The American Spirit Read online

  He was also a vociferous champion of abstinence from hard or spirituous liquors—but then no one’s perfect.

  In truth he was something of a gadfly intellectually. As a scientist he too often jumped to conclusions with little to go on. As a physician his heart often surpassed his head, though maybe in a physician that’s not an altogether bad thing.

  And Rush, to be sure, was a man of his time—or more to the point, a physician of his time—whose answer to most ailments was a severe bleeding, in addition to terrible emetics and purges, leading some latter-day scholars to surmise that the real heroes were his patients.

  Nor did he, any more than others, understand the causes of malaria and yellow fever, two of the most dreaded scourges of the day.

  But let us not look down on anyone from the past for not having the benefit of what we know, or allow ourselves to feel superior. In my experience, the more one learns of that founding generation of Americans—and I mean the real flesh-and-blood human beings, not the myths—the larger they become, the more one wonders what we’ve lost, or are in grave danger of losing.

  If in some ways the doctor’s professional perception was no better than the norm of the eighteenth century, in other ways he saw beyond his time as almost no one did.

  Seeing insanity as an illness, not a curse, he demonstrated in his care of the insane that kindness and pleasant surroundings went much farther than punishment and moral lectures.

  He was fascinated by dreams long in advance of Freud and has been called justifiably the father of American psychiatry.

  Far ahead of his time, he insisted on better sanitation and hygiene among the troops of the Continental Army as a way to check the spread of disease.

  He was fascinated by the influence of the environment on health. He knew that physical health and mental outlook were somehow joined and he would have concurred heartily with last week’s report from three of our universities that stress has much to do with catching colds and that people with close ties to friends and family are the least likely to catch colds. The New York Times subhead to the story—“More friends, fewer sniffles”—was exactly the kind of thing Rush might have said.

  His own family was large and close—there were thirteen children—and friends mattered greatly to the doctor. He was constantly doing favors for friends and corresponding at length, busy as he was. Two of his closest friends were John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, and it was he, Benjamin Rush, who worked out a reconciliation between the two after years of enmity when they refused to speak to one another. Rush himself considered it one of his best services to the country.

  That this bright, industrious son of a Pennsylvania farmer and model son of the Enlightenment was also a devout Christian is essential to our understanding of him.

  “To spend and be spent for the good of mankind is what I chiefly aim at,” he once said, and what he preached was what he practiced to his dying day.

  The part he played in the 1793 yellow fever epidemic is legendary. While thousands of people, including some of the doctors, fled the city in terror, Rush remained working among the sick and dying, without letup, with little or no sleep, seeing as many as a hundred patients a day wherever they were, until he, too, took ill and collapsed.

  His devotion to his patients in normal times was hardly less. I’ve been reading the diary of a Philadelphia woman named Elizabeth Drinker, a Quaker wife and mother whose large household included two free black children, boys aged seven and eleven, who to her alarm had taken severely ill.

  “Dr. Rush called,” she recorded April 8, 1794. “Dr. Rush here in forenoon . . . [despite] roads being so very bad,” reads her entry for April 9. Dr. Rush called again on April 12, April 14, April 15, 17, 22, and 27, and on into the first week of May. By my count he made fifteen house calls on those two boys by the time they were out of the woods. And Elizabeth Drinker records, too, that she had finished reading five volumes on religious matters lent to her by Dr. Rush.

  Yet for all that Benjamin Rush did, said, wrote, accomplished in his crowded days, nothing surpassed his role as teacher and educator. Profoundly influenced in his own youth by some of the greatest educators of the age—Samuel Davies of Princeton, William Cullen of Edinburgh—Rush held education to be the highest of callings and took to it, of course, ardently, all out. “Prudence,” he liked to say, “is a rascally virtue.”

  In the good society, Rush held, a physician must be a teacher. As a professor of medicine he trained perhaps three thousand doctors and unquestionably raised the standard of what passed then for medical training.

  Further, he wanted everybody to be educated in the basic rules of good health and saw no reason why the benefits of exercise, sensible diet, good hygiene shouldn’t be part of everyone’s course of study.

  What he wanted above all in education was more regard for the same phrase he’d given Tom Paine—common sense. At his own commencement day at Princeton, Rush had heard the president of Princeton, Samuel Davies, charge the graduating class to “bravely live in the service of your own generation.” To Rush it was only common sense to prepare the young for the realities of their own time, their own lives. “We teach [our children] what was done 2,000 years ago and conceal from them what is doing every day,” he wrote.

  Too much fuss was made over Latin and Greek, he said. He wanted French, German, the modern languages emphasized, a radical notion then. He wanted more attention paid to writing and public speaking and disdained arbitrary divisions between science and the arts. “Some of our best physicians have been poets,” he told his son James, who was to become a noted doctor in his own time.

  Rush’s life was not without shadow and heartache. He was ridiculed for his “lunatic system of medicine,” called “remorseless” by one newspaper editor, and blamed for thousands of deaths during the yellow fever epidemic. One of his own sons was severely mentally ill. Rush’s response was entirely in character. He sued the newspaper editor for libel and when he won the case, he gave the money to charity. To the afflicted son, who was confined to a mental hospital for the remainder of his life, Rush gave unstinting care and attention.

  Rush remained active to the end. He died in 1813. On hearing the news, John Adams wrote to Jefferson, “I know of no character living or dead who has done more real good in America.”

  In all human relations, Rush taught, it was good nature that mattered most. “In this quality,” he wrote, “I include candor, gentleness, and a disposition to speak with civility and to listen with attention to everybody.” Words to the wise then, but perhaps in our own day more than ever.

  “Knowledge,” he said, “must be universal.” How fitting that the students of this, the college he founded, now come from every part of the world, twenty-two different countries, and that you of the senior class have spent time studying abroad in some thirty-one different countries.

  Rush, with his animating spirit, set a standard for Dickinson and for education overall, and it seems to me that the components of that spirit were threefold: goodwill (or good nature, as he said); inexhaustible curiosity (it was this that made him so everlastingly interested in everything and everyone); and commitment—commitment to principle, commitment to service, to his country, and to the fundamental faith that education ought never ever stand still, in the country and in one’s own life. It is an animating spirit that transcends time and let it ever be so.

  . . . I am greatly honored to be able now to count myself an alumnus of Dickinson College. I thank you for that and for inviting me to take part in this wonderful occasion.

  Warmest congratulations to you of the Class of 1998 and to your families. You wouldn’t be here today if you hadn’t worked hard and done well. Be assured the world needs you.

  It’s said that you and your generation are apathetic, that you care only for money, that idealism is in decline among you.

  I don’t believe it.

  I offer a parting thought from the good Dr. Rush: “The American war [with Britain] is over,”
he said in 1786, “but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed.”

  Like much that he said, it is as true today as ever.

  The Lessons of History

  UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

  Boston, Massachusetts

  1998

  President Bulger . . . Chancellor Penney . . . members of the Board of Trustees . . . fellow honorees . . . distinguished faculty . . . members of the Class of 1998 . . . ladies and gentlemen . . .

  I’ve been thinking what two beautiful words they are . . . university . . . and Massachusetts.

  University: from the Latin meaning universal. University: an idea, an ideal going back more than a thousand years.

  And Massachusetts: a good American—native American—word, from the Algonquin tongue going back perhaps farther still and meaning “near the green mountain.”

  Say them together: the University of Massachusetts. What a potent combination. One might think it could hardly be improved on . . . But then add Boston . . . The University of Massachusetts Boston. Pure music!

  It might never have happened. That’s among the most important lessons of history . . . and of life. There is so much around us that might never have happened were it not for a host of qualities called imagination, commitment, courage, creativity, and determination in the face of obstacles—that maybe most of all.

  There were seemingly good reasons why this university should never have happened. There was already the university at Amherst. There were already many universities in Boston, and weren’t they enough? But there were men and women who thought otherwise, who were inspired by the idea of not just a public city university, but one of first rank, with a first-rank faculty, and not just for any city, but for Boston.

  They made it happen, a strong public university in Boston founded on the sound principle that in a vital community, as in one’s own life, education ought never be at a standstill.

  Chancellor Penney in her letter inviting me to take part in your commencement—one of the most gracious letters I have ever received—used the word numinous. I looked it up to be sure. It’s a good word. It means of or pertaining to the spirit or spiritually elevated.

  Rising above the ancient city of Florence is the magnificent Santa Maria del Fiore, the great cathedral that burst from the age of the Renaissance in the early fifteenth century, well before Columbus sailed. It wasn’t Gothic. It wasn’t Romanesque. It was something new and there it is still, rising 350 feet into the sky, beautiful as ever, truly numinous.

  The architect of the cathedral dome was the incomparable Brunelleschi. But when praised for his genius in what he had done, he said—and it’s this I hope you’ll remember—he said, the credit did not belong to him but to Florence.

  The credit for this university, the credit for this joyous occasion belongs to Boston, like so very much else that has enlarged and enriched American life—great works of literature, architecture, music, great strides in science, new ideas, noble causes.

  It was here in Boston that the first school in America was established, here that the American Revolution began, here that the abolition movement took hold. Leonard Bernstein and Martin Luther King were educated here. How very many gifted and intrepid souls have embarked from these very shores, figuratively and literally.

  Once, near dusk, in the bitter cold of winter, a father and his young son embarked in secret from the beach just down the bay, not three miles from here. They were two future presidents of the United States, John Adams and eleven-year-old John Quincy Adams. The year was 1778, in the midst of the Revolutionary War.

  John Adams was bound three thousand miles over the sea in the dead of winter, to seek French support for the American cause. And there was every reason why he could have refused the mission, why it need not have happened. No one sailed the Atlantic in winter if it could be avoided. Enemy cruisers lay in wait. Adams was leaving family, home, livelihood, everything he loved, risking his life, risking capture and who knew what horrors at the hands of the enemy.

  John Adams by Gilbert Stuart

  He felt ill-suited for diplomacy and had no training or experience. He spoke no French, the language of diplomacy. He had never in his life laid eyes on a king or queen or foreign minister of a great power or set foot in a city of more than thirty thousand people.

  But go he did. With his overriding sense of duty, his ardor for his country, there was never really any doubt of his going. If he was new to diplomacy, so was every American. If he was unable to speak French, he would learn.

  Adams did well on the far side of the Atlantic. He secured vital loans, he played a key part in the Treaty of Paris that ended the war, and served as the first American ambassador to Britain. The boy John Quincy, as it turned out, would travel all the way to St. Petersburg and back, an epic, unheard of adventure of the time and the start of a life of diplomatic missions in the service of our country.

  The lessons of history are manifold.

  Nothing happens in isolation. Everything that happens has consequences.

  We are all part of a larger stream of events, past, present, and future. We are all the beneficiaries of those who went before us—who built the cathedrals, who braved the unknown, who gave of their time and service, and who kept faith in the possibilities of the mind and the human spirit.

  An astute observer of old wrote that history is philosophy taught with examples. Harry Truman liked to say that the only new thing in the world is the history you don’t know.

  From history we learn that sooner is not necessarily better than later . . . that what we don’t know can often hurt us and badly . . . and that there is no such thing as a self-made man or woman.

  A sense of history is an antidote to self-pity and self-importance, of which there is much too much in our time. To a large degree, history is a lesson in proportions.

  History reminds us that nothing counterfeit has any staying power, an observation, incidentally, made by Cicero about 60 BC.

  History teaches that character counts. Character above all.

  I am extremely grateful for this high honor from the university and proud to count myself an alumnus now. To you the graduating class, warmest congratulations.

  You’re here because you’ve done a lot of hard work. Me too.

  But more than most, I know, you’ve shown great determination to achieve what you have. And I have some idea of how many reasons there were that this day might never have happened in your life.

  So on you go. If your experience is anything like mine, the most important books in your life you have still to read.

  And read you will. Read for pleasure. Read to enlarge your lives. Read history, read biography, learn from the lives of others. Read Marcus Aurelius and Yeats. Read Cervantes and soon; don’t wait until you’re past fifty as I did. Read Emerson and Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor and Langston Hughes.

  Read a wise and sparkling book called While the Music Lasts by an author named William Bulger. See especially page 19, where he describes his own discovery of books.

  The world needs you. There is large work to be done, good work, and you can make a difference. Whatever your life work, take it seriously and enjoy it. Let’s never be the kind of people who do things lukewarmly. If you’re going to ring the bell, give the rope one hell of a pull.

  I wish you the fullest lives possible—full of love and bells ringing.

  What’s Essential Is Invisible

  DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

  Hanover, New Hampshire

  1999

  We have had farmers and generals in our highest office, and a great many lawyers, a college president, a world-famous engineer, numerous career politicians, and a movie star: and the movie star was by no means the only actor. Or necessarily the best one. Six of our presidents—and they were all men, all white men to be more specific—came from Ohio. There have been a number of Episcopalians, still more Presbyterians, and one
Roman Catholic. Abraham Lincoln was the tallest at six foot four. James Madison was the smallest, at five foot four, and he weighed only a hundred pounds.

  In striking contrast, William Howard Taft, by far the largest of the lot, weighed 332 pounds. A custom-built bathtub had to be installed in the White House. There’s a wonderful old photograph in which the three workmen who did the installation sit together quite comfortably in Taft’s giant tub. With Taft we had a gravitas of a kind, if not necessarily power, in the highest office.

  Calvin Coolidge is famous for having said as little as possible. Theodore Roosevelt could hardly keep quiet.

  Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest president in history. When he took office, after the death of McKinley in 1901, he was all of forty-two.

  TR was the first president born in a big city. Harry Truman was the first and only president born in Missouri and the only president in this century who never went to college. It was not until Jimmy Carter that we had a president who was born in a hospital. John Adams, first of the Harvard men, was ninety at the time of his death in 1826.

  Of the first seven presidents, whose combined terms spanned forty-eight years, all were slave masters but two, and they were father and son, John and John Quincy Adams. So for nearly half a century, slave holders dominated in the executive branch.

  Presidential nicknames through the nineteenth century favored an affectionate use of the word “old” as a prefix—as in Old Man Eloquent (for John Quincy Adams), Old Hickory (for Andrew Jackson), Old Rough and Ready (for Zachary Taylor). In the twentieth century, beginning with TR, the use of initials became the fashion.

  A great variety of wise and stirring pronouncements were delivered by, or attributed to our presidents, but then nearly all said some silly things, too. Jefferson stood on a hillside at Harpers Ferry where the Shenandoah meets the Potomac and proclaimed the view worth a trip to Europe. Gerald Ford, one of the most admirable presidents of our time, once observed that if Lincoln were alive today, he’d be turning over in his grave.