Radio Script #418

Little Talks on Common Things

April 26, 1959

A few days ago I chanced across an old program of a Colby Commencement. Actually it was the Commencement of Waterville College of 1855, twelve years before the institution took the name of Colby. I was particularly interested in this program because one of the graduating seniors was William S. Heath, the man for whom Waterville’s Grand Army post was later named. His part in the commencement program was designated as a Poem, of the Rank of an English Oration. Its title was “The Year of Struggles”.

In the 1850’s it was usual for the geographic experience of a college senior to be rather narrow. Some of those members of the Colby Class of 1855 had never been outside their native state of Maine, and few of its several Massachusetts members had been outside New England. But William S. Heath had enjoyed much wider travel. Readers of Kennebec Yesterdays may recall that it was this young man who had accompanied his father, Solyman Heath, the lawyer, by covered wagon train from Independence, Missouri to the gold fields of California. When he recited about “The Year of Struggles” on that Commencement Day in 1855, he had seen some real struggles. He had encountered the hazards of plains and mountains and rushing streams; had been in danger from Indian raids; had seen a dozen members of his party die of the dreaded cholera. He had seen the lawlessness and had felt the inflation of the reckless mining camps. And on top of that, at San Francisco he had boarded a ship for China and spent nearly a year in the Celestial Kingdom. When William Heath returned home and entered Waterville College, he had surely seen the world.

Intending to pursue his father’s profession, William Heath was admitted to the Maine Bar in 1856 and practiced here in Waterville until the outbreak of the Civil War. At the very first call for troops he recruited in Waterville and its immediate vicinity Company H of the Third Maine Regiment, and went out as its captain. He rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel and saw heroic service in several battles before his division, as part of the Army of the Potomac was in what history has called the Seven Days Battles of June, 1862. Determined to drive McClellan’s Army from the Virginia peninsula, Lee sent Jackson to attack the left flank while he struck at the Union center. Alerted by an untimely cavalry raid by Jeb Stuart, McClellan withdrew to the protection of Union gunboats on the James River. Then Lee struck the Union right at Mechanicsville, which started seven successive days of heavy fighting at different points. On the second day the combat area was Gaines’ Mill and there, leading a charge against the enemy, Col. William S. Heath met his death.

I found other names in that old commencement program to interest me, besides the name of Heath. One of his classmates was Rufus Knight Marriner, the only person of that name to attend the college before I myself entered in 1909. Although my branch of the Cape Elizabeth Marriners has’ never been able to establish relationship with the Belfast and Searsmont branch of the family, we have always assumed that somehow both branches must be related to that first John Marriner who came to Boston in 1680. But whether Rufus Marriner who came to Waterville College from Searsmont in 1851 was a relative of my great-grandfather, Joseph Marriner, who lies buried on Meeting House Hill in South Portland, I do not know. Upon his graduation from college Rufus became an assistant to that great teacher, James Hanson, at the Boys High School in Portland. Like William Heath, he then studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1859. Unlike Heath, he did not serve in the Civil War, but like Heath he did go to California, where he was both lawyer and teacher at Santa Rosa, Sacramento and San Francisco. It was in the Golden Gate city that he died in 1875, at the early age of 44.

Except for William Heath, the best known man to get his diploma on that August day in 1855 was Larkin Dunton, who from 1872 to 1899 was Headmaster of the famous Boston Normal School. Another classmate was Reuben Foster, who became a prominent Waterville attorney and served in the Maine Legislature from 1866 to 1874, where he was both Speaker of the House and President of the Senate.

In the same class was Samuel Leavitt, who went to Indiana and served in the Civil War as captain of the 65th Indiana Volunteers. John Parrington went to Geneva, New York, where he enlisted, and like Heath rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. William Henry Baldwin went to Ohio, and in the war rose to even higher rank, that of brigadier-general. To California went Nathan Blanchard, on to success and fortune. He became known as the citrus fruit baron of the Santa Paula Valley.

It was left for Heath’s classmate, Oliver Gray, to have the oddest fate of any member of the Colby Class of 1855. Born in the Maine town of Jefferson, he had the same kind of itchy foot as his other Colby classmates. So after graduation, off he went to Minnesota, then in 1860 went down to Arkansas to teach in a female seminary. The war came and what do you think happened to Oliver Gray? That Yankee from Jefferson, Maine became a colonel in the Confederate Army.

I tell you it is always interesting to pick up one of those commencement programs of a hundred years ago.

Someone has suggested that this program ought to be called “Horse and Buggy Days”, which leads me to comment tonight on that old expression itself. We hear it used today usually in derision. When someone makes objection to a new proposal or is opposed to new legislation, we say “He wants to go back to the horse and buggy days”. Do you think it is unfair to your grandchildren for our own generation to pile up mountains of local, state and national debt? Do you happen to believe that a nation, like an individual, should pay his debts honestly and not in depreciated money? Do you think a family should try very hard to spend a little less than it earns? If that is what you believe, you belong in the horse and buggy days.

Roughly speaking, those days were the years of the 19th century. Of course the horse had been around for a long time, but not until nearly 1800 did the buggy become prominent. Its early model was a two-wheeled vehicle drawn by a single horse. Before 1820 it had been given a hood on top. By the time it reached the United States, it could be either two or four wheeled, and had either shafts or a tongue that is, for one or for two horses. It often had a folding top, let down in fair weather and turned up in rain. Side curtains could be snapped on also, and some drivers even had a storm curtain with is in glass window, with protective slots for the reins. Attached to the top, this curtain came down over the dashboard, making the driver as snug as a bug in a rug — and that too is a good 19th century expression.

What about those horse and buggy days? Were they so benighted and dismal as we are led to believe? Let’s take a brief, panoramic look at them. They were the days of James Watt and Robert Fulton and Peter Cooper — days when men dreamed of ways to harness the explosive power of steam. Those days saw Corliss perfect the reciprocating engine and DeLaval invent the steam turbine.

They were the days also of Volta and Farraday and Kelvin, who turned the electrical theories of Galvani and Franklin to practical use. The horse and buggy days saw the coming of the telegraph and the laying of the Atlantic cable and before they were over, Alexander Graham Bell had spoken over the world’s first telephone. In the midst of horse-drawn buggies, Edison gave us electric light, Marconi perfected the wireless telegraph, and the Curies discovered the magic of radium, and on cylinders and disks were made man’s first recordings of the human voice.

All the time that sail was changing to steam and the tiny Mayflowers were becoming the great ocean liners, people kept going to the wharves in buggies. While the crude, wood-burning locomotive of Stephenson’s day was changing to the giant Mogul, it was in buggies that passengers still went to the depots. In agriculture the transformation was tremendous; from the scythe to the mowing machine; from the simple, laborious processes of harvesting to the giant steam combine. In cities came the trolley car and the elevator. On the railroads came the Pullman car, automatic coupling, the air brake, and the refrigerator car. In short, during the horse and buggy days, more progress was made toward speed, comfort, health and diffusion of general benefits to all classes of people than had occurred in all the previous ages of human experience.

At the end of the War of 1812, about the time when the buggy became common in America, our nation was heavily in debt. But so strongly did the people of the horse and buggy age believe in solvency and balanced budgets that by 1837 the national treasury had a surplus which was distributed to the states. Of course there were financial panics and hard times repeatedly through the century. Of course both families and nation more than once got into debt. But to operate on a permanent deficit basis, to keep piling debt on top of debt, was something that just didn’t make sense. It was repugnant both to reason and to morals.

Now don’t misunderstand me. I have no desire to go back to the horse and buggy days. I couldn’t go back if I would, and I wouldn’t go back if I could. Nobody in his senses wants to go backward. We must always go forward to new adventure and new achievements. But it does not follow that what were considered virtues in the past are vices in the present. Sputniks do not alter the value of honesty. Thermonuclear bombs do not obliterate the ideal of human freedom. Guided missiles do not destroy the truth that neither a man nor a nation can continue indefinitely to spend more than it takes in.

Do you remember those old lithographs of the American home? They often depicted a parlor scene in a small American town. The windows were heavily draped against the wall was a horse-hair sofa; in one corner the parlor organ; on the walls hung the family portraits; a round-bellied wood stove furnished the heat and over the door was the motto “God Bless Our Home”. That kind of picture appears occasionally today as a sort of cartoon, intended to amuse us.

But there is something about it that does not amuse me, because it typifies an era that we ought not to forget. Perhaps never again will our country see such an era of peace and comfort, so free from fatal worry, so filled with real security, so full of freedom. Of course the man who owned that parlor of the picture had a small income by today’s standards. But it was his, and he saved a little of it. Perhaps he was just a farmer, but, if so, the government didn’t tell him what he could and couldn’t plant. He would have been horrified at the idea of Uncle Sam paying him for not planting wheat. Perhaps he just ran a country store. Then nobody in Washington shed crocodile tears over his plight as a small businessman, and nobody in either Washington or Augusta told him how to run his business. He didn’t have to be a tax collector from his customers. Of course the occupant of that parlor had his problems. He knew plenty of hardships. But he actually enjoyed far greater security than he could have today. Again let me repeat, we aren’t going back to the horse and buggy days.

But one thing we can do. We can stop referring to them with a sneer of derision. The horse and buggy days were not the Dark Ages. They were a great and glowing era, rich in their expanding benefits for mankind.

Year: 1959