Radio Script #46
Little Talks On Common Things
December 11, 1949
Last week I said I would some day tell you what Mr. Jolicoeur’s old MalteBrun Geography says about Maine. The very first section of that old book is devoted to our state, which was only thirteen years old when the book was published. “Maine”, says the book, “has very long winters. The cold is extremely severe, and great quantities of snow fall. It has extensive sea coast with many harbors. The people, therefore, have generally neglected agriculture and manufactures, and devoted themselves to commerce. Many of the inhabitants of Maine are engaged in cutting down the forest trees, and converting them into lumber, which is shipped to the West Indies and exchanged for sugar and molasses. ” This old geography pays due respect to what was once another prominent industry of Maine — never so important as lumber, but one which gained our state considerable fame. It was an industry which people of the Kennebec valley knew very well — the harvesting and shipping of ice.
“The people of Maine”, says the old geography, “occasionally ship cargoes of ice to New Orleans and the West Indies. During the winter the extreme cold in this state creates large masses of ice in the rivers; a ship is easily supplied with a cargo of it, and in the sultry climate of the West Indies nothing can be more grateful. The ice is exchanged for sugar, molasses, spirits and other products of those islands.” “Portland”, says this 1833 geography, “has 12, 600 inhabitants. Bath is a considerable town near the mouth of the Kennebec River with 3,800 people. Augusta with 4,000 has a fine state house of granite. Machias is a place of considerable trade with 1,000 inhabitants. Brunswick is the seat of Brunswick College, a flourishing literary institution; at Waterville is a college supported by the Baptists.” in 1833. Thus was Maine presented to American school children.
Mr. Robert Gay of Silver Street tells me that the old steamboat City of Waterville seemed to have a habit of going aground. A clipping from the Biddeford Journal, dated July 9, but unfortunately not naming the year, states that the City of Waterville, under Captain James Brown, lodged on a ledge off Stag Island in the Saco River. The passengers, numbering 125 and badly frightened, were taken off in row boats and brought back to Biddeford in wagons. The next day the steamer was pulled off the ledge by the tug “Joe Baker”. Mr. Gay thinks the City of Waterville was purchased by Biddeford interests before it was finally sold for use in the South, but he is not sure. Perhaps someone has information-on that point~ and perhaps someone also can tell us the year was· it 1891 or 1892 — when the City of Waterville went aground in the Saco River.
A little more than a year ago we were talking about cattle pounds. Frank McCallum of Park Street tells me that the cattle pound in Jefferson is 120 years old; that it was built in 1829 by Silas Noyes for the munificent sum of 28 dollars. Since we last talked about cattle pounds I have learned, to my amazement, that there used to be one within the city limits of Waterville. I am told that a pound long stood on Western Avenue (then Mill Street) just east of the Messalonskee, near where Corson’s market was not long ago located. Just east of that spot and running along the avenue for some distance toward Elm Street, was located Waterville’s first cemetery, according to Gene Crawford, who has a lot of accurate information about old scenes and landmarks in this vicinity. Mrs. Eugene Crawford, by the way, has one of the most unusual collections it has ever been my privilege to see. It is a collection of newspaper cartoons of the Spanish-American War of 1898. A lot of people keep newspaper clippings, but altogether too many such people fail to date their clippings. For instance that old clipping from the Biddeford Journal about the steamer City of Waterville is not dated. That’s why we’re having a little trouble to find out in what year the incident happened.
But Mrs. Crawford’s collection of cartoons are meticulously dated and are carefully arranged in chronological order. Here in pictured form is the story of aroused public opinion for a war that ought never to have been fought. In these pictures are recalled the cry “Remember the Maine”; the charge at San Juan Hill; Dewey at Manila Bay; the naval exploit of Hobson’s Choice; and the sordid profiteering contracts that provided the rotting meat and the moldy flour to the camp at Chicamauga. I doubt if there is another such collection in existence. Certainly I have never heard of, much less seen, another complete collection of Spanish War cartoons from the sinking of the Maine to the treaty of peace.
Did you ever hear of the Waterville bank robbery? About the time when Jesse James and his gang were terrorizing the Middle West, robbing banks and trains and payrolls, robbers not so glamorous nor so spectacular descended upon Watervil.le. But unlike the James gang, they didn’t get away with any loot. On the evening of November 22, 1876 a lecture was scheduled in the Town Hall, now the notorious old armory about to be torn down. Early in the evening four men left their team at Luke Brown’s on the corner of Pleasant and Mill Streets, saying they had come to town to attend the lecture. About half past ten Augustus Wood, the town night watCh, was approached by these men, who blindfolded and gagged him, then led him to a shed in the rear of St. Francis church.
Leaving him gagged and bound, the men took his keys and returned to the bank. Two of the gang were climbing up to a rear window when George Vigue, a private watchman, came toward the bank looking for Watchman Wood. L. D. Carver, afterward Maine’s famous state librarian, had a room in the rear of the building. He was awakened and heard one of the robbers say, “There’s that cussed night watchman. Let’s get him out of the way first.” Taking his pistol — how he happened to have one handy the historian does not say Carver rushed down stairs. Vigue, accosted by the robbers, broke away, as Carver said afterwards “hollering like a loon”. The two robbers rushed back to their team, were joined by their two companions, and dashed off out of town. A general alarm was rung. It was a student at Coburn Institute who found Watchman Wood tied up in the shed — none other than J. Frederick Hill. I wonder if anything happened in Waterville that J. F. Hill didn’t have a part in, always on the right side. The next morning Constable Levi Dow and young Fred Hill followed the trail as far as Augusta. For many years afterward Dr. Hill quoted the remarkmade by that grand old schoolmaster, Dr. Hanson, then head of the Institute, when Constable Dow came to the school to get Hill to go on the chase the morning after the robbery. “Well, Mr. Hill”, said Dr. Hanson, “if you think you had rather be a detective than a scholar, you may go, and your present education is entirely sufficient for that business.” Now, 73 years after the event, we may modestly ask, what would Alan Pinkerton and J. Edgar Hoover say about that? Be a good detective?
Does it take no education to among the common things about folks in Maine is the general belief in other parts of the country that we are old fashioned and ultra-conservative. If to be old fashioned is to uphold the cherished American freedoms we ought to be proud of it. In recent weeks, as I have traveled a bit about New England and New York, I have noted th.t a lot of people are beginning to express the same apprehensions that disturb us old fashioned folks in Maine. People are disturbed about the continuance of deficit spending in good times. The economists whose logic is most persuasive and whose evidence is most conclusive are those who have long told us that government treasuries at every level — city, state and nation — should accumulate surplus in times of prosperity and spend it to provide employment and prevent social misery in times of adversity.
Now the Maine Yankee has been brought up to believe that you cannot get something for nothing; that somehow, at some time, by somebody, everything we get must be paid for. It is grounded deep in our Maine philosophy that Uncle Sam is not a mystical Santa Claus, that the billions of dollars poured out of the government till is really your money and mine. For in this democracy we, the people, are the government. It is our money that is being so lavishly spent.
Everyone knows that a primary need in our American economy indeed in the whole world economy is to increase the purchasing power of the people. But purchasing power is not increased by taking more and more money out of the pockets of the people for government purposes. Every step in the great federal program of so-called welfare costs money. That money does not grow on trees; it must come from taxes. There are no federal aid funds except those taken from our pockets. In the last analysis government can’t do things for people. What we get doled out to us in one form has to be paid for in some other form.
It was my privilege last week to hear a powerful address by Harold Stassen, former governor of Minnesota and now president of the University of Pennsylvania. with straightforward courage, pulling no punches, Mr. Stassen pointed out the dangers in the expanding program of federal aid, even federal aid to education. He made it clear that, as philosophers long ago pointed out, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The surest way to lose our liberties in this land of the free is to let it stop being the home of the brave — of men and women brave enough to fight even what today sometimes looks like a losing battle against the power-mad bureaucrats. The Government of the united States is not the president and his cabinet, not the fellows who tell the farmers how much they can plant, not the inspectors who dictate the business man’s procedures, not the FBI protecting on the one hand and prying on the other, not the tax collector nor the welfare worker. The Government of the United states is the people, and if we ever forget that fact American democracy is doomed.
Now we folks who burst into print or talk over the air waves about the American way of life are naturally derided and hated ‘by the give-away boys. They say we favor the robber barons, the exploiters of labor, the slave-makers, and those who grind humanity into poverty and starvation. So let’s set the record straight. Everybody wants a state of welfare. We want it just as much as the other fellow. No people in this whole world have ever done so much by voluntary contributions, not only of money, but of time and effort, to alleviate human misery as have the people of the United States. Of course we want to see other people besides ourselves decently fed and clothed and housed.
The difference between our thinking and that of the give-away boys is that we refuse to admit that the only way to achieve a state of welfare is through the welfare state. In fact we are trying to point out that the end of the welfare state is just the opposite from a state of welfare. It is indeed a state of bankruptcy. A state of welfare means a state of security with fears of want and suffering reduced — and no state of security comes from a bankrupt state. In fact the biggest single factor in the rise of Hitler and Nazism in Germany was the collapse of German currency in the 1920’s when it took a Wheelbarrow load of paper money to buy a loaf of bread. A nation of free, unregimented people that has built up by private enterprise and under the capitalist system the highest living standard of any people on the earth can and will provide for all of its deserving population a state of welfare without taking the road to both bureaucracy and bankruptcy that is the welfare state.
Year: 1949