History | The Gad About Town

The War of 1812

Posted on November 3, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

November 3, 1814, fell on a Thursday. In a coincidence that can be seen only when one is wasting time, it turns out that November 3, 2214, will be a Thursday, as well. Today is the bicentennial of things that happened on this date, and two centuries from now, something taking place or yet to happen today might be bicentennial-ized. (As of this typing, there are several hours left for major history to be made. [Eastern time.])

What was important on this date two centuries ago? The U.S. Congress awarded eight Congressional Gold Medals, making November 3, 1814, one of the larger single-day award hand-outs in our history. Going back to the Revolutionary War, there have been fewer than 200 Congressional Gold Medals awarded, total; some were awarded to entire groups like the Native American Code Talkers and some of the medals were awarded posthmously, but fewer than 400 people in the history of the United States are Congressional Gold Medal recipients. Something important must have been worth commemorating that autumn day.

The eight medal winners were Captain Johnston Blakely, Major General Jacob Brown, Major General Winfield Scott, Brigadier General Eleazar Ripley, Brigadier General James Miller, Major General Peter Porter, Major General Edmund Gaines, and Major General Alexander Macomb. Here is the entire, updated list of Congressional Gold Medal winners from the U.S. House of Representatives: Gold Medal Recipients.

In 1814, the United States was at war with Great Britain, in our mostly forgotten conflict, the War of 1812. Every time one sings “The Star Spangled Banner” one is commemorating the War of 1812, but other than that, U.S. history classes skip over it on their way from the Revolutionary War to the Civil War. The War of 1812 was unique, however; it was a war in which a U.S. mainland city was captured, as British forces occupied Washington, DC, in August 1814. They looted the Capitol Building, destroyed every book held by the Library of Congress, and burned the White House, leaving an empty shell of a building. The occupation lasted one day, as a sudden August thunderstorm forced the British back to their storm-damaged ships.

The war is a confusing one for cursory study, as its many causes are still under debate, its fronts covered every region in the young United States, Canada, and the Caribbean; and, all the worse for ease of understanding, in Canada it is seen as a Canadian victory, in Europe it is viewed as one portion of the larger Napoleonic Wars, and in the U.S. it is seen as a victory but one in which our national capitol was occupied.

Congress in November 1814 was meeting in a replacement building that was quickly built for it, so every recent victory and city liberation in the still ongoing war was viewed as a something to be celebrated in grand style. The Siege of Fort Erie, the Battle of Chippawa, the Battle of Plattsburgh, and the recent heroic exploits of Captain Johnston Blakely were deemed worthy of our nation’s top honor. These were the skirmishes and doings the Congress honored with medals; each was a recent action that contributed to the overall war effort but none was decisive; Blakely had died at sea less than a month before.

Captain Johnston Blakely

Blakely’s 1814 had been a successful one, in which his ship, the USS Wasp, had fought many times near Europe and in the English Channel. All told, the Wasp encountered 15 rival ships in two separate cruises, sinking three ships and capturing or scuttling the remainder. Fifteen for fifteen. There is a mystery about the Wasp that remains to this day, however: What happened to it. Its final encounter was with the HMS Atalanta on August 21, 1814, which the crew of the Wasp captured and considered valuable enough to keep afloat, appoint a captain and crew, and send across the Atlantic to the States. It arrived here on November 4. The Wasp was only seen one more time after this and on some unknown date, it, its crew, and its captain probably sank during a storm (September and October are hurricane season) as it was crossing the Atlantic. Blakely was about 33 years old.

These were the efforts and achievements that two centuries ago we commemorated as eternal and unforgettable. And we do not remember them. Winfield Scott remained famous for decades after 1814, won a second Congressional Gold Medal, and was the Whig Party’s nominee for President in 1852. In Navy history, three ships have been named the USS Blakely in honor of the lost Captain Blakely. The last one was active from the mid-1970s to 1990, a period of little action at all.

On November 3, 1814, our nation honored eight by listing them on a roll of the eternals, and two hundred years later we think of them not at all. Whatever we think we might teach those who will follow, two hundred years from now, whoever we deem noteworthy (“#AlexfromTarget, anyone?”), it, he, or she will likely not be.

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 3 asks, “The year is 2214, and your computer’s dusty hard drive has just resurfaced at an antique store. Write a note to the curious buyer explaining what he or she will find there.”

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Time and Dr. Johnson

Posted on November 1, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

Samuel Johnson wrote, “He that hopes to look back hereafter with satisfaction upon past years must learn to know the present value of single minutes, and endeavor to let no particle of time fall useless to the ground.”—Rambler 108, March 30, 1751

Dr. Johnson was 41 in March of 1751 and several years into his work on his most lasting project, his Dictionary. Unlike most of the dictionaries developed for any language, and all dictionaries in English, Johnson’s “A Dictionary of the English Language” was written by one man. An entire dictionary, with more than 40,000 word entries and over 100,000 literary quotations to back up and explain Johnson’s definitions and create an etymology (the study of the origin of words). It took Johnson nine years to complete it; 75 years later, Noah Webster published his own dictionary, which had 70,000 entries, took 25 years to complete, and cites Johnson throughout. The first completed edition of the Oxford English Dictionary took 75 years and dozens of scholars to compile its first edition, published in 1928.

Johnson’s Dictionary is not the best one written for or in the English language—the dictionary that sits forgotten on your shelf is probably named Webster and not Johnson, and the website that you use instead of a book is also not named “Johnson.com” or something like that. Johnson’s definitions are often complete sentences and are sometimes essays on the topic inspired by the word under consideration. His treatment of the word “time,” for instance, offers fourteen different meanings for the word: “1. The measure of duration. 2. Space of time. 3. Interval. 4. Season; proper time. 5. A considerable space of duration; continuance; process of time. 6. Age; particular part of time. 7. Past time. 8. Early time. 9. Time considered as affording opportunity. 10. Particular quality of the present. 11. Particular time. 12. Hour of childbirth. 13. Repetition of any thing, or mention with reference to repetition. 14. Musical measure.” (“Time,” Johnson’s Dictionary)

Johnson offers a quote from English literature, usually the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, or Dryden, as a pertinent example for each particular definition. Sometimes he offers as many as seven quotes. For his fourteen definitions of “Time,” he uses forty-six quotes.

Samuel Johnson by Joshua Reynolds

This project would be difficult enough to produce in our era of desktop publishing (is there an app for dictionary creation?); Johnson put together his Dictionary in his house, with workmen appearing every so often to assemble a printing press and run off some pages. He paid them out of his own pocket. His personal library, large but not comprehensive, was supplemented by books borrowed from friends. The books were so covered with his markings that they were not worth being returned, the friends remembered.

It took him nine years to complete the Dictionary, yet he had promised it in three. For the rest of his career, Johnson was ridiculed as a slow worker; he proposed to work up an edition of Shakespeare’s plays (the first ever single source, authoritative edition that would be created) in 1756 and started attracting subscribers, but by 1762 another writer took a public jibe at him: “He for subscribers baits his hook/and takes your cash, but where’s the book?” His Shakespeare was published in 1765.

While working on his Dictionary, he published a self-written, twice-weekly periodical, The Rambler, to earn a living. (In other words, he wrote a blog while working on his big project.) Then, while working on his edition of Shakespeare, he published a weekly blog, um, magazine, called The Idler.

Samuel Johnson visited the topic of time over a dozen times in those two journals, and perhaps for understandable reasons: For someone so productive and yet considered a slow worker (The Idler was so named as a joke about his avoiding the long slow work on his Shakespeare), it is likely that few writers had considered time in so many facets. Any waking hour not spent earning a living was indeed “a particle of time (dropped) useless to the ground.”

Johnson had many health issues, ranging from regular bouts with a bleak depression, which he was the first to name the “black dog”; nearsightedness that glasses did not aid (or vanity made him avoid them); a disfiguring skin condition; and Tourette syndrome, a condition that did not have a name until the late 1800s and was not considered a medical condition in Johnson’s lifetime. The tics made him seem an odd character, and he felt he had to win people over with his wit. (Asked once why he made noises, he said it was a bad habit.) His many tics and violent gesticulations are described in every contemporary account about him written by his friends, so the posthumous diagnosis seems a trustworthy one.

A year and a half before his death, he described time and its slowness in old age thus:

The black dog I hope always to resist, and in time to drive, though I am deprived of almost all those that used to help me. … When I rise my breakfast is solitary, the black dog waits to share it, from breakfast to dinner he continues barking, […] After dinner, what remains but to count the clock, and hope for that sleep which I can scarce expect. Night comes at last, and some hours of restlessness and confusion bring me again to a day of solitude. What shall exclude the black dog from an habitation like this?

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for February 25 asks, “If you could slow down an action that usually zooms by, or speed up an event that normally drags on, which would you choose, and why?”

The WordPress Daily Prompt for November 1 asks, “If you could slow down an action that usually zooms by, or speed up an event that normally drags on, which would you choose, and why?”

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Inequality for No One

Posted on October 16, 2014 by Mark Aldrich

“The Mexicans here, they’re better than the ones in California. They’re polite here. I like our Mexicans: they work hard and don’t make me think about them.”

This was small talk, office talk. It always surprises me how quickly people get comfortable enough with me that they gush out their own prejudices, as if they think/assume I have similar sympathies. I had no idea what to say in reply to something that was no longer small talk, so I mumbled that I was suddenly hungry and was going to the lunch room, immediately. “Our Mexicans” was the only phrase in my head. It kept clanging around in there.

The conversation took place in our shared office cubicle in a factory in Iowa; four of us occupied the space and one joined me in the walk to the cafeteria.

“‘Our Mexicans?'” I repeated. “That’s a concept?” He said he was surprised, too. I suggested that maybe when we returned to the cubicle, I would ask her opinion about Iowa vs. California Jews or other groups of people. I did not.

(In the years since, I have heard “our black people” spoken. By an African-American man. Regional prejudice trumped the more traditional kind, and it got the expected laugh from the white people in the room.)

The speaker who had stunned me was a woman who had moved with her family from California to Iowa—on purpose—to escape from California’s California-ness (read: liberal politics and “awful regulations” on cars and guns) and prevent her young daughters from growing up in the Golden State. No jobs had turned up in Nebraska, which was her and her husband’s first choice, so Iowa it was. Both states are 97%-98% white in population.

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Every woman I know, including the one from California, has reported that she has experienced sexual harassment. Every woman walks through a different day than any man does: she is gauged and judged for her appearance. Young and old, woman are called tarts or teases, or a phrase like “she must have been a looker when she was younger” is used. I dated a woman who had been raped, except she was puzzled when I called it that; in her description she said the guy had “come on strong” and that she should have said “no” more forcefully. “Did you say ‘No’?” I asked. She had, and he had penetrated her. That is rape.

Several women friends have described unpleasant encounters in which anonymous men have exposed themselves; one woman found a man rubbing his open-zippered self against her on a crowded subway, another was given a private show while she was seated on a crowded bus.

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It is not a nature vs. nurture matter that many people seem to think in this progression of loyalties: Self > family > tribe/extended family > neighborhood > region > population type (color or creed) > interest group > nation. I am conscious that I have not included income, but maybe “interest group” covers that. Humans are tribal, but this is not something we are born with; it is taught. We teach each other to find and use power over others, or to act like we have it.

My family inculcated in my sister and me a sense that we all were pretty lucky, blessed even, to be middle-class and white in America of the 1960s and ’70s. And that luck, simple luck, is not something to brag about or wield like a privilege.

Oh, but I am a member of a minority, you see, many of them. I am the product of a “mixed” marriage, Jewish and Baptist. I am disabled, living with a rare neuromuscular disease. Perhaps some breaks can be given to me. Give me some breaks, universe! This thinking is attractive, insidiously so. I deserve something, something more than I have. Say it with me.

I am a part of the uncomplaining majority, which makes me a minority. Reward me now.

It is indeed insidious, and in my lifetime it has become sickeningly popular. Call it the appeal of the self-declared minority, or the privilege of being underprivileged. The majority, the lucky blessed majority, has appropriated the language, and what it thinks is the mindset, of being underprivileged or even a victim. The powerful majority population decided that enough has been asked of it over time and has started to regard each activist minority population demanding mere equality as another squeaky wheel that gets oil. If finding a way to be the squeaky wheel means getting more privileges and benefits, well, how could they be against being the squeaky wheel? It can be one more way to more power.

Justice and fairness are not equal, but they are just and fair. We should do all we can—I should do all I can—to increase those two things.

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Today is Blog Action Day. It is estimated that there are more than 250 million blogs published around the world and spread among many hosting companies, many of which are publicly traded. That is a lot of voices, and if they could be united for one day about something other than the universal appeal of cats, they could direct attention in some productive areas. Public attention is not as productive as action and changing minds, but it is better than no action at all.

Blog Action Day is an annual event that was started in 2007. A topic of activist concern is selected and announced in advance. This year’s topic is “inequality.”

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The WordPress Daily Prompt for October 16 asks, “Did you know today is Blog Action Day? Join bloggers from around the world and write a post about what inequality means to you. Have you ever encountered it in your daily life?

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