Louis L’Amour, Education of a Wandering Man
(New York: Bantam Paperbacks, 1989), 258 pages.
Education of a Wandering Man is only the second book I’ve read by Louis L’Amour. The other book, Comstock Lode, I read in 1988. At the time, I was heading to Virginia City, Nevada , the center of the Comstock,. I would be there for a year as a student pastor. L’Amour mostly wrote fiction. In Education of a Wandering Man, we have a memoir which looks at L’Amour’s life up through World War 2. After the war, he’d become a best selling author. We learn about his travels and reading. L’Amour hoboed, hitchhiked, and walked around the American West. He shipped out as a merchant marine from East and West Coast ports. He preferred the West Coast ships as they had been unionized which meant better berths and food. The book consists of many stories which I enjoyed but also found a bit disjointed.
L’Amour begins this book in Singapore, on the day his classmates graduated from high school in Jamestown, North Dakota. L’Amour quit school two years earlier. His travels took him all over Southeast Asia in the prewar years. As he travelled, he read. And his reading wasn’t just light fiction. He read classics, history, geography, and philosophy. Traveling to new lands, he sought out books (and interpreters) to learn about the places places he traveled. He was also a great listener, allowing him to collecting stories which would later be used in his books. Additional jobs he held included working as a security guard, at mines, sawmills, and as a boxer. Over time, he also became curious and studied indigenous cultures in America. All this became material he later used as an author.
In the mid-1930s, he began writing short stories, a form he continued to love. Writing in the 1980s, he laments the decline of the short story market after World War II. Fewer places now exist for writers to publish such work. Before publishing his first novel, he had written over 100 pieces for magazines and journals.
I enjoyed reading about him traveling through places I’d traveled or lived in the American West. Not only did he spend time in Virginia City, he met a few old miners from the Bonanza era of the 1870s. L’Amour sought them out and listened to their stories. He also traveled through Randsburg, California. I found myself intrigued that he met Eric Hoffer (the longshoreman philosopher who wrote The True Believer. And I was jealous of him being able to see Mesa Verdi at night when the rangers place candles in the ruins. He saw this twice, once with his musical friend, Charlie Daniels.
During the Second World War, L’Amour wanted to serve in intelligence. By this point, he had seen much of the world, and from his readings had insight into many different places. The lack of a college degree kept him out of intelligence. However, he was accepted into Officer Candidate School and served in Europe.
At the end of the book, he lists the books he read between 1930 and 1935, years he averaged over 100 books a year. And most of these books were not light fiction! This book shows the importance of travel, listening, and reading to form a sharper mind to interpret and understand the world. I highly recommend it, even to those not interested in L’Amour’s writings about the American West.
George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone: Essays
(New York: Riverhead Books, 2007), 257 pages.
I have read five or six of George Saunders books. For some reason, I have only reviewed one:A Swim in a Pond in the Rain in Which Four Russians Give a Master Class in Reading, Writing, and Life. All the other books by him have been short stories. Unlike the other books I’ve read by him, this book consists mostly of non-fiction essays. Many, but not all ,of the essays are travel related.
The first essay, from which the work takes it title, is a humorous critique of the news media. In a way, he blames the general population for putting up with their nonsense. He equates today’s mass media to someone in the past attending a party with a megaphone. They drown out all other conversations. In the second essay, he travels to Dubai for GQ to check out “The New Mecca.” He falls in love with this “fake town” where things seem perfect. But he notices many cracks in the facade, especially with the imported workers.
In other essays he appreciates the writings of Kurt Vonnegut while working as a geologist in Indonesia. He also applies a similar critique of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn in his essay, “The United States of Huck.” He travels to Nepal to meet “Buddha Boy,” a boy kid on an epic fast as he mediates. And then there’s a bit of fiction as he creates a Dear Abbey-like newspaper column titled “Dear Optimist.” Mr. Optimist can be a jerk, but so upsets a reader that he is killed. The killer, a total jerk, takes over the column. While it sounds bizarre, it’s also funny. In “Thought Experiment,” he lampoons the idea that any of us are “self-made.” None of us come without benefit of the environment upon which we’re raised.
While few people will fully agree to everything Saunders writes, I recommend this book. Not only do we need to be challenged, but we also need to laugh. Saunders provides both.
Douglas R. Egerton, The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era
narrated by Eric Jason Martin, (Audible Studios for Bloomsbury, 2014), 16 hours and 4 minutes.
It’s common in the South to hold to the view that the Reconstruction as harsh and undemocratic. Egerton, however, suggests it was one of the most progressive eras in American history. It was democratic as it opened up politics for all American men. Many of the African Americans who won seats in local and state houses and Congress, had been enslaved a decade earlier. However, contrary to popular belief, only about 20% of Southern political positions were filled by African Americans. Furthermore, they were not as incompetent as often portrayed. Also during this period, literacy among former slaves grew rapidly, a benefit which could never be recalled.
In this study of the Reconstruction, Egerton begins with the Civil War. How, from the beginning, a large numbers of slaves sought refuge behind Union lines. He leads the reader through the Northern debate on what to do with the slaves and whether or not they should be armed and allowed to serve in the military. It wasn’t until later in the war they were allowed to serve as soldiers. At first, they were second class soldiers, paid less than their white counterparts. Later, they received equal pay. Another oddity which was debated had to do with northern slaveholders in states like Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware, who received a bounty for allowing their slaves to serve in the Union Army. The availability of these soldiers allowed the Union to greatly expand its army. This helped bring the war to a quicker end.
Egerton devotes much time to Andrew Johnson’s Presidency. A former slaveholder, Johnson seemed uninterested in helping the freed slaves. He interested lay in helping the plantation owners of the South. Yet, despite the Presidents reluctant support, the Freedman Bureau, it increased literacy of former slaves. It also kept them (and many white Southerners) from starving in the years after the war. A significant number of workers with the Freedman Bureau were free African Americans from the north.
In the years after the Civil War, many of those who fought for the Confederacy continued to fight for White Supremacy through guerrilla activity. Groups like the Klan, sought to prevent former slaves from voting. In addition to discouraging voting, they sought to keep the former slaves in subservient positions. As the wars against Native Americans rose not the American Plains, the federal transferred the calvary stationed in the South to the West. This left on the mobile infantry in the South. Such forces were unable to quickly respond to the fast moving and hooded “night riders.”
Southern resistance not only involved violence. Groups, such as the Daughters of the Confederacy, put political pressure on school boards to teach the Reconstruction as a failure. Books were written and later made into movies such as “Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind.” These helped create an alternative and negative view of the Reconstruction.
Egerton devotes significant time to discuss the seemingly failures of the Reconstruction. He identifies many reasons the progressiveness of the era struggled. A leading reason can be credited to the resistance from Southern Whites. Even those whites who would have benefited from the progressive programs of Reconstruction, shunned them out of what they considered loyalty to their own race. The era didn’t just end, it collapsed.
Other reasons for the failure included Republicans moving away from a more radical platform to a a more pro-business orientation. Business Republicans refused to support issues such as a land ownership for former slaves.
One minor but surprising issue involved tension between lighter skinned mix-raced freemen (as opposed to freedman, who were former slaves) in the South. The “freemen,” were often the ones who gained power. They looked out for themselves, and did not push hard enough for the radical changes desired by their darker skinned brothers and sisters. While there can be some truth in each reason, in the end violence brought an end to the era and ushered in the rule of Jim Crow.
Another question he debates is when Reconstruction actually ended. While most historians see the era ending 1877, at the end of Grant’s second term as President. However, the end wasn’t so clear-cut. Many former slaves in places throughout the South, especially Louisiana and North Carolina, continued to vote and hold office long afterwards. However, by the turn of the 20th Century, Jim Crow laws had been firmly established throughout the South.
While many may not appreciate Egerton’s scholarship, wanting to continue to insist the Civil War was about State Rights, this book deserves to be studied. Egerton quotes James Longstreet, one of the most capable Confederate Generals, who supported Reconstruction. Longstreet led an integrated police department in New Orleans after the war. On the war not being about slavery, Longstreet quipped, “Why not talk about witchcraft if slavery was not the cause of the war, I never heard of any other cause of the quarrel than slavery.”
Egerton’s research maintains a focus on the condition and struggle of African Americans during and after the Civil War. While the focus is primarily about the South (where most lived), he also point out the harsh conditions people of color faced in the North during the era. Many places in the North denied voting to African Americans at a time when they were voting in places like South Carolina. Racism in America has never been limited to one region of the nation.
I confess to feeling shame when I read about what my fellow southerners, some who may have been ancestors, did to restrict the progress of the former slaves. We should learn from the past and not try to clean it up, so that we can help create a society where all people might flourish.
