[for Paris] Enlightening 'Mother of Exiles'

by Bill Doughty
(Navy photos courtesy Navy.mil and Naval History and Heritage Command)

The Statue of Liberty stands as a symbol of enlightenment. France bequeathed the sculpture to the United States in the late 1800s. Lady Liberty has inspired U.S. Sailors and Marines, veterans, and people "yearning to breathe free" for more than a century.

131108-N-XQ474-108 NEW YORK CITY (Nov. 8, 2013) A Sailor and Marine man the rails of the amphibious transport dock ship USS New York (LPD 21) as it transits past the statue of liberty. New York departed Naval Station Norfolk to conduct training operations and participate in Veterans Week New York City to honor the service of our nation's veterans. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Andrew Schneider/Released)

According to the National Park Service, "In 1865, a French political intellectual and anti-slavery activist named Edouard de Laboulaye proposed that a statue representing liberty be built for the United States. This monument would honor the United States' centennial of independence and the friendship with France. French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi supported Laboulaye's idea and in 1870 began designing the statue of 'Liberty Enlightening the World.'"

The statue had to be shipped in pieces and reconstructed. It arrived aboard the French Navy ship, Isère. For more than a century U.S. Navy ships have paid tribute, sailing past in New York Harbor.

The Statue of Liberty is framed between the smokestacks of USS Boston in 1889, a protected cruiser and one of the first ships constructed from steel, part of the "modern Navy" of the late 1800s.

USS Leviathan sails with escorts past the Statue of Liberty in 1917. The former German passenger liner Vaterland was seized by the United States during World War I and renamed USS Leviathan in September 1917, serving as a troop transport to Europe, where troops fought with the people of France and England. According to the Naval Historical Center, "Leviathan (was) an appropriate name considering that she was then the largest ship in the U.S. Navy, and in the World. The Navy would not operate a bigger ship until 1945, when the slightly longer and heavier aircraft carrier Midway entered service."

Jerome Agel writes in "Words that Make America Great" (Random House, 1999), "America was the objective of the largest migration of people ever seen on the planet. This extraordinary flow shaped us as a nation. The newcomers came for different reasons ... But most of them considered America a haven, a refuge, a country of the second chance."

Agel reprints the sonnet "The New Colossus," written in 1886, noting that the last five lines of the poem are part of the 150-foot-high pedestal that supports the sculpture.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.

"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVB-42) Passes the Statue of Liberty while en route to Bayonne New Jersey from the New York Navy Yard 16 November 1945.

SSN 696 emblem designed in 1977. USS New York City (SSN-696) was commissioned March 3, 1979 and served till April 30, 1997.

131213-N-KG934-298 NEW YORK (Dec. 13, 2013) The U.S. Navy Flight Demonstration Squadron, the Blue Angels, pilots fly in the world-renowned Delta Formation past the New York City skyline. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Terrence Siren/Released)

121001-G-TG089-038 NEW YORK - The guided-missile destroyer Pre-Commissioning Unit (PCU) Michael Murphy (DDG 112) makes its way through New York Harbor in preparation for its commissioning Oct. 6, 2012. The new destroyer honors the late Lt. (SEAL) Michael P. Murphy, a New York native, who was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in combat as leader of a four-man reconnaissance team in Afghanistan. Murphy was the first person to be awarded the Medal of Honor for actions in Afghanistan, and the first member of the U.S. Navy to receive the award since the Vietnam War. #murph (U.S. Coast Guard photo by Petty Officer 2nd Class Erik Swanson/Released)

Smashing Ideas About Monuments

Review by Bill Doughty––

More than 250 years ago the federal government hired sculptor Clark Mills to cast a statue called Freedom, pictured above, that would be placed atop the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington D.C.

The first plaster model of Freedom, created in 1854, was rejected by then-U.S. Secretary of War (SECDEF) Jefferson Davis (future president of the Confederacy) because it wore a “liberty cap,”as Erin L. Thompson explains in “Smashing Statues: The Rise and Fall of America’s Public Monuments” (W.W. Norton, 2022).

Davis insisted the cap, which represented emancipation, be replaced with a helmet. But the new design looked “more suited to a Vegas showgirl than a warrior, with a starry headband topped with feathers sprouting from a popeyed eagle.” Eventually the symbol of liberty created by Clark Mills and his team of workers moved forward and upward, headgear and all:

“When Freedom was finally hoisted into place in December 1863, it was hailed as a symbol of the universal liberty the Emancipation Proclamation had declared in January of that year. More than 150 years later, many avowed white supremacists undertook a deadly invasion of the Capitol building to dispute the results of the presidential election. You might think that a symbol of the liberty America is supposed to offer to all would have dissuaded or at least shamed them. Looking more deeply into Freedom’s history reveals why the monument instead inspired them. It is a white supremacists vision of freedom.”

To help create the cast and melt bronze for Freedom, Mills depended on his workmen, including Philip Reed, a man born into slavery in South Carolina, who was paid $1.25 per day by Mills, but was considered his property. As Mills gained fame and made more money he purchased more enslaved people.

The symbol of Freedom was, in actuality, a symbol of slavery. “Slavery shaped everything about her,” Thompson writes.

Despite an attempt to promote emancipation and liberty, seditionists in the South staged the ultimate insurrection, led by Jefferson Davis. Construction of the Capitol Building stopped for a while, but was restarted under orders from President Abraham Lincoln, who said, “If people see the Capitol going on, it is a sign we intend the Union shall go on.”

The supreme irony of the statue atop the Capitol –– symbolizing liberty but built by enslaved people –– is matched in the story of Horatio Greenough, eugenic “father of our monuments,” whose “blatant racism” is found in his work.

Greenough's George Washington (Wikimedia)

Greenough created a bizarre god-like statue of George Washington that includes a subjugated indigenous “Indian chief” in the design, under Washington’s hips, as the first president holds a sword and points to the sky. Greenough had planned to include “a negro” along with the indigenous figure, but abolitionist Charles Sumner convinced him not create a tie to slavery. The sculptor included a depiction of Christopher Columbus instead.

The public and press mocked the semi-nude statue of the first president. “American audiences paid less attention to deciphering the meaning of Washington’s symbolic sword and more to his nipples.” The statue, Thompson notes, "is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, awkwardly wedged next to an escalator. Today, the sculptures upraised hand looks as though it points the way up to the next floor."

Greenough's "Rescue." (LOC)

Greenough’s next work was received more favorably, at least by white Americans. In many ways it was even more bizarre and offensive. Like other monuments to follow, Rescue celebrated the genocide of Native Americans, particularly after President Andrew Jackson’s “Indian Removal Act” of 1830.

Rescue is in effect a monument to Manifest Destiny –– the idea of a god-given right of white people to subjugate indigenous people –– and for men to have an ordained role as dominant protectors of women. Thompson explains the scene of a white settler holding a dying indigenous warrior he'd just shot; his wife and child hover beneath him, and a dog watches balefully. The symbolism is clear and cringe-inducing.

At Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration in 1861, Rescue was prominently on display. It was removed from the eastern front of the Capitol Building in 1958 after decades of complaints. Thompson writes, “The removal of Rescue is another example of what happens when enough people decide that the messages encoded in a monument are unacceptable to them.”

“Greenough’s sculptures, the first thoroughly American national monuments, were also the first in a long line of public artworks to address questions of how much Black and Indigenous lives matter in America. He and his monuments claimed these lives didn’t matter at all. Greenough’s monuments assert that only people of a certain gender, class, and race deserve honor.

“Greenough’s beliefs informed not only his own sculpture but all the subsequent American public monuments based on his influential examples.”

A natural progression to other monuments highlighting white supremacy extended in the wake of the Civil War, even in Thomas Ball’s controversial Freedmen’s Memorial, dedicated in 1876.

Also known as Emancipation Memorial, it depicts a fully clothed Lincoln standing over a nearly naked kneeling black man. One interpretation is of a gracious leader bestowing freedom, but another view is of ongoing patriarchal and racial inequality.

Freedmen’s Memorial was unveiled on the eleventh anniversary of Lincoln’s assassination. President Ulysses S. Grant, members of Congress, and Supreme Court justices all attended and listened to Frederick Douglass’s speech. Several days later, Douglass wrote a letter to the editor of the National Republican in which he said, “What I want to see before I die is a monument representing the negro, not couchant on his knees like a four-footed animal, but erect on his feet like a man.”

Douglass’s descendants would live to see many hundreds of monuments erected to honor the seditionists of the Confederacy.

The rise of many of those monuments coincided with the rise of the rights and equality of African Americans as guaranteed under the Constitution.

An example is the statue of Robert E. Lee erected in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1924, shortly after Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act made segregation lawful and outlawed in interracial marriage (not overturned by the Supreme Court until 1967 in Loving v. Virginia).

“The conflict at the heart of America,” Thompson writes, is “the conflict between the freedom for all and freedom for some.”

Thompson enlightens readers with the psychology, politics, and intent of Civil War monument creators. She delves into the meaning of statues’ poses, shows the influence of donations in creating profit motives for monuments, and explains the role of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacists.

Then there's Christopher Columbus.

Columbus Fountain in Washington D.C. (NPS)

Thompson reminds readers about Columbus’s contemporary, the priest Bartolemé de las Casas, who wrote about the real Christopher Columbus during his cruel reign as governor of Hispaniola (now Dominican Republic and Haiti). Columbus is condemned for overseeing torture, rape, slavery and genocide. Columbus shipped young girls back to Spain to be sold into slavery.

In recent years more people have assembled, protested, and demanded statues honoring Columbus, like monuments to the Confederacy, be taken down.

Thompson explores how, despite widespread opposition to their presence, some monuments remained in place for years. “We think our monuments celebrate our democracy, but really, they are held in place by some of America’s least democratic uses of power.”

Complacency and willful ignorance kept monuments up until catalysts of violence created a backlash: “Unite the Right” white supremacists' march (and killing of Heather Heyer) in Charlottesville; the horrific mass murder at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; and the senseless murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as examples.

Acts of civil disobedience are often the result of willful acts of bureaucratic lethargy, intransigence, and not listening to peaceful protesters. Thompson writes, "Talking about monuments is not easy. But we need to do it. We need to come together as communities to make sure our monuments leave room for everyone's life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness."

Towering over all the monuments to the Confederacy is the incomparable Stone Mountain in Georgia. Cut into the face of the mountain, it is the world’s largest bas-relief sculpture: images of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, along with Civil War generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee on horseback. The sculpture inspires white racists and believers in the Lost Cause Big Lie, including the KKK.

Thompson writes about eccentric anti-semitic sculptor and con artist Gutzon Borglum, who was involved in creating the Stone Mountain monument. Borglum would go on to create the monument at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota, on land that was sacred to indigenous people.

There’s a lot more in this book about Borglum and Stone Mountain –– stories “to startle us out of our assumptions,” as Thompson writes.

[While reading this book I came across a new Americana CD by Bill Edwards, “61356,” with a great song from the perspective of a statue of a Union soldier on a Civil War monument in Illinois: “We Don’t See It Yet.” Edwards sings: “Since nineteen hundred and thirteen/I’ve stood in my place on this stone/In the middle of my Bureau County/But I haven’t stood here alone/Above me, a guardian angel/To my right, left and back, over Vets/We watch the horizon for justice/Alas, we don’t see it yet.” It’s a terrific song and album, highly recommended. Read more about "61356" on The Stratton Setlist.]

In “Smashing Statues” Thompson laments the lack of monuments to African Americans who fought for the Union in the Civil War.

There are also a relatively small number of monuments to women in the United States, but last week Speaker of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi unveiled a statue of Mary McLeod Bethune in the Capitol Building. Behune was “an unyielding force for racial justice, a pioneering voice for gender equity” from Florida, who was also “a devoted advocate for education,” Pelosi said in her remarks.

Bethune statue unveiled at Capitol Building July 13, 2022. (CNN)

The statue of Bethune joins statues of Rosa Parks, Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall. Bethune’s statue replaces that of a Confederate general.

On January 6, 2021, Trump-supporting insurrectionists, many wearing helmets or other headgear, walked through Statuary Hall during the coup attempt. Some rioters carried Confederate flags into the Capitol. High above them, on top of the building stood the statue in plumed helmet with an American eagle, mouth agape, eyes bulging –– Freedom.

This is an indispensable book for military readers interested in the reasons for the initiative to rename installations, facilities, and ships named for Confederate white supremacists or Confederate battle victories.

Filling in Gaps in ‘How the Word Is Passed’

Review by Bill Doughty––

At the beginning of “How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery across America” (Hachette Book Group, 2021) author Clint Smith introduces us to Navy veteran David Thorson.

Thorson serves as a tour guide and teacher at Thomas Jefferson’s plantation home outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Smith learns that “prior to becoming a tour guide at Monticello, David served for more than thirty years in the U.S. Navy.”

Monticello

David Thorson’s “peach face, reddened from all the hours spent standing in the sun, was clean-shaven … He spoke with a calm evenhandedness that invited people into discussion, like a professor.”

According to Smith, Thorson became a docent and tour guide at Monticello after retiring from the Navy because of his love of history and interest in Thomas Jefferson.

While giving a tour focusing on Jefferson’s relationship to slavery, Thorson addresses the visitors:

“Slavery’s an institution. In Jefferson’s lifetime it becomes a system. So what is this slave system? It is a system of exploitation, a system of inequality and exclusion, a system where people are owned as property and held down by physical and psychological force, a system being justified even by people who know slavery is morally wrong. By doing what? Denying the very humanity of those who are enslaved solely on the basis of the color of their skin.”

Smith recounts, “In just a few sentences, David had captured the essence of chattel slavery in a way that few of my own teachers ever had.”

During the tour Smith notices how Thorson chooses to refer to the enslaved black people as “human beings” rather than “slaves.” Smith writes, “What reverberated throughout was the humanity of the enslaved people –– their unceasing desire to live a full life, one that would not be defined simply by their forced labor.”

Frederick Douglass

For his part in “How the Word Is Passed,” Smith brings in luminaries from history such as Frederick Douglass and W.E.B. DuBois, as well as respected historians Eric Foner, Annette Gordon-Reed, and Kenneth M. Stampp, to fill in some of the gaps of enslaved people’s lives. Smith presents information to settle debates about the impact of slavery on African Americans, from the founding of the nation through the Civil War and Emancipation and even through the era of Jim Crow, when many whites in southern states still longed for the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

When it comes to debates about critical race theory or Big Lie / Lost Cause –– and even anti-vaccination stances –– it’s important to not only present facts and tell the truth but also be understanding and empathetic in how you talk to people. According to Smith:

“David sees it as essential that a guide be able to find the balance of telling the truth and not pushing people so much that they shut down. He told me that when you challenge people, specifically white people’s conception of Jefferson, you’re in fact challenging their conception of themselves. ‘I’ve come to realize that there’s a difference between history and nostalgia, and somewhere between those two is memory,’ he said. ‘I think that history is the story of the past, using all the available facts, and that nostalgia is a fantasy about the past using no facts, and somewhere in between is memory, which is kind of this blend of history and a little bit of emotion … I mean, history is kind of about what you need to know … but nostalgia is what you want to hear.'”

“What would it take –– what does it take –– to confront a false history even if it means shattering the stories you have been told throughout your life?” Smith asks. “Even if it means having to fundamentally reexamine who you are and who your family has been?”

Smith says the search for truth is worth the pain. “Just because something is difficult to accept doesn’t mean you should refuse to accept it. Just because someone tells you a story doesn’t make that story true.”

In the 1930s and 40s, black men dressed as slaves conducted tours of Monticello, so hearing about David Thorson is evidence of progress, but Smith is careful about too much celebrating about that progress.

“When I think about the history of slavery and racism in this country, I think about how quick we are to expose notions of progress without accounting for its uncertain and serpentine path,” Smith says, reflecting on a visit with his grandparents to the National African American History and Culture Museum. 

In this thought-provoking book Clint Smith travels from Monticello to the Smithsonian’s NAAHCM in Washington, D.C. And he also visits the Whitney Plantation in Wallace, Louisiana; Angola Prison in Louisiana; Blandford Cemetery in Petersburg, Virginia; Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia; Galveston Island, Texas; Wall Street and Ellis Island, New York City; and Gorée Island, Dakar, Senegal, Africa.

His journey backtracks the route black Africans took as chattel slaves brought to the colonies in the Americas to create and maintain an economy based largely on cotton, tobacco, and sugar.

Smith’s goal on his trip is to fill in the blanks of history and gaps that separate people. He fills in those blanks and gaps with information, truth, and understanding.

With a journalist’s ear and poet’s eye, he takes readers to uncomfortable places and truths.

• We confront the fact that Thomas Jefferson kept hundreds of humans enslaved; he also separated families, removing children even under the age of ten from their mothers and fathers.
• We go to the Whitney Plantation, site of a slave revolt in 1811 on the heels of the Haitian Revolution of 1803; at Whitney, whites decapitated 55 slaves and displayed their heads on posts.
• We ride to Galveston, Texas, considered by some as the site of the end of slavery and beginning of celebrations now known as Juneteenth.
• We take a behind-the-scenes tour of Angola, where Smith reveals how mass incarcerations have roots in slavery.
• We get a comparison of the now-removed Robert E. Lee statue in Richmond with the Statue of Liberty, designed by a French abolitionist –– and we’re reminded that Lady Liberty stands on broken chains as she stands for truth, justice, and democracy.
• Finally, Clint invites readers with him for an emotional return to Africa as he examines remnants of colonialism and the role of history in accurately reflecting what was once a “system of plunder,” slavery and colonial rule, where “white sugar [and white cotton] means black misery.”

The Statue of Liberty stands for freedom from slavery and the promises of July 4, 1776. (NPS)

Clint Smith

Along Smith’s remarkable journey, he introduces us to individuals who earned their right to provide perspective and context, people like Angola’s Norris Henderson, NYC’s Damara Obi, Dakar’s Hasan Kane, Smith’s grandparents, and Monticello’s David Thorson.

Near the end of his visit to Jefferson’s plantation, Smith seeks out Thorson to get more insight and fill in more gaps.

Smith is intrigued by Thorson’s wisdom about the reality of human imperfection and Thorson’s view on “an idea worth fighting for.”

Smith writes:

“Before I left, I wanted to understand how much David’s role as a former military officer –– responsible for protecting and promoting this country’s foreign policy agenda at home and abroad –– was something that felt, if at all, in tension with his role now. ’I was born in the United States of America. I served the country for thirty years, so I actually believe in the idea of America,’ he said, straightening up in his chair. ‘Are we exceptional? No. Have we had unique advantages based on geography, based on a whole host of factors? Yes. Did a group of people come together in 1776 and conceive of an idea that was pretty radical in its time and then create a system of government, through the Constitution and its amendments, that was pretty radical and pretty novel? Yeah. Have other countries found their own way? Sure. So I believe in the idea of America. I don’t believe that this country was perfect. I don’t believe it is perfect. I don’t believe it’s going to be perfect. I believe that the journey to make this a better place is worth the effort and that the United States, if you conceive it not so much as a place to be in but an idea to believe in, it is worth fighting for.'”

Democracy is safe when it’s protected. Truth, honest reflection, and the pursuit of justice must be at the heart of “how the word is passed.”

President Barack Obama and President François Hollande of France tour Monticello, the home of Thomas Jefferson in Charlottesville, Va., with Leslie Bowman, President of the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Feb. 10, 2014 (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

Frederick Douglass Speaks to Us in 2023: Part 3, Accountability

By Bill Doughty––

The “Big Lie” of Frederick Douglass’s time on earth was slavery. Generally, white people in the South (and many in the North) not only accepted enslavement of people with dark skin, they embraced the idea, justifying it with Bible passages such as Genesis 9, 18–27, Leviticus 25:44–46, and Paul’s Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians.

Douglass wrote about his experience as a slave, free man, and abolitionist in “Narrative of a Slave.” In “Narrative” and decades later in “My Escape from Slavery,” Douglass recounted how the sea called to him, how he was helped to learn to read in a shipyard, and how he escaped enslavement in a sailor’s uniform. We presented excerpts in our Navy Reads, “The Naval Inspiration of Frederick Douglass,” in June 2020.

The Library of America offers more of Douglass’s brilliant writing in “Douglass: Speeches & Writings” (2022, edited by David W. Blight).

Douglass confronted the Big Lie of his time with frustrated passion, a strong moral compass, and a call to arms on behalf of the truth, justice, and the ideals of the American Dream. He called for responsibility, accountability, and (as inspired by Thomas Paine) “common sense.”

His often acerbic insights reached new heights during the Civil War, during Reconstruction, and as African Americans gained more power and influence in the face of voting suppression, discrimination, and hate crimes, including lynchings. Douglass called for responsibility and accountability of the nation's leaders.

On Accountability –– For the President; For the Union; By Government of the People:

• “The President of the United States seems to possess an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous, if nothing worse. Since the publication of our last number he has been unusually garrulous, characteristically foggy, remarkably illogical and untimely in his utterances, often saying that which nobody wanted to hear, and studiously leaving unsaid about the only things which the country and the times imperatively demand of him.” (09/1862)

• “Experience demonstrates that our safety as a nation depends upon our holding every officer of the nation strictly responsible to the people for the faithful performance of duty. This war has developed among other bad tendencies, a tendency to shut our eyes to the mistakes and blunders of those in power … Our rulers are the agents of the people. They are fallible men. They need instruction from the people, and it is no evidence of a factions disposition that any man presumes to condemn a public measure if in his judgment that measure is opposed to the public good.” (07/04/1862)

• “The structure of the American Constitution and Government imply the existence among the whole people of a fraternal good will, an earnest spirit of co-operation for the common good, a mutual dependence of all upon each and of each upon all. The Government is not enthroned above the people but is of, by and through the people. A despotic form of Government with its standing armies, holds its existence in large measure independently of the people and in some sort against the people, looking at them very much as a slave-holder regards his slaves, to be worked and fed when obedient, and to be flogged and otherwise punished when they disobey. When such people raise an insurrection and are put down, the path before them is plain and simple: It is submission. To obey is the fulfillment of the whole law of despotism.—But our form of Government contemplates in such a case something more than mere cold obedience. It not only requires this, but a cordial co-operation. Its whole machinery is deranged when one of its parts fail to perform its functions. The rebellion has paralyzed the Federal Government in all the rebel States, but putting down the rebels in arms does not necessarily cure this paralysis. The benumbed or dead state must be called into life, and for this the highest wisdom must be employed. The State Senate, the State Legislature, the State Courts, the State Governors, and officers generally have to be gathered in under the fold of the Constitution and Union, and brought to co-operate in good faith with the National Government. How all this shall be done, is one of the great questions of the future.” (11/1862)

• “A man sets out in life with honest principles and with high purposes inspired at the family hearthstone, and for a time steadily and scrupulously keeps them in view. But at last under the influence of some powerful temptation he is induced to violate his principles and push aside his sense of right. The water from the first moment is smooth about him, but soon he finds himself in the rapids. He has lost his footing. The broad flood, resistless as the power of fate, sweeps him onward, from bad to worse, he becomes more hardened, blind and shameless in his crimes till he is overtaken by dire calamity, and at last sinks to ruin. Precisely this has been the case with the American people. No people ever entered upon the pathway of nations, with higher and grader ideas of justice, liberty and humanity than ourselves. There are principles in the Declaration of Independence which would release every slave in the world and prepare the earth for a millennium of righteousness and peace. But alas! We have seen that declaration intended to be viewed like some colossal statue at the loftiest altitude, by the broad eye of the whole world, meanly subjected to a microscopic examination and its glorious universal truths craftily perverted into seeming falsehoods. Instead of treating it, as it was intended to be treated, as a full and comprehensive declaration of the equal and sacred rights of mankind, our contemptible negro-hating and slaveholding critics, have endeavored to turn it into absurdity by treating it as a declaration of the equality of man in his physical proportions and mental endowments. This gross and scandalous perversion of the true intents of meaning of the declaration did not long stand alone. It was soon followed by the heartless dogma, that the rights declared in that instrument did not apply to any but white men. The slave power at last succeeded, in getting this doctrine proclaimed from the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States.” (07/04/1862)

• “Do not ask me what will be the final result of the so-called negro problem. I cannot tell you. I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the right to the strong, and too grateful for public services ever to forget them or fail to reward them. I have fondly hoped that this estimate of American character would soon cease to be contradicted or put in doubt. But the favor with which this cowardly proposition of disfranchisement has been received by public men, white and black, by Republicans as well as Democrats, has shaken my faith in the nobility of the nation. I hope and trust all will come out right in the end, but the immediate future looks dark and troubled. I cannot shut my eyes to the ugly facts before me. Strange things have happened of late and are still happening. Some of these tend to dim the lustre of the American name, and chill the hopes once entertained for the cause of American liberty. He is a wiser man than I am, who can tell how low the moral sentiment of this republic may yet fall. When the moral sense of a nation begins to decline and the wheel of progress to roll backward, there is no telling how low the one will fall or hear the other may stop. The downward tendency already manifest has swept away some of the most important safeguards. The Supreme Court has surrendered. State sovereignty is restored. It has destroyed the civil rights Bill, and converted the Republican party into a party of money rather than a party of morals, a party of things rather than a party of humanity and justice. We may well ask what next? The pit of hell is said to be bottomless. Principles which we all thought to have been firmly and permanently settled by the late war, have been boldly assaulted and overthrown by the defeated party.” (01/09/1894)

Douglass recognized the corrosive aspects of fear. He called for hope and optimism in an era of negativity and hypocrisy, personified in the Big Lie of slavery. He called for integration of the military, expanded rights for women, respect for the rule of law, and diversity in society. And he demanded a government of the people, by the people, for the people.

We hope this series of Navy Reads reviews of Douglass’s “Speeches & Writings” will pique readers’ interest in the full works of the great abolitionist. Some leaders who seek power would prefer to ban books about African American history, including the Big Lie of slavery and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. The words of Frederick Douglass remain alive and relevant more than a century later. His words inspired great American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, Barack Obama, Harry S. Truman John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson –– and Jimmy Carter.

The Underground Railroad – to DC

Review by Bill Doughty

(Art courtesy National Park Service)

It's on the Commander-in-Chief's summer reading list, was chosen by Oprah for her book club, and gives insights to our nation's original sin in the lead-up to the opening later this week of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

All good reasons to read this fantasy fiction by a gifted writer.

Colson Whitehead's "The Underground Railroad" (2016 Doubleday, Penguin Random House) takes liberty in his storytelling of the sacrifices of slaves and abolitionists in the decades before the Civil War. Fantasy comes into play when he envisions an extended, actual, literal underground railroad.

Reading this novel, one can imagine a movie version produced by directors who blend the real with the unreal: Spike Lee, Oliver Stone and, especially because of the graphic violence the jumps out unexpectedly, Quentin Tarantino.

Strong characters include both resilient and resigned slaves, sadistic plantation owners, a patronizing widow, conflicted and committed railroad operators, and weird slave-catchers. Settings involve slave quarters, saloons, various hiding places, an "anatomy house," the Museum of Natural Wonders and a barn filled with shackles.

"She saw the chains first. Thousands of them dangled off the wall on nails in a morbid inventory of manacles and fetters, of shackles for ankles and wrists and necks in all variety and combinations. Shackles to prevent a person from absconding, from moving their hands, or to suspend a body in the air for a beating. One row was devoted to children's chains and the tiny manacles and links connecting them. Another row showcased iron cuffs so thin that only the thought of punishment prevented their wearer from splitting them. A line of ornate muzzles commanded their own section, and there was a pile of ball and chains in the corner. The balls were arranged in a pyramid, the chains trailing off in S-shapes. Some of the shackles were rusted, some were broken, and others seemed as if they had been forged that very morning. Cora moved to one part of the collection and touched a metal loop with spikes radiating toward its center. She decided it was intended for wear around the neck."

A display of slave shackles will be featured in the Smithsonian's new museum. For his part, Whitehead in "Underground" imagines a Museum of Natural Wonders with live-action scenes of American History acted out by people. One scene involves a sanitized look at life on a slave ship:

"The soothing blue walls of Life on the The Slave Ship evoked the Atlantic sky. Here Cora stalked a section of a frigate deck, around the mast, various small barrels, and coils of rope. Her African costume was a colorful wrap; her sailor outfit made her look like a street rascal, with a tunic, trousers, and leather boots. The story of the African boy went that after he came aboard, he helped out on deck with various small tasks, a kind of apprentice. Cora tucked her hair under the red cap. A statue of a sailor leaned against the gunwale, spyglass pointed. The eyes, mouth, and skin color were painted on its wax head in disturbing hues."

Slavery is described by the slave catchers and by the antebellum South, in general, as an "American Imperative," part of the economy, the normal way of life, based on an authoritarian patriarchal attitude where intolerance, hatred and violence were acceptable, especially when directed to "the other." Through the hundreds of years of slavery in North America we can perhaps come to grips with its legacy––segregation, racism, bigotry and Civil Rights––in the decades since it ended.

In the deep South nearly two centuries ago, Cotton is king, and cotton becomes a symbol, both in the first time our hero Cora wears soft cotton clothes and in the pivotal role a cottonmouth snake plays deep in the narrative.

And aboard slave ships, atop auction blocks (such as the one pictured at left above, courtesy of Smithsonian Institution)  and on plantations people are "cargo":

"List upon list crowded the ledger of slavery. The names gathered first on the African coast in tens of thousands of manifests. That human cargo. The names of the dead were as important as the names of the living, as every loss from disease and suicide––and the other mishaps labeled as such for accounting purposes––needed to be justified to employers. At the auction block they tallied the souls purchased at each auction, and on the plantations the overseers preserved the names of workers in rows of tight cursive. Every name an asset, breathing capital, profit made flesh."

From Frederick Douglass's autobiography.

But freedom is the "ultimate currency" in life. 

This book is both an indictment and an inspiration.

Whitehead gives us a poetically worded insight from a slave's perspective: "Men start off good and the world makes them mean. The world is mean from the start."

As good as this book is, could it have been better story without the fantasy of an actual railroad underground? What is blurred in strong metaphor and mythology? What is considered reality and historical truth?

For strong, passionate and contemporaneous nonfiction on this important topic, I recommend reading the works of Frederick Douglass, whose writing is strong and whose stories are powerful but true.

And, beginning Sept. 24, we can visit the Smithsonian's new wing to see why some of our national polity is still shackled to sins of the past.

World War II Sailors. 
The Second World War began just 76 years after the official end of slavery. And this year marks the 75th anniversary of the beginning of WWII in the Pacific. (Photo courtesy of Smithsonian Institution.)

How the Wright Brothers Got to the Moon

Review by Bill Doughty––

When naval aviator and U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first man to step onto the moon he brought a physical piece of the Wright Brothers legacy with him. What the fellow Ohioan carried with him is revealed in David McCullough's latest work, "The Wright Brothers" (Simon & Schuster, 2015).

McCullough, the author of "1776," "Truman" and "John Adams," explains how and why Wilbur and Orville were successful in inventing the airplane and demonstrating the first  human-operated, powered and sustained flight of a heavier-than-air machine in 1903.

The brothers faced family ravages of typhoid and tuberculosis, swarms of "demon mosquitoes," oppressive heat and plenty of crashes before and after their first flight. Later, another challenge was just getting the scientific community, media and nation to take them seriously.

How they dealt with challenges and setbacks was key to their success.

Wilbur and Orville Wright at home in Dayton, Ohio, 1909.

The boys' father, Reverend Milton Wright, bought them educational toys and books, encouraged high standards of excellence, promoted unity of purpose and nurtured determination. "We learn much from tribulation, and by adversity our hearts are made better," the senior Wright wrote to Orville after a crash cost the life of an Army lieutenant.

The brothers' high school teacher noted "their patient persistence, their calm faith in ultimate success, their mutual consideration of each other."

Books in the Wright family collection included ecclesiastical works alongside works by Robert Ingersoll, who had an apparently significant influence on the brothers, according to McCullough.

"There could be found the works of Dickens, Washington Irving, Hawthorne, Mark Twain, a complete set of the works of Sir Walter Scott, the poems of Virgil, Plutarch's 'Lives,' Milton's 'Paradise Lost,' Boswell's 'Life of Johnson,' Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,' and Thucydides. There were books on natural history, American history, a six-volume history of France, travel, the 'Instructive Speller,' Darwin's 'On the Origin of Species,' plus two full sets of encyclopedias."

Wilbur was interested in history and science, especially birds, equilibrium and the study of wind.

McCullough's butterscotch voice comes through the narrative as if the reader is listening to a Ken Burns documentary. McCullough's descriptive powers, so strong in all his work, are put to good effect here. For example, here is the author's description of the Outer Banks of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina:

"The previous winter on the Banks had been especially severe, one continuing succession of storms, the brothers were told, the rain coming down in such torrents as to make a lake that reached for miles near their camp. Ninety-mile-an-hour winds had lifted their building from its foundation and set it down several feet closer to the ocean. Mosquitoes were said to have been so thick they turned day into night, the lightning so terrible it turned night into day.  But the winds had also sculpted the sand hills into the best shape for gliding the brothers had seen, and the September days now were so glorious, so ideal, that instead of turning at once to setting up camp, they put the glider from the year before in shape and spent what Wilbur called 'the finest day we ever had in practice.'"

The brothers' aircraft were tested near Kitty Hawk and refined in a pasture near Dayton, Ohio, where their 1905 Flyer would become the first practical aircraft 110 years ago this year.

"It was at Huffman Prairie that summer and fall of 1905 that the brothers, by experiment and change, truly learned to fly. Then, also, at last, with a plane they could rely on, they could permit themselves enjoyment in what they had achieved. They could take pleasure in the very experience of traveling through the air in a motor-powered machine as no one had. And each would try as best he could to put the experience in words."

McCullough at Wright State University with CBS's Rita Braver.

McCullough's extensive research helps us experience the brothers' emotions and read their first-hand accounts.  The author acknowledges resources with humility, respect and appreciation, including Library of Congress, Wright State University in Dayton and Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum.

This book takes us through the early life of the Wright Brothers, their success in designing and selling bicycles and their adventures in Europe, especially in Paris, at a time when they were courted by French, British and German governments and militaries – before the American military showed real interest in their achievements.

Eventually they received honors, memorials and accolades (and unfortunately acrimonious patent infringements) from Dayton to D.C. and from Le Mans to New York. We learn about their relationship with Otto Lilienthal, Chanute Langley, Charles Lindbergh, Alexander Bell, Glenn Curtiss and other friends and rivals.

Wilbur's flight in New York around the Statue of Liberty and above the departing Lusitania in 1909 is a standout. Orville saw the 1921 commissioning of his namesake USS Wright (AV/AZ-1), a ship that was captained by commanding officers that included Ernest J. King, Aubrey W. Fitch and Marc A. Mitscher and which fought in World War II in the Pacific. Orville lived long enough to see aircraft and bombers used extensively in WWII. The first USS Kitty Hawk (APV-1) was launched in 1941 and served throughout the Second World War. Another namesake, the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk II (CV(A) 63), was launched 57 years after the brothers' first flight, served nearly half a century, and was decommissioned in 2009. Read an extensive timeline history of the USS Kitty Hawk here.

When Neil Armstrong stepped on the lunar surface in 1969 he carried with him a piece of muslin from the Wright Brothers' 1903 Kitty Hawk Flyer.

Orville Wright (left) congratulates Maj. C.A. Lutz, United States Marine Corps flyer, who won the Curtiss Marine Trophy in Washington, May 18, 1928. Lutz averaged 157 miles an hour. (Photo by Harris & Ewing)