Calling a whatever a whatever . . .

Yeah!!

There's a new literary uproar about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer! As the New York Times reported on January 5th . . .

Alan Gribben, a professor of English at Auburn University at Montgomery, . . .said Tuesday that he had been teaching Mark Twain for decades and always hesitated before reading aloud the common racial epithet, which is used liberally in the book, a reflection of social attitudes in the mid-19th century.

So, as I'm sure you know, Mr. Gribben has talked an Alabama publisher, NewSouth books, into replacing the "n" word (used 219 times in Huck Finn, alone) with the word "slave."

The ensuing kerfuffle over this clean-up of an American classic has made me think about the late Elisabeth Scott Bocock (1901-1985).

I never met Mrs. Bocock (whom I would not deem it appropriate to call Ms. Bobcock), but I have read the fine and sprightly biography/memoir of this charming, imperious, and exasperating Richmonder written by her daughter, Mary Buford Hitz.

Mary Buford (who lives in Charlottesville) brought me a copy of Never Ask Permission when she recorded her last-month's Civic Soapbox at WMRA. I read the book with great, great pleasure; truthfully, with much more pleasure than I'd expected to.

First of all, Mary Buford is a fine writer -- reason enough, in my opinion, to read almost any book. But it's her mother who fascinated and, yes, repelled me a bit, and so kept me glued to the page. Elisabeth Scott Bocock sprawls, stomps, twirls and swirls through the book in a way vaguely reminiscent of Scarlett O'Hara.  Mrs. Bocock, however, is real Virginia history, a woman who was not only a beauty and a charmer, but also erratic and willful. And, at least within the confines of Richmond, quite powerful. According to her daughter, when Elisabeth Scott Bocock told people to do something, they generally did it.

A little background on her place in Virginia history . . .

Those of us who advocate historical preservation owe Mary Buford Hitz's mother a round of applause, for one of the main reasons significant parts of old Richmond have been rescued and restored is because Elisabeth Scott Bocock lived in, and loved, that city. For decades she was the face, the drive, and the funding of Historic Richmond Foundation, the Carriage Museum at Maymount, the Hand Workshop, and the Virginia chapter of the Nature Conservancy. And Mrs. Bocock didn't just command others, either. She hauled bricks and timbers, negotiated deals, led by example and effort, as well as position.

Two buildings are worth a thousand words, perhaps, when it comes to understanding Elisabeth Scott Bocock's view of how things worked in the world. She was born into established city wealth (Scott & Stringfellow), and lived most of her life in the house shown below (now leased by the Scott family to VCU).

 Large parts of her summers were spent at Royal Orchard, the Scott family estate on Afton Mountain, which is otherwise known as the Scott Castle.

I'm not sure it's possible for anyone raised in such architectural grandeur to come at historical preservation without an elitist viewpoint.

Mary Buford does not shy away from showing her mother's autocratic, difficult side. In Never Ask Permission, Elisabeth Scott Bocock appears frequently as a bossy, intrusive and pig-headed creature in her dealings, as well as a charming one.

And this is where the Huck Finn kerfuffle comes in.

As an old hippie, I was frequently put off by Elizabeth Scott Bocock's imperious attitude toward others. Yet this woman was what she was: a rich, entitled, brilliant, hard-working early-to-mid Twentieth Century southern woman. She lived in different times than I do; bred to employ different tactics to make things happen.

Mary Buford Hitz wisely chose not to soften her mother's high-handed edges in order to make her more appealing to modern readers. And this, for me, is what makes Never Ask Permission really, really interesting, because this is what makes it true social history. Elisabeth Scott Bocock lives on her daughter's pages as a fascinating creature of her racist, sexist times. This means that, as a reader, I get to know exactly what it  was like to be born a white, smart, moneyed, capable, and driven female in the heart of a racist, sexist century.

Isn't this what reading Huck Finn should be about, as well? Shouldn't this Mark Twain classic give us an opportunity to stomp around in the shoes of 19th Century Americans; live in those times the way its author experienced them, rather than in a way that makes us comfortable today? How can we learn from our past if we sanitize our retelling of it?

I, for one, want Elisabeth Scott Bocock and Huck Finn down on the page exactly the way they were!

Art and Politics: Thoughts on Mark Twain and Bristol Palin . . .

NPR sends out a regular missive called "Scoop," which contains mostly shop talk about NPR programming. But occasionally the Scoops include some entertaining nugget that has absolutely nothing to do with NPR.

This week's entertaining nugget was culled from a short New Yorker article about Mark Twain by Macy Halford. In it, Halford relates how, in 1905, Mr. Twain asked the President to move Thanksgiving, because its date that year, November 30th, coincided with the famous author's 70th birthday.

Mark Twain's 70th Birthday Celebration

Twain, himself,  noted the incident in his modest, 2000-page autobiography (the excerpt below was lifted from The New Yorker. 

It [Twain's birthday] arrived on the 30th of November, but Colonel Harvey* was not able to celebrate it on that date because that date had been preempted by the President to be used as Thanksgiving Day, a function which originated in New England two or three centuries ago when those people recognized that they really had something to be thankful for—annually, not oftener—if they had succeeded in exterminating their neighbors, the Indians, during the previous twelve months instead of getting exterminated by their neighbors the Indians. Thanksgiving Day became a habit, for the reason that in the course of time, as the years drifted on, it was perceived that the exterminating had ceased to be mutual and was all on the white man's side, consequently on the Lord's side, consequently it was proper to thank the Lord for it and extend the usual annual compliments. The original reason for a Thanksgiving Day has long ago ceased to exist—the Indians have long ago been comprehensively and satisfactorily exterminated and the account closed with Heaven, with the thanks due. But, from old habit, Thanksgiving Day has remained with us, and every year the President of the United States and the Governors of all the several States and the territories set themselves the task, every November, to advertise for something to be thankful for, and then they put those thanks into a few crisp and reverent phrases, in the form of a Proclamation, and this is read from all the pulpits in the land, the national conscience is wiped clean with one swipe, and sin is resumed at the old stand.

Twain by this time (writes Macy Halford) had traveled a long way—from the banks of the Mississippi to a mansion on Fifth Avenue—and had become, as New Yorkers will, unrelenting in his agendas, and brilliantly so:

[Harvey] went to Washington to try to get the President to select another day for the national Thanksgiving, and I furnished him with arguments to use which I thought persuasive and convincing, arguments which ought to persude (sic) him even to put off Thanksgiving Day a whole year—on the ground that nothing had happened during the previous twelvemonth except several vicious and inexcusable wars, and King Leopold of Belgium's usual annual slaughters and robberies in the Congo State, together with the Insurance revelations in New York, which seemed to establish the fact that if there was an honest man left in the United States, there was only one, and we wanted to celebrate his seventieth birthday.

Hmmmm. Methinks Mark Twain did not approve of the direction in which his country was heading . . .

The President whom Mr. Harvey went to see was Theodore Roosevelt.  Mark Twain was famously not a fan of the President, disagreeing with him on many points of policy, such as whether or not invading the Philippines had been a good idea and the appropriateness of America shouldering the White Man's Burden.

Yet, amazingly, many people who voted for Theodore Roosevelt read Mark Twain.

What a concept! Imagine keeping one's personal politics from taking over one's entire life. But then think for a moment about what a loss it would have been to us all if Mr. Twain's anti-Imperialist politics had eroded his book sales to the point where Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn never made the literary big-time..

Zoom with me to the present, please: Thanksgiving Eve Day 2010

The Washington Post has been running front page coverage of Bristol Palin's appearance on Dancing with the Stars. I haven't watched the show, but I have followed the Post's coverage. Consensus appears to be that a lot of the folks who voted for or against Bristol in the competition were more focused on her mother's politics than her own dancing.

These paragraphs were drawn from Lisa de Moraes' regular Post TV column.

"Are you planning on hosting a Team Bristol Monday Night Dancing Watch party?" conservative blogger Kevin DuJan asked on his blog Hillbuzz.org before the Monday show. "You ... can actually vote together and send Bristol over the top ... while sending Leftist heads into meltdown."

On the other side of the political spectrum, the liberal Web site Network for Progress urged people to get out the vote for Jennifer.

"Fight back against the Tea Party ... because they may make our news and elections into a joke but we need to draw a line at our reality competitions!" the Web site said in an e-mail, with tongue planted firmly in cheek. "Join Network For Progress as we come together to raise awareness about one of the biggest threats America faces today ... Bristol Palin winning Dancing with the Stars...."

Bristol Palin placed third in Dancing with the Stars. We'll  never know whether it was her dancing or her mother that lost the competition.

Which, in my opinion, is a real shame. And kind of scary, as well.

Wonder how Mark Twain would have fared on Dancing with the Stars?

*Mark Twain's editor at the North American Review

Comments on the Moro Massacre by Mark Twain

Martha note:   Yesterday's blog post was on the Moro Campaign, the first (and almost forgotten) armed conflict the U.S. engaged in with Muslims driven by religious beliefs. The campaign, which lasted from 1903 to 1920, begs for comparison with our current conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. 

The so-called Moro Crater Massacre took place during this campaign. Below is a short description lifted from Wikipedia.

The Moro Crater massacre is a name given to the final phase of the First Battle of Bud Dajo, a military engagement of the Philippine-American War, which took place March 10, 1906, on the isle of Jolo in the southern Philippines. Forces of the U.S. Army under the command of Major General Leonard Wood, a naval detachment comprising 540 soldiers, along with a detachment of native constabulary, armed with artillery and small firearms, attacked a village hidden in the crater of the dormant volcano Bud Dajo. More than 600 mostly unarmed Muslim Moro villagers (including many women and children) were killed by the Americans, of whom fifteen soldiers were killed and thirty-two were wounded. 

Mark Twain, at the time, was vice-president of the Anti-Imperialist League.  He wrote the following response to news of the incident.

(March 12, 1906) This incident burst upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it was as follows: A tribe of Moros, dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from them, their presence in that position was a menace. Our commander, Gen. Leonard Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six hundred, counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit of a peak or mountain twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, and very difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see the order carried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devious and difficult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not specified, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp acclivity by tackle a distance of some three hundred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the battle began. Our soldiers numbered five hundred and forty. They were assisted by auxiliaries consisting of a detachment of native constabulary in our pay -- their numbers not given -- and by a naval detachment, whose numbers are not stated. But apparently the contending parties were about equal as to number -- six hundred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hundred men, women and children in the bottom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, 50 feet.

Gen. Wood's order was, "Kill or capture the six hundred."

The battle began-it is officially called by that name-our forces firing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of precision; the savages furiously returning the fire, probably with brickbats-though this is merely a surmise of mine, as the weapons used by the savages are not nominated in the cablegram. Heretofore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly; also ineffectual trade-muskets when they had any.

The official report stated that the battle was fought with prodigious energy on both sides during a day and a half, and that it ended with a complete victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives.

General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been. "Kill or capture those savages." Apparently our little army considered that the "or" left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there - the taste of Christian butchers.

The official report quite properly extolled and magnified the "heroism" and "gallantry" of our troops; lamented the loss of the fifteen who perished, and elaborated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suffered injury, and even minutely and faithfully described the nature of the wounds, in the interest of future historians of the United States. It mentioned that a private had one of his elbows scraped by a missile, and the private's name was mentioned. Another private had the end of his nose scraped by a missile. His name was also mentioned - by cable, at one dollar and fifty cents a word.

Next day's news confirmed the previous day's report and named our fifteen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.

Let us now consider two or three details of our military history. In one of the great battles of the Civil War ten per cent. of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Waterloo, where four hundred thousand men were present on the two sides, fifty thousand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leaving three hundred and fifty thousand sound and all right for further adventures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic comedy called the Cuban War was played, we summoned two hundred and fifty thousand men. We fought a number of showy battles, and when the war was over we had lost two hundred and sixty-eight men out of our two hundred and fifty thousand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just fourteen times as many by the gallantry of the army doctors in the hospitals and camps. We did not exterminate the Spaniards -- far from it. In each engagement we left an average of two per cent. of the enemy killed or crippled on the field.

Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded-counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred -- including women and children -- and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

Now then, how has it been received? The splendid news appeared with splendid display-heads in every newspaper in this city of four million and thirteen thousand inhabitants, on Friday morning. But there was not a single reference to it in the editorial columns of any one of those newspapers. The news appeared again in all the evening papers of Friday, and again those papers were editorially silent upon our vast achievement. Next day's additional statistics and particulars appeared in all the morning papers, and still without a line of editorial rejoicing or a mention of the matter in any way. These additions appeared in the evening papers of that same day (Saturday) and again without a word of comment. In the columns devoted to correspondence, in the morning and evening papers of Friday and Saturday, nobody said a word about the "battle." Ordinarily those columns are teeming with the passions of the citizen; he lets no incident go by, whether it be large or small, without pouring out his praise or blame, his joy or his indignation about the matter in the correspondence column. But, as I have said, during those two days he was as silent as the editors themselves. So far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion -- that was the President of the United States. All day Friday he was as studiously silent as the rest. But on Saturday he recognized that his duty required him to say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. If I know President Roosevelt -- and I am sure I do -- this utterance cost him more pain and shame than any other that ever issued from his pen or his mouth. I am far from blaming him. If I had been in his place my official duty would have compelled me to say what he said. It was a convention, an old tradition, and he had to be loyal to it. There was no help for it. This is what he said:

Washington, March 10. Wood, Manila:- I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag. (Signed) Theodore Roosevelt.

His whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms - and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines - that is to say, they had dishonored it.

The next day, Sunday, -- which was yesterday -- the cable brought us additional news - still more splendid news -- still more honor for the flag. The first display-head shouts this information at us in the stentorian capitals: "WOMEN SLAIN MORO SLAUGHTER."

"Slaughter" is a good word. Certainly there is not a better one in the Unabridged Dictionary for this occasion

The next display line says:

"With Children They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together."

They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children -- merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we know and love.

The next heading blazes with American and Christian glory like to the sun in the zenith:

"Death List is Now 900."

I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now!

Martha note #2: FYI, Lexington-based writer James R. Arnold, author of Jungle of Snakes: A Century of Counterinsurgency Warfare from the Philippines to Iraq, will publish a book on the Moro Campaigns next year.