The Zoom and the Tomb

 

            We just had an e-mail report from  an old friend of ours who moved to New Hampshire some years ago giving us a vivid report of his Christmas activities, which appear to have been composed of equal parts mud and Zoom. The first was caused by a marked warming period with steady rain falling upon, and rapidly melting, two feet of fallen snow.  The second was caused by Covid XIX.  (If the awful monarchs of history rate Roman numerals, why not other plagues?).  He had spent a good deal of annoying time hopping about on Zoom in search of religious services.  But he added this: “When I complained recently about Zoom to my 90-year-old friend in town, she said, ‘It's what we have just now’.  I hope that someday I can attain to her wisdom.”

 

            Well, me too.  We had a fairly Zoomed Christmas, as we have had a fairly Zoomed last half year at least, and I have griped about it a lot.  But  the remark of our friend’s friend has set me to thinking about just how helpful Zoom can be, as well as to try to categorize the functions for which it works more satisfactorily, and less so.

 

            In 1961 O. B. Hardison, an important literary scholar who died too young, and a one-time director of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, published an important book entitled Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama.  It had long been understood that the medieval European religious drama (often called the “miracle plays” from their typical content or “mystery plays” because they were sponsored by the misters, or trade guilds) exercised a defining  influence in the development of the secular drama of the Renaissance, the Age of Shakespeare.  Specifically, the birth of modern drama is supposed to have occurred not in the stable in which Jesus was born but in the tomb in which his body was laid.  One of the liturgical embellishments of the Easter services was a little dialogue, slightly reshaped from the gospels, between an angel assigned to the burial site and the women (often called the Marys) who had come to visit the tomb.  The women, we may presume, were equally surprised by who was in the tomb (the angel or angels, Luke reporting two) and who wasn’t (Jesus).  The following colloquy ensued.  It is usually called the “Quem quaeretis trope” after the Latin of the angel’s first two words.

 

            Angel: Whom are you seeking in this tomb, O followers of Christ?

            Women: Jesus of Nazareth, the crucified, O heavenly ones.

            Angel: He is not here; he is risen, just as he foretold.  Go, announce that he is risen from the tomb.  Alleluia

  

                                                                             Two Marys and one Joanna
 

         

           

Here I must get a bit technical.  This little dialogue was supposedly performed against the background of the melisma of the final syllable of  Alleluia, the all-purpose biblical ejaculation of praise and triumph.  Melisma is the musical term for extending a single sung syllable over several notes.  You may not be familiar with the term, but you certainly have experienced the phenomenon in the great cantatas, grand opera, and Hank Williams.  Please pass the chee ee ee ee se, sort of thing.   As the singers extended the final -a-of  “Alleluia” over many notes, some monks performed the mini-play with the dialogue given above.  That final unemphasized vowel was pronounced with the neutral sound of -uh- that punctuates the oratory of poor public speakers.  Prefaced with a d you get duh, an international signal of idiocy.   The symbol for the vocalic sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet is ɘ, and its name is schwa.  I always wanted to teach a course entitled “The Western Drama from Schwa to Shaw.”

 

            Having squandered most of my allotted words setting up a bad joke, I must be brief in concluding.  Hardison went further in discussing the religious origins of the stage..  According to him, the Mass itself was a drama.  At the time I read the book that claim seemed to me a trope too far, so to speak, and I could not agree with it.  My experience with Zoomed eucharists has only confirmed my original judgement.  Any spectacle—that is, a thing to be watched, like a play, movie, or athletic contest, can be more or less successfully Zoomed.  Vital, communal, participatory and interactive events more complex than Face-Timed conversations are different matters.

 

            I well know, however, that there are differing opinions.  As I was pondering this topic there appeared in the Times an opinion piece by Esau McCauley entitled “You Can’t Meet God over Zoom.”  Though I was somewhat dubious about his title, probably the work of a newspaper editor, I was in general agreement with his drift.  But a few days later McCauley’s thesis was disputed by two correspondents in the letters column.  A Lutheran pastor thought that Zoom enabled an entirely new kind of spiritual experience for his small congregation, and a Jewish lady explained that Zoom sometimes allowed for the gathering of a minyan, the minimum number of congregants needed for a communal worship service, which sometimes proves difficult to round up in actuality as opposed to virtuality. 

 

            But if my belief is more than mere prejudice and a defensible rule of thumb, the exception proving it was a lovely Christmas Eve Zoom with Luke, Melanie, and their two youngsters in Montreal.  The Canadian border has at times during the pandemic been as forbidding and confining as the old Berlin Wall, and we haven’t been able to have tactile contact with this family for far too long.  So Joan and Luke contrived a customized “Service of Lessons and Carols,” structured around a four-part reading of the gospel Nativity legend distributed among the four adults, the parts interspersed with choral interludes from more or less familiar carols.  Both families gathered about a laptop and a piano, and simply dived in.  From what I have observed, only practiced professionals equipped with high quality earphones can achieve tolerable choral music on Zoom, and from the technical point of view our international warbling was a disaster.  But in fact most amateur carol sing-alongs are disasters, and this one was only a little further along the spectrum.  But we didn’t care a whit.  We were not trying to compete with the Trapp family.  The music was not the goal, but the instrument of achieving the goal.  Instead of being an unsatisfactory religious service, it was a triumph of family fun.  And after all the elderly friend of a friend in New Hampshire was certainly right.  Zoom is what we have just now.  So deal.

 

 

 

 

 

Great, Danes

 

                                                                            Borgen: the cast
 

            My most recent act of Covid escapism was a semi-binge on three seasons of the Danish political drama from a few year back, Borgen.  “Borgen” is a synecdoche (a figure of speech in which one uses the container for the thing contained, or in this instance a particular location for the thing that happens at that location), such as the “Quai d’Orsay” in Paris, or “Whitehall” in London, or “the Hill” in Washington, all of which denote governmental functions carried out in those places.  In its root Danish Borgen means “castle” or “fortress”, and here specifically the Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, the seat of the Danish government.  If you happen to be a professor of Old English you will notice as well that the borg part has to be cognate with high German -burg and English -bury, as in Luther’s famous hymn Ein feste burg (“A mighty fortress…”) or in the place name Canterbury, “fortified place in Kent”.  In Romance countries you get castel-this and chateau-that, and everything-ville, because big buildings owned by important people were so often the nuclei of whole towns and cities. 

             Borgen deals with the fictional career of a fictional pioneering prime minister, Birgitte Nyborg.  Other major characters include her husband and two children, several parliamentary colleagues and adversaries, a couple of oversexed press agents, and various other newspaper and television journalists.

             The English language dubbing, on which I am of course dependent, is rather disconcerting, as the voices are a medley of British accents ranging from apparent natives of the Orkneys to the male lead’s Mick Jagger London mumble.  The use of the revolting verb shag is prominent, since for approximately twenty percent of the screen time somebody or other is doing it, though there is still more than the statutory use of the f-word in its general all-purpose meaningless adjectival senselessness.  The leading actor, Sidse Babett Knudsen, comes across as so mentally, morally, and physically attractive that I was smitten from the first moment.  Indeed, the writing, the plotting, the direction, and above all the acting in this series are of a very high quality.  For a long production in which there are many big roles, this is really saying something.  I strongly recommend it.

                                                                 Prime Minister with spin doctor

            For Americans the trouble with West Wing and House of Cards, the obvious models for Borgen, is not that they aren’t great TV serials, which they certainly are, but that you are likely to know just enough about actual American political life to be unable to ignore their lack of verisimilitude.  Since I know nothing of Danish politics, the boundaries of the plausible, and even the barely plausible, are much more fluid.  In fact, I have met few Danish people in either my actual or my imaginary lives.  Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were already dead when I got there. And none of the only five  vaguely recent great Danes I have read or read about—Hans Christian Andersen, Soren Kierkegaard, Niels Bohr, Karen Blixen (aka Isak Dinesen), and my brilliant long-time colleague Hans Aarsleff--is a political  type in the conventional sense. 

             Denmark is not a world power, but an itty bitty little place with roughly the population of Washington, D. C.  As presented in Borgen, however, it is a very attractive place, big on intelligence, beautiful young people, social welfare, pork bellies.  The Danes have a multi-party parliamentary system with the usual problems and usual advantages.  It may be difficult to construct workable governing coalitions, the construction of which generally requires imagination, cooperation, and compromise.  But if one of the parties suddenly suffers brain death, it is not necessarily a national catastrophe.  Simply form a new and improved party.  People peddle about on bicycles except when shagging, and the political correctness quotient is off the charts. The government has a Minister for Integration, just in case, since most  the dislocated immigrants  seem to be brain surgeons,  though a few are merely academic PhDs.  On the down side, the Danes don’t seem to have gotten the word about smoking, and they sleep in their clothes a lot.  The chief executive lives in a little house without security guards, heats up her own TV dinners, worries about her teenager’s anxiety problems, has a cool British architect lover who designs bridges in Finland,  and she speaks in complete sentences in which subject and predicate are in invariable grammatical agreement.  Not exactly what you could call presidential.  You can absolutely believe that her political party is called “The Moderates”. 

            But Borgen is no mere rip-off of the Anglo-American political drama.  Though I have not found this in the few reviews I have been able to find, I think Borgen subtly aligns itself with an ancient Danish tradition.  I think most people know that Beowulf is a very old English poem, but they may not know it it is an old English poem about old Danes, effectively a piece of Danish literature accidently written in English.  The Danes show up in the poem’s third word:

    Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,

    þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,

    hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.

    Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,

    monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,

    egsode eorlas.,,

                                   which goes roughly like this:  “Listen up!  We have heard about the prowess of the leaders of the Spear Danes in days of yore, how the princes performed bold deeds.  Frequently Scyld Scefing (that is, “son of Scef”) seized the mead-benches of enemy forces, of many tough folks, and terrified their officers.”  This Scyld Scefing was himself a child immigrant who became the founder of a warrior society (hence the spears). In the poem his descendants are sometimes also called the Ring Danes (they loved the bling), also the South-, West-, North-, and East-Danes (which pretty much covers the waterfront of Denmark), and occasionally the Scefings.  The Danes were really rough customers in the old days.  If you don’t think it takes cojones to seize an enemy mead-bench, I invite you to try it for yourself.          

            Well, the action of Beowulf is set many generations after Scyld Scefing.  The current king is a wise and venerable senior named Hrothgar.  His borg is not a stone castle but a huge wooden mead-hall called Heorot.   In this mead-hall his warriors sit around on their mead-benches drinking mead, which is a highly intoxicating drink made from fermented honey—a drink that this blog cannot in good conscience recommend even in this festive season.   Beowulf is an epic, and in its way an immigration epic.  Hereot is under attack by a monstrous outsider, Grendel, who breaks into the borg of an evening to chow down on a few of Hrothgar’s thanes.  The Spear-Dames seem incapable of dealing with this invasion.  In desperation Hrothgar must turn to another foreigner, the hero Beowulf, who eventually quells not merely Grendel but Grendel’s even more ferocious mother.  I’ll grant you that the parallels are not exact.  There has obviously been considerable social evolution in Denmark since the days of Beowulf.  I don’t think that the Moderate Party had yet been founded in Beowulf’s time, for instance.  Yet I suspect that careful textual research would discover a pattern of subtle continuity.  

    In Borgen the widely bruited spiritual void of the modern Scandinavian welfare states, classically illustrated in the gloom of Bergman's Seventh Seal, is clearly on display.  The series appears to search for redeeming redress in a strange quarter: journalism.  Newspaper reporters and TV anchors form a thin red line of heroes mounting a lonely defense of Truth, Beauty, and meaning in life.  But then it may be only natural that a bunch of television writers and producers should stake a claim for the unique nobility of their trades.  One of the great scenes in Beowulf is the bragging contest.

                                                                   Beowulf meets Grendel's mother
 

       

 

 

Women in Black

 

Christmas approaches.  This will be my last homicide for the indefinite future, and that’s a promise.  But you need to know that in 1909, in Essex County NJ, three weird sisters, the impoverished daughters of an old, ruined Southern family named Wardlaw, were indicted on charges of having committed a ghastly and incomprehensible murder.  The signature feature of their flamboyantly eccentric behavior—labelled a folie à trois by the fascinated metropolitan press, which for a year kept the case headlined on its front pages—was that all three were never seen wearing anything but heavy, enveloping black mourning dresses with full veils.  This meant that they were seldom actually seen at all.  The semi-starved body of a young woman, Oceana Martin Snead—the daughter  of one of the sisters (Caroline Martin) and the niece of the two others (Virginia Wardlaw and Mary Snead) lay dead in the water of a bathtub at the top of an old rented house in East Orange, a nearly empty house in which there were only a few sticks of furniture.  She had been dead for at least twenty-four hours when her aunt Virginia Wardlaw, apparently the unfurnished house’s only other inhabitant, tried to summon the coroner.  According to the aunt, poor young Ocey (as she was called)—discouraged by the death of one young child, the necessity of having to commit a second baby to a charity hospital, and the disappearance and presumed death of her husband (who also happened to be her first cousin)--had drowned herself.  This was also the gist of a supposed suicide note at the scene.  This note seemed a bit fishy to the authorities at the time, given the fact that there was in the house no paper and neither pen nor ink.  Their suspicions were not allayed when in the course of investigation in various parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan through which the Wardlaws had left a trail of unpaid bills for short-term rentals, they uncovered dozens of similar suicide notes, written by one hand, signed by another.  They also discovered that Ocey’s young life had been lavishly insured by her relatives, that the Wardlaw ladies indeed were surrounded by a veritable cloud of witnesses of conveniently insured dead associates, and that the bizarre transactions of their peripatetic lives constituted a pattern of elder-care anticipating that in  Arsenic and Old Lace.  (It turned out that their thing was actually morphine.)

 

 

            Many years ago I was involved in recruiting for our department the eminent feminist scholar and general all-around great lady Sandra Gilbert, co-author of a book much admired then and now, The Madwoman in the Attic.  Readers of Jane Eyre will at once recognize the reference to Mrs. Rochester, née Bertha Mason, the demented, incendiary wife of Jane’s brooding heart-throb, kept under wraps in permanent house arrest on the top floor of creepy Thorncroft Manor.  Not good mental health therapy, perhaps.  The “madwoman” theme has been brilliantly developed by feminist literary criticism.  But Virginia Wardlaw demonstrated the dangers of letting the madwoman out of the attic.  Death by fire, death by water: take your choice.  Virginia’s own lawyer declared her mad, and her ministerial brother tried to save her from the trial of being tried by having her committed instead.  But she took charge, went on a hunger strike and died before the Law could arrange either her punitive or her protective confinement.  The State of New Jersey took the other two sisters to trial.  At the last minute Caroline Martin plead guilty to manslaughter, while Ocey’s surviving aunt got off on a legal technicality, there being no such thing as an accessory to manslaughter.

 

 

Oceana Martin Snead, in better times

 

            There are limits to the amusement to be found in eccentricity, which often enough masks grave distress.  What I know of this matter comes from a delightful book, and I have adopted the tone of its lighter moments.*  However, there was much, much more to the story, some of it tragic; and Ms. Wardlaw’s tragedy played out on several levels: mental illness, the upheaval of war, the inequities of a Man’s World.  For there is definitely a feminist dimension to the Wardlaw disaster.  All three women, dependent upon male lawyers, were patronized offensively by court and counsel alike.  They explicitly made the point, made also by other female defendants, that an all-male jury could hardly be regarded as a “jury of their peers”.

 

            The sisters’ stuffy lawyers told them to keep their mouths shut.  “I want to talk,” one of them said to eager newspaper reporters,  "but I am like one of the six hundred who rode to their death through obeying orders.”  This was, of course, an allusion to Tennyson’s famous poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade” the subject of which is a horrendous military snafu in which Lord Ragland’s Light Cavalry brigade of six hundred men was mistakenly sent against an inappropriate artillery target at the Battle of Balaclava (1854), resulting in nearly forty percent casualties.

 

Into the Valley of Death

            Rode the six hundred...

Honor the charge they made!

Honor the light brigade!

 

Her point was that her lawyer’s gag order was stupid, but had to be followed.  “I do not mean that we are surely going to our death.  We are innocent.”  My point is that in 1909 she could assume that any reporter, and possibly most Americans capable of reading a newspaper, would pick up on on a citation of the British poet laureate.  It was a different age.  In a moment of whimsy I once wrote those final two lines in very small print on the memo line of the payment check for a steep monthly PSEG electric bill.  The result was a phone call from a puzzled employee at a “payment center.”

 

            The most interesting thing I learned from this bizarre criminal case was incidental.  It concerns the history of American education, particularly the education of young women.  All three of the sisters were well educated teachers.  One of them had had a distinguished career in the New York high school system—a statement far from meaningless in 1900.  Before they left the South, all three sisters had been active in the organization and administration of two highly successful “female seminaries”.

 

            I was only vaguely familiar with this term, the modern synonym for which would be “girls’ school”; and to the limited degree I had ever thought about the subject at all, I suppose I imagined them as rather trivial “finishing” schools for the daughters of the upper middle classes.  So they were, to some extent.  The curriculum normally included such things as piano, needlework, freehand sketching, painting on velvet and other domestic skills thought socially necessary for a family matron and the mistress of a household, the destiny presumed for their pupils.  But among the six thousand female seminaries active in the United States on the eve of the Civil War, many also taught Latin, Greek, French, geography, mathematics and laboratory sciences.  Many were well equipped with scientific instruments, for which there was a bull market beginning in the 1850s.  In New England, not a few of them were hotbeds of Abolitionism and therefore, almost necessarily, of the nascent movement for Women’s Rights.  Obviously, this was not true in the same way in the South, but many schools there were also “progressive” in the context of the time.  Two of the sisters had with considerable success organized and nourished excellent schools in Murfreesboro TN and in Christiansburg VA, near Roanoke.  The Soule Academy in Murfreesboro, the flagship educational institution of vigorous Tennessee Methodism, was of ante-bellum founding and boasted a strong science curriculum.  The Montgomery Academy in Christiansburg had flourished under the headship of a Mrs. Oceana Pollock, after whom the bathtub victim had been named.  In both instances it would appear that successful Wardlaw enterprises  were finally overthrown by the deranged interference of the mentally ill Virginia.  Blood was thicker than water, and the Wardlaws stuck together.  Education was one of the limited number of  arenas in which women were allowed to make significant public social contributions in the old South, and the sisters unquestionably made theirs.  In the bankrupted and reactionary climate of post-Reconstruction, the Wardlaw sisters, like so many others, found it much more difficult to continue to do so.  Like so many emigrées from other national cataclysms, the French or Russian Revolutions, for example, they had been cast into a hostile world which they could face only when shielded by the heavy black garments of eternal mourning and inconsolable loss.

 

*Norman Zierold, Three Sisters in Black (Boston: Little, Brown, 1968)

 

 

 

 

 

The Plot Against Charles Lindbergh

 

 

                                                                                The hero

A few essays ago I touched upon my fascination with certain famous New Jersey murder cases.  Since then I had the time for a crash refresher course on “The Crime of the Century,” the Lindbergh kidnapping on March 1, 1932, perpetrated about ten miles from where I now live.  It’s pretty easy to research a subject pre-organized for you on a special bibliography prepared by Amazon!  It’s still that hot a topic in the conspiratorial-industrial complex.  Indeed, though the “case” itself is endlessly fascinating, what now strikes me as most remarkable is the graph of its historiography.  In recent decades there have been several revisionist books that have moved from exculpating the man convicted of the crime in the direction of inculpating Charles Lindbergh, father of the dead child.  This is a remarkable phenomenon worthy of reflection.*

 

Little Lindy lost

 

            The trial concluded with a guilty verdict against Bruno Richard Hauptmann, an immigrant German carpenter with a serious criminal history, an impressively loyal wife, a young child, a conveniently dead business partner,  and a rented house in the Bronx.  The trial was manifestly unfair to Hauptmann in various ways, but not in any way that succumbed to judicial review.  The New Jersey law with respect to “felony murder” at the time was that any death occasioned by the commission of a felony was homicide.  The theory held by almost everyone, and most probably correctly, was that the child’s death had been an accident caused when the kidnapper’s ladder broke as he was carrying the baby down it.  The murder charge, which allowed the prosecutor to seek and obtain the death penalty,  was a torturous stretch.  Unfortunately, kidnapping was not a felony at the time.  (The felony was stealing the night clothes the baby was wearing at the time he was taken!)  Still, fairness or unfairness in legal apparatus is a different matter from innocence or guilt in criminal activity.  Though many questions remain unanswered, I conclude that Bruno Richard Hauptmann was indeed guilty of participating in, or perhaps single-handedly executing, a terrible crime in which a baby was killed.  I come to this conclusion on the volume and strength of unrebutted evidence presented in court four years after the crime.

                                                   

Bruno Richard Hauptmann

            The stronger the evidence that must be refuted, the more extreme and dramatic must be the claims of the revisionist who seeks to dismiss it.  The prosecutors presented a huge amount of evidence against Hauptmann, some of it a rather tenuous and some of it convincingly strong.  For brevity’s sake, consider two of the strongest bits.  He had in his possession a large portion of the ransom money.  His explanation for having it—the famous “Fisch story”—falls somewhere between the implausible and the preposterous.  Then, one of the boards in the homemade ladder found at the crime scene indubitably had had a former life in the rough attic subflooring in Hauptmann’s garage**.  When under the duress of scientific demonstration the conspiracy theorists were forced to abandon doubting the indubitable they had to move to a theory of a police frame-up, that is, conscious, criminal, and very wicked hoax perpetrated by local and state officials in New Jersey, including the Attorney General in his role as prosecutor.  The ladder had indeed been made from a board in Hauptmann’s garage, but it was not the carpenter, but the police who made it!  Richard Hofstadter’s classic Paranoid Style in American Politics has just been republished in the Library of America.  Who will write a Paranoid Style in American Historical Writing?

 

            It is no exaggeration to say that in 1927 Charles Lindbergh was the most famous man in the world.  His fame had if anything increased by 1932.  Furthermore that fame, the product of historical, cultural, and technological circumstances of a unique moment, was of a kind unlikely ever to be matched in future generations.  Warhol’s “fifteen minutes of fame” may be overly cynical, but it’s probably closer to future norms.  In 1932 Charles and Anne Lindbergh received more than 100,000 telegrams of sympathy when their baby’s remains were found in the woods where they had been cruelly dumped.  By the end of the century supposedly serious writers were postulating that Charles himself had dumped them.  How could this be?

.

            Historians, who ostensibly make history, are themselves made by history.  If you read accounts of Lindbergh today you will hear more of his suspect politics and of the bizarre double life he undertook in his late fifties than of his heroic lone-eagle transatlantic flight in his twenties.  As war in Europe appeared ever more likely in the late ‘Thirties, Lindbergh became an outspoken isolationist whose America First movement preached an aloof neutrality and presented a serious obstacle to Roosevelt’s semi-covert policies.  America First was not simply a pro-fascist group, as sometimes represented, but a broad-based coalition uniting the Socialist leader Norman Thomas and King Kleagles of the Klan.  But both Lindberghs were for a time way too Germanophile for their later reputational health.  Once the war came, and Hitler became the most hated man in the Anglophone world, Lindbergh’s earlier enthusiasms diminished him.  And when much later it became known that he had secretly sired several children with three different women in Germany,  it may have seemed to many that there was no crime, however unlikely,  of which he was incapable.  Americans had always imagined the man in semi-mythical terms.  So when in 2004, thirty years after Lindbergh’s death, Philip Roth published his brilliant counterfactual novel The Plot Against America, you could hear the click of the paradigm shifting into its new socket.

                                                                                        

 Hauptmann's tripartite ladder

            Virgil has a striking image of the personification of Fama (Rumor, or Gossip) as a great and most dangerous bird-lady flapping about the land spreading “news” in which truth and fiction are inextricably mixed.  That would do as a description of the counterfactual historical novel, of which I know no more impressive an example than The Plot Against America by Philip Roth.  In it Lindbergh—through circumstances made to seem not merely historically convincing but historically inevitable—wins the presidency in 1940 in a truly vast right-wing conspiracy compared with which Hillary Clinton’s is very small beer.  In this book an inventive mind, like Fama, has so thoroughly dissolved what could have happened in what really did happen that only the knowing few will know the difference.   It is the special gift of a powerful novelist to exercise supremely well a privilege that should not be claimed by historians. But that is exactly, I think, what the revisionists have done.  That is why I call their work the plot against Charles Lindbergh.  Despising his politics and feeling justified by his apparent sense of sexual exceptionalism, their strange retribution takes the form of accusing him of infanticide and imputing to the police and the judicial authorities of two states the elaborate framing of Richard Hauptmann: all in all an extraordinary exercise in blaming the victim.

 

*Among the principal revisionists are the following three: Ludovic Kennedy, The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann (1985); Gregory Ahlgren and Stephen Monier, Crime of the Century: The Lindberg Kidnapping Hoax (1993); and Robert Zorn, Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind of the Lindbergh Kidnapping (2012). The most balanced and dispassionate antidote to the conspiracists is Richard T. Cahill’s Hauptmann’s Ladder: A Step-by-Step Analysis of the Lindbergh Kidnapping (2014).  In A. Scott Berg’s Lindbergh (1998), a masterly biography by a masterful biographer, the episode of the kidnapping is fully treated as a terrible event in its subject’s long and varied life.  As his subject is Lindbergh, not Hauptmann, Berg takes no definitive position on the “revisionist question” but does recognize that despite all flaws of the police work, a rabid press,  and the judicial proceedings, “there remained a veritable mountain of undisputed evidence against [Hauptmann], a man so secretive that his own wife declared that she did not even know his first name was Bruno…” (pp. 334-335).

 

**The sleuthing done by Arthur Koehler, an expert dendrologist in the U. S. Forest Service, remains one of the most amazing feats in the history of criminal forensic science.  It is described more or less adequately in most of the books about the kidnapping, but best of all by Shirley A. Graham, “Anatomy of the Lindbergh Kidnapping” in the Journal of Forensic Sciences, no. 42 (1997), pp. 368-377.

 

 

 

The Buried Past

 

                                                 Alabama: a forgotten cemetery

            A saving grace of this generally unpleasant coronavirus lockdown, one that makes it more tolerable for us than for so many others we know, is that we have been able to see most of our children and grandchildren, those who live in New York City, on a fairly regular basis.  As the adults are abundantly occupied professional people with full agendas of their own, not to mention their own pandemic constraints, the filial piety manifested is neither unnoted nor unappreciated.  Our elder son Rich and his wife Katie, based in Brooklyn, have been able to make frequent escapes to their  gorgeous rural property about thirty miles northwest of us, near Frenchtown, and they regularly drop in on us in Princeton on their journeys to or fro.  They were here briefly on Sunday, with the sun still shining bravely if not entirely effectually for a well aerated and distanced backyard visit.

 

            I have mentioned their place in Kingwood Township before but not, I think, one of its most interesting features, a family cemetery dating back to the eighteenth century.  This appears to have been badly neglected by twentieth-century owners, but the headstones for some of their Huguenot predecessors from Revolutionary times are still clearly intact.  Rich and Katie were quite pleased when a special “grave expert” from (I think) the Hunterdon County Historical Society asked if he could inspect and record the graves.  He came during the last week, and much to Rich’s pleasure, this knowledgeable man took a keen interest in the site, spending several hours in serious clean-up and brush removal, leaving no fewer than seventeen gravestones, some with still legible inscriptions, exposed to view.  (In my own earlier survey, I had found only six.)  I regret that I have no photographs as yet, but even in its “wild” state it was an impressive sight.   My hope is that we can eventually enclose and protect the whole area with a low fieldstone wall.  There is some evidence at the site of a much earlier gesture in this direction.

 

            This local historian was a font of fascinating information, but not all of it was encouraging.  Private graveyards were apparently by no means uncommon in early America, especially but not only on the large properties of rural magnates.  Many of the old, large landholdings in the Delaware Valley survived more or less intact well into the early twentieth century.  There were 180,000 people in all of New Jersey in 1790.  By 1940 there were four million, by 1950 not quite five million, but by 2000 more than double that.   Most of the large old Jersey farms were sold and sometimes repeatedly subdivided, often for suburban residences.  Throughout the Eastern states subsistence farmers suddenly were besieged by developers.  It was standard practice to exempt burial sites from land sales in special clauses.  No matter how needy or greedy people were in unloading their ancestral acres, even those who (in a great line of Wordsworth’s) “would peep and botanize upon their mother’s grave” would not brazenly  face up to having sold their grandfather’s bones for the mineral rights.  But from the developer’s point of view it is quite unsatisfactory to have a protected and unowned pile of gravestones in the middle of their Tinkling Brook Luxury Estates.  Beginning in the 1980s, according to this expert, aggressive Jersey subdividers began simply bulldozing their way through the diminishing  back woods—metaphorically and sometimes literally—in the 1980s..  A landowner had recently denied the  grave historian  access to a small plot that he did not own but effectively surrounded.   Well, we’ve had roughly four centuries of practice trampling over Indian burial grounds.  The shoe has been on the other foot since the Tennessee Valley Administration began building large lakes in places long settled by Europeans.

 

            American family burial plots are not uncommon in most rural places, especially in places of early settlement.  We had some even in the impoverished Ozarks, and I have seen some fairly extensive ones in older parts of the Old South.  There are undoubtedly many small plots that have simply disappeared in the woods.  In old England, with its long-settled village and parochial systems, the normal, expected site of burial would be the churchyard.  There is now a transatlantic divergence in the meaning of the English term yard.  What Americans might call their back yard is in England the garden.  The two words, yard and garden, are obviously close relatives, the original Old English, like Old French jardin, denoting an enclosed and specially tended plot of land.  In England the word churchyard principally signified, and still signifies, the  burial place or cemetery associated with a church building,  as in Gray’s immortal “Elegy Wrote in a Country Churchyard”.  But even in old Christian times the dead could be buried, for a variety of reasons, in many other places.  The burial of the dead was one of the recognized acts of “corporal” mercy encouraging the establishment and upkeep of civic “Potter’s Fields” for indigents, travelers, unknown and unclaimed bodies found on the road, and so on.  Criminal executions, military deaths and epidemic disease often called for a variety of ad hoc arrangements.

 

            In colonial North America the burial customs of the new immigrants from  Spain, England, and France survived but with greater or lesser degrees of mutation and adaptation.  In our country, the radical Protestantism of large sections of the population broke cleanly with the traces of medieval mortuary customs still half remembered even in Puritan Anglicanism.  Furthermore, the old parish system presupposed conditions very different from those of frontier life, which is another way of saying that churchyards presupposed churches with stable, uniform congregations.  We see some of that development in New England, but not much in the sparsely populated countryside.  Family graveyards were common, and in populated places one sees also the growth of the civic public (or semi-public) cemetery, eventually aspiring to the grandeur of a Green-Wood in Brooklyn.

 

            That life is for the living no sane person would dispute.  Its spiritual tense is future—at least until it isn’t.  We spend a great deal of time in hope or apprehension pondering futurities—our own, our children’s and grandchildren’s, our nation’s, the future of food, medical care, race relations, classical music, whatever.  All this is done, however, beneath the shadow of a preterit destiny that becomes ever more importunate with advancing age.  In the midst of life we are in death—a beautiful line from the old burial service, and the English of a Latin liturgical hymn going back at least to the fourteenth century.  I do not regard it as the life-denying downer that many take it to be.  I take it instead to be a reverent and poetic statement of fact that recognizes our own participation in the universality of human life, which has an ending even as it had a beginning and a past as well as a prospective history.  Far from being macabre, a few carved stones in the south forty could be an encouraging reminder that your own animated vitality was not your personal invention.  It came as a gift and can be passed on as one.

Intransigent Transition

 

            One hesitates to try to make light of a situation that so many serious and substantial people quite seriously view as an unprecedented national crisis, but I at least would make a plea.  Eartha Kitt, an inventive popular singer of my college years,  at one point had a hit song that went “If I can’t take it with me when I go, I just ain’t going to go.”  Perhaps even some of those who enjoyed her song were not aware that Ms. Kitt’s theme, which she pushed with a kind of edgy irreverence, plays off the common doctrine of many of our most solemn religious and secular moral traditions.  The theme is summarized in the title of one of Dr. Johnson’s poems, itself an imitation of the Latin satirist Juvenal, “The Vanity of Human Wishes”.  According to Aristotle the fall from power, prestige, authority, and material sufficiency, allowed or encouraged by some moral blemish or transgression, is the very pattern of tragedy.  According to Boethius, supposed happiness dependent on the possession or enjoyment of what can be taken away, cannot be true happiness.  Returning to the realm of catchy popular music the Beach Boys reminded us that among such items are Thunderbirds.  Just at the moment we seem to have a problem with our President, Donald Trump.  Because Daddy—in the form of the American electorate—really has taken the T-bird away.

 

            Though by the end it seemed to me likely that Trump would lose, that was by no means an easily foreseeable certain outcome, the pre-election polls being mainly expressions of wishful thinking on the part of the liberal press.  What was perfectly foreseeable was that if he were a loser, he’d be a sore one.  How can anyone have been shocked, shocked by the President’s tantrum, which was perfectly predictable and had in effect been predicted by Mr. Trump himself?  I was more surprised by the number of sore winners.  It is no doubt always discouraging to feel that one is voting against something rather than for something, and a very large number of Mr. Biden’s votes must have been in that category.  It is much easier  to strike back indignantly at the flamboyant mendacities  of the aged impresario of “The Apprentice” than to burst with enthusiasm for the long-practiced mediocrity of an aged career politician who has been running for the presidency for forty years.  But the Democrats did win the presidency, and while the nature of the victory was not of the sort that can sustain arrogance, it was clear and decisive and  should encourage all of us to get on with the job.  Our press could help by concentrating on this aspect of the situation rather than on endless whining about the latest episode of presidential petulance.  Why should the loser’s losing be a greater story than the winner’s winning?

 

            Many wise commentators whose political wisdom far exceeds my own say that the reason is that Trump’s current posture is an actual existential threat to American democracy.  It is perhaps presumptuous to disagree with a whole college of experts, but I think they are selling America and Americans short.  It is true that political rancor and division within the land are acute.  A rancorous atmosphere has been spreading, and poisonous attitudes cultivated, for many years.  The President has been no small part of this, but he is not alone.  I am also prepared to believe that my personal innocence of Facebook and Twitter leave me ignorant of the dimensions of the “social media” aspect of all this.  One of my own sons, whom I would rank among wise men, tells me, gently, that I simply don’t know the half of what has been going on.  But I still think that if we are susceptible to being swept up in a Q-Anon plot, the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings

 

            Having reached this point in my essay, the Tuesday newspaper arrived with a banner headline: TRANSITION TO BIDEN ADMINISTRATION BEGINS.  As I am unlikely to get another chance to be prophetic, I’ll have to be satisfied with claiming this prophecy retrospectively.  Mr. Trump has shown no hint of graciousness, but in this context a mere whiff of realism may be satisfactory.  Perhaps he can view the results of the election as he has viewed his previous string of bankruptcies, as evidences not of personal failure but of the reluctance or actual inability of the common mind to appreciate great ideas and true genius.  And then there was the fortuitous and  malign intervention of the “Chinese virus”.  As for the President-elect, the entire nation owes him best wishes and moral support as he addresses major challenges affecting all of us, but who would envy him his job?  Apart from one well-known person, that is.

 

            Invitations to a universal and nonpartisan comity may seem preposterous under the circumstances, but if Lincoln could issue one in the middle of the Civil War we should not be shy of trying now.  And as a matter of fact certain important issues of general interest, free of the most obvious contaminations of partisan interest,  did emerge from this mess.  Would it not be a good idea, for example, at least with regard to the offices of president and vice-president, if we had clearly articulated uniform  national voting regulations and procedures worthy of a first-world country?  Specific aspects of the arrangements are less important than their impartiality, uniformity, and practicality.  For efficiency’s sake one would hope that state and local elections could fall under the same governance.  Next concern: income taxes.  This arises from the peripheral issue of the drama of Donald Trump’s tax records.  I am enough of a libertarian to doubt that anyone should be compelled to make public such private information, but also  sufficiently intelligent  to find the President’s stated reasons for refusing to do so laughably contrived.  But some records did become public, and the subject of wide public discussion.   I do not accuse the President of any illegality.  On the contrary, my fear is that his preposterous calculations might be entirely legal.  Legality would demonstrate the gross unfairness of a system rigged in favor of very wealthy people.  The architecture of this system—the moral equivalent of geographical gerrymandering--can only be the result of the effective intervention by special lobbies working on pliable legislators.  I hope that its prominent exposure might lead to some obviously desirable reforms, though if good sense will not move our congressmen, I doubt that embarrassment can.  What would embarrass many of them would shame a hog to death.