Lincoln

I saw the movie yesterday with two terribly interesting and compelling companions. I’m glad I was with someone who understood that a general, personal withdrawal and some quietness was required at the film’s conclusion.

by Charlie Leck

Sam knew I was extremely moved by the film. I was still fighting back emotions as we filed out of the theater.

“I can’t wait to read your blog tomorrow,” Sam said, as we walked through the theater lobby toward the exit doors. After that, he remained quite silent as we walked to the car, uttering a nearly silent farewell to Bert.

“No, this was too big for me to write about it,” I replied very quietly, after thinking about it.

“Not for you,” he said. “I’ll bet you write about it.”

“No! How do you even begin to explain such a film?”

Yet, I knew he’d thrown me something like a challenge and I sat around last night thinking about it. I sipped on some scotch that I had poured over a mountain of clear ice cubes and thought about it. I stared at the newly decorated Christmas tree and thought about Lincoln! How could one possibly explain such a big movie – such incredible storytelling and such a wondrous recreation of historical reality?

I mean… What do I mean?

The cameras and the people who worked them and directed them seemed as intruders on reality. They carried me back into history and to moments that I’d wondered about as I read the historians who tried to explain them – Doris Kearns Goodwin, in A Team of Rivals, and Gore Vidal in Lincoln.

But, I can’t explain the power of this movie to you! I sit here thinking about it and I begin to tremble when I think about the man – Lincoln. What can I write that will be meaningful?

Here’s what I know!
The movie tried to capture a period in Lincoln’s presidency – a moment when he was trying to get the 13th amendment to the U.S. Constitution approved by the U.S. Congress.

What was it the New York Times said about the movie – praise that got me so excited about seeing it?

“The squalor and vigor, the glory and corruption of the Republic in action have all too rarely made it onto the big screen.

“There are exceptions, of course, and one of them is Steven Spielberg’s splendid “Lincoln,” which is, strictly speaking, about a president trying to scare up votes to get a bill passed in Congress. It is of course about a lot more than that, but let’s stick to the basics for now. To say that this is among the finest films ever made about American politics may be to congratulate it for clearing a fairly low bar. Some of the movie’s virtues are, at first glance, modest ones, like those of its hero, who is pleased to present himself as a simple backwoods lawyer, even as his folksy mannerisms mask a formidable and cunning political mind.” [A.O. Scott, NY Times, 8 November 2012]

To me, it was about that something more that A.O. Scott mentions. It was about a moment in history – a moment, mind you, that might pass without decisive action or, through great moral belief and perseverance, might display the awesomeness of human character. Lincoln! Seward! Thaddeus Stevens! Oh, my, what men!

A.O. Scott says: “…Daniel Day-Lewis, who eases into a role of epic difficulty as if it were a coat he had been wearing for years.” A friend of mine spoke to me about the movie in the days before I saw it. “Daniel Day-Lewis nailed it,” he said with such total enthusiasm it was as if he were proclaiming a moment of epiphany! And, yes he did – Mr. Lewis, I mean! He absolutely nailed it and captured a Lincoln who was, to me and the other viewers around me, so real that it was as if we were sitting with him in his White House, listening to his humble tales born out of his experiences in Kentucky, Indiana and Southern Illinois. Such little stories with such far reaching morals to them!

“Above all, he gives them voice. His Lincoln speaks in a reedy drawl that provides a notable counterpoint to the bombastic bellowing of some of his allies and adversaries. (John William’s score echoes this contrast by punctuating passages of orchestral grandeur with homey scraps of fiddle, banjo and parlor piano.). [A.O. Scott, NY Times, 8 November 2012]

The screenwriter is Tony Kushner. I know nothing about him. My companions at the movie theatre were enthused and delighted when they saw that he had written the script. It was quite brilliant and excruciatingly realistic. Lincoln, Kushner makes both eloquent and down-to-earth folksy. How could a man tell tales so well of George Washington’s portrait in a toilet (WC) in Great Britain and utter so compellingly those words at Gettysburg, or deliver the magnificent chord so vibrantly in the Second Inaugural Address? Kushner, Spielberg and Day-Lewis deliver just that to us in startling reality. Brilliantly, to boot!

I have never sat through “a full-length, feature film,” as we used to call them in the old days, that so grasped me and held me tight from beginning to end. As I so boldly said in the opening to this blog, I was drawn back into the reality and moment of history and allowed to be a living, contemporary and witness right at hand.

Sally Field allowed me to have great sympathy and even compassion for the bedeviled Mary Todd Lincoln. No mother, no wife, no woman should have to endure the agony and great personal expenditures paid by Mrs. Lincoln.

Tommy Lee Jones was brilliant as Congressman Thaddeus Stevens. He was put on a grand stage and given the opportunity to play a complex and well-spoken, sharp-tongued character. He grasped the opportunity and delivered a forceful performance with such reality that I forgot it was digital images I was watching.

The gorilla in the room, in this entire story, and that which provides the compelling conflicts, confrontations and great debates, is the institution of slavery in America and whether it can be allowed to stand at the conclusion of the Great Civil War that was fought over this very question: Can a State be a State within the Union, but defy the compelling heart and soul of the Constitution of the United States that cries out that “all men are created equal!” All men!

The film is about the question of slavery and how it shall be abolished. Clearly, some dynamic northern politicos decide that it must go before peace treaties are consummated. However, the North is divided about the question. Is the black man truly the equal of the ruling white men? Is the black man equal? Is he? The question lingers there and probes at us and at the characters in the story with a sharpness that is frightening. You are smacked with it again and again! Is he?

Spielberg opens the doors to the House of Representatives and to the White House and allows us a view of the political process in all its unseemly reality – and that is incredibly dramatic and forceful. It is also dirty and corrupt and unwholesome. Yet, it is beautiful because the ends do seem, in this case, to justify the means.

Enough, read the NY Times review by Mr. Scott. Then, if you haven’t already, get your tired old ass out there and sit in a grand, big-screen theater and become an actual witness to one of the most important historical moments in all of time.

If you don’t get it yet, here is my message in total bluntness: “God, I loved this movie!”

_________________________

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My Opinion!

“Why I have a strong opinion about some matters!”
by Charlie Leck

“I read you for stimulation and insight, Charles… I do enjoy your point of view and everyone’s opinion comes from life experiences only they have had… I would love for you to flesh out some of your own reasons for why you have a strong opinion about some matters…”     [comment posted by a woman on one of my recent blogs]

I have thought a lot about this question – an awful lot. I’ve not been feeling too good the last few days and I’ve laid back and thought about what this very kind and good lady has asked me.

Before plunging into the deeper and murky water, let me play around for a moment in the shallow edge of the pond.

Why do I have a strong opinion about some matters?
That question raises other questions for me. I’m guessing that most people who hold opinions hold strong ones, especially if those opinions have been formulated after a considerable amount of thought and study. I am not unusual, am I, in holding strong opinions? Or are you saying that I hold rigid opinions? That would worry me if it were true. Though my opinions are strong, in most cases they are not inflexible. However, I can’t imagine flip-flopping 180 degrees on many of my opinions.

There are some matters that I classify as human truths
and I cannot budge on those! A little church upon on the hill, in the town where I grew up as a child, had an enormous impact on my thinking in this regard…..

I grew up paying attention to matters of faith, trying to figure it all out. My parents weren’t particularly religious. We were not a spiritual or prayerful family at all. Yet, it was important to them that I, scrubbed and polished, trudge on up to Sunday School on the big day each weekend.

I didn’t pay careful attention, but things occasionally interested me and I’d find myself wondering about something here or there.

Who is this Jesus character anyway? I wasn’t much interested in his divinity. “Who do you say that I am,” he asked Peter. It was as if he had asked me. Who was he? (Or, is it more appropriate to ask: Who is he?)

I didn’t much care that he rose up – or that he sits at the right hand of God – or that, in a triune sort of way, he is God or a part of God.

I like what he did when he roamed around. I liked a lot of the very plain things that he said about justice and righteousness. I paid careful attention to the simple, unadorned things that he said.

“If you want to be perfect,” he said, “go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then, come and follow me.”

Whew! What does that mean? I wondered a great deal about it. Could anyone really do that?

You know, the guy was obsessed with the poor. He came “to preach good news to the poor.” He also worried about prisoners and the lame and blind. He talked about “the oppressed.”

All that stuff affected me. I never stopped thinking about it.

So, our responsibility toward and on behalf of our fellow-man ranks very high with me and here my opinion is rigid. Jesus, in the scriptures, called it “love” for our neighbor or brother. The apostles (especially John and Peter), writing later, would actually equate it with our love for God – that is, the only way we could love God was to love our fellow man.

In such matters, I am not looking for a return – for reward or recompense. It is just, according to our faith, something that is supposed to be natural and certain and spontaneous. If we wish to love and honor God, we must love and honor our fellow man.

We cannot leave brothers and sisters unsheltered, hungry, ill and addicted. Turning from them in their need is, according to Christian teaching, turning away from God.

My attitude is the same about the earth that God put into our hands for care-taking. That is what our faith says. Ignoring this spectacular and totally unusual planet is to ignore the Creator. Not caring for the planet with utmost caution and tender love, is not caring for God.

These are two matters that I am rigid about: (1) Our calling to love and serve our fellow man; and (2) our calling to protect, serve and love the earth upon which we live.

Now then, there are matters upon which I hold firm opinions that are, I suppose, debatable.
I am thinking of some examples… and it is not easy, because my opinions about these matters have been solidly informed by experience and study.

What, for instance is JUSTICE?
Well, my goodness, I’ve asked myself a terribly difficult and complex question. With certainty, there is no certainty about such a complex question. Here one must proceed with caution and careful examination.

Let me use two of the most incredible of the possible examples: (1) Slavery in America and (2) the Right to Marry the person one loves.

On the first of these, 99 percent of you are going to say there is no question – no reason for debate – no possible reason to consider whether slavery can possibly be just. Indeed?

Well, put yourself back 155 years ago in our history – to 1857 – and then ask the question. At that time there were dozens of books written by American scholars of the south and by southern churchmen that posed arguments that justified slavery. Indeed!

There were plenty of southern thinkers who believed the world was ordered the way it was for a reason; that is, that there were the weak and there were the strong. They believed that this order was created by God and that human beings ought not tinker with that order. It was a natural, organic conception of stability in the world. Southern thinkers were writing that freedom is not an absolute concept and that no one is born equal. Freedom, they said, must be balanced with order and with tradition.

Churchmen argued that slavery was a biblical institution and was divinely sanctioned. How often they quoted the New Testament writings of Paul: “Slaves, be obedient to your masters!”

Instead of arguing for natural rights, southern philosophers were proclaiming that there was a “natural inequality.”

William Harper (Memoir of Slavery) wrote that “man is born to subjection” and that “man struggles with evil choices and must choose between them.”

Henry Hughes argued that slaves were “charges put in the world for slaveholders to care for and develop them.” Hughes strongly supported the idea of a master race.

The Yale University Scholar, David Blight, has pointed out that nearly every slave owner’s library included an anthology of pro-slavery writings of 400 to 900 pages.

Now it may seem I am making a lurch away from the subject, but I am not…
I had a remarkable lunch on Friday with one of our little town’s most distinguished residents, who also happens to be one of our state’s most remarkable citizens. He wanted to make an important point to me in reply to one of my questions.

“You know,” he told me, “if you go back to the years before 1860, you will find that about 25 percent of the nation’s population was firmly, rigidly and unbendingly against slavery.” Then he pointed out to me that approximately the same percentage of people were solidly and unyieldingly in favor of slavery and the importance it had to the American economic engine. And in the great middle, were 50 percent of Americans who, for some reason or another, had no real opinion on the matter at all.

This brilliant fellow looked across the table to me for reaction. He was dumbfounded. From today’s perspective can you imagine that there were so many people who had no opinion about anything that we now regard as so unjust? Can you imagine?

He went on to talk, at considerable length, about a book he had just read with his book club: Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe.

It was Stowe, as far as President Lincoln was concerned, who called our nation to examine itself – to examine its thinking and its fairness and its right to own human beings.

“It was Stowe,” my neighbor said, “who set the other 50 percent thinking and pushed them over the edge. The book was terribly popular. It sold like wild-fire!”

I’d read the Stowe book (and recently another wonderful book about it, Mightier Than The Sword by David Reynolds). My neighbor wasn’t aware of that and he went on to recount the story that Stowe’s novel told and how real and gruesome it was. It was wonderful to sit and listen to him.

“Can you imagine? That it was a book that did that?” he said.

I must tell you, this friend is one of the leading members of the Republican Party and always has been throughout his adult life. He knows that I am a committed member of the Democratic Party. We talked about some issues over which we differ, like the voter identification constitutional amendment on this year’s November ballot.

“In the end, I’m not going to vote for it,” he said, relieving me, “but I’m not so sure it would be a bad thing.”

About the marriage amendment, which would change our constitution enough to define marriage as that between only a man and a woman, we also talked at great length. Like I, he opposes that one with all his heart. He likened the issue to the feelings of the nation about slavery back in the 17^th century.

“About 25 percent oppose it and 25 percent favor it. The other 50 percent pretty much don’t care and aren’t mobilized by the issue.”

“We need someone like Stowe to move the 50 percent – to define the injustice of the amendment – to side with people who have no choice about being gay or lesbian; for they just are!”

Now I understood why he had told me the story. He travels around the state speaking about the issue. He always introduces the subject with the story about Stowe’s book.

“I have a son who is gay,” he said to me.

This man – this conservative Republican – has given thousands of dollars to the local organization that is fighting the marriage amendment (Minnesotans United for All Families).

You see, sometimes these issues go beyond being an issue and they become personal matters; and because they are personal we see the questions of justice and fairness differently.

These are fellow human beings we are talking about – our brothers and sisters in life upon this earth – and the great scriptures urge us to love them and care for them and to be fair to them in all ways.

I can not but have strong opinions about an issue like the marriage amendment. To me, there is no question about what is just and right.

The commenter on my blog (titled Fred), posited that “everyone’s opinion comes from some life experience only they have had.” There’s probably some truth in that. If so, let me say that I can think of two life experiences that have formed my opinions.

(1)   One is that little church upon the hill, about which I wrote at the beginning of this blog and from which I learned that every man is our brother and every woman is our sister and we are called to love them without reservation (and that means being fair to them, just to them and helpful to them). 

(2)  Second, was that trip to Mississippi in 1964, about which I have written so often in these blogs. That journey was my Harriet Beecher Stowe book. I saw injustice and mistreatment as I never dreamed it possible. The KKK was not just something someone wrote about – not anymore. The journey rattled me to my core and changed me forever. I would not stand on the sidelines again about matters of justice and fairness to my fellow human beings – never!

I have “fleshed out” for you, as best I can, what experiences cause me to hold such strong feelings. I thank you for the good and thoughtful comment and for motivating me to write these words.

Afterword
Perhaps there were other impactful, influencing experiences, but those mentioned above are the two most forceful ones. Meeting and spending time with Saul Alinsky dramatically changed me; as did sitting in the living room of Jesse Jackson’s home (in 1967) and chatting with him about justice and injustice; as did reading Noam Chomsky carefully (that reading proved to me that Chomsky was no communist but called for capitalism of a different, more just order); as did coming-out publically in 1968 against the War in Vietnam with the ability I’d gathered to talk about the war’s history and turning points; as did the extraordinary and mind-bending sermons of the Reverend John Fry in the late sixties (sermons I cannot retrieve as hard as I try). Oh, as I think about it, there were dozens of experiences and people that impacted me greatly and formed my thinking – the poet Arthur Mampel nourished me with extraordinary wisdom; meeting Arne Carlson before he became widely known made me more open to political possibilities; listening to the Welch pastor, Vivian Jones, calmed me and made me more rational about seeking justice; a professor named Tom Campbell (who died too, too young) taught me how to read a book properly and with goals; Professor James Nelson and his triangle of love for God and man helped me understand how to love God in reality; a single evening in the presence of Brenda Ulend made me want to write and write; and having four incredible grandchildren made me regret so much that life can’t go on and on and on.

_________________________

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America’s 19th Century Slave Economy

An answer to a reader’s question (+)...
by Charlie Leck

Based on what I wrote yesterday, one of my regular readers, Lynn, asked an interesting question about how the rest of the world felt about slavery in the American south:

“Do you think the other nations of the world at that time i.e. Europe, Norway, Sweden, etc., thought the U.S. barbaric in the use of slavery? England decried it openly at some point during the height of slave trade to the U.S.”

Lynn is talking about the anti-slave-trading movement that grew so strong in England in the early 1800s – the topic of the wonderful movie, Amazing Grace. I wrote about the film in a blog in April 2007.

In fact, as best I can tell from my reading, Europe was also divided on America’s southern slave economy, but not as seriously as America was. We’ve got to remember that there was strong opposition to slavery in America, too. About 50 percent of the northern population totally opposed slavery and the other 50 percent was divided about the South’s right to a slave economy. Somewhere around 10 percent of the southern population also believed that slavery was immoral; however, this small group knew better than to speak up about their feelings.

Even in Europe the black human beings were a mystery and plenty of stories had circulated about the “uncivilized black man” from Africa. Yet, it’s also true that a number of black people had made their way into Europe and some distinguished themselves as scholars and succeeded in the economic system while others ended up as indentured servants.

Some scholars like to picture the division in America as one over the constitutional question of secession and withdrawal from the union and not a matter of race or racial injustice. That is not the case. It was a matter of moral and social justice and it was the debate over those ethical questions that pushed the South’s decisions about war.

The South had built a strong economy around slavery and slave trade. Its economic health and stability were threatened by the moral questions raised in America’s north and in Europe. As is often the question, morality and religious concepts are altered to be amenable with matters of economic success. There were very, very few voices in the churches of the South that condemned slavery during the late 18th and early 19th centuries – and there were strong voices among the religious of the South that justified it.

The general concept held fast to by the majority in America’s North and in Europe was that of natural rights and natural equality among men. The South built a moral argument that it was the opposite – that there was a natural inequality. In his Memoir of Slavery, William Harper argued that “man is born to subjection” and that “man struggles with evil choices and must choose between them.”

“It is what it is,” Harper declared.

Churchmen in the South argued that there was a biblical argument for slavery and they pointed to the Old Testament prophets in their argument that slavery was divinely sanctioned. Utopian, Henry Hughes built a theory of warrantyism and proposed that the black people “are charges put in the world for the slaveholder to care for and develop.”

Historical justifications for slavery were also used in the South. Edward Brown, a prolific pro-slavery writer, held that “slavery had ever been the stepping ladder by which nations have passed from barbarism to civilization.” The historical argument for slavery contended that it had been crucial to the development of all great civilizations.

It would be wrong to think that such moral justification were rare. In fact there was large-scale writing about the case for slavery. As Doctor David Blight (introduced to you in yesterday’s blog) explains, “In almost every slave owner’s library was an anthology of pro-slavery writing (at first more than 400 pages that grew to more than 900 pages in subsequent editions.)”

There was no great and strong defense of the South’s right to hold slaves anywhere else in the world (the emphasis is on the word strong). The anti-slavery movement in the north of the United States was very strong. It was a regular theme from the pulpit of northern churches. There were dozens of different anti-slavery organizations. The same was true in England and in most of Europe. America’s South had few international supporters other than those small organizations that benefited from the slave trade industry and the slave economy.

It is not amazing that such attitudes about the black African persisted in the South for so many, many years when one considers the intensity of the argument in the middle of the 19th century.

It’s a long answer to your question, Lynn, but one I enjoyed babbling out.

_________________________

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A Year Before the Mayflower Arrived

It was a Dutch ship of some unknown sort that arrived on a historically significant trading mission to Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia, in 1619.
by Charlie Leck

Slaves from blackest Africa arrived in the American colonies a year before the famous passengers of the Mayflower arrived in New England in 1620. They were brought here on a Dutch sailing ship that had cannons aboard. She didn’t stay long, but put her cargo of black slaves up for trade and quickly loaded the goods in payment that the white settlers of Jamestown provided for the slaves.

You tell me! Considering our nation’s dark history and involvement in the institution of slavery, was this unnamed ship of more historical consequence than the Mayflower?

The questions of history are not easily answered; for history is so much more complex than that pabulum supplied to us as school children.

Just mark the fact that slavery developed into an accepted and acceptable institution of the South very quickly after the arrival of that first boat load of slaves. Keeping slaves and trading them would be seen as legal and socially acceptable in the South for the next 250 years. It is not a proud part of our history about which we will boast.

Believe me (and many historians agree with this), had the colonists been able to enslave the local Native Americans (the Powhatan Confederacy) they would have. This, however, was the land of the Powhatan and they knew it well and used that knowledge to protect themselves. These Natives sensed early on the cruelty of these white Europeans and they took measures to defend themselves.

Those first colonists in America needed a labor force; first, to produce enough food to stay alive; and second to grow tobacco for export. These were people unaccustomed to hard labor and they had a difficult time surviving and many didn’t because they couldn’t take care of themselves and produce enough food for sustenance. It must have frustrated them when they saw how much more superior the Natives were in taking care of themselves.

Agreeing to take black slaves was the answer to a tough problem for the Virginians. The slaves turned around the failing situation in Jamestown and, over the years, the keeping of slaves became more and more profitable.

There are plenty of histories that attempt to tell us these first black people in Virginia were indentured servants; that is, that they sold themselves into service for a period of time and for a certain amount of money after which they would receive their freedom and full citizenship. That is a fairy tale of enormity. They came as slaves. They were forced on to the ship that brought them and they were sold by the shipping company when they arrived. They were treated brutally by their owners and they were kept as prisoners and not as servants.

Black Africans had been forcibly taken to Europe starting sometime in the 1500s. In most cases, however, slavery in Europe was a far different institution than that which grew up in the colonies and in the islands of the West Indies. Blacks in Europe had certain rights of citizenship and they could hold money, own property and marry. They eventually earned their total freedom. The first blacks brought to America may have thought that was the kind of condition into which they were coming; but it was certainly not. The black slaves were reduced to less than human status and they were most often hated and held in contempt based on their color. In Virginia it was very quickly established that the white man was the master and the black person was a slave.

Black slavery would not become common place in the southern colonies until the establishment of the Carolinas in 1670; and from that point the spread of slavery throughout the south happened quickly.

Many black Africans were shipped to other parts of the Americas as early as the late 1500s. Between then and through the 1800s, as many as twelve millions slaves may have been shipped to North and South America. Huge numbers were shipped to Brazil and to the islands of the Caribbean. Though less than a million slaves were sold into the United States and its early colonies, that population would grown to approximately four million by 1860.