William Kieft, once director-general of New Amsterdam, may no longer be remembered in New York, but reminders of his successor can be found in many places. Peter Stuyvesant’s name has been given to a high school, a street, a square, a housing complex, and city neighborhoods. A statue of him has been erected, and his remains are buried in a New York City church graveyard. But even if Stuyvesant had never made it to New Amsterdam, he would have had a memorable career.

Son of a minister in the Netherlands, he joined the West Indies Company and was sent to Dutch possessions off the cost of Brazil. After a half dozen years there, he was transferred to Curaçao, and shortly after he turned thirty, he became acting governor of that island, Aruba, and Bonaire. A few years later, he led an attack on St. Martin, an island the Spanish had captured from the Dutch. Hit by a cannonball, Stuyvesant had his right leg amputated below the knee. He returned to the Netherlands where he was fitted with a wooden leg, leading to his nickname–no surprise here–Peg Leg Pete. When he regained his strength, he was sent to New Amsterdam to replace William Kieft.

For several years he went about improving the ragged condition of New Amsterdam, and in 1653 he built The Wall. Although there are no records enunciating the reasons why it was built, fear of Indians could have been a cause. New Amsterdam was situated among tribes that were ancient enemies with each other, and that led to a restiveness that may have concerned the Europeans. And, of course, not long before, under Kieft, the Europeans had massacred Indians.

Other forces from the wider world came into play. England and the Netherlands were commercial rivals, and the mid-seventeenth century saw Anglo-Dutch wars in various parts of the globe. (I don’t remember my education ever covering these wars. Why is that?) The leaders of the sparsely settled New Amsterdam were concerned about being attacked by the English. These concerns were heightened by the Dutch colony’s precarious perch in North America. Although the Dutch claimed what is now Delaware, Swedes had been settling there, and to the northeast, New England seemed to be expanding–and warlike.

The Dutch had overlapping claims to land with the English New Haven colony, and it seemed to the Dutch in America that New Haven was trying to expand into Dutch territory. (New Haven was a Puritan settlement, and as far as my reading goes, the least joyful and the most petty and mean of the Puritan settlements. This says a lot about New Haven. We can be glad that the New Haven colony did not expand. I will concede that later New Haven did produce good, even if over-hyped, pizza. But, of course, New Haven also subsequently gave us Yale.) Furthermore, rumors flew that a former resident of New Amsterdam was raising an army in Rhode Island to attack his one-time settlement.

In response to these multiple threats, in 1653 Stuyvesant had a wall built across the northern border of New Amsterdam. (And again what are the odds? It stretched along the present Wall Street.) Descriptions of the wall differ. One gives a suspiciously exact length of 2,340 feet. In any event, the wall was not long because New Amsterdam was a small place, smaller than today’s Manhattan below Wall Street. From early on, inhabitants threw all sorts of things into the waters that surrounded the island, and this landfill expanded the land mass. The present shoreline is now several blocks further out into the waters than it was in the seventeenth century. Even with this expansion, however, lower Manhattan south of Wall Street is a small place. In my jogging days, I would run around the perimeter of the tip of Manhattan, and even though I was covering more ground than that which existed in New Amsterdam, it took only about ten minutes. My guess is that the entire perimeter of New Amsterdam could have been walked in 1650 in less than a half hour.

Not all agree what The Wall looked like. One historian describes it as a palisade by which he apparently means logs upright in the ground with sharpened points on top—think those forts in the John Ford westerns or, perhaps, F-Troop. (These cinematic structures were often placed on the treeless plains. Where did all those logs come from?) On the other hand, most of the historians I have read state that while a palisade was the original intention, The Wall in fact consisted of vertical planks. One historian, however, said it was a double row of upright planks with Wall Street in between.

(To be continued.)

The heads of the Dutch colony in North America were employees of the West Indies Company. Few of us know the names of the first two, but the third one, Peter Minuit, continues to have fame. He is the one who selected the Manhattan location as the headquarters for the new Dutch enclave, and, of course, many of us have heard that in 1626 he bought the island from the Indians for $24 worth of beads.

Surely it tells a lot about our national character that this story has been passed down through the centuries. What actually happened is now murky to say the least. I have read several accounts. They agree there was a transaction in the 1620s between Indians and Minuit. Was it for $24? Well, since dollars did not exist then, probably not. Instead it is accepted that the Dutch valued the deal at 60 guilders, but, of course, money was not exchanged. Of what use would Dutch currency have been to the Indians? Instead, some sorts of goods went to the Indians. Was it beads? We do not know. Maybe it was a mixture of goods—a pot, sewing needles, clay pipes. Maybe beads. We simply do not know except that I am positive that we can rule out Bic lighters even though they would have been handy. The question then comes up, “They got it for 60 guilders. What would that be worth today?” Again, the historians don’t agree. For example, I have seen a source that says that the guilders would be about $1,000 in modern money, but I have no idea how that equivalency was calculated. I do buy into one valuation method–the beer one. Sixty guilders could buy 2,400 steins of beer in New Amsterdam. I pay $7 or $8 for a beer or ale today in New York, so at this beer rate, the transaction would be worth about $18,000 now.

But there is another set of questions? Did the Indians sell all of Manhattan to the West Indies Company? Some accounts suggest that the transaction only concerned the southern tip of the island, a small plot of ground. Others suggest that the Indians were not selling the land in a European sense because it is not likely the Indians had the same sense of “property” or ownership as the Dutch did. The Indians might have only been leasing the land or merely permitting the Dutch a non-exclusive access to it. Of course, an underlying message of the version that has come down to us is that the Dutch were sharp traders. In another version, however, the Indians were the clever ones. This story contends that the Indians who traded with Minuit had no claim to the land but were Canarsies from distant Long Island. Most versions, however, say that the transaction was with Manhattan-dwelling Lenapes. In any event, the transaction was a success. No Indian tribe bothered that tiny settlement at the tip of Manhattan while Peter Minuit ran the place. The troubles came when a less successful governor was head of the colony.

In 1638, William Kieft came to govern New Amsterdam. He quickly angered many of the inhabitants by closing taverns, but his handling of Indian affairs was even more atrocious. While the Europeans had been living without Indian conflicts, Kieft’s Indian policies soon led to regular bloody skirmishes, and within a few years, Kieft ordered the Company’s militia to massacre 120 Indians leading to Indian retaliations. New Amsterdam now had to think about defending itself in ways it had not before and started fortifying the northern reaches of the settlement. First Lesson. The Europeans under Kieft had taken unnecessary, hostile actions against Indians. The actions had not made New Amsterdam safer but the opposite, and the result was that the Europeans now had to defend themselves from threats of their own making that had not previously existed.

The inhabitants of New Amsterdam were not pleased with Kieft’s governance. The West Indies Company realized that the settlement functioned better and more profitably if there were reasonably good relations between the governor and the inhabitants. They sent Kieft packing.

(A pattern seen in Kieft’s New Amsterdam has continued to this day. Kieft may have imposed restrictions on taverns to bring increased morality and order to the settlement, but morality and order seldom win out in New York. Money does. As many others have after him, Kieft soon sought money more than morality. He built his own distillery and, not surprisingly, then relaxed the tavern restrictions. A quarter of the buildings in New Amsterdam soon housed a tavern of some sorts. This meant that no one had far to go to get a drink. That pattern also continues in New York. My local is two short blocks away, and I pass two bars on the way there, and if I strolled a few more feet, I would find several more drinking establishments. Of course, this means in New York, there is often no need for a designated driver–yet another good thing about this place.)

(To be continued.)

We were promised time and again a wall across our southern border, a wall to be paid for by Mexico. While you may be thinking about that and whether it should be constructed, I have been thinking about America’s first border wall and trying to figure out whether we can learn anything from its history.

We begin with a man who went looking for spices and found beaver. Englishman Henry Hudson, bankrolled by British merchants, had made a couple of failed attempts at finding a sailing route from Europe to the Far East. Hudson could not smooth talk these businessmen into funding yet another voyage, so he jumped across the English Channel and convinced the Dutch East Indies Company to underwrite one more attempt. (I don’t think that the Dutch called it the Dutch East Indies Company. I think to them it was just the East Indies Company.)

The story goes that Hudson was ordered to sail east, north of Russia to see if he could reach China. Apparently, Hudson was not enamored of the charms or likely success of such a route. He had heard rumors of a Northwest Passage through North America, so Hudson disregarded his bosses’ orders and went west. This is why in 1609 he found himself sailing up the Hudson River. (What are the odds that he would go across the Atlantic and then proceed up a river that bore his name?) He found that the Hudson petered out. This was not the Northwest passage, and he was not going to be bringing back cinnamon, cardamom, or nutmeg. But in the land around the northern reaches of the Hudson River, he found beaver, boatloads of beavers. (All these beavers building dams no doubt made this a much more exciting place than the Albany area has ever been since.)

Europeans then were in love with beaver fur. (Ever hear anyone talk about beaver meat? Ever see a beaver recipe? Europeans may have salted cod caught off North America and brought it back, but I never heard of salted beaver.) When Hudson returned to Holland, I do not how he explained his wrong turn that had him going towards the setting sun instead of away from it, but his company overseers took consolation in the beaver sightings and saw a moneymaking opportunity. Hudson also told them about this island with a great natural harbor at the mouth of his river. It was a marvelous place for a trading post for all the beaver skins that could be taken from the luckless animals and shipped to the fur-mad Europeans. The Dutch then laid claim to the land from what is now Delaware north up the Hudson and to what is now western Connecticut and began a settlement in 1625 on the southern tip of Manhattan. It was called New Amsterdam.

(Hudson did not last as long as New Amsterdam. A few years later he was up in those cold waters exploring Hudson Bay—again, what are the odds? He wanted to press on after some significant difficulties. His crew did not. You know those stories about how the Inuit set adrift their aged parents for the parental last voyage. I don’t know if the indigenous people learned from Hudson’s shipmates, or the Europeans learned from the natives, or it was merely coincidence. Having had enough of Henry Hudson, his ship fellows set him adrift near the arctic circle, and–surprise, surprise–he was never heard from again.)

The Dutch thus began a New World settlement. It was a commercial place, and it was run by a commercial enterprise. Not long on imagination on this front, the Dutch named it the West Indies Company. And beaver was the moneymaker, which explains why a beaver is on the seal of the City of New York. (I have never seen a beaver in New York City, not even in a zoo. I have only seen a few beavers anywhere. Perhaps my first sighting was as a boy with the family in a car driving to northern Wisconsin. A beaver was waddling across the road. The father came to an abrupt halt. Beaver do not move quickly on asphalt, and we waited for quite a while. The father looked in the rearview mirror and saw nothing. Assuming that the beaver had finally made it to the ditch next to the car, he inched on. Thump. The left rear wheel clearly drove over something. The father drove a little further and stole a glance in the mirror. He looked as if he were going be sick. I glanced back and saw the beaver’s tail wave feebly once, twice and then stop. Total silence in the car. I never heard any of us ever mention this incident.  We certainly did not try to collect its fur.)

(To be continued.)

The impression I get from hearing it discussed among my friends is that curling is not the official name for the sport. Instead, it is, I Could Do That. But I doubt that any of them could get low enough to be in the proper position to slide the rock down the sheet. And none of them understands the strategy.

“His friend was a chronic romantic who constantly made the mistake of falling in love with women before sleeping with them.” John Lanchester, Capital.

Is there a difference between an adviser and an advisor?

What does it mean that some people want secure borders but don’t care about secure elections?

As I neared the exits on the expressways. I saw the usual signs giving the names of the highways and the towns and cities I could find if I left the interstate. Another set of signs indicated “services” near the exits—motels and fast food restaurants mostly. Near many, but not all, of the exits, signs also listed “attractions.” These were a varied lot, including wineries, malls, parks, campgrounds, a miniature roadside village. They seemed aimed at creating an impulse decision by the driver and passengers to make a visit to the “attraction.” But then an attractions sign listed Hershey Medical Center. Would you put that on an attractions sign?

A postcard came with the restaurant check. The card was an old photograph of a bridge under construction. I asked the hostess what bridge it was. She did not know. I thought she should have.

I was disappointed to learn that “Mickey Rooney” was not Mickey Rooney’s name.

As he came into the theater lobby, he said, “Actually I didn’t think it was going to be this cold.” “That just shows,” his companion replied, “how poorly you think.”

“Sex is the consolation you have when you can’t have love.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

When that time comes for me , don’t say he earned his angel wings or joined the angels or that he has been laid to eternal rest or he went to a better place (there is a place better than Brooklyn?) or he went to his eternal glory or even that he passed away. Just say he died.

She was in an Off-Broadway musical. I said that I might go to it if I could find discount tickets. Even though I had just met her, she got offended and said that she had to pay full price for her masters in music, so I should have to pay full price to hear her.

(Guest post by the spouse)

For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved miniature things. Well, we all love puppies and kittens and even human babies. But I loved miniature things, read dollhouses and the things that were inside them. When I was a child in the 1950’s, a dollhouse from Sears and Roebuck was a somewhat boring affair: a metal box with a slanting roof, open on one side to reveal four cubes representing four nondescript rooms (where was the bathroom?). Still, it was small, and if you could find them in Woolworth’s and your mom would let you splurge a little, tiny pieces of plastic furniture could be housed inside. I thought that was pretty satisfying until I was 9 or so. It was around that time that I became aware of the Colleen Moore Dollhouse at the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry. No mere house, this. It was a mansion of a million rooms (or so it seemed), each completely furnished down to the teeny rose in a teeny vase on a delicately carved mahogany table next to a velvet-covered settee carefully placed on a tiny Persian carpet. And it had electric lighting! Electrified chandeliers, electrified wall sconces. It was a revelation.

As I gawked at this magnificence, though, the pitiful contrast to my Sears and Roebuck box became far too apparent. Knowing that something so utterly amazing existed whose elegance and detail could never be duplicated (at least, not by me) quashed my interest in dollhouses for many years thereafter.

It was a bit later in life that I marveled at the historically accurate rendering of tiny rooms at the Chicago Art Institute. Conceived by Mrs. James Ward Thorne in the mid-twentieth century, the rooms were (“painstakingly” almost goes without saying) constructed on a scale of one inch to one foot, and there are 68 of them! It’s overwhelming to the likes of me, and similarly discouraging. This was a life’s work – and an expensive one. It would take a highly dedicated Mrs. Thorne’s full-time efforts and considerable fortune to even think of duplicating a single room. Sigh.

I most certainly should have given up this interest in miniatures. But no. At Gainesville (Florida) High School I chaired the decorations committee for the senior prom. They could not have picked a more inept leader. Being a complete dufus, I envisioned an entrance to the dance floor (the gym) that would replicate – in miniature — the Gainesville main street at the turn of the century. Low-rise buildings, gas lights, cobble-stone streets. It was a complete and utter disaster! Neither I nor anyone on my committee had a clue on how even to begin. I have mostly repressed the whole affair, but I think somebody’s mother bailed me out by providing crepe paper streamers and Kleenex roses – like any sensible prom decorating committee should have done.

But I never really gave up being enamored of small things. Even my scientific career focused on things microscopic. Nothing gave more satisfaction than to examine through a microscope cells stained to show the delicate intricacies of their inner workings.

And in the meantime, I started to collect miniature tea sets. Cheap enough and still satisfyingly small. I learned that there are small tea sets (suitable for tea time with a teddy bear), smaller tea sets (not suitable for anything, really), and teensy, tiny tea sets (designed to please people like me who have a miniature fetish and a limited budget). The smallest I have came from a gift shop at The Greenbrier. The tray upon which the tea pot, sugar, creamer and two cups in saucers sits is no more than three centimeters in diameter. I love it. All of my tiniest treasures are now displayed in a shadow box that is ill-lit. No one really notices it, but I do, and when I do, it surprises and pleases.

Not knowing much about the military nor coming from a military family, I was never as intrigued by toy soldiers, but a friend, James Hillestad, has a most extraordinary collection of toy soldiers at the Toy Soldier Museum in Cresco, PA. Here are 3,000 square feet of full-scale models with 70 authentic military uniforms. You can see the battle at Vicksburg, parade scenes of Scottish bagpipers, the military review that attended Queen Victoria on a visit to India, etc. etc. In short, hundreds of toy soldiers are on breath-taking display. Definitely worth a trip to the Poconos or go to http://www.the-toy-soldier.com.

Well, okay, so when I retired, I decided to give my full-time effort to building a doll house. I bought a reasonably sized, reasonably priced kit to produce a Victorian house with four rooms (one is a bathroom!) and a front porch. I put wall paper on its walls and carpets on its floors. The bathroom has “tiles.” The outside is painted dark green with white trim. It’s furnished now, complete with a teeny, tiny copy of Scientific American on the living room coffee table. There’s a chandelier in the dining room, but it’s not electrified, and it keeps falling down. There’s a tray of wine and fruit available to guests. I decorated the outside for Christmas with battery-powered fairy lights. I love it. And…I have gotten that Moore/Thorne impulse out of my system.

I think of this topic because I recently saw what must be one of the most amazing miniaturization projects ever! The Ringling Circus Museum in Sarasota, Florida, houses a 3,800 square foot model of a circus conceived and built by one Howard C. Tibbals. It comprises (in small part) The Big Top (with 7,000 folding chairs and five rings), the Midway complete with side shows, the multitude of train cars that carry the 500 hand-carved elephants, tigers, and horses. Horses! Hundreds of horses both for work and for performing. There are clowns putting on make-up, the cooking tent and mess tent with maybe 500 people inside, each with his own tiny plate of food, a patrons’ parking lot with old-timey model cars, a wardrobe tent with tiny sequined circus costumes pouring out of tiny circus trunks. They say there are more than 42,000 individual pieces, not including railroad ties and tent poles. A separate exhibit shows the parade pageantry of the Big Top with hundreds of elephants, acrobats, and costumed beauties. Go to You Tube and put in Howard Bros. Circus. It is miraculous.

So, you see, there are more people than you might think who are driven to a lifetime of miniaturization. Bless ‘em!

“He wasn’t a great writer, only a good one.”  Jerome Charyn, Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice.

“Long, narrow Manhattan Island sits in the bay, among other islands, outcroppings, flatlands, like a silhouette of a right whale navigating a rocky passage; on the area map, among blank-faced formations all like itself colored yellow for density of population, it lies like a smelt in a pan.” Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York.

“It was a wrong number that started it, the telephone ringing three times in the dead of night, and the voice on the other end asking for someone he was not.” Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy.

“Manhattan is shaped like an ocean liner or like a lozenge or like a paramecium (what remains of its protruding ribs, its cilia) or like a gourd or like some sort of fish, a striped bass, say, but most of all like a luxury liner, permanently docked, going nowhere.” Phillip Lopate, Waterfront: A Journey Around Manhattan.

“At night I would lie in bed and watch the show, how bees squeezed through the cracks of my bedroom wall and flew circles around the room, making that propeller sound, a high-pitched zzzzzz that hummed along my skin.” Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees.

“When the first apartment house was built in New York City, it was as out of place on the streets as a visitor from another country or another century.” Elisabeth Hawes, New York, New York: How the Apartment House Transformed the Life of the City (1869-1930).

“In the beginning, when Adam was first created, he spent whole days rubbing his face in the grass.” Jonathan Goldstein, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bible!

“For the first few days of the trip to Fort Sumter, the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher was in excellent spirits.” Debby Applegate, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.

Michelle Bachman announced a month or so ago that she had asked God if she should run for a Minnesota Senate seat. Although she stated that God had previously told her to run for other offices, this time He did not bother to answer her question at all, and she is not running for what had been Al Franken’s seat. Does this make you believe more or less in God?

Why are some government officials a “Secretary”? You know, Secretary of State, Defense Secretary, and so on. Are comparable non-governmental officials ever “secretaries”?

“If one attitude can be said to characterize America’s regard for immigration over the past two hundred years, it is the belief that while immigration was unquestionably a wise and prescient thing in the case of one’s parents or grandparents, it really ought to stop now.” Bill Bryson, Made in America: An Informal History of the English Language in the United States.

I have read biographies of J. Edgar Hoover. I have read histories of the FBI. I have read newspaper stories and magazine articles about that law enforcement agency. As a lawyer, teacher, scholar, administrator, and landlord, I have had dealings with FBI agents—excuse me—FBI special agents. Even so, recently, I have come to have a new regard for  this federal agency. In all my study and interactions, they were circumspect beyond belief in hiding the fact that the FBI was a leader in a vast, left-wing conspiracy.

The recent Grammy telecast had an overhead camera shot of dancers on the floor making kaleidoscope patterns. This was reminiscent of the June Taylor Dancers. I wondered if any of the Grammy dancers, or even the choreographer, had any idea who the June Taylor Dancers were.

Why is it that the national debt only matters when Democrats are in charge of the government?

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.” George Orwell, Animal Farm.

I am sure that there are good reasons for them, but life was better for me before supermarkets started putting those little stickers on apples and pears.

I was on the sidewalk and could see her through the store’s window. She was behind the counter. She was very attractive. I went in. I admired her yogurts. They were not semi-skim. They were full fat.

In the days when I attended the church, Baptists seldom mentioned abortion. That may have been because then there was little public discussion of it, although I have learned since that there were many private discussions of the practice as many people sought one. The lack of a Baptist discussion, however, may also have been due to Baptists’ reverence for the Bible and for liberty of conscience. The last time I checked a biblical concordance—admittedly quite some time ago, but surely this has not changed—“abortion” was not in it. One has to interpret or extrapolate from verses and contexts to conclude that the Bible condemns abortion. Biblical passages can be construed to say that life begins at conception, but what “conception” meant in biblical times is not clear. I doubt to ancient Israelites it meant a sperm fertilizing an egg. Other biblical passages, however, indicate life begins with the first breath. But even though the Bible does not explicitly, and may not implicitly, condemn abortion, it is hard to suggest that it supports the view that abortion should be the choice of the woman and her doctor.

A Baptist, however, might extrapolate from Baptist principles and conclude that because there are ambiguities in the Bible on the matter, whether an abortion is sinful must remain a matter of conscience. The opinion would hold that the state cannot dictate what is sinful and should not dictate that a woman cannot have an abortion. In fact, when a number of states began to change their absolute proscriptions of abortion, many Southern Baptist leaders held quite liberal views on the subject. For example, a poll in 1970, three years before Roe v. Wade, found that 70% of Southern Baptist ministers supported abortion to protect the mental or physical health of the pregnant woman; 64% supported abortion in cases of fetal deformity; and 71% supported abortion in cases of rape. The next year the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution stating, “We call upon Southern Baptists to work for legislation that will allow the possibility of abortion under such circumstances as rape, incest, clear evidence of severe fetal deformity and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.”

This liberal viewpoint, however, soon vanished. Since Roe v. Wade, the Southern Baptist Convention has passed many resolutions about abortion that are much different from the 1971 pronouncement. On the thirtieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Convention stated that that Supreme Court “decision was an act of injustice against unborn children as well as against vulnerable women in crisis pregnancy situations. . . . We lament and renounce statements and actions by previous conventions and previous denominational leadership that offered support to the abortion culture. . . . We pray and work for the repeal of the Roe v. Wade decision and for the day when the action of abortion will be not only illegal but unthinkable.”

In the last quarter of the twentieth century, then, Southern Baptist shifted away from dogmatic opposition to school prayer and aid to religious school and towards dogmatic opposition to abortion. These moves have had more than a religious impact because they are all opinions that affect how people vote. Southern Baptists, for example, now want their elected officials to be strongly against abortion and generally friendly, at least, to religion, or at least some forms of religion. This certainly has had importance for the country since the Southern Baptists are the country’s largest Protestant denomination.

Over the last generation or two Southern Baptists seem to have moved even further to the political right than they were before. Perhaps people who are better historians, sociologists, or theologians than I can explain why, but I do point out that the Southern Baptists were not alone in the rightward lurch during this period. Something similar also occurred with the National Rifle Association, which had been largely an apolitical group interested mainly in marksmanship and gun safety, but was captured by an element that began the NRA’s move to become one of the most important conservative organizations in the country. Both Baptists and the NRA moved to the right at the same time. Is there a connection? Are they in essence joined—Christ with a gun?

Some Baptists have drifted–or sprinted–away from the principles that defined Baptism. Nevertheless, when I see one of those white frame Baptist churches, part of me still thinks that could be my home. But I also wonder why. I felt Baptism was right because it depended not on ritual or coercion or enforced rules. It was founded on the consciences of individuals, persuasion, and reason. Yet I don’t remember, and certainly do not miss, the sermons I heard when I went to church–the stuff that was meant to appeal to my reason. Instead, I miss communion, a responsive reading, and, most of all, the hymns. I sing to myself often “Stand up, Stand up for Jesus.” It turns out I miss the ritualistic aspects of what I experienced. Go figure.

When I was young American Baptists opposed aid to parochial schools on the grounds that it forced people, through taxes, to support religious practices, and no one should be forced to support religion. Worship should be free and voluntary and arise from the person’s conscience otherwise it is not meaningful and sincere, and insincere religious practices are sinful.

Southern Baptists also opposed government aid to religious schools. Thus, in 1971, when a voucher system was proposed to allow public money to go to parochial schools, the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that said, “We reaffirm our belief that the use of public funds for education in church-controlled schools, regardless of the manner in which these funds are channeled to church schools, is contrary to the principle of religious liberty.” The Convention went on to “reaffirm its commitment to our system of public education.”

But times change, and, apparently, so do religious principles. That adamant opposition to state support for parochial schools has shifted. Thus, the Convention passed a resolution in 2014 entitled “On the Importance of Christ-Centered Education.” The SBC now encourages lawmakers to enact policies and laws that maximize “parental choice.” It goes on to say, “We affirm and encourage support for existing Christ-centered K-12 schools as they engage in Kingdom work.”

What, you might ask, accounts for this change? Although religiously tolerant, Baptists were quite opposed to Roman Catholics, who were not seen as real followers of Christ. (A Sunday School teacher of mine once announced that the United States had three major religions: Christians, Jews, and Catholics.) A generation or two ago, “parochial schools” was seen as a coded term for “Catholic schools,” even though other denominations also had religious schools. (My father and a nephew went to Lutheran schools.) The adamant opposition for aid to parochial schools that then existed could have sprung from opposition to Catholicism, but, in fact, the position was consistent with long-held Baptist views that go back to Roger Williams.

So, why the changes? A generation or two ago, Baptists had few K-12 schools. (A fair number of colleges and universities have Baptist roots, including, for example, Wake Forest and the University of Chicago.) However, then came the school desegregation movement. Even though the Supreme Court outlawed segregated public schools in 1954, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that meaningful desegregation got underway. And, surprise, surprise, Christian Academies started springing up in places–coincidentally, I am sure—where opposition to desegregation was strongin places where many were fighting desegregation. Non-Catholic Christian Schools doubled their enrollment between 1961 and 1971. And while there were few Baptist K-12 schools before Brown v. Board of Education, they became more numerous just at the time when public schools were being desegregated.

Many of the Christian Academies were originally unabashedly segregated We tend to forget all the preaching that said the separation of the races was commanded by the Bible, and Brown did not apply to private schools These schools, however, could get back door government help. In the 1960s, donations to the schools were tax-exempt, but that changed through a series of Supreme Court decisions into the 1970s that declared racially discriminatory private schools ineligible for the tax break.

After these legal decisions, most, if not all, of the schools no longer claimed to be all-white, but not many then became truly integrated. The schools increasingly said they existed to fight secular humanism and to oppose liberalism. That message and the costs of the schools attracted few non-whites. The schools no longer touted segregation, but that remained the implicit message of many of them.

Funding of a Christian Academy education, however, is difficult for many who desire it no matter what their reasons. Therefore, many of those seeking a religious education support school vouchers. These vouchers are public moneys given to the parents for the education of their schoolchildren. Thus, parents, not the state, decide which school will get the government money. Conservative economists promoted the vouchers in the 1950s as a way to improve education. The claim was that allowing free market principles, under the slogan “school choice,” would work wonders for educational quality. Today, however, many who want to send their kids to parochial schools support vouchers. And this raises a question of the separation of church and state.

Because the voucher can be used at any private school including parochial ones, public money is used for religious purposes. The Supreme Court had earlier made it clear that governments could not directly aid religious schools, but vouchers, by giving parents control over the state money, is an indirect aid to religious schools. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court in 2002 held that a school voucher did not violate the federal Constitution.

In 1971, the Southern Baptist Convention had taken a strong stand against vouchers as an improper state aid of religion. The Supreme Court, of course, cannot change the religious principles of Baptist, but since that strong stand against vouchers, many Baptist schools have been created, and, for whatever the reason, that adamant opposition by Southern Baptists has disappeared. Apparently, dogmatic opposition to public moneys for religious schools starts to waver when those schools might be Baptist schools. (to be continued.)

When I attended the Baptist church, the views of separation of church and state, liberty of conscience, equality, and religious toleration espoused by Roger Williams were strong. Tolerant Baptists may not have been publicly militant about much, but they were militant about the separation of church and state. On occasion, however, I recognized a bit of Baptist backsliding. I was home from college or law school during the Vietnam War and went to church. The minister’s sermon gave support for that war. I was offended for two reasons: (1) He was wrong about the war. (2) He was wrong as a Baptist. The church should not give or wiithhold support for the government. It cheapened the worship of God to bring the state into it. Church and state. Separate.

I voiced my displeasure to the minister after the service, and he invited me to visit him during the week, which I did. We discussed the war. I knew that as Baptists he could not speak to me from a position of authority where he could attempt to dictate what my views should be. He, using either reason or the Bible or both, had to persuade me that his sermon was correct. He did not do so.

This interjection of politics into church was rare, however. Church and state were kept separate, and it was easy to predict how American Baptists would react in those days to some prominent church-state issues: prayers in public schools and government aid to parochial schools. For American Baptists the answers were a simple no and no.

The public prayers profaned God. If one prayed because the state required it, then the prayer came not out of devotion to God, but because of devotion or fear of the state. This made such a prayer unholy and defiled true religion. If the prayer was uttered, not out of devotion and faith, but merely out of a habit, like saying “Good morning, Miss Ketter” to the teacher each morning, the prayer was still sinful.

We American Baptists thought that the United States Supreme Court got it right when it held in 1962 that a recitation of a state-written prayer in the public schools violated the First Amendment, which prohibits an establishment of religion. Furor around the country, however, resulted. Godlessness would prevail. Communists would ascend. I found this panic amusing. My public school did not have prayers. I believe they were outlawed in Wisconsin, as they were in many–perhaps most–other states. I listened to the rants about the Court’s decision, and looked about me and could not figure out what they were going on about. Wisconsin, to my keen eye that was on a vigilant lookout for such things and disappointed when I could not find them, did not seem to be more a hotbed of iniquity than places that required the public prayers. It was clear to me that here was no connection between morality or godly behavior and the recitation of prayers in public schools.

American Baptists were not alone in accepting the Supreme Court ruling about school prayers. Southern Baptists agreed. The Southern Baptists came into being in the1840s when they segregated themselves from other Baptists. It should come as no great surprise that race was the dividing factor. The specific issue, as I understand it, was whether slave holders could be missionaries.

But even with the split, Southern Baptists maintained the same doctrinal positions as other Baptists. They maintained that the Bible only authorized two sacraments—adult baptism by immersion and the Lord’s Supper. They also were without a hierarchy. There was a Southern Baptist Convention to which churches sent “messengers,” but the pronouncements of the SBC did not bind anyone; they were just recommendations or urgings or food for thought. As with American Baptists, the church was congregation-based with the congregants selecting a minister. And Southern Baptists also believed in the strict separation of church and state. Thus, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention said shortly after the Supreme Court decision finding public school prayers unconstitutional that the decision was “one of the most powerful blows in our lifetime, maybe since the Constitution was adopted, for the freedom of religion in our lifetime.”

Soon thereafter, however, Southern Baptists started changing their positions. In 1982, the SBC supported a constitutional amendment that would have allowed individual or group prayer in public schools as long as the government did not require participation in the prayer. (This was a curious proposal. Individual prayer was never outlawed, and of course, a silent prayer could not be. Surely, I am not the only one who reached out to the Almighty before a calculus exam. A spoken prayer might run into troubles with school authorities, not because it was a prayer, but because any vocalization might have been disruptive to school order. Part of the power of prayer, it seems to me, is that at least silent ones can be said anywhere, including in government facilities.) (To be continued.)