politically.
But in the meantime, Spokane, Washington is next.
Go ahead.
Mm-hmm.
Go ahead.
Please, you're on the air.
Hello?
I'm sorry.
Hello?
Where are you calling from?
My husband's lineage goes back to James Fendermore Cooper, and we have heard that he was part
Mohican.
Is this true, or do you know anything about that?
All right.
Thank you very much.
Any idea?
I would doubt it very seriously.
Any idea?
Certainly not.
And why do you doubt it very seriously?
Well, he came from the wrong place and the wrong people.
But on the other hand, haven't you, I saw on a note that you had your own theory about
Natty Bumpo himself.
Oh, Natty was, yeah, intended originally in the Pioneers, I believe, as a mixed blood.
Mixed blood?
Yes, which means he was part Lenape, Delaware, and he was part European.
His father would have been.
Dr. Taylor, do you have any problem with that theory?
No, I find it an intriguing theory.
I think in the last of the Mohicans, he's had great pains to cover that track.
Yes.
Did you agree with that?
Oh, yeah.
You know, when he started the Pioneers in 1823, it was still respectable.
There was still that Enlightenment era positive regard for Native Americans that slipped very
deeply.
The more America went into the antebellum era, the more heavily, deeply racist America
became because it had to support slavery and it had to support really bloody conquest of
the rest of the continent.
Before that time, there was recognized that there was race mixing in the country.
It was not a screaming, crying shame.
They knew that Natives, Africans, and whites mixed especially on the frontiers, that most
of the children in the villages were mixed at some point, and especially somebody like
Natty was mixed because he was Moravian.
The only way, the only way that anyone became a Moravian was either to be born one of German
parentage like Hickwilder or to have been among the Delaware, a Native American because
they only preached, they only preached to the Delaware.
His mother had to have been Delaware.
Dr. Taylor, on the nonfiction writings, he wrote books called Notions of Americans in
1828, The American Democrat, 1838, Cleanings in Europe, and even the History of the United
States Navy.
Out of all of that, does he have a statement to say about American politics and American
society in those years?
Yeah, he was a man who believed that there was a natural elite that ought to govern the
country and they would be people who would have superior educations, greater wealth,
had paid more attention to politics, and he believed that the American electorate ought
to defer to them, that it ought to choose its leaders from such people and it ought
to stand back and let those people govern, and that it ought to take its moral and political
guidance from informed and elite authors like himself.
And when this was denied by the public, it was something that was enormously frustrating
to him.
And so over the years, his writings became angrier in his sense that the American public
was rejecting his role as a teacher of morals, aesthetics, and politics.
You know, an interesting point is that Cooper actually is of two different minds.
When he's actually intellectualizing his politics, he does come down in that very conservative
way, but when he's writing from his heart, and his best writing is always from his heart,
he's a totally different person.
Look at Natty.
He's about as far down on the spectrum of society as you can possibly get, and yet he's
the most moral and the best person around.
The next best person around is Chinchachuk, who's not even European, and they're both
the poorest people in sight.
So when he's writing from his heart, he gets the Harvey Birches, he gets the Natty Bumfels,
he gets the Chinchachuk, and the people who are rats are people like Judge Temple, who
is a real moral swamp.
Well, I don't think that's the end of Mark Cooper's take on it.
I think that's right about Natty Bumpo, but Natty Bumpo and Harvey Birch are people outside
of society.
When he's looking at people who are within society who are from the lower orders, they're
usually negative portrayals.
Well, Paul wasn't entirely a negative portrayal in the Prairie.
He was certainly an object of fun and derision.
James Fenimore Cooper is the subject of today.
We're live from Cooperstown, New York, on the banks of Otsego Lake.
And as we take the next call, I want to show you the one depiction of James Fenimore Cooper
in town.
It's located on the statue of him, located on the site of the home that he built there,
now long since gone.
Next call is from Davis, Michigan.
Go ahead, please.
Good morning.
The Professor Mann, first of all, I want to ask you, are you familiar with the history
of Detroit?
We are, our tricentennial is happening.
My point about making about that is, last week, the writers program, I went to the library
and tried to get books on George Drouillard.
This will tie into it with the program.
Armadis said the original Drouillard came from France, and he arrived with Caddack 17
and won, died in Detroit 1733.
His grandson, I'm looking at Gene Ali, says they're married to an Indian woman.
And it's a Drouillard, George Drouillard is the book I'm trying to get, and the George
Drouillard is descendant of that family.
They are French people from Normandy, France.
Not many writers have written about that.
So that's my point.
What question would you direct to Barbara Mann or Dr. Taylor this morning?
Am I still on?
Hello?
Yes, you are.
What would you like to address to our guests this morning?
My point is this, in the Declaration of Independence, may I read it?
This is Jefferson's writing.
Well, actually, if you would give us the gist of your point, I think that would be helpful
and we could get right to it.
This is about the oppressions that Jefferson's writing about in our Declaration of Independence
talking about King George.
He has excited domestic insurrection amongst us and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants
of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an indistinguished
destruction of all ages, sexes, and cultures.
My point is, I believe the English here...
I'll tell you what, I think we've got a lot of material to work with here.
That quotation from the Declaration of Independence is very helpful.
I think it applies directly to what we're talking about, Dr. Mann.
It's a real example of stereotypes.
What he was talking about there was, first of all, in 1772, Britain outlawed slavery
and it was to be outlawed in all its colonies and they followed up in 1830 with an absolute
no slavery anywhere that's British.
Now in 1772, America was very much a slave kind of a country and there were an awful
lot of people who were quite disturbed to think that Britain might force them to release
their slaves.
That's what he meant by inciting domestic rebellion, I think the term was.
When he's talking about the Native Americans, he's talking about the Iroquois League who
were allied with Britain.
They were not minions of Britain.
They were defending their own territory, which included Western New York, Pennsylvania, most
of Ohio.
And bringing them on for savage warfare was actually scare talk in the frontier, especially
Virginians tended to that scare talk about Native Americans.
And interestingly enough, elsewhere, Jefferson is not so nasty about Natives.
He was writing this to incite rebellion against England.
What he meant was the Iroquois League was going to be in it with Britain against the
colonists and therefore he was demonizing Native America.
Alan Taylor, did James Fenimore Cooper own slaves?
Yes, he did.
Slavery remained legal in New York State until 1827.
And so he grew up in a family that possessed usually three slaves and as an adult, he certainly
owned a slave or two.
And how does that, how did he rationalize that in his own life given what we're hearing
about what he wrote in his novels?
Well he certainly considered himself a benign slave holder and he was holding slaves as
domestic servants and they certainly did become free.
And they were probably, it would be fairer to say that they were in a state that was
somewhere between slavery and freedom during the 1820s because it was known that all slaves
in New York were going to become free at that point.
And the system of bondage had loosened considerably by that time.
He did oppose abolition and on a number of occasions and public addresses engaged in
debates with abolitionists in that he did not think this was a good idea for the country.
Next call, Hoosick Falls, New York.
You're on the air.
Yes, good morning and thank you for taking my call.
My name is Jack Gattaneo.
I retired from the New York City Police Department and moved up to Hoosick Falls, New York.
It's about 25 miles east of Albany near the Vermont border.
In the Hoosick Falls Museum, I found some documents, affidavits from a journalist and
these documents say that James Fenimore Cooper befriended a woodsman from Hoosick Falls,
New York by the name of Nathaniel Shipman.
The history that I, also the research that I did, I found that most people claimed that
James Fenimore Cooper befriended a man named David Shipman from Cooper's town.
But these documents are clear, they say that Nathaniel Shipman from Hoosick Falls had a
black and white dog, which Natty Bumpo did, and it was from the stories that Nathaniel
Shipman of Hoosick Falls, New York told to James Fenimore Cooper.
That is how Cooper developed the leather stocking tales.
In addition, I just want to mention that Hoosick Falls is also the home of Grandma Moses.
So the historians, I'm asking the historians that are watching this program to check out
the documents in the Hoosick Falls Museum and let's find out who James Fenimore Cooper
got his information from.
James?
Alright sir, thank you very much and we'll ask these historians here, starting with Dr.
Taylor, does it matter?
It probably doesn't much matter and I think Barbara's quite correct that John Heckerwelder
is more of a model and I think also Daniel Boone is much more of a model.
And I've seen those documents because they've been republished and I don't buy it.
The connection's not to Nathaniel Shipman.
If there was any connection to a Shipman, it was to a man named David Shipman who lived
in this area, was known to the family and had dealings with Judge William Cooper and
there's absolutely not a shred of credible evidence from the time that Nathaniel Shipman
was known to the Cooper family.
Does it matter Dr. Mann?
I don't know that it matters all that much, it matters to people who want to be very particular
about things but you need to remember that Cooper researched very carefully.
He didn't rip things off the top of his head, he may have written quickly, but he researched
carefully beforehand so he was primed right and this included talking to any Native American
he could meet, this included studying Heckerwelder, this included reading all kinds of other sources
on things and he would talk to other people, anyone who might have some information.
I think that what's going on here is something in Heckerwelder.
He says, well you know if you want to know about the old timers, what you have to do
is walk up to them and say, especially if they're Native, say, yeah you're a very old
person, you've obviously heard more than I've heard and seen more than I've seen so why
don't you begin to tell me now about your life, why don't you tell me what age you took
your first deer, why don't you tell me the stories that your fathers and forefathers
told you.
When I hit that in Heckerwelder I knew that that started his juices moving because that's
exactly what he does with Natty.
He's walking up to an old man and saying, tell us all these things you've seen in all
these places you've been.
So there are many different sources, you know this is an imaginative process, he was an
artist.
Artists don't sit there and copy from life verbatim, they take all these different influences
and they merge in the subconscious and then they come out as a Natty Bumpo a little later.
The year was 1826 and the novel The Last of the Mohicans was published in that year and
there's, I have an excerpt of it here from chapter three that speaks to the very subject
of The Last of the Mohicans and I'd ask Dr. Taylor and Dr. Mann to comment on it.
So all of my family departed, each in his turn to the land of spirits.
I am on the hilltop and must go down into the valley and when Uncas follows in my footsteps
there will no longer be any of the blood of the Sagamores for my boy is the last of the
Mohicans.
Alan Taylor?
Well James Fenimore Cooper had promoted this belief that Indians were doomed people and
there is an elegiac tone to The Last of the Mohicans.
This appears very early.
It is alerting the reader that Uncas is not going to have any progeny and that it's a
tragic moment but this is the fate of native peoples is James Fenimore Cooper's message.
That was in there but there was also more in there.
You'll notice he comes back to that in the very final pages when they're mourning over
Uncas' grave.
He and Natty together.
There's also a reference here to the horrific genocide against the Delaware Mohicans that
took place at the very end of the Revolutionary War in 1782 at Gashuckin, a place that the
missionaries called Gununhun was the village where this occurred.
That was a very, very well known massacre partly because Heckwallet republicized it
and made sure that it was known.
When it was first presented to the Philadelphia Gazette it was presented as a great victory
over the hideous warriors of the Iroquois League.
In point of fact what the Pennsylvania militia out of Fort Pitt did was destroyed.
It was an act of genocide, deliberate and premeditated, attempting to destroy all of
the Delaware and Mohican who were in Ohio at that time and they managed to kill 96 in
one stroke at that village and another 30 on their way back to Pennsylvania.
This was well known and Heckwallet revealed it as an attack against starving women, children
and old men so they couldn't get away with the original line on it anymore.
Now this became as famous as the My Lai Massacre.
If you were to say My Lai to people today they might not have all the particulars in
their mind but if somebody said oh I'm the last of the people from My Lai, you would
know what it was about.
And when he's talking about last of the Mohicans, that's in there because Heckwallet had made
that event so famous that the general reading public was well aware of it.
As part of our visit to Cooperstown today we've got a group of Cooperstown high school
students, students from the history and English classes in the school.
They're watching along with everybody and we've got one student on the line.
We'll take that call.
Tell us who you are please.
You're on the air please, go ahead.
Cooperstown High School?
We know you're there.
I'll tell you what, we'll come back to that in a second.
Let me just ask Dr. Taylor as we wait for the high school students, give us the basics
of the French and Indian War in 1757.
So this is the climactic war for control over North America between the British and the
French empires.
The British invested more troops and more money than ever before and they made their
goal that they were going to conquer Canada.
And after some initial profound defeats including the first battle of the war in which George
Washington got his baptism by fire and lost his first battle.
Of those early defeats the British were able to muster their men and their ships and their
cannon and they were able to capture French forts and sweep all the way to capture Quebec
in 1759 and Montreal in 1760.
Then in the peace treaty that ended the war in 1763, France conceded Canada and all of
the lands east of the Mississippi River to the British Empire.
And France was whittled down to a few islands in the West Indies and a couple of islands
in the Gulf of St. Lawrence was the last of its empire in North America.
I think we're ready now to hear from Cooperstown High School.
Go ahead please.
Cooperstown High School.
In that case, let me go on to introduce to you two people we're very pleased to have
with us this morning.
They're descendants of the man of the hour, James Fenimore Cooper.
Henry S. Fenimore Cooper, he's the great-great-grandson of James Fenimore Cooper.
And also standing next to him in the Cooper Room of the Fenimore Art Museum is Henry Cooper
Weil.
He's the great-great-great-grandson of James Fenimore Cooper.
And let me start with, I was going to say Mr. Cooper, but well that would do it.
Mr. Cooper, what is it like being a Cooper in Cooperstown?
Well, good question.
Very fun.
I rather enjoy it up to a point, but I keep trying to remember something that my father
used to tell my two sisters and my brother and myself, which is that people who think
too much about their ancestors are like potatoes.
The best part of them is underground.
I try not to let that happen to me.
I should mention that Dr. Cooper is a journalist.
For 35 years he wrote for the New Yorker Magazine largely about space, of all things.
He's also an author of eight books.
And he's the honorary chairman of the James Fenimore Cooper Society.
And next to him is Mr. Weil, graduate of the College of Physicians and Surgeons.
He's practicing medicine here in town.
Mr. Weil, what is, you think, the legacy of your ancestor?
Well, I guess I think the most important themes in his books to me, just another reader, are
about the clash of civilization and the wilderness.
And I think you've heard the other guests talk about them.
They recur through his writings.
And he sees the wilderness as the place where the best is brought out in human beings.
And whatever race they are, the best is brought out in them.
And the encroachment of civilization is a threat to this.
And I think those themes resonate with our modern times.
And we are still struggling with that loss of wilderness and frontier and trying to deal
with those issues.
We are here in Cooperstown trying to preserve things and elsewhere across the country.
Earlier in the program we saw the original library of James Fenimore Cooper.
Understand that you donated that to the Cooper Room.
Was that lying around in boxes?
That's exactly it.
Really?
Yes.
It had come down through five generations of our family and was really a gift from our
family.
And we talked about it and felt that fire or something could destroy this collection
of books.
And they would then be lost to future scholars who hopefully might find some use in them.
Mr. Cooper, I mentioned you've written a number of books.
What's your opinion as an author of the literary style and the quality of your ancestors'
books?
I think that at best he's terrific.
He's extremely powerful and really has gone a long way to creating an American legend,
an American myth of epic proportions.
He has flaws, as many people do, and it's easy to focus on them the way Mark Twain did.
But what he I think gave Americans is really an epic that brought their wilderness alive
to them and also to much of the world.
He grew up on the shores of this lake.
There are descriptions about how his older sister Hannah wrote a letter about how her
two younger brothers, William and James, they're growing up wild.
They grow up in the woods.
And he really developed his feelings about nature here in Cooperstown and projected them
in his writings throughout the country and throughout the world.
And they did much to help formulate Americans' views towards nature, towards conservation,
and towards the environment.
Alright, thank you both, gentlemen.
We appreciate your time this morning.
I want to continue with taking your calls.
The next one from Sisters, Oregon.
Go ahead, please.
And we lost Sisters, Oregon.
But that gives us a chance to talk to Dr. Taylor about, again, the politics of, and
we're picking the year 1826.
What is the state of the economy and what is the state of growth?
Well, the economy was recovering from a pretty drastic depression that occurred in 1819 and
it extended into the early 20s and was partially responsible for the destruction of the Cooper
Estate.
They were unable, the heirs were unable to pay their debts and their properties largely
got wiped out.
But things are much better in the country by the middle of the 1820s.
And 1826 is a symbolically powerful moment.
It's the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
And on July 4th, 1826, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died, the two people most closely
associated with that Declaration of Independence.
And this suggested to the American public that this is a critical moment of transfer
of generations, from the founding generation of the Republic to the new generation, which
James Fenimore Cooper is a spokesman for.
Dr. Mann?
You just about covered it.
I...
What is the, what is the condition at this time of the population of the Native Americans?
And is there any sense at that time that they will remain a part of where they are now living
or then living?
You mean today, the people today, the situation in the Native Americans today is really very
poor if you're looking at the reservations.
Well, I'm really talking about the sense of Americans in 1826.
Is it their sense that the American Indian is going to be pushed further and further
back?
Oh, that was the clear political intention.
There was no question about that.
In fact, in 1805, Jefferson was floating ideas for removal.
He couldn't quite get it past the people at that time.
They weren't strong enough and the political will wasn't there yet.
But as you see it going into the Jacksonian era, there is a tremendous push.
Why?
Well, one of the reasons is they had a population.
You talked about population before.
And the land was already taken up in the more settled eastern parts and there was no way
these landlords were getting up off that land to accommodate newcomers.
So they were pushing people west.
Don't forget the Erie Canal and the attempt to open Ohio to settlement.
That was very much an economic necessity at the time for the Europeans and it was very
much fought by the Native Americans because Native Americans, as far as they were concerned
and in fact, if you read the history of the American Revolution, won that part of what
was called Canada, Ohio, Michigan, the old Northwest.
And so here you had the settlers who were determined to pump up the economy by bringing
all this new, very fertile farmland in Ohio into the nation.
And on the other hand, you had natives staunchly resisting it.
By 1826, that resistance had been broken and they were able to move into Ohio.
Next call is from Maysville, Kentucky.
Hello.
Hello.
Maysville, Kentucky.
Go ahead.
I'm a student at Mason County High School and for a book project I read Les Moheekins
by James Fenimore Cooper.
And at the beginning of each new chapter when he has those little excerpts of poetry and
such, does that have any significance or any meaning?
Oh, it certainly does.
I mean, it sets the theme for that chapter.
So they're very meaningful and you were quite astute in order to notice those and think
about them as you read each chapter.
Well, let me, I'm glad this call came in because the very first chapter of Les Moheekins opens
with the following excerpt from Shakespeare.
It says, mine ear is open and my heart prepared.
The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold.
Say is my kingdom lost.
The connection there, do you care to make it?
Well, it'll be interesting, Barbara's thoughts, but I think it's very much about the fate
of Native Americans.
It's interesting that April 23rd today is the acknowledged birthday of Shakespeare and
it's also the day that he died.
We are here to talk about James Fenimore Cooper on the shores of Otsego Lake and his series
of books.
We're focusing on The Last of the Moheekins, one of the several leather stocking tales,
but he wrote up to 50 books?
Over 50.
Over 50 books.
So, how would you say, was his motivation for writing money or was it for something
else?
It was a combination of things.
It would depend on the genre.
He always wrote things that he felt very deeply about.
I don't think he just tossed off hack work in order to make money.
That would be completely out of character for him.
That's correct.
No, he talked about things that he knew and loved or else had strong convictions about
Native America, the sea.
He's got all these sea novels and of course he was at sea.
He was a sailor for some time.
So, he's talking about things that are near and dear to his heart and very frequently
you see subconscious things, things that I don't think he ever actually articulated
politically in any kind of linear fashion, but subconsciously they bubble to the surface
and very frequently actually contradict the sorts of statements he'd make when he was
writing ideologically.
Certainly his concern for slavery as shown in Cora Monroe was not at all in concert with
the sorts of sentiments he was espousing in the American Democrats.
So when he was talking from his head, it was one thing he was talking from his heart.
You got a different message.
Cooperstown High School.
Go ahead, please.
I was wondering, what did the Native Americans of Cooper's time period think of the last
of the Mohicans and how has the perception of James Fenimore Cooper changed over the
time?
All right, I think we'll divide that up and it's an easy division.
I think, Dr. Mann, you take the first question.
Well, I can actually talk about both and in fact would like to.
Native Americans at the time by and large did not accept literacy, saw it as one of
the tools of European oppression and unless they were actively being missionized and dragged
into church schools, did not bother learning to read.
They were not reading the reading public for James Fenimore Cooper and in fact were not
even commenting on the issues until much, much later time.
I think maybe 1970s would be the first you started seeing Native Americans actively commenting
on Cooper's work a few in the 60s.
And did you want to say something about the subsequent?
Cooper's literary reputation has come and gone and ebbed and flowed and it was probably
at its lowest in the 1890s when Twain wrote his satire on him.
It made something of a comeback with a very appreciative essay by D.H. Lawrence that refocused
our attention as readers on the landscape description and the mythic elements.
And I think he then went into a bit of an eclipse again but in recent years as American
literary critics and readers are interested in ideas of race and of nature that James
Fenimore Cooper once again is very interesting.
Let's take another call from Vinton, Iowa, is that it?
Yes.
Go ahead please.
I would like more information on the content of the letters we were shown from George Washington,
the Mark Westolafi at and Sir Walter Scott.
Well I'm afraid I don't think we're in a position to tell you what the content of those
letters were.
We had the ability to show you them and time being what it is we just didn't get to it.
I'm sorry about that.
Any?
Well actually I'd like to come back to the point that we were discussing before.
Let me do that and let's take this next call from Sisters Oregon.
Go ahead please.
Oh yes I was calling about exactly what was discussed on the Twain satire.
Could they please elaborate on that?
Oh sure let's do that.
Dr. Mann.
Twain took his points for his literary offenses of Fenimore Cooper directly from the Lewis
Cass attacks on him in 1826 and 1828.
Lewis Cass was a general, he was the governor of the Michigan Northwest Territory.
He was also the secretary of war under Andrew Jackson and he was personally the architect
of removal.
He was an Indian hater par excellence.
Now he was hated, literally hated Heckwalletter who was Cooper's source and in fact there was
very bad blood between Cooper and Cass because when Cooper was known to be thinking about
writing leather stocking tales in 1822, Cass made a point of getting his own very racist
greed, it was just a stockpile of stereotypes about Native Americans because Cass actually
had no information about Native Americans.
He couldn't speak any language, he hated people, his whole response to Native America was kill
them all at God's sort of mouth.
So he made it sure that his pamphlet, his statistical survey or whatever he called it
of Native American got into Cooper's hands because he wanted to be Cooper's source and
they thought at this point that if they got Cooper on the side of removal that would be
a very nice thing.
On the other hand, Cooper at it simultaneously at the same time got a hold of Heckwalletter
and he wrote his publisher Wiley and said, you know, I feel like a bull up track between
two bales of hay, I don't know which one to sample first, but he did.
He read all of Cass and then he read all of Heckwalletter and he decided Cass was a blowhard
and he was and he used Heckwalletter as his source.
This angered Cass who waited until Heckwalletter was dead before he made his attacks on Heckwalletter
and then tied Cooper into those attacks and then came back with a very ferocious attack
on Cooper that basically was attacking him through Heckwalletter.
These were the points, exactly the points that Mark Twain pulled up later in the 1890s
and I don't think it's accidental that Jim Crow laws were coming into strong effect in
the 1890s through 1920s when Cooper's reputation was seriously depressed again because Cooper,
no matter how you read him, is presenting a sympathetic portrait of the dispossession
and the murder, the deaths of Native America under the flood of invasion.
The Cooper family is very present here in Cooper's town.
They have a large plot where James Fenimore Cooper and his father and many descendants
of William Cooper still are.
We'll show you a picture of that as we take our next call from Schenectady, New York.
Hello.
Good morning.
There are two things I would like to say.
Number one is I'm only about 60 miles north in Schenectady of Cooper's town and I've never
been there and because of your program I will be there this summer.
But my other comment is our local newspaper, the Gazette, has a big article in the arts
and entertainment section as of yesterday about Cooper's town art, five exhibits open
season at Fenimore Museum.
I haven't heard you mention that.
I don't believe that it has anything to do with the leather stocking tales, which I intend
to read after hearing your program.
I'm absolutely fascinated.
Thank you for C-SPAN.
But I want to urge everybody to go down there.
I'm going to go in July and I'm looking forward to it after seeing your program.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Next call is from New York City.
Go ahead.
New York City, you're on the air.
Yes, my question is in how many languages was Cooper translated into and when were these
translations made?
During his lifetime...
Dr. Taylor.
Thank you.
Certainly in his lifetime he was published in French and German and I believe in Italian,
but I could be wrong on that.
And perhaps in his lifetime in Russian.
But since then almost every language in the world he's been translated into.
He's a very popular writer to this day overseas.
And most of the books, or many of the books still available?
No, only the leather stocking tales really retain their popularity, especially overseas
where there is a fascination with the American frontier and American Indians.
And so the leather stocking tales, although they're a very small subset of what he wrote,
they are what people continue to read.
Let's continue.
West Booth Bay Harbor, Maine is our next caller.
Go ahead.
Good morning.
I noticed that you showed some paintings of N.C.
Wyeth in the background.
Did James Fenimore Cooper use any of N.C.
Wyeth's paintings or drawings in his books?
Well I think that was before his time.
No, Wyeth is an early 20th century author, so James Fenimore Cooper was long dead.
But publishers in the early 20th century did use Wyeth's illustrations and certainly with
The Last of the Mohicans and they're quite powerful illustrations and closely associated
with the word pictures and the text.
Marietta Georgia, go ahead.
Marietta Georgia, you're on the air.
Good morning.
Good morning.
You mentioned Scott Austin and Twain.
I'm a great Austin fan and I wanted to say one thing that Twain was just as nasty about
Austin as he was about Cooper.
But Scott was a great fan of Austin and I loved something he wrote in his personal letters
in which he said he was a great, he had great ability in the Bow Wow scene which I think
Cooper's books would be much the same scene that he was talking about.
Okay, thank you ma'am.
Let me ask Dr. Mann, we read an excerpt of the Twain commentary earlier and it was frankly
rather humorous although strong.
Was he looking for jokes or was he trying to achieve something when he was critical
of as our caller says not only Fenimore Cooper but also Jane Austin?
What he was doing was parroting basically the racist commentary on Cooper, the attack
on Cooper which said for example oh he made these Indians talk so eloquently and he loved
them to use metaphor and one of Cass's points was well Native Americans don't talk at any
length and if they want to represent a number they'll just go and stick a finger up or they'll
go pantomime and all that reflected was the fact that Cass was completely unable to speak
any Native American language and obviously if somebody's talking to them they're going
to pantomime.
Twain goes and picks this up and makes this into one of the points on which he drugged
Cooper but actually it was one of the accurate presentations that Cooper was making because
oratory in Native America is an extremely important concept especially if you have cultures
that subsist heavily on oral tradition you're going to require people to be able to speak
eloquently at need when the need arises and to do it by the use of metaphors and analogies
which is the Native American thinking style not the linear style of the West.
So they were actually picking up and drugging Cooper for one of the things that he got right
and yes Twain was every bit as nasty to Austin as he was to Cooper and that actually tells
you something about Twain's taste I believe.
New Hampshire's our next call from is it Cuntoon Cook New Hampshire?
Yes it is.
You're on the air sir.
Yeah hi I'd like to speak to Professor Taylor.
Go right ahead.
I'm a big fan of Cooper but I'm a big fan of the the the the the naval novels you know
that the and I wanted to I think you guys already went through it but I noticed a lot
of similarities between between those and also the leather leather stocking things and
like him to comment about that.
Well I don't know the the naval novels as well as I know the leather stocking tales
with the exception of a shore and a float and but I think your observation is a good
one that he sees the sea as testing people and bringing out either the best or the worst
in them in the same way that the forest did.
McComb Illinois is next go ahead.
Hi I just oh boy.
The delay is getting me.
I'm just curious about the significance and derivation of the name Fenimore in both James
Fenimore Cooper and his great grandson Henry Fenimore Cooper.
Okay and I wish we could have asked the descendants.
Dr. Taylor.
That is the maiden name of James Fenimore Cooper's mother.
Her name was Elizabeth Fenimore until she married William Cooper.
What's interesting is that James Fenimore Cooper Fenimore was not in his birth name
but he was born as James Cooper and he had no middle name and in 1826 the year that he
published Last of the Mohicans is also the year in which he got his name legally changed
by the state legislature of New York in order to add Fenimore and he actually wanted to
lose the Cooper and become James Fenimore but the legislature wouldn't go that far
and they just allowed him to have Fenimore as his middle name.
So he became James Fenimore Cooper in 1826 and his earlier novels had not had his name
on the title page and he was just James Cooper legally at that time.
Laurel Maryland is next go ahead.
Yeah hi my name is Harold Hurt I'm from Laurel Maryland.
First to Dr. Mann I know it's probably a day late and a dollar short but if I might be
able to being a member of the most hideous of them all a wasp but I'd like to apologize
for what my ancestors may or may not have done to your ancestors and also my question
to both the speakers is what is their opinion of the movie The Last of the Mohicans that
was I believe produced either in the late 80's or the early 90's and I'll take my answer
off the air thank you.
Alright thank you sir Dr. Mann.
I think that came out in 1992 wasn't it the Daniel Day.
It was the William Day Lewis movie.
Well the main thing that they really changed was to turn Nattie Randy as hell and also
Cora they made her a very sexual being and all of a sudden the attraction instead of
being between Cora and Uncas was actually and by the way between Cora and Magva there
was sexual tension there as well they turned it into this grand love affair between Nattie
and Cora which completely upended everything that Cooper was attempting to do in his racial
commentary on Cora.
Cora was as the reviewers especially the unfriendly ones described her a quadroon which meant
that she was an African American and Cooper understood her political position in the United
States and so did all of his readers at the time.
She was not Monroe's daughter she was his slave because that's how you were defined
in America if you were of African ancestry and Cooper was actually making a very serious
set of racial points about what her position was or the tenuousness of her position in
this society and Nattie of course he kept celibate his entire life and I believe it
had a lot to do with the racial content of what he was putting into Nattie as well.
So the movie really destroyed that whole concept of what was going on.
On the other hand I think that they attempted to be sensitive to Native Americans as whole
human beings.
I had that impression from the movie.
Washington Kentucky good morning.
Oh hello I have called once today I was the one with the ex-sirs at the beginning of the
chapters but I have another question.
Yes ma'am.
Go right ahead.
When he is when Uncas is sitting with Magwa at the war fire of the other Indians after
his capture and when it says he takes Magwa takes Uncas warplume does he really scalp
him?
What?
She wonders if Uncas scalps Magwa.
I think the question is whether Magwa scalps Uncas.
Yes that's what I thought the question was.
No.
Absolutely not.
Absolutely not.
Warplume was actually a feather that he was wearing.
You know it is hard to understand exactly what he's because of the style of the language
you have to sometimes read it twice or three times at least in my case to know exactly
what we're talking about.
Springfield no I think Washington.
Well caller you're on the air tell us where you're calling from.
Hello.
Hello you're on the air where are you calling from?
Springfield Missouri.
Go right ahead please.
My question about Cooperstown I always heard of it because I'm a Lincoln person and he
went there.
I didn't know until I saw this it was probably named after James Fenimore Cooper.
When did that town incorporate?
Well that's a good fact question the incorporation of Cooperstown.
Well it's named for his father William Cooper and it had an informal name and it wasn't
formally incorporated until after 1800 in the first decade of the 19th century and it
was incorporated initially as Otsego Village and that was done by William Cooper's political
enemies as an insult to him and the majority of the people in the town were actually William
Cooper's friends and political supporters and so they refused to put that incorporation
into effect.
And it was only in the 1810s that the village was incorporated and then it was incorporated
as Cooperstown but as a settlement it had existed since the late 1788.
I want to give the audience a sense of the flavor of the language and because your comments
about Cora Monroe this is from chapter 16 of The Last of the Mohicans and it reads describing
Cora Monroe she was the daughter of a gentleman of those aisles by a lady who's misfortune
it was if you will said the old man proudly to be descended remotely from that unfortunate
class who are so basely enslaved to administer to the wants of a luxurious people.
Next call Cooperstown High School go ahead.
Hello I was wondering how many times has Last of the Mohicans been adapted to the silver
screen?
No Dr. Monroe suggests at least three do you know of more?
I just know of two so three is our...
And I read about seven that goes back to the silent two wheelers so that's what I bring
to the table.
And we have plenty of we've only got a few more minutes left and we want to try to get
a wrap up of what we've been talking about for the last couple of hours.
Well let's wrap a little bit on Cora there.
Well then let's.
Yes she was very distinctively meant to have been a light skinned mulatto and there was
a very specific use in Cooperstown for a light skinned woman of African heritage she was
going to be a fancy girl if she was caught and sold which was the threat throughout the
novel she would have been a sex slave.
Also by the way it was physically impossible to be only remotely descended if you were
from the West Indies they didn't even start sustained concubine until 1713 after 1713
when it was finally decided between the French and the British she was going to hang on to
the sugar plantations there.
So you know her lineage would have actually started after 1713 and is only 1757 in the
novel.
Dr. Taylor I'm relying on you to give us once again that thumbnail sketch of James Fenimore
Cooper and his significance.
Well I think for this novel I think Barbara's pointing to Cora's significance and the fact
that Cora dies at the end and that Uncas dies and their funeral is presented as a marriage
a marriage that could never happen in life and must happen after death and what it suggests
is what turns out to be very misleading for American history but is part of the ideology
of the time and that's the notion that America doesn't have a multiracial future that mixed
race people are doomed is what is the overt message in this final scene and as we all
know and has certainly been highlighted by the recent American census America is more
and more a multiracial country a country of mixture.
We've got time for one more call this one from Albuquerque New Mexico you're on the
air.
Hi yeah I was wondering if there were any Quaker influences in his writings as a whole
because he came from Quaker ancestry and what would that be about?
Well clearly the kindly attitude towards Native Americans the Quakers were well known and
had a reputation among Native Americans as being among the more kindly elements of the
European invasion they were all for cultural genocide but they do the line at actually
physically murdering people and so I think that the level of kindliness that Cooper has
regarding Native Americans to the extent that it exists I would trace that back to Quaker
roots.
Dr. Mann I don't know if you can do this but you've got one minute to give us your general
summary of the life of James Fenimore Cooper.
Of the wife of Cooper?
What was his significance to you?
I think his significance at least for us today is talking openly about issues of race which
was something that they absolutely did not want to do at his period of time as Alan said
there was the ideology that the three races must remain separate and here he is consistently
showing the races mixing as they were.
He was refusing to turn away from the contradictions of history he looked him square in the eye
and he says there it is what do you think of that?
Alan Taylor same question.
Well I entirely agree with Barbara that he is a man who speaks with a very contradictory
voice and I don't think that he was always aware to the degree to which he's contradicting
himself because he certainly has a full investment in the structure of society and in its racial
principles but he also is sufficiently honest and complex a man that he cannot completely
subdue his understanding of the tragedies that are going on historical tragedies going
on in his own world.
Well as always as we've been finding as we've begun and we've embarked on this year long
American writers series there's never enough time and we've just run out of it so I want
to thank you Dr. Alan Taylor and Dr. Barbara Mann for being with us today and also to the
descendants and the other guests that we've had and also some people who haven't been
on the camera Jane Duell she is on the staff of the Fenimore Art Museum on whose grounds
we're now sitting and also Wayne Wright and the entire New York State Historical Association
and the people at Time Warner Cable which have been very big help in getting things
together for us also Hugh McDougall of the James Fenimore Cooper Society who's written
extensively and conducted a walking tour for us yesterday on various sites throughout Coppers
Town also to our audience of course for your calls and your emails and our producer Paul
Brown and other C-Span people Mo Haynes he's the man in the control room choosing all the
shots for you and Sherry Sanders Smith and her crew it takes a lot to put up a tent and
take pictures outside and it's a lot of work and we appreciate all of it so thank you all
and we'll see you next time.
This American Writers Program on James Fenimore Cooper will air again Friday night at 8 p.m.
Eastern also that night take part in an online chat about the author Hugh McDougall founder
and secretary treasurer of the James Fenimore Cooper Society will be our guest he studied
the life and works of Cooper since 1980 that online chat gets underway live at 9 p.m. Eastern
and will last about an hour to participate go to AmericanWriters.org log in to the book
club and click on the meeting room icon.
Next Monday our American Writers series continues with Sojourner Truth live from Battle Creek
Michigan we'll explore the abolitionist and women's rights movement in early 19th century
America as we look at her work the narrative of Sojourner Truth that gets underway live
at 9 a.m. Eastern 6 Pacific here on C-SPAN.
C-SPAN's American Writers a journey through history every Monday and Friday now through
December our nation's history told through the lives and works of 46 American Writers
writers who have influenced our history and whose work lives on today.
Our series website is AmericanWriters.org for schedule information bios of our featured
writers and first chapters of every featured book.
Teachers visit AmericanWriters.org and click on classroom to become a member of C-SPAN
in the classroom you'll receive a free educators kit and access to all C-SPAN's teaching resources
maps timelines video lessons and email alerts also available at AmericanWriters.org click
on shop for official American Writers products including the official companion book to the
series Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of American Writers this handy reference book contains
biographical sketches of a thousand writers and descriptions of five hundred significant
American works.
American Writers a journey through history Mondays at 9 a.m. Eastern and Fridays at 8
p.m. Eastern the words that shaped a nation.
Just ahead a pro-choice rally held in Washington yesterday by the National Organization for
Women live at 1245 Eastern a discussion on US-China relations including remarks by China's
ambassador to the US after that a pro-life news conference held by the Christian Defense
Coalition and at 530 another chance to see our American Writers program on James Fenimore
Cooper.
The US House and Senate return to session this week after a two-week break the Senate
meets in about a half an hour at noon Eastern for morning business at 2 p.m. legislative
work begins with more on the fiscal year 2002 budget resolution live coverage of the Senate
on our companion network C-SPAN 2 and live coverage of the House here on C-SPAN when
members return tomorrow at 2 p.m. Eastern.
C-SPAN's 2001 Congressional Directory is now available and includes.
You are the winner Nancy.
Genesis thank you for being on the show.
Congratulations.
You did very very well.
You are the winner of the day.
Bob Barker reminding you helps control the pet population.
Have your pet spayed or neutered.
Goodbye.
Thank you.
Bob Barker reminding you helps control the pet population.
This is Ron Roddy speaking for the Price is Right.
I'm Mark Goodson television production.
Join me for the one night of the year when Hollywood goes country.
The Academy of Country Music Awards with Hearst Lee Ann Rimes.
We're going to have some fun.
Find out at Faith Hill Tim McGraw or the Dixie Chicks will take home the prize.
Thank you.
The Academy of Country Music Awards.
Live Wednesday.
Right here on CBS.
Always wanted straight hair?
We'll show you how to deal with that lifelong struggle of straightening out your curls.
Wake up to what's happening tomorrow on the early show with Bryant Gumbel and Jane Claisen.
What Shante Kimes and her son did to their victims was so shocking.
It's still making headlines today.
Now CBS presents the twisted true story of Shante and Kenny Kimes.
You'll have everything we ever dreamed of.
Mary Tyler Moore like you've never seen her before.
Say what you made me do.
Jane Stapleton.
I don't like this.
Irene.
Like a mother.
Like a son.
Pray for me.
Pray for your mama.
CBS Sunday May 20th.
Punch 62 for Hollywood Squares.
Weeknights at 7 on Detroit 62, CBS.
$239,000.
The salary of the Wilderness Society President was $204,000.
The salary of Defenders of Wildlife President and CEO was $201,000.
Earth Justice Legal Defense Fund President Buck Parker was $157,000.
And the Sierra Club's Carl Pope salary was $138,000 in 1998 and listed as $199,577 in
1999, nearly a 50% raise.
And the list goes on.
Now folks think about it.
How many of those $25 contributions does it take you as you did like I did as a young
college student?
Nearly 100 species of wildlife will tumble into extinction.
The fact is no one knows how rapidly species are going extinct.
The Alliance figures is an extreme estimate that counts tropical beetles and other insects
including ones not yet known to science in its definition of wildlife.
Another example from the Wilderness Society.
We will fight to stop a reckless clear cutting on national forests in California and the
Pacific Northwest that threatens to destroy the last of America's unprotected ancient
forests in as little as 20 years.
Fact, the national forest logging has dropped dramatically in recent years in California
and clear cutting on national forests dipped to 1,395 acres in 1998, down 89% from 1990.
And from the defenders of wildlife again.
Won't you please adopt a furry little pup like Hope?
Hope is a cuddly brown wolf.
Hope was triumphantly born in Yellowstone.
Fact, there never was a pup named Hope.
As John Valeri, chief of research at Yellowstone National Park, we don't name wolves, we number
them.
Since wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone in 1995, their numbers have increased from
14 to about 160.
The program has been so successful that Yellowstone officials now favor removing animals from
the federal endangered species list.
And one of my favorite that I want to talk for just a minute about again comes from the
defenders of wildlife, and I wish I had some blow-ups of it, but it's a poison alert.
Wolves in danger, one of the sections that runs in a newspaper or a letter that goes
out to individuals, fundraising letter.
Another one that says a special grift when you join our pack, and it has pictures of
these cuddly wolves.
More than 160 million environmental fundraising pitches swirled through the U.S. mail last
year.
Some used the power of cute animals to attract donors.
The problem is that in many cases, those campaigns were less than honest.
And this was the pitch, and this is the one that caught my attention.
In Salmon, Idaho, which is in my district, in Salmon, Idaho, anti-wolf extremists committed
a horrible crime.
They killed two Yellowstone wolves with lethal poison, compound 1080.
Please don't allow anti-wolf extremists to kill our wild wolves.
These wolf families don't deserve to die.
Please, we need your help now.
And then, of course, they solicit a contribution.
The fact is, the two wolves were not Yellowstone wolves, but wolves reintroduced by the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service into central Idaho against the state of Idaho's objections to
reintroduction of those wolves.
Some wolves were killed illegally, but the population of wolves continues to increase
at a pace faster than federal wolf recovery officials had anticipated.
The government expects to remove wolves from the federal endangered species list in three
to four years.
In fact, in Idaho, we have already met our commitment of 10 mating pairs.
The problem is that they take Montana and Wyoming together and say we have to have 30
breeding pairs within the entire region.
Wolves are overpopulating Idaho better than anyone had anticipated, and they are using
these instances, this group, defenders of wildlife, to raise money to try to save wolves.
Unfortunately, much of the pleading that they do with the American public at the best can
be called dishonest.
I like you, Mr. Chairman.
Want to save the environment?
We want to make sure that what we do is compatible with the species and protecting species, but
we also think that human beings play a role in this environment and in our world, and
that human beings ought to be considered in this whole equation.
Look at what Congressman Walden is going through in Oregon right now, where they've taken 170,000
acres of 200,000 acres of irrigated land that won't have water this year because a judge
has ruled that the sucker fish that they are trying to protect is more important than those
people.
I yield back to the Chairman.
I thank the gentleman from Idaho.
I'd like to yield to my friend from Florida, Mr. Goss.
I thank the distinguished chairman for his consideration, and Mr. Chairman, with your
permission, I would like to address the speaker.
May he be recognized for permission to file a rule.
Mr. Speaker.
What reason does the gentleman from Florida rise?
Mr. Speaker, I send to the desk a privileged report from the Committee on Rules for Filing
under the Rule.
The clerk will report the title.
Report to accompany House Resolution 136.
Resolution waiving points of order against the conference report to accompany the House
concurrent resolution 83, establishing the Congressional budget for the United States
government.
To these organizations.
And then the question comes up, well, what are they spending it for?
And when we first got into this thing, we were arguing the idea, are these the people
that have the fire in their bosom to go out and take care of the public land?
Well, no, as we both discussed in the last while, it's not that.
It's more of an idea of raising more money and more money and more money.
And where is it spent?
I'd like to give a little example, if I could, about an environmental group in the state
of Utah.
I'd hasten to say, if that's what the public wants, fine.
If the public wants this money to just go into paying lawyers, paying marketeers, paying
advertising, K Street type of thing, Madison Avenue, fine.
But I thought that most of us who got involved in this thing didn't want that.
I thought we wanted to restore the forest and the clean water and the wildlife and do
it in a way that is environmentally sound at the same time to take good care of the
energy.
And as we know, we've got one coming.
But let me just refer to this one group.
They're called the Southern Utah Wilderness Society.
And some nice people are there, and some of them I think are a little misled, but they
probably think the same thing about me.
This group raises more than $2 million each year in donations from hardworking people
who care about protecting our environment.
The money is raised under the direction of the idea of protecting Utah wilderness lands.
Send this group some money, and you will help wilderness in the Colorado plateau, you were
told.
And so they sent out these beautiful calendars saying this is what you'll protect.
However, some of it's in national parks.
Only one was in that area, but it was a pretty calendar anyway.
However, when you look at their tax reports, you'll find that not one dime of this money
is actually spent on the environment.
Not a penny goes to plant a tree.
Restore a stream bed or protect an acre of ground in Utah or anywhere else.
Not a dollar to create a habitat to take care of an animal.
What this group does is they lobby for the passage of a wilderness legislation.
In fact, they lobby to pass virtually the same old tired worn out legislation every
year but they keep raising the ante.
I find it interesting that that group went with me and we said, now look, no one from
Utah really wants this.
They said, oh, go back to the time that Congressman Owens was here.
He wanted it and he introduced it.
In those days, what they don't realize as Congressman Owens was then a member of the
majority party, which was then the Democratic party.
This president was a Democrat.
The House and the Senate were Democrat and I was the ranking member of the committee
and they never, ever asked for a hearing.
So I wonder how serious they were about it in those days.
As a recent Associated Press story noted, the only end of pack this bill has in the
last decade are the trees that were killed to provide for the paper in which the bill
is printed year after year.
They're fierce lobbyists.
They have a staff of 20 attorneys, lobbyists and strategists who operate offices in four
cities including Washington, D.C.
They spent only $11,000 in 1999 in grassroot efforts to reach out to the public, though
they claim their primary reason for existence is to educate the public about the environment.
But they spent nearly a million dollars in the last four years to lobby, to get their
will-desist legislation passed.
I privately believe that the last thing in the world this group wants is to pass that
bill.
That's why they keep moving the goalpost.
That's why the numbers keep going up.
Above all, this organization is a self-perpetuating consumer of resource and energy.
They deal in volumes of paper and plastic.
They issue their own credit cards, the Affinity credit card.
That's what our environment needs, more credit cards.
They do a brisk business in the sale of videos, t-shirts, hats, books, posters.
Most of these products are either made from non-degradable materials like plastic or require
the cutting down of trees of paper.
They send out more than 100,000 newsletters, flyers and bulletins each year.
Folks, that's a lot of trees, and that doesn't even include their reports, press releases
and lawsuits.
They are aggressive users of electricity, four offices, all these things that they talk
about.
Now, I'd like to just say something about the lawsuits.
If I could move this one chart here.
Look at the number of lawsuits that the environmental community has done in the 1990-2000.
435 environmental lawsuits.
Now, I thought we were out here taking care of the environment.
I didn't know we were just in this thing of litigating.
It's the most litigious society we've ever had, but no, let's litigate again.
And this is how much they've made.
3.6 million legal fees paid by the U.S. government, whether they won or lost.
That's your tax pay money, folks.
$31,000 right there.
If they win or lose, they get that money.
One case netted $3.5 million for the share club, and it was questionable whether it was
even endangered.
The average award is in excess of $70,000, and they risk nothing.
So why go out and get you to give them money to plant a tree, to pick up the garbage, to
be aware of these things, to take good care of the environment, when you can get in court
and make that kind of money?
Who's knowin' who?
Let's be smart about this thing.
This thing isn't in there to protect the environment.
And that reminds me of when I was back here as a freshman.
1981, the Secretary of Interior was Jim Watt.
And he was supposed to come in and see me with Senator Garn over at Indian School.
And that morning, I received in the mail something from a group that was going to save the Chesapeake
Bay that was all ruined.
And it said, Mr. Hanson, if you'll send us $10, $20, $30, $40, $50, we'll do our best
to meet with the Interior Committee and Secretary Watt, who is ruining the Chesapeake Bay.
And so that afternoon, the Secretary walked in.
I said, Jim, I want to show you this.
And he laughed.
He said, what do you mean?
I put $285 million into protecting the Chesapeake Bay.
And he said, that's just poppycock.
So I sent him $10, because I was curious what was going to happen.
Six months later, I got a letter back, said, Mr. Hanson, due to your generous contribution,
we have met with the Interior Committee of the House, which I sit on or was sitting on
in those days also, and they never walked in.
And we have influenced the Interior Department to do our very best to take care of this terrible
problem.
And we've got that.
And if you'll send us some more money, another generous contribution, we'll be there to help
do these other things.
And I thought, what?
Poppycock.
I just like these people who prey upon the elderly regarding Social Security, when half
of those allegations, I should say, are not true.
Well, I can just tell you, you just rest assured, there's members here that are on the Resource
Committee.
We're not going to do drill in parks, as a gentleman from Idaho was mentioning some people
out.
That's not going to happen.
We're not going to hurt or rape or pillage the ground.
If anything, in a moderate and reasonable way, we are standing ready to take care of the
ground.
So I guess we can ask ourselves the question, do you want to pay attorneys?
You know, we do enough of the attorney's retirement bills around here anyway.
I don't know why we have to make it easy for other people to do that.
And those folks seem to do pretty well.
American trial attorneys do extremely well.
And I don't think we want to do that.
I think your money should go to take care of the public grounds of America and take
good care of it.
And I would hope that every American is a good conservationist and a good environmentalist
in the true sense of the word.
And that's what I'm hoping would happen.
So if you want to spend your money, put it somewhere where it does some good.
Do it somewhere where we can have access to the public ground.
And while we have access to the public ground, let's each one of us take good, good care
of it.
I took my children, we went to the very top of the Uinta Mountains, King's Peak, highest
peak in the Uintas.
I've taught my children when we go in an area and we find all kinds of things.
We found five beer cans right on the top of this beautiful, pristine area.
Of course, we crushed them and took them out.
Our theory is, is clean up ours and somebody else's and take it out when you're backpacking.
I wish we'd all do that.
I'm happy to yield to the gentleman from California, the chairman of the Western Caucus, an extremely
important member of the Resource Committee, the gentleman from California, Mr. Rodanovic.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
And I want to thank you for putting together this special order.
And regarding this topic, which I think is very important to the American people, and
as we're speaking here with an audience of probably over a million people tonight, I
really want to kind of pose a question to the American people.
We were dealing with an issue that's important to you and important to me with regard to
local influence over federal government lands and the management plans of our national forests
and our federal lands.
And it was said by some critic about local influences that those people that are closest
to the resources really don't speak in the interest of the American people on public
lands, which are lands for the American people.
And that somehow the national organizations that send out contribution forms, like what
you just mentioned, are somehow speaking for them.
And in some ways I wanted to agree that the local perspective on some of these resources
and keep in mind the Quincy Library group, which is a group in California of local people
that work together with federal forest lands to develop forest policies that are not only
good for the forest but also good for the local communities.
And it was a better plan than by far any Washington bear crack had put together.
And my concern was that while people might understand that a local person's influence
may not represent the best interest in the American public for public lands, there is
another side to that too.
And that is that when you have extreme zealots, like the list that you just mentioned of people
that solicit for any reason or another money to keep their influence, it doesn't necessarily
mean that those groups have the environment as the best interest in their minds and in
their hearts and that they pursue public policy that is good for the American people and good
for America's public lands environment, because it is not.
What it really boils down to is power and influence and keeping that.
And I think that is what you have done very excellent in an excellent way in demonstrating
tonight that it is not necessarily about good environmental policy for federal lands.
It is about power, keeping power, keeping power and influence.
And I think that the federal policies become secondary to that.
And it is proven by some of the foolish notions that have come up in these last years, like
Rhodes moratoriums and the Sierra Nevada framework, which is just a nightmare for our people in
the Sierra Forest in California, and some of these other issues where people with good
intentions and maybe fears that on the earth we are becoming too populated and that we
have to reserve and guard these public lands at all costs, but are basically operating
out of fear and not good common sense when it comes to management of public lands.
And so I just am grateful that you pinpointed, even the Sacramento Bee in California did
a series of articles on the environmental community and how they are such a money raising
operation whose sole interest I think these days has become to remain an influence and
secondarily was the environmental policy that they promoted, that it has really become out
of control.
And I think the American public needs to really take a second guess because groups like the
Sierra Club and the NRDC do not corner the market on a good environmental policy in this
country.
And I think the American people need to realize that.
It needs to be balanced by somebody who is there.
It is like an on-site landlord rather than somebody who is never on-site on a piece of
rental property.
The one who is on-site knows what is going on, knows the detail, knows the property better
than anybody else.
And it is no different than in our federal lands that the, and the Sierra Club and the
NRDC and groups like that depend on people that are miles and miles away and never see
the resource.
So how would they know one way or the other if they are being improperly influenced by
these groups or not?
They would not know.
But they tend to react on the, you know, pictures of Bambi on the TV or in their mailers that
they get and they give money.
But these people need to know that they are not, those groups are not necessarily promoting
the best environmental policy for public lands.
And that is why I wanted to come down and kind of reinforce it as what you were saying
is that people need to really be aware of these groups and don't, and they need to learn
to second-guess them and just don't take them for granted that what they are doing is good
environmental policy.
And thank you for holding this special order in order to bring up points like that as well
as many of the other points that you brought up.
I thank the gentleman from California.
Here, the gentleman from Idaho.
I thank the chairman and I thank the gentleman from California for his comments.
I agree with him fully.
You know, the chairman made a good point that unfortunately this money that is spent on
litigation is money that could go, it's taxpayers' money to start with, and it is money that
could go to protecting the environment.
When I met with Chief Dombeck a couple of years ago and talked to him about some of
the problems we were having in Idaho in our national forests, he said to me that one of
the problems they have in the Forest Service is making a decision because they know no
matter what decision they make, they are going to be sued.
And last year in this article that was from the Sacramento Bee, during the 1990s, the
government paid out $31.6 million in attorney's fees for 434 environmental cases brought against
federal agencies.
The average award per case was more than $70,000.
One long-running lawsuit in Texas involved an endangered salamander, netted lawyers for
the Sierra Club, and other plaintiffs more than $3.5 million in taxpayers' fund, as the
chairman has already pointed out.
That's money that could be used for other environmental purposes and actually cleaning
up the environment and taking care of the backlog in maintenance that we have in our
national forests and in our national parks.
And again, it is taxpayer money.
One of the main arguments for the roadless issue was that the Forest Service didn't have
the money to maintain the roads that they currently had.
And so if they couldn't maintain those, how could they justify building more roads so
we might as well make them roadless?
Well, if we're spending all that money on lawsuits, then certainly we don't have the
money to take care of the roads.
You know, one of the things that was interesting in this series of articles is that the effects
of these things are actually damaging to the environment oftentimes.
And let me read a portion of these articles.
Wildfire today is inflicting nightmarish wounds, injuries made worse by a failure to heed scientific
warnings.
For example, and there's three of them here that they list, in 1994, Wallace Covington,
a professor of forest ecology at Northern University, Northern Arizona University, and
a nationally recognized fire scientist and a colleague warned that the Kendrick Mountain
wilderness area in Northern Arizona was so clotted with vegetation it was ready to explode.
They will only perpetuate fuel buildup and increase the potential for uncontrolled and
destructive wildfires, they wrote in a scientific analysis for the Kaibab National Forest.
Some thinning was done, but not enough.
Last year, a large fire swept through the region, carving an apocalyptic trail of destruction.
What happened is much worse ecologically than a clear cut.
Much worse, Covington said, and that fire is in the future.
It's happening again and again.
We're going to have skeletal landscapes.
The other example, listening to fire and forest scientists, Martha Cattell pleaded in 1996
for permission to log and thin an incendiary mass of storm-killed timber in California's
Trinity Alps.
This is a true emergency of vast magnitude, Cattell, then supervisor of the Six Rivers
National Forest, wrote to her boss in San Francisco, it is not a matter of if a fire
will occur, but how extensive the damage will be when the fire does occur.
Because of an environmental appeal, the project bogged down.
Then in 1999, a fire found its way into the area.
It spewed smoke for hundreds of miles, incinerated spotted owl habitat, and triggered soil erosion
and stream damage in a key salmon-spawning watershed.
Well these stories are something that I hear about daily as I go back to Idaho from my
resource advisory group and my ag advisory groups and I talk to them.
We did more damage last year in Idaho with the nation's largest wildfires.
We did more damage to the environment, to salmon habitat, to spawning habitat, than
was done by any logging practices that have ever been done.
And today is that snow melts and the rains come, hopefully the rains come.
That erosion is going to filter down into those streams and it's going to cover the
reds and consequently you're going to have a difficult time with managing salmon habitat.
So oftentimes these efforts to address these environmental concerns, the potential for
catastrophic wildfire, today the Forest Service says something like 35 percent of our national
forest is at risk of catastrophic wildfires, or 35 million acres I guess it is, of our
national forest are at risk of catastrophic wildfires.
And these are not just fires.
These are cataclysmic fires that burn everything.
They burn so hot.
They burn the microorganisms, they sterilize the soil down to as much as 18 inches and
for years and years those forests never recover, if they ever do recover.
We still have spots in Idaho from the 1910 fire that nothing will grow on.
We do more damage to the environment by not proactively managing it.
And of course every time you try to do that there's an environmental lawsuit from someone.
And now they say, well, maybe we can do thinning if it is not for commercial purposes, as if
commercial or business or profit adds some damage to the environment that thinning just
to thin doesn't do.
Of course there are the Sierra Club groups that want no cut.
The fact is, is we have to proactively manage these forests and we can do that.
It was managed by fire before.
Now we have to get in and do some management so that we don't have these catastrophic
fires and unfortunately at every step of the way we're fought by groups who think that
man should not touch the forest, that they should be left as natural as they ever were
before we came.
I yield back to the gentleman.
I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Speaker, may I ask how much time we have remaining?
Approximately 11 minutes.
11 minutes?
Mm-hmm.
I thank the speaker.
Let me just say a word about what the gentleman from Idaho just talked about.
We're having a hearing not too long ago and lo and behold, one of the big clubs was there
and I asked this vice president the question, so why is it that you resist managing the
public grounds?
Why is it that you resist the idea that we can go in and do some cleaning, thinning,
prescribed fires and take care of it and keep a wholesome forest like many of the private
organizations have?
We now have, as the gentleman from Idaho said, fuel load.
What is fuel load?
It's dead trees.
It's dead fall.
It's brush.
And so now you have the potential of this summer as last summer is a careless smoker,
a fire caused by a camp fire that's left unattended or a lightning strike, which is one of the
bigger ones.
And here we go again.
We're going to burn the forest.
This person from this organization answered me and said, because it's not nature's way.
Nature's way is just let it do its thing.
Well, I don't know if I buy into that.
I mean, you get down to the idea of 1905, we started the Forest Service.
And if you read the charter of the Forest Service, it is to maintain and take care of
the forests of America.
And that means cleaning it, thinning it, making sure that fighting fires instead of getting
ourselves in what we had of 2000, the year 2000, the heaviest fire year in record.
And I dare say, and I'm no prophet, but I think the fuel load is still there after these
eight years of mismanagement we've had.
And we now have 2001 waiting for another one because talk to your local forester.
And the people, Mr. Speaker, are watching this, should talk to their district rangers.
They should talk to them and ask the question, have we still got that fuel load?
And the answer is a resounding yes.
So here we go again.
We're going to spend taxpayers' money all over the place because we haven't done what
they said in 1905 we should have done, and that's manage the forest.
This new administration luckily has a man of the stature of Dale Bosworth and now the
chief, and I'm sure we'll see some men.
But I have to ask the question, does it mean to be a good environmentalist we let the forest
burn to the ground?
Does that mean being a good environmentalist?
If so, I hope there's not too many of them out there.
Does it mean the idea that we drain some of our water resources like Lake Powell that
services the whole southwest part of America, and that's the way we live because we've got
water?
That's a good one.
Yet one of the biggest organizations around in their book, the Sierra Club, had a whole
four or five pages on let a river run through it and drain Lake Powell.
Does Jim want to comment on that?
Well, I do and want to comment on one specifically thing because I think I've got an unusual
perspective on being from California, Mr. Hanson, and that is because we're going through
the California energy crisis.
I have to be careful there, too.
I know, and I love my state and it's the best state in the world, and don't mess with California.
But what I'm saying is that we have really seen the over-influence of environmental
zealotism in California, and we're viewing that in our energy policy.
We have had the worst problem with the NIMBY attitude on the development of energy generation
resources in California, but it's all been backed by your top environmental groups who
have really wanted not the population of California to grow, so they've basically forced officials
to stick their heads in the sand and pretend it wasn't happening until we have an energy
crisis like now and an upcoming water shortage.
I mean, unfortunately, California's going to get to the point where they turn on the
faucet, they get no water, they flip the switch, they get no electricity because of the environmental
influence on public policy in the state of California.
And it's not just in California.
It's happening all over the world.
Today, this summer, we're going to have to face the fact of whether you either force
a temporary relaxation of air quality standards or you're going to have rolling blackouts
and people are going to be dead.
And those are the choices that we're facing in California.
And you know what?
People are going to face that choice all over the country because of the undue influence
of the environmental community in this country right now.
You're going to see it this summer, if I may say to the gentleman from California.
This summer is going to be the biggest wake-up call that America's had for a long time.
Eight years of neglect in these things is now going to catch up with this.
When we're asking, what does it mean to be a good environmentalist?
Does it mean to deny access to the public grounds of America for the Americans?
I think not.
Does it mean that we protect the housefly over children?
I don't think so.
In southern Utah, we've got a desert tortoise and we've spent $33,000 per turtle.
And we can't really say that it's endangered.
What our weighted pupil unit is to pay for our kids every year down there, $3,600.
So I guess the turtle is more important in some people's mind.
But it comes down to this.
Can Americans who are great and wonderful and good thinking people, can we come to some
common sense on this or have we come way too extreme in this issue?
I think tonight we've tried to make that case that we feel we have.
Gentleman from Idaho.
Well, Mr. Chairman, I think the point is made that unfortunately the environmental movement
has become far too extreme.
That doesn't mean that there are good environmentalists out there, many housewives and husbands across
the nation that want to take care of our land and our country.
I being one of those and I'm sure you and gentlemen from California also.
But as I was saying earlier, you know, many of these things don't really address the environment
or don't address the environment.
They hurt it more than they address it.
They are trying to use environmental issues for other means.
And I will tell you an example in Idaho.
We have a sage-grouse problem, declining sage-grouse populations.
And we're trying to find out why and what we can do to control it.
Fish and Wildlife Service and the Idaho Fish and Game for 20 years have been studying this
and they decided that predators are a main problem with sage-grouse populations.
They eat the young chicks.
So they proposed a study to take two areas, one where they did some predator control this
year and the other one where they didn't do any predator control and examine the two of
them and see the sage-grouse populations.
But two environmental groups have sued them to stop the study because they want to protect
the sage-grouse, they say.
But their real goal is, their argument is to get cattle off of this land.
And if it is shown that sage-grouse can be protected by removing some of the predators,
the argument for removing cattle goes away.
And so they don't want this study done.
So is it truly their aim to try to save the sage-grouse or is their true aim to get cattle
off public land regardless of what cattle does to the sage-grouse?
You know, when I want to look at a true conservationist, an original conservationist, I look at the
farmers and ranchers of this country because it is the land that produces the crop, that
produces the grass that the cows eat.
That's what they depend on for a living and they take care of it.
Overwhelming majorities of them take care of it.
So when I want some true conservation issues, I generally talk to my farmers and my ranchers
and I yield back to the gentleman.
Mr. Speaker, I thank you for the time that we've had tonight and yield back the balance
for a time.
Thank you.
The chair will entertain a motion to adjourn.
How do we have?
Okay.
Mr. Speaker, I move the task to now adjourn.
The question is on the motion to adjourn.
Those in favor say aye.
Aye.
Those opposed, no.
The ayes have it.
The motion is agreed to.
Accordingly, the House stands adjourned until 10 a.m. tomorrow.
The House today worked on the fiscal year 2002 federal budget resolution.
Members sent the measure back to the House Senate Conference Committee for some revisions
and it was refiled for consideration tomorrow.
The House also approved a resolution honoring the National Science Foundation on its 50th
anniversary and voted to allow the 20th annual National Peace Officers Memorial Service to
be held in the U.S. Capitol.
On Wednesday, the House will resume work on the nearly $2 trillion budget outline called
a budget resolution.
Also members will take up a wildland fire management measure.
It would let the Departments of Interior and Agriculture reimburse agencies for the costs
of fighting wildfires.
Live House coverage starts at 10 a.m. Eastern Time here on C-SPAN.
For a guide to the House and Senate, C-SPAN's 2001 Congressional Directory is now available.
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Order your copy for only $10.95 plus shipping and handling at cspan.org slash shop.
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This week in our American Writers series, we're focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson and
Henry David Thoreau.
Next you'll hear about the Old Manse, a house lived in by Thoreau, Emerson and Nathaniel
Hawthorne.
Lori Butters, the historic site director, discusses the history of the House and how
it was involved in the lives of these three American writers.
What was the country like in 1834 and 35 when he was here at this house?
It was still very much smaller towns, very country-fied, a lot of farmland, especially
in Concord, was still a lot of farmland.
Concord itself did not have the railroad yet.
The railroad didn't come here for another 10 years after that, which of course opened
up a whole new thing.
When that happened, it was easy to get in and out of Boston, easy to meet with friends.
It was the whole start of the Saturday Club with Emerson and the Hedge Club in Boston.
So they were still a little more insular in their groups and weren't quite as widespread.
Had the Transcendental Movement started and what was that?
It hadn't really started yet and it didn't have that name.
We now have that name for it.
But it really didn't get started for at least another 10, 15 years.
And of course Emerson was part of that, as was Henry Thoreau.
However, Nathaniel Hawthorne was not, even though he was one of the quote unquote Concord
authors, he was not part of that particular movement, even though he was a friend.
What was that movement all about?
Again, just as with Emerson and that whole idea of finding your spirituality elsewhere,
it didn't have to be in nature, but it could be wherever you found it.
Thoreau also happened to find it more so out of doors than in a church.
In fact, he, if ever, went to church, very rarely did.
It was the same kind of theory.
His definition is a little different.
So there is no definition for Transcendentalism.
It is a very hard concept to define specifically for every person.
You mentioned Thoreau and I wanted to know if you ever came to visit Emerson in this
house when Emerson was here.
Possibly.
We don't have any written record of Thoreau actually visiting Emerson at this house.
Emerson was only here for about a year and a half.
He purchased a house in 1836, which he and his wife, he was about to marry his second
wife Lydian and they named it Bush.
Once they moved there, there was definitely a lot of visitation going on over at that
house.
Not so much recorded here.
Did Thoreau and Emerson know each other at this point in their lives?
Oh yes.
Oh yeah, because they were both local families.
Even though Emerson was older than Thoreau by a good 15 years, they were both Concord
boys and were very well aware of each other.
We have you standing in front of the garden here at the Old Man's and there's a story
behind Henry David Thoreau planting a garden here.
This particular garden that we have recreated several years ago is based on Nathaniel Hawthorne's
journals of the 1840s as well as another man named George Bradford.
Now in 1842, as a wedding present, Henry Thoreau planted this vegetable garden as a wedding
gift.
To?
To Nathaniel Hawthorne, they actually rented this house for three and a half years and
they moved in on their wedding day which was July 9th, 1842.
Now whether or not this was Thoreau's own idea or there's more evidence that shows
that perhaps his mother or one of his aunts suggested that he plant this garden, he did
plant it.
And Hawthorne cultivated it that first year and he continued to plant and cultivate for
the next two years that they were here.
He wrote a lot about that in his journals, talking about his vegetable children, among
other things.
Doing every little detail it seemed for quite a while.
So it sounds as if Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Emerson all knew each other here in Concord
and interacted.
What was that like?
Oh yeah, in fact there's a wonderful story that was in a letter that Sophia Hawthorne
wrote to her mother.
And in it she's describing the three of them, Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne, skating on
the Concord River which is right behind the house here.
And she talks about Thoreau skating in front of the other two doing these diarhythmic dances
and bopping leaps.
And he's followed by Hawthorne looking like a stately Greek god, followed in turn by Mr.
Emerson with his hands behind his back and his head bent low just trying to keep up with
the other two.
Emerson gave up first and came inside and had a cup of tea with Sophia and the other
two continued to do their skating.
Which this is not something you picture these people doing.
When people talk about Emerson they talk about his writings and how serious they were and
all his ideas.
But he was also somebody who had a normal life, who went ice skating on the Concord
River or took walks through Sleepy Hollow or went berry picking with his kids.
Same with Hawthorne and Thoreau as well.
Thoreau also sold a boat to Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The boat that he and his brother John built for the trip that eventually became the book
A Week on the Concord and the Merrimack Rivers.
The boat was called the Msketiquid.
He no longer needed it.
He needed a little cash.
So he sold the boat to Hawthorne for about $7 and Hawthorne renamed it the Pond Lily
and he got Thoreau to teach him how to row it properly because he himself did not know
how to row the boat.
And that was the boat they had for the three years they were here.
Our American Writers series this week is focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
Friday night at 8 Eastern our program from Concord, Massachusetts where we examine the
life and writings of these two men.
It gets underway at 8 p.m. Eastern, 5 Pacific here on C-SPAN.
Then on Monday our American Writers series looks at the life and works of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton will be live from Seneca Falls, New York to meet authors and her descendants as
they talk about the time period that she lived in and her role in the women's suffrage movement.
The program begins live at 9 a.m. Eastern, 6 a.m. Pacific here on C-SPAN.
Ahead tonight on C-SPAN a news conference by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the
Pentagon space programs.
After that a report from the BBC on calls for June elections by British Prime Minister
Tony Blair.
Later White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer briefs reporters on the President's energy
policies and judicial nominations.
Now Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
At the Pentagon today he discussed the findings of a commission looking at the future of defense
and intelligence uses for space.
His comments are just over 35 minutes.
It's kind of exciting to come in on a Monday and find out from the press that I've been
doing things on the weekend that I never dreamt of doing.
We're here to discuss plans for transforming the management and organization of America's
defense and intelligence programs.
More than any other country the United States relies on space for its security and well-being.
Our daily lives are increasingly tied to space.
We depend on satellite services to our homes, schools, businesses and hospitals.
Satellites enable global communications, television broadcasts, weather forecasting, navigation
of ships, planes, trucks, cars, synchronizing computers, communications and electric power
grids.
Satellites are also our worldwide eyes and ears.
They collect information on capabilities and intentions of potential adversaries, monitor
treaties and agreements and support military operations worldwide.
U.S. space capabilities enable military forces to be warned of missile attack, to communicate,
navigate to an area while avoiding hostile action and precisely attack targets in ways
that minimize collateral damage and protect the lives of U.S. soldiers, sailors, Marines
and airmen.
Our dependence on operations in space, however, makes us somewhat vulnerable to new challenges.
It's only logical to conclude that we must be attentive to these vulnerabilities and pay
careful attention to protecting, promoting our interest in space.
History shows that deterrence and dissuasion are important.
Our first choice is not to prevail in a conflict but to be in a range in a way that can dissuade
others from engaging in acts hostile to the United States national security interests
and therefore deterring conflict from occurring.
We need to ensure that the management and the organization of our national security
space program reflects the importance of space to the nation today.
Space issues are complex and merit a renewed focus.
A more comprehensive management and organizational approach is necessary to assign clear responsibilities
and accountability for national security space programs.
We're fortunate that Congress recognized our growing dependence and vulnerability and had
the foresight to establish the space commission to consider how to strengthen our national
security space programs.
I would particularly like to recognize Senator Bob Smith of New Hampshire, who I'll bring
up to the podium in a moment, for championing this effort over a period of years and for
initiating the legislation that created the commission.
I'd also like to thank the leadership of the Senate and the House Armed Services Committee
and Congressman Mac Thornberry, who is also with us today, who I will ask to come up to
the podium in a few minutes.
Both played important roles in this effort to improve our national security space programs.
The space commission paved the way by presenting thorough independent and objective assessment
of our national space program.
I thank the commissioners who are private citizens, took their time to offer their talents.
We have three here today.
Tom Mormon, who's going to say a few words on behalf of the space commission, retired
Air Force General, Dwayne Andrews, and who served in the Pentagon, as all of you know,
as I believe an assistant secretary of defense in CQDI and other activities, and acting secretary
of the Air Force, of course.
And then we also have the vice chief of staff of the Air Force, who will make some remarks
since a good deal of what the organizational activities relate to is the Air Force, needless
to say.
Now I'd like to take a moment just to summarize the management and organizational changes
I believe will help the U.S. advance our interest in space.
First, I should say that the director of central intelligence and I are meeting regularly to
address space and intelligence matters.
Such meetings will allow the two officials who have primary responsibility and accountability
for the U.S. national security space program to discuss space issues on a frequent basis.
Second, the Department of Defense is merging disparate space activities and adjusting chains
of command.
These changes will involve all key facets of the department, the office of the secretary,
the military departments, the national reconnaissance office, and the U.S. space command.
The majority of these changes involve realigning Air Force headquarters and field commands
to more effectively organize, train, and equip for space operations, ensuring that the Air
Force will become the lead for space activities in the Department of Defense.
These national security space management and organizational changes are part of our initial
efforts to transform the U.S. department and establishment and reform DOD structures, processes,
and organization.
They will help the U.S. to focus on meeting the national security space needs of the 21st
century.
We'll be available to respond to questions, but first I'd like to ask Senator Smith to
come up and make a few remarks and Congressman Thornberry to join him and make some remarks.
Thank you, Mr. Secretary.
It's an honor and a privilege for me to be here.
I can remember about two years ago sitting in my office with a couple of staff members
discussing the concept of just exactly what you're talking about today, how we could be
more active in space to protect ourselves.
And someone of the staff members suggested a commission.
I said, oh, no, not another commission.
But this one turned out to be a good one.
I never could have dreamed that in two years not only would we have the commission created,
but we would have you as the Secretary of Defense, who is the chairman of the commission,
to really enact or to begin the process of enacting many of the recommendations of that
commission.
You are a true visionary.
I am really delighted that you are the Secretary of Defense.
And I would just close by reminding the American people there are nations out there who are
hostile to us, and they are in space.
They have such weapons as lasers, anti-satellite weapons, and electromagnetic pulse weapons.
And we have to be ready to recognize that threat.
And I'm looking forward to working with the Secretary of Defense in the coming years to
see to it that we have the capability in space to deal with those problems.
As one who tried to push the space commission from the House side, I want to congratulate
the Secretary on the announcements he's making today.
The space commission really came about because a number of us were concerned that space has
not been getting the attention that it needs.
Most Americans don't understand how dependent we are on space now, not just for the military,
but for the everyday life of the average Americans.
And that dependence is going to grow, and that growing dependence means more vulnerabilities.
We have to be prepared to deal with that.
There are a number of things that we have to deal with, as these recommendations, these
decisions will do, from the organization of the government to funding to doctrine development,
all sorts of issues there.
But the most important part in the history of the Transcendental Movement of the mid-19th
century.
I was seated by the shore of a small pond about a mile and a half south of the village
of Concord in the midst of an extensive wood.
As the sun arose, I saw the pond throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here
and there by degrees, its soft ripples, or its smooth reflecting surface was revealed,
while the mist, like the ghosts, were withdrawing in every direction into the woods.
That was a passage from Henry David Thoreau's Walden, and you're looking at Walden Pond,
on the land once owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And where Thoreau built a cabin in the woods, this pond and these woods are central to the
American Transcendental Movement.
Bob Richardson, author, historian, you've studied these two men.
We're at the start of the 21st century.
Why should we care about 19th century writers?
Well, these two men came to say one word, which was nature.
Nature matters.
Nature is the law.
We turn to nature, not to the church, not to state, not to family, not to history, to
find out who we are and what our real relation to the world is.
And this was a revolution in the middle of the 19th century.
The country is building, the railroads are going, people are leaving New England for
the west, the population is doubling every 15 or 20 years.
The woods are all being cut down for fuel.
There's an energy crisis.
There's not a standing forest within 75 miles of an American city by 1850.
It all is going up the fireplaces.
It took 30 cords of wood to heat a big house in New England in those days.
Woods have been cut down all around here.
And Harrison and Thoreau realized that to get our bearings, to find out who we are,
individually and as a people, you have to go back and start with nature and ask what
is your relation to the natural world?
What though was happening philosophically in the country at the time?
You talked about the Calvinist movement when we walked through this area yesterday.
What was that and how did that influence the writings of Emerson?
Calvinism teaches that we're all fallen and we're sinful and the world is fallen and we
can't make it without help.
What Emerson came to say was that the individual is adequate, that the powers of the soul are
commensurate with its needs no matter what experience may tell you that you can do it.
Was that radical at the time?
This was completely new at the time because what people thought at the time was we can't
do it.
We are weak.
We are fallen.
We live under original sin.
We need grace.
We need outside help.
What Emerson wanted to say was no, that's not so.
The soul has within it the powers that it needs to make it through life.
This of course is still around us.
This is what all the self-help manuals are full of.
You can go to any bookstore and you can buy dozens of these books that teach you how to
find within yourself the resources to live.
We basically can do it.
But this was new at the time.
This is the main beach here at the Walden Pond Reservation.
It's about 420 acres, we'll learn more about it later.
But what about this area?
If these two men came back today, has it changed?
It's changed.
There is a beach.
Later on today there will be a lot of people swimming down here.
But in some ways it's even better.
All over there was timbered off.
Was cut off and there were fields.
There were a lot of ugly stumps when Thoreau came out here.
He spent a lot of the first year digging out stumps so he could plant beans.
This is in many ways as beautiful, maybe more.
Who was Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Emerson was the spirit of Concord.
One time after he gave a speech, somebody at the reception afterwards proposed a toast
and said, I give you the spirit of Concord and introduced Emerson.
He'd been a minister, he stopped being a minister because the church gave him problems and he
had turned to being a freelance writer and lecturer.
And he had moved to Concord, married for a second time, and was busy writing a book which
he would eventually call Nature.
But he could really have called it The Way Things Are.
This is how I see it.
He sat down and did what a lot of people want to do, which is to write one little book which
says this is how I see it.
We began this writer series as a way to look at history and a year before the Declaration
of Independence was written in 1775, just a couple miles from here, there was the Battle
of Concord.
Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather was there, trying to draw the connections between that
period in 1775 and the early 1830s.
Well it was Oliver Wendell Holmes who called one of Emerson's speeches America's Intellectual
Declaration of Independence.
And it is sometimes seen as a piece of the revolutionary experience.
Emerson's grandfather was in the war, he died as a chaplain up at Ticonderoga with the troops.
And they were all very conscious of the revolutionary generation, which for them meant the ability
to stand up for your rights when the time came.
Meant revolt, meant revolution, meant throwing off England.
And Thorough's grandfather was part of a group in Boston that patrolled the streets during
anti-Catholic riot, protecting Catholics from the mob.
They were very much conscious of their past.
And of course Lexington and Concord were where the revolution had started up here, where
the fighting had started up here.
So they were very much aware of this as time was going on.
As we get into the 1830s, the country is building, the railroads are going west, people are leaving
New England to find better farmland elsewhere, population is growing wildly, boom times everywhere,
carpenters are banging up houses all over.
Concord is a transport town, it's full of wagons all the time, and taverns.
It's not quiet at all, it's manufacturing.
They're making hats, they're making shoes, they're making pencils, they're making clocks,
all kinds of stuff for export trade.
They're trying to turn this into a mill town.
America is becoming industrial, and all the time underneath it the problem of slavery
is sitting there, just getting worse and worse and worse.
And the abolition movement is beginning to gather steam, people are beginning to think
about women's rights, should women have the right to own property?
Do they even have the right to vote?
These things are beginning to roll a little bit.
And the long shadow we see now, the long shadow of the Civil War reaches all the way back
these times, because things are going to get worse and worse and worse.
The government...
It was percolating around this time though.
It's percolating already around this time.
And by the end of the 1840s, Congress is going to pass the Fugitive Slave Law.
Daniel Webster is going to stand up and agree to return escaped slaves.
And this outraged a lot of people up here, especially Thoreau Emerson.
And they decided that this was a law that should not be obeyed.
They were ordinary law-abiding people, but when the law is wrong, then you have a different
obligation.
The country's population in the 1830s, just under 13 million.
It was about 31.5 million by 1860.
How did the country change geographically during this time?
Well it was moving west.
Central population was moving west as much as it could.
This is before the potato famine in Ireland, but immigration is already setting in a fair
amount.
The South is beginning to fill up.
Kansas is beginning to be settled.
The country is expanding.
Henry David Thoreau.
And we've heard Thoreau a lot of different discussions on how to pronounce his name.
What is the proper pronunciation and how do we know how to pronounce his name?
Henry David Thoreau, as people used to say.
It's Thoreau, as in the word Thoreau, to do a Thoreau job.
And we know because people wrote it down.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who also lived in Concord, met Thoreau before he'd ever seen
his name in print.
He went home and wrote down, I met Mr.
Thoreau, T-H-O-R-O.
And various other people gave a phonetic spelling of it that way.
Who was he?
He was the only one of the transcendentalists who was actually born in Concord.
All the rest moved here or came here, associated here, visited here, but he was from here.
He was a native.
And his father was a pencil maker.
His grandfather had been a sailor shipwrecked off the New Jersey coast 50 years earlier.
When Henry grew up in town with a brother, sister, he was early interested in the outside
world.
He had an absolute genius for picking up arrowheads.
He could be walking along like this.
And he would start to clown or do something dramatic and say, this is Tehadawan's country,
going back to the Indians.
Here is Tehadawan, and here he would bend over and pick you up an arrowhead.
Yeah, he could actually do it.
And he could show other people how you find arrowheads.
The trick is you find high ground after a rain.
Walk along high ridges just after a rain.
Maybe you'll find an arrowhead.
I only got a pebble.
There's a road up there.
There's a rail line back there.
All here back in 1830, 1830s?
All here back then, the railroad had just come and it had cut off an arm of the pond
and made a big ugly landfill and laid a track across it.
There was a wagon road up here, a dusty wagon road.
Of course, nothing was paved in those days.
And produce would crank back and forth on this.
He could walk into town either along this road or he could go along the railroad or
he could cut through the woods.
We welcome you to our continuing series on American Riders.
And if we were here about two hours ago, the fog was pretty heavy, wasn't it?
Oh, it was a gorgeous morning.
Mist was just rolling in out there and then curling up off the water.
What do you take away from here?
What I take away from here is that every morning the world is born again.
Henry says that morning brings back the heroic ages.
It's one of those wonderful things.
And what he came to say was that every day is the day of creation.
It gets started again every day.
The sun comes up every day.
Every day is the day of judgment.
You don't know anything until you've learned those two things.
Did political leaders in Washington read what these two men were writing?
Not much at the beginning because a lot of what they had to say didn't work into government.
They really talked about what people's obligations were when the government was doing something
wrong.
And later when, what you could call the sort of, transcendentalism said that I'm free and
if I'm free I must wish the same thing for everybody else.
So it pushed people into social reform, into abolition, into women's rights.
Whatever I want for myself I can't deny to anybody else.
Now eventually that means freeing the slaves.
It means the government will have to break its support for slavery.
And at that point the government began to pay attention because transcendentalism was
beginning to teach revolt.
Our phone lines 202-624-1111 for those of you who live in the eastern and central time
zones, 202-624-115.
If you live in the mountain and pacific time zones we do have a line set aside for those
of you who are under the age of 18.
That number is 202-737-6734 and in the second half of the program we will welcome your emails
as well at writers at cspan.org.
We're joined by Bob Richardson who began to study both of these men when?
Well about 25 years ago really.
Why?
Well I moved to Denver, got away from the east coast and away from the stultifying influence
of growing up around here and suddenly it began to make sense that what they were talking
about was something that applied to everybody everywhere.
You didn't have to be at Walden Pond.
You could be at Harvard Gulch in Denver.
And the morning brings back the heroic age there.
Every day comes up in this wonderful way there.
Every day is creation.
Every day is judgment.
I began to see that it really applied to me.
Let me read what Thoreau wrote in Slavering Massachusetts.
As we look out of this pond it could be a lake as well.
He said that we walk to the lakes to see serenity when we are not serene.
Who can be serene in a country where both the rulers and the ruled are without principles?
The remembrance of my country spoils my walk.
What was he saying?
He was saying that the problem was slavery.
That the government was supporting slavery.
The government was undertaking the Mexican War which meant the extension of slavery.
It profoundly felt that this was immoral.
The problem is not to obey the law.
The question is what is right?
Emerson had a similar reaction when the Fugitive Slave Law was passed.
He said this filthy enactment was made in this century by men and women who could read
I will not obey it by God.
Emerson's influence in Henry David Thoreau, how big was it?
It's enormous.
Emerson was the context out of which Thoreau came.
They end as perhaps twin stars, a pair.
In some ways Thoreau has a more powerful single book.
Walden is a greater book than any one thing that Emerson ever wrote.
The two of them are inseparable and I don't know that Thoreau really would have been Thoreau
had there not been an Emerson.
What have you learned about these two men that strikes you as far as the country, what
they wrote, the influence of what they wrote that may have been permeating around the country
at the time?
I think they wrote about and were interested in, spoke for and have created a kind of democratic
individualism.
I think they really follow on from the great founders of the Declaration and the Constitution
and what they're interested in is a country in which each voice counts.
It took until the 1830s and 40s to get past the slavery clauses and inclusions in the
Constitution that every voice mattered, every person mattered.
Going back to the individual and not to the group, we don't consider just the white planters
or just the women or just the slaves.
You go back to people, each individual person.
That means there's kind of an irreducible democratic individualism that these people
stood for and this eventually has become I think as strong as any strain in American
life and politics.
And again, in trying to connect all of this and why it's important to people, the writings
of Thoreau, how did it influence people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King, a hundred years
later?
And the King of Denmark during the Second World War, they all took from Emerson and
Thoreau the idea of what we can call civil disobedience, which means when the law is
wrong you have a moral obligation to disobey the law.
The individual conscience is finally higher than the government.
Individuals made this government, they can make another.
They both are these people.
We will get a call from Southport, Maine.
Good morning.
Yes, good morning.
I have a question.
I think I'm correct on this.
Isn't it true that Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News and U.S. News
and World Report, who's one of our little great talking heads, at one time with his
Boston properties had bought a lot of land on Walden Pond and was planning to build a
big development there, but then people came in, including singer-songwriter Don Henley
of the Eagles, and stopped it and got the money and put him out.
Isn't it true that Zuckerman was part of the group that was going to do that?
I believe that's right.
It's certainly right that Don Henley raised an enormous amount of money and threw his
heart and soul into the saving of Walden Woods.
And here it is.
What was Nature, the book, the essay?
Nature was a little short book that Emerson wrote when he became upset with his time and
his generation, and he started out by saying, the trouble with this generation is it looks
backwards our age is retrospective.
And he was trying to call people to look inward first, to look at nature and to look ahead.
It's a kind of call to arms.
What Emerson says in Nature, and is still saying in Nature, is that the power that you
can see in nature, what a famous poet once called the force that through the green fuse
drives the flower, that wonderful notion, nature in the spring.
The leaves are all coming out right now.
The candles are up there on the white pines, the little growths on the ends.
The power that you see in nature is finally the same power that the individual has to
remake his or her own life.
This is an extraordinary connection.
The power that's in nature is not a power outside you.
It is the same power that you have to start again, to reach inside, start your own life.
When Nature came out in 1835, the president of the time again?
It was Martin Van Buren.
It was published in 1836, finished in 1835, published in 1836, and Jackson had just finished
two terms and Martin Van Buren was about to become president.
The book made very little splash.
Just very few copies sold.
It was really for his own satisfaction at the time.
But it spread like a pebble thrown into a pond.
The ripples began to move outward.
Give our audience a sense of where we're at.
Concord is about a mile, mile and a half down the road.
Concord is a mile or so down that way.
Boston is 14 miles off that way, down the road.
We are at Walden Pond.
It feels like the countryside.
It is the country.
People come out here and go swimming, go fishing.
You get here early in the morning.
It's just glorious here in the morning.
This morning early the fog was curling off the lake.
It was just spectacular.
This is home for you originally, is it not?
It's been home for a long time.
I was 15 when we moved here.
But have been around and in and out ever since.
I come up and walk around the pond every chance I get.
It's a renewal.
Athens, Tennessee, you're next.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I have a couple of questions for your guest and a couple for you concerning the program
if I might ask those as well.
For Mr. Richardson first, your earlier comments are about Emerson vis-a-vis Calvinism.
You said if I remember correctly that Emerson taught human beings to depend upon their own
inner resources.
That's not precisely the way I read him, particularly in his 1835 Harvard Divinity School address.
It seems to me that Emerson is not so much appealing to human resources as a sense of
the divine, which is other than the human, but that is within the human.
I would ask for clarification on that from you and in that connection what influenced
Eastern thought had on Emerson and what his resources were for that.
For you Mr. Scully, in looking at the program for American writers, I noticed the omission
of Melville, which seems like a striking omission to me, and also nothing about American poets
like Dickinson and Whitman.
I was just wondering why the omission.
I'll hang up and listen to your answers.
Thank you.
Bob Richardson, we'll start with you.
Got a lot of that question.
Quite right about nature, I was giving the short version, the longer version would be
that Emerson thought and said that the mind common to the universe is disclosed to each
individual through his own nature.
The mind common to the universe is disclosed to each of us through his or her own nature.
That is a crucial and important distinction, but connection.
It means that when you look within, when you are relying on your own best self, it is the
divine within you.
The point is the divine is within everybody.
That's a good point.
The Asian influence on Emerson is quite large and the resources were quite impressive.
He was particularly fond of the Bhagavad Gita, but he had also read a good deal in Hindu
religion beside that, the Mahabharata.
There was quite a library of Indic materials available at Harvard.
Later on, he became much interested in Buddhism, as did Henry Thoreau.
They were among the earliest to see that the mind common to the universe could express
itself in religions other than Christian.
Herman Melville, of course, one of the several hundred authors featured in this book, which
you can get on our website, American Writers, and the web address is AmericanWriters.org.
To call her on your point about Herman Melville, who did write Moby Dick, and the countless
other authors who are not included, the purpose of this program is really to look at history
and reflect on the writings at the time that these authors conducted their work.
We realize that we could do this program for the next ten years.
There are so many outstanding writers out there and we appreciate your comment and participation
and hope that this will be the start of a dialogue on American history and many other
writers including those that we're featuring over the course of the next several months
through December.
Next call, Abita Springs, Louisiana.
Good morning to you.
Good morning.
Thank you.
I would like to ask the gentleman...
Thanks for your call.
...if such minds as Emerson and Thoreau would have been those who would have written our
Constitution in comparison to those of Madison and Jefferson, what kind of society does he
think that those writers being our founding fathers, what kind of society do you think
we would now be living in today?
Well, I'm not sure it's quite a fair question because by the time Emerson and Thoreau were
coming along, they'd had 50 years to think about and see what, if anything, was wrong
with the Constitution.
And I don't mean to sound critical of the Constitution, the founding of the Constitution.
It was a great and remarkable document and very few things like it have ever happened
in human history.
It did have one crack in it, I think, and that was slavery.
And by the 1830s, that crack was more apparent than it had been 50 years earlier.
So I think if Emerson and Thoreau had had some peace in that, they would have thrown
their weight toward that problem with slavery.
Who was Elijah Lovejoy?
He was an abolitionist newspaper editor out in Alton, Illinois, across the river from
St. Louis, who had his press broken up and thrown in the river several times and then
he got new ones and then he was eventually murdered.
By whom?
By an anti-abolitionist mob.
And who was John Brown?
John Brown was a man who took it upon himself to attack slavery in what was then called
Bleeding Kansas and who got involved in the border ruffian disputes and there were, the
question was which way Kansas was going to go, was it going to be a slave state, was
it going to be a free state?
And John Brown was a very powerful, one might say fanatical man who said he believed in
two things.
He believed in the golden rule and the declaration of independence and he thought it would be
better for a whole generation of men and women to perish by violence than that one word of
either of those documents be abridged.
In fact, let me read what he wrote in his plea for Captain John Brown.
He said that, I foresee the time when the painter will paint that scene and the historians
will record it with the landing of the pilgrims and the declaration of independence it will
be an ornament of some future national gallery when at least the present form of slavery
shall be no more.
We shall be at liberty to weep for Captain Brown.
And Emerson said of John Brown after his execution that he made the gallows as glorious as the
cross.
Let me go back because there seemed to be literally an explosion of ideas during this
time.
What was it in the country that led to all this excitement, these movements, these ideas?
What was happening?
It's very hard to say that there was any one thing, but there was a financial crash in
1837, the year after nature came out, the year Thoreau graduated from college.
This was followed by a long severe depression.
At the same time, industry is starting to really build, the railroads are starting to
move, anti-slavery is becoming an issue, women's rights are becoming an issue, farming is beginning
to spread dramatically across the mountains and into the middle western plains.
This is a time of growth, almost boom times you could call it.
We welcome your calls and we have set aside one phone line for those of you under the
age of 18.
That number is 202-737-6734.
We have one call on the line from Houston, Texas.
Good morning.
Yes, I'm a homeschooler from Houston, Texas.
I'm 12 years old.
I would like to know how long did it really take him to write on Walden Pond?
Thanks for the call.
Bob Richardson.
Yeah, nice question.
It took him the better part of eight years to really write it.
But he wrote the first draft while he was out here at the pond.
He also wrote another book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers while he was
out here and he wrote several essays.
He got a lot of work done in those two years.
But for Walden, he wrote and rewrote and rewrote and rewrote.
He wrote seven complete drafts of that book.
It took him a long time.
Massenutton, Virginia, you're next.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I have a question about the difficulty of performing civil disobedience in such a highly
organized society as we have today.
I'm wondering, as an example, what we're going through here.
I'm against the standardized test movement because I think it tries to fix something
by making things more expensive.
The schools just need to, you know, a lot of what's wrong with the schools is that they're
poorly funded and teachers are poorly paid and so on.
My daughter refused to take a test.
It sort of surprised me, but she picked up on all of this and refused to take a test
last week.
It's very difficult to explain to our teachers that we weren't trying to hurt the school
and the school's record, but that we wanted to protest, that she wanted to protest this
movement and that doesn't really get to the heart of what a lot of the difficulties are
with schools these days.
I'm wondering if you have anything to say, what Emerson or Throne would say about this
kind of thing in this day and age.
Thank you, Coller.
It's a nice question.
Civil disobedience, disobeying the rules, saying no to authority is never easy.
You don't do it lightly.
You don't do it every time you turn around.
You don't do it just on a whim.
You don't do it for nothing.
Sometimes, however, you have to do it, but it's never easy.
It takes a lot of courage.
It takes a lot of energy.
It creates a lot of anxiety.
I salute anybody who has the courage to do it when they know they're right.
Who has been behind the preservation movement if you travel through Concord?
Except for the traffic, the shops and the buildings haven't changed much in over a hundred
years.
Concord's had a lot of good luck that way.
It's on low, very swampy ground, most of it.
Unsuitable for building until recently.
By the time it became buildable, people had developed a kind of conservation or preservation
ethic about it.
So it's very fortunate that Concord didn't even have curbs and gutters until just a few
years ago.
Do you shop there?
I have.
Most of the ordinary shops have disappeared from downtown now for boutiques.
We'll continue to show you the scene from Concord, which is about a mile and a half
from where we were at, at the Walden Pond Reservation, which is operated by the state
of Massachusetts.
The next call comes to us from Philadelphia.
Good morning.
Good morning.
I'm just calling to inquire.
I heard some time ago that Ho Chi Minh specifically was influenced by Thoreau, and I found that
kind of strange, and I was just hoping you could comment on that as well as some of the
post-World War II revolutionaries that were influenced by Thoreau in Emerson.
Ho Chi Minh?
I don't know.
I had not heard that before.
I know that the protesters in Kienanmen Square were very much influenced by Thoreau when
they built that plaster statue of liberty that we've all seen and made a lot of.
The impulse is still very much alive.
The King of Denmark during World War II, when Jews were supposed to wear badges, the King
said, I'll wear a badge, and then everybody in Denmark wore a badge, and then the badge
didn't mean anything.
It's still alive.
You can follow along our series, AmericanWriters.org, or you can log on to C-SPAN.org, and you can
also purchase a number of books through our website, including the work of our guest,
Bob Richardson.
This book came out when?
That book came out in 1985.
How many years did you spend researching it?
About ten years to write a book.
This book came out on Emerson, The Mind on Fire.
Why that title?
Because it seemed to me to talk about the man.
We believed that we all share one mind.
It's kind of like the fire under the earth, and each volcano is one individual expression
of that fire under the earth.
Next call, Memphis, Tennessee.
Good morning.
Good morning.
My question is, what formal education did Thoreau and Emerson have?
What form of education did they have?
What form of education?
Well, they had a very good education for the time.
They went to grade school, and then they went to grammar school, and then they were both
fortunate enough to go to Harvard College, which they went in those days at the age of
14.
The Old Manse, we talked about it earlier, which is how far from where we're at right
now?
Well, the Old Manse is about two miles from here, two and a half miles from here, perhaps.
And the North Bridge crosses what body of water?
And the North Bridge crosses the Concord River, just a couple of hundred yards from the Old
Manse.
And who lived there?
Well, that was built for Emerson's grandfather, the Reverend William Emerson, who was a minister
in Concord.
He was quite young.
He was in his 20s when the revolution broke out and the firefight across the bridge and
across the river down there.
And then his grandfather went with the troops as a chaplain and died up outside Fort Ticonderoga.
This home, like so many other historic exhibits and locations around Concord, open to the
public during normal hours.
And you'll see some of the scenes.
It was from one of those windows that Ralph Waldo Emerson's grandfather saw the shots
that were fired April 1775.
That's right.
That house is seen a lot.
Emerson wrote the first draft or wrote much of nature there.
Nathaniel Hawthorne and his bride Sophia spent their honeymoon there.
Wonderful house.
Our guest is Bob Richardson, who is joining us for the full two and a half hours of this
American writer series as we look at the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau
and the history of the time.
We'll get a call from Silver Spring, Maryland.
Good morning.
Good morning, Mr. Richardson.
I'm enjoying the show very much.
I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about Shakespeare's influence on Ralph
Waldo Emerson, please.
Thank you.
Shakespeare's influence on Emerson was considerable.
Emerson considered Shakespeare the single greatest writer, certainly in the English
language, perhaps the greatest writer.
He also thought that everything that Shakespeare was able to describe and able to see about
human nature, we could see as well.
In a wonderful little book called Representative Men, which Emily Dickinson said is a little
granite book you can lean on, a wonderful phrase, Emerson treats Shakespeare as what
he calls a representative human being.
That means he's not greater than we are, not better than we are.
He's representative of the poet in all of us.
The reason you like Shakespeare, I like Shakespeare, anybody likes Shakespeare is that we have
the same impulses in us that Shakespeare had.
Walt Whitman said that I was simmering, simmering, simmering, and Emerson brought me to a boil.
What was he referring to?
I think he was referring to the notion that this is the heroic age itself.
We don't live in fallen times.
We don't have to look back to Greece and Rome for greatness or Elizabethan England or Napoleonic
France.
We are situated as well as anybody ever was.
We have every advantage that Homer or Moses or Menu ever had.
The time is now, today is the day, every day is the day of creation.
Start.
And then Walter got started.
It was about 1855, the cemetery, sleepy, hollow cemetery, the signs from this reservation
will point you to the location, was dedicated.
Who gave the dedication speech?
Emerson gave the dedication speech.
What did he say?
Inevitable by then that they would ask Emerson for these things.
He had become enormously famous.
He said that this was a place where people would bring their children, only his child
was dead and would not be brought there.
His child was already buried there.
But he said that people would come there for peace, for rest.
It was a garden cemetery.
It was planted with every kind of tree that would grow in this climate.
It was one of the first of the garden cemeteries.
The idea was to have not just a field of crosses, not just a mortuary, a charnel house of stones,
but to see that the graves in fact give rise to the trees.
And if you go to one area of sleepy, hollow cemetery, you'll see Authors Ridge, which
includes Emerson's grave site, Oliver Wendell Holmes, I believe.
Who else is buried there?
Well Henry Thoreau is up there, and Hawthorne is up there, and many of the Emersons.
It's a very remarkable group of people who managed to live in this town at that time
and make it a kind of intellectual or spiritual center for America.
Did their ideas beget more ideas?
Is that why they all congregated around this area?
Well the great magnate was Emerson.
Emerson had a big house and he was a hospitable man.
When he got to know Margaret Fuller, he invited her out for a visit and she came and stayed
for three weeks.
Now that's a house visit on a heroic scale.
And people would come from all over.
Next call comes to us from Las Vegas.
Good morning.
You're on C-SPAN.
Yes, good morning, and I'm enormously jealous that you're sitting in such a beautiful, serene
spot.
And my question is about the children and keeping this philosophy alive for the future
generations when we're not surrounded by nature.
In fact, we're surrounded by concrete and casinos.
How do we foster the philosophy that nature is within us when it's not around us?
It's hard to foster the idea of nature when it's not around you.
You have to go out to get it.
Although you can make a connection almost anywhere.
When I was in China, I watched how people could do Tai Chi in a narrow alley with nothing
but bricks to look at.
And yet they moved as beautifully and fluidly as if they were on the shores of a pond.
I think you can do it anywhere.
Thoreau once said that it's important to have a sort of wilderness experience even in the
midst of an outward civilization.
I think he understood, even at the time, that it's not getting away to the wilds or the
ends of the earth or the wilderness places.
It's the ability to do it here.
Anywhere you can look up and see the sky every day.
Just look up once a day and see it.
We showed you earlier what's known as the Mance, which was the home of Ralph Waldo Emerson's
grandfather.
We'll now show you Emerson's home.
He lived at this location from 1835 until 1882.
He experienced a fire just before he died, I believe, 1870s.
The fire was not long before he died.
It was six years or so before he died.
But it was a terrible shock to the family and they thought all the books were going
to burn and they threw all the clothes out the window, threw all the books out the window.
Eventually, a man got up on the roof, a one-armed man helped rattle the hoses up and they put
the fire out.
The books and manuscripts were saved.
They're now across the street in the Concord Museum.
Would he recognize his home today?
Yes, he certainly would.
He'd know right where everything was.
He could put his hand on a book.
Danielson, Connecticut, you're next.
Good morning.
I'm interested in knowing whether there was a reaction from the established religious
authorities of the time to the writings of both Thoreau and Emerson.
And I'll hang up and listen.
Thank you.
There certainly was a reaction to Emerson's writing after he gave a piece called the Divinity
School Address, which argued that the essence of religion is not in churches or Bibles or
creeds or other external historical figures, but the essence of religion is inside one.
It's the religious experience.
Emerson was shunned.
He was considered a mad dog.
He was considered a complete radical.
People would cross the street with their children to get on the other side of the street from
this mad dog, Emerson.
And the theological establishment wanted none of it.
He was not invited back to Harvard for 35 years.
Could you compare him and his ideas to anyone today as a way to relate what was happening
in the country at the time?
There's really nobody, no one person who has the kind of cultural authority today that
Emerson had in his day.
He would be a kind of combination of Carl Sagan and...
It's very difficult to do.
We have more media, more exposure, more fame.
We don't have single figures of quite that cultural authority.
In the second half of this two and a half hour program, we will welcome your emails.
Our address is writers at C-SPAN.
Don't forget the hyphen between the C and the S dot org.
Next call comes to us from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Go ahead, please.
Hello, Mr. Richardson.
I wanted to tell you...
To ask you a question or two about Brown.
First of all, I'm a Mayflower descendant from George Soule and I also am a descendant from
Jamestown, Captain Thomas Gray, and I'm a Southern American.
Now, George Brown did some terrible things...
Not George, but Brown.
I can't think of his first name right now.
John Brown.
He did some terrible things out there in Kansas, slammed a baby up against a tree, killed some
innocent people.
Then he went to Harper's Ferry with the backing of some Northeast people, about five or six
of them, gave him the money.
And he went there and he killed some people at Harper's Ferry.
But his whole plan was to get every black person in Virginia and the South to rise up
and kill the white people.
Now, that was his plan.
And thank goodness that Robert E. Lee and others stopped him.
And then when he was tried and going through his trial, there was even people up in the
Northeast, the same people, who were planning to kill the governor of Virginia.
Now, you can understand, sir, why we have some real hard feelings down here.
And I think that we are right back where we started 150 years ago.
And if you don't elaborate when you speak and when you talk about these people and tell
the truth, we are going to be back where we were in 1830.
Sir, I'd really appreciate if you would really consult your soul.
You seem like a sincere, deep thinker.
And you would even come down South and stay a while, you know?
You might learn something, sir.
Thank you.
Thank you, Coller.
Thank you.
My wife and I live in North Carolina.
We love it down there.
And we live in Florida.
We love it down there, too.
I appreciate the point about John Brown.
It is true.
He was doing some terrible things in Kansas.
And John Brown was a difficult and, I've said, fanatical man.
He was, however, against slavery.
And insofar as Emerson and Thoreau rallied to John Brown, it was not because he was killing
babies.
They didn't know about that.
Or if they had read about it, it was part of rumor that they did not know whether to
believe or not to believe.
The issue was simply slavery.
And they were determined that slavery is wrong.
And I think many people, North and South, think that slavery was wrong.
How it came about, that it ended, took the country through a lot of grief.
But it did end.
We'll take another call, and then we'll show you the cabin where Henry David Thoreau lived
for two years, two months, and two days.
But first, Virginia Beach.
Go ahead, please.
Yes.
I've read a little bit of Thoreau and having a little bit of trouble understanding the
relationship between some different concepts, say things like population pressure, the United
States Constitution, and genocide.
Square those for me, if you could.
I don't think I quite understand how you're seeing it.
Population pressure and genocide?
Collie is still with us?
Got it.
And the United States Constitution.
And the United States Constitution.
Yes.
I'm not quite sure how the connection works.
Is there a connection?
Well, the Constitution is certainly not in favor of anything like genocide.
The Constitution is trying to create a level playing field, or the beginnings of one.
It took a long time, is still taking a long time to get it straight.
Population is going to be a problem and was a terrible problem in the 1830s as it is now.
Genocide is never a good idea.
Let me try to bring this together though.
Concord is a Latin term which means what?
Which means peace.
The Puritans came here in the late 1600s?
About 1636, Concord was founded.
And the Algonquin Indians called this place home?
They did.
What did the Puritans bring with them in this area?
What was the attitude of the people at the time and how did that translate to what Emerson
Thurow was seeing 200 years later in the 1830s?
The white English settlers who came here, and this was the first settlement above tidewater
in this part of America, certainly Jamestown and Virginia have a long priority there as
does St. Augustine and other parts of the country.
But this was the first settlement above tidewater here.
And the white settlers got together and made an agreement with the Indians to buy 36 acres
of land here and signed an agreement under Jethro's Tree.
They thought it was a good faith purchase.
What I'm trying to get at though is the attitude that the Puritans brought to this country,
how that developed for 200 years, and then the often radical ideas of writers like Emerson.
That's certainly true.
The Puritan ethic is that it's a fallen world, an imperfect world, and that we are radically
unable to help ourselves.
We are at the main beach.
We're going to take our viewers across the pond.
It's about 62 acres, Walden Pond, and show our audience where the cabin was that Henry
David Thoreau lived for two months, two years, two months, and two days.
In Walden, he said, I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life and to see if I could not learn what it had to teach and
not when I came to die discover that I had not lived.
It's about a 10 minute walk from where we're at.
There is now a replica of this cabin that was built for about $28.
Does that sound right to you, Bob Richardson?
That's about right.
I don't have the figures in front of me.
It cost him less than a year's tuition at college to build his cabin, is the way I remember
it.
Also in Walden, probably one of the more famous quotes, Thoreau said that the mass of men
lead lives of quiet desperation.
What was he writing?
That's in the first chapter of Walden.
I thought of it this morning on my way over here as I got stuck in traffic and I looked
from car to car and it was gridlock out there on route two and I thought there's a fair
amount of quiet desperation going back and forth there.
When I read that passage that you just read about not getting to the point of dying and
discovering that you hadn't lived, I remember getting up out of my chair and walking outside
and thinking, yes, this is me.
He's talking to me.
I've got to listen to this.
All of this of course is open to the public and if you come here to the Walden Pond Reservation,
you can see the site that we showed to behind those trees.
It was rather difficult to see but that's actually where the hut or cabin was built.
It's a one room cabin.
There is a replica of this and we're joined by Henry David Thurow who is in true to form
May 1847.
Good morning.
How are you today?
Good day.
How are you today?
What's life been like for you for the last year and a half or so?
Well, I've been here now for almost two years.
I moved into my house here July 4th, 1845.
I must say every day has been an experience and certainly has been an invitation to live
a more simple, a more economical, a more spiritual life.
Tell us about this cabin.
When did you build it?
How did you build it and how long did it take?
Well, I started my house at the end of March, 1845.
I borrowed an axe from my friend Bronson Alcott and came down here and this is Mr. Emerson's
land.
He allowed me to squat here for the last two years or so and I took my time building my
house.
Rather than make haste, I made the best of the situation and I moved in on July 4th of
that year and the walls were not yet completed when I moved in.
By the time winter was here, I had the house plastered and had my fireplace built as well.
You have a view through the trees of the pond.
Why did you choose this location for your cabin?
Well, I think one of the main reasons I chose it was because Mr. Emerson had this property.
He's had 14 acres here and so he was kind enough to let me build my house here free
of rent.
The only agreement that we have is that I have to clear away some of the scrub brush
and replant some of the trees when I'm done living here.
So he's been kind enough to let me stay here.
And why are you doing this?
Well, I've been working on a book.
I'm calling it A Week on the Concord and Mary Mack Rivers about a boating trip my brother
John and I took a few years ago in the summer of 1839.
I'm also here to live a deliberate life, to live as simply as I can, to experience what
life is all about.
I hate to come to the time where I'm going to die and I've discovered that I've not
lived.
And so I'm here to find out not only about myself but also about nature and about God
around me.
In coming here I had expected to see this literally in the middle of a forest and yet
there's a train line that runs adjacent to this cabin and you're about a mile from Concord.
So how often did you go back into town?
Well, Walden is no howling wilderness.
The rumor that's going around town that I'm some sort of hermit living out here by the
pond is entirely false.
I go into Concord if not every day, almost every other day.
If I follow the train tracks I can be at mother and father's house in 20 or 25 minutes.
When do you do most of your writing?
Usually in the morning.
The first thing I do when I arise with the dawn is I bathe in the pond.
That's probably the best thing that I do all day.
That is a religious experience for me.
If that's all that I did that would be a day well spent.
I then spend the morning doing my writing and then the afternoon I have to myself to
go for walks or to go into town to catch up on the local gossip or to visit friends and
family.
How old are you?
I will be 30 this July.
Can you take us inside and give us a sense or let our camera go inside and show us around?
Oh certainly, certainly.
What stands out in this one room cabin?
Well the house is 10 feet by 15 feet and I built everything myself.
I did have some help raising the frame but everything else I did with my own two hands.
You can see that I'm trying to live as simply as possible.
I have three chairs.
I like to tell Mr. Emerson that I have one for solitude, two for friendship and three
for society.
I have my writing desk as you can see which I built myself and my table.
The fireplace I had my first winter here.
I had just the open hearth.
The second winter that I was here I obtained the stove.
Mr. Emerson was afraid that I would chop down all of his trees for firewood and since I
do not have a forest to burn the stove is a lot more economical.
Not much room in there.
No, in fact the stove has taken up more room than I care to but another drawback with the
stove is that I'm losing the face of the fire.
Having the open flame was almost like having an extra companion in my house.
Now that the stove is here it certainly keeps the house a lot warmer and it gives it a good
smell but it takes up more room than I would care to.
Does anyone come out and visit you here?
Oh, I have guests here all of the time.
Mr. Alcott often brings his four daughters down.
His 15 year old Louisa is thinking of being a writer and so she'll come down and we'll
discuss literature and writing.
Mr. Emerson and his family is down here quite often.
My mother, my sisters Helen and Sophia are down here all of the time as well.
So I'm not the hermit that everyone thinks that I am.
I have more than enough visitors on occasion.
And how do you pronounce your last name?
Well, my name is pronounced thorough as in I do a thorough job.
We'll get a call from Peoria Heights, Illinois.
Go ahead please.
Yes, I want to say congratulations on another wonderful program and my question is, it's
already partly been answered, what kind of a relationship did the different authors share
in Concord?
And I'll hang up and listen for the answer.
Thank you.
Thank you, caller.
And Bob Richardson, I'll add to that, who lives here today?
Well, quite a lot of writers live here today.
Bob Coles has lived here.
Jane Langton lives here.
Paul Brooks lives here.
There's a lot of people still living around here.
In the 19th century, they all knew each other and they all got along pretty well.
They had different interests sometimes.
Henry Thoreau took Nathaniel Hawthorne for a walk once to one of his favorite swamps
and the mosquitoes were buzzing around and Henry was just as happy as he could be and
they finally got all the way into this swamp and Hawthorne took one look around and said,
let us get out of this dreadful place.
So nature wasn't always Hawthorne's cup of tea, but they talked together, they walked
together, they took trips to different towns together.
They were at each other's houses.
Hawthorne didn't think much of transcendentalism.
Emerson didn't read novels much.
They weren't all of a mind.
Mr. Thoreau, who's reading your writings?
Well, just about two months ago, I had an essay published in Graham's Magazine out of
New York City on Thomas Carlisle and his works.
I've not had a lot published.
I had some things in the dial a few years ago, but there were not a lot of readers to
that magazine.
The book that I'm working on now will be my first book if I can find a publisher.
That's the hard part.
Why is that?
Well, as an unknown author, as they keep calling me in Boston and New York City, I need to
perhaps pay for the publishing costs myself, which could run around $200, which is certainly
money that I do not have.
So I need to somehow finish the book and find somebody who would be willing to publish it
for me.
As we talk to you about 1847 politics, what do you think of the current administration
in Washington?
Well, I think the president Polk is a humbug.
His current war in Mexico is certainly his way of trying to take over territory so that
he can expand slavery into those territories.
Of course, President Polk is a slaveholder himself, so why would he not want to do that?
We've got a call from San Francisco.
Go ahead, please.
Good morning.
Actually, that dialogue was a good segue into... I have two questions.
The first is, can you talk about the incident when Thoreau was in jail for refusing to pay
a tax because of the Mexican war?
I think it was Emerson who came to visit him.
Can you talk about that?
Did it cause any lasting disaffection between Emerson and Thoreau?
The second question was, there's a town in New Mexico that's called Thoreau, and when
I first visited, I thought they had mispronounced his name.
Now I find out that that is the correct pronunciation.
Was it named after the author?
I don't know if it was named after the author.
I think it was, but I am not sure of that.
On the night Thoreau was spent in jail, he spent one night in the Concord jail for non-payment
of his poll tax.
The reason he didn't want to pay the poll tax was that it was supporting the government
in the Mexican war.
It was another protest against slavery, and he thought he could do his bit in protesting
by not paying the tax.
Well that was against the law, and eventually he was put in jail for it.
Other people did the same thing.
Bronson Alcott, who lived in Concord, also didn't pay his poll tax several times.
But somebody came down and paid Thoreau's poll tax, and he got out.
Nobody knows who that really was.
It might have been his aunt, it might have been somebody else.
Mr. Thoreau, that was about a year ago in 1846.
What do you remember about your night in jail?
Well, I had been going into town to get a shoe repaired, and I had not paid my poll
tax in a few years.
Sam Staples, the constable, came up to me, and he informed me that I had not paid my
poll tax, which I was very aware of, and he said, Henry, I can pay it for you if you're
hard up.
I said, well, it's not that I'm hard up, Sam, it's the principle of the thing, which
I don't think Staples quite understood.
And he said, well, Henry, if you do not pay your tax, sooner or later I will have to lock
you up.
I said, well, now's as good a time as any, Sam.
And he took me to the jail right in Concord Center.
And I was there that night.
Now, it is not any small town lockup.
It's got about 18 rooms.
And I was in for the night.
Someone did pay my tax.
I'm not sure if it was my Aunt Mariah or who it was.
They let me go the next morning.
I did not want to go.
Staples was quite surprised that I was willing to stay there as long as I could.
But since someone had paid it, he had no choice but to let me go.
I had to meet the Allcut girls for a berry picking party anyway.
So I retrieved my shoe and I was soon on a hillside a couple of miles outside of Concord,
away from the state and the government as far as possible.
What's your relationship like with Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Well, Mr. Emerson has been very keen on helping me with my writing.
He's the one who encouraged me 10 years ago when I graduated from Harvard to keep my journal.
And he's been very keen on supporting me with my writings.
I did live at his house a couple of years ago.
And I was his handyman.
And he also has given me ideas and pointers on writing.
Of course, this is his land that I'm living on.
So he's been very helpful and been very kind with my life.
Bob Richardson, this relationship between these two men?
It was enormously important and it was enormously important to both of them.
Thorough was 15 years younger.
So it could almost have been a father-son kind of relationship.
But it wasn't.
And it wasn't partly because Henry was a very strong, proud man who did not want to be condescended
to.
But he was also a gentle and gracious man and he recognized in this young man a friend,
not just a disciple or not a junior of some sort.
And they became colleagues.
They became friends.
They came out here and walked all the time.
Walden was Emerson's favorite place to walk, long before Thorough built a cabin here.
And Emerson came to walk here after Thorough had left the pond.
They were so close that they had disagreements and fallings out.
There was a sort of famous moment when Thorough got very angry at Emerson for failing to tell
him that his first book wasn't really good enough to publish.
Thorough seems to have been angry that Emerson let him publish the book knowing it needed
improvement.
And he said, it's the job of a friend to really give me straight criticism and not let this
happen.
And it caused some hard feelings.
But as Walden later said, it's like the stalk of the lotus.
You can bend it, but it won't break.
And they came back together and it stayed strong to the end.
And when Thorough died in 1862, it was Emerson who gave the funeral eulogy, which I think
is still the most beautiful thing ever written about Henry Thorough.
We began this series about two months ago at the Plymouth Plantation and the Mayflower
Compact.
And we hope you join us for the next several months.
It's a 38-week series.
We're calling it our American Writers Series.
It's a journey through histories.
We look at the writings and works of some of our more well-known authors.
And you can also log on to our website.
The purpose of this program is also a discussion on history.
And there are many other authors that are not featured in this series of programs, but
certainly worth your time and research.
And we hope you join us in this educational project.
We'll get another call from Juneau, Alaska.
Go ahead, please.
Yes.
Lawrence Buell has written a book about Thorough.
I noticed that he gives George Perkins Marsh quite a bit of credit for the knowledge of
the destruction of forests in Europe.
And Marsh was a scholar who spoke 20 languages and read in those.
And apparently Buell points out that Marsh was really superior to Thorough as far as
the knowledge of the destruction of forests, although Thorough was much more eloquent in
his writing abilities.
And I'd just like you to comment on that particular period.
And also, Thorough brings up the idea of apocalypse.
And we in our modern times now have an apocalypse of a thing that's waiting out in space for
us.
And I'm curious of where that figures into the present scheme of things.
Thank you very much.
Thank you, Coller.
Yeah, nice question.
And that's quite true, Larry Buell has focused on that, and he's exactly right.
Thorough was the first one to talk about the creation of national parks.
He doesn't say much about it, but he says, why shouldn't we keep some piece of the land
for national recreation?
So he really is a beginner of a conservation movement or a park movement.
And he had many people, John Muir and others, who followed him and who built the parks.
George Marsh, George Bergens Marsh, wrote a book in the 1860s, which focused on what
man had done to nature.
And it was the first time really that anybody had said, we can really damage nature.
I don't think up until then, I don't think it really deeply occurred to either Emerson
or Thorough that man could ruin nature.
Yes they could mess it up, yes they could cut down trees, yes they could be bad stewards,
but that they could really damage it.
I don't think it had occurred to them.
And that does come with Marsh, and he gets credit for that.
Henry David Thorough, where are your ancestors from and how long have you been in this country?
Well, my father is of French Huguenot descent.
And my father's family has been here since the late 17th, early 18th century.
My mother is of Scottish descent, and they've been here about the same time.
Are you married?
Certainly not.
Why do you say that?
Well, I do not know if being married would exactly be conducive to the type of life that
I want to live.
I want to be a writer.
I want to experience life as simply as possible, and I don't know if there is anybody who would
be willing to put up with that sort of arrangement.
And what do you eat?
Oh, well, since I've been living here at the pond, I've been growing beans.
My first summer here I ate two and a half acres of beans, some corn, potatoes.
My second summer I had about a quarter of an acre.
I have made bread, Johnny cakes, rice.
I do eat fish occasionally from the pond, but I find that the longer I've been out here,
the more I'm giving up the eating of flesh.
I'm finding it disagreeable to my constitution as well as my conscience.
Henry David Thoreau, thanks very much.
And we'll be joined later by Richard Smith, who has been in character for the last 10
to 15 minutes.
We'll continue with your phone calls.
Next is Washington, D.C.
Go ahead, please.
Hello.
Well, I must have heard, I better turn down the television, right?
I must have heard a slander against Thoreau, but I heard that he had gone home for dinner
to his mother's house almost every night.
And I'd like to hear just how often Thoreau did go home to his mother's for dinner and
if he was really not dependent on his mother and his family for his sustenance after all,
not such an independent person.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
Well, nobody really knows how often he went home, but he certainly did go home.
He was out here not so much to be self-sufficient or isolated or certainly a hermit.
He was really out here to get some work done.
He used this as a place to write.
He was quite a sociable man in many ways.
He once hosted the Abolition Society annual picnic on the front lawn outside his cabin,
and there were somewhere between 60 and 100 people lounging around the cabin.
He wasn't isolated all the time.
And yes, he went home, and yes, he helped support the family.
He worked in his father's pencil-making factory.
He invented a better way to make pencils.
He was very close to his mother.
But home was a boarding house, and he often tried to get away from the boarding house
atmosphere.
He once said his idea of hell was a boarding house.
What was—how do you define laissez-faire individualism?
I want to bring this back to Ralph Waldo Emerson, who talked a lot about that, and ask you also
if that influenced anyone beyond the time of Emerson.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by laissez-faire individualism.
In your book, you write about Andrew Carnegie, and you write about Horatio Alger.
And did the writings of Emerson influence these individuals in their lives?
Oh, it did.
It did.
And this is the idea that you can—that you have the resources within yourself, from wherever
they come from, whether they are divine or whether they are you, or whether they are
both, whether the divine reveals itself only in the human.
You have the resources to start again, to make a new life, to make your life better.
The whole self-help movement really rolls out from Emerson.
The idea that it's our life, we have to take charge of it.
Every day is the day of creation.
Every day is the day of judgment.
It's yours.
Some have called him the father of American literature.
Would you call him that, Ralph Waldo Emerson?
Well, I would.
And for something we haven't talked about much, Emerson considered himself mainly a
poet.
And he talked about the idea that the poems really are all around us.
The poems are already in the world.
The poet's job is to deliver them.
It's the idea of art as expression we need to express.
Art, he once said wonderfully, is the path of the creator to his work.
It's not the finished work, it's the path.
It's getting there.
This Walden Pond Reservation, which is our base of operation as we look at these two
writers, is about a mile from Concord.
The pond itself is just over 60 acres and about 400 plus acres of land preserved, land
owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family.
By Emerson and the family and some other people who went in on it.
But Emerson had the bulk of the land back over that way, back over that way.
We're now operated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and Denise Morrissey is joining
us from the shoreline at the main beach.
Thanks by the way for your help and the staff here.
They've all been tremendous.
We appreciate it.
You're welcome.
It's been great having you.
Give us a tour for those who have not been here.
Well I'm standing on the main beach in front of Walden Pond.
This is the area that in a few weeks will appear very different.
There'll be lifeguards, a roped off area for people to swim in.
So this is where the main activity happens in this summer season.
And then behind me on the left is another beach area that's called the Red Cross Beach.
And that is not as busy.
There aren't as many lifeguards on that side.
There are no lifeguards on that side in fact.
But historically that's important because that was created before our time as the Department
of Environmental Management before we managed the park.
People developed that beach area.
And what is different about this park compared to other state parks in Massachusetts?
Well certainly the history is unique as I know you've been talking about both the influence
of Emerson and Thurow here.
The fact that Thurow lived here for over two years in a cabin that's in the back corner
of the pond.
That's where his house was located.
And currently there is a replica of the house as you've seen where Henry Thurow does living
history presentations.
And then the area where the house actually stood is marked.
So it has a great history of both literary and ecological significance because of Thurow.
And also it's got an international reputation.
We have people here from, we have estimated all the states in the United States and also
ninety countries in the world.
We have a guest register in our replica and people sign in and literally people come from
all over the world to not only recreate but to see the place that inspired Thurow and
Emerson.
Denise Morse, why is it called a reservation?
That's a good question.
Mainly, the other thing that makes us different from a lot of the state parks is there are
a lot of restrictions on the area and that is solely to protect it, to protect the natural
resources and to provide the best experience for the visitors of course.
So a reservation has little less recreational opportunities.
For instance, we do allow swimming but we don't allow a lot of activity on the water
itself including motor boats.
There are no motorized vehicles, no sail craft, there are no fires, we don't allow dogs.
There are things that may seem ordinary for people coming to a place to recreate but
they are necessary in order to preserve the integrity and the quality of Walden Pond.
And as our audience can see in these pictures, the water is remarkably clean.
Why is that?
It is.
Part of that, we owe to nature definitely because it is a kettle hole pond.
It was formed by glaciers thousands of years ago and the nature of kettle hole ponds is
that they are very deep, the soil around them is very sandy and gravely that was left by
the glacier.
There are no inlets or outlets and in some ways that definitely benefits us because it
is fed by underground streams, underground springs and also the water table that it intersects.
So it naturally tends to be sandy which allows the water to filter through so that there
aren't a lot of pollutants that end up staying.
But also we are lucky in that this area around us, not only the land that the state owns
but there is a large area of conservation around us.
So we are very fortunate that there has not been and fortunate and also there has been
a purposeful part to that, that there has not been a lot of development in this area.
So in terms of anything coming into the pond, we are pretty safe and also we regulate the
number of people that come so that does limit the amount of swimming activity in the pond
which does help with the water quality.
And as part of the preservation effort which is an ongoing project here at the Walden Pond
Reservation operated by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the tree planting effort,
we will learn more about that later but we will show you one of the scenes on how it
looks as some young students from the area help to plant one of the trees, now calling
this area home.
We will get a call from Hattiesburg, Mississippi.
Good morning.
Hello.
I have a question for Professor Richardson, a follow-up on a question that was asked by
an earlier caller.
The question on John Brown and the slavery issue.
I have had an opportunity to teach Thoreau and Emerson both for years.
And when we get to the essay on John Brown and slavery in Massachusetts, life without
principle and Emerson's writings on slavery and abolition, it seems to me that that issue
provided a great test for them of their principles and their ideas.
And my question is this.
It seems to me that Thoreau gets very close in his rhetoric to approving the use of violence
in the service of a principle like the abolition of slavery.
The lady who called from the south was very upset by the violence perpetrated by John
Brown.
And I just wonder what, having read a great deal and written two books on both Emerson
and Thoreau, could you comment a bit on this question of the use of violence?
Thanks, caller.
Bob Richardson.
Yeah.
It's a wonderful question.
It's not a wonderful issue, but that question is beautifully put.
No one wants to trigger violence.
No one wants to turn to it.
No one wants to take it up if it isn't absolutely necessary.
I've come to think that the slavery issue was for Thoreau and Emerson a little the way
Hitler and Nazi Germany appeared in the middle of the 20th century.
This was a terrible evil.
It threatened a great deal of life, civilization.
It was going to be a necessary war.
This was not easily taken up.
This was not a joyful rush.
This was not a love of killing.
This is a settled, social, slowly built up conviction that some things must be fought
for if we're going to have them.
Denise Morse, do you understand spending time here where these two men got some of their
ideas by walking around this pond?
Definitely.
It's a great treat to be here year round.
That's one of the many benefits of the job, is getting to see Walden not only in the
summer when a lot of people see it, but as I said year round.
It's a beautiful place.
I've been here over nine years and I am still not tired of it in any way.
Every time I walk around I still find something new.
I can definitely see, as Thoreau referred to it as, beauty on a humble scale.
It's not majestic like the Rocky Mountains or places like that, but it is gorgeous in
its own right.
Definitely there's something about it.
I've gotten to speak to a lot of visitors who have come here not necessarily for Thoreau.
They kind of came here for other purposes and happened upon the history.
They too feel it.
They're people who will, they just insist against great odds at being able to come here
for some reason that they can't always define.
I have to ask you, it is a little bit warmer now.
It's been a bit nippy this morning, but we can see some folks in the pond.
What's the water temperature?
The water temperature is probably in the 50s.
We have a great hardy group that does come.
We have people that come literally as soon as the ice is out to swim.
Would you swim in this water today?
I personally would not.
I'm a not so hardy New Englander.
I wait until around July or August.
It's really nice.
We'll get a call from Charlottesville, Virginia.
Good morning.
How old are you?
I'm nine.
Charlottesville, Virginia.
I'm nine.
Go ahead with your question.
My question is, who was Thomas Carlisle?
Thomas Carlisle was an Englishman.
He was an English friend of Emerson's and he began writing essays saying some of the
things that Emerson would say later in this country.
Carlisle was early a friend of the Chartist movement, which was a democratic movement
in England, although Carlisle later did other things.
Carlisle believed also in the individual, what individual people had inside them.
Denise Morse, do you teach history here at the reservation?
I do.
That's one of the things I do.
We lead programs on the history of the area of Emerson and Thurow and also on environmental
education.
Bob Richardson, this is not just a place to recreate.
No, this is a place to learn.
This is also a place, I think it's a place to reconnect with the natural world.
Or it's a place to learn that you can reconnect with the natural world any place you are.
You can go home and do it.
And this concept was beginning to resonate in the country at the time.
Well they began to make it resonate, yes.
And through the 1850s it began to make sense.
Central Park had to be planned and thought about.
And what kind of park was it going to be?
One of the plans for the park was to pave the entire thing and make it look like a sort
of Viennese plot.
But it was a Greenswad plan that won.
Because Emerson and Thurow had already started talking about the importance of nature and
the natural world to the American mind.
So even our parks began to be shaped by ideas that were starting here.
Well, we've got another call.
Oak Ridge, Tennessee, good morning.
Yes, thank you very much.
I'm James Sly, 69 years old, a native of South Carolina.
A question that I had has already been very succinctly asked and answered by a lady from
Virginia and a gentleman from Mississippi relative to the John Brown thing.
So I won't go back into that.
But since I have ancestry that dates in the South back to colonial times, I'd like to
say that I'm opposed to slavery of any style, whether economic or absolute.
Some of the apprenticeships were very oppressive early on.
And I wonder what Mr. Thurow and Mr. Emerson felt about that other types of slavery.
And also, from my gleanings of history of over 60 years, I've come to the conclusion
that many of the businessmen that brought slaves by ship to this country were from New
England, and of course our southern planners bought them.
And I wonder how the people of the New England states could square that with their passion
for abolition.
Appreciate the comment.
We'll get a response.
Thank you.
Thank you, Coller.
Yeah.
No, it's an interesting question.
Slavery was supported by the North as well as by the South.
This is certainly not a North-South issue.
And I don't mean to suggest that the North had the righteous approach on all of this
at all.
In fact, the town of Concord was about evenly split between people who were in favor of
the war as it came and people who were opposed to it.
The business and respectable classes in Boston wanted nothing to do with abolition.
They were perfectly content to let the southern economy feed the northern economy and the
whole thing to go on and work.
They were also aware that the apprentice system here in the early days and the mill conditions
in the later days were not much better than slavery.
What Emerson and Thoreau were talking about was not sectional violence, was not North
versus South.
It was the importance of the freedom of the individual.
And that had to come before everything else.
That got locked into sectional politics and sectional war.
But it's certainly not a sectional superiority.
Last week we focused on Isabella, the slave from New York who became Sojourner Truth.
Did the writings of these two men influence her in her anti-slavery movement?
Well as I learned just the other day, she was in the audience when Henry Thoreau gave
his slavery in Massachusetts speech in Framingham in 1854.
There was certainly connection.
Denise Morrissey, what sense of history do you have walking around this pond?
Well you definitely can feel Thoreau in different places.
If you've read Walden or any of his writings, you can find places that he referred to.
And as Bob mentioned earlier, you don't necessarily even have to be here to have that feeling.
Thoreau was an excellent ecologist.
He chronicled all the major events that happened here when the ice formed on the pond, when
it went out in the spring.
And we sort of continue in those traditions.
There's a school group that calls us every year.
It's called Journey North and they use our site as one of the places to test when the
ice is out and we keep records of that ourselves.
So you really cannot escape, if you've read his words which are incredibly beautiful,
you really can't escape the feeling between the things that he described here at Walden
and also knowing the history of Concord itself.
Him walking at the backside of the pond, going by the railroad tracks and knowing that the
tracks were in this place when Thoreau was here.
Emerson's Cliff, so many places named after him and his friends who came out to visit
and all the stories of them coming out for swimming parties and Thoreau bringing Emerson's
children out here and teaching them bird calls.
It helps to have some information about him but really you can't escape his spirit here.
A compilation of the works of the two authors that we're focusing on today, Ralph Waldo
Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.
You can get more information on these and other books by going to our website which
is AmericanWriters.org and Bob Richardson who is our guest wrote two biographies of
these two writers, spent ten years working on each of these works.
That's right.
One more call before we take a short break.
Fort Lauderdale, Florida, go ahead please.
Yes, good morning Professor Richardson.
My name is Don Anderson and I spoke with you once before.
I actually found you down in the Keys or I think you're on vacation to tell you that
your book Emerson, Mind on Fire was the greatest biography that I've ever read in my life.
And I highly recommend it to anyone who's listening to the program.
But I have just two quick questions.
First of all, Emerson's famous for saying something about don't worry about quotations
or don't quote from quotations.
And I'm wondering how you feel about that because I find that so much that he has written
is worth quoting.
And then my second question is, is there someone who does a recreation of Emerson the way you
have the actor playing Thoreau today?
Thank you very much for your time.
Thank you, Coller.
Right.
Emerson said I hate quotations which is very funny because he's the most quoted of American
writers.
In many ways.
I think what he was trying to say was I hate imitation.
I'd rather hear you say it in your own words.
But he'd find it ironic that we keep quoting Emerson and quoting Emerson and coming back
to it.
I don't know that there's anybody around here who does a recreation of Emerson.
But there is an actor on the West Coast who does this whose name is escaping me at the
moment.
But I'll try and pick it up.
What did Ralph Waldo Emerson think about reading?
Emerson read everything.
He was an omnivorous reader.
He read history.
He read all kinds of things.
He would not read certain things.
He would not read criticism or commentary or what he considered secondary stuff.
He wanted to know what your take on the world was.
But he also recommended to young writers that if they found themselves getting absorbed
by anything, they should put it down at once.
Because the reason to read is to start your own team.
This is not easy advice to take.
It's very interesting.
It means you don't want to get lost in a book if that means losing what you have to say.
Emerson in one of his essays says, meek young people grow up in libraries believing in their
duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Hobbes have given, forgetting
that Cicero, Locke and Hobbes were young men in libraries when they wrote those books.
That gets me.
These books are different because why?
Why should one read this biography that you wrote versus the 20 or 30 or 40 that may be
out there as well?
What did you do differently?
You should read the others too.
What I tried to do was to read the reading of these writers as well as what they wrote,
as well as what was written about them, and then to synthesize it into a narrative life.
Denise Morrissey, have you read much of Emerson or Thoreau?
Yes, definitely more Thoreau than Emerson.
I do enjoy both.
We're fortunate that Concord is still sort of a living, breathing library in a way and
that there are so many other organizations that focus on both these people.
I've been fortunate to take classes and have these scholars write at our fingertips, which
is a great advantage.
There's a man named Tom Blanding who actually teaches just on his own in town, and I've
taken classes through him, particularly on Thoreau.
It's an amazing place.
There's always more.
I can see why it would take Bob at least 10 years to write about either of these authors.
One final point, tell us about the path that lines this pond.
The pond path circles Walden Pond.
It's 1.7 miles.
It's the most used area, the most used trail around the reservation, although there are
plenty of other trails that go off in all different directions.
The amazing thing about it is that Thoreau refers to it in Walden.
He refers to it as an Indian path and talks about it being lined with stones and refers
to it in his section about how the pond got its name.
It's a great place for people to come.
It's been newly restored.
We do suffer from some erosion problems due to the number of people that come and also
just the sensitivity of the soil.
We do have to take measures that sometimes impact people's usage.
We do have to limit usage in a lot of places to protect the natural resources.
But it's been newly refurbished.
It's ready to go.
People come with, we don't allow bikes, but people bring strollers and they walk.
People run.
People come daily to use that particular path.
It's a great resource for the community.
How long has the Commonwealth of Massachusetts been operating this site?
The Department of Environmental Management has been running it since the mid-70s, since
1974.
Prior to that, it was a park.
It's been a park since 1922 when the descendants of the Emersons and other neighboring families
actually deeded the land to become a park as early as 1922.
There wasn't a state agency to run it at that time, so it was run by the county.
Middlesex County ran it for about those 50 years.
Denise Morse is the acting supervisor here at the Walden Pond State Reservation.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
And Bob Richardson, did Emerson come from money?
Did he have wealth?
No.
The family was very poor.
The four brothers, three of them would work while one of them would go to school.
And they didn't have much in the way of clothing, beyond what they needed.
They lived thin.
After Emerson's first wife died, he inherited some money from her, but it wasn't really
enough to live on.
And he made a living as a traveling lecturer for most of his life.
We will continue our conversation on two authors that we're featuring on C-SPAN's American
Writer Series as we continue to show you scenes on this May date from Walden Pond, the Walden
Pond State Reservation, a state park that is open to the public.
About a thousand people can come, and then they shut down the park and make room for
others.
It's rather restrictive, Bob Richardson, for those who want to come here.
Well, it is.
They are limited to about 600,000 a year, which is close to 2,000 a day, if you spread
it out.
But the pond's a fragile ecosystem.
And if you just opened it up to the two million people who come through Concord every year,
two million plus, it would just be pounded down to nothing.
Nobody wants to restrict it.
And we'll come back and talk more about that as we continue.
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Every Monday and Friday, now through December, our nation's history told through the lives
and works of 46 American writers, writers who have influenced our history and whose
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Our series website is AmericanWriters.org for schedule information, bios of our featured
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All the books featured on American Writers are available for purchase.
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and follow the links to Borders.com.
On American Writers Monday, the women's suffrage movement, as we look at the early organization
of the fight for women's rights, and discuss one of its initiators, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Along with Lucretia Coffin-Mott, they held the first women's rights convention in Seneca
Falls, New York.
American Writers, live on Monday at 9 a.m. Eastern, here on C-SPAN.
In just a moment, we'll return to our American Writers program on the lives and writings
of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thorough.
After that, we'll take a quick break from Emerson and Thorough and look at today's events
surrounding the delay of Timothy McVeigh's execution.
First, Attorney General John Ashcroft on the subject, and then President Bush.
And then back to our programming on Emerson and Thorough with a look at their writings
held at the Concord Public Free Library.
Now from Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, we continue with our American Writers program
on the lives and works of Henry David Thorough and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Thank you.
Walden Pond takes up about 62 acres of this 411 acre reservation known as the Walden Pond Reservation.
We continue our look at these two writers, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
and we're joined by Bob Richardson, who's the author of two books on these two writers,
and Brad Dean, who's the director of the Thorough Institute.
Thanks for being with us. What is the Institute?
The Thorough Institute is a facility that's a collaborative venture between the Walden Woods Project
and the Thorough Society, two non-profit organizations.
We began this program, Bob Richardson, by talking about the country, transcendentalism.
What was it? What was happening at the time?
A lot of things were happening at the time. The railroads were pushing west.
Agriculture was leaving New England and going to the Middle West.
The anti-slavery movement was starting. There was a terrible crash in 1837
when the English started calling their loans on America.
A depression followed in the 1840s.
Utopian communes were springing up all over the country.
This was the great period of commune building, Brook Farm, Oneida, and many others, 40 of them in that decade.
It's the beginning of the rundown to 1848. The Convention for Women's Rights will take place at the end of the decade.
And over it all, the shadow of the Civil War is coming and coming.
Brad Dean, why should people care about these two men?
The people that I know, I would say, there's a broad range of feelings.
Some people are into Thorough, for instance, for his social conscientiousness.
Some for his ecological thought.
I would say the multifaceted membership of the Thorough Society sort of represents all of the, maybe not all,
but certainly many of the various interests with Thorough.
Emerson, even though recently it seems to be changing, there's a lot of academic interest in Emerson.
We just had yesterday at the Thorough Institute some philosophers, for instance, were considering Emerson on the soul.
But there are many, many reasons why people are interested in both writers.
And Bob Richardson, 150 plus years later, are they still influencing this country?
I think they're influencing it more all the time, and they're influencing it in that way that people don't know their names,
but people who have found that communism was not the answer, that communalism was not the answer,
that the resources in the individual are what are needed to make a free society.
This idea is back up and back out in the open.
This means Thorough and Emerson and Whitman and their democratic individualism is one of the great forces shaping modern, democratic America.
So as you have said earlier, their thoughts and what they wrote was pretty radical at the time.
It was very radical at the time against the background of Calvinism and the idea that people can't do anything about themselves.
It's less radical now. Now it's become part of that sort of mainstream of the river.
Our phone lines, as always, are open, 202-624-1111 if you live in the eastern or central time zones,
202-624-115 for those of you in the mountain and Pacific time zones.
And if you are under the age of 18, we hope you'll call in as well, 202-737-6734.
Also we'll show you our website, AmericanWriters.org.
There is a lesson plan also available on this particular program.
We hope you log on and get more information, particularly if you're a teacher and we'll continue with your phone calls.
I think we have a call up now. Go ahead, please.
Caller, you with us?
Do we have a call up?
Let me talk to you about the institute that was developed when?
We opened our doors in June of 1998.
Who's Don Henley?
Don Henley, most people probably know him as a performer, one of the two major stars of the Eagles,
the rock group from the 70s, is very engaged in conservation efforts in this area, of course,
very well known for his efforts in the Walden Woods to preserve endangered locations in the Walden Woods,
but also other places around the country, particularly in the Texas area where he grew up.
When did Henry David Thoreau die, Bob Richardson?
Henry died 139 years ago yesterday.
How old was he?
He was 45.
In your book on Ralph Waldo Emerson, you talk about the travels that he had in the late 1850s until near his death.
Was he a more traveled man at that point in his life than earlier when he and Thoreau lived in this area?
No, Emerson traveled a great deal starting in the mid-1840s,
but of course as time went on he went further and further, he spent more time in Wisconsin and what's now the Middle West.
Did Emerson meet any presidents?
Well, he met Lincoln, for one.
Secretary of State Seward took him over to meet Lincoln at least a couple of times in early February
when Lincoln was in town giving speeches pushing the idea of emancipation,
and Lincoln had not yet issued the Emancipation Proclamation,
and the two men met and talked back and forth, and there's a fairly extensive record of it,
and Emerson was really impressed with Lincoln and much more impressed than he was prepared to be.
Austin, Texas. Go ahead, caller.
Yes. I was wondering, I heard the lady a while ago say the cabin was a representation.
I was wondering what happened to the original cabin. Did it just wear away or was it torn down? Thank you.
Brad Dean?
It was torn down shortly after Thoreau left the pond.
Emerson, as you know, owned the land that Thoreau occupied during that two years, two months, and two days.
Almost immediately after he left, Emerson sold or allowed his gardener, Emerson's gardener,
to use the boards and some of the other materials, and they moved it to the middle of Thoreau's bean field
where it stayed for about two years, and then they moved it to a place north of Concord in the Estabrook woods,
and it has since, it was incorporated from what we understand into a hen coop,
and then it was basically over the years taken down and probably used in other locations,
but now no one knows where that part of the cabin is.
There are a few in the collections of the Thoreau Institute, there are a few bricks, a beam, and some other materials from the cabin,
but by and large no one knows what happened to it after it left the Estabrook property or if it just disintegrated on that location.
When you tour this site, there is a marker that shows you an indication of what the cabin may have looked like.
Of course, you have the replica built at a cost of about $28.12.
Next call to Hunga, California. Go ahead, please.
Oh, yeah, hi. A little while ago, Denise Morse mentioned something about how Walden got its name, but she didn't elaborate.
I was wondering if you could tell me something about that?
Thoreau actually speculates in Walden, some of it we think might be fanciful,
but it may have been Thoreau spells it Walled Inn Pond because of what he called the shingles, the rocks on the shores of the pond, fairly steep shores.
So he speculates it may have been that.
We think most probably it was from Saffron Walden, which is a district in England.
That's probably where it got its name.
An email by Bridgerton from Chris Jackson of Walpole, Massachusetts. I see great parallels between Emily Dickinson and Henry David Thoreau. Agree or disagree?
I would agree. For one thing, they were both deeply influenced by Emerson, who stands back of both of them.
But then both, Emily Dickinson had a kind of individual approach to poetry that Thoreau had to prose.
They're both of them sort of isolated, sort of loners, but who later came to be seen as really important representatives of part of America.
Another email, a viewer asked, in what denomination was Emerson ordained as a minister? Why did he leave the ministry?
And then he asked the question, what was the situation of his second marriage?
He was a Unitarian minister, as was his father.
He left the church essentially, well he says, over the issue of communion.
The question was whether only people who are part of the church can get communion or not.
And he thought that this was getting very fussy about forms of religion when religious experience mattered.
And he could no longer in conscience preside over this, to him, false ceremony.
The other one was the two marriages.
His first marriage was to a young, beautiful poet named Ellen, who had tuberculosis, and who died tragically shortly after the marriage.
It completely broke him up. It happened just at the time he was leaving the church.
And was the first really terrible blow in his life.
There were to be many others. His brothers died, his youngest son Waldo died.
He remarried a woman from Plymouth named Lydia Emerson, whom he renamed Lydian.
Some people think so that the Yankees wouldn't say Lydia, with an R.
And she became the mother of his children.
And they lived a long and happy life and were much in love with each other.
San Bruno, California. Go ahead please.
Yes, my question is for Mr. Richardson.
I listened to your program this morning and I think as you portrayed them, Thoreau and Emerson were great thinkers,
men of great capacity.
But I wanted to know, how did they live?
Were they among the leisure class, where they could afford to isolate themselves on Wadsham Pond and think great thoughts and write great books?
How did they get their income?
Because even to be against slavery, slavery existed for economic reasons.
So I want to know how free were Emerson and Thoreau from the needs of economy, of the daily, getting of the daily bread, you know.
So how does that work? Were they really separate from needing to make a living for themselves, other than writing books or being free to think great thoughts?
No, they weren't. Although writing books is a way to make a living.
But neither of them made enough money off writing for that to be it.
Emerson was a professional lecturer and he gave up to 60, 70, sometimes 80 lectures a year.
Train trip in between each lecture. Hotel room, lecture, train trip, hotel room, lecture.
He spent six months or so away from home on the lecture circuit every year for over 25 years.
That was how he really made his living. Thoreau went the other way. He didn't want a regular job.
He worked as little as he could to get by. When he ran out of money, he would do surveying.
And he was a very gifted surveyor, much trusted, not only in Concord, but wherever his reputation had gotten to.
And he did terrific survey work, but he would do only enough to get by.
Now he did contribute money to home, to his mother and to his father and to the family there.
But his idea was, I don't want to work more than I have to because my real world, my real work is out in nature and writing.
But no, they were neither of them disconnected from the economic necessities of life.
We're here at the Walden Pond Reservation, which is midway between Concord and Lincoln.
If you're familiar with this part of Massachusetts, about a half hour drive.
If you're not in the big dig to get down to Boston, we're north of Boston, correct, Brad Dean?
I would say mostly west. West of Boston.
Next call comes to us and the truck is behind us.
There's a main road that was here back when Emerson and Thoreau lived here. Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Good morning.
Hi, good morning. Let me just first say what a great idea broadcasting from the pond up there is.
And I really appreciate the conservation efforts that goes on.
My question for Dr. Richardson is regarding Thoreau's connection with a Danish transdentalist named Kierkegaard,
who lived around the same time period, the Annabellum period in Denmark, of course.
If there was any contact between Thoreau and Kierkegaard.
And on a side note, excuse me, there is another Japanese transdentalist who I just read about in the National Geographic magazine a few years ago.
I just wanted to know if there was, if you know of any connection between those two or those three.
Thanks for the call. Brad Dean?
Bob could probably speak to Emma. I believe it was the question addressed toward Emerson's connections with Kierkegaard.
So far as I know there was no connection with Kierkegaard. Emerson did write about Kierkegaard, didn't he?
I don't think so.
No? I thought he mentioned Kierkegaard. Perhaps I'm thinking of a different thinker.
Let me along those lines, and I'm going to give this to you, Bob Richardson, a passage from Nature, one of the more well-known works from Ralph Waldo Emerson.
If you could read it and tell us what he was writing about.
This is the opening section of Nature.
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.
The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face, but we see it through their eyes.
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us and not the history of theirs?
This is terrific called Arms, it seems to me. This is saying, I mean, when he says our age is retrospective, that's not praise.
He doesn't mean we ought to be looking back. We ought to be looking forward.
Our forefathers and foremothers had a religion by revelation to them. We just read the history of it.
Why can't we have a revelation to us? Why isn't this a revelation to us, in fact?
This is what he is saying, is stand up. The world is created again anew each day.
Albuquerque, New Mexico, you're next.
Yes, how you doing? My name is Joe Padrelle.
I am a celebrator of the Emancipation Proclamation, a holiday called Juneteenth.
My question to Mr. Richardson, who spoke earlier about there are times when we have to stand for that which is correct in the midst of that which is current law.
Both Emerson and Mr. Thoreau so eloquently present themselves as the kinds of Americans that we need to be today.
I think that today we are faced with the same issue that they are faced with, and that of bringing this country to the attention that slavery needs to be atoned.
It is a deed of the past of this country, and we need to be able to grow up and realize that it is a part of our past,
and that the call to arms today is the ability to see that this country has the potential to be an oppressor,
and that when people of African lineage bring to the attention that it has been an oppressor,
part of the democracy that we should be able to be mature to today is that we have been oppressive to a portion of our human family.
To get past that is the greatest thing we could do for this country, and it would make us the country that we are in the face of world diplomacy.
Thanks for the call.
And Brad Dean, as a way to peg off with the caller's comment, was if you could read a passage from what Henry David Thoreau wrote.
This is from Civil Disobedience.
I think that we should be men first and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate the respect for the law so much as for the right.
Your hand went up. Why is that?
That's true. That's the way it is.
Richard Smith, who we met earlier as Henry David Thoreau, is joining us again. What was he writing? What was he saying?
When he was living here at the pond?
When he wrote Civil Disobedience.
Well, I mean, Thoreau was really concerned about what he called higher laws, the consciousness of listening to the voice of God inside you,
as opposed to listening to the voices of man or the voices of politicians or anybody like that.
He thought that you should be men first and Americans second. Listen to what God has to say. Listen to your conscience and your inner voice.
That's just pure transcendentalism right there.
When we talked to you earlier in characters, Henry David Thoreau, the book had not been written.
But in chapter one, he said, again, one of the more famous quotes, I think, that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.
What do you take away from that?
Well, I think that he was looking for more in his life. I mean, he moved out to the pond. He was 28 years old.
He had tried various things. He had done teaching. He had done some work in his father's pencil factory.
He was kind of at a loss as to what he was going to do with his life.
He came out to the pond firstly to write the book and also to kind of get away.
And he saw his fellow townsman, you know, working and slaving and working in the fields and being farmers.
And he was really wondering if those people were really happy with their lives.
I think that he saw just a general discontentment with people, how unhappy they were with everyday life.
And he wanted to celebrate life. He wanted to live every day to the fullest as much as possible.
And one of the reasons he was out here was to do that sort of thing.
These essays, Nature and Walking, two of the essays that we used for our research for this program.
And again, you can get more information on these books by going to AmericanWriters.org.
Next call comes to us from Framingham, Massachusetts. Go ahead, please.
Good morning. I was calling to point out Mr. Richardson had noted about the events in Framingham in 1854, July 4th,
the anti-slavery meeting where Sojourner Truth spoke, where William Lloyd Garrison as well as Thurl.
And that program, there was a reactment done by Richard Smith at a wonderful Framingham, I'm sorry, Concord Church in the wintertime.
And I was hoping to see that program on Friday night in your fill-in programming.
And a quick question. You haven't mentioned Cape Cod, and I was just wondering how that piece of literature rates in the Thurl history.
Thank you very much.
Thank you. On the first point caller, yes, you will be seeing that as part of our programming Friday evening.
We'll be coming to you if you're watching this live on a Monday morning here at Walden Pond. Brad Dean?
Cape Cod. It's an interesting, a very well-known Thurl scholar years ago claimed that Cape Cod was Thurl's sunniest book.
Others have voiced other opinions about that. It's a very, very, I think it's one of Thurl's more complex books.
But it begins with a shipwreck and Thurl staring into the eyes of the passengers who had died on the passage.
And so it's difficult, I would say it's difficult. I mean there is a lot of humor in it.
But there's also a lot of, particularly I think Thurl's dealing with the difficulties of accurate perception.
He, for instance, looks out at the ocean and talks about seeing his eyes because they're accustomed to seeing a lake.
And the whole, one of the big issues that he deals with there is how do you adjust your perceptions to see what's really in front of you as opposed to what's in your mind, the preconceptions that you carry around in your mind.
So it's a fascinating book. Another email, David Chek says, I was hoping you would comment on Emerson's quote on success.
Familiar with it?
Well he says quite a number of things about success, one of which is that if you build a better mousetrap the world will beat a path to your door.
Which he said in a lecture on the West Coast.
Is that the one you had in mind?
The caller, what he wrote is, to laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, this is to have succeeded.
That's right.
Now that's a wonderful thing.
It's not to make a lot of money, it's not to have the most toys, it's to lead the best life.
Los Asos, California, you're next, go ahead please.
Hello.
A while ago a caller called in and wanted to know about the cabin that stands on the pond and that Thoreau had lived in and they said that that was a representation.
And then remarks were made about its thought that some of the original materials, a log and some bricks I think you said, were somewhere and I got the feeling that people have a lot of feelings of importance about physical objects.
And I think isn't this inconsistent with what Thoreau and Emerson expressed that nature is within us and developing universal thought and personal esteem.
Isn't it inconsistent with that to place such value on such things as bricks or other things that I notice in our society today we tend to put a great deal of value on and I can't understand it.
Can you explain?
Thank you.
Richard Smith, do you want to elaborate and then Brad Dean we'll have you jump in on it.
Yeah, I think when Thoreau left the house in 1847 he was pretty much done with it.
He doesn't seem to mention it that much in his journals once he leaves the pond so in that instance she's right.
He probably didn't care.
I mean it was Emerson's land so I guess technically it was Emerson's house and so Thoreau didn't really care after he left.
He mentions it every now and again in his journal that he went by where his house stood but once he was done with it he was done with it and probably didn't care what Emerson did with it one way or the other.
I think it's certainly she touched on one of the interesting Thoreauvians and Emersonians I think do have we all live in the world and we have certain imperatives that we have to take care of.
In a sense when Thoreau is sitting there or Emerson is sitting at his desk writing he's writing from a somewhat higher perspective than most of us normally live at.
So I think it's a very human thing when President Clinton came and opened up the Thoreau Institute in June of 98 we had him place one of the original bricks from the cabin into the brick facade of the Thoreau Institute.
It's a very human thing for Thoreauvians the pieces of the cabin are pieces of the cross as it were and I regard that as somewhat natural.
Is it antithetical to not everything but some of the ideas that Thoreau articulates?
Certainly it is.
So it's a very interesting question.
I think I would have to say we're human.
Bob Richardson an email from Laura McGill of Warren, Pennsylvania who asked the question could you compare the theological view undergirding Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and the theological view undergirding Thoreau's Walden?
Well you're not obliged to testify against your wife.
But Annie's work has often been compared to that of Henry Thoreau and I guess I have to say that when I once taught a course in American literature in which I had the students read Thoreau and then Annie Dillard they often preferred her.
How long have you been married?
We've been married 14 years.
And how often do you share ideas?
Oh every day.
Next call Lake Worth, Florida.
Go ahead please.
Hi, I have always been taught that the Eastern philosophers influence the transcendental writers.
But isn't there a closer link in American Quakerism?
And is there a link with Quaker thought and Emerson in particular?
Thank you very much.
Thanks for the call.
Who would like to take that?
Bob why don't you go ahead.
Well let's start.
Yes indeed there's a wonderful Quaker link for both of these people.
One of my fans.
Emerson had very important run ins with Quakers and learned from Mary Roach and from Edward Stabler a great deal about the world and fundamentally the Quaker point of view which was his, which is the inner light.
Which fits in with the Asian thing very beautifully.
And one of the things, I was somewhat astounded, I did quite a bit of research on Thorough as a lecturer.
He actually participated in, what is it a conversation?
I don't exactly know what the Quakers do on Sundays but he was down in New Jersey doing some surveying for a Quaker community or a community with Quakers in it.
And actually stood up and said a few things.
My sense with Thorough is that he was very influenced by, he obviously gave a considerable amount of thought to Eastern philosophies in his younger years.
Basically prior to going to the pond.
I don't see too much of that in the 1850s for instance during the last decade or so of his life.
Whereas Quakerism I think was sort of a part of the social fabric of the time and he had to deal with it as a consequence.
Many of his friends were Quakers.
He very frequently would give lectures for instance when he went to Salem he gave it, he went to the home of a Quaker and gave a lecture there.
So many of his friends and acquaintances were Quakers.
Walla Walla Washington, you're next.
Hello, I love your program.
I'm wondering though if Mr. Richardson could give us a good description of exactly what the Transcendentalist philosophy was.
Thank you.
A good description of the Transcendentalist philosophy?
No I probably can't give you a really good one.
It's difficult.
One person thought it meant a little beyond.
But I think the best definition of Transcendentalism that I know is that there has to be more to the world than chemistry and carpentry.
Emerson was interested in chemistry.
He was a scientifically minded person.
So was Thoreau.
Thoreau was a good carpenter.
They both believed there has to be more to it than carpentry and chemistry.
There has to be more to life than the material.
Transcendentalism is a revolt against materialism and commercialism on behalf of idealism.
Next call comes to us from Newburyport, Massachusetts.
Go ahead please.
Yes, good morning.
My question to Mr. Richardson is coincidentally sort of a follow up to his last answer.
I wonder if he could comment on Emerson's influence and participation in the Brook Farm communal experiment that took place in West Roxbury Mass in the early 1840s.
Brook Farm was the sunniest and most successful of the communes that were set up in the 1840s.
And it was all Emerson's friends who went out and set it up.
And they were going to set it up on principles that were very congenial to him.
And they urged him to join and his name would have meant a great deal to them and wanted him very much.
And he agonized over that decision as he agonized over a few other things.
Look at the letter that he finally wrote to George Ripley saying that he couldn't come.
He wrote it and rewrote it and rewrote it and crossed it out and went back again.
But he finally concluded that he hadn't really reformed himself.
And he needed to reform himself before he undertook the reform of the community, let alone of the state.
Richard Smith, in his conclusion in the book Walden, Thurow wrote that if a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.
What was he saying?
I think what he was saying was that it was all right not to follow the norm, not to be part of the crowd.
Thurow was never really a joiner.
I mean he was involved with the abolitionists, but he certainly didn't consider himself an abolitionist.
He didn't join any of the communities like Brook Farm.
He said that he would rather board in hell than go to live in heaven, something along those lines.
He just didn't want to belong to any group.
He thought the individual in true transcendentalism was the most important thing.
And so he thought that if you want to be different, it's okay.
And certainly he was doing that when he was out here at the pond and he did that throughout most of his life as well.
Richard Smith, thank you very much for joining us now and joining us earlier in your portrayal of Henry David Thurow.
Thanks again.
You're welcome.
Also, Bob Richardson, in politics, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, quote,
the less government we have, the better, the fewer laws, and the less confined power.
What was he saying?
He was saying that people are basically good.
People are able to govern themselves for the most part.
And we should have government, but we should not have any more than we actually need.
He didn't believe in just magnifying it endlessly.
He didn't believe in the power of the state as the state.
He thought that individuals could get along, that communities could get along.
The state was the thing of last resort.
And there shouldn't be more of it than we really need.
Seattle, Washington, you're next.
Go ahead, Caller.
Yes, Professor Richardson, I was wondering if you could elaborate on Ralph Waldo Emerson's wife, Lydia Jackson.
She was, I know, from Plymouth and was a descendant of the Cotton family and of Nathaniel Morton.
Thank you.
Right, she was.
She came from old New England families.
She was interested in Swedenborg.
She was very much interested in religion.
She had a kind of almost second sight.
She was really a gifted and remarkable woman.
She had a sort of preview of their wedding day.
She saw herself on the stairs before the wedding.
It was a kind of, I don't want to make it sound silly, but clairvoyance about her.
She had an astonishing insight.
And Emerson called her my Asia because he compared her to Asia for insight and wisdom.
We're going to take a call from down the road to Cape Cod, Massachusetts,
but we want to show our audience the Thurow Institute, which is located where?
It's located half a mile from where we sit, slightly under a half a mile.
It's just on the other side of Pine Hill here from Walden Pond.
And your money comes from where?
Our 501c3 nonprofit organization comes from donations sent from donors around the country and around the world.
This is what it looks like, including the Henley Library.
Cape Cod, go ahead, please.
Hello, yes?
You're on the air caller.
Yes, I have two questions concerning Emerson.
The first question is, in his essay Nature, he begins by pondering the purpose of the moon.
He provides several options and doesn't really draw a conclusion.
And I wondered, what is the point that he's getting at there?
As I read it, there's several possibilities.
And is he really looking for the purpose of the moon,
or is he trying to make a statement that it's only our perception of its purpose?
Go ahead, thank you.
In Nature, he says that our perception of the sun is as much a fact as the sun itself.
He's trying to call attention to the fact that there's not just a world out there.
There is the fact that we see the world.
The world is revealed to us only through our own senses.
So that your seeing the moon matters just as much as the fact that, quote, there is a moon.
Olath, Colorado, you're next. Go ahead.
Yes, Mr. Richardson.
Mr. Richardson?
I was influenced by Emerson and Walt Whitman.
And I was wondering what the influence was.
And when I get a little upset with all the building going on in our state and crowding,
I think of the poem Walt Whitman wrote, The Animals.
I'm going to stop you there. We're getting a little bit of feedback.
But I'll stop you there, caller. Thanks.
I think we get the point, and if you want to respond.
Yeah, Whitman learned a great deal from Emerson and came to visit him.
Emerson helped him with the publication of Leaves of Grass and consulted with him about later editions.
And they were both celebrating the individual in America.
Self-reliance. What's in this essay?
Self-reliance starts out by saying that to be able to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for everybody.
That's genius.
We are really fundamentally similar, and the reason that because we're fundamentally similar, we can trust our best selves.
What kind of influence did Ralph Waldo Emerson have on Henry David Thoreau?
The short answer is a tremendous and enormous influence.
Shortly after he discovered Emerson in Harvard University, you see Emersonian images pop up throughout the remaining college essays that he was writing.
Emerson remained a tremendous influence on Thoreau throughout his young career.
I would conjecture that really until Thoreau, when Thoreau gets to Walden Pond is when he really in a sense starts to break away from the Emersonian, starts to break out of an Emersonian orbit.
It would be hard to overstate the influence of Emerson on Thoreau.
We have another young person calling from Harriman, Tennessee. Go ahead, how old are you?
I'm 14 and I'm homeschooled, and I wanted to comment on that Thoreau said that, quote, that government is best which governs not at all, that governs not at all, in civil disobedience.
And I wanted to get a comment on that if I could.
Thanks, Coller.
Brad Dean, do you want to take that one?
That's right at the very beginning of civil disobedience.
If you figure, for instance, that you're free in direct proportion to the number of choices you have, and you also understand that government, in a sense, by governing, limits your choices and therefore limits your freedom,
and if one of the things you want to do is maximize your freedom in the world, it would make sense that you would say that government is best which governs least and finally not at all.
But what he also seems to assume in that position is that people will govern themselves, not having an external governor but an internal governor.
And this program is really just the start of what we hope will be a process for many of you interested in the works of these and many other writers.
If you want to log on to our website for this book and others, you can do so, AmericanWriters.org.
Next call is Urbandale, Iowa. Go ahead, please.
Well, thank you very much for your programming and the way it is.
I want to state this first.
Well, I found Ralph Waldo Emerson when I was 17 years old.
To me, he is the greatest, I think, essayist, maybe even philosopher and writer and public speaker probably America has ever had.
Self-reliance comes forth with a sentence, whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist.
That's outstanding and I would like Dr. Richardson to explain that but I would also like this other question.
The poem, which is an introduction to self-reliance, cast the bantling on the rocks, suckled him with a she-wolf's tit,
wintered with the hawk and fox, power and speed be hands and feet.
How does that relate toward that?
I'll take the second part of that first. He's trying to get you to locate the energy that you need in yourself.
It's that power. Emerson was always interested in power, not physical power, not imperial power, but what is the source of your power?
What is the source of your energy? Find it and use it.
The problem that he had with conformity, he explains, is if you conform to usages that are dead to you, it scatters your force and wastes your time.
There's really no objection to conforming to something you believe in.
I can conform to the thorough institute. I believe in it.
It's conforming to things that don't mean anything to you. Don't go to church and take communion if it's a dead issue.
If it's a live issue, fine, then it's you. Do it despite whatever anybody says.
You don't conform to get along. You need to do what's right. Sometimes that's what other people do. Sometimes you're all alone.
Brad Dean, one of the books available as part of the Walden Woods project, which you talked about earlier, includes this one.
Is this a pretty good description or a photograph of what this area looks like in mid-October?
In fact, it looks to me like that's Haywood Pond, just on the other side of Emerson's Cliff from here.
That's a very good portrayal of it. It's a very, very beautiful place. I'm not from here. It's a pleasure to be able to walk through the woods here.
One more call. Buena Vista, Virginia. Go ahead, please.
Yes. I was very interested in your program this morning.
I wanted to ask the professor, what would these two gentlemen think if they came back today and saw the congressional delegations that we're sending out of New England, Massachusetts in particular, to Congress, who really want to turn this country into a socialist country?
What would they think of what's going on today?
Thanks, Coller.
Well, I think they'd have had the same difficult time with the government today that they had with the government then.
The government doesn't always do what's right, and there's got to be somebody there to say that this is not so. The individual conscience has to come first.
They might in some cases approve of what the Northeast delegations are doing, but probably not in all cases. Not now, not then.
Who put this book together, Brad Dean?
I believe that was the Historic Trees folks. This is the first time I've actually seen it, but I believe there's an organization called Historic Trees.
I seem to recall they had an event in Dallas, but they did an event with the Walden Woods Project, I know, and were basically taking some seedlings and other trees from the Walden Woods and encouraging people to plant them in their own communities.
So I think that's the organization that put that book together.
And Bob Richardson, as you walk through nature, what do you take away from this location?
Well, Emerson taught people to think about nature, and Thorough taught them to look at it.
This is a scarlet oak leaf. You can get it on the camera. It's one of the last years, obviously.
Thorough thought that you had to look at everything in nature with a separate intention of the eye in order to see it.
You can't just look out there and see leaves or trees or nature. You have to look. Look at this.
He said, the eye dwells with equal delight on what is and is not leaf.
The part that's not there is just as beautiful as the part that is there. But you see it. That's a scarlet oak leaf.
It's not rounded. It's sharp. You won't ever mistake it for a white oak leaf or a maple leaf.
You have to look at everything that way. That's what I take away.
When did Henry David Thorough live?
He lived from 1817 to 1862.
Ralph Waldo Emerson?
1803 to 1882.
Who claims these men today? Who have they influenced that our audience may be following in American politics or government or business?
I think in some ways they've influenced all of us who believe in democratic individualism.
They're particularly alive in writers like Ted Hoagland, in poets like Mary Oliver,
in writers like Marilynne Robinson, Gretel Ehrlich. It's a long list.
We began this program, Brad Dean, by talking about the political environment in the country at the time that these two men lived.
What was it like from your standpoint as somebody who studied these works? What was happening?
It was a period of time, I think, during which America had in a sense formed its own identity as a country.
There was still a lot of jockeying going on for the national identity.
Emerson's call, for instance, for national literature, distinctively American literature, was being heated by more and more writers.
As Bob mentioned just a moment ago, there was an enormous amount of agitation for various kinds of reform at that time.
To me, that's one of the most distinctive hallmarks of that period that Thorough lived in.
It was a period when there was an enormous amount of sectional conflict, of course, leading up to the Civil War.
It was a very troubled and very exciting time.
The technologies like the railroad and telegraph were coming in, dramatically changing the world.
It was a very unsettling, exciting time.
Did they influence history?
Yeah, they influenced history, and they're continuing to influence what we're doing.
We've been looking this morning at nature as pictures.
Nature is more than pictures.
Nature is energy. It's power.
Nature creates things, pushes up mountains, creates lakes.
What Emerson understood, what Thorough understood, is that that energy in nature is the same energy that's in you and me and Brad.
And that's the connection. It held then. It holds now.
Let me have you draw one last connection. Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
We're going to be focusing on her next week, Seneca Falls, New York.
She writes that she met and talked with both of these writers that we've been focusing on today.
What was the connection?
The connection is that if I am free, I have to want freedom for everybody.
Anything I claim for myself, I have to claim for others, for slaves, for women who don't have the vote.
There's a necessary ethic in transcendentalism to spread the freedom out.
They thought of history, as the philosopher Hegel put it, as a progression of freedom.
In the beginning, the Orient, Asia thought that one was free, the ruler.
Feudalism thought some were free.
Democracy thinks everybody is free or should be.
1848 is one of the apexes.
And more on that as we continue our program and our discussion.
There are a lot of people that we want to thank that helped put this project together.
First and foremost, the tremendous staff here at C-SPAN, technical and editorial.
Too many to mention all the names, but headed up by Gary Ellenwood and his outstanding field of technicians.
Michelle Dumas, who joined us, as well as Denise Morrissey, the staff at the Walden Pond State Reservation.
Barbara Mungan, who is at the Emerson House.
Lori Butters, who's at the Old Manse. We showed you pictures of that earlier.
Carol Haynes at the Concord Museum.
Leslie Wilson at the Concord Free Public Library.
Jeffrey Kramer and Tom Harris at the Thoreau Institute and Society.
Anna Finch, who's a teacher at Concord Carlisle High School, who put together the forum last Friday.
Is thorough, alive and well in Concord today.
You'll be able to see that as part of our programming during the course of the week.
And also AT&T Cable.
We want to thank Bob Richardson, who has spent the last two and a half hours sharing with us his knowledge, his history.
Final thoughts?
We are connected to nature. We always will be.
We come back here to get started again.
And Brad Dean.
I would second that. I think I would encourage those of your viewers who have not read these gentlemen's works to do so.
Gentlemen, we thank you both. And as always, we thank you for watching.
Enjoy the rest of your day.
Thanks very much.
See Span's American Writers, a journey through history.
Every Monday and Friday, now through December, our nation's history told through the lives and works of 46 American writers.
Writers who have influenced our history.
And we're going to be sharing with you the stories of the American writers.
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Our series website is AmericanWriters.org for schedule information, bios of our featured writers, and first chapters of every featured book.
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All the books featured on American Writers are available for purchase.
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On American Writers Monday, the Women's Suffrage Movement, as we look at the early organization of the fight for women's rights,
and discuss one of its initiators, Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Along with Lucretia Coffin-Mott, they held the first women's rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York.
American Writers, live on Monday at 9 a.m. Eastern, here on C-SPAN.
Coming up, we'll take a quick break from tonight's programming on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thorow,
and look at today's events surrounding the delay of Timothy McVeigh's execution.
First, Attorney General John Ashcroft on the subject, and then President Bush.
Then we'll get back to our programming on Emerson and Thorow, with a look at their writings, held at the Concord Public Free Library.
And later, another chance to see the American Writers program we just showed you on the two authors.
Coming up this June on C-SPAN's Booknotes, June 3, Rick Perlstein and Before the Storm, Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus.
On June 10, Morton Kondraki, with Saving Milley, Love, Politics and Parkinson's Disease.
June 17, Edward Said and his Reflections on Exile and Other Essays.
And on June 24, Alma Guillermo Prieto, Looking for History, Dispatches from Latin America.
All in June on C-SPAN's Booknotes, every Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
Here's a look at our programming lineup Sunday night on C-SPAN.
First, on American politics, a debate from the Los Angeles Mayor's race between Antonio Villaraigosa, a former speaker of the California State Assembly, and Los Angeles City Attorney James Hahn.
The nonpartisan runoff election will be June 5.
See the one-hour debate Sunday at 630 and 930 p.m. Eastern and Pacific.
And later on Sunday, Prime Minister's Question Time from the British House of Commons.
This week, Prime Minister Tony Blair took questions on the June 5th general election, which the Prime Minister called for earlier in the week.
He also took queries on the National Health Service and adopting the European Union single currency, the euro.
Prime Minister's Questions Sunday at 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, here on C-SPAN.
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