TRUMAN ON THE FARM

As it was, he had plenty to think about. He felt the responsibility of the farm keenly and “gave it everything he had,” as his sister later said. “I almost got done planting corn this evening. . . . I was in the field at six o’clock [AM] and quit at seven [PM]. Nearly a day’s work,” he informed Bess in April 1915. “. . . I’ve simply got to make things come across this year if I have to work night and day.” He worried about the weather. He worried about his debts. He worried that the men would never work for him as they had for his father. He kept on as road overseer for another six months, until a rival faction took over at the Independence Courthouse and he was out. From February to August he also served as postmaster in Grandview, though in name only, since he left the work to an assistant, a widow, who he thought needed the money more than he did. He was up with the sun every morning, still, even with Papa gone. 

Early morning was the best time for “solid thinking,” he liked to say. He was thirty years old. He had been on the farm eight years, or more than a quarter of his life. He had lost none of his devotion to the family, or his determination to win Bess Wallace, or his good humor. (She must send him another picture of herself soon, he said, so he could have one downstairs as well as up. “It’s right unhandy to chase upstairs every day to see how you look”).

Yet his restlessness was greater than ever. He hated his “slow progress” at home, even with the rise in farm prices. He had reached a point, in fact, where he might have gone off in any of several directions with his life, given the opportunity. With Uncle Harry in tow, he traveled to Texas hoping to entice him into some land speculation. The trip, like his earlier ones, came to nothing. Involved next in a zinc mine in Oklahoma, he told Bess, “There’s no one wants to win half so badly as I do.” He pictured the two of them in an ideal country house and the thought made the delays nearly unbearable. “Then I wake up and see our old house going to wreck for want of paint and repairs because I must pay interest on a debt I had no hand in making and my dream has to keep waiting.” When the suit over his grandmother’s will was settled at last, after six years, his mother wound up no better off than before. She won the case and kept the farm, but what money came of it was consumed in lawyers’ fees. Even before John Truman’s death she had been forced to put another mortgage on the land. To pay off doctors’ bills and funeral expenses, Harry had to sell some Black Angus cattle he had only recently acquired.

David McCullough, Truman. Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.

IMPERIALISM

Keith Windschuttle
“The Burdens of Empire”
in Lengthened Shadows
Editors: Roger Kimball and Hilton Kramer
San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2004, 9

....Moreover, in the past decade, some good historians have made a number of important reevaluations of imperialism and have contributed to a greater maturity of discussion about the subject. The contribution of imperialism to advancing the human condition can now be acknowledged. It is not hard to argue that, throughout the course of human history, the absorption of many smaller communities by larger polities has been the major single force for the evolution and progress of human culture. Imperialism can be seen as the ultimate form of this process. The Romans, for example, gave the forest tribesmen they conquered in Gaul, Illyria, and Germania the gifts of literacy, books, and all that the Latin language opened up. Roman notions of law, property, and government were established where few existed before, as were the habits of living in towns and using coin for exchange. Along with this came Mediterranean tastes in food, drink, and clothing as well as new concepts and forms in architecture and artistic expression. Much the same can be said for the early emperors who united the people of China. In short, history shows imperialism, rather than being a force of oppression, has often been the engineer of civilization.

Moreover, far from being a major cause of racism and racial discrimination, imperialism has usually pushed in the opposite direction. Emperors who have governed diverse peoples have often found it in their own interests to ensure the protection and status of their different tribes and races, including those of racial minorities. In the mature Roman Empire, a non-Roman ethnic origin was no barrier even to ascending to the purple robe of Caesar. The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Hapsburgs created a multiethnic society that guaranteed the civic, cultural, and property rights even of alien minority groups such as Galician Jews. Throughout history, it has been smaller, self-governed communities and nations, organized around kinship or ethnicity, which have most frequently regarded other tribes and peoples as sub-human, and therefore unfit to live.

GIBBON ON WRITING

 ...But all this well-laboured system of German antiquities is annihilated by a single fact, too well attested to admit of any doubt, and of too decisive a nature to leave room for any reply. The Germans, in the age of Tacitus [56-120AD], were unacquainted with the use of letters; and the use of letters is the principal circumstance that distinguishes a civilised people from a herd of savages incapable of knowledge and reflection. Without that artificial help, the human memory soon dissipates or corrupts the ideas intrusted to her charge; and the nobler faculties of mind, no longer supplied with models or with materials, gradually forget their powers; the judgment becomes feeble and lethargic, the imagination languid or irregular.

        Fully to apprehend this important truth, let us attempt, in an improved society, to calculate the immense distance between the man of learning and the illiterate peasant. The former, by reading and reflection, multiplies his own experience, and lives in distant ages and remote countries; whilst the latter, rooted to a single spot, and confined to a few years of existence, surpasses, but very little, his fellow-labourer the ox in the exercise of his mental faculties. The same, and even a greater difference will be found between nations than between individuals; and we may safely pronounce that, without some species of writing, no people has ever preserved the faithful annals of their history, ever made any considerable progress in the abstract sciences, or ever possessed, in any tolerable degree of perfection, the useful and agreeable arts of life....

Edward Gibbon
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire [1776]
London: Everyman’s Library, 1993
Volume I, pp. 242-243

THINK

 

Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.

Philippians 4:8