Radio Script #15
Little Talks On Common Things
February 20, 1949
This is National Security Week, and we want to put in a good word for the Reserve Officers Association. They are a group who take our national security seriously, but not be1igerently. Some of them have been in combat in two world wars, and they will bend every effort to see that we escape a third. Of Maine’s 3,000 reserve officers — those who accepted commissions on separation from service — only about 700 belong to the Association. Many more ought to join. Everyone of our country’s wars has been fought by citizen soldiers. Our Reserve Officers are citizen soldiers who are enough interested in the nation’s security to be willing to give time to the military during peace years in order to be qualified for active duty if emergency comes.
We owe much to the R.O.A. for the speed with which we could prepare after Pearl Harbor. The Reserve Officers then gave us a substantial part of our military leadership. Ranging in grade from lieutenant to lieutenant general, these officers held key positions in all combat units.
The Reserve Officers are in no sense a substitute for the Regular Army or for the National Guard. They are an important and effective supplement to those units. The Reserve Officers would in no way disparage the Regular Army. They have no quarrel with the West Point men. They share completely the sentiment of General Eisenhower, who recently said: “The wartime army of the United States was a mass expression of America. No one questioned whether a man was a regular or reserve or national guardsman or selectee or volunteer; whether an officer came from west Point or the Reserve or O.C.S. or directly from civilian life. All of them together, rising above minor differences, built a magnificent unity.” Good luck to the Reserve Officers Association in its efforts to build a more effective organization.
This is definitely not one of those “view with alarm” programs. We neither prophecy disaster nor rave about the terrible ways of modern life. But after all, we are human, and occasionally some condition that we consider bad does raise our wrath. That is just what these miscalled comic books do to us. Either we are getting older and more crotchety, or those comics are really getting worse and worse. Horror, murder, torture and the lowest motives of life are their common subjects. Their so-called Characters are often utterly devoid of Character. Their ethics wouldn’t meet the approval even of gangsters. Yet they deluge the news stands in ever increasing numbers and then go into the hands of our boys and girls.
I was interested when my friend, the famous sea writer, Jim Connolly, was appointed a few weeks ago as chairman of a Boston commission to control those publications and try to get the worst of them off the news stands. Then someone dug up an old ordinance forbidding any municipal position to go to anyone over seventy years old. That was all right with eighty year old Jim.
He had never read a comic book in his life. But something vastly better could be said of him. In all his hundreds of thousands of words in his several hundred stories, Jim Connolly had never written a line unfit for any man, woman or child to read. The comic books would arouse his anger and disgust when he did take a look at them.
Now I do not defend the Boston method. That city’s record of ridiculous censorship is too well known. To censor a publication in anyone community is only to give it free advertising, at best only drive it under cover into a kind of black market. The better way is to show an aroused public opinion that makes reputable newsdea1ers unwilling to sell these items and reputable homes unwilling to have them in the house. But the best way of all is to encourage the picture technique of the comics for worthwhile publishing. Picture stories just as interesting and far more valuable are Ji.e.iilg produced,Let us give those little books our hearty support.
Such, for instance, is a sixteen page paper book, made exactly like the comics with colored pictures and all of the text issuing from the mouths of the pictured characters. This book is one of a series called “Adventures”, produced for the General Electric Company by General Comics, Inc. This particular one is called “Adventures Inside the Atom”, and tells in this forceful, simple fashion the scientific facts about nuclear energy and the making of the atom bomb. The way to kill the comic books is to fight t;hem with their own weapon. Why can’t the churches do for religion and the schools themselves do for general education what the General Electric Company is already doing for science?
As we celebrate this week the birthday of George Washington, we are reminded how his military career and his presidency had obscured the real Washington until Douglas Freeman brought to light much of the forgotten past in the first two volumes of what will, without question, be the great, definitive biography of the Father of His Country. Those first two volumes deal only with the young Washington, before he came to fame. They reveal, however, a central fact about the man that ought to give us pause in these days when so many Jeremiahs predict the imminence of social revolution.
We hear much today about human rights versus property rights. In some quarters it seems as if to own property is to be called an economic royalist. Not long ago I listened to a man who talked as if one who had property rights had thereby forfeited his human rights. I hope no one is so stupid as to deny the supremacy of human rights, but it does not follow that there is no such thing as property rights.
So I contend it is good for us to realize the central, controlling motif in the life of George Washington. That motif was land — the ownership and control of land. Washington inherited land, he surveyed and prospected land, he cultivated land, he built on land, he bequeathed land — but he seldom sold land.
Washington was anything but a selfish man; he gave years of his life to the public welfare. He never tried to amass a fortune by his land; he simply loved it. For the soil of Virginia was to him the soul of America. He would fight to protect that soil; he would resist its exploitation by an unsympathetic king and parliament; he would leave his beloved acres to head a strong central government in order that the security of those acres might be better preserved. In these days when it is somewhat fashionable to belittle property rights, let us not forget George Washington, the man of property.
Remarks about our two greatest presidents, whose birthdays fall in this month, remind us of the log cabin myth. Because log cabins were common on the Kentucky frontier, from the days of Daniel Boone until long after Lincoln’s boyhood, we have always associated the log cabin with American colonial life. Most people think it is the way the first settlers built their homes at Jamestown and Plymouth, at New Amsterdam and Salem. But such is not the fact.
The Jamestown settlers lived in tents, caves and what were called “English Wigwams”, patterned after the huts of Welsh miners and somewhat resembling Indian wigwams. Those structures were made of woodbine or grapevine, steamed and bent to form a shape like the frametop of a covered wagon. The frame was then covered with thatch. The temporary dwellings during the first awful winter at Plymouth were built much the same way.
But within a year at both Plymouth and Jamestown better and more permanent houses had been built. And they were built like the only kind of houses these English settlers knew. They did not know the log cabin — they had never seen one — but they did know the English frame houses of timber, boards and clapboards.
Why do so many people think the Pilgrims lived in log cabins? Because, as so often happens, the error got into a widely read book. In 1840 Rev. Alexander Young published his “Chronicles of New England”. He quoted an old Plymouth diary as reporting that a great storm of February 4, 1621 “caused much daubing of our houses to fall down”. Now in young I s time — the first half of the 19th century — the space between logs of a cabin was chinked with moss and “daubed” with clay to keep it in place. That was what “daubing” meant to Young. But in the journal kept by the great pilgrims, Bradford and Winslow, the word daubing had the English Elizabethan meaning of the more modern word “plaster”. The daubing that fell down in the storm of 1621 was clay plastering, smeared over the clapboards or interior sheathing of the Plymouth houses.
The log cabin first appeared in America in 1638, introduced when the Swedish West India Company sent settlers to Delaware. It was the kind of house the Swedes knew at home and was just what was needed for rapid spread of settlements in a land of no saw mills and few tools. Because it was so quickly built and so strong against the elements, the English settlers copied it as they moved westward across the Appalachians. Perhaps the Scotch-Irish, even more than the English, were responsible for the log cabin’s wide use for they quickly adopted it when they first came to Maine and Vermont. and they carried it with them to the Ohio Valley. There were log cabins in Gorham, Maine at the time of the French and Indian Wars, built by Hugh McLellan and his fellow Scotsmen before the building of the big McLellan House on Fort Hill, where the Gorham State Teachers College now stands.
In 1840, twenty years before Abraham Lincoln was to become President and when he was an unknown young lawyer in the Illinois Legislature, the log cabin became a sacred symbol. It was the holy embodiment of the campaign that made Harrison President of the united States. The symbol seems to have originated as a boomerang launched by the opposition, for a Democratic newspaper said that Harrison would be out of place in the civilized White House, that he would be more at home in a log cabin with plenty of hard cider. The Whigs eagerly seized upon this slur and turned it to their own advantage. Harrison became, the first log cabin candidate. “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” became a long-remembered campaign slogan. To be born in a log cabin became such a mark of popularity for any political candidate that Daniel Webster, speaking at Saratoga in August, 1840 apologized for not being born in one.
Let us not forget what American democracy really means. A nation that, by popular acclaim, can elevate to its highest office both a Washington and a Lincoln, proclaims that both the humble log cabin and the wealthy Virginia acres belong in American life.
Any speaker is embarrassed when he makes a slip, when he “pulls a boner”. So I wonder if it wouldn’t be smart to plan for one ahead of time. It is practically certain that some evening on this broadcast we Shall make a mistake, misquote a passage, ascribe a quotation to the wrong person, or perhaps misstate a fact. If we do, we Shall try to make amends, but, we trust, without the formality and pomposity that marks such corrections in the halls of Congress. Frankly, I don’t like to see the columns of the Congressional Record cluttered with stuff like this.
On February 7 Senator Tobey of New Hampshire rose to speak on the pending bill concerning the special connni ttee on small business. He said: “Mr. president, I have listened to the remarks of my friend, the minority leader, the Senator from Nebraska, with great interest. To me, after listening for some time, I think they form a perfect illustration of Shakespeare’s reference to ‘linked sweetness long drawn out.l. I think the Senator from Nebraska had his fingers crossed in some of the points he made, and I propose to uncross his fingers for a few minutes”.
Now Senator Tobey had slipped up on his quotation, a very natural and pardonable slip. Why not let it go? But, no, they don’t do things that way in the Senate of the united States. The next day, February 8, the Senate had scarcely opened when Senator Tobey again arose and thus addressed the president of the Senate:
“Mr. President, yesterday in speaking on the floor of the Senate I attributed a quotation in which I used ‘linked sweetness long drawn out’ to the immortal bard of Avon. Mr. James Murphy, the Official Reporter of Debates, has called my attention to the fact that credit Should have been given to John Milton. Therefore, with apologies to William Shakespeare, I ask that the Record be corrected and the name of Milton substituted for the name of Shakespeare in my remarks.
” Whereupon the genial Alben Barkley, president of the Senate, said: “The correction will be made.” Just why Senator Tobey apologized to Shakespeare rather than to Milton is not clear. Anyhow he set the record straight by use of the Congressional Record with the taxpayer’s money.
We all appreciate a sense of fair play. It is good to see it in a game, in politics, in business. There is an interesting symbol of it in old London. At one end of the famous Whitehall is a statue of Charles I, the king who lost his head at the executioner’s block, and at the other end of Whitehall is a statue of Oliver Cromwell, the man who ordered the king’s execution. Nothing could better express the sense of fairness of the British people than the proximity of those two statues.
Year: 1949