Christmas Every Day

1856 Pottawatomie Massacre

Bleeding Kansas again. John Brown was an abolitionist activist who had recently moved to the Kansas Territory to aid the forces of anti-slavery settlers. In May, 1856, he joined a group riding to the aid of the town of Lawrence, centre of the Free State movement, which was threatened by a pro-slavery militia. Finding, en route, that they were too late to be of any use to Lawrence, Brown, four of his sons, and two other men decided to march toward Pottawatomie Creek, near present-day Lane, Kansas, to the homes of pro-slavery sympathizers. 

On the night of May 24th, 1856, Brown banged on the door of James Doyle and ordered the men inside to come out. Brown’s sons then attacked them with broadswords. They executed three of the Doyles, father and sons (a 16-year-old boy was spared after his mother pleaded for his life), splitting open heads and cutting off arms. Brown himself put a bullet into the head of James Doyle. The gang then sought out other pro-slavery supporters in the area. They traveled to Allen Wilkinson’s home, where, against the protestations of Wilkinson’s wife, who was sick with the measles, they took Wilkinson and hacked him to death, leaving his body alongside the road.

Brown’s men then crossed to the south bank of the creek and approached the home of James Harris. Here Brown’s group found several guests and questioned them about their views on slavery and whether they had participated in the attack on Lawrence earlier in the week. William Sherman’s answers did not satisfy Brown, and he was killed behind the residence and his body left in the creek. The Browns then disappeared into the night.

Proslavery forces launched a manhunt, plundering homesteads as they searched the countryside for the Pottawatomie killers. John Brown took to the woods and evaded capture. His sons did not fare as well; John Jr. and Jason — neither of whom had been involved at Pottawatomie — were savagely beaten. Frederick was shot through the heart at the Battle of Osawatomie and Brown’s Station was burnt to the ground. 

1812 The Assassination of Spencer Perceval

The only assassination of a British Prime Minister took place on this date when Spencer Perceval was gunned down outside the House of Commons. For some reason, political murders are rare in the British Commonwealth, much less frequent than in presidential systems. Yet another advantage of a constitutional monarchy.

A near-contemporary account reveals the fate of the assailant and his motives.

A weak ministry, under a premier of moderate abilities, Mr. Spencer Percival, was broken up, May 11, 1812, by the assassination of its chief. On the evening of that day, Mr. Percival had just entered the lobby of the House of Commons, on his way into the house, when a man concealed behind the door shot him with a pistol. He staggered forward with a slight exclamation, and fell expiring. The incident was so sudden, that the assassin was at first disregarded by the bystanders. He was at length seized, and examined, when another loaded pistol was found upon him. He remained quite passive in the hands of his captors, but extremely agitated by his feelings, and when some one said, ‘Villain, how could you destroy so good a man, and make a family of twelve children orphans?’ he only murmured in a mournful tone, ‘I am sorry for it.’ It was quickly ascertained that he was named John Bellingham, and that a morbid sense of some wrongs of his own alone led to the dreadful deed. His position was that of an English merchant in Russia: for some mercantile injuries there sustained he had sought redress from the British government; but his memorials had been neglected.

Exasperated beyond the feeble self-control which his mind possessed, he had at length deliberately formed the resolution of shooting the premier, not from any animosity to him, against which he loudly protested, but ‘for the purpose,’ as he said, ‘of ascertaining, through a criminal court, whether his Majesty’s ministers have the power to refuse justice to [for] a well-authenticated and irrefutable act of oppression committed by their consul and ambassador abroad.’ His conduct on his trial was marked by great calmness, and he gave a long and perfectly rational address on the wrongs he had suffered, and his views regarding them. There was no trace of excitable mania in his demeanour, and he refused to plead insanity. The unhappy man, who was about forty-two years of age, met his fate a week after the murder with the same tranquillity. He probably felt death to be a kind relief from past distresses, for it was his own remark on his trial, ‘Sooner than suffer what I have suffered for the last eight years, I should consider five hundred deaths, if it were possible for human nature to endure them, far more to be preferred.’ He had left a wife of twenty years, with a babe at her breast, in St. Petersburg, waiting to be called to England when his affairs should be settled. A more affecting image of human misery can scarcely be conceived.

1163 The death of Héloïse

The story of the tragic love between the philosopher Peter Abelard (1079-1142) and the beautiful and learned Héloïse d’Argenteuil (1100-1163) is told in Chambers’ Book of Days. Chambers is justifiably harsh on Abelard who, despite his academic brilliance, was a thorough-going jerk. 

The story of Heloise and Abelard is one of the saddest on record. It is a true story of man’s selfishness and woman’s devotion and self-abnegation. If we wished for an allegory which should be useful to exhibit the bitter strife which has to be waged between the earthly and the heavenly, between passion and principle, in the noblest minds, we should find it provided for us in this painful history. We know all the particulars, for Abelard has written his own confessions, without screening himself or concealing his guilt; and several letters which passed between the lovers after they were separated, and devoted to the exclusive service of religion, have come down to posterity.

Not alone the tragic fate of the offenders, but also their exalted worth and distinguished position, helped to make notorious the tale of their fall. Heloise was an orphan girl, eighteen years old, residing with a canon of Notre Dame, at Paris, who was her uncle and guardian. This uncle took great pains to educate her, and obtained for her the advantage of Abelard’s instruction, who directed her studies at first by letters. Her devotion to study rendered her remarkable among the ladies of Paris, even more than her beauty. ‘In face,’ Abelard himself informs us, ‘she was not insignificant; in her abundance of learning she was unparalleled; and because this gift is rare in women, so much the more did it make this girl illustrious through the whole kingdom.’

Abelard, though twice the age of Heloise, was a man of great personal attraction, as well as the most famous man of his time, as a rising teacher, philosopher, and divine. His fame was then at its highest. Pupils came to him by thousands. He was lifted up to that dangerous height of intellectual arrogance, from which the scholar has often to be hurled with violence by a hard but kind fate, that he may not let slip the true humility of wisdom. ‘Where was found,’ Heloise writes, ‘the king or the philosopher that had emulated your reputation? Was there a village, a city, a kingdom, that did not ardently wish to see you? When you appeared in public, who did not run to behold you? And when you withdrew, every neck was stretched, every eye sprang forward to follow you. The women, married and unmarried, when Abelard was away, longed for his return!’ And, becoming more explicit, she continues: ‘You possessed, indeed, two qualifications—a tone of voice, and a grace in singing—which gave you the control over every female heart. These powers were peculiarly yours, for I do not know that they ever fell to the share of any other philosopher. To soften by playful instruments the stern labours of philosophy, you composed several sonnets on love, and on similar subjects. These you were often heard to sing, when the harmony of your voice gave new charms to the expression. In all circles nothing was talked of but Abelard; even the most ignorant, who could not judge of harmony, were enchanted by the melody of your voice. Female hearts were unable to resist the impression.’ So the girl’s fancies come back to the woman, and it must have caused a pang in the fallen scholar to see how much his guilt had been greater than hers.

It was a very thoughtless thing for Fulbert to throw together a woman so enthusiastic and a man so dangerously attractive. In his eagerness that his niece’s studies should advance as rapidly as possible, he forgot the tendency of human instinct to assert its power over minds the most cultivated, and took Abelard into his house. A passionate attachment grew up between teacher and pupil: reverence for the teacher on the one hand, interest in the pupil on the other, changed into warmer emotions. Evil followed. What to lower natures would have seemed of little moment, brought to them a life of suffering and repentance. In his penitent confessions, no doubt conscientiously enough, Abelard represents his own conduct as a deliberate scheme of a depraved will to accomplish a wicked design; and such a terrible phase of an intellectual mind is real, but the circumstances in which the lovers were placed are enough to account for the unhappy issue. The world, however, it appears, was pleased to put the worst construction upon what it heard, and even Heloise herself expresses a painful doubt, long afterwards, for a moment, at a time when Abelard seemed to have forgotten her. ‘Account,’ she says, ‘for this conduct, if you can, or must I tell you my suspicions, which are also the general suspicions of the world? It was passion, Abelard, and not friendship, that drew you to me; it was not love, but a baser feeling.’

The attachment of the lovers had long been publicly known, and made famous by the songs which Abelard himself penned, to the utter neglect of his lectures and his pupils, when the utmost extent of the mischief became clear at last to the unsuspicious Fulbert. Abelard contrived to convey Heloise to the nunnery of Argenteuil. The uncle demanded that a marriage should immediately take place; and to this Abelard agreed, though he knew that his prospects of advancement would be ruined, if the marriage was made public. Heloise, on this very account, opposed the marriage; and, even after it had taken place, would not confess the truth. Fulbert at once divulged the whole, and Abelard’s worldly prospects were for ever blasted. Not satisfied with this, Fulbert took a most cruel and unnatural revenge upon Abelard, [his thugs castrated the philosopher] the shame of which decided the wretched man to bury himself as a monk in the Abbey of St. Dennis. Out of jealousy and distrust, he requested Heloise to take the veil; and having no wish except to please her husband, she immediately complied, in spite of the opposition of her friends.

Thus, to atone for the error of the past, both devoted themselves wholly to a religious life, and succeeded in adorning it with their piety and many virtues. Abelard underwent many sufferings and persecutions. Heloise first became prioress of Argenteuil; afterwards, she removed with her nuns to the Paraclete, an asylum which Abelard had built and then abandoned. But she never subdued her woman’s devotion for Abelard. While abbess of the Paraclete, Heloise revealed the undercurrent of earthly passion which flowed beneath the even piety of the bride of heaven, in a letter which she wrote to Abelard, on the occasion of an account of his sufferings, written by himself to a friend, falling into her hands. In a series of letters which passed between them at this time, she exhibits a pious and Christian endeavour to perform her duties as an abbess, but persists in retaining the devoted attachment of a wife for her husband. Abelard, somewhat coldly, endeavours to direct her mind entirely to heaven; rather affects to treat her as a daughter than a wife; and seems anxious to check those feelings towards himself which he judged it better for the abbess of the Paraclete to discourage than to foster. Heloise survived Abelard twenty-one years.

Visitors to Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris are told that the bodies of the two lovers are interred there side by side.

1889 Death of a leper saint

Native Hawaiians in the 19th century were beset by the ravages of imported diseases to which they had no natural immunity: smallpox, cholera, influenza, and leprosy. Those who contracted leprosy (now known as Hansen’s disease) were quarantined in villages on an isolated peninsula of the island of Molokai. There they lived in miserable conditions, demoralized and poorly supplied with essentials.

In 1873 the Catholic bishop decided that the lepers required the service of a priest. Four missionaries volunteered to go in rotation and the first to arrive was a Belgian of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary named Father Damien. He remained on the island for the rest of his life, treating the suffering with dignity, burying the dead, empowering leaders from among the community, and improving living conditions. Eventually hospitals, roads, schools and a church were built to serve the victims of leprosy. After serving there for 11 years he contracted the disease but carried on there until his death in 1889. He was buried on Molokai but the King of the Belgians asked for his body to be returned to his native land where it as interred near to his home village. In 1995 one of his hands was returned to Hawaii and is laid in his original grave.

In 2008 the Catholic Church declared him to be a saint. The anniversary of his death is a holiday in Hawaii.

1930 Birth of Pat Robertson

The son of a Democratic United States senator from Virginia, Pat Robertson turned from a career in the law to one in religion and made himself one of the most influential and enigmatic leaders of the so-called Christian Right during the Reagan era of the 1980s and beyond. As president of the Christian Coalition, which he founded, from 1989 to 1997, Robertson helped galvanize millions of evangelical Christians toward greater participation in the political process, and has himself considered running for the White House.

Raised in the Southern Baptist tradition, Robertson graduated magna cum laude from Washington and Lee University in 1950. After serving as a Marine Corps officer during the Korean conflict he returned to his education, receiving a J.D. from Yale Law School in 1955. Failures in an early business venture, and his attempts to pass the New York bar exam helped steer him back toward his religious roots. He attended a theological seminary, graduating with a B.Div., and worked for a time with the mostly black inner-city poor in Brooklyn before returning to Virginia where he was ordained a Southern Baptist minister in 1960.

Robertson demonstrated the intensely entrepreneurial side of his character in 1961 when he started operating WYAH, a television station in Virginia that became the first in the nation devoted to primarily religious programming. From this single station Robertson launched what would become a veritable communications empire: the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN), offshoots of which grew to include a relief agency, cable television holdings, the American Center for Law and Justice, which specializes in First Amendment cases, and Regent University, which came to call itself “America’s premier Christian graduate school.”

The flagship program of his network was The 700 Club, which Robertson hosted from 1966. His success both behind and before the camera led many conservative Christians to promote Robertson’s involvement in U.S. politics. Though he at first thought political organizing was inconsistent with his clerical calling, he had a change of heart by the 1980s, when he began to organize mobilization efforts such as a 1980 “Washington for Jesus” rally and his own Freedom Council (1981-86). In 1984 he changed his party affiliation to Republican. When presented in 1987 with what was purported to be a petition of some 3.3 million names urging him to run for office, he resigned his church offices and launched a campaign for the 1988 Republican presidential nomination. Despite early successes in some primaries, Robertson’s candidacy had been decisively rejected by “Super Tuesday” in March of that year, even by many members of conservative Christian churches.

Undaunted by his electoral failure Robertson returned to the idea of grassroots organizing. In 1989 he founded and became the first president of the Christian Coalition, an organization whose mission was to represent evangelical opinion to government bodies, protest anti-Christian bias in public life, train leaders, and develop policies–all while being careful not to lose its tax-exempt status by supporting partisan candidates. The Christian Coalition proved very successful in enunciating the social agenda of the religious right in the United States. With a national membership well in excess of a million, the group raised the political profile of a hitherto-marginalized section of the population. Mirroring the Republican Party’s “Contract with America,” the Coalition advanced its “Contract with the American Family,” which was trumpeted as “A Bold Plan to Strengthen the Family and Restore Common-Sense Values.” Many attributed the G.O.P’s triumphs in 1996 Congressional races to the efforts of Robertson and his branch of the religious right.

Robertson astonished the media world in 1997 when, on the same day he resigned the presidency of the Christian Coalition, he sold his International Family Entertainment corporation to Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul whose television and newspaper holdings had often been criticized for taking the low moral road. Robertson tried to assuage criticism by promising that the hundreds of millions of dollars the sale had generated would go toward a new global television evangelism campaign as well as to enhance the endowment of Regent University. Part of the deal with Murdoch’s Fox Kids Worldwide Inc. was that The 700 Club would continue to be aired by the new entity and that CBN itself would remain independent.

Robertson remains a figure who defies easy characterization. For many on the political left, Robertson is, as described by Robert Boston, “the most dangerous man in America” due to his stances on social issues like homosexuality and the role of women. Those who valued the country’s multicultural heritage reacted with horror to Robertson’s suggestion that only devout Christians and Jews were fit to hold public office. Other liberals decried his proposals to abolish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Endowment for the Arts. Robertson’s hopes of restoring prayer to public schools and re-establishing the United States as a “Christian nation” seemed an affront to the constitutional separation of church and state and drew the ire of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League.

His capacity for stirring outrage continues to attract media attention. He seemed to attribute the 9/11 attacks in 2001 and Hurricane Katrina in 2005 as divine retribution against Americans for their permissive lifestyles; he blamed the 2010 Haiti earthquakes on a 1791 pact with the devil. He offended many fellow Christians with the suggestion that it was morally permissible to divorce a spouse with Alzheimer’s Disease and with revelations of financial dealings with African dictator Charles Taylor of Liberia. His frequent predictions of cataclysmic events that never ensue have grown tiresome.

Robertson is neither a backwoods fundamentalist nor a one-dimensional Elmer Gantry. He is well educated, well off, and well connected, with two American presidents on his family tree, and his pragmatism has made him an enormously successful businessman. His particular brand of charismatic theology, moreover, is opposed by many right-wing Christians who are uneasy about his claim to receiving divinely inspired “words of knowledge” and his belief that even the faithful will suffer from a pre-millennial period of tribulation before the final coming of Christ. During the 1988 primaries, for example, Robertson’s bid for the Republican nomination drew less support from members attending conservative Baptist churches than it did from other white voters. Despite the criticism he has received from some American Jewish groups, he is a leading defender of the state of Israel, which he sees in the context of Biblical end-times prophecies. Robertson, for a time, resumed the presidency of the Christian Coalition after the departure of Ralph Reed, and presided over the reorganization of the group into two entities–Christian Coalition International and Christian Coalition of America–in the wake of a 1999 IRS ruling that revoked its tax-exempt status. A supporter of Donald Trump, he continues to be active in business, media and social advocacy of issues favoured by the Christian right.

1954

The birth of Robin Duke

It is not often that I venture into the realm of popular culture on this blog but today provides me with an opportunity to salute the Canadian actress Robin Duke. She was a sorely underestimated contributor to that pinnacle of comedic genius known as SCTV and also starred in SNL and Schitt’s Creek.

I remember watching this skit in Saskatoon after I returned to Canada from years of studying in London. I had never heard of SCTV and my only experience of Canadian television humour came from watching the Wayne and Schuster Show where laughs were produced in a more sedate style. Molly Earl’s introduction of the “bingo drop can” convinced me my frozen nation could, if called upon, be suitably zany.

Joining the line waiting to enter the gates of Hell on March 5, 1953 was Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvilli, aka Cato, aka Koba, aka Stalin, Georgian revolutionary and Soviet dictator.

Born in 1879 to a peasant family who hoped that he would become an Orthodox priest, Stalin rebelled and became fascinated with Marxism. He rose from being a low-ranking thug and bank robber for the socialist cause to becoming editor of Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper, and discipline of V.I. Lenin, head of the Bolshevik faction. Exiled to Siberia in 1913-17, he was released to join in the political turmoil that followed the overthrow of the Czar and the establishment of the first provisional Russian democracy. During the revolutionary wars provoked by the Bolshevik overthrow of parliament, Stalin served as a bureaucrat, a role at which he excelled. By 1922 and the establishment of the Soviet Union he was Party Secretary, an unglamorous but powerful post that enabled him to sit on all committees and influence the rise or fall of party members.

On Lenin’s death in 1924 a struggle for the top jobs broke out. Stalin’s rivals were all much better-known and few thought him a candidate for supreme leadership, particularly as Lenin in his last days had grown disenchanted with him. He succeeded, however, in out-maneuvering Leon Trotsky, founder of the Red Army by allying with Grigory Zinoviev, head of the Comintern, Politburo member Lev Kamenev and intellectual Nikolai Bukharin. Stalin then turned on his erstwhile friends and by 1927 was in command of the USSR.

His policies of rapid industrialization and collectivization of agriculture were brutally set in place.The former had some success but the latter was disastrous and resulted in millions dying of starvation. Millions more were sent to the Gulag slave labour camps and tens of thousands of generals, scientists, technical experts, and party officials were murdered in the political purges of the 1930s.

Stalin’s 1939 non-aggression pact with Hitler led to the Second World War. The reward for the USSR was the green light to occupy the Baltic republics and eastern Poland but Stalin was caught by surprise in 1941 when German forces launched Operation Barbarossa. Russian heroism mixed with a disregard for human life would eventually win the war on the Eastern Front but at an enormous cost. 158,000 Russian troops shot by their own side not to mention those killed in service in the punishment brigades from which only a survivable wound could free one. After victory in 1945, 3,000,000 liberated Russian prisoners were sent to the GULAG for the crime of having surrendered. Half of the returning officers were shot out of hand; only 20% ever returned home. Among the victimized were many of the most prominent Russian military heroes whose crime was outshining Stalin. 

Stalin was never in good health but it was considered dangerous to suggest this to him. In 1952 a number of Jewish doctors were accused of planning to poison him and other leaders. Robert Tucker’s biography Stalin in Power: The Russian Revolution from Above, 1928-1941 has this to say about Stalin and Jews:

On March 1, 1953 he suffered a stroke and lingered until expiring on March 5. (The dark comedy The Death of Stalin (2017) gives us a glimpse into his last days and the sordid crew jockeying to succeed him.) His embalmed body was put on display beside Lenin’s outside the Kremlin.

The historian Robert Conquest sums up the 70 years of Bolshevism this way: “There was an old bastard named Lenin/ Who did two or three million men in./ That’s a lot to have done in,/ But where he did one in/ That old bastard Stalin did ten in.”

1906

HMS Dreadnought and the arms race

With the exception of Great Britain, all of the major European states had adopted universal military service after 1871. Standing armies grew enormously, with millions of men under arms in many  countries. Moreover, all had copied the German General Staff and had adopted  their ideas on the scientific study of war and preparation for war. Thousands  of specialists in each country pored over maps, employed spies, sought out  enemy spies, assessed intelligence, and considered the problems of topography, ordnance, transportation and logistics. Once this sort of machinery had been put in motion, it was inevitable that they begin to have an influence on policy decisions. This was particularly true in France with its obsession about revanche and Germany, fully aware of French feelings and planning a “preventive war”. Militarism took an increasingly large part of national budgets: the British taxpayer who paid $3.54 for the armed forces in 1870 paid $8.23 in 1914; France went from $2.92 to 7.07; Germany from $1.28 to 8.19. The Dreadnought Race is symptomatic of this.

In 1906 the Royal Navy launched a new type of battleship: heavily armoured, all-big gunned, steam-turbine-powered, and fast. It made all other battleships obsolete. The problem was that HMS Dreadnought also made British naval superiority obsolete at a stroke. Hitherto Britain had insisted that its navy be as large as the next two navies combined so that no alliance could challenge its power at sea. Now, however, its numerical advantage was useless; what mattered was how many ships of the dreadnought class a nation could produce. Germany was particularly eager to compete and started building similar ships of their own, forcing the British into an ever more expensive arms race and heightening tensions that eventually exploded in 1914.

1964

The Beatles’ first appearance on the “Ed Sullivan Show”.

With so few entertainment choices, in the 1960s popular culture was still relatively uniform. It had not finished dividing into the many sub-categories we endure today; a television variety program like Ed Sullivan’s could attract a multi-generational audience with a variety of performers ranging from night-club crooners, Chinese plate-spinners, Mexican ventriloquists, borscht-belt comedians, and rock musicians.

The British Invasion that was changing the sound of pop music was led by those four lovable mop-topped lads from Liverpool, the Beatles. By early 1964, their hold on youth was so strong that my church youth group was resigned to letting us teenagers go home early to watch their first North American tv appearance. I sat on the polyester rug in our living room and sang along while my parents watched, manifestly unimpressed.

In the end, Sullivan’s show lost its appeal to those advertisers seeking to court the youth market and his show was cancelled in 1971.