Summer History & Heritage — #11 (week of August 22)
Veritas history students, we will take the Summer 2011 History & Heritage Quiz during the first week of school on Friday, September 2.
Do not worry about getting a bad grade; grades will only count if you do well (and they
will count rather handsomely). Our quizzes are about developing cultural memory,
awareness, and thoughtfulness. That’s what matters, so pay careful attention to the
content of each question as you read through the test.
We trust you have kept up with the weekly Almanac biographical sketches (just 2
pages per week) and the summer H&H installments by email or the Veritas blog
(there will be 12 in all). It would be a good idea to print these installments, if you haven’t
already done so, and bring them to class for the first day of school (Monday, August 29).
Our set-up preliminaries complete, we now resume our summer lessons.
August 16 — Rufus King (1755-1827)
One of the youngest of the American Founders at the Constitutional Convention (he was
just 32 in 1787), known for his forceful eloquence in oratory and competence in the law,
particularly maritime and commercial relations. He represented Massachusetts for the
first half of his career (including the Founding era) and New York for the second half. A
High Federalist (an advocate for the U.S. Constitution) and a Unionist, there was still a
good measure of regional and parochial spirit in the man. A strong union was best, in
King’s mind, mostly because he thought it best for New England and the Northeast. He
thought secession was a legitimate option for the states, he threatened it a couple of
times himself, and once recommended it to Virginia’s John Taylor of Caroline (Taylor did
not think the moment was ripe for that option).
Even King’s fierce opposition to slavery seemed to be less about the moral injustice of
the practice than about regional power politics (mounting a challenge to what he
perceived as an ascendant and domineering South). King, by the way, was born in the
district of Maine (part of Massachusetts at the time), the son of a slaveholder. He
owned slaves himself until 1812.
August 18 — Carlyle and Wordsworth in 1840
A verbally sophisticated and enjoyable sketch about men of letters having breakfast (not
readily adaptable to questions and answers). Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) was a
brilliant Scottish essayist and historian whose work on the French Revolution
established his reputation for wisdom in cultural criticism. William Wordsworth
(1770-1850) was England’s poet laureate from 1843 to his death.
We’ll quote one of Carlyle’s marvelous descriptions of the elderly Wordsworth as he
appeared to the learned Scot that sunny summer morning (make sure you get the
meaning of taciturn, hopefully from context): “You would have said he was a usually
taciturn man; glad to unlock himself to audience sympathetic and intelligent, when such
offered itself.”
There was one somewhat sour note in Carlyle’s account. After noting how Wordsworth
reveled in “the wells of English undefiled,” he complained about his being “stone dumb
as to the deeper rules and wells of Eternal Truth and Harmony, which you were to try
and set forth by said undefiled wells of English or what other speech you had.”
We can thank Mr. Carlyle for here reminding us of something we all know intuitively:
when it comes to rhetoric (speaking & writing), what we say matters more than how we
say it. Better to be true than merely eloquent or elegant.
Subsidiarity — (from Thomas Fleming’s The Morality of Everyday Life)
This term summarizes the substance of Roman Catholic criticism of both nationalism
and internationalism, ideologies that followed in the wake of the French Revolution?
Formulated by popes, including Leo XIII and Pius XI, in the late 1800s and early 1900s,
the Church’s teaching warned against larger jurisdictions swallowing up the functions of
smaller ones when the latter are indeed capable of performing them. Other names for
the concept include decentralization and federalism.
