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Jul. 18th, 2016 09:43 amLiberty's First Crisis by Charles Slack
A good if sometimes slightly weirdly paced book about the passing of the Sedition Act of 1798, as I continue to stubbornly not watch or listen to Hamilton but read all sorts of interesting books about the early days of the Republic. This one was alternately bleak and terrible and hilarious...
You'd get scenes where Benjamin Bache, Philadelphia printer and favorite grandson of Benjamin Franklin, got thrown in prison for badmouthing the President in a newspaper, and then died of Yellow Fever before he could ever go on trial, leaving his indebted newspaper to a wife already struggling with several young children.
And then you have Luther Baldwin, proudly of Newark, NJ, even back then a bastion of true American Heroes. Baldwin was a spy for Washington during the Revolutionary War, sailing up and down various waterways sabotaging British boats and passing information to the Continental Army. After the war he went into business as a river trader. And then we get to the moment when he displayed his true American heroism. Luther Baldwin was drunk one morning, as one does, and John Adams, President of the United States of America, was travelling through on carriage to the accompaniment of a cannon salute. Irritated by the noise, and needless to say, drunk as a skunk, he observed that he wouldn't mind if someone shoved one of those cannonballs up Adams's arse. Someone overheard this comment and reported him to the US Attorney for New Jersey, who sent him to jail on Sedition charges.
Both of these stories, actually, are equally terrible. It's just that one of them is also incredibly funny. In Slack's even-handed approach to a topic where it is easy for us to kneejerk against the suppression of civil liberties, he argues that the problem was that there were no real meaningful precedents for the kind of freedom of speech the First Amendment promises. The line it draws in the sand was previously unheard of, and everyone was still trying to figure out what it meant. The Federalist's defense, flimsy to modern ears, was that they were merely imprisoning people for statements that in that day's England would have resulted in gruesome execution.
Slack sees the Sedition Act as an early experiment in the limits of American free speech, an experiment that ultimately helped to destroy the Federalist Party and create negative precedents that still serve as vital warnings for us. But he also points out that some of the 'heroes' of the fight against the Sedition Act were unlikely heroes, and some were arguably not heroes at all. Some of the targets of the Federalist crusade were irresponsible journalists heaving poisonous and untrue statements at politicians who were barely managing to hold a fragile young country together. Should they have been more responsible? Of course. Is throwing unfiltered bile at one's political enemies the most productive way to solve America's internal disagreements? Of course not. But suppression of their speech and imprisonment of their supporters is not the American solution to this problem and should never be the American solution to this problem. We are a nation founded on the idea that with as many different viewpoints as we hold, it is better for the government to protect our individual freedom as citizens than to try to protect our national freedom as a community. This is ultimately a harder idea to accept than it would seem at first. There are always temptations and reason to suppress speech one disagrees with and finds hurtful and damaging. But it is the plain truth as I see it.
Somewhere- A Master by Elie Wiesel
Like everyone I know in the Jewish community, I was deeply saddened by the death of the great Elie Wiesel. I've been listening to people share stories and remembrances for the past several weeks, and it inspired me to read another one of his books.
The truth is I've always thought Wiesel was at best a mediocre writer, and Somewhere- a Master does not change this opinion. The prose styling is awkward and repetitive, his topics jump all over the place without apparent reason. This feels like an insensitive thing to say in remembrance of a great man shortly after his death, but there's a reason I am revisiting his writing now in remembrance in spite of the fact that I don't really admire his writing. It's because I do so admire the man.
What Wiesel's books lack in storytelling knack, they make up in courage. Wiesel was one of the bravest men of the 20th century, whose unflinching honesty is apparent in every page he labors to share with his readers. He is not writing because he's good at it. He is not writing because he wants to. He's writing because he feels an obligation to risk himself by sharing of himself with the world.
Somewhere- A Master is a collection of stories about 18th century Hasidic rebbes, part of a larger project on Wiesel's part to set down an oral history of the Hasidic cultures lost in the Holocaust. I've heard all these stories before- not all these specific stories, no, but basically I've heard all these stories before. I will hear them all again, because B"H the Jewish oral tradition has started up again. B"H we tell stories of Jewish leaders in shul every week, in divrei Torah and at tisches and onegs and farbrengens. B"H Hitler didn't win, but Wiesel setting the stories down, ploddingly, earnestly, and insistently, is an act of defiance that resounds. The book is a monument, one that doesn't necessarily benefit from being read, but its mere existence matters. Elie Wiesel mattered, and his loss is a shattering one to the Jewish people, but the Jewish people will survive in part because of what he wrote and what he said, and because of the determination he made that since it had to be said, he would be the one to say it.
A good if sometimes slightly weirdly paced book about the passing of the Sedition Act of 1798, as I continue to stubbornly not watch or listen to Hamilton but read all sorts of interesting books about the early days of the Republic. This one was alternately bleak and terrible and hilarious...
You'd get scenes where Benjamin Bache, Philadelphia printer and favorite grandson of Benjamin Franklin, got thrown in prison for badmouthing the President in a newspaper, and then died of Yellow Fever before he could ever go on trial, leaving his indebted newspaper to a wife already struggling with several young children.
And then you have Luther Baldwin, proudly of Newark, NJ, even back then a bastion of true American Heroes. Baldwin was a spy for Washington during the Revolutionary War, sailing up and down various waterways sabotaging British boats and passing information to the Continental Army. After the war he went into business as a river trader. And then we get to the moment when he displayed his true American heroism. Luther Baldwin was drunk one morning, as one does, and John Adams, President of the United States of America, was travelling through on carriage to the accompaniment of a cannon salute. Irritated by the noise, and needless to say, drunk as a skunk, he observed that he wouldn't mind if someone shoved one of those cannonballs up Adams's arse. Someone overheard this comment and reported him to the US Attorney for New Jersey, who sent him to jail on Sedition charges.
Both of these stories, actually, are equally terrible. It's just that one of them is also incredibly funny. In Slack's even-handed approach to a topic where it is easy for us to kneejerk against the suppression of civil liberties, he argues that the problem was that there were no real meaningful precedents for the kind of freedom of speech the First Amendment promises. The line it draws in the sand was previously unheard of, and everyone was still trying to figure out what it meant. The Federalist's defense, flimsy to modern ears, was that they were merely imprisoning people for statements that in that day's England would have resulted in gruesome execution.
Slack sees the Sedition Act as an early experiment in the limits of American free speech, an experiment that ultimately helped to destroy the Federalist Party and create negative precedents that still serve as vital warnings for us. But he also points out that some of the 'heroes' of the fight against the Sedition Act were unlikely heroes, and some were arguably not heroes at all. Some of the targets of the Federalist crusade were irresponsible journalists heaving poisonous and untrue statements at politicians who were barely managing to hold a fragile young country together. Should they have been more responsible? Of course. Is throwing unfiltered bile at one's political enemies the most productive way to solve America's internal disagreements? Of course not. But suppression of their speech and imprisonment of their supporters is not the American solution to this problem and should never be the American solution to this problem. We are a nation founded on the idea that with as many different viewpoints as we hold, it is better for the government to protect our individual freedom as citizens than to try to protect our national freedom as a community. This is ultimately a harder idea to accept than it would seem at first. There are always temptations and reason to suppress speech one disagrees with and finds hurtful and damaging. But it is the plain truth as I see it.
Somewhere- A Master by Elie Wiesel
Like everyone I know in the Jewish community, I was deeply saddened by the death of the great Elie Wiesel. I've been listening to people share stories and remembrances for the past several weeks, and it inspired me to read another one of his books.
The truth is I've always thought Wiesel was at best a mediocre writer, and Somewhere- a Master does not change this opinion. The prose styling is awkward and repetitive, his topics jump all over the place without apparent reason. This feels like an insensitive thing to say in remembrance of a great man shortly after his death, but there's a reason I am revisiting his writing now in remembrance in spite of the fact that I don't really admire his writing. It's because I do so admire the man.
What Wiesel's books lack in storytelling knack, they make up in courage. Wiesel was one of the bravest men of the 20th century, whose unflinching honesty is apparent in every page he labors to share with his readers. He is not writing because he's good at it. He is not writing because he wants to. He's writing because he feels an obligation to risk himself by sharing of himself with the world.
Somewhere- A Master is a collection of stories about 18th century Hasidic rebbes, part of a larger project on Wiesel's part to set down an oral history of the Hasidic cultures lost in the Holocaust. I've heard all these stories before- not all these specific stories, no, but basically I've heard all these stories before. I will hear them all again, because B"H the Jewish oral tradition has started up again. B"H we tell stories of Jewish leaders in shul every week, in divrei Torah and at tisches and onegs and farbrengens. B"H Hitler didn't win, but Wiesel setting the stories down, ploddingly, earnestly, and insistently, is an act of defiance that resounds. The book is a monument, one that doesn't necessarily benefit from being read, but its mere existence matters. Elie Wiesel mattered, and his loss is a shattering one to the Jewish people, but the Jewish people will survive in part because of what he wrote and what he said, and because of the determination he made that since it had to be said, he would be the one to say it.