REVOLUTION

In the summer and spring of 1789, American newspapers carried the first news of the revolutionary turmoil in Paris. First came the meeting of the Estates-General in May, then the National Assembly in June, and then the fall of the Bastille in July. In August, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens was ratified, and Americans could not fail to note its resemblance to the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, upon which it was largely based.

In its early, temperate stages, from the spring of 1789 through the fall of 1791, the French Revolution was greeted with near-universal rejoicing in America. The beloved Lafayette was conspicuously at the center of the events unfolding in Paris, where he served as vice president of the National Assembly and commander of the revolutionary militia. He sent George Washington the key to the Bastille, engraved with the words: “It is a tribute which I owe to you, as a son to my adoptive father, as an aide-de-camp to my General, as a Missionary of Liberty to its Patriarch.” On the streets of American cities and towns, a rush of nostalgia brought back all of the old symbolism and music and pageantry of the American Revolution. Liberty poles were erected in town squares, just as they had been in 1776; men wore liberty hats, just as they had in 1776. At festivals and civic feasts, the Stars and Stripes appeared alongside the new Tricolor of Revolutionary France: a red, white, and blue flag designed by Lafayette himself to replace the royal white banner of the Bourbons.

Beginning in mid-1792, however, there were disturbing reports of mob savagery on the streets of Paris. In August, a crowd gathered outside the Palace of the Tuileries, where the royal family was being held in closely guarded splendor, and howled for the king’s head. They slaughtered some five hundred of the king’s Swiss Guards and paraded their severed heads on pikes. Lafayette was denounced and forced to flee across the border, where he was captured by the Austrians and thrown into jail. In September, as foreign armies massed on the border, rumors of a domestic counterrevolutionary plot circulated among the sans-culottes of the Parisian mobs.

More than a thousand prisoners, among them women, children, and priests, were dragged virtually at random from their cells and hacked to pieces. The princesse de Lamballe, a friend and confidante of the queen, was raped, murdered, and mutilated; her head was exhibited on a pike beneath Marie-Antoinette’s window. The duc de La Rochefoucauld, the man who had first translated the Declaration of Independence, was snatched from his carriage and stoned to death as his wife and aging mother watched helplessly.  

The details of the massacres were so outlandish that many Americans refused to believe them. Jefferson maintained that they should be dismissed as English propaganda. But in late March 1793, shortly after Washington was sworn in for his second term as president, news arrived in Philadelphia that could not be so easily ignored. Louis XVI had been sent to the guillotine in the public square named for his father. As his severed head was lifted from the basket into which it had fallen, cries of “Vive la Republique!” had resounded through the streets of Paris and “every hat was in the air.”

Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (66-67). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

NAVY

 Of the thirteen American frigates built during the Revolution, seven were captured and taken into the Royal Navy, and another four were destroyed to prevent their falling into enemy hands….

…Robert Morris said there was no use keeping a navy afloat if the American people were unwilling to bear the financial burden. “Until Revenues for the Purpose can be obtained it is but vain to talk of Navy or Army or anything else….Every good American must wish to see the United States possessed of a powerful fleet, but perhaps the best way to obtain one is to make no Effort for the Purpose till the People are taught by their Feelings to call for and require it. They will now give money for Nothing.”

Ian W. Toll, Six Frigates: The Epic History of the Founding of the U.S. Navy (18-19). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

=================

ON JUNE 6, 1944, AS ALLIED TROOPS STORMED THE BEACHES OF northern France, President Roosevelt offered a simple prayer over the radio: “Almighty God: Our sons, pride of our Nation, this day have set upon a mighty endeavor, a struggle to preserve our Republic, our religion, and our civilization, and to set free a suffering humanity. . . . With Thy blessing, we shall prevail over the unholy force of our enemy.”

The president knew, but could not yet disclose, that another great amphibious flotilla was underway in the Pacific. If not for the invasion of northern France (OVERLORD), the Pacific operation (FORAGER) would have surpassed all previous amphibious landings in scale and sophistication. That two such colossal assaults could be launched against fortified enemy shores, in the same month and at opposite ends of the Eurasian landmass, was a supreme demonstration of American military-industrial hegemony. The force that sailed against the Marianas included more than 600 ships carrying more than 300,000 men. Admiral Marc Mitscher’s Task Force 58 now included fifteen (fleet) aircraft carriers divided into four task groups. Task Force 51, the Joint Expeditionary Force, carried 127,000 amphibious assault troops, including the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Marine Divisions and the army’s 27th Infantry Division. 

Records enumerated 40,000 discrete categories of supplies and munitions in the holds of the transports. These had been combat-loaded so that they could be removed and transferred to the beachhead quickly and in exactly the quantities requested by the troops ashore. For every one marine or soldier in the landing force, the transport fleet carried more than a ton of supplies and equipment. A single supply ship brought rations to feed 90,000 men for a month. Mitscher’s task force carried eight million gallons of aviation fuel, and would burn more than four million barrels of bunker oil during the operation. 

An F6F pilot, flying above Task Force 58 during the five-day passage from Eniwetok to Saipan, was impressed by the sight of the fleet as it turned into the wind to launch aircraft. Carriers, battleships, cruisers, and destroyers turned together and steadied on the same course. “The wakes from all of those ships were perfectly symmetrical with each other, like a perfect corps de ballet, but some of these ships weighed thirty-five thousand tons. I looked down on this power and wondered what kind of fools these Japanese were. They had made one of the greatest miscalculations of all time, and boy, were they going to pay a price.”

Ian W. Toll, The Conquering Tide: War in the Pacific Islands, 1942-1944 (Vol. 2) (The Pacific War Trilogy): War in the Pacific Islands, 1942–1944 (457-458). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

HOLOCAUST

 U.S. Holocaust Museum

What was the Holocaust? 

The Holocaust (1933–1945) was the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of six million European Jews by the Nazi German regime and its allies and collaborators. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum defines the years of the Holocaust as 1933–1945. The Holocaust era began in January 1933 when Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party came to power in Germany. It ended in May 1945, when the Allied Powers defeated Nazi Germany in World War II. The Holocaust is also sometimes referred to as “the Shoah,” the Hebrew word for “catastrophe.”

When they came to power in Germany, the Nazis did not immediately start to carry out mass murder. However, they quickly began using the government to target and exclude Jews from German society. Among other antisemitic measures, the Nazi German regime enacted discriminatory laws and organized violence targeting Germany’s Jews. The Nazi persecution of Jews became increasingly radical between 1933 and 1945. This radicalization culminated in a plan that Nazi leaders referred to as the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.” The “Final Solution” was the organized and systematic mass murder of European Jews. The Nazi German regime implemented this genocide between 1941 and 1945.

Why did the Nazis target Jews?

The Nazis targeted Jews because the Nazis were radically antisemitic. This means that they were prejudiced against and hated Jews. In fact, antisemitism was a basic tenet of their ideology and at the foundation of their worldview. 

The Nazis falsely accused Jews of causing Germany’s social, economic, political, and cultural problems. In particular, they blamed them for Germany’s defeat in World War I (1914–1918). Some Germans were receptive to these Nazi claims. Anger over the loss of the war and the economic and political crises that followed contributed to increasing antisemitism in German society. The instability of Germany under the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), the fear of communism, and the economic shocks of the Great Depression also made many Germans more open to Nazi ideas, including antisemitism.

However, the Nazis did not invent antisemitism. Antisemitism is an old and widespread prejudice that has taken many forms throughout history. In Europe, it dates back to ancient times. In the Middle Ages (500–1400), prejudices against Jews were primarily based in early Christian belief and thought, particularly the myth that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus. Suspicion and discrimination rooted in religious prejudices continued in early modern Europe (1400–1800). At that time, leaders in much of Christian Europe isolated Jews from most aspects of economic, social, and political life. This exclusion contributed to stereotypes of Jews as outsiders. As Europe became more secular, many places lifted most legal restrictions on Jews. This, however, did not mean the end of antisemitism. In addition to religious antisemitism, other types of antisemitism took hold in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. These new forms included economic, nationalist, and racial antisemitism. In the 19th century, antisemites falsely claimed that Jews were responsible for many social and political ills in modern, industrial society. Theories of race, eugenics, and Social Darwinism falsely justified these hatreds. Nazi prejudice against Jews drew upon all of these elements, but especially racial antisemitism. Racial antisemitism is the discriminatory idea that Jews are a separate and inferior race. 

The Nazi Party promoted a particularly virulent form of racial antisemitism. It was central to the party’s race-based worldview.

GOING TO WAR

Their fateful decision to attack the United States and the Allies in December 1941 had been founded upon a catalog of faulty assumptions. They had assumed that the war could be won quickly, averting a prolonged war of attrition in which American economic power would become decisive. They had assumed that Nazi Germany was unbeatable in Europe, and would break Britain and Russia to its yoke; that sea routes linking Japan to its oil supply in the East Indies could be secured against submarine and air attacks; and that the main U.S. naval fleet would charge into the western Pacific to be met and annihilated in a single decisive sea battle, reprising the Imperial Navy’s triumph at the Battle of Tsushima in 1905.

From childhood, the Japanese had been taught that they were a unique race, guided by a divine emperor, watched over by their ancient gods, with a sacred destiny to rule Asia. Indulging shallow stereotypes about American culture and democracy, the Japanese miscalculated the temper and character of their enemy. They assumed that Americans lacked the stomach to fight a long, bloody war on the opposite side of the world. They assumed that their enemies had grown soft and decadent by easy living, and were hopelessly infatuated by popular entertainment.

The Americans were a mongrel people, a nation of immigrants, without unity or higher purpose, enfeebled by racial, ethnic, class, and ideological infighting. Women had the vote, and therefore wielded influence in politics—and they would resist sending their sons and husbands to fight on distant foreign shores. The size and strength of the U.S. economy would count for nothing if it could not be mobilized for war, and the capitalist oligarchs would not consent to retool their lucrative industries. The strike on Pearl Harbor was intended to shock and demoralize the American public, so that they would react to the disaster by pressuring Washington to make peace. 

 “We thought that we could easily tackle them,” a leading Japanese officer later admitted, “a race so steeped in material comfort and absorbed in the pursuit of pleasure was spiritually degenerate.”

If all of these premises had been right, Japan would have won the Pacific War, and might even be the dominant power in the region today. If even some had been right, Japan might have escaped the conflict with its sovereignty intact, and perhaps some remnant of its overseas empire. But as it turned out, all of these assumptions, in some degree, were wrong. In a sense, as Admiral Yonai and others grasped, the outcome of the Pacific War had been foreordained from the start, and Japan’s defeat was plainly foreseeable even in December 1941. Worse, defeat was actually foreseen and even predicted by some of the men who had acquiesced in the fateful decision to launch the unwinnable war in the first place. Above all, the Pacific War was the product of a political failure in Tokyo—a failure of catastrophic proportions, one of the worst in the annals of any government or any nation.

Ian W. Toll, Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (Vol. 3) (The Pacific War Trilogy) (768-769). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

REPRESENTATION

         It is especially difficult to make the case that inequalities of outcomes can be automatically assumed to have been caused by discrimination by dominant majorities against subordinate minorities, when in fact many subordinate minorities have economically outperformed dominant majorities in many countries around the world and in many periods of history.

        A study of the Ottoman Empire, for example, found that none of the 40 private bankers listed in Istanbul in 1912 was a Turk, even though Turks ruled the empire. Nor was any of the 34 stockbrokers in Istanbul a Turk. Of the capital assets of 284 industrial firms in the Ottoman Empire, employing five or more workers, 50 percent of these firms were owned by Greeks and another 20 percent were owned by Armenians. The Ottoman Empire was by no means unique.

        Racial or ethnic minorities who have owned or operated more than half of whole industries in particular nations have included the Chinese in Malaysia, Germans in Brazil, Lebanese in West Africa, Jews in Poland, Italians in Argentina, Indians in East Africa, Scots in Britain, Ibos in Nigeria, and Marwaris in India.

        By contrast, we can read reams of social justice literature without encountering a single example of the proportional representation of different groups in endeavors open to competition—in any country in the world today, or at any time over thousands of years of recorded history.

Thomas Sowell, Social Justice Fallacies (2-3). Basic Books. [2023] Kindle Edition.

MacArthur

Although the truth would not come out until years later, MacArthur’s conduct on the first day of the war had been at least as culpable as that of Kimmel or Short. Receiving nine hours’ warning of the attack on Pearl Harbor, MacArthur had remained cocooned at his headquarters and refused to communicate with his air commanders, despite their repeated efforts to reach him. As a result, his main force of B-17 bombers and P-40 fighters was paralyzed for lack of orders, and more than half of the aircraft were destroyed on the ground by the first Japanese air raid on Philippine territory. Leaders in Washington were dismayed by this “second Pearl Harbor,” hours after the first, but no one outside a privileged circle even knew that it had happened. Press reports on December 7 only stated that Japanese airplanes had been spotted in Philippine airspace. Three days later, the White House announced that the Japanese had attacked Clark Field, an air base north of Manila, but offered no details: “General Douglas MacArthur thus far has been unable to report details of the engagement.”

 The different standards of accountability imposed in Hawaii and the Philippines have bothered historians ever since. The latter events were never formally investigated, and MacArthur never answered for errors and derelictions that seemed at least as blameworthy and certainly more avoidable than those in Hawaii. The discrepancy can only be explained as a peculiar result of the way the opening sequences of the Pacific War were reported in the United States. If MacArthur was to be relieved of command, the action needed to be taken immediately, or not at all—and it was not taken immediately. And by the second week of the war, the mood of the American people had changed. Now they seemed eager for a redemptive narrative that would expunge the trauma and shame of Pearl Harbor. MacArthur’s beleaguered army, half a world away, with little hope of support or reinforcement, was making a stirring fight against long odds. The man at the head of that army seemed a brave and noble figure, an American paladin straight out of central casting. His daily war communiqués, composed in a style ranging from the lurid to the vainglorious, kept the American people in thrall.

Ian E. Toll,  Twilight of the Gods: War in the Western Pacific, 1944-1945 (Vol. 3) (The Pacific War Trilogy) (p. 12). W. W. Norton & Company. Kindle Edition.

OWEN STANLEYS

 “The Green War”
William Manchester, American Caesar, Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964
Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1978, 297-304


    Other approaches to Port Moresby having failed, the Japanese now attempted the incredible, an offensive over the Owen Stanleys. At first the small rear guard of the digger militiamen, who remained in the range until August 8, assumed that the enemy soldiers climbing towards them were merely patrolling. To their astonishment, massed infantrymen, manhandling mortars, machine-guns, and fieldpieces, crept slowly up the slimy, zigzagging, hundred-mile Kokoda Trail. In four weeks Major General Tomitaro Horii’s fourteen thousand men had crossed the raging Kumusi River at Wairopi and struggled through thirteen-thousand-foot Kokoda Pass. Five jungle-trained battalions leapfrogged one another into Isurava village, fifty-five miles from their starting point, and pushed down the precipitous southern slopes toward Imita Ridge and Ioribaiwa, twenty miles from the bluffs around Port Moresby. How many men succumbed in this heroic endeavor will never be known. Many perished in the Kumusi, and others disappeared in quicksand or plunged into gorges. In places the winding trail, a foot wide at most, simply disappeared. It took an hour to cut through a few yards of vegetation. The first man in a file would hack away with a machete until he collapsed of exhaustion; then the second man would pick up the machete and continue, and so on. In that climate the life expectancy of the men who lost consciousness and were left behind was often measured in minutes.

    MacArthur had sent two of his best brigadiers, Pat Casey and Harold George, to survey the Papuan terrain. They returned to Brisbane shaken. Until now they had assumed that Bataan and Samar were covered with the densest jungle in the world, but New Guinea was unbelievable. They told the General that they didn’t see how human beings could live there, let alone fight there. From the air, whence they had first seen it, Papua’s most striking feature had been the razorback mountain range, stretching down the peninsula like the dorsal vertebrae of some prehistoric monster, its peaks obscured by dark clouds swollen with rain. It wasn’t until they had landed and ventured into the rain forest on steep, slippery, root-tangled trails that the full horror of life there had struck them. Blades of grass seven feet high that could lay a man’s hand open as quickly as a scalpel. The jungle was studded with mangrove swamps and thick clumps of bamboo and palms. Often the trail was covered with waist-deep slop. The air reeked with vile odors—the stench of rotting undergrowth and of stink lilies. Little light penetrated the thick matted screens of liana vines overhead, but when the rain stopped and the sun appeared, vast suffocating waves of steam rose from the dank marshes.

    This was the setting of the green war: the green of slime and vegetation, the green of gangrene and dysentery, and the green-clad enemy, whose officers smeared yellow-green, bioluminescent organisms on their hands so they could read maps at night. The diggers, and the GIs who were now joining them, called themselves “swamp rats.” The hideous tropical ulcers that formed on their feet, arms, bellies, chests, and armpits were known as “jungle rot.” Waving away the clouds of flies and mosquitoes that swarmed over mess gear was called “the New Guinea salute.” Bugs were everywhere: biting ants, fleas, chiggers, poisonous spiders, and brilliantly colored, enormous insects that would land on a sleeping man and, like vampires, suck his bodily fluids. Twisted vines swarmed with vividly colored birds and great winged creatures with teeth, like gigantic rats. Pythons and crocodiles lurked in the bogs and sloughs, waiting for a man to stumble from the mucky trail. At night a soldier would rip away blood-glutted leeches from his genitals and rectum. Bug bites, when scratched, turned into festering sores. Since native bearers were reluctant to help him, especially near the front line, the average soldier had to carry as much as a hundred pounds on his back, and he nearly always ran a fever. It was a rare infantryman who wasn’t affected with yaws, scrub typhus, blackwater fever, ringworm, malaria, amoebic dysentery, or bacillary dysentery. For every man suffering from a gunshot wound, five were laid low with illness, and that is not a true measure of the sickness, because no one was hospitalized unless his fever rose above 102 degrees.

    MacArthur heard all this while treading back and forth in his Brisbane office. Then he stopped, turned to Sutherland and Dick Marshall, and said in a  ow, trembling voice, “We’ll defend Australia in New Guinea.” He called an off-the-record press conference to provide war correspondents with background for their future dispatches. Gavin M. Long tells how “the thirty or more war correspondents and officers rose as the General made an impressive entry—bare-headed, grave, distinguished looking, immaculate. His right arm was raised in salute. There was no other introduction. Pacing to and fro…MacArthur immediately began to declaim his statement of the military situation. His phrasing was perfect, his speech clear and unhalting, except for pauses for dramatic emphasis; the correspondents took notes, but there was no interruption of any kind. The conference room had become a stage, MacArthur the virtuoso, the other officers the ‘extras’ in the cast, and the correspondents the audience. It was a dramatic occasion.” George H. Johnston, an Australian journalist, recalls that the General held them spellbound for two hours, never groping for a word and displaying “the histrionic ability of Sir Henry Irving.” He told them that Australia would be saved in Papua, and only in Papua. He said: “We must attack, attack, attack!” The meeting over, Long writes, “the General raised his right arm in salute and strode from the room followed by one or two staff officers. The conference was over. One man alone had spoken—the Supreme Commander. There was no questioning, no opportunity to clarify the meaning of the statement. It had come directly from the lips of General Douglas MacArthur, and as such it was, evidently, beyond question.”

    Sir Thomas Blaney, the cheerful, ruddy, stubby Australian who commanded MacArthur’s ground forces, was one of the few officers who didn’t believe that the Japanese would throw the Allies out of New Guinea. Most of MacArthur’s staff, by contrast, was shocked. They hadn’t anticipated this decision, which, he said, was one of the reasons he made it; if they hadn’t expected it, neither would the Japanese. And in fact the enemy was caught off balance. After the war Captain Toshikazu Ohmae of the Imperial Japanese Navy, who had been the senior staff officer of the Southeast Asia Fleet at Rabaul, told an interrogator: “The Japanese did not think that General MacArthur would establish himself in New Guinea and defend Australia from that position. They also did not believe that he would be able to use New Guinea as a base of offensive operations against them. The Japanese felt that General MacArthur could not establish himself in Port Moresby because he did not have sufficient forces to maintain himself there.”

    His forces were certainly meager, but he was convinced that if the Nipponese established a single beachhead in Australia, the continent would be lost; a foe gallant enough to cross the Owen Stanleys would quickly sweep across the plains down under, and at the time MacArthur lacked the reserves to envelop them. If, as he later wrote, the jungle was “as tough and tenacious an enemy as the Japanese,” it was the enemy’s enemy, too. Better a bloody, head-on, grinding collision on Papua, he reasoned, than a battle of maneuver when he had no troops to spare for maneuvering. At the same time, Guadalcanal was on his mind. The issue there was very much in doubt. He believed his drive in New Guinea would relieve some of the pressure on that beleaguered island. In fact, as we know from other postwar interrogations, once he swung over to the attack the Japanese decided to give Guadalcanal priority; Horii was told that the capture of Port Moresby would be delayed until the marines had been driven into the sea. Nevertheless, the General’s overruling of his staff was as courageous as it was shrewd. In George Kenney’s words, “MacArthur without fear of criticism might have decided to remain on the defensive until sufficient forces could be made available…With insufficient naval forces to insure his supply line to New Guinea, with a vastly outnumbered air force, and with the apprehension of the people of Australia in regard to invasion of that continent by the enemy, a lesser general might even have considered the abandonment of Port Moresby, his only base in New Guinea.”

    …One of the first American soldiers to learn that MacArthur was about to send them to New Guinea was E.J. Kahn, Jr. The general addressed the troops, disdaining a Signal Corps microphone and speaking to them directly. As Kahn recalls, “His speech was extemporaneous, but it was full of the rich, labyrinthine sentences that distinguish his prose. His main point, though, was crisply and pointedly made. He said we’d soon be in action. ‘And I want each of you to kill me a Jap,’ he added. Up to that moment few of us had guessed that we’d shortly be in a position to comply with such a request. Less than a month later our first detachments were on the way to New Guinea.”

    It was now mid-September [1942]. To the east, the marines were struggling to hold their defensive perimeter around Guadalcanal’s Henderson Field. MacArthur expected just as cruel a fight to retain Moresby; Horii’s men were so close to the port that at night they could see its searchlights crossing the sky above it. But on Thursday, September 17, the day that the Australians ferociously hurled back the enemy’s final lunge southwest of Ioribaiwa, Horii issued his last rice rations to his feverish, emaciated troops. Three days later he told them he had decided to withdraw back across the mountains. (“No pen or words can depict adequately the magnitude of the hardships suffered,” he said. “From the bottom of our hearts we appreciate these sacrifices and deeply sympathize with the great numbers killed and wounded.”) Four days after that he disengaged north of the Imita Ridge and began leapfrogging his battalions backward.

    The terrain was just as merciless going the other way, with the additional handicap that the worst of what Australians call “the wet”—the rainy season—was upon them. On October 1 MacArthur ordered his field commanders to push the disease-ridden enemy back across the Kumusi, but it wasn’t really necessary; the Japanese retreat had become a rout. So eager were they to fall back on Buna and Gona, where they knew godowns bursting with rice awaited them, that they trampled one another underfoot. Before the campaign ended they had lost over ten thousand men, including Horii, who had drowned in the swollen river.

 

442nd INFANTRY

         To the confusion of their guards they assembled each morning to raise the Stars and Stripes and salute it while their Boy Scout drum and bugle corps (every camp had one) played the national anthem. At Camp Topaz 3,250 adults were enrolled in camp courses; the two most popular were the English language and American history. Saturday evenings they sang ‘America the Beautiful,’ and after January 28, 1943, the men of military age did a lot more than sing.

            On that Thursday Stimson announced that the Army would accept Nisei volunteers. Immediately more than 1,200 signed up, and before the war’s end, 17,600 Japanese had joined the Army, taking the recruit’s oath of allegiance while still behind barbed wire. In Italy they served with distinction in the 100th Infantry and the 442nd Infantry. No Nisei ever deserted. During the Italian campaign the 442nd alone suffered the loss of three times its original strength while winning 3,000 Purple Hearts with 500 oak leaf clusters, 810 Bronze Stars, 342 Silver Stars, 47 Distinguished Service Crosses, and 17 Legion of Merit awards. In Europe these units were a legend. Bill Mauldin wrote that ‘to my knowledge and the knowledge of numerous others who had the opportunity of watching a lot of different outfits overseas, no combat unit in the Army could exceed them in loyalty, hard work, courage, and sacrifice. Hardly a man of them hadn’t been decorated at least twice, and their casualty rates were appalling.’

            Those who fought beside the Nisei knew what drove them. They were trusting that when word of their war records reached California, attitudes toward their families would improve, and that the Issei’s prewar possessions would be returned to them. It was a vain hope. Japanese–American homes, farms, and businesses had been taken over by white Californians, most of whom, with Hearst’s aggressive support, kept their loot. The Nisei themselves, returning in uniform, were rejected by barbershops and restaurants. After the San Francisco Examiner had run the headline SOLDIERS OF NIP ANCESTRY ALLOWED TO ROAM ON COAST, a Nisei who had lost a leg in the ETO was publicly beaten. That was too much even for bigots, and overt outrages subsided.

            To imply that everyone in the state was a xenophobe would be to compound injustice. But a great many people sat on their hands and looked the other way. The War Department became concerned about Nisei incidents; white officers who had served with them were sent on West Coast lecture tours to describe their gallantry to farmers and businessman. One first lieutenant was asked by a lanky farmer, ‘How many of them Japs in your company got killed?’ The lieutenant replied, ‘All but two of the men who started in my platoon were killed by the end of the war.’ The farmer said, ‘Too goddam bad they didn’t get the last two.’ People stared at the ceiling, at the floor, at their laps. No one said a word.

William Manchester, The Glory and the Dream,
(New York: Bantam Books, 1980) 301–302

LEARNING TO WRITE

[“It is assumed students will learn how to write in college.”]

Letter from Ginger Gentile

Valedictorian

East Hampton High School Class of 1998

Author of an essay on the Women’s Christian Temperance Union (Fall 1997)

September 7, 1997

William Fitzhugh

Editor and Publisher

The Concord Review

P.O. Box 661

Concord, Massachusetts 01742

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

I want to thank you for publishing my essay in the fall edition of The Concord Review. Before beginning the seven-month odyssey of researching and writing on my topic, the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, I considered myself a lover of history but a possessor of second-rate writing skills. Part of the reason for my lack of confidence is that I attend a school where students are given few opportunities to develop their talents in this field (it is assumed students will learn how to write in college). With publication in your journal as my goal, and with the help of my teacher, Mr. Timothy Rood, I began the process of learning how to use the English language to prove my thesis. The results were not only vastly improved skills but also, due to the nature of my topic, the questioning of my own feminist beliefs. 

 

The back copies you sent me were a great help. I want to thank the other students who have been published in The Concord Review, the quality of their articles was what I aspired to. In the future I will use their techniques, such as using more original sources, to enhance my writing. 

 

As a public high school student, I want to urge other students in similar situations to consider independently studying a historical topic and experiencing the thrill of becoming an author. For myself, being published has opened doors not only in the academic world, but in my own mind as well.

 

Sincerely,

(signed)

Ginger Gentile

East Hampton, New York

[Columbia, Class of 2002]

HOMESCHOLARS

Home Education Magazine
“Good Stuff” Column
November-December 2001
Pages 50-51

The Concord Review

        The Wall Street Journal described it as “one of those little starbursts of intelligence sparkling over our dreary educational landscape.” The Concord Review—founded in 1987 by Will Fitzhugh, a Massachusetts history teacher—is the only academic journal in the world that publishes the work of high-school students. Furthermore, to be published in it is a definite feather in the cap. Review authors, according to the publisher, often include reprints of their papers with their college application forms; the result has been admission to a raft of prestigious institutions, among them Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Oxford, Princeton, Stanford, and Yale.

        For those (high-school-level) history students who feel up to the challenge, the standard Concord Review submission is an essay approximately 5,000 words long, with endnotes and bibliography, on any historical topic (ancient or modern, domestic or foreign). Many previously published examples can be seen at the Review website (www.tcr.org); titles in the Summer 2001 issue include “Grigori Rasputin,” “Women in WWII,” “German Witch Trials,” “Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, and “Darwin in Kansas.” The essay submission form—which asks for school address and names of teacher, principals, and superintendents—is targeted towards public school students, but the Review welcomes the work of homeschoolers. (Mr. Fitzhugh refers to us as “homescholars,” a lovely term.)

        An annual subscription to TCR (four issues) costs $40; [now $60 or $100—WHF] order from TCR or call the journal office at 978-443-0022. Essays, along with the completed “Form to Accompany Essays” and a check for $40, should be sent [online now—WHF] to The Concord Review, 730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24, Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776. For more information, visit the TCR website at www.tcr.org, call 978-443-0022, or email fitzhugh@tcr.org.

BABI YAR 1941

Jewish Virtual Library

The Babi Yar Massacre
(September 29-30, 1941)

Babi Yar is a ravine on the outskirts of Kiev where Einsatzgruppen mobile squads killed at least 34,000 Jews over a one week period in September 1941. Russian estimates put the number of killed at nearly 100,000. Today, Babi Yar has come to symbolize the horrific murder of Jews by the Einsatzgruppen as well as the persistent failure of the world to acknowledge this Jewish tragedy.

With the initiation of Operation Barbarossa, Germany’s assault on the Soviet Union, the mobile killing units of the Einsatzgruppen operated over a wide area of Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Black Sea. There were four main divisions of the Einsatzgruppen—Groups A, B, C and D. All under Heydrich's general command, these groups operated behind the advancing German troops to eliminate political criminals, Polish government officials, Roma and Jews. Jews were rounded up in every village, transported to a wooded area, or a ravine, stripped, shot and buried.

On September 19, 1941, the German army captured Kiev, Ukraine. Within a week, a number of buildings occupied by the German military were blown up by the Soviet secret police and in retaliation, the Germans proceeded to kill all the Jews of Kiev.

 
An order was posted throughout the city in both Russian and Ukrainian:
Kikes of the city of Kiev and vicinity! On Monday, September 29, you are to appear by 7:00 A.M. with your possessions, money, documents, valuables and warm clothing at Dorogozhitshaya Street, next to the Jewish cemetery. Failure to appear is punishable by death.

From the cemetery, the Jews were marched to Babi Yar, a ravine only two miles from the center of the city. A truck driver at the scene described what he saw:
I watched what happened when the Jews—men, women and children—arrived. The Ukrainians led them past a number of different places where one after another they had to remove their luggage, then their coats, shoes, and overgarments and also underwear. They had to leave their valuables in a designated place. There was a special pile for each article of clothing. It all happened very quickly…I don't think it was even a minute from the time each Jew took off his coat before he was standing there completely naked….

Once undressed, the Jews were led into the ravine which was about 150 meters long and 30 meters wide and a good 15 meters deep…When they reached the bottom of the ravine they were seized by members of the Schultpolizei and made to lie down on top of Jews who had already been shot. That all happened very quickly. The corpses were literally in layers. A police marksman came along and shot each Jew in the neck with a submachine gun…I saw these marksman stand on layers of corpses and shoot one after the other…The marksman would walk across the bodies of the executed Jews to the next Jew who had meanwhile lain down and shoot him.

....On that day I may have shot some 150 to 250 Jews. The whole shooting episode went off without a hitch. The Jews surrendered to their fate like sheep to the slaughter,” reads the description of the slaughter by SS man by the name of Viktor Trill. “I saw a huge hole that looked like a riverbed that had dried up. Inside it were layers of bodies. The Jews had to lie down on the bodies and were shot in the neck.

Over the next week, 33,771 Jews were murdered at Babi Yar. Over the following months, Babi Yar remained in use as an execution site for gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war. Soviet accounts after the war speak of 100,000 dead and while research does not substantiate such a number the true figure will likely never be known.

Historian Abram Sachar provides a description of the extermination at Babi Yar:
Nearly 34,000 Jews of the ghetto were brought to a suburban ravine known as Babi Yar, near the Jewish Cemetery, where men, women, and children were systematically machine-gunned in a two-day orgy of execution. In subsequent months, most of the remaining population was exterminated …

... The Jews in their thousands, with such pathetic belongings as they could carry, were herded into barbed-wire areas at the top of the ravine, guarded by Ukrainian collaborators. There they were stripped of their clothes and beaten, then led in irregular squads down the side of the ravine. The first groups were forced to lie on the ground, face down, and were machine-gunned by the Germans who kept up a steady volley. The riddled bodies were covered with thin layers of earth and the next groups were ordered to lie over them, to be similarly dispatched. To carry out the murder of 34,000 human beings in the space of two days could not assure that all the victims had died. Hence there were a few who survived and, though badly wounded, managed to crawl from under the corpses and seek a hiding place.

In August 1943, with the Red Army advancing, the Nazis dug up the bodies from the mass graves of Babi Yar and burned them in an attempt to remove the evidence of mass murder. Paul Blobel, the commander of Sonderokmmando 4a, whose troops had slaughtered the Jews of Kiev, returned to Babi Yar. For more than a month, his men and workers conscripted from the ranks of concentration camp inmates dug up the bodies. Bulldozers were required to reopen the mounds. Massive bone-crushing machinery was brought to the scene. The bodies were piled on wooden logs, doused with gas, and ignited.

When the work was done, the workers from the concentration camp were killed. Under cover of darkness on September 29, 1943, 25 of them escaped. Fifteen survived to tell what they had seen.

Despite efforts to suppress the memory of Babi Yar, after the war the Soviet public learned of the murders through newspaper accounts, official reports and belles lettres. In 1947, I. Ehrenburg in his novel Burya (The Storm) described dramatically the mass killing of the Jews of Kiev in Babi Yar. Preparations were made for a monument at Babi Yaras a memorial to the victims of Nazi genocide. The architect A.V. Vlasov had designed a memorial and the artist B. Ovchinnikov had produced the necessary sketches.

After the Soviet anti-Semitic campaign of 1948, an effort was made to eliminate all references to Babi Yar with the objective to remove from Jewish consciousness those historical elements that might sustain it. Even after the death of Stalin, Babi Yar remained lost in the “memory hole” of history.

 
Intellectuals, however, refused to be silent. On October 10, 1959, novelist Viktor Nekrasov cried out in the pages of Literaturnaya Gazeta for a memorial at Babi Yar, and against the official intention to transform the ravine into a sports stadium. Far more impressive was the poem Babi Yar written by Yevgeni Yevtushenko published in the same journal on September 19, 1961:

No gravestone stands on Babi Yar;


Only coarse earth heaped roughly on the gash:


Such dread comes over me.

With its open attack upon anti-Semitism and its implied denunciation of those who rejected Jewish martyrdom, the poem exerted a profound impact on Soviet youth as well as upon world public opinion. Dmitri Shostakovich set the lines to music in his 13th Symphony, performed for the first time in December 1962.

Russian ultranationalism struck back almost immediately. Yevtushenko was sharply criticized by a number of literary apologists of the regime and then publicly denounced by Premier Nikita Khrushchev in Pravda on March 8, 1963. The theme of a specific Jewish martyrdom was condemned. But Babi Yar would not remain suppressed. It again surfaced during the summer of 1966 in a documentary novel written by Anatoly Kuznetsov published in Yunost (Eng. tr. 1967). Earlier that year the Ukrainian Architects Club in Kiev held a public exhibit of more than 200 projects and some 30 large-scale detailed plans for a memorial to Babi Yar. None of the inscriptions in the proposed plans mentioned Jewish martyrdom. Only after the collapse of the Soviet Union did the new Ukrainian government acknowledge the specific Jewish nature of the site and an appropriate rededication was held.

On October 6, 2021, the presidents of Ukraine, Israel, and Germany inaugurated a memorial center for the victims at the site of the massacre and attended the unveiling of the “Crystal Crying Wall” memorial The names of 159 of the Nazi soldiers who participated in the killings were also released.

The center, which is still under construction, will be dedicated to the stories of Eastern European Jews who were killed and buried in mass graves during the Holocaust.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Y. Yevtushenko, A Precocious Autobiography (London, 1963); W. Korey, in: New Republic (Jan. 8, 1962); idem, in: Saturday Review (Feb. 3, 1968); S.M. Schwarz, Yevrei v Sovetskom Soyuze 1939–1965 (1966), 359–71. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: E. Klee, W. Dressen, and V. Riess, The Good Old Days: The Holocaust As Seen by Its Perpetrators and Bystanders (1988); I. Ehrenburg and V. Grossman, The Black Book (1981).

Sources: Abram L. Sachar, The Redemption of the Unwanted. New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1983).
The Holocaust\Shoah Page.
Encyclopaedia Judaica. © 2008 The Gale Group. All Rights Reserved.
Ofer Aderet, “‘I shot hundreds of Jews that day’: Babi Yar perpetrators' testimonies revealed,” Haaretz, (October 6, 2021).
Yuras Karmanau, “Memorial for Babi Yar victims inaugurated in Ukraine,” AP, (October 6, 2021).

FRANKLIN A READER

 
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
New York: Library of America 1990, 13-14


    ...From a Child, I was fond of Reading, and all the little Money that came into my Hands was ever laid out in Books. Pleased with the Pilgrim’s Progress, my first Collection was of John Bunyan’s Works, in separate little Volumes. I afterwards sold them to enable me to buy R. Burton’s Historical Collections; they were small Chapman’s Books and cheap, 40 or 50 in all.—My Father’s little Library consisted chiefly of Books in polemic Divinity, most of which I read, and have since often regretted, that at a time when I had such a Thirst for Knowledge, more proper Books had not fallen in my Way, since it was now resolv’d I should not be a Clergyman. Plutarch’s Lives there was, in which I read abundantly, and I still think that time was spent to great Advantage. There was also a Book of Defoe’s called an Essay on Projects and another of Dr Mather’s call’d Essays to do Good, which perhaps gave me a Turn of Thinking that had an Influence on some of the principal Events of my Life.

    This Bookish inclination at length determin’d my Father to make me a Printer, tho’ he had already one Son, (James) of that Profession. In 1717 my Brother James return’d from England with a Press & Letters to set up his Business in Boston. I lik’d it much better than that of my Father, but still had a Hankering for the Sea.—To prevent the apprehended Effect of such an Inclination, my Father was impatient to have me bound to my Brother. I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded and signed the Indentures, when I was yet but 12 Years old.—I was to serve as an Apprentice till I was 21 Years of Age, only I was to be allow’d Journeyman’s Wages during the last Year. In a little time I made great Proficiency in the Business, and became a useful Hand to my Brother. I now had Access to better Books. An Acquaintance with the Apprentices of Booksellers, enabled me sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon & clean. Often I sat up in my Room reading the greatest Part of the Night, when the Book was borrow’d in the Evening & to be return’d early in the Morning lest it should be miss’d or wanted.—And after some time an ingenious Tradesman who had a pretty Collection of Books, who frequented our Printing House, took Notice of me, invited me to his Library, & very kindly lent me such Books as I chose to read.

READING

  “. . . how the hell did this child get to the 10th grade and they can’t read?”

Joanne Jacob
9 October 2023

Rosalinda wants to be an astronaut, but she doesn’t read very well.

Massachusetts, which claims to have the best public schools in the nation, is “failing its neediest learners,” write Mandy McLaren and Naomi Martin in the Boston Globe. “Before the pandemic, only about half of public school third-graders had adequate reading skills.” Now it’s even worse.

“Scores for all third-graders have slipped below the 50 percent mark, and the most vulnerable kids are in serious trouble; 75 percent of low-income third-graders could not pass the reading comprehension test on last spring’s MCAS exam,” they write. That includes “70 percent of Black third-graders, 80 percent of Latino students, and 85 percent of children with disabilities.”

Rosalinda, a fifth-grader in Lowell, wants to be an astronaut when she grows up, but she reads well below grade level. Teachers told her mother, Maritza Alvarado, who works as a chef, not to worry because Rosalinda doesn’t have a learning disability. But she’s not catching up. Most children who don’t master reading by third grade will continue to struggle.

“. . . how the hell did this child get to the 10th grade and they can’t read?”—Cambridge high school teacher Lily Rayman-Read.

In 2010, Harvard published a report that warned of a “cycle of academic failure” if Massachusetts did not get better at teaching kids to read, write McLaren and Martin. A panel named to study the issue issued five reports in 2019. The recommendations were not followed. “Teachers unions oppose state mandates on curriculum choices.”

Massachusetts, the “birthplace of public education,” lets schools do their own thing. Some schools “use instructional methods grounded in the science of how children learn to read, an approach which teaches kids to sound out words phonetically rather than guess, and helps them build a store of knowledge about the world early on, instead of skipping from topic to topic.” But nearly half use less-effective “balanced literacy” methods and low-quality curriculum.

“Poor children learning to read are now slightly better off going to school in Florida or Mississippi—states that got serious about early literacy years ago—than they are in Massachusetts,” they write.

Nine-year-old Isaac Osorio wants to read bigger books, books with longer sentences and harder words. But he’s stuck, unable to move on from beginner texts, whose pictures and predictable word patterns help signal what the jumbles of letters he sees on the page say.

“Winter is here,” he read one recent evening, opening a picture book to a page he’d memorized. “Sleep, bear, sleep. Winter is here. Sleep, snake, sleep.”

As a “balanced literacy” teacher, Marci Amorim adorned her classroom walls “with colorful posters of Skippy the Frog, who encouraged young readers to skip words they didn’t know, and Eagle Eye, who nudged kids to make a guess based on the pictures they saw,” McLaren and Martin write. When students didn’t learn, the Randolph teacher assumed it was their fault. “We’d say, ‘Poor little Timmy is just low [in reading]. We’ve tried all these things, but he’s just not reading. He’s just always going to be low and struggling.’ And no. We just weren’t teaching little Timmy how he needed to be taught.”

The story is the first in a series on the literacy crisis.

READING

READING 

What all of them had was, in the first place, reading.

For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all—as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which, (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. 

We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds—except in special fields—as their Bachelored, and Mastered, and Doctored acquaintances. 

No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V.S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.



All this is relevant, too, to the proliferation of business and management studies by which, in principle at least, a new business class emerges trained in all the expertise but deficient in education proper. When Leland Stanford, himself an outstandingly successful businessman, founded the university that bears his son’s name, he commented that the humanities (then) were important “for the enlargement of the mind and  for business capacity. I think I have noticed that technically educated boys do not make the best businessmen. The imagination needs to be cultivated and developed to ensure success in life.”



Robert Conquest
, Reflections on a Ravaged Century
. New York: Norton and Company, 2000; 228-229



INDIAN ORATORS

         There was a class of men among the Iroquois always put forward on public occasions to speak the mind of the nation or defend its interests. Nearly all of them were of the number of the subordinate chiefs. Nature and training had fitted them for public speaking, and they were deeply versed in the history and traditions of the league. They were in fact professed orators, high in honor and influence among the people. To a huge stock of conventional metaphors, the use of which required nothing but practice, they often added an astute intellect, an astonishing memory, and an eloquence which deserved the name.

        In one particular, the training of these savage politicians was never surpassed. They had no art of writing to record events, or preserve the stipulations of treaties. Memory, therefore, was tasked to the utmost, and developed to an extraordinary degree. They had various devices for aiding it, such as bundles of sticks, and that system of signs, emblems, and rude pictures, which they shared with other tribes. Their famous wampum-belts were so many mnemonic signs, each standing for some act, speech, treaty, or clause of a treaty. These represented the public archives, and were divided among various custodians, each charged with the memory and interpretation of those assigned to him. The meaning of the belts was from time to time expounded in their councils. In conferences with them, nothing more astonished the French, Dutch, and English officials than the precision with which, before replying to their addresses, the Indian orators repeated them point by point.

Francis Parkman, Boston, 1 January 1865
Pioneers of France in the New World
Boston: Little Brown, and Company, 1909, 378-379

GERMAN UNWISDOM

        To create the unfavourable conditions for herself in which Germany afterwards brought about the war, many acts of supreme unwisdom on the part of her rulers were nevertheless still necessary. France must be kept in a state of continued apprehension. The Russian nation, not the Russian Court alone, must be stung by some violent affront inflicted in their hour of weakness. The slow, deep, restrained antagonism of the British Empire must be roused by the continuous and repeated challenge to the sea power by which it lived. Then and then only could those conditions be created under which Germany by an act of aggression would bring into being against her, a combination strong enough to resist and ultimately to overcome her might. 

       There was still a long road to travel before the Vials of Wrath were full. For ten years we were to journey anxiously along that road. It was for a time the fashion to write as if the British Government during these ten years were either entirely unconscious of the approaching danger or had a load of secret matters and deep forebodings on their minds hidden altogether from the thoughtless nation. In fact, however, neither of these alternatives, taken separately, was true; and there is a measure of truth in both of them taken together.

    The British Government and the Parliament out of which it sprang, did not believe in the approach of a great war, and were determined to prevent it; but at the same time the sinister hypothesis was continually present in their thoughts, and was repeatedly brought to the attention of Ministers by disquieting incidents and tendencies.

    During the whole of those ten years this duality and discordance were the keynote of British politics; and those whose duty it was to watch over the safety of the country lived simultaneously in two different worlds of thought. There was the actual visible world with its peaceful activities and cosmopolitan aims; and there was a hypothetical world, a world ‘beneath the threshold,’ as it were, a world at one moment utterly fantastic, at the next seeming about to leap into reality—a world of monstrous shadows moving in convulsive combinations through vistas of fathomless catastrophe.

Winston S. Churchill, (2013-09-23). The World Crisis, Vol. 1 (Winston Churchill's World Crisis Collection) (Kindle Locations 389-404). RosettaBooks. Kindle Edition.

BEND IT LIKE TRUMAN

In education reform discussions in general, in my view practically all the attention is on what the adults are and/or should be doing, and almost no attention is given to what students are and should be doing. Leaving them out of the equation quite naturally contributes to poor discipline and reduced learning.

Bend it Like Truman
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
26 March 2013


In the United Kingdom the number of reports of the verbal and physical abuse of teachers is growing at a sad and steady rate. In the United States as well, a number of fine teachers say that they are leaving the profession primarily because of the out-of-control attitudes and behavior of poorly-raised children who will not take any responsibility for their own education and don’t seem to mind if they ruin the educational chances of their peers.

David McCullough tells us that when Harry Truman took over the artillery outfit, Battery ‘D’, “the new captain said nothing for what seemed the longest time. He just stood looking everybody over, up and down the line slowly, several times. Because of their previous (mis) conduct, the men were expecting a tongue lashing. Captain Truman only studied them...At last he called ‘Dismissed!’ As he turned and walked away, the men gave him a Bronx cheer....In the morning Captain Truman posted the names of the noncommissioned officers who were ‘busted’ in rank...the First Sergeant was at the head of the list...Harry called in the other noncommissioned officers and told them it was up to them to straighten things out. ‘I didn’t come here to get along with you,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get along with me. And if there are any of you who can’t, speak up right now, and I’ll bust you back right now.”

Now, I do realize the classroom is not a military unit, and that students cannot be busted back to a previous grade, however much their behavior suggests that they don’t belong in a higher grade. But Truman realized poor discipline would endanger the lives of the men in his unit, and teachers, no matter how much they yearn to be liked, relevant, and even loved, need to realize and accept that poor discipline in their classes will destroy some of the educational opportunities of their students. As it turned out, his unit respected and loved Truman in time, and lined Pennsylvania avenue for his inauguration parade.

For years, the Old Battleaxe was offered as a stereotype of the stern, demanding teacher who represented the expectations of the wider community in the classroom and required students to meet her standards.

In The Lowering of Higher Education, Jackson Toby quotes the experience of one man with an Old Battleaxe:

 
“Professor Emeritus of Religion at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Walter Benjamin, wrote about a demanding freshman English teacher, Dr. Doris Garey, whose course he had taken in 1946, in an article entitled ‘When an ‘A’ Meant Something.’ Professor Benjamin praised the memory of Dr. Garey and expressed gratitude for what her demanding standards had taught him.

‘Even though she had a bachelor’s degree from Mount Holyoke and a doctorate from Wisconsin, Miss Garey was the low person in the department pecking order. And physically she was a lightweight—she could not have stood more than 4-foot-10 or weighed more than 100 pounds. But she had the pedagogical mass of a Sumo wrestler. Her literary expectations were stratospheric; she was the academic equivalent of my [Marine] boot camp drill instructor...The showboats (other instructors) had long since faded, along with their banter, jokes and easy grades. It was the no-nonsense Miss Garey whose memory endured.’”

In my view, too many of our teachers have been seduced by the ideas that they should be making sure their students have fun, and that their teaching should include “relevant” material from the evanescent present of her students, their egregiously temporary pop culture, and from current events of passing interest.

Once discipline and student responsibility for their own learning is established and understood, there can be a lot of interesting and even entertaining times in the classroom. Without them, classes are in a world of trouble. Samuel Gompers used to read aloud for their enjoyment to a room full of employees making cigars, but they continued to make the cigars while he did it.

In education reform discussions in general, in my view practically all the attention is on what the adults are and/or should be doing, and almost no attention is given to what students are and should be doing. Leaving them out of the equation quite naturally contributes to poor discipline and reduced learning.

A suburban high school English teacher in Pennsylvania wrote that: "My students are out of control," Munroe, who has taught 10th, 11th and 12th grades, wrote in one post. "They are rude, disengaged, lazy whiners. They curse, discuss drugs, talk back, argue for grades, complain about everything, fancy themselves entitled to whatever they desire, and are just generally annoying." And one of her students commented: "As far as motivated high school students, she's completely correct. High school kids don't want to do anything...It's a teacher's job, however, to give students the motivation to learn."

As long as too many of us think education is the teacher’s responsibility alone, we will have failed to understand what the job of learning requires of students, and we will be unable to make sense of the outcomes of our huge investments in education.
 

STUDENT UNEMPLOYMENT

The most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work.

 
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
15 September 2023

    Teachers are employees. They are educated, selected, hired, assigned, and paid for their work. Students are not selected, hired, or paid, so how could they be unemployed?

    Think of students as academic workers. When I was teaching U.S. History at the high school in Concord, Massachusetts in the 1980s, I noticed that they had to do almost no academic work. I would assign ten pages of reading and then go over it in the next class, so they didn’t have to do the reading.

    Doing nothing can have its charm. Dolce Far Niente, as the Italians say. But sitting in classes six hours a day or so, and not being asked to do anything, is not charming. It is dull, boring, exasperating. Yet this is what we ask high school students to do, except perhaps in chemistry or foreign language labs.

    The message this sends to students is that the work of teachers is terribly important, but the academic work of students is not. If you tell a worker or an employee that what they do doesn’t matter, what happens to their motivation and morale?

    This is what we do to students day in and day out. On the athletic field the story is very different. If they are on a team, they are expected to work hard, take responsibility and contribute to the success of the team. When do they experience anything like that academically? On the football or soccer field, every player is called on in every practice and in every game. Even if a player is on the bench, there is a constant risk for most of them that they may be called on at any time, and if they do not know what to do, the disgrace and disapproval will be obvious and swift. The same may be said for Drama productions, Chorus, Model UN, and most of the students’ other activities.

    In extracurricular activities, the student will often face a peer pressure to do well that is usually lacking in the classroom. Peers in the classroom may even think it is cool for another student to “get away with” having done no preparation for the class.

    While the Educator consensus seems to be that teacher quality is the most important variable in student academic achievement, I have long argued that the most important variable in student academic achievement is student academic work. Seems obvious, but not to most thinkers in EdWorld.

    Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Doomed to Fail (150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (162) that “One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”

    In a June 3, 1990 column in The New York Times, the late Albert Shanker, President of the American Federation of Teachers, wrote: 

“...It is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system... As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved in it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged.”

    To be unemployed is to be passive, and to be passive when you are young is frustrating indeed. We really must help students to get off the academic unemployment line and let them do the work they need to become educated.

EISENHOWER

HE WAS BORN on October 14, 1890, in a small rented frame house, not much more than a shack, beside the railroad tracks in Denison, Texas. He was the third son of David and Ida Stover Eisenhower. They were members of the Mennonites, fundamentalists in their religion, and pacifists. David was a common laborer—he had once owned a general store in Hope, Kansas, purchased with an inheritance from his father, but it had failed. In 1891 he moved to Abilene, Kansas, where a relative had found him a job as a mechanic at the Belle Springs Creamery. When the Eisenhowers stepped onto the train platform in Abilene, David had in his pocket the sum total of his capital, $10. In a small two-story white frame house at 201 South East Fourth Street, set on a three-acre plot, David and Ida raised six strong, healthy boys—Arthur (born 1886), Edgar (1889), Dwight (1890), Roy (1892), Earl (1898), and Milton (1899).

The Eisenhowers were respected around town, but the family was in no way prominent. David held no elective office, provided no community leadership. Still the Eisenhowers were content. The parents were frugal out of necessity, but they were proud and ambitious, if not for themselves, then for their sons. “I have found out in later years we were very poor,” Dwight said on June 4, 1952, on the occasion of laying the cornerstone of the Eisenhower Museum in Abilene, across the street from his boyhood home, “but the glory of America is that we didn’t know it then.”

“All that we knew was that our parents—of great courage—could say to us, ‘Opportunity is all about you. Reach out and take it.’ ” By most standards, David and Ida never reached out to take that opportunity themselves. Instead they invested in their sons the hopes they once had for themselves. They taught the simple virtues of honesty, self-reliance, integrity, fear of God, and ambition. They wanted their sons to succeed in a wider setting than Abilene, or even Kansas. They gave the boys the feeling, as one of them later put it, that “if you stay home you will always be looked upon as a boy.” Eisenhower’s home life revolved around worship. Every day, morning and night, the family members got down on their knees to pray. David read from the Bible before meals, then asked for a blessing. After the meals the boys washed the dishes, then gathered around David for Bible reading. “Finally there was bedtime,” Earl recalled, “when Dad got up and wound the clock on the wall. You could hear the ticking no matter where you were. When Dad started winding, you might as well get ready for bed, for that was the bedtime signal.”

Stephen E. Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (15-16). [1989] Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

ABSENCE OF BOOKS

“When people ask me why I sacrificed the sociable, slightly surreal daily life at my local school for the solitary life of a homeschooled student in 2021, I almost never reveal the reason: an absence of books.”...“The worst part is that we students are blind to the extent of our loss.”

A Constitution for Teenage Happiness

Ruby LaRocca—the winner of our high school essay contest—urges her generation to read old books, memorize poems, and invite senior citizens to parties.

By Ruby LaRocca
August 31, 2023

Back in June, when we announced our first-ever high school essay contest, we invited teenagers to describe a problem troubling American society—and how they would fix it. We told young writers that we were especially interested in hearing about challenges older generations have misunderstood, missed, or maybe even created. ” But out of the hundreds of essays we read, one writer really stood out: 17-year-old Ruby LaRocca from Ithaca, New York. 

Ruby is a homeschooled rising senior. She told us she entered the contest because she believes in our mission of finding “the people—under the radar or in the public eye—who are telling the truth.” In addition to a lifetime subscription to The Free Press, Ruby’s essay has won her a $2,000 cash prize.

The Free Press high school essay contest winner Ruby LaRocca.

When we tried to reach Ruby to tell her about her win, she gave us the number for her mother’s cell phone because she doesn’t have one of her own. And when we asked her to respond to some of our edits, she said she’d tackle them as soon as she was done “putting in 15-hour days at a Latin program. I translated about 500 lines of the poet Propertius today!” 

All of which is to say: Ruby lives by her ideals, as you will see below. We look forward to seeing what she does next and we’re sure you’ll understand why. —BW [Bari Weiss]


When people ask me why I sacrificed the sociable, slightly surreal daily life at my local school for the solitary life of a homeschooled student in 2021, I almost never reveal the reason: an absence of books.

For many students, books are irrelevant. They “take too long to read.” Even teachers have argued for the benefits of shorter, digital resources. Last April, the National Council of Teachers of English declared it was time “to decenter book reading and essay writing as the pinnacles of English language arts education.” 

But what is an English [or History] education without reading and learning to write about books? 

Many of our English teachers instead encouraged extemporaneous discussions of our feelings and socioeconomic status, viewings of dance videos, and endless TED Talks. So five days into my sophomore year, I convinced my mother to homeschool me.

Distance from high school affords a clearer view of its perennial problems. As I head into my final year of homeschooling, I often think about the dilemma in American education, which perhaps should be called the student crisis (it’s also a teacher crisis). Students and teachers are more exhausted and fragile than they used to be. But reducing homework or gutting it of substance, taking away structure and accountability, and creating boundless space for “student voices” feels more patronizing than supportive. The taut cable of high expectations has been slackened, and the result is the current mood: listlessness.

Like human happiness, teenage happiness does not flourish when everyone has the freedom to live just as they please. Where there is neither order nor necessity in life—no constraints, no inhibitions, no discomfort—life becomes both relaxing and boring, as American philosopher Allan Bloom notes. A soft imprisonment.
So, here is my counterintuitive guide for teenage happiness:

#1. Read old books.
In Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, the profoundly human (i.e., imperfect) teacher, Hector, reminds his students that “The best moments in reading are when you come across something—a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things—that you’d thought special, particular to you. And here it is, set down by someone else, a person you’ve never met, maybe even someone long dead. And it’s as if a hand has come out and taken yours.”

Today’s teachers and students talk a lot about “relatability”; they want to see their own lives and experiences reflected in the books they read. I, however, am electrified when a book gives me the feeling Hector brilliantly describes—words from someone who is not at all like me, from a very different time and place, yet speaks words that feel written just for me.

Books that are “representative,” that are more easily “absorbed,” undermine the main reason to read them: to push readers beyond themselves in uncomfortable and productive ways.

Bloom wrote about the disappearance of books from our educational lives back in 1987. Books, he argued, “are no longer an important part of the lives of students. ‘Information’ is important, but profound and beautiful books are not where they go for it. They have no books that are companions and friends to which they look for counsel, companionship, inspiration, or pleasure. They do not expect to find in them sympathy for, or clarification of, their inmost desires and experiences.” 

The worst part is that we students are blind to the extent of our loss.

#2. Memorize poetry. Learn ancient languages.
In another scene from The History Boys, one English schoolboy preparing for Oxbridge entrance exams, Timms, asks Hector why they are reading the poetry of A. E. Housman instead of doing something “practical.” 

Timms: I don’t always understand poetry!
Hector: You don’t always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now, know it now, and you will understand it. . . whenever.
Timms: I don’t see how we can understand it. Most of the stuff poetry’s about hasn’t happened to us yet.
Hector: But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready!

Like Timms, I sometimes don’t understand what I’m learning or memorizing when I study poetry, but I believe Hector when he says it prepares us for the very real events of the world—going to war, falling in love, falling out of love, making a friend, losing a friend, having a child, losing a child. 

Understanding ancient authors as they understood themselves is the surest means of finding alternatives to our current way of seeing the world. It is what Bloom calls one of the most awesome undertakings of the mind. The first step to reading ancient authors is learning ancient languages—Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Old English. I have found the work of learning languages and the difficult art of translation to be the most taxing and pleasurable method of training my brain, combining technical rigor with poetic insight. It doesn’t matter if all the hours you spend studying gerundives, middle-passives, and semi-deponents seem to offer no immediate service. Learn them. It will serve you in a way you don’t yet know.

#3. Learn from the monks, and slow your pace—of reading, of writing, of thinking.
Someone once told me that I look like Martin Luther—you know, the sixteenth-century German clergyman who called for reformation in the Catholic Church. This comment referred to my bangs, which are somewhat short and monastic. I think it’s funny that my hairstyle echoes my lifestyle. I wake up at 6:00 a.m., work alone for many hours on subjects that seem arcane—Latin, German, applied mathematics—spend more hours caught up in an actual printed book, and get to bed at a very reasonable, grandmotherly hour (we have a family saying that “nothing good happens after 9:07 p.m.”). 

I used to think speed equaled competence. If you’re a motivated student, you may find yourself on the “accelerated” track. Instead of learning things that challenge you, you are simply rushed through the curriculum, “covering” concepts at a faster rate than your peers. Since I transitioned to homeschool, I never move on from a problem or subject before I am ready. I find knowing that I truly understand something—or at least, have spent time trying to know it, thus expanding my mind—far more rewarding than the fleeting frisson of being the first to finish.

#4. Learn how to conduct yourself in public. It all begins with knowing how to arrange your face when having conversations with real, living people. No one wants to talk to someone who has a slack jaw and glazed eyes, who yawns openly, who doesn’t laugh at jokes or nod in recognition. Too many Zoom school sessions involved speaking into a void of faceless boxes.

So for my seventeenth birthday, I threw an intergenerational celebration of First World War–era poetry. I labored lovingly on a historically accurate chocolate cake modeled on the trenches and the waste of No Man’s Land. When I told my best traditional high school–aged friend to come with her favorite war poem, she said sarcastically, “It will be so hard to choose.” I invited my favorite teachers, family members, and friends of my parents. A little weird, but it was a great party, and the conversation flowed.

Part of learning how to conduct yourself in public is learning how to interact with people of different ages and experiences—who read different books, watch different shows, and grew up in a different time than you. 

#5. Dramatically reduce use of your phone.
The final key to being a happy teenager is to do away with the “machine for feeling bad,” as we call it in my house. Seriously, walk away from your phone. You’ve seen the statistics, you’ve read the Jonathan Haidt articles, and you’ve watched that Netflix documentary with Tristan Harris. You know it’s bad for you. 

But let’s make it more concrete. Having a phone in your pocket is like always carrying around a glazed donut that constantly tempts you to snack on it—but if you do, you know it will ruin your appetite.

Sure, the phone is a good way for people to get hold of you—just like smearing yourself with blood before you go swimming in shark-infested waters is a good way for sharks to reach you. Now how appealing is that?

My roommates at Latin summer school, a group of some of the kindest and sanest teenagers I have ever met, agree that most of their friends are unhappy and anxious. “I wish there were higher standards for us,” said one. Another declared, “I wish we had higher expectations for what we learn.” Teenagers actually crave self-guided, unstructured time and the kind of rigor in school that makes you feel energized, not enervated. 

My suggestions for teenage happiness are, I know, unlikely to appeal to the intended demographic. And yet I hope my peers will hear me: if you choose to take on three out of five of these precepts, I guarantee your heart will stop sinking.