Radio Script #525

Little Talks on Common Things

February 11, 1962

Earlier in this season’s series of broadcasts I called attention to Arch Leavitt, a Colby graduate who enlisted in the Civil War in 1862 and was fatally wounded in 1864. Special interest attached to him because he was Captain of Company E of the Sixteenth Maine, the regiment commanded by Colonel Charles Tilden, about whose diary kept in Libby Prison I told you last spring.

A collateral relative of Arch Leavitt, Hazel Talbot Leavitt of Turner, was a student of mine at Hebron Academy 45 years ago. Last summer she let me see a composition book kept by Arch Leavitt While he was a student at Hebron in 1857 and during the years of his attendance at old Waterville College, where he was a senior when war broke out in 1861.

Most of the compositions that Leavitt wrote, both in school and in college, are on abstract subjects and in very general language, almost devoid of specific instances. As was the custom of the time, the writer does cite personal examples, always in the form of popular heroes of history. The first composition in the book was called “Guard Thy Tongue”. One sentence will give you its tone. Wrote Leavitt: “How many friends have been~parated, how much violence has been committed, merely because people did not guard their tongues?” The essay was written at Hebron in February, 1857.

That is followed by another Hebron paper entitled “Education”. Perhaps a hundred years ago people understood the true value of education better than we do today. Anyhow, Leavitt didn’t argue that education would bring wealth or even material comfort. Instead he wrote: “What is it that raises man above the brute? Education! What is it that gives to him the power to make the sea useful? Education! What gives him the power to make the most furious beasts tremble at his will? Education! It is education that opens man’s mind to the beauties and treasures of God’s handi work and teaches him to live in the hope of abetter world beyond the grave. Without education man would sink to inferiority among the brutes.”

It sounds both sanctimonious and crude, doesn’t it, in our sophisticated time? But young Arch Leavitt evidently grasped, in his immature way, what the discerning minds from Socrates to John Dewey have always seen — that the purpose of education is not wealth or power, not success spelled with a capital S, not even the welfare of the. state, but rather the enrichment of the individual life both in breadth and in depth.

When Arch Leavitt was a freshmen at Waterville College, he was asked to write an essay on whether the country or the city is a better place for college. Since Arch had chosen the college in this town, he made it the example of his proposition, that the country rather than the city is to be preferred. This student composition of more than a hundred years ago reveals what may seem strange to one who knows Waterville today. In 1858 Waterville College was indeed out in the country. Between the Elmwood Hotel which had been built in 1850, and the southern end of the college campus, there were only a few scattered residences, and beyond the campus only farms. The station of the A & K RR was not far away, but not where the Maine Central station is now. It was then located near where the Flood Fuel Company now has its office on Pleasant Street. Evidently its trains and those of the Penobscot and Kennebec, whose tracks ran along the river bank behind the college buildings, did not disturb the students, for Arch Leavitt’s first argument for preferring a college like Waterville was its comforting quiet. nIt is evident”, wrote Leavitt, “that the place to study is where almost universal quiet reigns. There is no clatter of hoofs on the stoney pavement or tramp of busy men on gravel sidewalks.”

Leavitt’s second argument is that the country provides more beautiful surroundings. As one goes by the ugly remains of the old buildings on the deserted campus on College Avenue today, it is difficult to think of the place as beautiful, but Arch Leavitt thought so in 1858. OIStudents in a city college”, Arch insisted, “are in a dismal place where they see nothing of God’s beautiful works.” Then, with obvious reference to the Kennebec long before the coming of the Hollingsworth Mill, he wrote: “How different for one who can look across the rushing river to the green fields and the wooded hills beyond.”

The young student’s third argument was that the country is free from vice. Mind you this was long before the revelations of Peyton Place and a score of similar novels debunking the sanctity of our rural towns. At any rate Arch Leavitt said of Waterville in 1858: “No vice is found here to lure him from the paths of right and purity, lie sees nothing but nature in·its purest form and is not distracted into vice and sin.”

I wish I could believe that was true, but unfortunately I have read the letters of many men who attended college here in the 1850’s, and while most of the students then were serious, upright, well-behaved young men, they did not find the little village of Waterville all piety and virtue any more than we find it so today.

Leavitt’ s final argument is that in the country there is less to distract a student’s mind from his books. There he can pursue his studies unmolested by the bustle of a crowded city. Now consider what pious Arch Leavitt considered distracting allurements. To him the diverting influences of the city were not dance halls and pool rooms. Listen to what he wrote: “Here are no operas or museums to lure one from study. One can sit quietly in his room with no such beckoning away. Certainly”, concluded the writer, “the country is superior to the city for the location of a college.”

The old composition book has many essays on literary subjects, obviously prompted by the assignments of the college professor of rhetoric, Samuel K. Smith. Some of the titles are “Causes of Ambition in MacBeth”, “The Character of Hamlet”, “Poetry Preferred to History”, “Character of Iago”, and “Sonnets of Milton”.

The method of teaching composition in those days is revealed by Arch Leavitt’s notes on the first lecture delivered in Leavitt’s rhetoric class by Prof. Smith. The professor told the class that an essay should consist of four parts: introduction, statement of the proposition, discussion and conclusion. Then he went on to explain ways in wbich each part can be developed. Then he showed that discussion takes one of three forms: explanation, narration or description. It was~all very formal and the student was expected to memorize every bit of it. What seems more remarkable is that those students somehow learned to apply it, and the form of all the compositions in this carefully preserved old book clearly reveal the formal teaching of Professor Smith.

If you should examine this old book, I think you would be greatly impressed by the good diction, the correct spelling, and the good sentence structure — grammar fully applied to writing. In correctness of expression and structure, Arch Leavitt’s compositions are much better than those of many college freshmen today. What they lack in specific content, they compensate by accuracy.

One of the most amazing of Leavitt’s essays comes toward the end of his 150 page composition book. It is entitled “Stephen A. Douglas”. When one recalls what the historians of half a century ago were making of Douglas, ‘we are startled by Arch Leavitt’s defense of a man who was considered in my own boyhood, in the first decade of this century, to have been the bad guy pitted against the good guy, Abraham Lincoln. Douglas was pro-slavery, we were told. He wanted to let slavery into the new territories. He was a sly, witty politician, who would sell his soul to the Devil if it would gain him the presidency.

Recent day historians are kinder to Stephen A. Douglas. We now know that he was ready to compromise because he feared war. He loved the Union and could not bear the thought of its breaking up to stave off secession, he pushed for compromise. We know that his Kansas-Nebraska Bill, the popular sovereignty· measure to permit the territories to decide whether to be free or slave, was’a mistake, against the tide of history, but it was not dishonest. We know too that, after his old political enemy, Lincoln, was elected and secession came, Douglas came valiantly to Lincoln’s defense.

With that as a background, let us turn to Arch Leavitt’s essay. It was written on New Years Day in 1861, two months before the inauguration of Abraham Lincoln. But two months earlier, in November, the national election had already decreed that Lincoln, not Douglas, nor Breckenridge, nor Bell, would enter the White House.

Leavitt’s essay did not mention Lbraham Lincoln, nor did it say a word about Douglas’ defeat at the polls in November. The essay is devoted wholly to praise of Douglas as a great statesman and a great man. Among the many flowery sentences are these: “The secret of his power lies in his indomitable perseverance. Talent without perseverance will, like the fires of Vesuvius slumber for ages unless roused by some superhuman power, but when talent and perseverance are combined, a man’s power is as irresistible as the waters of Niagara.”

The last essay in Leavitt’s book is a critique of a speech delivered in the British House of Commons in 1810 by James Brougham. Arch Leavitt wrote his essay about Brougham’s speech 51 years later, on January 22, 1861. One sentence in that essay has a prophetic touch. Young Leavitt wrote: “When the passions of men are well aroused, it requires only a plausible pretext for men to act in the direction of their prejudices.”

Two months later that student writer would see his own nation plunged into Civil War because men on both sides let plausible pretexts arouse them to act in the direction of their prejudices. And a year later Arch Leavitt would himself be caught up in the maelstrom of that terrible war, and would never return alive from its battle fields.

Now let’s end the program tonight on a lighter and more pleasant note. A year ago I had a lot to say about the Maine statesman, William R. Pattangall. I told you about those famous satires of his called the Meddybemps Letters. Pattangall was a great story teller and nothing delighted him more than an appreciative audience for his yarns. Let me now repeat a couple of his best.

An old lady who knew her end was near told her niece to bury her in her black silk dress, but to cut the back out and make herself a dress out of it. “Oh, Aunt Mary”, replied the niece, “I can’t do that. When you and Uncle Charlie walk up the golden stairs, I don’t want people to see you without a back to your dress. “Don’t you worry about .that”, said the old lady. “They won’t be looking at me. I buried your Uncle Charlie without his pants.”

Patt used to say it was easy for a lawyer, intent on flowery language, to get confused. He told about a case in Skowhegan when the defense attorney pleaded with the jury: “Gentlemen, this man is innocent. Look at him — innocent as an unborn baby, sitting on its mother’s knee.”

Although Patt was very fond of his native Washington County, he liked to poke fun at it. He said there was once a clergyman riding on a train out of Bangor, who got into conversation with the passenger beside him. “Think of the wonders of creation, my friend”, said the Reverend. “Just think. of it. God made the whole world in six days.” “Sure”, said the passenger, “but don’t you think he could have put in another day to advantage in Washington County?'”

Year: 1962