"The Pioneers" by David McCullough

In 2004, historian and author David McCullough gave the commencement address at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio. It was the school’s 200^thanniversary, and to prepare for the speech, McCullough researched the school’s history. He discovered a building on campus was named Cutler Hall, after a New Englander, Manasseh Cutler. Cutler would eventually lead McCullough to Marietta, Ohio, and the Legacy Library at Marietta College.

It was a long and winding road from the commencement speech to The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West. McCullough tells a great story, but then he has great material to work with.

Manasseh Cutler

It’s a story involving a multitude of people, but McCollough focuses on four families or individuals – the Cutlers, the family of Rufus Putnam, a Revolutionary War veteran and hero who helped lead settlers to the new Northwest Territory; physician Samuel Hildreth; and a carpenter named Joseph Barker who became an architect. Manasseh Cutler and Putnam were directors of the Ohio Company, a stock company that aimed to settle the Northwest. Cutler did the lobbying work with the congress functioning under the Articles of Confederation, and eventually the Northwest Ordinance was born. 

Samuel Hildreth

Cutler was instrumental in having the ordinance exclude slavery. His son Ephraim was instrumental in convincing the Ohio legislature, when it was drawing up a constitution for statehood, to exclude slavery. And Ephraim’s son William was an abolitionist congressman giving fiery speeches against slavery. The town they helped to found and develop, Marietta, known for its New England flavor, would become a stop on the Underground Railroad for runaway slaves. 

Rufus Putnam

What strikes McCullough about the Cutlers and the other early settlers is what strikes the reader as well. They traveled overland from Massachusetts, crossing the Allegheny Mountains (and sometimes in winter). They arrived in a land that was famous from its heavy, dense forests, and they had to clear the trees to plant crops and build houses. They had to contend with deadly epidemics of yellow fever and influenza. The native Americans seemed to shift constantly from friendly to hostile and back again. And they always kept their eye on the future, creating schools and planning and founding universities. 

Marietta would never grow to the size of what Cincinnati and Cleveland became, but it was the spirit of Marietta that permeated Ohio and its sister states of the Old Northwest, and eventually what would become known as the American Midwest. That spirit was born in the American Revolution, and it was the ideals of the revolution that would become the ideals of the region.

David McCullough

McCullough is himself something of an American institution, He’s won the Pulitzer Prize twice and the National Book Award twice. He’s received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His books include The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, The Wright Brothers, The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, Brave Companions, Truman, John Adams, 1776, and The Greater Journey. On television, he hosted Smithsonian World and The American Experience, and he narrated such documentaries as Ken Burns’ The Civil War.

The Pioneers is a stirring tale, the story of the vision of a small number of Revolutionary War veterans who brought their beliefs and ideals into what would become the expansion of the United States from 13 colonies hugging the Atlantic seacoast to 50 states straddling a continent.

Related:

My review of The American Spirit by David McCullough.

Poets and Poems: Darren Demaree and "Two Towns Over"

Two Towns Over by poet Darren Demaree includes 56 poems, mostly short, but all powerfully aimed at the drug addiction crisis in Ohio and other states. The poems are specific to Ohio; included are several odes to different townships and poems named by towns.

Short poems. Quick reads (you might think; quick and haunting). Devastating images and metaphors.

Opiod addiction is not the first drug crisis America has faced; that mantle belongs to heroin, another opiod, developed in the some of the same laboratories as aspirin (and by the same manufacturer).

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy”

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance tells at least three different stories.

It is, as the subtitle suggests, a story of a family and the culture that family has been part of – the American working class that increasingly finds itself on the losing end of globalization, economic change, the technological revolution, and government in the hands of a technocratic elite.

It is a story how a boy who had almost everything stacked against him climbed his way out of what could have been a life of destruction and despair.

And, without once mentioning the presidential election, it is a book that explains part of the appeal of candidates like Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, and the forces that seem to be tearing the United States apart politically and socially.

By telling the story of his own family – a candid, often painful story – Vance humanizes and gives a voice to a large segment of the American population that increasingly believes itself ignored, forgotten, and marginalized. He uses the word “hillbilly” to label it, but he uses it with love, understanding, and the recognition that he is one with the family and people he’s writing about.

After World War II, his grandparents moved from rural/small town Kentucky to Middletown, Ohio; his grandfather was recruited to work for Armco Steel. It was a dislocating move for the couple; while many people like them moved from the same and similar areas, it was also a move away from the large extended family they depended upon.

They had three surviving children, the youngest of whom was Vance’s mother. And she was the one who fell into the shrinking opportunity-drug abuse-multiple marriages trap. She would be married four or five times, with numerous boyfriends in between. Vance describes himself (and his older sister Lindsay) as fortunate in that none of the boyfriends or husbands were abusive towards the children.

“It would be years before I learned,” he writes, “that no single book, or expert, or field could fully explain the problems of hillbillies in modern America. Our elegy is a sociological one, yes, but it is also about psychology and community and culture and faith.”

While it appeared that Vance as he grew older would fall into the poverty cycle, one individual would be the rock that gave him the stability he needed – his grandmother. And you may never have met a grandmother quite like this one – she set her husband on fire while he was sleeping off too much alcohol (the children saved him); she excelled at the use of colorful and vulgar language; and if she threated to use a gun people generally understood that she was serious.

J.D. Vance

His grandmother provided stability, especially during his last three years of high school, but Vance himself was learning enough about himself to know it was better to join the Marines before going off to the unstructured environment of college life. And that experience helped provide the revelation that he was ultimately responsible for his own life.

“There is a cultural movement in the white working class,” he says, “to blame problems on society or the government and that movement gains adherents by the day.” He chose not to do that. After the Marines, he attended Ohio State University and then was accepted into and graduated from Yale Law School. (And his observations about both college life and Yale also describe part of the problems with America – the upper middle class and upper classes maintaining and living the unwritten rules by which their class rules.)

Hillbilly Elegy is a book one should read during an election year like this one, and read again after the election is over. It’s a remarkable story of determination and success.

Related:

Trump: Tribune of Poor White People - Rod Dreher interviews J. D. Vance.

Yuval Levin’s The Fractured Republic.

R.R. Reno’s Resurrecting the Idea of a Christian Society.

Top photograph by David Cooper: Middletown, Ohio, where J.D. Vance was born and raised.