Words Matter

Years ago I read a sentence that has stuck with me, as if, so it seems, to prove itself true. That sentence went something like this, “Words matter, not because of what they say, but because of what they set in motion.”

I fear for what our words–our many, many words–are setting in motion in our nation and world. Specifically, I fear for what words of hatred and distrust and division are releasing into our future. They threaten to drown out words of love, of hope, of human community. Words founded upon our fears threaten to overwhelm words grounded in hope.

Yesterday the Supreme Court of the United States issued a decision on the administration's “ban” on immigration from predominantly Muslim countries. That decision and the dissents it provoked were stated in carefully-wrought words intended to justify very different points of view on the matter.

Giving the majority the benefit of doubt, I believe it really believes that what it said faithfully interprets the Constitution and the law in the only way possible.

But I also believe the majority deliberated in a kind of vacuum. The five justices read the President’s Executive Order and the Constitution and the appropriate laws while wearing blinders and ear plugs, as if the documents exist apart from daily life and political and social realities. They did not consider what their words have already set into motion: more distrust, more despair, more injustice, more anger. “The law’s the law; it doesn’t matter when it opens the door to making things worse than they already are.”

About the same time, Representative Maxine Waters urged confronting government leaders and officials personally wherever we see them, and Representative Steven King darkly hinted that we may be looking at another civil war. Loose talk, but talk that can set into motion dire events that will lead to no good end and certainly not strengthen our democracy. 

I struggle to find words that might set good into motion, that might release the power of love and compassion and justice into the world, that might channel my outrage over this current crisis into messages that point to a better way. I am not sure I know how to do this, but somehow I must.

Suffer the little children to suffer

Our daughter told us last night about trying to explain the meaning of life to our 7-year-old granddaughter in response to a question she had asked.

My doctor this morning proudly showed me pictures of his 2-month-old grandson, happily snuggled in the arms of his loving parents (and grandfather). Years of questions to be faced!

All children are born with a basic human right to tender and responsive parental love. Sadly, not all parents are capable or available to give it. That void is never, ever the child’s fault.

But when our government denies that fundamental right to children because they belong to a class of people then the fault is only the government’s. It will have to answer in the court of human decency. 

I am ashamed of and angry about this mess foisted upon us by a dysfunctional political system and a cynical and heartless administration. Yesterday’s Executive Order does little to address the current situation, and even threatens to make it worse. We should be, we can be, we must be better than this, even while securing our borders and doing justice.

Has America grown weary of making even the feeblist attempts to do right by all people? Are we choosing to inflict suffering upon the most vulnerable because our fear of the future has overwhelmed our desire to do good? Is that what the 2016 election was really all about? Today, it surely seems so.

The Final Chapter in Clare and Lulu Myers's Family

My Aunt Marjorie died recently, thereby closing the book on my father’s nuclear family. Her passing has touched me not only because of who she was, but also for what it represents.

Clare and Lulu Myers raised their six children on a farm a couple of miles north of Beaman, in southern Grundy County, Iowa. They had been born in the 1890s, and their children were born between 1915 and 1929. My dad, Keith, was the oldest, and Marj was #4, born in 1925. There were four sons and two daughters.

All of my memories of grandparents Myers are good ones. They were hard-working, honest, caring people who were deeply involved in the life of their small community and its Methodist Church. They were remarkably aware of the world beyond their corner of it. My grandfather had a little college and I believe hoped to be a teacher, but family obligations took him back to the farm. Grandmother was an avid reader all of her life.

It is nearly impossible for me to imagine how they raised their children as successfully as they did. The decade before the worldwide Great Depression of the 1930s saw the agricultural depression and droughts of the 1920s. Then came World War II. Fortunately, their farm was on some of the most productive land on earth, and their hard work as a family assured their children of food and shelter and basic clothing, if not much else. I do not remember my father ever saying they went hungry, but he often said they were poor but didn’t know it because everyone they knew was in the same boat. They would not understand being considered “privileged.” They would smile modestly if you recalled that they had “fed the world” during and after the Second World War.

Each of the six children knew traditional measures of success. They all married (only one marriage ended in divorce), they all bore children (a total of 16, 12 of whom are still living), and they all achieved the comforts and benefits of middle class American life. So far as I know none of them ever crossed the law in any but the most minor of ways. They all made their communities better places, and some made contributions that were felt beyond those communities.

Five of the six were Iowans to their deaths. Many of the next generation have also remained in Iowa, but several live out of the state. Only two of my fifteen cousins are farmers today, and both those families have supplemented their income in other careers.

My generation, transitioning into old age itself, treasures later memories of the mature Clare and Lulu Myers family. We remember family gatherings with our grandparents and their six adult children and their families. Our children only know about those if and when we tell them about them. Their children will not likely know any of their names or where and how they lived.

History tends not to take special note of families like that of Clare and Lulu Myers. For the most part they will be remembered, if they are remembered at all, as names and perhaps bland notations in old government records. But the rememberers of the memories that matter–of life and laughter and death and despair in that little farmhouse and the land around it–are now silenced. The emotions and passions that went into living in that place at that time can no be longer felt exactly as they felt them then. We have some pictures and some written first-person accounts, but no one will be able to say ever again that we were there ourselves.

They are the kind of people and families, of all classes and careers and nationalities and races, whose work and devotion made us who we are today. They made our life as a nation better than they could ever have imagined. How quickly, and how sadly, we forget and try to move on.

Honest Abe Rolls Over in His Grave

President Trump gets along well with dictators, and finds it easy to make deals with them, although it's often hard to understand what those deals are.

He does not get along well with democratically-elected leaders, and demonstrates little interest in dealing with them in any but the most superficial way.

President Trump does not understand or accept how "government of the people, by the people, and for the people" works. I fear he feels himself above democracy, including our own.

The people will pay the price.

Denying Science in the Name of Jesus

Interim Pastor Jerl Watkins of Arcadia Baptist Church in Santa Fe, Texas, customarily preaches a sermon honoring high school grads each spring (sounds like a long interim). An article posted by USA Today reports that this year he had to modify his message substantially, for obvious reasons. It would be a tough one to get right.

It also reports that Pastor Watkins always includes a denial of evolution in this annual sermon, perhaps wanting to take one last shot at putting what he thinks the Bible teaches in front of the young ones before they are set loose in the big, bad, unbelieving world. He does this, according to the report, because “as a former chemistry student, he wants future college students to know there is no scientific evidence backing evolution.” He found time to include his warning against evolution this year. “‘That’s why they call it a theory,’ Watkins said, which prompted a few of the Santa Fe congregants to yell out ‘That’s right!’ and ‘Amen.’”

There's a host of ways to counter Pastor Watkins’s words, some of them even from a religious perspective. That’s not my interest today.

What interested me today was the report that one of his young congregants hopes to become a pediatrician and another plans to study physical therapy.

Can you become either of those without having to come to terms with evolution, other than by simply denying it? And if you deny it altogether, will you be competent to serve your patients? I’d probably be okay working with an evolution-denying physical therapist, but I am not sure I’d want my grandkids to go to an evolution-denying pediatrician. At the very least, I’d wonder what else they ignored in their studies because it isn’t “in the Bible.”

About Presidential Nobel Peace Prize Awards

For the record, I do not think Donald Trump, nor any sitting American President, should be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Certainly not based upon either their rhetoric nor upon actions whose results are not yet known. I felt it was premature for Barack Obama to be awarded it, and thought he should have politely declined the offer at the time.

History has a way of producing surprises. Actions "sure to work" in a certain way frequently do not, and political leaders are pushed to respond in ways that were not in the plan. In President Trump's case, if a few years from now there is relative peace and even reconciliation on the Korean peninsula, than consider him for the Peace Prize. However, I think his use of threat of war to get there may stand in the way of serious consideration.

Then there's the matter of Aung San Suu Kyi, a caution to the Peace Prize committee, in my estimation. What things . . . and what kinds of leaders and leadership . . . make for real peace?

Lakeside Press’s Four American Books: A Tribute to my Grandfather

My maternal grandfather, James Bohaty, was the foreman in the press room that printed Lakeside Press’s Four American Books in 1930. I am grateful that I have been able to acquire them all.

James Bohaty (1892-1984) worked at R. R. Donnelley and Sons in Chicago for 46 years, from before he joined its first apprenticeship class in 1908 until he retired 46 years later. On at least three different occasions the company’s in-house publications carried articles about him: as a press room foreman in 1923; upon his retirement in 1954; and in a 1983 four-page article that was one in a series celebrating Donnelley Pioneers. That third article is entitled, James Bohaty: Dean of the Letterpress, and includes several wonderful pictures (he is the man on the left in this picture). The articles praise his excellent work, his unfailing attention to detail, and his loyalty to the company. A loving husband, father, and grandfather, he was just as committed to excellence and attentive to detail in his personal life. 

In the late 1920s Donnelley’s corporate leaders determined to publish four books that would represent the best in modern book design and production. These four books, to be published by Donnelley’s Lakeside Press, were to demonstrate that American ingenuity and artistry could mass produce books on a par with anything the best European craftsmen could produce using more traditional methods They chose four works and selected an artist to illustrate and design each book. Quoting the 1983 article, “(Donnelley’s executives) wanted to print, in limited editions, classic works by American authors. To that end, they called together the best illustrators, designers, typographers, printers and binders to meet the challenge: Produce the finest books ever done in America. Jim Bohaty’s pressroom was chosen to do the presswork.” One thousand copies of each book would eventually be published.

In addition to Four American Books my grandfather supervised the printing of some of The Lakeside Classics and of the volumes produced by Donnelley’s Holiday Press. I remember him talking with pride about printing the likes of Time and Life magazines, the World Book Encyclopedia, and even the massive Chicago telephone book and the Sears catalogue. Donnelley’s was one of the largest printers in the world at the time.

I recall some of the books on the shelves my grandparents’ living room as I was growing up. Through the decades I often scanned the shelves of rare book stores when searching for just one of the four. I never found any. But upon my mother’s death in I received her copy of Walden.

In 2017 the Cleveland Museum of Art offered an exciting exhibition of the art and culture of the the 1920s – The Jazz Age. Toward the end of our visit I remembered the Four American Books, which are products of that time, and decided to try to find the three I did not have.

Here are Lakeside Press’s Four American Books, with a few pictures of each.

Moby Dick, or the Whale, by Herman Melville; illustrated by Rockwell Kent: 

Tales, by Edgar Allan Poe; illustrated by W. A. Dwiggins:   

Two Years Before the Mast-A Personal Narrative of Life at Sea, by Richard Henry Dana, Jr; illustrated by Edwin A. Wilson:   

Walden, or Life in the Woods, by Henry David Thoreau; illustrated by Rudolph Ruzicka:   

I found Moby Dick first, and not far away. I had heard of Zubal Books on Cleveland’s near West Side. I called, and was told that they had a very fine copy of Moby Dick at what my online searches told me was a fair price. We went to see it the next day. As promised, it is beautiful, likely hardly ever opened, and in its original aluminum slip case. The following day we returned to Zubal Books and purchased it.

In short order I was able to purchase Two Years Before the Mast from a dealer inGloucester City, New Jersey, and Poe’s Tales from a dealer in Mount Desert, Maine.

Whether the Four American Books realize the goal of being (at least until 1930) “the finest books ever done in America” is of course debatable. There can be little doubt that if any of them deserves that title it is Rockwell Kent’s three-volume edition of Moby Dick. It is the most dramatic of them. Its massive volumes are bound in black with silver printing. Its jet-black ink drawings practically leap off the pages. Grandpa Bohaty liked to tell us how difficult it was to get the large expanses of black printer’s ink evenly spread on the paper. The market value of the original Moby Dick is significantly greater than the market value of the other three books combined.

A small one-volume “trade edition” of Melville’s classic was soon produced to be a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Many, if not all of the original drawings are in it, but they lack the intensity of the originals. Fortunately, my mother’s older sister gave me her copy of the trade edition, which Kent had signed “for James Bohaty.”

Walden is often considered the best of the remaining three. Rudolf Ruzicka was a well-known illustrator and artist (and Czech, like my grandfather), and his highly-detailed woodcuts reflect the intensely personal nature of Thoreau’s thoughts. Inside the front cover of our copy of Walden Grandpa attached a note to him from Ruzicka expressing deep appreciation for the press work. It refers him a small engraving of a Hungarian town and inscribed “to James Bohaty.” It hangs in our home.

Poe’s Tales’ illustrations are dark and dramatic, befitting the horror conveyed in those stories. The intricate design of the decorations scattered throughout add a sense of the twists and turns of the Tales themselves. 

To some Wilson’s work in Two Years is the most problematical. The colorful paintings seem to reflect more the style of 1920s print advertising than of early 19th-century sea-farers. But it is the only one of the books the uses color at all, and its cover is very striking.

I cannot judge the books beyond what I’ve written, and I do not know enough about the actual printing process, either now or nearly 100 years ago, to judge the quality of the print work. I do know they are all beautiful to my eyes, and I like to think that Grandpa Bohaty may well have held their pages as his keen eye made sure that they were just exactly as they were meant to be.

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Additional information about these books is available in Claire Badaracco’s American Culture and the Marketplace: R. R. Donnelley’s Four American Books Campaign, 1926-1930. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1992.