New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009

I’ve given a lot of thought to New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, and to the way that it’s organized, and whether that organization system is a strength or a weakness. My wife gave me the book as a spontaneous gift. She had picked it up at a bookstore while browsing, and I thumbed through it some there with her, and was absolutely intrigued by the way that the book is put together. So, responding to my immediate enthusiasm, she bought the book for me. Isn’t she wonderful?

By way of a brief review, the book is a collection of diary entries from over a hundred different diarists, spanning four centuries. Some of the authors are well known, and some are unknown; some have only one diary entry included in the collection, and some have dozens of entries. The book is organized by day of the year, rather than by strict chronology, so January 1 has diary entries from four different authors, ranging from 1844 to 1953. January 2 has two entries, from 1850 and 1880. You get the idea. The entries for each day are organized chronologically, but that chronology starts fresh each day, with an abrupt jerk back to the past, like the platen on a typewriter racing back to the left side of the page at the end of each line.

So, here are the consequences from that structural scheme. Major events, that last for years, like wars, tend to be continuously present. For example, the Civil War is mentioned every month, and may actually be mentioned weekly. It’s like we’ve all become unstuck in time, like Billy Pilgrim, and our pasts are all continuously with us. The reader is always responding to the stresses leading up to the Civil War, and always exposed to the threats of British invasion during the Revolutionary War. The experience is interesting, but it doesn’t give us the flow from one event to another. We are jerked back and forth, and the move from historical cause to effect is lost.

This would have been a better collection had it been organized in the traditional way. We would have begun with the very earliest entries from Henry Hudson and Robert Juet as they recorded their exploration of the area in 1609. This would have set the stage for the eventual settling of the area, and then the challenges of settling the colony would have gradually become tensions leading to the Revolutionary War. The book could have told a historical story through the disparate diary entries.

In telling that historical story, the editor, Teresa Carpenter, wouldn’t have lost the glimpses into day to day New York life. These interludes would have nestled nicely in their original historical location, and offered glimpses into the life in the midst of the crises. One very memorable entry was a lament by an author who resented how people seemed to go about their daily lives so carelessly during the Civil War. That entry would have had more punch had it rested directly among other diary entries from the same time period, making for a better history, and not losing the charm of the unexpected amid the larger historical headlines.

Temporal Whiplash

George Templeton Strong

During a day spent largely in airports or airplanes, I continued my reading of New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009. Many of the entries I read were the oldest in the collection, dating from 1609, and describing the exploration of the area by Henry Hudson. One of the more diligent diarists to accompany Hudson during the expedition, Robert Juet, recorded the first known European expedition into New York’s Upper Bay. Interestingly, that entry was made on September 11^th, 1609, so the entries for that day include that historic expedition, and the response of several New York diarists to the terrorist attacks that same day, 392 years later.

That juxtaposition and conversation between the centuries produced a kind of dizziness in me. The rapid jumping back and forth across the years can give one a feeling of vertigo. Of course, the artificial atmosphere and pressurized cabins of modern air travel might have contributed to my sense of temporal whiplash.

For example, in my reading yesterday, I encountered vivid descriptions of the 9/11 attacks by those who lived in New York. Those descriptions were interspersed with news of George Washington’s brilliant retreat from New York in 1776. (Yes, it was a retreat. Yes, it was brilliant. If you’re not familiar with this episode of American history, I recommend reading 1776, by David McCullough.) There was also a moving account of a New Yorker with a loved one living through the London bombings of 1940, and the news of Benedict Arnold’s treason in 1780. Among those more dramatic entries were several that just recorded day to day life, from society news of 1832, to World Series news of 1963, and teacher strikes of 1968.

Among the more quotable were two separated by a little more than 100 years. George Templeton Strong, who I apparently favor, as he featured in my previous entry, had a scathing entry condemning the church in 1862 for not speaking out more forcibly against the evil of slavery. “Her priests call on Almighty God every day…to deliver His people from ‘false doctrine, heresy and schism,’ from ‘sedition, privy conspiracy, and rebellion.’ Now, at last, when they and their people are confronted by the most wicked of rebellions and the most willful of schisms on the vilest of grounds, viz. the constitutional right to breed black babies for sale…—the church is afraid to speak.” That sentiment is still alive and well today. The church as a whole is often afraid to take on the real issues of the day, but often seems content to focus on theological debates that don’t matter to the common woman or man, especially in light of suffering and injustice.

The other quote also refers to race, and to suffering. It’s from Judith Malina, in 1968, and is about the teachers’ strike going on in October of that year. The strike drew interesting supporters, among them, the Black Panthers, which made people’s reaction to the strike into a reaction to the Panthers, and a reaction to racial tensions. Malina quotes a conversation she had with her dentist about the strike, and Malina’s political activism. The dentist was Jewish, and felt himself to be among the persecuted as well. However, Malina’s final comment on his attitude was scathing.

“Suffering has only taught him how to suffer.”

The Drive to Make a Difference

This has been a wild week. My parents, who are 74, landed in the emergency room after a freak accident. Mom has a broken hip, and is still in the hospital, awaiting a transfer to a rehabilitation facility. Dad has returned home, which presents its own problems. In the days since the accident, I’ve been facing questions about their future health and safety, and, of course, mortality. While going through their closets, looking for clothes to take to them for their stay in the hospital, I had an epiphany, a sort of déjà vu-in-reverse experience. I was struck with the realization that I would be going through that closet again one day, when they have left the house for the last time.

Those thoughts echoed with an entry in the book I’m reading, New York Diaries: 1609 to 2009, edited by Teresa Carpenter. The book is a collection of diary entries from New Yorkers famous, infamous, and unknown, and from visitors who recorded their observations while passing through the Big Apple. It’s organized by calendar date, so today, May 27^th, has entries from 1844, 1925, and 1972, for example. I’m enjoying the book on the whole, though its organizational approach presents some interesting challenges. Reading it cover to cover, as I am, one sees little vignettes played out over days, when a diarist is included for several days in a row. For example, Gouverneur Morris records his response to the killing of Alexander Hamilton in a series of diary entries from July, 1804. These entries are interspersed with others made during the same week of July, ranging from 1776 to 1885, which, of course, have nothing to do with the duel between Burr and Hamilton. Much of the time, however, there is no narrative thread connecting one day to the next, as the diary entries included jump from century to century. At times, this lack of a narrative thread is mildly irritating, but it’s a natural consequence of the clever organization structure.

The entry that jumped out at me this week is from George Templeton Strong, a well-to-do lawyer whose contributions included in the book range from 1835 to 1875. His diary entry from July 7, 1851, struck a chord with my thoughts on mortality, morality, and the way that we all want to live a life of consequence. In that entry, he commented, with a mixture of revulsion and pity, upon gangs of young girls that could be found in parts of the city, and the terrible lives that they were forced to live in order to provide for themselves.

His final sentence, quoted below, is a beautiful appeal to himself to remember his urge to live a life of significance.

“But if Heaven will permit and enable me, I’ll do something before I die—to have helped one dirty vagabond child out of such a pestilential stink would be a thing one would not regret when one came to march out of this world…and would be rather more of an achievement than the writing [of] another Iliad.”

The Americans: The Colonial Period - The Quakers

Early in The Americans: The Colonial Experience, Daniel J. Boorstin looks at four groups of colonists to America. He focuses on the Puritans of Massachusetts Bay, the Quakers of Pennsylvania, the settlers of Georgia, and the Virginians. We tend to look back through the haze of history more with a goal of telling ourselves an inspirational creation story rather than understanding the complexities and variations in the group of colonists who braved the Atlantic passage for a new life in the New World, and we often view the colonists as a homogenous group of people, but Boorstin’s approach reflects the complex motivations that drew people to the New World, and the ways those motivations influenced and shaped the different colonies. By understanding the goals of the colonists, we can understand not just what drove them to the Western Hemisphere, but why they met with success or failure.

I found the unit discussing the Quakers especially challenging. So much of the Quaker approach is appealing. The ideals they espoused resonate nicely with the outlook of a modern day liberal: belief in equality, informality, and toleration. However, it is Boorstin’s contention that their attitudes toward these ideals made the Quakers ill equipped for governing. It’s the familiar argument of a pragmatist; idealists are naïve and unrealistic. While the Quakers possessed great personal bravery, and were willing to sacrifice their own lives for a cause they championed, their unwillingness to accommodate the political realities of the day caused others to suffer as well.

The chapters dealing with the Quakers caused me to view them with a combination of admiration and frustration. I found their ideals admirable, and their insistence on following those ideals long past the point of futility to be frustrating. In the end, one of the most admirable things they did was to recognize their own unsuitability to govern, and to voluntarily give up their political power.

MythBuster

My last blog entry might have been well written (the jury is still out on this) but it doesn’t really have a lot of myself in it.  It’s long on exposition, and there’s very little personal reaction in it.  The subtitle of the blog, I might remind myself, is “my response to what I’m reading”.  Apparently, I had little response to the pages I read that week.  The blog entry is more of a synopsis of what Diamond already wrote, but there’s not much of me in it.


Since I started reading the Guns, Germs, and Steel, I keep thinking of a guy I know.  As will become clear, I have ambivalent feelings toward the guy, for a host of reasons.  (Perhaps a more accurate explanation of the relationship would be that I do not have ambivalent feelings toward him at all, but actively dislike him, for a host of reasons.)

One of his favorite themes was the thoughtless greed inherent in Western Culture.  He proudly cherishes a mythologized image of Native American nobility, and is constantly holding up this image against American culture, and finding, unsurprisingly, that American culture falls far short of his idealized image.  This image of the nobility of the Native American is ridiculously stereotypical, artificial, and contrived, and reminds me of the anti-littering television ad from several decades ago, in which a Native American quietly weeps at trash blowing by his feet.  Key elements of this image are that Native Americans consider all of nature as brothers, view the hunting of animals as a religious experience, use the entire carcass from any animal killed, and only hunt what is absolutely needed.

However, Diamond tells a different story.  Diamond presents an image of human nature and culture being more constant over time and space, and argues that no society can hold itself up as possessing greater intellect or spiritual gifts than any other society.  Throughout the book, whether he is addressing the first arrival of humans on a continent, the development of agriculture, or the domestication of animals, he has mentioned a startling fact.  It appears that large mammal species were nearly exterminated from the Americas shortly after the arrival humans on the continents. As humans evolved in Africa and Eurasia, they slowly became more and more efficient hunters.  The large mammals that lived on those continents had the advantage of evolving along with us, and managed to develop a fear of humans as we became more proficient hunters.  By the time humans arrived in Australia and the Americas late in our evolutionary history, our hunting skills were highly developed.  The number of large mammal extinctions in Australia and the Americas is quite high shortly after the arrival of humans on each of those continents, where the native fauna had not developed a fear of humans.

So much for the image of Native Americans possessing a spiritual approach to living with the environment.  If that environmental sensitivity is not just a beautiful mythology, it only developed after large mammals across North and South America were hunted to extinction.

The Fertile Crescent Had Lots of Grass

The motivating question in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel is clearly articulated in the prologue.  It was asked of Diamond by a native of New Guinea decades ago, and has been asked in one form or another by people for centuries.  “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”  Put in a more general form, the question is phrased elsewhere in the book as, “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?”

That question, and the dozens of questions that spring from it, are frequently answered with an undercurrent of implicit racism.  We explain Eurasia’s primacy in developing agriculture, domesticating animals, and eventually creating societies that allowed for the invention of advanced technologies in terms of the people who lived there.  People who would normally blanch at the suggestion that they harbor racist assumptions fall back on what amounts to racist explanations when considering the difference in the states of civilizations in Europe and the New World at the time of Columbus.

Explanations that rely on presumed racial differences to explain the Eurasian development of plant and animal domestication hide a much more prosaic reality.  Human nature and capability is fairly universal, and something other than racial differences explains the reason that agriculture developed in Fertile Crescent before it spread to or developed in the rest of the world.

In order for agriculture to develop, the raw materials, in the form of wild grasses or grains suitable for domestication, are required.  Botanists have studied wild grass distributions, and find that the Fertile Crescent has an enormous advantage in terms of the number of promising wild species which are native to the area.  When gathering wild seeds, early hunter gatherers would naturally favor grasses with the largest seeds.  Botanists have identified 56 prize wild grass species with especially large seeds, and find that 32 of these wild grass species are native to the Fertile Crescent, or to nearby parts of western Eurasia.  Compared to other areas where agriculture developed independently, no other region offered early man nearly as many promising species for plant domestication.  Mesoamerica, the region that has the second highest number of promising wild grains, has only 5 wild species ideal for domestication.  Not coincidentally, agriculture developed in Mesoamerica 5,000 years after it did so in the Fertile Crescent.

One reason that agriculture developed in the Fertile Crescent before anywhere else in the world has less to do with racial differences, and more to do with the available wild grass species that flourished in the area.  The domestication of those wild grains would support a higher population density that would allow for the development of such technological advances as writing and the wheel. The concentration in the Fertile Crescent of the biological building blocks necessary for the development of agriculture is a better explanation for the different rates that human societies developed than looking to Providence or racial differences for that explanation.

Collision at Cajamarca

In Chapter 3, "Collision at Cajamarca", Diamond describes a “battle” between Incans and Spaniards in what is today Peru. Most of the chapter is directly quoted from the accounts of Spanish soldiers who participated in the battle, which pitted 168 Spaniards against 80,000 Incan soldiers. It seems inconceivable, but not one Spaniard was killed, while the Incans lost thousands of soldiers.

Since the chapter is largely written by the participants themselves, we can hear the shock in the voice of the participants, and their incredulity at what they managed to achieve.  This is history, written by the victors, giving us a glimpse into their minds as they tried to explain to themselves how they managed to achieve such a lopsided victory.

Diamond uses the one-sided encounter as an example of the forces that allowed Europeans to colonize the New World, rather than the New World “discovering” and conquering Europe. The same factors which played into the Spanish slaughter at Cajamarca also had a deciding impact in countless other encounters between the Old World and the New World.  The specific factors he identified are military technology, infectious diseases, maritime technology, centralized political organization, and writing.

This list contrasts dramatically with what the Spaniards themselves fell back upon to explain the slaughter. The consensus in the Spanish accounts is that the Spanish victory was a product of the "grace of God".

So, the difference in Diamond's assessment of and explanation for the encounter and that of the Spanish is somewhere between "military technology, infectious diseases, maritime technology, centralized political organization, and writing", and "the grace of God."

I cannot tell you how distasteful I found it to read this Spanish explanation. This distaste was heightened by the incongruity of the transition between the detailed description of the bloody encounter, and the pious praising of God for allowing the slaughter.  The movement from slaughter to praise was so abrupt, so unexpected, that it was shocking.  To hear the detailed accounts of the slaughter gratefully attributed to God was repulsive.

During a discussion this morning, unrelated to Jared Diamond and the fates of human societies, some friends and I struggled with the idea of prayer.  What started as a laughable acknowledgement that both teams in a football game pray to God for victory, became a little more grim when we thought about war.  Certainly, the Spanish at Cajamarca prayed to God for victory, and credited God with the victory afterwards.  Presumably, the Incans may have prayed to their gods for victory as well, but their defeat would have been explained by the Spanish as a failure of the Incan gods when compared to the Christian God.

What would the Spanish have said to explain a loss or a victory in a battle with another Christian nation?  Undoubtedly, both armies would have prayed for victory, and would have credited any victory to a decision by God of the worthiness of one side over another.  What is it about human nature that results in our blaming God for our bloodiness?  We are so quick to attribute our weaknesses to God.