One Man's Quest for Spiritual Fulfillment and the Rise of Islam in America

Editors Note: I first wrote about Alexander Russell Webb and his work to bring Islam to the United States back in 2009 for the Register Star and later expanded on the subject in 2012 for Columbia County History and Heritage magazine. The following is adapted from the latter. I felt in the current climate of Islamophobia it was worth highlighting the nation's historical view of that religion and of the man who helped spread its message at the turn of the century. 

Alexander Russell Webb felt the sun on his face and listened to the birds chirping, glad to be out of Sunday school. Even then, just a young boy, he felt closer to God out of doors than in the stuffy confines of the church.

This restlessness of both body and spirit would lead Webb from Hudson, New York, where he was born in 1846, to Chicago, the frontier towns of Missouri, and later to more exotic locales. It would also take him on a spiritual journey from his staid Presbyterian upbringing to a total embrace of Islam, which he would help spread across America. And although he may not have known it, the city of his birth, by dint of time and place, may have planted the seeds that led him to his faith.

As a youth he was not inclined toward religion and by his twenties had completely given up on the church and was a self-proclaimed “materialist” whose only compass was the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Hudson, N.Y. about the time Webb was born there. 

His break with the church apparently came after the loss of his first wife and destruction of his jewelry business in the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. Webb had moved to the city after graduating from Claverack College. Webb, like so many other young men of his generation, had left the East and headed to the wild and bustling cities of the Midwest to seek his fortune. 

After the fire he moved to New York City before again returning to Chicago where he eventually made enough money to buy a small newspaper, the Unionville Republican, located in Unionville, Mo. Webb’s journalistic interests were likely due to his father’s influence. Alexander Nelson Webb had been the editor of the Hudson Daily Star for years. 

The younger Webb would eventually find himself drawn to a spiritual life and sought this out by reading such writers and philosophers as John Stuart Mill, Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Aldous Huxley. Webb found their theories, explanations and conclusions on spirituality wanting. His studies of Buddhism, Theosophy and Christianity likewise left him feeling unfulfilled.

While working as the editor of the Missouri Republican in St. Louis, Webb began corresponding with Hazrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, the founder of a Muslim community in India. There is some dispute on when exactly Webb converted, but by the late 1880s when Webb was consul general to Manilla, in the Philippines, he was publicly calling himself a Muslim and corresponding with a number of Islamic scholars in India.

President Grover Cleveland appointed Webb to the position as consul in 1887 during Cleveland’s first administration. Webb left the job five years later to travel in India in order to further study Islam. His second wife, Ella, and their three children went with him. 

Webb would later say of his conversion that it “was not the result of misguided sentiment, blind credulity, or sudden emotional impulse, but it was born of earnest, honest, persistent, unprejudiced study and investigation and an intense desire to know the truth.” He believed that Islam was “the best and only system adapted to the spiritual needs of the humanity.”

Webb never publicly addressed, what, if any, influence his hometown played in his quest for spiritual fulfillment, but the fact remains that Columbia County and its environs, especially Western New York, was a hotbed of religious fervor when he was growing up. Umar F. Abd-Allah in his 2006 book, “A Muslim in Victorian America,” believes that this era which saw an upswing of Christian off-shoots come to the fore may have played a part in Webb’s later embracing of the Muslim faith. 

“There is no question that the religious ambiance of the times helped form the attitudes and expectations that guided Webb through life,” he wrote.

In Columbia County, besides Roman Catholics and a number of protestant denominations, there were also the Shakers and Quakers, while in Western New York, during this period known as “the Second Great Awakening” there were a slew of new religious movements that sprang up. Known as the “Burned-Over District” so often had it been swept by religious fervor, the area was home to the Mormons, tent revivals, the Oneida Community — which practiced a form of free love — the Millerites, who believed the end of the world was nigh (the original 1843 date was incorrect and the end was pushed back a few times), and the followers of Jemima Wilkinson who believed she was the reincarnation of Christ in female form, to name a few of the spiritual and religious groups that came from this well-spring.

Webb’s spiritual rebirth was completed in India and he soon longed to return to America to proselytize. With the backing of a group of influential Muslim leaders in India, Webb set off from Bombay in December 1892 and was soon back in New York. 

In Manhattan he established a weekly journal “to be dedicated to an exposition of Islam,” according to The New York Times. He also had plans for founding a publishing company.

Back in the U.S., Webb was shocked by the lack of knowledge Americans had of Islam. 

“Since my return…I have been greatly surprised, not only at the general ignorance prevalent among so-called learned people regarding the life, character and teachings of the  [Muhammad],” he wrote, “but also at the self-confident readiness and facility with which some of these same people express their opinions of Mohammed and the Islamic system.”

Three months after he arrived in New York City the first copy of his “Moslem World” came out and although the journal would later fold, Webb would continue to promote Islam in America by writing, publishing and lecturing on his faith until his death in Rutherford, N.J. on Oct. 1, 1916.

Webb’s long quest for spiritual fulfillment spanned many years and took him to distant lands. But it was likely his early life in Hudson during a flowering of religious expression that provided him with the openness of spirit that helped lead him to what he had so fervently desired. 

Sources and Notes

Abd-Allah, Umar F. A Muslim in Victorian America: The Life of Alexander Russell Webb (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Pgs. 27-28.

Islam - Our Choice (Karachi:Begum Aisha Bawani Wakf, 1970).
Webb, Alexander R. Islam in America (New York, 1893).
Some information was taken from the transcript of a speech given by Nadirah Florence Ives Osman at a meeting of Muslims held in Steinway Hall, New York, in November 1943
There seems to be some disagreement on when exactly Webb became a Muslim. A letter from 1886 seems to indicate he was already following the tenants of the religion, but other sources have Webb self-declaring his faith publicly around 1889.
For more on Western New York's religious past see John H. Martin’s wonderful “Saints, Sinners and Reformers: The Burned-Over District Re-Visited” from the Fall 2005 edition of The Crooked Lake Review.

"Hitler and Trump: A Scary Comparison" by Dan Udell

I've decided to do something I've never done before on Look, Read, Listen and venture into the political arena by publishing an op-ed from my friend Dan Udell. 

I met Dan and his lovely wife, Mary, about a decade ago when I was a reporter in Columbia County, NY, and soon realized that if there was a social/political/environmental issue being publicly discussed, it was guaranteed Dan and Mary would be there fighting the good fight. I love that he and Mary not only espouse progressive views  but live their beliefs. Unfortunately, my former newspaper decided against running this piece on their opinion page so I'm doing my small part by publishing it here. 

Now in his 80s, Dan provides a long view on both life and politics. As he says, he's lived through everything from the Great Depression to the election of our first African American president, so he can speak with an authority on our current election unlike most pundits who can't bring the same breadth of experience to bear in their views. 

Hitler and Trump: A Scary Comparison

Being in the Octogenarian’s Club, we have had the privilege of witnessing some of the most momentous events in our country’s history: the Great Depression, WWII, the Atomic Bomb, Moon Landing, the creation of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, Watergate, the Voting Right Act, School Desegregation and the election of the first African American, Barack Obama, as President of the United States.

But that is nothing compared to World War II in our nation’s ability to come together -- to defeat Nazi and Japanese militaristic aggression. The threat was very real, and the outcome uncertain. In the early 1940s, our ships carrying needed supplies to England — the only surviving European nation — were being sunk right outside our harbors by U-Boats. All discretionary U.S. manufacturing was stopped and diverted to building thousands of tanks, planes and ships every week — assembled in large measure by our able-bodied female population. General Eisenhower went on to command the largest amphibious invasion in the history of the world at Normandy. That was the beginning of the end for Nazism.

The lesson of that war, which we need to reflect upon today, is how Hitler was able to take a highly advanced and cultured nation like Germany and turn it into a hideous war machine. Populism and nationalism were on the rise, and Germany was suffering under crushing inflation, which was wiping out savings and tearing at the economy. Hitler’s evil genius was to invent an enemy, the Jews of Europe, which he could blame for all the country’s ills. And to literally wipe out anyone who did not fit the ideal Ayran (read German) mold: Gypsies, Jews, “inferior races,” and most anyone mentally or physically challenged. It was basically a “Make Germany Great Again,” philosophy. And its success depended on three major factors: An anxious, low information population looking for easy answers; a Hitler-directed campaign of hate directed at the above elements in the population; and as Edmund Burke once said, "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Fast forward 80 years. The stage is eerily similar. Populism and nationalism are again on the rise. People are looking for easy and quick answers. It’s each country for itself, consequences be damned. Look at how the U.K. has shot itself in the foot by leaving the European Union with BREXIT.

Donald Trump is, frankly, following many of Hitler’s crowd-rousing techniques. First is “Make America Great Again,” which is taken right out of Hitler’s appeal to anxious Germans in the 1930s. Then, there is antagonism and hatred against Mexicans, Syrian refugees, people of color, the physically and mentally challenged. Even disparaging remarks about women who don’t measure up to an Aryan ideal. And he is offering quick solutions for all the country’s ills. It’s basically the argument of Hitler in the 1930s: Let me take over and I, and I alone, will solve all the country’s problems. Those are the pronouncements of a dictator.

So the issue for everyone entering a voting booth next Tuesday is not to examine the latest string of accusations between candidates, but to look realistically at what’s going on in the world and the country and who can lead us through it. Not just to cover it over with bluster, but to lead.

Hillary’s motto is “Stronger Together,” which is an inclusive philosophy, and it’s just what we did, nationally and internationally, in the 1940s to win World War II. Right now, there is a movement in the world toward xenophobia, and the world is looking at us to lead the way back to sanity. The answer is to work with our international partners. We need them, and they need to trust us.

And nationally, we think Hillary has developed a broader view of what needs to be done to solve our country’s internal challenges because of her contest with Bernie Sanders. Finally, as Bernie has said, “Enough of your XXXX emails.” Yes, she admitted that setting up a personal email server was a mistake and she apologized. So, Hillary has shown that she can change. And we think that is the most important characteristic for a President of the United States. Take a measured view of the challenges ahead and work with our partners in the House and Senate to achieve solutions, not to cling naively to an exclusionary ideology.

But we know one thing will be constant, and that is her untiring efforts over the years to give all of our children a better, brighter future. And we are sure that she and her good friend, Michelle Obama will continue these efforts over the next four years.

We are voting for Hillary next Tuesday!

Dan and Mary Udell

My book "Gilded Age Murder & Mayhem in the Berkshires" is now available from Arcadia Publishing/The History Press. Fourteen heart-pounding true crime stories from between 1870 and 1911 await! Check it out here.

I'm happy to announce I'll be having my book about murder and mayhem in the Gilded Age Berkshires (1870-early 1900s) published by the History Press. Look for it in the fall of 2015. I'll update readers on my progress as it moves along.

Wind, Some Rain, the Hot Sun: An Interview with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats

Editor's Note: This is the unedited email interview with John Darnielle, the man behind the band The Mountain Goats, and sometimes the only member of the band. This interview was used for a story that originally appeared in The Berkshire Eagle on April 17, 2014.


 Amelinckx: When you finish writing a song do you have an idea of how you plan to approach the recording process -- just you and your guitar or lusher arrangements, (drums, backing vocal, cello, piano, etc.).

Darnielle: I'm usually not thinking of arrangements when I write - if I am, it's only if I'm thinking "this one should remain somewhat skeletal." These days, though, I'll sometimes sketch out some 
other instrumental ideas in the demo - a second guitar line, or a small keyboard idea. Once I've got the songs together then I start thinking about what other textures might complement the songs - woodwinds, strings, and so on. We flesh out the basics, the drums/bass/me stuff, when we get together to rehearse, usually - though Peter sometimes overdubs bass ideas onto the original demo I send him & then sends it back to me for feedback.

Amelinckx: In a related vein, are there certain songs you prefer to play/ don’t like playing when you go on the road solo or with the rest of the band.

Darnielle: The songs take on such different...not "moods," but "aspects," I guess, when I play them solo - I can get looser with tempo, and be more improvisatory with dynamics (which sounds very high-minded but what I mean is "I can get real quiet if it feels like the right move and I won't be acting unilaterally in a group context"). It's really fun and interesting to see how a song feels when I take away everything but the chords and the words and the vocal melody, especially if it's already spent a lot of time getting played in the trio format. Some songs it becomes a real challenge, when there's an especially strong drum part, say - "Sax Rohmer #1," for example. But meeting that challenge solo is really fun and rewarding.

Amelinckx: When you perform do you feel forced to play certain songs because you know fans really want to hear them?   

Darnielle: Well, there's a few songs that I know everybody wants to hear - not a huge number, maybe three or four - but that's an honor, really. I saw Lou Reed in 1986 and he gave a spiel about how he never got sick of playing "Walk on the Wild Side" because he loved knowing that there was a song everybody in the room wanted to hear, and that stuck with me - I can legitimately say that I enjoy "This Year" every time we play it. Although I don't feel like it works as well solo and of the three or four Mountain Goats "standards," it's the one I usually bench in solo sets...Peter's bass line is a huge huge part of that song.

Amelinckx: I once saw a Dylan show in the early 90s where you could tell he was just burning through his hits without any heart, but then completely shifted gears when he played his newer stuff. Do you still enjoy playing your older material?

Darnielle: I do - I'll say that it does take some work, sometimes, some diligence, to make sure I'm connecting with the song - but when that happens, we all know it, and we talk about it, and then we give the song a rest for a tour or two. But I don't tour nearly as hard as Dylan. Dylan is a tour monster who goes out for months at a time, huge worldwide tours, and I'm sure that when that old stuff was new, he played it literally hundreds of times. He's in a bind, really, anybody that big is, because he's pretty much obligated to play the big big old songs or people will be mad since they paid a lot to get in, but how can you connect with a song you've been playing 200 times a year for thirty years? The Dead benched "Dark Star" for a number of years, I consider them the model of how to keep the set fresh even if it means nobody gets to hear "St Stephen" for a while.

Amelinckx: Certain images and themes float through your work -- animal, ghosts, cold water -- what draws you to them? 

Darnielle: It's really hard to say - weather, too, I'm always having some wind or some rain, or hot sun - I try not to interrogate my inspirations too hard but just let them work it out for themselves.

Amelinckx: With We Shall All Be Healed and The Sunset Tree you moved into autobiographical material. Was it a surprise to you how listeners responded to more personal material?

Darnielle: It was a huge surprise. I was really nervous, especially on The Sunset Tree - it was pretty raw. But that opened up whole new avenues of writing for me, really - it made the story songs I make up more personal, put me in touch with something in myself. It was like a system reboot for me as a songwriter, really - I think of the stuff before that as stuff from a different age.

Amelinckx: Do you prefer making up stories with your lyrics or going to that well of your own life?

Darnielle: I mean, at this point, there's a sort of synthesis for me - when I'm telling a story, I feel like it's also necessarily somehow about me, somewhere - if not directly, then in spirit, you know? It's not really either/or.

Amelinckx: Born in the Midwest, growing up in California, and now living in the South, in North Carolina, have the places you lived at all influenced your approach to music? I grew up in Louisiana and when I go back home there is a brief period of adjustment and then I find myself slowing down, the way I talk, even move. Has the South changed you at all?

Darnielle: Sure, I assume so. But I am not super reflective about what I'm like, how I'm changing - that's really for others to say. I think my work's gotten a lot better since I moved down here ten years ago, that I'm just a more diligent, more honest writer. I feel like you have to put some of that down to the people around me, and the cycle of the seasons being something I connect to (I happen to love the miserable summers, can't get enough), and the terrain.

Amelinckx: Has fatherhood changed your outlook on life, specifically the life of a touring musician?

Darnielle: It is harder to leave for tour. I fly home a few times during longer tours. That's the main thing. I try not to make any broad philosophical observations on fatherhood - I've only been a dad for two years, I don't figure that short amount of time is enough to really say what's changed about how I look at life generally. It's made me more aware that I'll die, though - this I think is Goth Dad's destiny, to think about how, when you become a parent, that means that somebody you will no longer be around to be a parent any more. It makes me want to fill my days with good work, I have become more aware of time.

Amelinckx: It seems in much of your early work the songs have an instantaneous or conversational feel about them, without a ton of revision and that your newer work is in a sense a completed thought, fully formed, a paragraph rather than a single sentence. Has age, time, affected your approach to making music in the sense that as we get older there is a tendency to not just blurt things out, but rather approach things in a more measured way?

Darnielle: Well, I think my aesthetic priorities changed a lot - the very early stuff, spontaneous expression was a huge value for me - although it was more revised than it sounded, some of those lyrics took a lot of work to sound tossed-off. I'm a better musician now than I used to be, and with that comes a feeling of awe for how melody and lyric sort of elevate one another into this one-of-a-kind style of expression - but I still write pretty quickly, I've just gotten better at it.

Amelinckx: Was it a challenge going from writing songs to writing a novel? (Darnielle's novel "Wolf in White Van" is soon to be released). Was it difficult to sustain the writing process over weeks/months? Has writing the novel influenced your songwriting?

Darnielle: Too early to say on that last question. I was writing prose before I wrote songs - when I was a teenager, I wrote short stories all the time, it was my heart's desire to become a science fiction short story writer. I think the energy feeds from the songs to the prose - that sense of play, like when I'm writing a song how I'm not thinking "this has to be good" but just following ideas that seem cool to me - that's something I tried to remember always while working on the book.

Photo credit: Steven Keys and KeysPhotography.com

Righting a Wrong: The Civil War, Stolen Documents, and a History Sleuth

Editor's note: A version of this story originally ran in The Berkshire Eagle

The court document ordered tobacco farmer Robert Ashby Jr. to pay the local mercantile 3 pounds he owed, plus a fine of 79 pounds of tobacco.

It was dated 1753. And it was issued in Stafford, Virginia.

So how that document and another one dated some 20 years later ended up in an attic in South Worthington in 2005 was puzzling.

Dr. George Bresnick was digging through ``the proverbial old trunk in the attic’’ at a neighbor’s South Worthington home when he stumbled across the documents.

``They had absolutely nothing to do with the other papers,’’ said Bresnick, an ophthalmologist who now resides in St. Paul, Minn. ``I was confused for a while.’’

After some research, Bresnick came up with the only reasonable explanation: They were stolen by Union forces from Western Massachusetts during the Civil War.

And now he plans to return them to where they belong.

It was November 1862 and Union forces, including the 37th Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, which had been mustered in Pittsfield earlier that year, were occupying the town of Stafford, Va., as part of the Fredericksburg campaign.

The area around Stafford was overrun by 130,000 Union troops and the once pristine woods were decimated by the force for housing, defensive fortifications and heating. Farmland was torn up, homes were looted, and fences ripped out.

The county courthouse in Stafford received similar maltreatment as the locals’ homes, two thirds of the county’s records, which likely dated back to the 1660s, were ``burned, stolen or scattered,’’ Bresnick said.

He believes the documents were taken as souvenirs by Pvt. John D. Smith, a West Chesterfield resident who had enlisted with the 37th and would later be killed during the Battle of The Wilderness in 1864. Bresnick surmises that Smith sent the papers home and they ended up in the trunk in the attic of an old Methodist Episcopal parsonage that had once belonged to a Smith descendant.

Back in 2005, Bresnick and his wife were living in the village of South Worthington, across the road from the old parsonage where an elderly woman resided. He helped go through the neighbor’s home after her death and that’s when he discovered the legal documents. They, along with everything else in the house, ended up with an antiques dealer. Bresnick later bought the documents, along with many others related to Chesterfield and Worthington, for $100.

One of the documents, dated 1776

Eventually, he came up with a plan to return the documents from whence they came, in order, he said, to ``right a wrong.’’

According to Bresnick, there are both ``practical effects’’ of the loss of Stafford’s courthouse records, the inability to verify a deed on a property before 1862, for instance , and the psychological effect that comes with the loss of written records that help tell the story of Stafford’s history.

Bresnick’s plan was two-fold. He traveled to Washington, D.C., in November to hand over the papers to U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, D-Springfield, who in a symbolic gesture gave the documents to Rep. Rob Wittman, R-Va.

``For documents that were clearly removed from their place of origin to be returning after more than a hundred years, it’s certainly symbolic,’’ Neal said. ``History has an interest in seeing these artifacts, and I think it speaks well (of Bresnick), who wants to really respect these documents by returning them to the people of Stafford, Va.’’

Neal, besides being a congressman, is a professor who lectures in history and journalism at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He told The Eagle he was interested in seeing these documents returned ``in the context of their importance to history.’’

The congressman said that people contact his office on a regular basis ``looking to reconnect with things from the past. Sometimes it’s about a memorial, an event or a place. This is something different.’’

A day after Bresnick’s meeting with the two congressman, he presented the documents to Barbara Decatur, the Stafford County clerk of court, at a ceremony at the courthouse in Stafford. The documents now permanently grace the courthouse walls.

``I’m happy (the documents) are going back to their home,’’ Bresnick said.

The two legal documents that were found in an old trunk in South Worthington were believed stolen from the courthouse in Stafford, Va., by Union troops during the Fredricksburg campaign of the Civil War.

The first document, dated 1753, is a court order informing the sheriff of Stafford County to bring a tobacco farmer named Robert Ashby Jr. (c.1720-c.1780) to the courthouse for a hearing that May. Ashby owed the mercantile firm of Patrick and William Bogle a little more than 3 pounds, likely from a past due store account. The court ordered Ashby to cough up the 3 pounds along with a hefty court fine of 79 pounds of tobacco. If he didn’t pay, the court could then order Ashby’s personal property sold to pay the debt.

The second document was a promissory note dated Feb. 24, 1776, obligating Joel Reddish (c. 1748-1826), to pay 11 pounds, four shillings, six pence, half-penny on a loan from James Ritchie & Co. of Glasgow, Scotland. According to Bresnick, Ritchie was one of the ``Tobacco Lords’’ of Glasgow who imported tobacco from the colonies and sold it in Europe. The company was also in the business of loaning money to farmers in order to get their tobacco crop into the ground. Reddish was a Virginia tobacco farmer who had taken a loan out with the company.

History is a Funny Thing: A book review of "The Men Who United the States."

Editor's note: This review first appeared in the Dec. 8, 2013 edition of the Berkshire Eagle.

History is a funny thing. What may start as fact often becomes clouded by fancy and the personages whose names still trip off the tongue today may overshadow the true heroes whose names have been wiped clean, if they were ever there at all, from the popular imagination.

In Simon Winchester 's newest book, "The Men Who United the States," the author tells the story of America through its "connective tissue" and introduces, or reintroduces, the many obscure and half- forgotten men who helped unite the country via exploration, road, canal, and railroad building, electric generation, the radio, television and the Internet.

While the more famous folks, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Edison, for example, do get their due, the book's focus remains on the lesser known men whose work helped unite the country.

The narrative structure of this unique retelling of America's history by the British- born best selling author, and recently naturalized U. S. citizen, is held together via the five Chinese elements - wood, earth, water, fire and metal - corresponding to early exploration, geology, canal building, locomotives and other mechanized transportation and the telegraph, telephone and other electronic communication.

He did something similar in his last book, "Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories," in which he uses the "Seven Ages of Man" monologue from William Shakespeare's "As You Like It" as a framework.

In Winchester 's able hands, the stories of these pioneers - many considered cranks and misfits - and their contributions provide a lesser traveled journey through the country's past without losing sight of the bigger picture.

It should be noted the title does not lie and that the book almost exclusively looks at men's achievements. Sacagawea, who helped guide the Lewis and Clark expedition across the West in the early 1800s is the only woman who gets much of a mention in the book, something Winchester said he knew he would get some grief for, but that "It has to be accepted, like it or not, that most of those [connections] were created by men."

Winchester 's personal reminiscences that dot the book's pages provide nice counterpoints to the main stories, by connecting historical moments to the present, uniting themes, giving resonance to particular ideas.

One of the most touching of these is a story he relates about being in a remote area of Northern Australian in the mid-1990s and demonstrating the Internet to a 7-year-old boy whose mind was blown by its potential after seeing a video of a B1 bomber and a close up photograph of Mars, which the boy had previously only seen by looking at the night sky with his father's binoculars. Winchester left the computer for the boy and was soon receiving emails from him.

Another personal story comes in the book's epilogue, in which Winchester describes life in Sandisfield, where he has a small farm, and of the uniting of the village through a new community newspaper.

The author says in the book's final pages that the work of the nation's agencies and individuals "helped bind ever more tightly the peoples of the country together." The same could be said of Winchester 's book, which gives us a prismatic and unusual take on the nation's past and the strange, enigmatic and down right cantankerous men who helped make it what it is and will become, and provides - during this seemingly divided time in our history - insight into what has kept us whole.

A Love Affair with America: An Interview with Simon Winchester

 Editor's note: This article originally appeared in the Nov. 25, 2013 edition of the Berkshire Eagle.

 Chopping wood in the late afternoon on his small farm, writer Simon Winchester vaguely resembles one of the rough and tumble characters he writes about in his latest non-fiction book, "The Men Who United The States." But later, as he sits in the small cottage in which he works, surrounded by hundreds of books, talking of history, his British-accented voice filling the space, another image of the man emerges.

Such is the dichotomy of this Oxford-educated writer of more than 20 books, this journalist, traveler and adventurer who once briefly left an Arctic sledding expedition for an interview with a New York Times columnist at an Upper West Side Italian restaurant, only to return to the freezing north to finish what he started.

His latest book seems imbued with the 69-year-old writer's multifaceted personality, encompassing both history and personal narrative. It tells the story of the nation through the lives of the men who explored its wilderness, surveyed its natural resources and brought it physically together by rail, road and wire. It is also a love letter to Winchester 's new homeland.

"Without wanting to sound too sappy about it, I've been enraptured by this country for a very long time," he says." The genesis was born out of my love affair with the country."

In 2011, Winchester became a U.S. citizen, standing on the deck of the U.S.S. Constitution in Boston Harbor on a blazing hot July 4. Winchester says it was a moving experience, but it was another event a short time later that brought home the realization of his new status as a citizen.

He explains: "I got my passport and went to England almost immediately. I returned from London to Kennedy Airport [in New York City] and I had this shiny new passport and the guy opened it and stamped it, stood up, and said: 'Welcome home.' That was a great feeling, I must say. It really was."

Winchester 's enthusiasm for America started early.

He came here as a hitchhiker in the early 1960s, spending eight months on the road and finding everyone he met to be "terribly kind." It didn't hurt that a friend worked for NBC and was a buddy of John Frankenheimer, the director of classic films like "The Manchurian Candidate," who introduced Winchester to Burt Lancaster, Johnny Carson and Kirk Douglas.

"It was astonishing. I had this amazingly good impression of America," he laughs.

He was later returned as a correspondent for a British newspaper and covered Washington, D.C., during Watergate scandal.

In 1997, he moved to New York and in 2001 bought his home in Sandisfield, Mass., a bucolic agrarian space with geese, chickens and gardens. He and his wife, former National Public Radio producer Setsuko Sato, split their time between the farm and New York City. They also found time to start a local monthly newspaper, the Sandisfield Times.

Winchester signed the contract for his latest book around the time he became a citizen, feeling like the moment was right to try his hand at American history. The question was how to approach his subject. Winchester says that after "a number of experiments," he "just started ruminating" on the idea of "uniting."

"How did the country remain united - despite the Civil War, of course - for so long and so successfully in a way that so many other great big countries, like Canada and Russia … have not succeeded [in doing]?"

America, a "mongrel" of disparate peoples, ideas and beliefs, says Winchester , has managed to remain whole thanks to the "connective tissue" of exploration and the physical structures of canals and railways and even radio. He decided he wanted to explore the men who helped build these "tissues" that "bound the country together."

While working on the book, he hit upon the idea of structuring it around the five Chinese elements: wood, earth, water, fire and metal.

"It had to be something that had narrative logic to it, but that was perhaps slightly unusual that offered a different perspective. I happened to be writing to a friend of mine in Shanghai - I lived in China for a long time - and we had been talking about the classical elements. And I thought, 'Well, why not?' Maybe these 120 odd people, who I had established I wanted to write about, could be put into these various categories. So all the American explorers went under wood because they went through forests. The early geologists fit into the category of earth. The canals, and so forth, would go under water. Fire-breathing things like trains, planes and automobiles would go under fire. And then metal - the telegraph, telephone. It all seemed to work."

In each category, he came up with the names of the people who had been instrumental to the various fields, from canal building to the electrical grid, and to his "delight and astonishment," he found that "many of them were unknown."

He ended up focusing on the less famous of these men, believing truly famous people like Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Morse and Guglielmo Marconi, needed less space.

"There wasn't a great deal of a point in retelling the story of Marconi, except in a perfunctory way. The man who gave us AM and FM radio, allowed us to broadcast the human voice or music - Marconi only allowed us to do Morse code - he was unknown. He was named Reginald Fessenden. And he was such a colorful character. He was a big, bluff, bearded chap. A classic maverick and tinkerer. So I very much went to town with him. … He's just as important. Yes, it was a question of highlighting the forgotten and giving no more than their due to the famous."

During Winchester 's research, he came upon a story of interest related to the Berkshires, specifically Great Barrington.

"It was the first place in the world to get alternating current electricity. The first place to get distributed electricity of any kind was Edison, N.J., because that's where Thomas Edison worked and then he did the same thing in lower Manhattan. Then there was this war of the currents between Westinghouse, who preferred AC, [and Edison and direct current]. Once it was decided that it was going to be AC, then the first place to get AC was Main Street in Great Barrington. There's a little plaque that memorializes that fact. I think attention should … be paid to the fact that this was the first place in the world. No one would ever know that."

Winchester 's love for the subjects in his book comes across as he talks about them. It also shown by his manuscript, which came in 45,000 words longer than intended.

"I really wrote with tremendous enthusiasm on this book and ended up with 195,000 words. My contract was for 150,000 words. My editor liked it, said it was wonderful, but it was 'too much wonderful.' " Winchester was asked to pare it down, which he managed to do.

He's currently working on a book about the Pacific Ocean, having already written one about the Atlantic.

According to Winchester , he prefers to write for the general public, eschewing the academic for the more personal approach.

With a wry smile, he says, "I see no reason why a serious subject can't be made readable and accessible and nonacademic."
 
The Men Who United the States: America's Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible

More of my old time crime from Modern Farmer. This one on the horrific, and real crime, of ostrich feather theft.

I've begun writing a bimonthly series for Modern Farmer magazine called Old-Time Farm Crime. Here's the first piece, a look at an 18th century horse thief and highwayman named Dick Turpin and some contemporary examples of equine thievery.

CJ Ramone: Punk, Family and a New Album

 Editor's note: A different version of this story appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on March 22, 2013.

Chris Ward was in the midst of trying to learn 40 songs at break-neck speed. It was 1989 and five weeks after his release from a Marine brig in Virginia, he was about to go on tour as the bass player for one of the most influential, and by many accounts, the first punk rock group of all time: The Ramones.

“It was like ‘how did this ever happen?’ It was the ultimate … rock star dream,” he said in a phone interview from his Long Island, N.Y., home. 

He was in his early 20s and had been a fan of the band that was formed in Queens, N.Y., in 1974 by Douglas Colvin, John Cummings, Jeffry Hyman and Thomas Erdelyi, better known as Dee Dee, Johnny, Joey, and Tommy Ramone. 

By 1989, Dee Dee, Johnny and Joey were still playing together, but had gone through several different drummers. Mark Bell, AKA Marky Ramone, was the drummer at the time. 

Dee Dee was burned out from the road by this point, but continued to write songs for the Ramones while Ward was hired to replace him as the band’s bass player and sometimes-singer. Ward was reborn CJ Ramone and would end up in the band until their retirement in 1996. 

He said it was a strange sensation going from watching them from the audience to being on stage playing with them. 

“One day I'm bouncing up and down in front of Johnny, and the next I look over, and there's Johnny and Joey and I'm playing on stage with them,” he recalled. “I was 21 or 22. I grew up listening to them. It was tremendous … overwhelming.”

CJ Ramone’s first show with the band was on Sept. 30, 1989, in Leicester, England. 

“Whenever I'm in a situation that's stressful … I just get out of my head,” he recalled of his early days with the band and of his first show in particular. 

“Yeah, I made some mistakes that night. … Johnny was mad as hell and yelled at me for five solid minutes after the show. I stood there listening and then I ran back stage, drank some beer and celebrated. I knew I had it. I got the whole Ramones thing on stage," he said.

For the other band members, the rock and roll lifestyle was commonplace, but for C.J., who was younger by nine years and unused to it, he was enthralled by the famous people they hung around with. 

“I was so not cool when I was in the band. … I was going on pure instinct,” he said. “When I met Lemmy (the lead singer of English rock band Motörhead), I was out of my mind. I told him, ‘We have to party!’” They did, he said. 

But even in the midst of rock and roll excess, he never “fell into the rock-star thing” he said, keeping the same friends he had always had, living in a small house and refraining from splurging on extravagant purchases. He did buy himself a motorcycle, he admitted. 

Following the break up of the band in 1996, Ramone stopped playing music altogether for a short time. 

“My son [Liam] was born in 1997 and a year or two later was diagnosed with autism,” he said. 

Ramone said he was told by his son’s doctors that his son needed him to be at home. Ramone is heavily involved in the autism community. 

He said Metallica asked him to play bass for their band twice, but he turned the mega-selling and multi-Grammy-winning heavy metal band from Los Angeles down after he was told by his son’s doctors that he would be doing his son a great disservice if he took the job. 

“So I packed it in,” he said. 

He said he doesn’t regret the decision. 

“I had already done it all. Playing with Metallica would have been amazing, but I already played with the greatest rock and roll band in history,” said Ramone.

While he later started two other bands, Los Gusanos and Bad Chopper, both now defunct, before recording and touring as CJ Ramone he had always hoped The Ramones would re-form. 

“I had always waited for the [phone] call telling me we were going to get back together and going on tour. … Instead, I got the other calls,” said Ramone. “With Johnny and Joey, they were both sick [so] it was expected. … Dee Dee’s death was probably the biggest blow because it was sudden.”

Joey died from lymphoma in 2001. Dee Dee died from a heroin overdose the next year. And Johnny lost his battle with prostate cancer in 2004.

Ramone said he was one of the last people to see Johnny before he died. 

“I got the chance to say good-bye and thank him,” he said. 

He also saw Dee Dee before his death in 2002. According to Ramone, in the past Dee Dee hadn’t always been nice to him, but that night was different. 

“He told me, ‘You were always cool to me.’ It was out of character for him. I waited for him to crack a joke. He didn’t and I didn’t know what to say. A couple of weeks later, he was dead.”

The dynamic of “fan/friend, friend/ mentor” between himself and the other members was “like the ‘Twilight Zone.’ It was so odd. I’m still trying to get my head around it,” he said. 

His first solo album recording under CJ Ramone, “Reconquista,” Spanish for reconquest, is meant as a tribute to Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee, and was influenced by that band’s sound, but, he said, there are hints of his two later bands that come through on the album as well. 

“Reconquista” was recorded three times, said Ramone, and was released digitally last year. After two attempts that ended in results he just wasn't satisfied with, he called up his friend Steve Soto of The Adolescents, a punk band from Southern California, who helped him produce the album that he had intended to make.

Recorded in Orange County, Calif., with the help of a who’s who of punk and new wave musicians from such famed bands as X, Bad Religion, Blondie and Social Distortion, among others, Ramone said it was fun to record and the results made him proud. 

Before the recording session when Soto mentioned the list of people who wanted to help out on the record, Ramone was at first a little taken-aback. 

“In the back of my mind I’m thinking: ‘How much is this going to cost?” he said. “None of them asked for a dime. They did it because of The Ramones name. In honor of them. That's the power of the Ramones.”

The album was released through PledgeMusic, an online direct-to-fan, fan-funded music platform which bypasses record companies. 

“It’s about as DYI as you can get,” said Ramone. “It's anti-corporate music business.”

With a wife, Denise, and three kids — Liam who is 15, Lilliana, 12, and 3-year-old Mia Dove — he has scaled back his touring schedule and when he can, brings the family on tour with him. 

“We're playing at Fuji Rock Festival in Japan this summer and I'm bringing the family,” he told The Eagle. 

As if on cue, his 3-year-old daughter broke in to the interview with a question for her father about “Dora the Explorer,” a children’s TV show. And by the sound of it, Ramone was washing dishes as we spoke by phone. 

Ramone’s two older children were with first wife, Chessa, Marky Ramone’s niece from whom he’s divorced, and his youngest was by his second wife, Denise. 

His oldest daughter, who herself is a multi-instrumentalist, was into punk, but is listening to progressive music these days. “But every once in a while, she breaks out some Green Day,” said Ramone. 

He was happy to see punk attain such popularity in the 1990s with bands like Rancid and Green Day, but inevitably, the music industry got its hands on it and helped produce mediocre music, said Ramone. 

Punk rock was originally created by and for disenfranchised youth, he said. 

“As long as their are young, angry and alienated teenagers their will be punk rock,” he said, 

Beyond that, punk surmounts age differences, he said. At his shows he has fans both young and old. 

“I don’t think there is another type of music that transcends the generations, … and that’s a very wonderful thing.” 

He said when he played in Glasgow, Scotland, he met several people in their 50s who were had been in the scene since the 1970s and were still dedicated to the punk ethos.

“For them it’s not a musical style, it’s a lifestyle,” he said. 

Ramone hopes to continue to play and record for “the rest of my days.”

“I’ll always play The Ramones’ songs live. [The fans] love to hear it,” he said. “I do The Ramones justice.”

MLK in Berkshire County

Editor's note: A different version of this story appeared in the Jan. 22 edition of the Berkshire Eagle.

Two years before his famous "I Have a Dream" speech and seven years to the month before being cut down by an assassin's bullet, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Berkshire County, MA. and gave three talks to Williams College students in a single day to explain his ideas on civil disobedience.

"Frankly, we are breaking laws in the South," King told one rapt audience at the college in Williamstown on April 16, 1961. "But there are two types of laws -- just laws and unjust laws. I believe that if society brings into being unjust laws, a moral man has no alternative than to rise up."

Six months earlier, King had backed up those words when he was arrested, along with about 300 other protesters, during a sit-in at the segregated restaurant at Rich's, a department store in Atlanta. King was sentenced to six months of hard labor at the Georgia State Prison, but was released through the intervention of then-presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy.

King's visit to Williams College in April 1961 was part of a barnstorming tour of colleges in Western Massachusetts. His visit to Williams came a day after he was at Smith (where his daughter, Yolanda, would later receive her bachelor's degree) and a day before an appearance at Amherst College.

At Williams, King addressed a dinner for a student religious group, gave a sermon at the college chapel, and participated in a question-and-answer session with students. In total, more than 1,000 people saw him during his visit to the school.

King told his listeners that the idea behind the sit-ins concerned resistance without violence, hatred of segregation without hatred of the segregationist, and a desire to raise the consciousness of the opponent rather than to humiliate him, according to a Berkshire Eagle article that appeared the next day. The reporter described King, then 32, as "a short, handsome man" who was "an intense, direct and inspiring speaker."

The sit-ins of segregated lunch counters began in 1960 with four black college students in Greensboro, N.C., and quickly spread throughout the South.
"This movement is more than a lot of noise about hamburger. I don't think these students are hungry. It's a demand for respect," King told his audience.

King invoked the Boston Tea Party in his discussion, calling it "one of the highest expressions of civil disobedience" and said that "those of us who break segregation laws feel we are in noble company."

The response from the students was overwhelming.
"Dr. King's talk at the dinner drew a standing ovation of more than a minute for its spiritual and intellectual quality," the Eagle reporter, Arthur Myers, wrote.

It would be three more years before a federal Civil Rights Bill was passed that banned discrimination against blacks at hotels and restaurants, barred employers from discriminating based on race and allowed the federal government to sue school systems that refused to desegregate. King continued to fight for the rights of minorities and the underclass until his murder on April 4, 1968 as he stood on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tenn.

In 1974, Massachusetts, along with Connecticut, passed laws making his birthday a state holiday a decade before it became a federal holiday. Illinois was the first state to make King's birthday a legal holiday.

Dr. Swift and FDR

 If you are like me and wonder how accurate a historical film or bio pick is (sometimes to the detrement of fully enjoying the movie) historian Dr. Will Swift will be discussing that very subject in regard to "Hyde Park on the Hudson," a film that premiered this fall at the Toronto Film Festival and went into general release last month.

The film, starring Bill Murray as President Franklin Roosevelt and Laura Linney as his cousin, and lover, Daisey Suckley, recounts a weekend in 1938 in which King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were guests of the president at Hyde Park, the Roosevelt's family home in Dutchess County.

Swift, the author of "The Roosevelts and the Royals," will parse out truth from fiction and give the real story of that well-known weekend.
The event will be held this Saturday January 19th at 3 p.m. at the Chatham Public Library

The program is sponsored by the Friends of the Chatham Public Library. A reception will follow Will Swift's talk. For more information go to http://chatham.lib.ny.us/.

  
   

Mohawk History, Mohawk Pride

Editor's note: A different version of this story appeared in the Nov. 10, 2012 edition of the Berkshire Eagle. 

Jerry Thundercloud McDonald recalled the first time he entered his clan’s longhouse when he was 12, following the death of his mother.

"It was like watching a moving picture show," he said of the dancing and singing. "I was very inspired to learn about the tribal history of our people."

He recently shared the history of the Mohawk Nation and the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy through song, dance and storytelling. The versatile singer, storyteller, dancer, choreographer, and actor, was dressed in traditional costume, which included a headdress and a variety of hide clothing.

McDonald is a member of the Wolf Clan and lives in the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, a tribal area along the banks of the St. Lawrence River that straddles upstate New York and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario.

The longhouse, the center of tribal activity at Akwesasne and elsewhere, is a place of "joy and inspiration" where McDonald learned "a great deal of respect," he said.

McDonald discussed the various traditional instruments used in Mohawk ceremonies, from the water drum, which as the name suggests is filled with water, to the big drum, a moose-hide-covered instrument you can feel in your chest when he beats out a rhythm.

McDonald described how the Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy -- a union of five tribes that some scientists believe dates back close to a thousand years, (a sixth tribe joined the confederation in the 18th century) -- helped inspire the Founding Fathers in their writing of the U.S. Constitution, including the ideas of checks and balances and the separation of powers. Several of the nation’s symbols, including the Eagle holding arrows (look for it on the back of the dollar bill) comes directly from the Iroquois tradition, according to McDonald.

McDonald was also a so-called "skywalker," one of many Mohawk men who have worked in New York City doing skyscraper construction work, scampering along thin steel beams thousands of feet in the air. His last job was on the new Yankee Stadium, he said. He once fell several stories while working and woke up to find he has crushed his left clavicle.

His father, whom he never met was also a skywalker, as had been his father before him.

Powys finds a home

John Cowper Powys was happy. He was cold, but happy. He stood watching the sunrise from his Hillsdale, N.Y. home that December morning in 1930 taking the moment in.

He and Phyllis Playter, an American he had met in Missouri nearly a decade earlier and who was 22 years his junior, were now living a much different life, far from the crowds of New York City and his hectic schedule. No more crisscrossing the country lecturing on other, much more famous writers. Now the 58-year-old Powys would be focusing on his own work in this Utopian setting thanks to the success of his novel “Wolf Solent.”


Born in Derbyshire, England in 1872, the son of a vicar, Powys seemed to be destined for the staid life of a country schoolmaster. By 1904 he was married and a father, but America — and the freedom from restraint and convention — called.

In the United States, Powys became an itinerant, and much sought after, lecturer.  Over the course of the next two decades he would speak on a myriad of subjects, from philosophy to politics to literature, especially literature. During a lecture on the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, where Powys first met Playter, two of the other attendees allegedly fainted from the sheer sensual power of the presentation.

Powys gave about 10,000 lectures in his career by his own account and also picked up a number of influential friends and admirers along the way, including the writers Theodore Dreiser and Henry Miller.

During his time as a lecturer, Powys also wrote prodigiously, but didn’t find success until his 1929 novel “Wolf Solent,” a 900-page epic that became a bestseller, opening the way for him to take up writing full-time and to move to the hamlet of Harlemville, which lies in the town of Hillsdale.
In their little farmhouse at the foot of Phudd Hill, which Powys dubbed “Phudd Bottom,” the couple spent four productive and happy years. Powys would write two novels, “A Glastonbury Romance” and “Weymouth Sands,” as well as an autobiography and a book on philosophy: “A Philosophy of Solitude.”

While Powys was busy with his literary efforts, he still had time to explore the area and found joy in the county’s flora and fauna, old farms and his neighbors.
Some of his neighbors, according to at least one account, thought Powys a bit odd. The writer was idiosyncratic to say the least. The often disheveled-looking Powys was known to tap his head against his mailbox in the belief it would ensure the safe delivery of his mail and he would bow to the rocks and trees on his sojourns.

He was adverse to technology, drawn to the abnormal and multi-phobic, but to many he was, and remains, an overlooked and important writer — a “gigantic mythopoeic literary volcano” in the words of poet Philip Larkin.

For four years Powys made Hillsdale his home. He and Playter would move to England in 1934 and then to Wales the following year where Powys remained until his death in 1963, a few months shy of his 91st birthday. Playter followed him to the grave in 1982.

A Sailor's Life in Fiji

 John Gaul, lying in his bed in Lakeba with a sore leg, began to write his life story. After more than 30 years in Fiji he was once again communicating with his family and his brother had asked him to relate all that had transpired in the three decades since they had last seen one another. And what a life it had been.

Gaul left Hudson, N.Y.  in 1855, a scrappy 14-year-old full of wanderlust and a deep sadness over the recent death of his mother. He found his way to New York City and then sailed to Fall River, Mass., most likely working for his passage. From there he walked to New Bedford, a 15-mile trek, and shipped out on a whaler, the Elizabeth, headed to the South Pacific.

The sailor’s life was hard: filled with violence, poor food and little sleep. Gaul recalled the beatings he took at the hands of the captain and mates over trivial matters. At one point he was tied to a mast and whipped for fighting with another crewmember. According to Gaul, the fight broke out when he sat down to eat before a Portuguese sailor. The man shoved Gaul out of his seat and Gaul retaliated by slamming a keg of molasses onto the man’s head, nearly drowning him in the thick fluid as the sailor stumbled around blindly before finally being freed with the help of several other men. 

Gaul gave as good as he got, nearly killing one of the mates with whom he had an on-going dispute. The mate would beat the boy savagely any chance he got, but was unfortunate enough to be caught sleeping on his watch by Gaul who stole some gunpowder, piled it near the man’s head and set it alight, burning the man’s hair and face.

Gaul, tired of the beatings, jumped ship, was caught, beaten, and tried again. This time he made his escape by swimming to shore with a sailor from Pennsylvania. Gaul made it to Upolo, one of the islands that make up Samoa, then known as the Navigator Islands by westerners, but his friend wasn’t so lucky. He was killed by sharks as the two made their way to land.

It wasn’t long before Gaul was once again at sea, this time on a schooner shipping coconut oil. This captain seemed only marginally better than the first, since he beat Gaul for complaining about being worked too hard without food or water, but afterward made Gaul a mate, with a $5.00 a month raise. From there Gaul moved on to another trading vessel plying the waters between Australia and Fiji.

Gaul eventually settled in Fiji, a group of islands in the South West Pacific where cannibalism was still practiced at the time. His descriptions of the custom border on the fantastic and are more likely based on hearsay than on personal observation.

According to Gaul, the native people would dig up the dead and feast on their bodies and would steal one another’s children to eat. He also alleged that Ratu Seru Epenisa Cakobau, who united Fiji under his control in the 1850s, had an island where he would fatten up his victims before eating them. The King Of Bau, as he was known, had in fact repudiated the practice of cannibalism and took up Christianity in 1854, before Gaul settled in Fiji. While cannibalism was practiced there it was usually reserved for special occasions, such as the eating of one’s enemies after a battlefield victory, and the practice died out not long after Gaul’s arrival.

By the 1860s Gaul was married with children — he would eventually have four — and had taught himself to read and write. He said that the little schooling he had in Columbia County before he ran away hadn’t stuck. Gaul held a series of jobs from cotton plantation manager to store clerk, but continued to be drawn to the sea, often working as a sailor when land-based jobs dried up.

He was a conundrum when it came to his views of the aboriginal people of the islands, often describing them as savages, thieves, and “very saucy” to “whites.” At the same time, he married a native woman and treated her well, became fluent in the language and seemed to think more highly of the native people than the missionaries, drunken Europeans and the officials of the British colonial government installed in 1874 when the country became a British possession.

At one point he tells of fighting on the side of a tribe that lived near him against their enemies. Gaul led a charge during a pitched battle that helped secure victory for his neighbors. The next day the tribe, celebrating their success, invited Gaul to the festivities, but he refused and when they left gifts at his doorstep he sent them back.

Gaul was very protective of his wife and children and fought both whites and natives on several occasions when he thought his family’s honor was being trampled. He obviously loved his wife a great deal and described how when a letter from his father eventually reached him, his wife memorized it and would recite it to her children before bed. She, along with thousands of other native people, died from a measles epidemic that struck the islands in the 1870s. Gaul never remarried.

Ten years later Gaul finally wrote home and his personal history may have remained merely correspondence between two long-separated siblings, but for a writer named William Drysdale.

Drysdale was a roving reporter for the New York Times when he received Gaul’s narrative, possibly from Michael Gaul, and published a series of articles in the summer of 1890 on John Gaul’s life. Drysdale was a distinguished newsman during the boom years of the industry in the mid-1800s who started his career at the New York Sun before finding his way to the Times where he remained for two decades. He would eventually become a well-known (at the time) children’s book author.

In 1888, two years before Gaul’s story was eagerly being read at breakfast tables across the country — the story ended up in newspapers as far away as California — he returned to New York, 35 years after he left, and was reunited with his father and two brothers.

Gaul was uncomfortable with life in America, telling Drysdale that he never should have left Fiji where “as long as you lived you knew where your dinner was coming from, and when you were dead you did not care.” It was unclear whether Gaul ever returned to the land where he had spent so much of his life, thousands of miles from the country he had left behind as a child.

Sanctuary for the winged wounded

Editor's Note: A different version of this story appeared in the Berkshire Eagle July 17, 2011. For pictures, directions, and more information on Berkshire Bird Paradise click here. For more information on the work of Barbara Chepaitis click here.

Mitch, a steppe eagle from Afghanistan, has become quite a celebrity over the course of the past year, but remains humble, sharing his living quarters with a golden eagle named Thor and Buddy, a red-tailed hawk.

"I think he considers Thor like a father figure," said Pete Dubacher as we watched the birds.

Dubacher runs Berkshire Bird Paradise in Grafton, N.Y., where Mitch will be living out the rest of his life, thousands of miles from where he was shot by an Afghani soldier and rescued by a U.S. Navy SEAL team.

Dubacher’s role in Mitch’s rescue began with an unexpected call.

"Last June I got a call from Afghanistan," Dubacher said. "I thought it was a prank."

It wasn’t.

A special operations unit had taken the bird in after it was shot in the left wing at a rifle range. The team, while working in a combat zone, spent four months caring for the eagle they named "Mitch" after the snake in the movie "Road Trip."

"It shows compassion," Dubacher, a Vietnam veteran, said of the soldiers’ actions. "It’s a testament to our country."

The soldiers had heard about Dubacher’s work and asked him to take the eagle.

"Of all the places in the country, they called me," said Dubacher. "I’m a nobody. I’m in the middle of nowhere."

In truth, Dubacher has made a name for himself nationally for his dedication to the thousands of birds he’s rescued
Advertisement
over the years.

He’s been caring for birds since 1972, a hobby that quickly spiraled into a life’s work.

"People would call me and ask me to take these birds," he said. "I can’t say no. If I don’t take care of them who will?"

By 1975 he had converted his parents’ 20-acre farm into a bird sanctuary.

He admits it’s not an easy life. He does most of the work himself, which helps keep costs down, but is hard on him and his family.

"You make a lot of sacrifices. I have no social life. You put everything into it, but I’m loving what I do," he said.

After the phone call from Afghanistan, Dubacher called his friend, the writer Barbara Chepaitis, to help in trying to coordinate getting Mitch to America.

"She doesn’t take no for an answer," he said.

Chepaitis spent the next 137 days tirelessly taking on numerous government agencies.

"I delved into it with gusto," she said. "It felt impossible to get one good thing done. I devoted myself to proving that wrong."

Her fight went all the way to the White House, she said, and by September Mitch was allowed into the country. After a month in quarantine he was at his new home in upstate New York.

The experience taught the writer that "change is possible if you are persistent," something she also finds in Dubacher.

"His perseverance is what inspires us all," she said.

Dubacher, she said, works on the edge between "all possibility and all risk," a place she was drawn to as a writer.

She ended up writing a book about Dubacher and his work, "Feathers of Hope," and is now working on a book about Mitch -— "Saving Eagle Mitch: One Good Deed in a Wicked World."

And as for Mitch he has adjusted well to his new life, according to Dubacher, and is once again healthy, although unable to fly.

Mitch is just one of more than a thousand birds as well as tortoises, squirrels, deer, and orchids at Berkshire Bird Paradise and Dubacher seems inspired by them all.

He also raises bald eagles he releases into the wild, helping to repopulate the species in the region.

Saturday, he was doing a "soft release," with a 13-week old bald eagle, beginning the process of teaching it to live on its own.

"I’m so proud right now," he said watching the eagle soar across the sky. "I’ve got goose bumps."

Turning away from the scene he seemed reflective.

"I'm blessed to be able to pull this off," he said. "When you do things for the right reasons, put your body and soul into it, there's a power out there that will take care of you."

Hazel Rowley on the Roosevelts

Editor's note: Hazel Rowley, a biographer whose most recent work dealt with the complicated relationship of first couple Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, died suddenly March 1 after a series of strokes related to an undiagnosed infection. I had interviewed her only weeks before for this piece, a version of which ran in the Register-Star Feb. 10. I found the 59-year-old Australian-reared writer funny, brilliant and giving. She told me she was planning on writing about the era just after FDR's death when a pall of conservatism hung over America. I only wish she could have finished.


In Hazel Rowley’s newest book she explores one couple’s “extraordinary marriage.” That couple happens to be made up of two singular Americans — Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt — who helped define an era and hold a country together during the dark days of the Depression and World War II.

According to the author, she hit upon the idea of writing "Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: An Extraordinary Marriage," while visiting the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park.

She said that while on the tour people kept asking questions about the Roosevelts’ marriage. Many were interested in the couple, it seemed, as was Rowley, so much so that she spent three years writing the book.
And in her opinion, it was an extraordinary 40-year marriage and one that moved from a conventional Victorian relationship — the distant cousins were married in 1905 — to one that encompassed an openness that included romantic friendships with others, but remained rooted in abiding love and respect.

Theirs was a “community marriage,” said Rowley, filled with close-knit family, including FDR’s overbearing mother, and friends.

When Franklin contracted polio at 39 the circle grew, since he needed help almost 24-hours a day. The disease created a situation where the couple were living at close quarters with a number of aides and others who were fiercely loyal to them and in return received the same.

“They were an unconventional couple ... after Franklin got polio in 1921 their marriage opened up,” Rowley said.

Distance would seem to have been one factor in the nature of their relationship.

“There was five years — between 1923 and 1928 — where he was away from home more than at home,” said Rowley.

For example, FDR was away from home during the period between 1925 and 1928 for 116 weeks while trying to recover from his disease. His wife was with him for four of those weeks, while his social secretary, Missy LeHand, with whom he ended up having a long romance with, was with him for 110.

“He had to find himself again as a man,” said the author. “(Eleanor) understood that.”

Eleanor’s role also changed after FDR contracted polio. She pushed him to continue his political career and took on much of the burden of making his political life possible.

“It was her passion,” said Rowley. “It was the glue that held their marriage together.”

FDR apparently understood this.

“He knew what he owed to Eleanor,” she told me.

While Eleanor denied the fact that she wanted to be First Lady, saying as much in her autobiography “This is My Life,” Rowley doesn’t buy it.

“She said it in her autobiography, but that doesn’t mean we need to believe it,” the author said.

Rowley said it was written while the couple was in the White House, at a time when the Republicans were looking for fodder against the administration and already calling Eleanor a “petticoat president.”

Rowley doesn’t believe the Roosevelts could have lived the life they did in today’s world.

She said it was a different time, with the press respecting their privacy and the president’s public image, going so far as to never film FDR being lifted in and out of his car.

After FDR’s death in 1945, Eleanor continued to be a progressive voice in a newly conservative America, said Rowley.

This period, beginning just after the Roosevelt era, when a “fog of conservatism” fell across America, in Rowley’s words, will be the subject of her next book.

The author, who resides in New York City, has written a number of other biographies including one about the relationship of Simone De Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre.

The crime commission comes to Hudson

Mention Hudson’s Diamond Street to people of a certain age in the area and you may be likely to hear a story about a neighborhood known for its flaunting of the law, a place where gambling and prostitution thrived.

The funniest story this reporter heard related to Diamond Street, by then renamed Columbia, involved a man I met in Kinderhook. It was the late 1940s and he and his new bride, on their way south to honeymoon, stopped in Hudson for the night. Not knowing their way around, the newlyweds ended up on Columbia Street looking for a hotel. The man left his bride in the car and went to find out the price of a room at what appeared to be a small hotel. He soon realized his mistake when he was greeted by the denizens of the establishment. Needless to say the couple didn’t stay.

Our friend in Kinderhook may not have been aware of Hudson’s reputation, but he was apparently in the minority.

“The little town with the big red-light district,” as Hudson was known for many years, had a reputation that stretched along the east coast and through history, beginning almost from the founding of the city in 1785.

Everyone from early sailors who plied the Hudson to Albany politicians who came down from the capitol on Fridays, allegedly after knocking off early from governmental duties, spent money and time with the painted ladies of Hudson. While there they could also take a roll of the dice, plunk down cash for a chance to win at the numbers, or place a bet for horse races anywhere in the country they happened to be running.

Everything seemed to be running smoothly with Hudson’s vice trade until that warm summer night when a long line of trucks and sedans slowly pulled onto Columbia Street.

Fifty state troopers quickly smashed in the doors of six “disorderly houses” as the newspaper delicately put it, located on Columbia Street between North Third and Fourth Streets. Twenty three women were rounded up, as were two Hudson Police Officers who were in one of the houses of assignation at the time. Four of the women were charged with operating the houses; the others, prostitutes all, were charged with vagrancy.

A pinochle game was raided as well that night, with other gambling house raids following.

While the raid stirred the city and county up and generated some headlines regionally, it also turned the head of a man who had of late lost a run to the White House.

A year and a half after the raid, in December 1951, then-Gov. Thomas Dewey issued an executive order that sent his State Crime Commission, created by Dewey in April 1950, to Hudson to look into “the relationship between organized crime and units of government.”

The committee reported its findings to the governor and legislature.

Hudson was only the third place the commission had been to, the others being Staten Island, where waterfront corruption was looked into, and St. Lawrence County.

The public hearings, according to Judge Joseph Proskauer, who headed up the commission, were being done for the sake of “the public peace, public safety and public justice.”

The commission came to Hudson and set up camp at the county courthouse for three days, from Dec. 17 to 19, subpoenaed 200 county residents and ripped the lid off a corrupt system that included collusion between government officials, gamblers, and houses of prostitution. Several wire services were also brought to task for providing tickers so that illegal horse room operators could get up to date information on horse races around the country.

Interestingly, the only connection the commission found between organized crime and Hudson’s inner-workings was between a gambler named Raymond Van Buren, who ran an illegal horse room and had a tenuous connection to Frank Erickson, New York City’s “King of the Bookies.” Van Buren allegedly gave a good bit of money to the Hudson Democratic Committee in order to keep his business open.

What it did find included a city police force and city officials who seemed to look the other way when it came to prostitution and gambling and both Republican and Democratic committees that shook down vice peddlers and used some of the money to buy votes.

John Gibbons, the former Democratic County Committee chair from 1931 to 1951, admitted that he would meet with other committeemen at the Register-Star building, then known as the Evening Register, to dole out funds to be used “as they saw fit.”

When asked if the money was used to buy votes, he answered in the affirmative, adding “anybody likes a dollar bill.”

When confronted with paperwork that showed the party disbursed more money than they had taken in, he had no answer.

The Republicans, according to testimony given at the hearings, apparently ran things the same way.

Former district attorney and city judge Thomas Kennedy told the commission that he made “contributions” to the county Republicans and that the amount paid was directly “calculated on length of term and salary.”

John Fardy, the former head of the Hudson City Democrats and police commissioner, told the commission that there was an arrangement with the Republican Party to divide up city government positions, giving the example of the Republicans agreeing not to run anyone against the Democrats’ city judge candidate and in exchange the Democrats allowed the Republicans to run the mayoral candidate unopposed.

Vera Faith, who operated a house of prostitution at 340 Columbia Street, was brought before the commission. She said she usually had between one and three girls working for her at any one time. An advertisement in a Poughkeepsie social event program that read “Vera’s, Come on up boys. Sporting Merchandise” was trotted out for the hearing.

Carol Desmond, the operator of a house at 325 Columbia Street, also appeared. She was a little less forthcoming than Faith, saying that the three girls that worked for her—Donna, Patricia and Billy—“sold things.”

When a stack of cards with the girls’ names and heart-shaped punch holes was proffered, Desmond answered simply that they “were used in my business.”

In the eight month period, in 1949-1950, she operated her business, Desmond made $24,000, almost $220,000 in today’s dollars. She didn’t pay taxes on any of it.

The citizenry, when brought to bear for Hudson’s rampant vice, pretty much had the same attitude as Samuel Berman.

“They might profit by it, but I don’t think they condone it,” he said of the city’s business community.

Berman owned the house at 325 Columbia Street, which he rented to Desmond and eventually sold to her.

He told the committee that he suspected what the house was being used for, but didn’t know for sure.

When Kennedy was asked why he didn’t clean up the city while D.A., he answered that he had tried to get outside help for an undercover investigation, but was told that he would have to go through regular channels, that is, Hudson’s mayor and the governor’s office.

“I might just as well put it in the paper,” he said.

The district attorney who did finally help clean up the city was John McLaren. He went directly to the governor’s counsel, who put him in touch with the NYS Police superintendent, leading to the Hudson raid.

He told the commission that he had had trouble getting the Hudson Police to cooperate. They balked in regard to getting warrants, he said.

But even McLaren had balked at untangling the strings that led from vice to government.

He told the commission he would be “glad to prosecute gamblers and hoodlums, but...to bring some political figures in here, as you’ve done...it’s tough.”

After the dust cleared from the commission’s presence, a dozen Hudson officers are brought up on different charges, with nine being reinstated with back pay. Benjamin Goldstein, a crap game operator, does a year in jail and the houses of prostitution, its denizens and Hudson’s colorful past fade into history.