Radio Script #1082

Little Talks on Common Things
April 11, 1976

In this Bicentennial year, it is well to note a phase of the movement for American independence that certainly has a lesson for us in 1976.

It is often said that the major issue behind the Revolution was taxation without representation. The uprisings in many of the colonies against the stamp act, the tax on tea and other imports are well recorded in the history books. What is too
often overlooked is the colonists’ resentment at government interference in their private lives, especially with their pursuits of occupation and trade.

The promoters of American independence, many of them born not here but in England – though native born sons like Washington, Adams, and Jefferson were leaders – came to a firm conviction that economic freedom, as expounded in England by Adam Smith, was essential to life in the New World. If there was to be economic prosperity on this side of the Atlantic, the British colonists here must be free to develop their own commerce and levy their own taxes. The founding fathers who drew the U. S. Constitution firmly believed that that government is best which governs least. Thus the Declaration of Independence, eleven years before the Constitution, was actually a series of protests against government intervention in the colonists’ economic lives. The Declaration complained of swarms of British soldiers eating out of the substances of the people, of troops quartered in colonists’ homes, cutting off their trade with all parts of the world, and imposing taxes on them without their consent.

Now, 200 years after men risked their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to sign that Declaration, how free are we today from government control? Of course, we know that much of this control has come in the interest of alleged equality and of social welfare. But it is hard to make the great majority of Americans understand that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Not only must the federal funds that flow into the state and the communities come from taxes on the people, for money isn’t something that grows on trees; it is also true that if Uncle Sam is going to furnish individuals or public groups with funds, he is going to exercise increasing control over our dollars, no matter how we get them.

This is not an argument to do away with Social Security, to stop all federal welfare programs. It is rather an argument to be as alert as were the founding fathers about control of our lives by government.

In fact, we Americans can never seem to learn the value of Aristotle’s golden mean – never too much or too little. Somewhere between complete laissez faire in our economic relations, and extensive government control, there must lie a sensible, advantageous golden mean.

If we want the Communist way of state control of individuals and families from cradle to grave, that is one thing. But do you know many of your neighbors who would like to live in Russia, with most individual rights so precious to Americans there denied? If we don’t want that, let us beware of getting it by a kind of creeping paralysis of our economic and social freedoms. After the government colossus gets his nose in the tent, he too soon takes it over.

So much for letting off bicentennial steam. Now for a reference to a Revolutionary woman who lived in Maine, but of whom you may never have heard.

On a knoll in the western part of the little town of Freeman in Franklin County, not far from either Strong or Phillips, is the grave of a woman who had a part in the Boston Tea Party more than 200 years ago. The grave has been properly marked by the DAR through its chapter in Kingfield.

Eight cement posts set in cobblestones are entwined with cable chains, enclosing the grave. In one corner stands a tamarack tree, planted at the time of the woman’s death in 1818. Originally marked by a rapidly eroding slate slab, the grave was nearly forgotten for 105 years, until it was properly dedicated by the DAR.

The woman was Elizabeth Nichols Dyar, wife of Joseph Dyar, a patriot sea captain of the American Revolution. Though several times arrested by the British, he persisted in carrying supplies to the Continental Army. He was indeed a smuggler
under British law, but after the Declaration of Independence, the colonists insisted that British law did not apply to their trade. What Dyar was doing was defying British claim to make Americans trade when and how the government in London dictated. Dyar’s wife Elizabeth was one of a group of three young wives who mixed and applied the paint to disguise the members of the Tea Party as Indian braves.

After that eventful night of December 16, 1773, with increasing numbers of British troops being garrisoned in Boston, it was dangerous for Elizabeth Dyar to stay in that town, especially when her husband was often away at sea. So friends saw to it that she and her children were smuggled through the British lines to her father’s home in Malden. A friendly butcher, who regularly did business with the British garrison, was persuaded to put her and the children under loose straw in his cart, then place pieces of beef on top of the straw. In that way she reached Malden safely.

Elizabeth Dyar was 22 years old at the time of the Tea Party. She had married sea captain Joseph Dyar in 1771, had one child and was soon to have another when the Tea Party was planned.

In 1806, a third of a century after the Tea Party, Elizabeth’s oldest son, named Joseph after his father, came to Phillips, Maine, as a Free Baptist minister. He remained there until his death in 1819, soon after serving as a delegate to the Maine
constitutional convention in Portland. Elizabeth Dyar came in 1818 to live in Phillips with her son Joseph, but after his death went to live with another son, who had settled in the adjoining town of Freeman. In 1802 John Dyar had built his cabin further north than any other in that newly settled region. Before his mother joined him, he had built a frame house, and
after her death he accumulated enough substance to warrant building one of the finest homes in town.

In the little cemetery near the old frame house was placed the body of Elizabeth Dyar when she died in 1818.

And that is the story of a woman, in her last years a resident of Maine, who had part in one of the historic events that led to the American Revolution.

Now let us turn to another subject – conditions in Maine when it was a new state more than 150 years ago. When the great geographer Moses Greenleaf produced his 1828 Gazetteer of Main, he made an interesting prediction. He wrote: “The time must arrive when the surplus population of our state must look for its support not from the cultivation of land, for there will be none to spare, but to a superior degree of industry, economy and frugality. When that time comes, not agriculture but manufacturing will be the livelihood of a majority of our people.”

When Greenleaf wrote those words, five-sixths of all working persons in Maine were engaged in farming, but as early as 1828 Greenleaf, who knew Maine better than any other individual of his time, was convinced that such a situation could not last. Bear in mind that his time was many years before the development of even horse-drawn farm machines, to say nothing of the modern motor equipment. In 1828, not even an efficient mowing machine had been invented.

The exodus of Maine people to the prairies of the mid-west had not then begun, but enough persons had already been attracted to cause Greenleaf to make this comment: “It is incredible that, with all Maine’s advantages, people will, in any large numbers, move to the west, where they must still encounter hostile Indians. Rich prairie soil is no inducement to risk one’s scalp.”

Greenleaf continued: “The time is not far distant when manufacturers will provide more employment for Maine workers than they now find on the farms. Nor is lumbering the answer. The vast stands of Maine timber will rapidly diminish until
someday there will be none for export. It will be a diversity of factions, supplied from the farms and the forests that will make Maine prosperous.”

Now that was an interesting prediction. Manufacturing does today far exceed farming in this state, both in number of employees and in dollar production. The connection between agriculture and manufacturing may not be so close as Greenleaf foresaw it, but it does exist. For instance, factory workers do have some dependence upon the dairy farms.

But on one important point the great geographer was wrong. The supply of lumber has been far from exhausted. Reforestation has helped, but even without it there would still be in Maine at least a hundred trees for every one person. In fact, in 1976, more than 85% of the entire acreage of Maine is still forest.

Furthermore, what Greenleaf could not foresee was the nation’s tremendous demand for paper and other products of ground pulp. His Gazetteer appeared 50 years before Martin Keyes succeeded in making dishes from molded pulp. To Greenleaf, an entire thriving town like Millinocket, based on the newsprint industry, would have been unthinkable.

Even the revered Maine geographer of the early 19th century was not infallible. Like everyone else, he would make mistakes. But he did make it clear to Maine folk 150 years ago that good as Maine farms were, without developing manufacturing industries Maine could not grow and prosper.

Year: 1976