Radio Script #36
Little Talks On Common Things
October 2, 1949
In this day of fast transportation by land and air it is difficult to realize that, less than a century ago, inland waterways served an important and sometimes sole means of transportation between two Maine localities. Last spring I referred on this program to the importance of the Presumpscot Canal in making possible a through water route from Portland to Raymond, Casco, Naples, Bridgton and Harrison.
Most Waterville citizens know the story of the founding of Colby College –how Jeremiah Chaplin, his family, and a handful of students, came in the sloop Hero from Boston to the head of navigation on the Kennebec, then by lone boat up the river to Waterville.
What is not so well known to Maine people generally is that some method of river transportation was once common in every county in the state, even in Aroostook. When the Eaton grant, now a part of the town of Caribou, was laid out in 1808, the deed conveyed by the General Court of Massachusetts contained these words: “Excepting and reserving for the use of the Commonwealth, and as a common highway forever, the main channel of the Aroostook River in its course through this tract of land.” Indeed the Aroostook River was the only line of transportation in that day. There wasn’t even a road into the tract, and the river served as common highway for many years. Until 1830 there was no road north of Mattawamkeag. To get to what is now Caribou the prospective settler went by boat through New Brunswick up the St. John and Aroostook Rivers.
By the way, that Eaton Grant in Aroostook got its name from Captain William Eaton, whose exploits Kenneth Roberts has made famous in his novel “Lydia Bailey” • It was Eaton who, in 1805, won a momentous victory over the Barbary Coast pirates who had long preyed on American ships in the Mediterranean.
Snubbed by superior naval officers and neglected by Congress, Eaton was finally rewarded by the General Court of Massachusetts with this gift of land in the wilds of the District of Maine. Almost immediately Eaton sold a half interest to John Callender of Boston for $2,500. Callender’s half amounted to somewhat more than 5,000 acres. Think of it — fifty cents an acre for what was to be Caribou potato land.
Well, we started all this by talking about water transportation. Of course, among Maine’s more than 2,000 rivers, some were never very important highways. We doubt whether the Messalonskee from Western Avenue to Rice’s Rips was ever a very important highway, but a lot of Waterville people can remember when, on a sunday afternoon, it was covered with canoes. Was it the automobile that ended canoeing on the Messalonskee, or was there some other reason? Who knows?
California is making much this year of its centennial of the Forty-Niners, the adventurers who went to the coast in search of gold. But Maine too, as Hon.
Edward Chase of Portland recently pointed out, has reason for remembering 1849. In that year the efforts of determined Portlanders had succeeded, and the Atlantic and St. Lawrence Railroad (later called the Grand Truck) was under construction between Portland and Montreal. Maine railroads already had reached Waterville via Lewiston, and another line was being built up the Kennebec. Mills were rising at Lewiston, where the water-power canal system was now complete. Gas light had just come to Portland and Lewiston. The lumber business took on a new lease of life, with railroad transportation to supplement the water routes. Now, as Mr. Chase emphasizes, these things did not just happen.
Risks were great and losses were common. It all required a high degree of confidence, not in everybody,but in the character of selected individuals. Confidence was established and maintained. The money was risked; the job did get done. But what did it was not government insurance, subsidies, and guarantees.
It was not done by the pump-priming of deficit financing. It was accomplished by the confidence engendered by direct and understandable relationships between men, in faith in the lessons of human experience. And not the least important factor is this. In 1849 security was sought through energy, men were proud of how much work they could turn out in a day, and he who did the very best that he could might confidently hope for reward.
We hear much about the alleged pessimism among leaders of business and industry concerning the economic future of our country. It is heartening, therefore, to see an acknowledged business leader like Lewis Rosenstiel, head of Shenley Industries, sound a note of optimism. He insists the united States can have annual national income of $300 billion by 1954. An increase of five per cent a year in total production will achieve that goal. Mr. Rosenstiel suggests a program to bring about this result, including one item that may be subject to controversy.
“Give the American workingman”, he says, “the incentive of a five per cent wage increase every year between now and 1954, and let him know that each year l s boost will follow if he increases his productivity by five per cent, and you will find the volume of production rising at an astonishing rate. The national payroll during the peak year of 1948 was $140 billion. The suggested five per cent increase in wages, cumulated for five years, would increase the payroll one-third by 1954, giving the nation’s workers $47 billion more to spend. Other income would go up in the same proportion.”
Having no right to pose as an economist, I don’t know whether Mr. Rosenstiel’s economic logic is sound or faulty. But I do know that bold measures of some kind must be taken to eliminate the depression psychology that is now scaring so many of us. Certainly the way to win the peace in this present cold war is to make the whole world outside Russia so strong that the Russian people themselves will come to question their own system as inadequate and insecure. The peace of the world will never be made secure by military force alone. Only an expanding world economy that offers a better standard of living can fight off the insidious infiltration of communism.
Whatever plan we follow — Mr. Rosenstiel’s or some other — it -must be a cooperative plan in which industrial owner and manager, laborer, farmer, and professional men work together to produce more goods for the people of the world. It is the most trite of economic truths that the world’s trouble is not and has never been over-production; it is poor distribution and under-consumption.
The purchasing power of the world’s people must be significantly increased.
Two weeks ago I promised you another Ben Butler story — one about Butler and the silver spoons. His military governorship of Louisiana was so obnoxious to the New Orleans’ aristocracy that they accused Ben of appropriating and turning to his own profit the beautiful solid silver of some of those famous New Orleans homes. So all through the South Ben Butler became known as the hated northern general who stole the New Orleans silver spoons. That he was completely innocent made no difference. The story was believed as gospel in all the South.
After the war Butler not only took up the practice of law in Massachusetts; he also became immediately and violently active in politics, and a dozen years after Appomatox, the time came when Butler ran for governor of the old Bay State.
The campaign was bitter and personal; no holds were barred. The Marquis of Queensberry rules that now govern a Truman-Dewey contest were sadly lacking in the late 1870’s. For reasons which we have no time to relate here, the region of the Berkshires was strongly anti-Butler. When his speaking tour brought him into that region, Butler was sure to encounter heckling and perhaps outright interference. What happened at Pittsfield neither he nor the audience could have anticipated.
A group of Butler’s opponents, more clever than the general run, engaged a boy to climb into the scenic props and flies over the stage of the theater where Butler was speaking. Ben was scarcely warmed up with his opening remarks when down from above the stage dangled on a string a huge wooden spoon painted a glistening silver.
The audience, catching on at once, let out a roar of laughter. But old Ben didn’t bat an eyelash. Calmly taking a pocket-knife out of those capacious trouser pockets of his, he grabbed the spoon, cut the string, and brandished the spoon before the audience with, “Well, well, here’s one I must have missed.”
In a moment Ben’s quick wit and good nature had turned the audience from hostility to approval. Contrary to the predictions of his most ardent supporters, in the subsequent election, Ben carried the city of Pittsfield.
My friend Groves Weymouth says I missed the real point in my remarks about vacations. His comment to end all comments on the subject is this: “Almost anybody can work, :put it takes a mighty good man to stand a vacation.”
Did you go to church today? There was once a time here in Maine when it was the conunon thing for everyone to go to church on Sunday. Many years ago it was the custom in most New England communities to hold two preaching services in each church, one in the morning and the other in mid-afternoon. Members of the congregation coming in by wagon or horseback from the whole countryside brought their luncheon and remained on the premises between services. In the winter they often spent the interval in homes near the church. Now most people who have heard about those old hours of church attendance and those long-winded sennons, sometimes lasting more than two hours, suppose that the change was made directly to morning and evening services with which Protestants are familiar today. That such is not ~e case is revealed by a glance at the Waterville Sentinel for December 7, 1883. Church notices listing the services for the following Sunday reveal that only two churches — the Congregational and the unitarian — had then caught up with modern practice, having their services at 10:30 A. M., but even they differed on the hour of evening service, the Congos meeting at 7:00 O’clock and the Unitarians at 7:30.
The other Protestant churches — Methodist, Baptist and Universalist had no morning service; their first service was at 2:00 P. M. Methodists and Baptists had evening services at 7. Only the Universalists had no evening service at all. This was long before the present important and prosperous local Episcopal church had become even a mission station in Waterville. Waterville’s Catholic communicants today will be interested in the announcement of Catholic services in the Sentinel of 1883. The beloved Father Charland was then, as he was many years afterward, the priest and pastor. The announcement reads:
“Mass at 8:00 A.M. and 10:00 A.M. on every first and third Sunday in the month, at ten-thirty only on every second and fourth Sunday. Sunday School at 3:00 P.M. Vespers at 4:00 P.M. Instruction in English every second and fourth Sunday, in French every first and third Sunday.”
Many distractions invitingly call us away from church attendance today. Perhaps our grandfathers and grandmothers missed a lot of the comfort of modern inventions and the fun of modern amusements, but perhaps we too are missing something in not emulating their devotion and their zeal to the particular church of our faith in this land where religious worship is unrestricted and free.
Year: 1949