The Literary Foundations of America

The last month has seen a flurry of videos and tweets on what it means to be an American, with the usual political sniping, but no one has mentioned the most fundamental aspect of our creation and history: reading. No other world power was ever founded by, and for, such a highly literate population, on the idea that the common man could and must read and evaluate complex ideas in town halls, in churches, on juries and in judging the affairs of their country.

Aztec, Muslim, Chinese, Bantu and many other empires had armies and slaves, but none had small towns where everyone read the newspaper, or bookstores or coffee shops where everyone gathered to debate the latest book. The European Empires – Britain, France, Spain – began in the Dark Ages but developed a literate culture eventually, and when they found the New World, it was passionately literate sects like the Puritans were the ones that most often made the voyage.

Even in the middle of a dangerous wilderness, colonists quickly built printing presses, libraries and colleges; just 16 years after the first Puritans stepped off the Mayflower and 15 years after they almost died of starvation, they founded Harvard University. Even with a less-literate Native population and a constant influx of new and sometimes illiterate immigrants, colonial America still had a literacy rate upwards of 90 percent by the American Revolution.

Booksellers and printers did a brisk business in every city and town of colonial America, coffee-shops hosted vibrant debates on all manner of subjects, and wandering preachers paid their way through the countryside by selling books to rural homesteaders. They often read multiple languages as well, many books sold were in Ancient Greek and Latin, and newspapers were shipped in from various European countries – months late, of course, but still prized – in their native languages.

Thomas Paine’s book Common Sense sold half a million copies in its first year, reaching 20 percent of the population – only the Harry Potter books come close today. And despite its homespun title, its long and complex sentences, subtle philosophical distinctions and references to John Milton and classical literature flummox many a college student today. Take this sample paragraph:

“It is repugnant to reason, to the universal order of things to all examples from former ages, to suppose, that this continent can longer remain subject to any external power. The most sanguine in Britain does not think so. The utmost stretch of human wisdom cannot, at this time, compass a plan short of separation, which can promise the continent even a year’s security. Reconciliation is now a fallacious dream. Nature hath deserted the connexion, and Art cannot supply her place. For, as Milton wisely expresses, ‘never can true reconcilement grow where wounds of deadly hate have pierced so deep.’”(1)

By 1831, French author Alexis de Toqueville wrote that “there is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.” (2) English politician Richard Cobden, who toured the USA in 1835, estimated that there was six times more newspaper reading in the young America than in his own country – more than 1,200 newspapers publishing 90 million copies, in a country that had only 17 million inhabitants, implying that every adult read perhaps eight newspapers a day. (3)

When I point this out to people today, most retort, “If they were so much better than we are, how could they oppress Native Americans? How could they keep slaves?” One could answer in a number of different ways; for example, that very few Americans in the 1700s or 1800s killed Native Americans or owned slaves; such things were done by a miniscule percentage of the population. Or that Europeans committed a fraction of the atrocities of the Muslim slavers of that age, or of the Aztecs, or almost any other civilisation; such things were universal then, and that progress wasn't going to begin in an already-perfect society. Or that we don’t need slaves, as we use fossil fuels, and leave the burden to our grandchildren. Or that we contribute to atrocities as well, but through corporations and governments that commit them far away on our behalf, leaving us with the illusion of moral superiority. The best answer, though, might be: Why do you think those things ended?

Paine’s writings, and many less famous texts, galvanised a population of fence-sitters to join the Revolution; nothing like this would have happened if Americans were not a people who would buy and read such a book enthusiastically and follow its sophisticated arguments. Lincoln spoke against slavery in masterful speeches, with extended sentences, expansive vocabulary and logical constructions. They were also, obviously, spoken, so his audience had to follow them by ear in real time – sometimes a long time, as the Lincoln-Douglas debates lasted for three hours, with each speaker lasting up to 90 minutes at a stretch, all to an audience of frontier farmers.

All these people had been introduced to a breadth of ideas by the Greek and Roman classics, from Aristotle to Xenophon, all able to reference the same cultural standards. Most of the writers we remember for their original works – Alexander Pope or John Dryden, for example – actually put most of their time and energy into magnificent translations of Greek and Roman classics. It was for this reason that by 1600 Shakespeare could write about Coriolanus or Titus Andronicus, confident that the audience would understand who these people were and would care.

A classical education involved more than merely reading ancient texts: it meant learning to think critically and debate logically, in the way pioneered by the Greeks. Medieval Christian clergy were trained in these skills, and the legal, political and scientific infrastructures of the West continue to assume such training. It is no coincidence that much of our legal and scientific terminology comes from Greek and Latin. Obligations like jury duty and voting assume that ordinary citizens have an ability to assess logical arguments; science assumes the ability to test theories. 

Once I began to read Greek and Roman classics as an adult, I suddenly understood many of the paintings in art galleries and the writings of Jefferson or Lincoln, as most of them reference Greek and Roman works. I used to think the famous sculpture of George Washington in a Roman toga was a bit of pretentious glorification; now I understand, as Americans at the time surely did, that it was the opposite. It portrayed Washington as Cincinnatus, the farmer who did his duty to his country and then peacefully stepped away from unlimited power. As my daughter put it after reading Tolkien, “he put down the Ring.”

Even into the mid-20^th century American novels, black-and-white films, newspaper articles, popular songs and even children’s rhymes referenced Horatius or Croesus or the Gospels, assuming everyone would understand the reference. When I casually read books or magazine articles written a  mere few generations ago, written not for professors but for regular mailmen, farmhands or construction workers, I’m struck by how liberally they are peppered with references to the classics, lost on anyone reading today.

People had a literate culture not because they went to school for more years than we do – many children only went to formal school for a few years -- but because they read almost constantly, at home and at work, to themselves and each other. They had a democracy not because a document said so, but because they debated what they had read in coffee shops and town halls and churches. Our institutions – science, local government, jury trials – all depend on the assumption that we are still a people who can do this .. and until recently, we were. Only in recent decades have we abandoned this most fundamental characteristic of Americana, and without it our institutions remain only in name.  

As recently as 1940 literacy stood at 96 percent for white Americans and 80 percent for black Americans, and those were not just people who could read but did. Older Americans can still remember a time when people read books and newspapers on the bus, on the train, waiting for the dentist. Nor were these celebrity gossip magazines or children’s books; the runaway best-seller of 1927 was Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy.

In the mid-20^th century, though, as modern Hollywood culture slashed through our real culture like a Mongol horde, references to classical literature bled out with astonishing swiftness – all the more because so few have ever remarked on it. Not only do we no longer know any of the things for centuries we knew as a people, but we no longer know that we once knew them.

If you’re like many people I know, you might be surprised how much phones and television have eroded your attention span, how your very brain isn’t responding to your will the way it used to. Retrain it by reading a bit each day, perhaps half an hour every morning before you've looked at a phone. If you have to, start with material that was once considered for children, like the McGuffey Readers of the 1800s. Work your way up to Robert Louis Stevenson and G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. Read a half hour every morning – I’ll do it too – and we’ll work our way back to the level of Revolutionary-era Americans again.

Today is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and of course we can enjoy all the usual celebrations and barbecues. What I’d like to see everyone do, though, is to resolve that this will not just be a day for flags and explosions, but a new beginning for everyone reading this: that we will become a nation of readers again.

 

1 - Common Sense

2 - Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville, Chapter XIII

3 - The Political Writings of Richard Cobden p. 90

 

 

Whitewashing

Our homes might be made of brick and lumber, our cars of metal and plastic, but their surfaces – the part we see – are usually paint. Their colours, though, hold an alarming stew of ingredients -- benzene, tricholoroethylene, formaldehyde, phenol, titanium oxide and many others – all of which flake off over time but never, of course, truly leave us. That’s not even counting the lead, now long banned from new paint, that has been flaking off old buildings into our water, soil and blood for generations.

So when our chicken coop needed some brightening, we took the old-fashioned route and whitewashed. Whitewashing was used on buildings here in Ireland into the late 20^th century, only recently replaced by more dubious alternatives. Whitewash can consist of as little as two one-syllable ingredients – lime and water – that can be mixed and prepared with almost no energy in a few minutes. It is non-toxic enough that animals can actually lick it off with few or no ill effects, but anti-septic enough to discourage bacteria in the coop or dairy.

Lime refers not to the fruit or unrelated tree, but to a product made from burning limestone in a kiln. Limestone is mainly coral and shells of long-extinct sea creatures, squeezed over aeons into a solid mass of calcium carbonate, or CaCO3.  When burned at 900 degrees C or more it vents carbon dioxide (CO2), leaving behind the volatile calcium oxide (CaO) or “quicklime.” When combined with water – hydrated or “slaked” – it becomes calcium hydroxide or Ca(OH)2, or simply called “lime.”

Humans have been creating lime this way for several thousand years, putting it to many uses; as a mortar for building, as an early form of cement, as an antiseptic ointment for animals or an anti-fungal coating for trees. A bit of lime could help remove hair from hides, sterilise water, to bleach paper, to deter slugs from a garden, or preserve eggs for months.

Irish farmers, though, found it most important to neutralise acid soils and multiply crop production – as much as fourfold, by some contemporary accounts.  Some 40 per cent of the arable land in the world is too acidic for many plants to grow – the more acidic the soil, the more toxic aluminium plants absorb. Lime could be worked into boggy and acid soils to temporarily “sweeten” or neutralise the soil, increasing the fertility many times over.

Its brilliant whiteness was valued in places like Britain and Ireland, islands a thousand miles from the Arctic Circle where the winters grow very dark indeed. Irish cottages were traditionally whitewashed in spring, as the rainy season gave way to the less-rainy season, and again as part of the ritual leading up to Christmas.

After experimenting a bit, we settled on a rather simple recipe: two cups of water for every cup of lime, with a quarter-cup of salt thrown in. It was a particularly thick ratio and flaked off a bit when drying, so next time we might try a thinner combination. Once mixed, the wash can be applied with regular paintbrush strokes – or with my then-nine-year-old’s more Jackson-Pollock-inspired approach. It looks thin and transparent at first, but whitens as it dries. Wear gloves and goggles – lime is only a mildly caustic alkalai, but work with it all day and you’ll get raw hands.   

We also tried mixing milk in as well, recommended by many old books, but found the effect no different, so the extra expense of milk was not justified. Farmers here sometimes added oils – linseed was most popular – to make it more water-proof, or strengthened it with animal hair or cereal husks.

To be sure, whitewash has disadvantages; it is water-soluble, for one thing, so rain washes it away. This presents little problem when the sides are under a slight overhang, like the sides of our coop or most houses, but our hen-boxes receive a constant gusher of water from the roof, and we had to divert the water with a plastic awning or the white coating wouldn’t have lasted long. Even in dry weather, however, whitewash flakes off over time, and powders your clothes when you rub against it. On the other hand, it leaves no permanent stains.

I note that cob houses here – made of a mix of sand, clay and straw, mixed into a plaster that hardens like cement -- were whitewashed, and wondered how much of that was for decoration, and how much was as an early-warning system. Cob itself slowly erodes when exposed to water, and whitewash creates a first line of defence and points out vulnerable areas.

It is also, almost inevitably, white, except in the west of Ireland some farmers painted their houses pink by mixing pig’s blood with the wash. The fact that lime was cheap and easy, while coloured paints were expensive, probably accounts for the classic look of Irish homes -- clean white exteriors accented by brilliantly-coloured doors and windows.

Locals here seemed familiar with many vegetable dyes or fabrics -- elderberries for lavender; red cabbage or bramble-berries for blue; nettles for green; St. John’s Wort for magenta and marigolds, calendula, dock root and onion skins for yellow. Or they used clays and minerals -- yellow and red ochre, sienna, umber, cinnabar and iron oxide for reds and browns, copper ore for green paints, lampblack or charcoal for blacks and greys. Wherever you live, your plants and soil probably have their own palette of all-natural colours, which you can use at least as well as the Neanderthals who painted long-extinct animals on cave walls.

 

A New Beginning

I’ve been publishing this blog for almost 20 years now, and lately my posting has fallen off, for personal reasons. I recently moved back to the USA to help take care of my elderly parents, and also to spend more time with my own extended family. I’ve had to adjust to living in a country much changed from what I remember, as well as with family duties, jobs and the burning usual of life.

On the good side, however, I assembled 20 years of writings about the Irish countryside, and the words of several hundred elderly Irish, into a book, and this year it was published. I also met an amazing woman, and for the first time since I was raising my daughter, am no longer living my life alone. With everything that’s been happening, I have not had much time for new writing, and I intend to change that. I’ve never been much for resolutions, but for the first time in years, it feels like a new beginning.

Using plants to cleanse the land

 

Most people around the world have some legends about what lies under the earth, and whatever it is – devils, dragons, spirits and monsters of all kinds – it is almost always something to be avoided. We can easily imagine how such stories began – for a thousand generations humans must have come across volcanic fumes, exposed tar pits or other such hazards, and concluded that what lies under the earth is meant to stay there.

In the last century or two, however, humans have gone the opposite direction in a big way. Around the same time that scientists were discovering all manner of useful metals, fossil fuels gave us the means to extract them, and soon we were digging the biggest pits, the deepest holes, the longest tunnels the world had ever seen. All this was, remember, to take what were often extremely toxic materials --- our bodies did not evolve to cope with lead, cadmium or mercury – put them in machines and compounds for humans to use, and spread them throughout the places where humans lived. We're starting to suspect this wasn't a good idea.

One of these elements is lead, which last-century humans put into containers, car parts, pipes, paints and many other products – and even in petroleum, spreading lead-tainted exhaust across the world. Lead causes brain damage and erratic behaviour if absorbed into the human body, and its rise and fall correlates with the U.S. crime rate in the 20th century – the more lead was around children, the more crime appeared a generation later. It’s been banned from paints and auto fuel, of course, but it lingers on old buildings and in soil.

Or take mercury: Burning coal releases it into air and water, and thence into animals like fish – a 2009 study by the U.S. Geological Survey tested 300 streams across the United States and found that every fish tested contained mercury, a quarter at unsafe levels.

You could go on with a list of such heavy metals – cadmium, zinc, copper – right down the periodic table. Most of all, we have pulled out coal and oil and used it not just to fuel up the car and turn on the lights, but to generate hundreds of thousands of petrochemicals with unpronounceable names as long as sentences and often-unpleasant effects.

I say “we,” of course, but this isn’t a guilt trip; most of this was before your time, and you didn’t vote for it anyway. You and I use small amounts of heavy metals and fossil fuels in our own lives – driving, flying, heating, buying plastic products, just looking at this on a computer – but it’s very difficult to avoid doing so and still living in the modern world.

The consequence of so many people doing so many of these things, though, is that any urban area – and many rural ones – will have splotches on the map with large quantities of toxic materials in the ground. If you live where a gasoline station used to be, or a factory, a garbage dump, or any number of other things, you might have things in your soil you don’t want in your stroganoff.

If you think you just won’t live in places, or just move away from them, congratulations: You’re thinking the same thing as everyone else. That presents a problem, as everyone who can live somewhere else will do so, and everyone who can’t live somewhere else will live on contaminated sites. Realistically, this means the poor, the elderly and other vulnerable people have to live with everyone else’s toxic waste – which is often the case already.

Other methods, like removing tonnes of contaminated soil, involve years of work and vast sums of money we don’t have anymore. If you could remove all the affected soil, moreover, where would you put it, aside from somewhere else that would then be contaminated?

What we need is a device that can suck toxins out of the soil and either turn them into something harmless, or concentrate them in something removable. No one has much money lying around to invent such a device, though, much less to manufacture millions of them and send them to sites around the world for free. Thus, these hypothetical devices would be even better if they already appeared around the world, or were lightweight and easily transportable.

It would be best, in fact, if these machines cost nothing to create, and once created could make more of themselves, at an exponential rate. While we’re at it, it would also be nice if the devices also prevented soil erosion, fed bees and other pollinators, and provided shade, beauty, a home for wildlife, and possibly firewood.

Thankfully, we have these machines now. Certain plants, it turns out, have a particular gift for sucking up specific chemicals, either as a quirk of their biology or as a way to make themselves poisonous and avoid being eaten. When these plants are sown on contaminated ground, they absorb the contaminants into their tissues, gradually reducing the amount in the soil until it is safe for humans.

Called phyto-remediation, this process has become one of the newest and most promising fields of biology. Similar methods use mushrooms in what is called myco-remediation, or use bacteria and have unfortunate names like bio-sparging, bio-slurping and bio-venting, but we’ll restrict ourselves here to plants.

The basic method is straightforward: Find out what toxins lurk in your patch of ground, and come up with a regimen of plants appropriate for the climate that hyper-accumulate those particular toxins.

“Toxins,” of course, covers a lot of ground, and the vagueness of the word allows it to be used in all kinds of unproductive ways – for example, every fake New Age cure that claims to rid your body of unspecified “toxins.” So to get more specific, let’s separate toxins into two of the most common categories: metals and petrochemicals.

Petrochemicals generally have familiar atoms like carbon, hydrogen and oxygen, the same things that make up chocolate sundaes, flower gardens, testosterone, newspaper, and most of the world around us. Those same elements in different combinations, however, make common but un-tasty compounds like gasoline, or lethal poisons like Agent Orange – it’s all in how many atoms are put together in what arrangement.

If a plant can absorb, let’s say, the cancer-causing benzo-pyrene – C20H12, found in coal tar – with some oxygen (O) and then separate it into C12H22O11 and H2O, the petroleum-based poison would become sugar water. I’m not saying this is the actual chemical process, by the way – just an example of how chemical combinations can make something deadly or delicious.

When the toxins are metals, of course, they cannot be broken down into other elements any more than lead could be changed to gold. Some plants can absorb the metal and metabolise it into some kind of molecule, however, making it less easy to be absorbed by the human body and thus safer to be around. Sometimes the metals can even help us; some biologists have even proposed using certain edible plants to accumulate zinc from contaminated soils and feeding the plants to people with a zinc deficiency.

After the plants are harvested with the metals concentrated in their tissues, they can be burned, and the metal stays in the ash – a small amount of space and weight to dispose of, compared to the tonnes of contaminated earth. The ash might even be able to be mined for the metals, for complete recycling.

Blue Sheep fescue helps clean up lead, as do water ferns and members of the cabbage family. Smooth water hyssop takes up copper and mercury, while water hyacinths suck up mercury, lead, cadmium, zinc, cesium, strontium-90, uranium and various pesticides. Sunflowers slurp a wide range of compounds – not just the uranium and strontium-90 from radioactive sites, but also cesium, methyl bromide and many more. Perhaps the most magnificent hyperaccumulator, though, is the simple willow tree, Salix viminalis; it slurps up copper, zinc, cadmium, selenium, silver, chromium, uranium, petrochemicals and many others. Also, once its biomass has concentrated the heavy metals, it can be harvested and used for many practical things.

Of course, phytoremediation operates under certain limitations; the plants have to be able to grow in that climate, and should not be an invasive species that will take over the landscape, as kudzu did in the American South. The plants can only remove toxins as deep as their roots, so the technique might not solve groundwater contamination.

Most importantly, plants move at a different speed than we do, and even after the plants are harvested they are not likely to have eliminated the toxin. Reducing a toxin to safe levels takes time, and phytoremediation doesn’t remove a problem overnight.

Perhaps the most appealing aspect of this new field, though, is its scale, that the work to clean up toxic-waste sites could be done with no massive government project or corporate funding, with no bulldozers or construction equipment, without advanced and delicate technology beyond that to measure the toxin levels. The principles could be taught to every schoolchild or practiced by every land-owner, so that if anyone detects a certain toxin on their property, they will know what to plant to gradually remove it. The seeds and plants could be sold by any gardening or farm-supply store, so that some of our society’s most grandiose mistakes can be fixed by ordinary people, using natural means, using home-made experiments, hard work and patience, to restore our land to what it once was.