360 Review Magazine Winter 2019/Spring 2020

W I N T E R 2 0 1 9 - S P R I N G 2 02 0 • V O L U M E 2 . 2 • U N I V E R S I T Y O F M A RY I S S U E S & I D E A S O N & B E YO N D T H E N O R T H E R N G R E AT P L A I N S

360 REVIEW MAGAZINE covers issues and ideas on and beyond the Northern Great Plains. 360 Review Magazine presents in-depth inquiry, analysis and reflection on important topics, trends and events happening in our region, nation and worldwide. Our point of view is rooted in North Dakota, where we are located, but is not provincial. Rather, the magazine honors the local while striving for the universal. This is the essence of the Christian, Catholic and Benedictine tradition at the University of Mary, which exists to serve the religious, academic and cultural needs of people in this region and beyond.

“Magazine” derives from makhazin, the Arabic word for “storehouse,” which also soon gained military application as a “store for arms.” The world’s first print magazines began publication in England in the 18th century and sought to provide a storehouse of information and intellectual armament. 360 Review Magazine joins that tradition with the benefit of Christianity’s 2,000-year heritage.

As a poet once wrote: “The universe is composed of stories, not atoms.”

360 Review strives to tell some of these stories well—on paper (made of atoms, we presume), which is retro-innovative in a world spinning into cyberspace.

To request a copy of 360 Review Magazine, please email pjmccloskey@umary.edu and provide your name and mailing address. A digital version is available at: news.umary.edu/360-review/ Publisher: University of Mary Editor-in-Chief: Patrick J. McCloskey Art Director & Photographer: Jerry Anderson Illustrator: Tom Marple Contributing Editor: Karen Herzog Media Relations: Tom Ackerman Consultant: Travis Wolf, PhD Editorial Offices: 360 Review Magazine, University of Mary, 7500 University Drive, Bismarck, ND 58504 Signed articles express the views of their authors and are intended solely to inform and broaden public debate. They are not intended to aid or hinder legislation before legislative bodies at the municipal, state or federal levels.

© 2019 – 360 Review Magazine at the University of Mary Printed in Canada

You can never have a greater or lesser dominion than over yourself.

Leonardo da Vinci

Table of Contents [Energy] Illusion of a New Physics of Energy — Mark Mills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 [Education] What Happened to Skilled Labor? — Joseph T. Stuart, PhD . . . . . . . . . . 6 [Economics] Dangers of Protectionism for the American Economy & Politics — Ivan Jankovic, PhD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 [Culture] Rodeo Sisters in the Badlands — Patrick J. McCloskey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 [History] Old John Brown’s Freedom Ride: An American Outlaw & Twelve Fugitive Slaves — Springs Toledo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 [History] An Argument from the Start: From Colonists to the Constitution to Gettysburg to Today — William J. Olson, PhD . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 [Art] A Christian Renaissance Man: Understanding Leonardo 500 Years Later — Elizabeth Lev, PhD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 [Literature] On Creating Monsters: Dr. Frankenstein, a Modern Deadbeat Dad — Barbara Stuart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 [Religion] Long Live the Aberration: First Feminist & Pro-Life Movement — Mike Aquilina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 [Film Commentary] The Power of Witness: Taking on the Abortion Industry — Christopher Collins, PhD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102

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Energy

Illusion of a New Physics of Energy Mark Mills, Senior Fellow Manhattan Institute & Faculty Fellow, Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering, American Energy Society’s Energy Writer of the Year 2016

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week doesn’t pass without a new report or claim that the world is undergoing a massive, structural energy transformation. It is a near future, we’re told, that will see the nearly complete replacement of oil, natural gas and coal by windmills, solar panels and batteries: “[Clean tech is] a perfect example of a 10x exponential process which will wipe fossil fuels off the market in about a decade.”

The chief cause of problems is solutions.

Eric Sevareid

— Tony Seba, Stanford economist, Clean Disruption of Energy and Transportation: How Silicon Valley Will Make Oil, Nuclear, Natural Gas, Coal, Electrical Utilities and Conventional Cars Obsolete by 2030, self-published in 2014, a top-selling energy book on Amazon.

“The world is experiencing a global energy transformation driven by technological change and new policy priorities.”

— European Union, Energy Transitions Commission, “Mission Possible:

Reaching Net-Zero Carbon Emissions from Harder-to-Abate Sectors

by Mid-Century,” report published in 2018.

“Smartphone substitution seemed no more imminent in the early 2000s than large-scale energy substitution seems today.”

— International Monetary Fund, “Riding the Energy Transition: Oil Beyond 2040,” report published in 2017.

It is true that, over the decades, all three of those “green” technologies have greatly improved and become roughly tenfold cheaper. Subsidies aside, that fact explains why, in recent years, the use of wind and solar have expanded so much. Now the claim is that the expansion will accelerate because those technologies will follow the same kind of trajectory seen in recent decades with computing and communications. “Green energy” enthusiasts are convinced the world will yet see the equivalent of “an Amazon or Apple of clean energy.”

The analogy is a seductive idea, precisely because so few forecasters anticipated the astounding advances in silicon technologies. It is an idea that 2

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renders moot cautions that wind/solar/batteries are too expensive today— such caution is seen as foolish and shortsighted, analogous to asserting, circa 1980, that the average citizen would never be able to afford a computer. Or saying, in 1984—the year the world’s first cell phone, (costing $9,000) was released—that a billion people would one day own one.

Today’s smartphones are not only far cheaper but also far more powerful than a room-size IBM mainframe from 30 years ago. That transformation arose from engineers inexorably shrinking the size and energy appetite of transistors, and consequently increasing their number per chip roughly twofold every two years—the “Moore’s Law” trend, named for Intel cofounder Gordon Moore.

Over the past 60 years, Moore’s Law has seen the efficiency of how logic engines use energy to improve by over a billion-fold. But a similar transformation in how energy is produced or stored isn’t just unlikely, it can’t happen with the physics we know today.

Only in comic books do energy technologies scale like computing technologies. In the world of people, cars, planes and large-scale industrial systems, increasing speed or carrying capacity causes hardware to expand, not shrink.

Detail from the cover of DC Comics “The Man with the Electronic Brain,” designed by Murphy Andersen.

Only in comic books do energy technologies scale like computing technologies.

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Our culture runs on coffee and gasoline, the first often tasting like the second.

Edward Abbey

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The energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of steel or silicon or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, mass and thermodynamics.

If photovoltaics could scale by Moore’s Law, a single postage-stamp-size solar array would power the Empire State Building. If batteries scaled by Moore’s Law, a battery the size of a book, costing three cents, could power an Airbus A380 airliner to Asia. But only in a fantasy world does the physics of energy work like that. In our universe, power scales the other way.

An ant-size solar photovoltaic array (in fact, feasible) produces a thousand-fold less energy than an ant’s biological muscles. And the energy contained in the fuel actually used by an aircraft flying to Asia would require a mountain of Tesla-type batteries weighing five times more than that aircraft.

Storing and processing information entails a different domain of physics than does storing and producing energy.

The world of logic is rooted in simply knowing and storing the fact of the binary state of a switch—in other words, whether it is on or off. Logic engines don’t produce physical action but are designed to manipulate the idea of the numbers zero and one. Unlike engines that carry people, logic engines can use software to achieve ‘tricks’ such as compress information through clever mathematics and thus reduce energy use. No comparable compression options exist in the world of humans and hardware.

Of course, wind turbines, solar cells and batteries will continue to improve in cost and performance. (So too will drilling rigs and combustion turbines.)

But there are well-known physics limits to future gains in wind/solar/battery technologies.

Wind turbines can’t extract more energy than exists in the kinetic flows of moving air. Solar arrays can’t convert more photons than those that arrive from the sun. And batteries can’t store more energy than dictated by the physical chemistry of the molecules chosen.

For wind, the boundary is called the Betz Limit, which dictates how much of the kinetic energy in air a blade can capture; that limit is about 60 percent.

Capturing all the kinetic energy would mean, by definition, no air movement and thus nothing to capture. There needs to be wind for the turbine to turn.

Modern turbines already exceed 45 percent conversion. That leaves some real gains to be made but nothing revolutionary.

For silicon photovoltaic cells, the physics boundary is called the ShockleyQueisser Limit: a maximum of about 33 percent of incoming photons are converted into electrons. State-of-the-art commercial photovoltaics achieve slightly better than a 26 percent conversion efficiency—in other words, near the boundary. While researchers keep unearthing new non-silicon options that offer tantalizing performance improvements, all have similar physics

boundaries, and none are remotely close to manufacturability, never mind at low costs. There are no tenfold gains left.

Future advances in the economics of wind turbines and solar arrays are now centered on incremental engineering improvements: economies of scale in making enormous turbines, taller than the Washington Monument, and similarly massive, square-mile utility-scale solar arrays. For both technologies, all the underlying key components—concrete, steel and fiberglass for wind; and silicon, copper and glass for solar—are all already in mass production and are already well down cost curves of diminishing returns.

As for modern batteries, there are no subsidies and no magic engineering from Silicon Valley or elsewhere that can close the physics-centric gap in energy densities between batteries and oil. The energy stored per pound is the critical metric for vehicles and, especially, aircraft. The maximum potential energy contained in oil molecules is about 1,500 percent greater, pound for pound, than the maximum in lithium chemistry. That’s why aircraft and rockets are powered by hydrocarbons. And that’s why, for example, an eminently feasible 20 percent improvement in oil-based propulsion is more valuable than a 200 percent improvement in batteries (still difficult).

And there are in fact potential options for such improvements in the underlying physical chemistries. New non-lithium materials in research labs offer as much as a 200 percent and even 300 percent gain in inherent performance. But even those kinds of potential improvements—ones, it bears noting, that are not yet realized or manufacturable—will still leave batteries miles away from the real competition: petroleum.

Of course, there are economic gains yet to be captured in the supply chains for all these new energy technologies. In fact, all manufacturing processes experience continual improvements in production efficiency as volumes rise.

This experience curve is called Wright’s Law. That “law” was first documented in 1936, as it related then to the question of whether manufacturing costs for aircraft could improve enough to make commercial aviation viable.

Aviation costs did decline, and production took off and created a worldwide transportation industry.

Finally, when it comes to limits, it is relevant to note that the technologies that unlocked shale oil and gas are still in the early days of engineering development, unlike the far older technologies of wind, solar and batteries.

In no small irony, tenfold gains are still theoretically possible in terms of how much energy can be extracted by a rig from shale rock before approaching physics limits.

Just as last century’s magic of commercial flight didn’t end the age of the automobile, or the ship for that matter, neither will the advent of practical wind/solar/batteries end the age of oil and gas. ±

The maximum potential energy contained in oil molecules is about 1,500 percent greater, pound for pound, than the maximum in lithium chemistry.

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Education

What Happened to Skilled Labor?

Joseph T. Stuart, PhD, Associate Professor of History, University of Mary

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hy does one struggle to find a machinist in Michigan, a construction worker in Denver or a carpenter in Boston? There are plenty of people who could do the work. But they don’t: Seven million men, ages 25 to 54—considered by economists as the prime working age—have not entered the workforce. Why not? In some states, 60 percent of skilled laborers (needed especially in manufacturing and construction) are 45 or older. Where are all the younger male workers?

Many grew up bored in schools geared more toward girls’ aptitudes.

Many have never held a hammer or a screwdriver in their hands. Now they live with parents or relatives and play video games. Despite long-term consequences of dropping out of the workforce, increasing numbers of young men do not seem unhappy with this lifestyle, as shown in Erik Hurst’s macroeconomic research at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.

As a result, there is a serious shortage of machinists, electricians, plumbers and other tradesmen. According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the shortage of skilled labor is causing construction firms to miss deadlines and even reject new projects. Current workers are asked to work overtime and construction costs increase as a result. In Denver, for example, the skilled labor shortage has become a crisis in home and commercial construction to the point where free eight-week courses are being offered to attract new workers. Experts at Colorado State University predict 96,000 job vacancies (new jobs plus retirements) in the state’s construction trades by 2025.

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Ryan Pohl (left) cofounder, Harmel Academy of the Trades, teaching a student about CNC machines at a machine shop in Grand Rapids, MI. These machines work with computer numeric controlled (CNC) heavy machinery from setup to operation to produce parts and tools from metal, plastic and other materials.

CNC equipment is precision machinery that cuts, grinds and drills into these materials.

According to the National Electrical Contractors Association, 7,000 electricians join the field yearly nationwide, but there are 10,000 who retire.

The manufacturing industry is likewise troubled by the shortage of skilled workers, as shown in the graphic on page 11.

Worse, a large proportion of skilled workers are baby boomers who, overall, are retiring at a rate of 10,000 per day. Boomers comprise 40 percent of construction workers and 54 percent of construction managers. In the skilled trades, 54 percent of workers are 45 years of age or older, which is 19 percent more than peers in all other jobs nationwide. As experienced workers retire, not only are there fewer skilled workers, a considerable wealth of institutional knowledge goes with them.

Source of the Skills Gap Matthew Crawford blames American work culture for the skilled labor shortage. His first book, Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work (2009) was reviewed positively in both The New York Times and The New Yorker. With a PhD in classical political thought, Crawford repairs motorcycles in the shop he owns and operates. He argued in his book against cultural biases denigrating manual and physical work as not “smart.” Manual labor in his shop is more intellectually stimulating and “liberal,” in the sense of befitting a free person, than typical white-collar “knowledge” work, he wrote. Crawford called not for social revolution but for a movement supporting widespread “pockets of mindful labor.” Such local pockets would correct the misguided separation of thinking from doing that has degraded both blue-collar and white-collar work.

Like Crawford, Ryan Pohl is aware of these problems in American work culture and is doing something about them. He grew up among the German Catholic farm families of central Michigan. The 6-foot-5 college football 8

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player worked as a journeyman computer numeric controlled (CNC) machinist. Twenty years ago, he founded Praeco Skills, which provides advanced manufacturing training. In response to the growing skills shortage, Pohl is now cofounding Harmel Academy of the Trades, a two-year, residential Catholic trade school for men in Grand Rapids, Michigan. In an innovative partnership, Kuyper College, also a Christian institution, is leasing space and offering dining and residential services to Harmel on its campus.

The academy is named after the 19th century French industrialist Léon Harmel, a devout Catholic, whose efforts to provide safe working conditions, a just wage, worker associations, health care and retirement benefits, during a time of extreme worker exploitation, inspired Pope Leo XIII’s social encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). This inaugurated over a century of Catholic social teaching, which Pohl and cofounder Brian Black—the general manager of Grand River Builders, Inc. and the academy’s first president— are making foundational to Harmel Academy. By integrating vocational education with a theological perspective on work as a participation in God’s creative activity, their students will learn not only how to work but why they should work. Further, Pohl said in an interview, linking profit considerations to real worker responsibility in their new trade school will build financially and spiritually stronger blue-collar families.

Pohl and Black are responding to a deep missionary need in the Church to the mechanically minded, as they seek to transform American work culture, which currently separates thinking from doing—a division rooted not only in human nature and technological change but also in historic patterns of racism.

Brain & Hand Let’s consider a story about two men, one black and one white, found in A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race from the Colonial Era to Obama’s America, by Jacqueline Jones, which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2014.

William H. Holtzclaw, founder of the Utica Normal and Industrial Institute in 1903, grew up in a poor, black sharecropping family in rural Alabama. The family lived in a small, windowless cabin that had served as slave quarters before the Civil War. At 4 years of age, Holtzclaw began to work at a corn and cotton plantation owned by a Mr. Yarbrough (first name unknown).

Every morning, Yarbrough sent the sharecroppers out to the fields. He gave orders all day without ever picking up a hoe, claiming to do more work in a day without tools than his workers did in a month. Young Holtzclaw found this hard to believe.

The dichotomy between “management” (Yarbrough) and “labor” (Holtzclaw), between brain and hand, underlies much of American and world

Usually there are responsible jobs going begging because not enough men are willing to sweat enough to master the problems involved.

W. Alton Jones

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The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.

GK Chesterton

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history. In the ancient world, physical work was considered unworthy of free men and relegated to slaves. Social classes were differentiated by the type of work. In ancient Egypt, the royal scribe Nebmare-nakht wrote to his students about how “the maker of pots is smeared with soil … [H]e is like one who lives in the bog.” Cobblers, carpenters and peasant farmers he described as dirty and overworked. “Set your sight on being a scribe, a fine profession that suits you. You call for one; a thousand answer you. You stride freely on the road. You will not be like a hired ox. You are in front of others.”

Choose to become a Yarbrough, a manager, a dealer in abstractions rather than tools.

For the ancient Greeks, one should not contaminate pure thought with things. Keep them apart—in theory and social classes, forcibly if necessary.

Don’t dirty yourself if you want to be somebody. That perspective has characterized Europe to the present and carried over into modern America.

In the classical tradition, there is hardly a hint of dignity in physical labor.

However, Christ changed this paradigm. As a craftsman (carpenter), he used the tools of the working class, such as ax and saw—unlike other religious founders, such as Buddha (royalty), Confucius (gentry scholar), Muhammad (merchant) and Laozi (court scholar). Christ also developed intellectual penetration, which manifested when he talked with temple rabbis as a young man. St. Paul did much the same. Although the well-educated son of a Pharisee, he practiced the working-class trade of tentmaking with Aquila and Priscilla, the first missionary couple mentioned in the New Testament. This imbued richer meaning to St. Paul’s description of them as “fellow workers in Christ Jesus.”

According to historian Lynn White Jr., the key figure in the history of labor was St. Benedict. Although an aristocrat, St. Benedict required his monks to work in fields and shops, reversing the traditional attitude toward labor. “For the Benedictine monks regarded manual labor not as a mere regrettable necessity of their corporate life but rather as an integral and spiritually valuable part of their discipline,” White wrote in Dynamo and Virgin Reconsidered, published in the American Scholar in 1958. This elevated the dignity of manual labor into the Middle Ages, such that later forms of Western asceticism, including Puritanism, linked prayer and work.

Benedictine monasteries also became centers of scholarship. “Brethren ought to be employed in manual labor at certain times, at others, in devout reading,” states Chapter 48 of The Rule of St. Benedict. For the first time, “the practical and the theoretical were embodied in the same individuals,” White wrote. The Benedictine monks were the first intellectuals to get dirt under their fingernails. This set a pattern for the revolution in modern science and human labor.

Skills Shortage in U.S. Manufacturing LACK OF SKILLED WORKERS…

50%

of executives report a moderate to severe shortage of highly skilled workers.

75%

HELP WANTED!

61%

of executives report a say it has been difficult moderate to severe to hire the skilled people shortage of skilled workers. they need.

INCREASE PRODUCTION COSTS

50% plan to increase production at least 5% in the next five years.

manufacturers use overtime to maintain base levels, overtime costs increase and BUT asproduction downtime also increases …

70% say overtime costs are up at least 5%.

62% say downtime increased at least 5%.

That revolution—a key factor in the rise of the modern world—broke down class barriers dividing theoretical and practical knowledge. Applied knowledge (or science) captured the imagination of Western Europeans in the 18th century, including merchants, civil engineers and inventors who could both do and think. Sir Isaac Newton’s mechanical theories shaped subsequent inventors and entrepreneurs, including James Watt and Matthew Boulton who built the steam engines first powering the Industrial Revolution.

Racism, however, was incorporated into industrialization. The new factories only employed whites, for “machine operatives were ‘modern’ workers, while people of color continued to perform task-oriented labor in white households or out-of-doors,” Jones chronicled. Thinking and doing again were separated, as blacks were relegated to menial jobs and whites, who ostensibly represented progress, were trained for professional positions requiring intelligence.

Job specialization further divided thought and action. To improve industrial efficiency and reduce costs, Frederick Winslow Taylor, a mechanical engineer, wrote Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. He recommended the reduction of trade skills to sets of rules such that each worker performed only one part of what became a work process. “All possible brain work should be removed from the shop and centered in the planning or laying-out department,” Taylor recommended. White-collar managers would

Data provided by the Bureau of Labor Statistics

We must teach our children to dream with their eyes open.

Harry Edwards

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We have faced a skilled labor shortage many times. Our solution is to look for new employees that possess some natural aptitudes for the type of work we perform and then train them. It takes two to five years to become proficient.

Kris Lengenfelder, president and co-owner, Modern Machine Works, Bismarck, ND

work as the Yarbroughs of the world and blue-collar workers as the Holtzclaws of the laboring classes.

In response to this scenario, Holtzclaw left Yarbrough’s plantation and attended Tuskegee Institute in southeast Alabama in the 1890s. The institute, which eventually became Tuskegee University, was cofounded in 1881 by Booker T. Washington, the renowned educator and author who was the preeminent leader of the African American community in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tuskegee trained black students in job skills, academics, morals and religious life.

After Holtzclaw graduated, he resolved to start a comprehensive trade school in rural Mississippi. In 1903, he founded Utica Normal and Industrial Institute by securing support from the local black and white communities, and from industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Utica educated male and female African Americans in skilled crafts, such as carpentry, blacksmithing, tailoring, shoemaking, printing, mattress-making and sewing. The campus included a chapel where, in 1908, Booker T. Washington spoke about the dignity of labor and the importance of those simple, homely things that make the life of the common people wholesome and hopeful. To empower African Americans in the face of dehumanizing racial and economic forces, Holtzclaw combined moral formation and academic instruction with skills training.

Such educational efforts, however, did not halt the inexorable “progress” away from manual labor as a coherent activity. Henry Ford’s 1913 innovation, the moving assembly line, completely severed the cognitive aspects of manual work from physical execution in factories. “Such a partition of thinking from doing has bequeathed us the dichotomy of white-collar versus blue-collar, corresponding to mental versus manual,” Crawford noted, leading many people to mistakenly assume ever since that blue-collar work is as mindless as an assembly line and that white-collar work is actually intelligent.

College for All?

Michael Hoff, at Modern Machine Works, refurbishing a giant pulley wheel from a dragline excavator. Hoff is a new employee at this family-owned firm, established in 1917, who is benefiting from an in-house training program.

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In 1944, Congress passed the GI Bill to help servicemen and family members get funding to cover education costs. This enabled millions of people, otherwise without sufficient means, to attend colleges and universities. A significant unintended consequence of this laudable effort was to prioritize college attendance, whether or not students were best served by higher education.

Eventually, high schools began replacing vocational classes with computer instruction and more emphasis on academics for college preparation. Shop class had exposed many students to working hands-on with wood, metal and wire, and led to many trade careers. By the 1980s and 90s, few shop classes remained. In 1986, the Los Angeles Times reported on parents and educators

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Young people avoid the trades, I believe, out of the fear of reality and the responsibilities reality brings. The trades are not forgiving in their action/consequence relationship. You only succeed by performing the work properly.

If you don’t, the results are immediate and undeniable. Also, we live in a technology driven society where all that seems new and exciting is disconnected from the use of physical labor and skill.

Kris Lengenfelder

believing “the industrial arts programs have outlived their usefulness and that it is better that students—even those not bound for college—have the strongest possible academic background.” Further, vocational education was seen as fostering “sex segregation” because it disproportionately attracted boys.

This mindset undermined skilled trades.

The universal drive for higher education favors universal knowledge, which can be received and transmitted electronically, over and against local knowledge, which is embodied in people. That is why it is hard to find a carpenter in Boston and almost everywhere else in the country. “Occupations based on universal, propositional knowledge are more prestigious,” Crawford wrote; practical knowledge is tied to the experience of a particular person and it can’t be downloaded. While many manufacturing jobs have often moved overseas, the trades, by definition, must remain local. One can’t outsource plumbing to India, for example. Nevertheless, modern culture conditions people to desire the first kind (universal knowledge) and to avoid “dirtying” themselves with the second kind (practical knowledge), just as Nebmarenakht advised his student in ancient Egypt.

Social Pressure Pushed Workers Away from Trades Spenser Villwock, interim CEO of Independent Electrical Contractors, a national trade association, said social pressure to attend college to the exclusion of all else created a disincentive for new workers. “The message became that you need to have a college degree or you’re a lesser individual,” he said.

“We aren’t exposing people to these opportunities, and the funding model in public schools supports college-or-bust.”

Even new workers are aging, according to Bill Irwin, executive director of Carpenters International Training Fund. “Right now, the average age of a carpentry apprentice is 27,” he says. “The ideal age is 19.”

He cited cultural trends drawing new workers away from the trades.

“Carpentry has a black eye because there’s a perception that it’s a job you get if you’ve dropped out of high school or have just been released from jail,” he says. “Now, it’s becoming a field that older workers, especially those who want union benefits, are turning to, but the goal is to identify qualified workers much earlier. There’s a lack of good information about what we really do and who we really are out there.”

Degradation of Work Rather than viewing the dignity of work subjectively, because a living person is doing it, the Yarbroughs of the world locate dignity solely in the objective dimension, in the supposed prestige of the work itself. John Paul II wrote of the importance of the subjective dimension in the Laborem Exercens encyclical and how neglecting it degrades the trades.

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Ironically, even white-collar work increasingly suffers from these cultural biases in the post-industrial economy. The idea of progress, surrounding the decline of shop class, and the desire to get everyone into college assume that everyone will work in digital worlds of abstractions. “Yet trafficking in abstractions is not the same as thinking,” Crawford noted. It takes more thinking to fix a car than to perform most office jobs. “White-collar professions, too, are subject to routinization and degradation, proceeding by the same logic that hit manual fabrication 100 years ago: the cognitive elements of the job are appropriated from professionals, instantiated in a system of process and then handed back to a new class of workers—clerks—who replace the professionals.” This removes the possibility of independent judgment from professionals, degrading their work.

By contrast, carpenters, machinists, electricians—they are all needed on the ground in local communities, exercising the judgment and the responsibility that gives work its dignity.

Coming Apart A crucial social consequence of work degradation is the “coming apart” of America: the divergence between the upper and lower classes, as sociologist Charles Murray argued in Coming Apart: The State of White America, 19602010. In a talk at Princeton University, Murray said, “the most important question that distinguishes a secluded upper-class person is ‘Have you ever held a job that caused a body part to hurt at the end of the day?’ If you have not held such a job, you are unable to understand what work is like for a large portion of the American population.” A student asked, “How should the upper class relate to the lower class?” Murray answered, “Don’t take an internship next summer. Get in the car, drive out to Great Falls, Montana, and get a job waiting tables.”

In 2015, Sir Ken Robinson, famous for his TED talk “Do Schools Kill Creativity,” wrote in Time magazine (“Why Schools Need to Bring Back Shop Class”) that for some policy makers, “‘academic’ is a synonym for ‘intelligent.’” But, “[i]t is not. It has a much more limited meaning and refers to intellectual work that is mainly theoretical or scholarly rather than practical or applied.”

Many youngsters—especially boys—need to do things to come alive intellectually. Shop class, as a methodology and metaphor for rethinking education, can activate aspects of the mind that respond dimly to book-learning.

Technical education provides moral formation in that manual labor confronts us with the world as it is. “A washing machine, for example, surely exists to serve our needs,” Crawford wrote, “but in contending with one that is broken, you have to ask what it needs. At such a moment, technology is no longer a

Humans have been using physical skills backed up by sharp minds to build and create for thousands of years. The work of human hands has been the source of pride and lasting satisfaction for individuals and societies. The love of creating great works out of the material world is ingrained in the human spirit, and the loss of this creative physical energy contributes to the general malaise in our society.

Kris Lengenfelder

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means by which our mastery of the world is extended, but an affront to our usual self-absorption.” Thus, “[f]ixing things may be a cure for narcissism.”

Edith Stein, a great 20th-century philosopher, entered the Carmelite religious order in 1933. She had never performed much manual labor but suddenly found herself doing needlework and scrubbing floors. “She had always worked hard, but with her brain and not her hands,” wrote Robert Royal in The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century. For the first time in Stein’s life, she had to do work in which she was not one of the best. She “never laughed so much as during this period when her inadequacies were revealed for all to see.” There may be something to be said for having gifted students learn a trade, if only in the summers, “so that their egos will be repeatedly crushed before they go on to run the country,” Crawford noted.

Supporting the trades will also strike a blow against the widening income gap. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, the median income for electricians is $52,720, with 10 percent earning over $90,000.

Carpenters have a median income of $43,600, with 10 percent making more than $79,000.

Coming Together The farther from the physical realities of working with stuff we get, the farther away from the humility we need to keep ourselves whole as created persons.

Brian Black, President of Harmel Academy

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In response to the growing skills shortage, companies are now working with high schools to create apprenticeships, a common model in Europe. In 2018, the Home Depot Foundation announced a $50-million commitment to skilled trades training. “We want to bring shop class back, from coast to coast,” said Shannon Gerber, the foundation’s executive director. The same year, rival retailer Lowe’s started offering tuition and other incentives to employees for training in the trades.

More is needed than technical training, however. A major concern among manufacturing companies is the common lack of work ethic in young people today, according to Brian Black, Harmel Academy’s president. Character formation must accompany technical training. Pohl and Black are working with employers, such as Micron Manufacturing of Grand Rapids, to create an apprenticeship curriculum that integrates doing and thinking, vocational and moral education.

Pohl and Black believe this integrative model will help close the widening income gap in the United States by helping ordinary people stand on their own two feet. From Holtzclaw’s Utica Normal and Industrial Institute to Rice High School in Harlem, detailed by Patrick McCloskey’s absorbing study in institutional culture, The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, this is a proven paradigm: discipline, moral formation and education help working-class students make something worthwhile in their lives.

Harmel Academy is a single-sex institution. It admits only men because its

founders believe men are uniquely suited for the trades. They have specific needs not often met in the current educational milieu, and male bonding at a young age can have a profound impact on long-term outcomes. Young men who don’t go to college have few opportunities to form positive, lifelong friendships with other men in their chosen trade. Through immersion in faith, the humanities, and the construction and manufacturing trades at Harmel, young men will be well prepared for family, financial stability and responsible citizenry. “The key thing we are looking at here is forming a fully integrated man who knows what he is about and knows how God built him,” Black said.

Harmel students will begin by studying and living for two years at the Grand Rapids campus. Students in the Machine and Systems Technology pilot program will work part-time as paid apprentices in a local shop.

All students will be immersed in the Catholic intellectual tradition at the same time as they learn trades. Graduates will continue their education by working full-time at a sponsor company for four years and studying parttime at the academy.

Harmel Academy will open in the fall of 2020 as the only Catholic postsecondary trade school nationwide. Annual tuition and room and board will total only $18,500, due to generous donations from supporters. ±

Charles Shiock, a skilled tradesman nearing retirement, working on a lathe at Modern Machine Works. He is using a micrometer to measure his progress while refurbishing a sheave pin from a dragline excavator.

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Economics

Dangers of Protectionism for the American Economy & Politics Ivan Jankovic, Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Mary

The language is almost always about how we must export and what’s really good is an industry that produces exports. If we buy from abroad and import, that’s bad. But surely that’s upside down.

What we send abroad we can’t eat, we can’t wear, we can’t use for our houses.

Milton Friedman

“Jewish Sailors Exporting Polish Products at the Port of Danzig” from a cycle of 45 miniature paintings illuminating The Statute of Kalisz, by Arthur Szyk, 1927. The Statute of Kalisz was issued by the Duke of Greater Poland Boleslaus the Pious in 1264 in Kalisz, granting exclusive jurisdiction over Jewish matters to Jewish courts.

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his author had the unfortunate but illuminating experience of growing up in a communist country. In my teen years, Yugoslavia transitioned out of communism but into a war economy, in which the Serbian government still maintained near-total control. As a result, I know something first-hand about governmental micromanagement.

Soon after populist dictator Slobodan Milosevic seized power in Serbia in the late 1980s, he started a trade war with the neighboring Republic of Slovenia. “Boycott Slovenian Goods” was the motto of the day. In a kind of mass hysteria, many Serbians stopped buying Slovenian products altogether.

The government boycott and tariffs were imposed to “bring them (the Slovenians) to their knees,” primarily for supporting Kosovo’s independence.

I remember my junior high geography teacher, otherwise a very intelligent and learned man, bragging in class about throwing out his Slovenian-made electric stove and replacing it with a Serbian model—which, I can attest, was a far inferior product.

Trade wars are great and easy to win, believed many in Serbia at the time: Slovenians are ripping us off, and we need to teach them a lesson. It ended in a real war with four different countries, which Serbia lost with catastrophic costs in lives and economic destruction.

The last time Americans believed that trade wars are cool and easy to win was in 1931 when Congress enacted the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which precipitated the Great Depression. Tariffs were enacted to protect American agriculture and manufacturing against “unfair” foreign competition and to stabilize prices. The result was the destruction of international trade and a deep depression here and in Europe, which aided Hitler’s rise in Germany.

Then, after the triumph of the Reagan-Thatcher revolution in the 1980s and subsequent demise of communism, free market globalization and free trade were universally accepted, while protectionism and governmental direct control were relegated to the proverbial trash heap of history.

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Commerce tends to wear off those prejudices which maintain distinction and animosity between nations.

William Robertson

In the early 2000s, young “anti-globalist” protesters against free trade marched in the streets of European and North American cities under red banners and with pictures of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. These protesters evoked the spooky shadows of my communist youth, of Slobodan Milosevic, his cronies and useful idiots, such as my geography teacher, and of the millions of communism’s victims worldwide. Yet I thought these protesters were irrelevant since the people who count in the West know better and won’t fall for that nonsense again. Or would they?

Worrying signs have appeared over the last 10 years in the reemergence of protectionist sentiments and policies in America. Initially, Democrats were the main purveyors, which is not surprising since that party has long been in league with trade unions, environmental lobbies and other enemies of free enterprise. Shockingly, in the last several years, the Republican Party joined the protectionist ranks, after a takeover by a European-style populist, fashioning himself as a “tariff man” and determined to undermine the free trade regime created after WWII. President Donald Trump canceled a free trade agreement with 12 Pacific countries and then started a trade war with China. Republicans spoke eloquently for decades about free markets and free trade, but then succumbed to the old mercantilist propaganda they despised and ascribed to the left—confirming Ludwig von Mises’ notion that economic fallacies are like zombies that must be fought by every new generation.

Short- vs. Long-term Thinking It is often said that three economists have four opinions about any given topic. Fortunately, that is not the case with free trade. From Paul Krugman on the left to Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek on the right, economists agree that free trade creates prosperity for all participants, and that any restriction will produce economic stagnation and the deterioration of living standards.

The economic case for free trade is based on complicated arguments about the principles and long-term consequences of economic policies. In contrast, protectionist propaganda relies on catchy slogans and emphasizes the short-term effects of different policies on isolated groups, while ignoring systematic, long-term effects.

This is why protectionist propaganda makes for better politics, in that policies usually concern short-term benefits to influential groups—and the robbing of other groups over a longer period of time. This is the common dynamic of democratic politics writ large. Ever wondered why politicians, no matter their ideological provenance, never do anything about the welfare state entitlements that threaten to ruin the federal budget in the long run?

Entitlement spending is based on taking money, through taxes and public 20

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debt, from young people and future generations—who don’t vote yet and so are completely irrelevant politically—and giving it to voters, especially the elderly, who vote in high percentages.

A similar dynamic is present in the trade arena. Protectionist policies benefit special interests, especially organized lobbies, in the short run, while stealing millions of dollars from consumers in the long run through higher prices and inferior products. Politicians don’t view unorganized consumers as significant donors to their reelection, while the lobbies and the industries they represent profit from protectionism and contribute large sums to political campaigns.

Another reason for the disconnect between economists and politicians, journalists and intellectuals, who often misunderstand economics and mislead the public, is common to all economic fallacies that appeal to easily observable realities that obscure long-term consequences.

Division of Labor & Comparative Advantage Sound economic reasoning always wages an uphill battle against common misconceptions. For example, we often hear that Chinese competition hurts American industries through lower prices and, as a consequence, American workers lose jobs and American firms produce less or not at all.

Hence, the government must impose tariffs to protect American jobs and manufacturing.

To understand why this is a false proposition, we must consider two basic principles of economics: division of labor and comparative advantage.

Division of Labor: A worker doesn’t produce everything he or she consumes. Everyone specializes in one line of work and produces more of something than one needs. That surplus is traded for the surpluses of other people who make different things. A shoemaker makes shoes, for example, while a farmer grows crops. As a society, we have immeasurably more and better corn, shoes, computers, health care and so on because different people specialize in producing different things and offering different services.

This principle was understood as early as the 5th century BC in Greece by Xenophanes and was formulated by medieval Islamic scholars Ibn Sina and Ibn Tayyimiya. Adam Smith, the preeminent 18th-century economist, explained the principle most thoroughly in his celebrated needle factory parable in Wealth of Nations. Smith observed that workers become vastly more productive in making pins through specialization in the different tasks involved in pin production.

Comparative advantage: This principle guides specialization by identifying what has a lower opportunity production cost. Imagine that Jeff Bezos, the founder, CEO and president of Amazon.com, needs a janitor. Now imagine that Bezos is twice as efficient as the best available janitor candidate. Should

Money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer or plumber.

Marshall McLuhan

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Yes to a market economy, no to a market society.

Lionel Jospin

Bezos hire that candidate? Common sense might respond that no one should hire someone else to do a job one can do better. In contrast, the principle of comparative advantage shows that Bezos should hire the candidate because the janitor can provide the cleaning service at a lower opportunity cost to society, since Bezos is a million times more efficient at running the company than the candidate. If Bezos worked as a janitor, society would lose billions of dollars of value he could have created as the CEO of Amazon, which had $232.9 billion in revenues in 2018.

By substituting the “American economy” for Bezos and the “Chinese economy” for the lowly janitor in the example above, it becomes clear why protectionism is such harmful nonsense. Imagine that American workers can make everything—including plastic gadgets, shirts and window glass—more efficiently (cheaper in dollar terms) than Chinese workers. Yet, American workers typically have better training, education and easier access to capital investment and sophisticated technology than Chinese workers. As a result, they can produce products requiring more capital investment and technology, such as microchips, plane engines, robots and expensive drugs much more efficiently and cheaply than Chinese workers. It makes no more sense to have American workers make plastic gadgets than it does to make Jeff Bezos work as a janitor.

Simply put, the Chinese economy has a comparative advantage in making cheap and easy stuff (although the American economy has an absolute advantage in this), while the American economy has a comparative advantage in manufacturing products that are complex and expensive. The fact that you can make something better than somebody else does not mean you should make it. It’s not an exaggeration to say that the protectionist position is based on the ignorance of these basic principles.

Market Extent The most succinct refutation of protectionism was coined by Adam Smith who wrote that “the benefits of exchange and trade are determined by the extent of the market.” In short, the more people cooperate in specialization and exchange, the greater are the benefits in the quality and price of consumer goods for everyone involved. An economy with 7.7 billion people (global), producing and exchanging freely (that is, without bans, tariffs, quotas or other impediments), is vastly superior to an economy of 330 million people (American), exchanging and producing in the same way.

There are two reasons for this. First, if we assume that the number of occupations and products is fixed, then a larger number of people participating in the economy means more competition, which results in products at both lower prices and higher quality. Second, as the number of people in 22

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an economy increases, some will start competing by offering new products that enrich the supply of goods and services. Consider the large variety and higher quality of restaurants available in a large city versus a small one.

However, tariffs artificially limit how broad and deep the division of labor can go. Imagine that a steel tariff is enacted to protect the American steel industry. Workers and investors in the steel industry benefit in the short term, but consumers pay for this through higher prices of all goods using steel as a component (houses, cars, tractors, machines, tools and so on). Since costs would likely increase slowly, the public’s reaction wouldn’t precipitate protests.

Worse in the long run is that tariffs increase both employment and investment in an industry that is relatively inefficient and should be shrinking, since more labor and resources are used to produce less economic value than without the tariffs.

Trade protectionism reduces the extent of the division of labor and distorts the economy’s structure by rewarding inefficiency and wasting labor and resources. This traps workers in less productive jobs and capital in less productive ventures.

Manufacturing Canard The promise to “bring back manufacturing jobs” represents one of the most nonsensical canards in American politics. Yes, Chinese competition destroys some American jobs, but these should be eliminated in the same manner that Bezos should not be working as a janitor. Insofar as patterns of domestic manufacturing are influenced by foreign trade, these are based on the comparative advantage of foreigners to produce stuff we need as consumers at a lower opportunity cost than we can produce the same.

The real secret is that American manufacturing never “left” anywhere to begin with, so we don’t need politicians to “bring it back.” In reality, the United States has the most productive manufacturing workforce in the world. Over the last 30 years, American manufacturing output more than doubled while the number of workers in this sector declined by a third. This means that the productivity of our manufacturing workers has increased 2.5 times, compared to 1989. American manufacturing is top worldwide.

The share of manufacturing jobs in the total workforce peaked in 1943 and has declined steadily ever since. Ninety percent of this decline has nothing to do with international trade and Chinese competition, but everything to do with technological development and robotization. Manufacturing workers have magnitudes better equipment and machinery today than 40 years ago, resulting in much greater quantity and far superior quality of products with a fraction of labor hours.

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Above, a print ad for the 1908 Ford Model T and, opposite, a print ad for the 2019 Ford Fusion, which costs the same in inflation-adjusted dollars as the Model T.

Technology saves human labor, which frees up millions of workers to specialize in something else and produce other useful goods and services that we wouldn’t have with the previous lower level of manufacturing productivity.

On December 1, 1913, Henry Ford initiated the moving-chassis assembly line, which revolutionized manufacturing. Automobile assembly was divided into 84 discrete steps, and workers were trained to master only one of them.

The cost of the Model T declined from $850 in 1908 to $300 in 1925. In 1925 dollars, the cost of the car fell by 82 percent from $1,651 to $300. The quality of the automobile also increased—and has certainly improved enormously since then. The 1908 Model T cost $23,999 in 2018 dollars.

“Made in USA” Fallacy Often this rhetorical question is posed: “When was the last time you saw a ‘Made in USA’ sign? We are not producing anything anymore.”

This misguided comment is based on ignorance of how the international division of labor works. Production processes that give us modern consumer products go through numerous stages and typically involve the cooperation of workers and investors in many countries. The label “made in” is put at the last stage when the final product is assembled. Since this involves relatively low-skilled workers, assembly is often performed in poorer countries. That’s 24

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why so many products read “Made in China” or “Made in India.” Workers in these countries tend to perform lower-skilled and lower-paying functions in production processes. A car that bears the label “Made in Mexico” was assembled there, but the electronic and computer components, as well as most of the precision mechanical parts are manufactured by highly trained and highly paid American workers.

Trade Deficit Another favorite protectionist bogie is the trade deficit. Tariffs are necessary, we are told, because we need to lower our trade deficit. But trade deficit figures constitute an irrelevant accounting fiction in assessing the economy’s productivity value.

In 2018, the United States ran a $420-billion trade deficit with China.

American exports to China were $120 billion, while imports from China were $540 billion. What are the Chinese going to do with the excess funds?

Certainly not burn the money or bury it in the ground. They will buy something else in America, for example stocks, bonds, real estate, golf courses or other useful things. In addition to flooding American markets with their cheap goods, the Chinese will also be flooding them with capital and investment. As a result, the higher the trade deficit with the Chinese, the higher the Chinese capital account deficit with Americans becomes.

More Chinese goods being sold in America equals more American stocks,

2019 Ford Fusion with gas, hybrid and plug-in hybrid powertrain options, six-speed automatic transmission with steering wheel mounted paddle shifters, all-wheel drive (available option) and hundreds of additional improvements to the 1908 Model T— thanks in large part to decades of free trade.

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bonds and real estate bought by the Chinese. This results in more production and investment for American firms, higher dividends for American stockholders, and better jobs and higher wages for American workers. Trade deficits are always matched by a capital account surpluses. The difference between exports and imports is irrelevant. What matters is the sum total of imports and exports as a percentage of national income, showing to what degree a country is integrated into the international division of labor. And here America is doing extremely well.

Intellectual Property Theft Another justification for the current trade war is the “intellectual property theft” by the Chinese, which harms the American economic interests and should be punished. Yet, this is very ironic coming from a country whose industry and manufacturing in the 19th century were built on a large-scale intellectual property theft from the British Empire. For example, the entire American textile industry was based on the theft of British spinning technology. Alexander Hamilton, the nation’s first Secretary of the Treasury, even enacted a system of elaborate financial subsidies and incentives for people to spy on the British to steal their trade secrets and advanced technologies— exactly what the Chinese are now trying to do to Americans.

What did the British do in response? They did not impose tariffs or sanctions to punish insolent Yankees. On the contrary, they imposed a unilateral trade liberalization—abolishing all tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade, without asking any other country, including the USA, to do the same.

Consequently, Britain became the most prosperous and wealthiest society the world had ever seen, confirming the Adam Smith’s dictum that there has never been a country ruined by free trade.

Currency Manipulation The charge of “currency manipulation” is also used to justify trade wars and tariffs. The Chinese government lowers the value of its currency, the yuan, in order to make Chinese exports artificially cheaper. This results in flooding American markets with Chinese products that compete “unfairly” with domestic products. This argument concludes with a call to punish the Chinese.

However, the argument doesn’t make much sense. First, let’s assume the Chinese are indeed “artificially” devaluing their currency to make their exports cheaper. What they are doing, in economic terms, is subsidizing foreign consumption: They are paying American consumers to buy their stuff. How exactly is that bad for the American economy? If the Chinese government taxes Chinese companies and citizens to prop up American 26

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consumption, let them do it. Although one can say the Chinese are hurting American producers, it’s far from self-evident that the interests of American producers should trump the interests of American consumers as a matter of economic policy.

Secondly, it’s not clear what constitutes “currency manipulation.” One man’s “currency manipulation” is another man’s “monetary policy.” All modern monetary regimes are based on fiat money, where governments determine the value of money and influence it on a daily basis in various ways. How do we distinguish a legitimate “exercise in monetary policy” from pernicious “currency manipulation”? In the wake of the 2008 recession, the American central bank (Federal Reserve System) printed $4 trillion in order to prop up domestic investment in the so-called program of “quantitative easing” and kept the federal interest rate at zero from 2008 to 2015. Were zero interest rates and increasing the money supply by $4 trillion “currency manipulations” or not?

The same president who put China on the list of “currency manipulators” is routinely scolding the head of the Federal Reserve for not manipulating American currency enough through lowering interest rates. Today the federal funds rate, the main interest rate that the Federal Reserve uses to boost investment and increase the credit supply, is set at 2.25 percent. The Chinese equivalent is set at 4.35 percent, almost double the American rate. Perhaps the Chinese should put the United States on its list of “currency manipulators” and demand that the Federal Reserve increases its target rate to 4.35 percent to “level the playing field.”

Dangerous Political Ideas This article treats protectionism as a matter of economic ignorance, but the true danger lies in the fact that protectionism reinforces dangerous political ideas. American economist Otto T. Mallery wrote that if goods do not cross borders, armies will. Trade protectionism encourages militant nationalism by making it easier to perceive and define foreigners as enemies to be destroyed, rather than partners to benefit from. The zero-sum mentality in economics, the idea that I can win only if you lose, is an accessory to political zero-sum mentality, to the spirit of armed conflict and war.

We have almost forgotten that World War II was preceded by a decade of trade wars in which America, with its ignominious Smoot-Hawley Tariff, fully participated. The exact same thing happened in my unfortunate home country, which led to war. The true danger of protectionism is not just that it elevates economic illiteracy and superstitions, but that these superstitions lend a veneer of respectability to the darkest impulses of human nature that can lead to all-out hostility and conflict. ±

Otto T. Mallery wrote that if goods do not cross borders, armies will.

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Culture

Rodeo Sisters in the Badlands Patrick J. McCloskey, Editor-in-Chief, 360 Review Magazine

“A

griculture,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, “is our wisest pursuit because it will, in the end, contribute most to real wealth, good morals and happiness.” Two sisters grew up immersed in that wisdom on a beef cattle ranch in western North Dakota—and take Jefferson’s insight with them in ventures across the country.

On a perfect summer day in August, Codi Ann and Kit McCall Miller took a ride—on half-sister horses—in the Badlands near the family ranch in Amidon, North Dakota. Amidon has only 22 residents but is the county seat of Slope County—a 1,200-square-mile area with 763 people and 23,500 beef cattle.

Codi rode Peppy and Kit rode Star, quarter horse mares who share the same grandfather, Colonel Freckles, who was a top-performing rodeo horse.

Peppy’s and Star’s inherited agility was on display as Codi and Kit rode them up and down steep hills and then let them gallop across open stretches of prairie grass.

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Shimmering in the distance in all directions are sheer multi-colored canyons, creating the dramatically stunning landscapes known as the Badlands. The Lakota term for the area is similar to the description coined by early French traders: “bad land to travel.” The meandering canyons are steep and many dead end, and there is little water.

Weathering and erosion have exposed layers of sediment and rock—from as far back as 55 million years—creating stratified and seemingly painted canyon walls.

“Most people don’t know how beautiful this secluded area is,” said Codi.

“When we were young, we rode real horses on the family land and played wild west. As grownups on horseback, we ride down ravines in the Badlands, follow creeks and explore canyons. I think about cowboys riding through here a hundred years ago.”

Codi (left) and Kit (right) ride in the Burning Coal Vein area of the Badlands, which is on US Forest Service land.

When white settlers first came here over a century ago, they saw smoke from the fire smoldering in the coal layer many feet underground. The coal burned slowly for decades but is no longer active. Most of the trees are ponderosa pine and juniper.

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Codi (left) on Peppy and Kit (right) on Star. The sisters bred the horses, which have produced four fillies so far.

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Rodeos & Pageants On the edge of the Badlands, only a few miles from this spot, is the ranch where Codi and Kit grew up, and where their paternal great-great-grandparents homesteaded in 1907. Their mother’s side of the family traces its lineage back to the American Revolution, and the family moved west to Montana.

The sisters’ parents, Gary and Stacey Miller, had two other children: Kelley Jean, the eldest, a schoolteacher in Bowman, who married a rancher; and Joe, the next eldest who ranches nearby. In total, Joe and his father raise 450 beef cattle on 11,500 acres.

Codi, now 26, is almost two years older than Kit. They and their siblings attended a two-room schoolhouse in Amidon, which used only one room when Codi started since there were four students and one teacher, K through 8. Two years later, when Kit began school, there was a population explosion with a total of five students in her grade.

Codi and Kit attended Bowman High School, 25 miles away in nearby Bowman, a bustling metropolis—in comparison—with 1,600 residents.

They started riding ponies before attending kindergarten and eventually competed in rodeo events, primarily pole bending, in which, Codi explained,

Codi (a junior) riding in the state high school finals in the pole bending competition in Bowman, ND. She rode Fancy, a small sorrel mare, and won the state championship in 2009 and 2010. Kit also rode Fancy in the same event in 2009 and won the state junior high school title. Fancy took a total of seven girls to state finals in her career. Fancy was raised and owned by Lavern Kulseth, a long-time cowboy who mentored Codi and Kit.

Kit riding Ima Special Kindaguy—a palomino stallion that Kit helped train—at the Marcie Locken Memorial Barrel Race in Rapid City, SD, on August 10, 2019. Barrel racing is similar to pole bending. Kit and her horses compete most weekends and often during the week.

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Below, the belt given to Kit in 2012 for competing in the state goat tying competition, put on by the National High School Rodeo Association.

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a mounted rider “weaves through six poles on horseback as quickly as possible without knocking any over.” The poles are spaced 21 feet apart, and five seconds is added for every pole knocked over.

In the 10th grade, Codi won the high school state title in pole bending, while Kit, an 8th-grader won the state junior high school championship.

Kit went on to compete in the national finals, hosted by the National Junior High School Rodeo Association, in Gallup, New Mexico. She placed 13th against competitors, not only from across the country, but also from Australia and Canada. In high school, Kit finished in the top 10 in the state finals in grades 10 through 12, while Codi won the state title again as a junior and competed in the state finals as a senior.

Throughout high school, Codi and Kit also competed in goat tying, a rodeo competition in which a rider races to a tethered goat, dismounts and ties three of the goat’s legs. The fastest time wins, and a competitor is disqualified if the goat’s legs don’t stay tied for six seconds. Happily for the goat, undue roughness is also grounds for disqualification. Codi qualified for the state finals in the 10th and 11th grades. Kit qualified for the state finals in grades 10 through 12, and also competed in the national goat tying championship as a senior.

In 2009, when Kit won the state title in pole bending, Codi didn’t get to see her ride in the national rodeo. Codi was preparing to enter the Miss

Kit and Codi with Star and Peppy in front of the horse trailer they used to transport the horses from their parents’ ranch.

We all flourish or decline with the farmer.

Bernard M. Baruch

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Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the corn field.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

Codi and Kit ride across prairie grassland in the Badlands. The sisters are sponsored by Medora Boot & Western Wear in Medora, ND.

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North Dakota Teen USA beauty pageant—which she won at only 15 years of age. Then she competed in the Miss Teen USA pageant in the Bahamas as the youngest entrant. Unfortunately, Codi couldn’t ride in the national pole bending event as state champion since it was at the same time as the Miss Teen USA pageant.

Kit played on the high school basketball team, as did Codi who was also a sprinter on the track team. As well, the sisters worked weekends and in the summer as waitresses at a café in Bowman. Finding time for schoolwork and all the activities they loved was a challenge that taught discipline and time management. Codi and Kit also had to stay slim—as well as energetic—since the horse they competed on, Fancy, was undersized and extra pounds would have slowed her down.

As Miss North Dakota Teen USA, during her junior year, Codi recalled “teaming up with the state highway department to do events, for example at various Walmart locations, to promote seat belt usage, as part of the ‘Click it or Ticket’ campaign.”

Rodeo Queen In 2010, Codi was crowned the North Dakota High School Rodeo Queen. The next year, she attended Black Hills State University in Spearfish, South Dakota, as a tourism major. The following summer, Codi entered the Miss Rodeo Mandan beauty pageant, and she was crowned the winner for 2013.

Through these rodeo queen reigns, Codi created an anti-bullying presentation, which she gave at schools throughout the state, as well as in Florida, New Jersey and throughout the Midwest.

In the fall of 2013, during the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association’s Badlands Circuit Rodeo Finals in Minot, North Dakota, Codi was crowned Miss Rodeo North Dakota 2014. This was both a triumph, after many hours of ardent preparation, and a challenge.

Winning the pageant committed Codi to a year’s internship as a rodeo ambassador nationwide. The catch was that the honor and all the work was unpaid.

“As Miss Rodeo North Dakota, I traveled to rodeos from New Jersey to Florida, to Texas, and all across the Midwest.” Codi recalled. “I drove down to Oklahoma and Kansas quite a bit.” Her job was to promote rodeo events in local schools and communities.

To make gas and travel money, Codi worked part time at the Buffalo Gap Ranch near Medora, North Dakota, doing everything from cleaning rooms to bartending to event planning to getting horses ready to sell.

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Codi de Ville Given the amount of required travel, some states provide vehicles for their rodeo queens. Not so for North and South Dakota. Codi drove her 2000 Cadillac de Ville—aging but indestructible.

“Miss Rodeo South Dakota, Melynda Rose Sletten, and I are really good friends,” Codi recalled. “Since a lot of our rodeos were co-sanctioned, we used to drive together.” For a while, that is. “Like most people, she hated my driving.”

One evening, Codi and Melynda were driving on a gravel road on the way to Abbeville, a tiny town in central Kansas. “The road was flat and straight, and I was probably driving too fast,” said Codi with a mischievous glint in her eyes.

“Codi? Codi?” Melynda said as she grabbed the strap above the passenger window and pointed ahead.

Codi saw they were quickly approaching a railway crossing. “I looked over and smiled as she got really nervous,” Codi recalled. “I knew nothing could hurt that old Cadillac. We hit the railroad track and lunged through the air like a boat crashing through waves. When we landed, I just laughed. Next trip, she took her own car.”

At other times, “I hit a deer and a huge coyote or wolf on other trips, and they just bounced off that car,” Codi said. That two-ton vehicle was almost a home on the road. Codi ate many meals under the vinyl roof and took innumerable naps. “I probably traveled about 35,000 miles that year.”

Gallery, Pageants & Pro Rodeo

What farmers need to do is raise less corn and more hell.

Mary Elizabeth Lease

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Codi finished a BA at Minot State University in 2016. The next summer, she started working as the communications director at The Capital Gallery in Bismarck, which she enjoys. Codi is also working on a children’s book to help kids with life-threatening illnesses.

Meanwhile, Kit graduated high school and then trained horses in western South Dakota for rodeo competitions. She has also been working as a model and competing in professional rodeo events, as she works towards qualifying for both the Pink Buckle Barrel Race and the Wrangler National Finals Rodeo, the top professional rodeo events. The Pink Buckle is held every October in Guthrie, Oklahoma, with $1.5 million in guaranteed payouts. The Wrangler NFR culminates the ProRodeo Tour every December since 1959 in Las Vegas, Nevada, with total winnings at more than $10 million. Kit is now working at a horse operation in Texas training performance horses.

Codi entered the 2020 Miss North Dakota beauty pageant in September.

She placed Second Runner-up and was chosen as Most Photogenic. Codi plans to compete again next year and will continue as the pro bono director

of all three levels of the state rodeo queen program: junior high, high school and Miss Rodeo North Dakota.

“I have a passion to keep the rodeo queen alive,” she said, “especially since agriculture here and nationwide is in trouble.”

Beauty pageants have helped Codi develop a strong work ethic and moral character. “I feel most empowered preparing for and competing in a pageant,” Codi related. “Afterwards, I have the privilege of meeting so many people and helping communities across the state.”

Both Codi and Kit are very proud to have grown up as fifth-generation ranchers in North Dakota. Their older brother and sister are carrying on the family legacy in Amidon. The big challenge for Codi and Kit, they recognize, is how to carry on the ranching heritage and connection to the land wherever they live, and how to bring these values to their families in the future. Imprinted on their DNA, fortunately, is the grandeur, vibrant stillness and freedom rooted in the soil of the North Dakota Badlands. ±

Peppy and Codi.

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History

Old John Brown’s Freedom Ride An American Outlaw & Twelve Fugitive Slaves Springs Toledo, Author & Essayist 38

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I

t was the bleak midwinter, 1859. They were holed up inside two log cabins along Straight Creek near Holton, Kansas—12 slaves on the run and a handful of white men who had freed them. A U.S. Marshal and his men were on the north side of the creek, reinforced by a posse of “law-loving citizens.”

Their objective? To arrest the thieves and return the chattel to Missouri.

“There was about seventy-five of them,” said Samuel Harper, one of the slaves. “We was all afraid we were going to be took for sure.”

The outlaw who led them should have been dead already. At 58 years old, John Brown was 20 years past the average life expectancy at the time and had been surrounded by violence for three years. He was stooped, grizzled and gaunt, with a matted beard and holes in his boots. The underclothes he wore were donated by a friend who saw him shivering on a ferry as the group crossed the Kansas River. He was nothing but a poor farmer, 1,000 miles

Above, the four-panel mural painted by Arthur Covey (between 1933 and 1939) for the former post office building in Torrington, CT, depicting “episodes in the life of John Brown, who was born in Torrington.”

The project was financed—for a total cost of $350—by the Public Works Administration, a New Deal government agency created to reduce unemployment during the Great Depression.

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from home, though Harper saw an archangel. “He was a great big man, over 6 feet tall with great big shoulders and long hair white as snow,” he said. “A very quiet man, awful quiet. He never even laughed.”

An alert reached Topeka. A half-dozen Free State settlers left Sunday service and hurried to the creek. The old man lined up his ragtag band on either side of a covered wagon and stood at the front with a carbine. “Get ready boys and we’ll whip them all,” he said.

Whip them all? Harper and the others traded anxious looks as they followed him to the ford, straight for the federal posse watching from rifle pits.

It was the bleak midwinter, 1859, and the wind was whispering through the pines and rattling branches.

“Old Brown is coming!”

In Syracuse, an antislavery convention was called to order in June 1855.

Letters were read from supporters, including a chief justice in Vermont and the editor-in-chief of the Herald of Freedom in Kansas Territory. A motion to amend the statement “Slavery annihilates all natural rights” to “Slavery invades all natural rights” in the declaration of principles failed, while the condemnation of the institution as an affront to civilization was affirmed.

But it was only words.

On the morning of the convention’s second day, Brown was invited to speak. He asked for funds to buy guns so that he might join his five sons in “Bleeding Kansas.” A letter from one of his sons was read. “We need them more than we need bread,” it said.

Brown had been beckoned down from the Adirondacks by a senator from Illinois, as much as by his sons’ cries for help. Two months after the antislavery Whigs formed the Republican Party, the bombastic Stephen A. Douglas pushed the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 all the way to the desk of President Franklin Pierce, who thought it “demonstrably right and patriotic” and signed it. The consequences were immediate. It retired the old Mason-Dixon Line— the schoolmarm that had been separating the unruly children of the North and South for a generation. Kansas went up for grabs and became a battleground for two irreconcilable positions; in its fate, the fate of millions whom Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, unclaimed hero of judicial activism, would soon declare had “no rights which the white man ought to respect.”

Senator David Rice Atchison (D-MO) led the charge. If the South fails to take Kansas, he warned, “It is an omen that the institution of slavery is to fail in this and the other Southern states.” Private correspondence claimed that about 10,000 Missourians were “on the move,” exhorted by that state’s former attorney general “to enter every election district of Kansas . . . and vote at the point of bowie knife and revolver.” Not a few sported hemp on their hats as a 40

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symbol of their intention to hang any “Black Republican” who tried to block their self-declared right to cast illegal votes.

When Brown finished his appeal at the Syracuse convention in June, a collection was taken up to aid him in his objects, said The Liberator, “pistols and all.” He drove his wagon westward, accompanied by a son and son-in-law. By the time Brown got to Missouri, $60 in donations was down to a few coins. But there were arms stowed in the back—a lot of them. A stranger approached before they crossed the border from Missouri into Kansas Territory. “Whar you going?” he asked.

“To Osawatomie,” came the answer.

“Whar you from?”

“New York.”

“You’ll never live to get thar.”

Brown looked at him. “We are prepared not to die alone.”

His name and exploits soon spread like a prairie fire throughout the region, this strange white man who earned the honorary title “Captain,” called himself “Old Brown” and had several aliases. “He has been ubiquitous,” said The Lawrence Republican, “turning up wherever danger seemed most threatening, or assistance most needed.” By his own count, 30 guns were discharged at him in the war-torn territory, “but they only touched my hair.”

He drove a wagon. What drove him?

Harper would soon learn what freemen in the North already knew—that Brown sought to upend American slavery itself. Driven by a combustible mix of patriotic indignation and Christian compassion, he understood slavery for what it was: “a most barbarous, unprovoked and unjustifiable war of one portion of citizens upon another portion;” a “rotten whore” of an institution, a betrayal of the American promise, a blasphemy against God’s universal fatherhood.

His way of thinking was not far from John Locke’s ideas about higher law, and Locke’s was not far from Thomas Jefferson’s justification of violence against tyrants. Brown saw not himself but a federal government, corrupted by the expansionist South, as the true outlaw and was convinced that his role had been outlined centuries before. Sometimes, wrote John Calvin in 1536, God “raises up manifest avengers” to “deliver his people from calamity when they are unjustly oppressed.” Brown, a brimstone Calvinist if there ever was one, rose up—with a sword. Mahalia Doyle never got over the loud knock on the cabin door late on a May night in 1856, when her husband and two oldest sons were taken from hearth and home, escorted to the banks of the Pottawatomie Creek, and massacred along with two other pro-slavery collaborators. Brown did it, he said, “to regulate matters” three days after Lawrence, the Free State capital of Kansas, was sacked by Missourians 41

waving blue and white banners that said “Supremacy of the White Race” and “Southern Rights to All.” Two days later, Charles Sumner (R-MA) was brutally assaulted to within an inch of his life by Preston Brooks (D-SC) in the Senate chamber. The hue and cry over what history remembers as the “Pottawatomie Massacre” sent Brown and his men into hiding for a month.

His reputation went viral. To Southerners already plagued by visions of “black devils” exhorted by abolitionists, the very idea of him was a terror. He was raised up from every prairie and thicket, said a contemporary, and the cry “Old Brown is coming!” was enough to send whole bands of well-armed Missourians running for their lives and misbehaving children running to bed.

Running Rebels

Always remember that a soldier’s pack is lighter than a slave’s chains.

David O. McKay

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When the slaves on Harvey Hicklin’s farm got wind that Brown was near the border in 1858, they cheered. Quietly.

“We kept hearing that the Captain was taking slaves away and sending them North, ’til finally, about Christmas, we heard that the Captain was nigh to the farm we was working,” said Harper. “So we sent word.” They sent Jim Daniels.

On Sunday December 19, Daniels crossed the border to sell brooms and then made a detour. Brown was delighted. He’d been preparing to invade Virginia when a betrayal of the plan (which would become the Harpers Ferry Raid of high school textbooks) forced a delay. Raiding Missouri was the perfect feint.

Daniels returned to his owner and told him he’d gotten sidetracked by squaws. Then he told Harper and his wife—who was eight months pregnant with their third child—that “the day of jubilee was coming.”

Brown hastily formed two companies and careened into Vernon County, Missouri, the next night. It was snowing. Hicklin was startled awake by an ominous knock not unlike what Mahalia Doyle heard two years earlier. The farm was looted while Brown spent 30 minutes explaining himself. “He said he would take off all the Negroes and free them,” Hicklin said, “and he was also going to take provisions for them and property enough to bear their expenses for freedom.” It was, said Brown, “the Lord’s work and he was not ashamed.” Furthermore, he invited the whole United States to follow him.

Hicklin’s losses were recorded in an affidavit: “five Negroes, one sorrel horse, one bay horse, one large yoke of oxen, one large wagon, two horse collars and two blind bridles, and one lock chain”—a fortune. The slaves alone were worth $109,176.29 in today’s currency. Whether they said goodbye went unrecorded.

Less than a mile away was Isaac Larue’s house. Brown again made his intentions clear and gave those inside a choice: “We have come after your Negroes and their property. Will you surrender or fight?” Five more slaves

were liberated. Six horses and a team of oxen were converted to the cause of abolitionism, and a wagon, bedding, clothes, boots and foodstuffs were taken, as were Larue’s son and a boarder who were soon released with an over-the-shoulder challenge to “follow as soon as they chose to.”

Hicklin left for Larue’s shortly after Brown left. When he got there, he could still hear the wagons clattering off in the distance. He found Larue staring blankly at the fire.

Earlier that night, the other company rode up to David Cruise’s farm in Bates County. They weren’t as clean about it. One account says that they tried to get in on a ruse and Cruise, a 60-year-old veteran of the Black Hawk War, reached for a gun to shoot through the door but it got entangled in a ribbon and wouldn’t fire. Several armed men crowded in and Cruise was shot dead.

Two slaves lived on that farm. One of them had slipped out to get to another farm where he was “sparking” a woman named Charlotte. A middle-aged slave named Jane was there that night. She laughed when she saw her liberators and hurried to the kitchen where she packed up her bedclothes, bedding and $60 that Brown would assert was only a token of what was owed her.

Two horses, a yoke of oxen and eleven mules were confiscated. Spotting a wagon, the men loaded it with provisions and took that too. Jane was right there loading it alongside them. “Brown wanted to know if we wanted to be free,” she recalled years later, “and said he’d take us where we’d be free.”

When the sun rose, the raiders and the liberated slaves converged in Kansas and hid out in a wooded ravine. At nightfall, they made their way north to Mound City.

Brown turned back to engage any Missourians bold or stupid enough to pursue him, and the caravan continued northward, creaking into Osawatomie on Christmas Eve. The fugitives, frightened and clinging to their faith, spent the holy day hiding in the kitchen of a minister’s cabin.

Meanwhile, slaveholders in western and northern Missouri were in a frenzy.

Was the raid the beginning of a full-scale invasion? They began shipping their human chattel out of reach, bound away across the wide Missouri River and as far south as Texas. Bills were reportedly introduced to expel all free blacks from the state within a year. Other petitions flirted with emancipation.

In Indiana, the Randolph Journal and its Quaker readership applauded the irony. “Only three years since the slave propagandists predicted that our fair and fertile soil would be worked by slave labor,” said its Kansas correspondent, “—alas! How changed! Kansas is not only free from the polluting

Salt print reproduction of a daguerreotype, threequarter length portrait of John Brown by Martin Lawrence in 1859, Library of Congress.

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influence of Slavery, but one old man . . . by a bold stroke in defiance of the slave laws, in the night, should drive slavery out of her stronghold.” Free State leaders were unenthused, primarily because Brown’s raid had disrupted the recent peace along the border. “Brown should be arrested and set to work on the public improvements in Missouri’s Jefferson City, until he is restored to reason,” said the Herald of Freedom.

On the other side of the argument was blind outrage. “Robbers!”

“Assassins!” shrieked the Harrisonville Democrat. “The mind grows dizzy with horror,” moaned the Missouri Democrat. A wealthy Missourian with free-soil tendencies was driven out of the county faster than Candace Owens was driven out of the Green Eggs Café, and his property was set on fire by neighbors. The governor of Missouri was authorized by the state legislature to offer $3,000 for Brown’s arrest, and troops spilled over the border and camped along the Wakarusa River. President James Buchanan posted a $250 reward for Brown’s head. Brown countered with a $2.50 reward for Buchanan’s head and wrote an open letter excoriating them all. It appeared in the New York Tribune in January 1859 and reminded everyone that what the South and their tools condemned as a “dreadful outrage” was 11 persons restored to their “natural and inalienable rights.”

And 11 soon became 12.

Shoot the Hemp off a Hat Not long after Brown posted the letter, he led the wagons off course to Garnett, Kansas, where Dr. (and future Union Major General) James Gilpatrick Blunt resided. The fugitives were hidden in log cabins on an open prairie, and it was under Dr. Blunt’s care that Mrs. Daniels gave birth a baby boy.

She gave him the name John Brown Daniels, and he became the first of many namesakes appearing in the black community well into the 20th century.

By January 14, Brown was 50 miles north in Lawrence trading off an ox team and staying at Joel Grover’s farm. A schoolteacher boarding at the farm kept a diary that was discovered and transcribed by his great grandniece in 2014. “Brown is sitting near me reading the Lawrence Republican. There is a young man with him. Both are armed to the ‘teeth’,” reads one entry. “One of the happier events of his life, he says, was the lib[erty] of those slaves a few days ago, and he will readily tell it to a slaveholder as to a free statesman.” The schoolteacher saw Brown and the caravan off on the evening of the 24th. “I gave him a good shake of the hand just as he left.”

“It was mighty slow traveling,” Harper remembered. “You see there was several different parties among our band, and our masters had people looking all over for us.” The traveling got slower still when they ran into a snow squall on the way to Holton, 40 miles south of the Nebraska state line. They stopped at a tavern, but word got out fast and they took shelter in 44

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cabins near Straight Creek. Their enemies, led by a U.S. Marshal, gathered like storm clouds.

“He is surrounded,” went a report to Washington D.C. “They are coming over from Platte County, Missouri, to rescue the Negroes and take old Brown … [E]verything looks like a fight. Brown will fight, and he is well armed and in two cabins.” One detail went unmentioned. Brown had armed the black men and women with him and was teaching them to shoot the hemp off a hat.

Battle of the Spurs As it was, no one fired a shot. The grim train rumbled closer and closer toward the rifle pits as the federal posse moved back farther and farther until, said the Lawrence Republican, “discretion overcame valor and away they went.” The Marshal was the first to flee. “The scene was ridiculous beyond description; some horses were hastily mounted by two men. One man grabbed tight hold of the tail of a horse, trying to leap on from behind, while the rider was putting the spurs to his sides; so he went flying through the air, his feet touching the ground now and then.”

Jane was still laughing years later. “They wouldn’t face old Captain Brown, no way. You coulda played marbles on their coattails.”

Three were taken prisoner. “They all had nice horses,” said Harper. “The Captain told them all to get down” and then upended their world by inviting the slaves to ride while they tramped ankle-deep in mud, cursing the whole time. Reports were circulating that Brown was hanging his prisoners, but he merely lectured them on morals and required them at prayer where they stood side-by-side with hated abolitionists and the slaves they’d set out to capture. One of them, a “wild, rattling, devil-may-care kind of fellow,” was asked to lead prayers one evening. “By God!” he said, “I can’t pray!” Brown urged him to recall one his mother taught him, and he relented: “Now I lay me down to sleep … .” After his release the next day, he said Brown “talked to him like a father” and was “the best man he had ever met,” though he resented being guarded by “damned niggers.”

After the so-called Battle of the Spurs, Brown’s wagons traveled in open defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act, which made it a federal offense to assist runaways. “Old Brown,” the Leavenworth Times taunted, “is not to be taken by ‘boys,’ and he cordially invites all pro-slavery men to try their hands at arresting him.”

When they reached the end of what Brown called Liberty Road and crossed the Nebraska border, the emancipated slaves erupted with joy and “cut up all kinds of foolishness.” Brown, Harper noted, stood by, “as solemn as a graveyard.” They stayed a night on the Sac and Fox Reservation and

Adversity is the trial of principle. Without it, a man hardly knows whether he is honest or not.

Henry Fielding

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John Brown’s Journey: Step-by-Step On the night of December 20, 1858, John Brown and several of his men crossed the Kansas border into Vernon County, MO, to free slaves. The following day, he began the freedom ride to Canada with 12 liberated but endangered slaves.

1 Vernon County, MO, December 20, 1858 2 Osawatomie, KS, Christmas Eve, 1858 3 Garnett, KS, early- to-mid January 1859 4 Lawrence, KS, January 14-24

8 Casey, IA, February 14-15 9 Des Moines River, February 18 10 Newton, IA, February 19 11 Grinnell, IA, February 20 12 Iowa City, IA, February 24 13 Springdale, IA, February 25-March 9 14 West Liberty, IA, March 9 15 Davenport, IA, March 10

5 Holton, KS, Battle of the Spurs, January 31

16 Chicago, IL, March 11

6 Nebraska City, NE, February 4

17 Detroit, MI, March 12

7 Tabor, IA, February 5-12

18 Windsor, Ontario, March 12 47

the next morning found the Nemaha River not frozen enough to bear the wagons. So they were disassembled and the timber used to construct a makeshift bridge for the horses. The wagons were reassembled on the other side. Before entering Nebraska City, they had one of many narrow misses with an armed posse, this one 50-strong, and soon crossed the frozen Missouri River. They found shelter in Civil Bend (now Percival), Iowa.

On February 5, they were in Tabor, where churches announced a public meeting to be held to discuss the raid and Brown’s presence. The opinion went against him. He walked out without a word.

By the 9th, the strain of constant travel, danger, cold and probably malnourishment did what no marshal could do and put him down. Their departure was delayed three days as he recovered from chills and a fever.

On the 12th, they stayed the night at Malvern and then headed north in a snowstorm toward Lewis, where Brown’s cousin provided shelter on the 13th. On the 14th and 15th, they stopped not far from what is now Atlantic and stayed the night at the Porter Hotel in Casey, the site of the Dalmanutha Cemetery today. On the 16th, they were just east of Redfield and, on the 17th, were sheltered in a timber outside of West Des Moines. The editor of the Citizen paid the bridge toll across the Des Moines River on the 18th, and they rested on a farm just west of Yellow Banks Park. From there, we know they were in Newton because a letter appeared in the Davenport News confirming that Brown passed through that town, and a collection was taken up to aid him on his way.

Twenty miles east of Newton is Grinnell, named for future Republican Congressman Josiah Bushnell Grinnell, who received them into his home on the 20th. “I am the ‘awful Brown’ of whom you have heard,” was the introduction. The slaves received clothing and bread, meat, cake and pies were prepared. Brown joined a public thanksgiving and, after helping the women into the wagons, including the still-ailing Mrs. Daniels, he took his seat at the lead. Grinnell saw him holding the infant named for him in his arms.

“We are far on our journey and are ready to die on open field, but to go back, never, white or black,” he said before leaving. “We can shoot 60 times a minute and everyone, even the women, is a dead shot.”

Thirty-five miles east of Grinnell is Marengo, where they stopped at a farm, and 33 miles east of that is Iowa City.

And so the wagons clattered on, the frozen prairie a spinning wheel brightening and fading black. The old man, sleepless, up front, scanning the horizon with the baby on his lap. The fugitives huddling, shivering, singing their hymns. Wolves howling in the distance. At sunrise, the children awakened first, the rest soon afterward, and all hands shared the chores— 48

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gathering wood, cooking, patching clothes, repairing the wagons, taking care of the horses and mules.

Iowa City proved to be full of friends, enemies and frenemies. An aspiring politician, determined to rid the still-new Republican Party of the abolitionist albatross, headed for a saloon in University Square and there recruited a posse to get Brown. Later seen shooting targets and drinking courage, some among them carried a rope and an empty promise to hang “the damned nigger-thief of Kansas.” Brown drove his wagon with a blanket draped over his head and shoulders and was only later told of their fizzled attempts to arrest him. “Ah!” he said and smiled.

On February 25, they were 15 miles east in the village of Springdale, where they stayed two weeks. “They are out of funds,” said the Vermont Journal. They were, in fact, destitute. To help raise funds, Springdale residents purchased the wagons and mules. One of them noted Brown’s boots coming apart at the seams and purchased a new pair for him. Brown gave them to one of the slaves who had no shoes at all.

“The Twelve,” researcher Cathleen Briley’s sobriquet for them, stayed out of sight on a farm and made their marks on a bedroom wall with a pencil under an inscription that read “Captain Brown’s Little Band.” For years it was preserved by the locals. When “a Buchanan marshal” went sniffing around, Quakers hid them in a grist mill and, pacifists though they were, stood guard.

In the midst of all of this, Samuel Harper and Jane were married by a justice of the peace.

Detective Pinkerton On March 9, the Twelve spent a restless night in a steam mill in West Liberty. A railway boxcar was left close to the mill, compliments of a pair of Republican newspaper editors, and secretly stocked and never billed. Brown climbed in and arranged clean straw and checked the locks on the sliding door. A small crowd gathered as the Daniels children were handed up to him and the others followed. At 11:00 a.m., the Chicago train arrived and was coupled to the boxcar, the conductor unaware that he’d just been commissioned an agent on the Underground Railroad.

In Chicago early on the morning of March 11, Detective Allen Pinkerton was asleep in his bed. Outside in the frigid air, a weary and ragged group trudged up Adams Street and knocked on his front door. Pinkerton bolted up and answered it, a loaded gun at the ready. Recognizing Brown, he hustled everyone in out of the cold. They were then separated and hidden.

Brown stayed with John Jones, one of the hundreds of unsung Underground Railroad agents and a close friend of Frederick Douglas, on Dearborn Street. Pinkerton housed several in his own home and scattered 49

the rest to other agents in the neighborhood. After an attempt to raise money at the Chicago Judiciary Convention proved a delegated failure later that day, he barged in and said that if he did not collect a substantial sum then and there, he would bring Old Brown himself to the meeting. Pinkerton walked out with $600 in a hat. That afternoon, he was driving a wagon through the neighborhood, collecting everyone from their hideouts and transporting them to the depot at the foot of Lake Street. The train left for Detroit at 4:45 p.m.

Detroit. The city had a code word on the Underground Railroad: “Midnight.” Its black community was well organized, well-funded and experienced in all things abolitionist. Led by George DeBaptiste and William Lambert, it had been flouting the Fugitive Slave Act since 1850, and by the end of the decade, the Colored Vigilant Committee was spiriting over 1,000 runaways annually across the Detroit River into Canada. Overmatched slaveholders were reduced to spreading daffy rumors that the river, three miles from shore to shore at its widest, was 3,000 miles wide, and that Canadian soil was only good for black-eyed peas.

It was raining and sleeting when the train pulled into the station downtown. The Vigilant Committee took immediate charge of the Twelve and hustled them to the wharf. Brown could finally relax. His old bones had led five women, four children and three men out of Missouri, through Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois and Michigan—82 days and 1,151 miles through the Midwestern winter.

He was there to see them off before they were ferried over to Windsor.

There is no record of a goodbye, though his fabled stoicism must have faltered with so many arms embracing him.

Soon, his figure was shrinking in their wake.

The Twelve Of the Twelve who became a part of Brown’s history, four are identifiable in the historical record: Jim and Narcissa Daniels, John Brown Daniels, and Samuel and Jane Harper. Researchers dug deeper and found the names of the Daniels’ elder children (Missouri Jane and Willie Glee) in probate records. More names appear in an 1861 Canadian census and can be easily cross-checked with the widowed mother, her two daughters, young son, and an unrelated young man mentioned in a March 1859 edition of the New York Tribune. The widowed mother is Phillis Harper, Malinda is the name of one of her daughters, and ten-year-old Mark Harper one of her sons. These are Samuel’s mother and siblings. Malinda’s last name is given as “Hamilton.”

She had married a “Sam Hamilton” who is also listed and who was likewise born in the United States and is of African descent. The name “Hamilton” 50

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appears as the surname of Samuel and Jane’s daughter in a later census and on a legal document as Jane’s maiden name. Sam Hamilton, then, is likely the other “young man” mentioned in the Tribune and Jane’s brother. The Harper and Hamilton families had become one.

The name of the widow’s other daughter is elusive. In March 1895, the Windsor Star mentions that a “Mrs. Flenoy” was among those liberated in Missouri and had died “a few months” earlier. An Essex County death schedule reveals that a washerwoman and resident of Windsor named Cecilia Flenoy died that past November. She was born in Kentucky around 1830, which would make her too old to be the widow’s missing daughter, unless Phillis was at least five years older than the 40 years recorded beside her name in the 1861 provincial census. Phillis may well have been older. An 1850 Kentucky slave census for Isaac Larue lists the age and sex of his slaves and a woman appears on it who is likely Phillis. Her age is given as 35. If that’s the widow and the age given is fairly accurate, then the record points toward Cecelia Flenoy as the missing daughter.

Canada West

On March 12, 1859, we see the Twelve, recognizable now, disembark from the ferries at the foot of Oullette Avenue in Windsor in the British colony of Canada West (formerly Upper Canada). We see them drop to their knees.

There was much to be thankful for. Legislation abolishing slavery in the British colonies went into force on August 1, 1834, and Canadians generally felt duty-bound not to assist bounty hunters or U.S. Marshals in the capture of runaway slaves on their lands. In fact, there was hostility to the idea of it.

What’s more, Windsor’s climate was relatively temperate, labor was needed in Essex County to clear forests and work on the railroads, and it was close to the Detroit marketplace and what was their native soil—what was, despite everything, home.

We know that soon after their arrival in Windsor, they were staying in a house owned by Mary Bibb, widow of Henry Bibb, an ex-slave turned author and abolitionist. The Bibbs were major figures in the Fugitive Home Society, and their presence in that house spoke to the priority placed on them by Brown’s friends in Detroit. But they were still adjusting to freedom, and their trouble letting go of the old ways caused a disaster. They would burn pine and other inflammable knots for light, as they had done in their slave cabins.

One night they left a knot burning after they had gone to bed and the house caught fire. They escaped, though Bibb’s house was destroyed. It had no insurance. All of the items given them in Detroit and by friends during their long journey were lost.

By July, the Detroit Advertiser reported that they had recovered. “The 51

adults are at work, and the little children are kindly cared for,” it said.

On August 1, they were among 7,000 who gathered in a handsome grove in nearby Sandwich to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Emancipation Day. Most of the revelers were American ex-slaves. Two were named: John Brown Daniels, who was 6 months old, and a girl called “Lina” (likely Malinda) who told a journalist that “she liked living in Canada better and better every day” and affirmed that they were all “comfortable now with plenty of work to keep them busy and a great many good friends willing to lend a helping hand.”

In the fall, they were readying themselves for the winter and staying busy.

Jim and Narcissa Daniels and their three children had moved further inland to Maidstone, and the rest were renting land in Windsor. Samuel Harper and another man, probably Sam Hamilton, team-sawed wood and hired themselves out as day laborers. Mark was helping around the property. Two of the women, described as former field hands in Missouri, spaded an acre of land and grew a fine crop of corn and potatoes, the latter of which they stored in a root cellar behind the house. They produced plenty of onions, carrots, parsnips and “some extraordinary cabbages,” packed neatly in fodder and straw, and owned three hogs they fed on swill collected from neighbors.

They had already socked away what would be almost $600 today.

When their industriousness was not enough, they had each other. And they had their freedom. Its scent was in the harvest, in the timber they stripped; its touch in the coins they earned, in the cool evenings and the heat of the small hearth they gathered around. When nature’s white curtain began descending on 1859, they spent Sundays in Sandwich skating on one of the frozen tributaries.

“If the Bible was true … .”

Old Brown was by then a prisoner in Virginia.

After capturing the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry on October 16, he lingered instead of leading his black and white band to the mountains as planned. When then-Colonel Robert E. Lee demanded an unconditional surrender, he refused. The door to the engine house he had holed up in was breached, Marines piled in and, by some fluke of fate, Brown survived. He lived just long enough to tell the world why he had done what he had done.

On November 2, he stood before the court and delivered one of American history’s great speeches. He said, “I intended certainly to have made a clean thing of [the] matter, as I did last winter, when I went into Missouri and there took slaves without the snapping of a gun on either side, moved them through the country, and finally left them in Canada. I designed to have done the same thing again on a larger scale. I am yet too young to under52

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stand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done, in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right.”

The judge was unmoved. “The sentence of the law is that you, John Brown, be hanged by the neck until you are dead.” At that, a spectator in the court “clapped his hands jubilantly.”

On November 5, a reporter for the New York Tribune visited the Harpers and Hamiltons at their rented farm. He read them the speech and the sentence of Brown, and they sobbed aloud. Two of the women said they’d be willing to die in his place. “If the Bible was true, he practiced most of it here,” said another, “so he would be rewarded by ‘old Master’ up higher with greater happiness” than he ever knew on earth.

On December 2, Brown’s jail door was unlocked, and he was escorted to the sun-drenched street. There is no truth to the legend that a slave mother waited for him and he kissed her baby, though it might as well have been.

The scene followed a grim protocol; only armed men in uniforms stood by as he climbed a wagon that took him not to Kansas or Canada, but to the gallows. He sat on his coffin.

“This is a beautiful country,” he said as the wagon rumbled on its way.

Brown was hanged as a traitor but saw himself as a patriot. He numbered among his heroes George Washington and Nat Turner and saw no irony in it and nothing inconsistent about it. “As citizens of the United States of America,” he wrote for a black defensive organization in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1851, “we will ever be true to the flag of our beloved country, always acting under it” [emphasis his]. Had he transported those arms out of Harpers Ferry and to the mountains, it would have marked the beginning of a renegade state out of reach of corrupt laws, a free state that would have stayed out of reach until the rest of the nation regained its sanity and honored its principles. The flag was going to be the same his grandfathers fought under during the Revolution.

His 12 friends were never far from his thoughts. The last time he saw them, they were sailing away from this beautiful country—from their beautiful country. And as he watched them go, he must have wrestled with a profound and prodding feeling of regret that they had to go.

He, and we, might like to know that not all of them stayed gone.

Not 20 years after the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified, John Brown Daniels returned to the United States. He was living in Springwells, just outside of Detroit, and working as a laborer in a brickyard. On July 5, 1886, he married Mary Douglas; he was 27, she 21—the prime of life.

Together they step out of view, their dreams and consolations like whispers through the pines. ±

Had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, the socalled great, or in behalf of any of their friends … every man in this court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment.

John Brown’s last speech to the court (November 2, 1859)

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History

An Argument from the Start From Colonists to the Constitution to Gettysburg to Today William J. Olson, PhD, (ret.) Distinguished Professor for International Security Studies & Chairman of the Department of Strategic Studies at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.

Abraham Lincoln

Opposite, detail from “Gettysburg. Repulse of Longstreet’s Assault” painted by James Walker, engraved by H.B. Hall, Jr., circa 1876, Library of Congress

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n July 1863, two American armies met at Gettysburg, a small market town in the rolling hills of Pennsylvania, to do battle in fields and orchards and in residents’ front yards. These armies converged not to fight a common foe but each other. The Army of the Potomac, the main Union army, came to persuade by force their once brethren to return to a common allegiance in the national experiment. The Army of Northern Virginia, the primary military force of the Confederacy, came to dispute that effort in order to achieve independence. The ongoing Civil War would decide whether there would be one nation united, without slaves—a house divided no more—or two countries: one free of slavery and the other predicated upon it.

The Battle of Gettysburg began on July 1 and lasted three days, during which more than 50,000 Americans were killed, wounded or went missing.

The issues that made fellow Americans into enemies claimed more than 700,000 lives by war’s end, along with countless more permanently disabled and half the nation in ruins. More soldiers died than in all of America’s other wars combined.

As President Abraham Lincoln noted in his second inaugural address, delivered in the war’s final days: If God wills that the war “continue, until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Of 120 generals present at Gettysburg, nine were killed or mortally wounded during the battle. No other battle claimed as many general officers.

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Key to Understanding the Civil War

War is the second worst activity of mankind, the worst being acquiescence in slavery.

William F. Buckley, Jr.

Should you visit Gettysburg today, there is no menace in the angle of the light through the trees, no danger in the attitude of the hills and fields. A rock is just a rock. The fortifications, now muted by time and weather, were hastily assembled before the battle in hopes of some tenuous barrier against shot and shell. The battlefield is now a collective national memorial, where one can still find bits of shot or shell. Less apparent than reminders of this violent encounter is why the battle took place.

On the same field, several months after the battle, on November 19, 1863, Lincoln stepped up to a podium on a makeshift stand to commemorate the struggle and dedicate the cemetery to the fallen. Although poorly reviewed at the time, that speech—with fewer than 300 words, spoken in under five minutes in Lincoln’s distinctive Midwestern twang and high-pitched voice— is perhaps the greatest piece of political oratory in American history.

The Gettysburg Address was once required memorization by most high schoolers across the land Lincoln so clearly cherished and in which he had an abiding faith, despite the terrible war that was disfiguring it.

In those few well-chosen remarks, Lincoln not only dedicated a battlefield but memorialized the principles upon which the struggle had been fought.

He reminded his distracted fellow citizens of the purposes engaged, the meaning the struggle was striving for and the profound outcome waiting upon the war’s conclusion. Today, these remarks offer occasion for reflection and recovery from the neglect that now seems to occupy so much of contemporary thinking.

Gettysburg Address The opening lines and concluding sentiments examine the essence of what lay behind the struggle that brought Americans to kill one another. The Battle of Gettysburg was an armed debate over the Constitution’s meaning and interpretation—a debate leading to an effort to destroy the country upon the arguments that sought to create it and, ultimately, a debate that substituted bullets for ballots.

Lincoln’s brevity on the occasion embeds profound thoughts that require some effort to unpack and understand: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure.

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What strikes one in the opening sentence is the almost Biblical cadence that invites a mathematical calculation as to its import. Subtract four score and seven years (87 years in unpoetic terms) from 1863 and we derive 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence. In Lincoln’s computation, this is the proper place to begin with the founding of the country—not with the Constitution, which had to wait until 1787, but with the struggle over ideas that brought Americans to an earlier war, the American Revolution, fought over principle and purpose. The Constitution was not the founding document but a practical attempt after independence from Britain to embody the ideas in the Declaration into formal structures and practices.

The closing lines, again a shorthand, point to a misconception that often prevails in academic understandings of the nature of American government and our Constitution. The common trope used to explain the Constitution is the idea that it creates three branches of government—the legislature, the executive and the judiciary—separating powers to limit each branch. While not wholly wrong, this misconstrues a far more complex reality to which Lincoln refers. Reflecting the Constitution’s prerevolutionary origins, what it in fact established was five branches of government.

Lincoln’s address at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, November 19, 1863, from a print published by the Sherwood Lithograph Company, circa 1905.

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The first branch of government, contained in the opening words of the Constitution, is “We the People,” whom Lincoln addresses directly to summon a new commitment to our constitutional government, which was suffering great distress due to the war embodying the clash of the principles that created it: It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion— that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain—that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom— and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The fifth branch of government, which the Constitution creates, empowers and incorporates, is the governments of the separate states of the Union.

The Constitution divides sovereignty. Without this understanding, the term “federalism,” which describes the nature of the American system of government, has no meaning. For all its effort, the Civil War did not efface this fifth branch of government.

An Unending Debate

Wars almost never end the way starters had in mind.

Malcolm Forbes

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America was an argument from the start, even before there was the idea of an “American,” whatever that strange being might be. It was an argument over what to believe; about who should prosper; about status, self and property; and, most particularly, it was an argument about who should govern, on what principles and with what authority.

The first two successful English settlements opened the debate in what would become the United States: Virginia, established initially for commerce, created the first representative assembly in the New World in 1619, while in Massachusetts Bay a year later, the Puritans established the notion of local rule under royal charter with the Mayflower Compact.

The Puritans came as dissenters, both for religious reasons and to escape a government that persecuted them for believing differently.

Thus, commerce and conscience were present at the nation’s creation, and the settlers would carry these themes forward in all their actions.

Indeed, most of the conflicts, contradictions and compromises in American culture and politics to this day derive from these two fundamental ‘Cs’—commerce and conscience.

The colonists explored not only a new physical landscape, strange and beckoning, but a new geography of heart and mind. Most importantly, they did so in virtual isolation and innocence regarding the changes that such a

distance-wrought remoteness involved. While it’s commonplace to attribute American ideas of self-government, such as the separation of powers, to the philosophical musings on government by John Locke or Montesquieu, Americans practiced these before such seminal figures were born.

By the time of the American Revolution and Declaration of Independence, our political theory derived, but only partly, from British constitutional history and the assertion of parliamentary government in the Revolution of 1688 that led to England’s constitutional monarchy, and from the Scottish Enlightenment, which included Adam Smith and David Hume.

The radical nature of American self-government did not show itself openly until the English King and Parliament attempted to assert more direct control over the colonies and passed the Stamp Act to pay for winning the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War). This conflict ended in 1763 with Britain as master of Canada and the American colonies—whose inhabitants thought of themselves as loyal subjects of the English crown and citizens of the British Empire with rights chartered in the evolution of the unwritten British Constitution.

Colonists hated the Stamp Act since it completely bypassed any role for colonial legislatures in taxation. In response to this resistance, Parliament replaced it in 1766 with the Declatory Act—not to heal the rift but to impose even greater control by asserting the right to legislate for the colonies in “all cases whatsoever.”

The issue here was not taxation per se, but representation—which the English failed to grasp. Such legislative powers were understood and accepted by British citizens in Devon, England, but this was no longer true in Devon, Massachusetts, or in any of the colonies. Hence the puzzlement on both sides of the Atlantic over interpretations of governance while speaking the same language but arguing from different starting points.

After a century and a half of self-rule, Americans were not about to surrender their decision-making process and the traditions and culture that were emerging.

In truth, the American Revolution began not with any of the events after the Seven Years War but with the founding of the first colonies. The radical nature of the growing differences between England and the colonies went largely unnoticed until the King and Parliament tried to assert more direct control. Then it was not coincidental that the leaders of the Revolution were mostly from Virginia (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison) and Massachusetts (John Adams, Sam Adams).

A one-penny stamp, May 10, 1765. The Stamp Act (1765), according to Britannica.com, was the “first British parliamentary attempt to raise revenue through direct taxation of all colonial commercial and legal papers, newspapers, pamphlets, cards, almanacs and dice.” Newspapers, for example, were required to be printed on stamped paper purchased from colonial government agents.

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Still photo from the film “Lincoln� (2012), directed

by Steven Spielberg and staring Daniel Day Lewis. In this scene, in January 1865, Lincoln demands that members of his cabinet secure the votes in Congress to enact a constitutional amendment (the Thirteenth Amendment) prohibiting slavery before the end of the Civil War, which would bring the Southern states back into the Union. Lincoln fears that the former slaves states would work to nullify the Emancipation Proclamation.

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Constitutional Conflict The 13 colonies that then formed the United States of America had many differences from one another, which precipitated years of debate. Whether these colonies could become a nation was the big question in 1789 as the Constitution, which hopefully resolved disparities, was passed.

Seventy plus years later, however, irreconcilable contradictions in the notions of democracy and federalism, as held by the northern and southern states, erupted into the Civil War. Representative government, to work, must be based on shared principles and a commitment to a common destiny.

As long as differences of self-interest and experience can be discussed and compromise reached, a government and its people can long endure. But if the disagreements concern fundamental principles, then compromise is only likely to drive divisions deeper.

Differences over the institution of slavery were present from the nation’s foundation. By 1860, the abolitionist movement was growing, and Northern states were refusing to return fugitive slaves, in violation of Section 2 of Article IV of the Constitution (later changed by the 13th Amendment). The election of Lincoln made many Southerners worry that slavery and the plantation economy were under threat.

The determination of the South, based on one interpretation of the nature of the Constitution, to then leave the Union, illustrated deep contradictions

in the founders’ instrument if not intent. But there is a lesser noted constitutional crisis more immediate to secession and the war. In Lincoln’s view and that of Unionists, secession was illegal, and the war that followed Fort Sumter was an effort not to restore the Union, which could not be sundered in the manner the South proposed, but to enforce the binding and enduring nature of the compact creating the Union.

In creating a separate government and taking up arms to secure it, the South denied the efficacy not just of the Union but of the legal basis for it.

Thus, the original Constitution ceased to be a valid framework for law, its reach, justification or enforcement. As a result, there was a constitutional quandary at the heart of the war: What legal framework justified war, not only in fighting the South, but that inevitably the war had to be fought amidst a civilian population that no longer accepted the Constitution’s binding power.

In the early days of the secession crisis, before Fort Sumter, this quandary paralyzed the Buchanan government, which viewed secession as a nullity but could find no means available to federal authority to prevent or undo it.

Lincoln’s early days as president were spent denying the validity of secession, but he was reluctant to use force to restore the Union. Then, after Fort Sumter and open rebellion, he summoned the militias, and more Southern states seceded on the grounds that suppression was illegal—not secession.

By abrogating the Constitution and arguing for a different basis of government, the South’s war created a legal vacuum and a constitutional black hole. In the North’s view, especially Lincoln’s, the South could not unilaterally leave the Union, and force was required force to sustain the point. But in abstracting themselves from the legal basis binding the country together, the South not only raised armies to resist ‘invasion,’ it also removed the legal means from the federal government to enforce its writ—law enforcement, public officials, individual loyalties: everything of which national unity is derived, including its moral justifications.

What then was the constitutional basis for governing the ensuing environment? The international rules governing wars, especially internal ones, were largely undeveloped in 1861. Thus, putative international law was vague or silent on many of the issues involved, while the Constitution, which concerned itself with government under a union not disunion, no longer existed, apart from the presence of Union armies to enforce its legal meanings in the South.

The United States Postal Service issued this 4-cent stamp on August 27, 1958, honoring the 100th anniversary of the Lincoln-Douglas debates. The stamp was the first in a series of four stamps commemorating the sesquicentennial of the birth of Abraham Lincoln in 1809.

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Confederate forces bombarding Fort Sumter, Charleston, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861, in a lithograph

by Currier & Ives, Library of Congress.

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And the War Came What then was the governing legal authority? The only remaining way to answer that question was on the battlefield. All other legal means tried had failed. All the instruments of compromise lay broken. All the goodwill and common heritage that once sustained men past their differences were lost.

Only a test of arms remained.

From a legal viewpoint, a battle is a means to reach the end of a dispute using violence to arbitrate the outcome. Politically, a battle is a means to resolve differences by bullets when ballots fail. For the armies involved, it is a question of victory or defeat. For the individuals, it is a matter of life or death. Victory or defeat in war decided through battle can also decide the fate of a nation and its people.

The Gettysburg battlefield was all of these. More marched onto the field than the armies. Ideas, hopes, fears and the resolve of a common people, now divided but once joined, accompanied the armies in the minds and hearts of the soldiers about to fight so that the nation would live united or forever divided.

Might may not decide right, but it does make winners and losers. No one wanted the war. But the war came and with consequences far beyond the expectations that began it.

Gettysburg Redux?

Perhaps in these experiences and in the folds and wrinkles of the now quiet Gettysburg landscape a lesson still lies—or a warning.

The Civil War was fought over a failure of the American political system to resolve deep divisions on matters of principle, abrogating the political process necessary to its survival. War followed. At enormous cost of life, limb and land, the Civil War restored the necessity of compromise to the political process; reaffirmed the need to accept reciprocity in governing; reconfirmed the need to accept governance by turns despite differences; and restored acceptance of the idea that short of anarchy or dictatorship, the only practicable way to resolve irreconcilable differences of moral perspective, legal interpretation and a sense of right is the give-and-take of politics.

The question today is whether these lessons retain meaning.

Clearly there is a growing divide, not merely between political parties, but throughout the nation regarding such fundamental issues as abortion, immigration, the First Amendment (freedom of speech and religion), the Second Amendment (the right to bear arms) and other elements of the Constitution, including the Electoral College. The deep divisions also concern the most basic concepts such as sex/gender, marriage, family, American history and our role on the world stage, and the nature of our economy (free markets or planned economies).

Have these differences reached an unbridgeable impasse? What does it mean for the nation’s future when the Founders are under increased attack for personal failings taken as refutations of the principles upon which the country was ordained? Will more states rediscover the idea of states’ rights trumping federal law and seek secession? What would happen in North Dakota, for example, if a future Congress proposed nullifying the Second Amendment, shutting down the petroleum industry and greatly increasing tax rates? Citizens and state governments in most other states would oppose such measures, which are being promoted in political platforms today.

Already, irreconcilable differences of interpretation are finding expression, not only in increasing rhetorical violence, but in violence in the streets. Consider the random murders of police officers or Antifa’s increasing physical attacks on free speech and assembly.

What has been described as a cold civil war appears to be heating up— just as in the 1850s. Unfolding currently is a process that is eerily reminiscent of the collapse of the shared commitment to principle that led to the Civil War. At stake is whether a government of, for and by the people can long endure.

Are we slouching towards a new Gettysburg? ±

For a war to be just, three conditions are necessary—public authority, just cause, right motive.

Thomas Aquinas

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Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci April 14, 1452 – May 2, 1519 64

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Art

A Christian Renaissance Man Understanding Leonardo 500 Years Later Elizabeth Lev, PhD, Author, Journalist, Public Speaker, Art Historian

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t is a perverse irony that the term “Renaissance Man,” coined by the modern age, defines a person of many talents but no appreciable faith, even though that era was saturated with religion. Religious orders and prelates were prime patrons, churches were the principal loci of art, and public preaching and sacred ceremonies served to delight the people as well as organize worship. No artist has been more misunderstood and maligned by this recasting of the Renaissance era than Leonardo da Vinci, painter, inventor, engineer—and Christian artist.

Born in 1452 as the illegitimate child of Florentine notary Piero da Vinci, Leonardo was brought to live in Florence with his father at age 5. Modern biographies have made much of Leonardo’s alleged stigmatization as illegitimate, yet while creating some legal inheritance issues, Leonardo’s birth, like that of many of his contemporaries, was never held against him. Leon Battista Alberti, architectural advisor to popes and princes, Caterina Sforza, the countess of Forli, were never hampered in their progress by their origins. Kids happen—the Renaissance understood—and they knew how to deal with it.

Leonardo began training in the busy workshop of Verrocchio, where he quickly ascertained that the life of businessman artist was not for him.

Running a bustling studio with assistants, ledgers and inventories while competing for commissions with the likes of Botticelli, Ghirlandaio and the other hungry, dedicated and talented artists studying alongside him at Verrocchio’s shop would not allow for his febrile imagination to roam. Leonardo needed a patron, a wealthy court that would allow him space to follow his own interests, while doing various tasks for the ruler. To achieve this, Leonardo wrote a lengthy letter of self-recommendation to Ludovico Sforza, known as “the Moor,” the rich and powerful Duke of Milan whose ambitions were even greater than Leonardo’s. This helped secure Leonardo a position in the court and, in 1482, he moved to Milan where he would spend the next 18 years.

Where the spirit does not work with the hand, there is no art.

Leonardo da Vinci

Opposite, self-portrait, red chalk (13.1 in. x 8.5 in.), circa 1512, Leonardo da Vinci.

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Notebooks & Inaccurate Myth

Detail from “Experiment on the Lifting Power of Wing” from “Codex on the Flight of Birds,” (8.27 in. x 5.9 in.), circa 1505, Leonardo da Vinci.

The modern era is particularly fixated on the notebooks that Leonardo produced in this period. With more time at his disposal, Leonardo began to record the knowledge he was gaining as he indulged his Aristotelian curiosity in the world around him. Anatomical drawings, botanical sketches and designs for machines reinforce the notion that this Florentine was a man solely of this world. But while Leonardo produced unbuildable machines and proudly recorded his many dissections, the only thing the Sforzas really wanted from him were his artistic skills. Several of their commissions would allow Leonardo to turn that formidable mind to creating religious images. With his art, he would make visible the invisible.

Despite Leonardo’s evident attention to religious subject matter, the myth of Leonardo the atheist/ activist continues. His notebooks, with their scientific, mechanical and anatomical drawings are held up as testimony to a man whose mind had space only for science. The psychology of his portraits is touted over the contemplation of his far more successful religious works. And even among scholars looking to learn more about this artist, there is much deceptive information. During his time in Milan, Leonardo accumulated a certain amount of wealth and thus amassed a considerable library of books—probably about 150. When touting his thirst for knowledge, secular writers highlight the anatomy, astronomy and engineering treatises, invariably omitting the fact that Leonardo also owned the writings of St Augustine, as well as several copies of the Bible in Italian.

Virgin of the Rocks

Opposite, “Virgin of the Rocks,” oil on panel transferred to canvas (78.3 in. x 48 in.), 1483-86, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre, Paris.

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Leonardo’s proving ground was a commission given to him along with the DePredis brothers, a pair of local painters. The Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception, operating out of San Francesco Grande in Milan, wanted a painting of the Immaculate Conception to celebrate the foundation of the feast of the same name, placed in the universal calendar by Pope Sixtus IV in 1483. Although the feast had been declared, the doctrine was still lacking as to how to teach that Mary was conceived free of the stain of original sin. Art had long struggled to illustrate this complicated and controversial teaching.

The Dominican Order, while venerating Mary, protested that if Christ’s

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How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art, Elizabeth Lev, Sophia Institute Press (2018)

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salvific sacrifice had saved everyone, her sanctification must have happened later, while the Franciscans pressed forward with this special exaltation of the Virgin.

In the 1300s, Duns Scotus shed light on comprehending the Immaculate Conception by appealing to the all-knowing nature of God in His eternal existence. Knowing everything, God planned Mary’s role before time itself.

Therefore, God’s eternity being fundamentally different from nature’s time, Leonardo set his “Virgin of the Rocks,” as it is called, in a timeless world, nestled in nature yet strange to it. The Virgin sits high in the center, rough rocks forming a sort of primitive triumphal arch over her head. She makes a solemn pyramid swathed in blue, her hair radiates a soft golden glow, in lieu of the disc halo so common in the era. Her face, eyes downcast with a slight tilt of the head, is reminiscent of the ubiquitous Florentine image of Mary, kneeling before Gabriel as she proclaims, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; may it be done to me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38). Leonardo paints Mary’s fiat, which opens the door to the Incarnation. Through past, present and future, God has prepared the role Mary was to play.

By contrast, the infant John the Baptist was believed to have been sanctified in the womb when he encountered his unborn cousin in the Virgin’s womb during the Visitation. The tender, sweet child who loves Jesus plays an important part, but it is less than that of her who bore God. The angel announces the glad tidings of the coming of Christ, and John prepares the way of the Lord. The two figures converge towards Christ, like parentheses on either side of the panel, but Mary’s outstretched and foreshortened hand forms a direct vertical line with God Incarnate.

This version of The Virgin of the Rocks, now housed in Paris, is believed by most Leonardo scholars to be the first of two versions. Although the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception had given Leonardo precise instructions about what they wanted to see—a Madonna, two prophets and Jesus surrounded by angels—Leonardo produced something different. Less didactic, his version omitted the Old Testament scriptural figures associated with the Immaculate Conception and instead attempted to visualize God’s eternal plan conceived in mystery but carried out in nature. Dark rocks open onto a verdant sward; the craggy frame encloses the brilliantly colored figures but recedes into a nebulous and mystical light. This is how Leonardo tackled the thought of the “Subtle Doctor,” Duns Scotus, the Franciscan theologian of the Immaculate Conception.

Leonardo’s carefully honed techniques all found their best use in this work. His fascination with nature, constantly sketching myriad botanical species, lends realism to the foreground setting for the figures. His development of sfumato, the blurring of the contours (at times done with his

fingertips) adds a mystical note as the figures glow with an inner light, and their downy hair illuminates their heads as would a halo.

His colors, rich jewel tones against the murky background, swathe Mary in sapphire, leaving no doubt of her regal status as she towers above the group. Gold silk flashes over her abdomen, an allusion to the immaculate vessel in which the Lord was incarnate. The angel, seated a little lower, forms a protective shield around the Christ Child, the jade green evoking nature as well as the liturgical color of hope, while the scarlet mantle billowing around his back refers to the humanity of the Child, born to be sacrificed.

The foreshortening technique, allowing an object or figure to appear to project into the two-dimensional space, focuses the viewer’s attention away from the colors, setting and delights of nature, and on the main point of the panel. Mary’s hand reaches toward the viewer, fingers extended forward, hovering over the head of the Jesus. Underneath her palm and the angel’s pointing finger, the infant Christ sits, slightly out of the well-balanced compositional triangle. The viewer’s gaze, surprisingly, is drawn downwards, not upwards as was the norm in the art of this period. Jesus’ bare flesh rests upon a sprig of star-shaped white flowers sprouting on rough stone. Again, Leonardo’s skills come to the fore as the child’s fingers curl around the edge of the rock as if inching towards the viewer’s space. Placed above the altar, this painting would show Christ perched above the stone slab, where his death and resurrection were re-presented in the Catholic Mass. Leonardo’s engagement with the complicated subject of the Immaculate Conception was not limited to a repetitive series of dogmatic symbols, but used his special talents to invite viewers to delve deeper into this great mystery.

Last Supper In 1494, Duke Ludovico Sforza began to lavish attention on the convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie, intending it to become a family mausoleum.

His father, Francesco I, had built the church for the Dominican Order and Duke Ludovico, for his part, hired Donato Bramante, future architect of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, to work on the apse. The Duke spent much time in the convent, often taking meals in the refectory with the friars. In 1495, he ordered Leonardo to paint a “Last Supper” to occupy one of the refectory walls. The project, carried out over three years, was one in a long line of Last Suppers, yet after Leonardo turned his talents to the subject, it would never be the same again.

As a youth in Florence, he had seen many of these works—Taddeo Gaddi’s oldest version in Santa Croce; Andrea del Castagno’s mural, done at the time of Leonardo’s birth; and while Leonardo was preparing his, Ghirlandaio and Perugino were each working on the iconic scene in Florence. Yet Leonardo, 69

“Last Supper,” Leonardo da Vinci, tempera & gesso (180 in. x 350 in.), circa 1495-98, Convent of Santa Maria delle Graze, Milan.

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while respecting its special location and iconographical tradition, subtly changed the image to draw the viewer more deeply into the event.

Refectories in religious houses had long loved the Last Supper as a decorative as well as devotional theme. In the space where the community ate together, most often in silence, with edifying passages read to them, the scene from Jesus’ final meal with his apostles was an obvious choice. Some earlier versions seemed to draw from the synoptic gospels of Luke or Mark, where the characters appeared rapt in separate discussions, whether who was the betrayer or who was the greatest, while others appeared to meditate after receiving the first Eucharist. The typical composition arrayed 12 men around a long rectangular table facing the room, sometimes arranged in pairs. Christ always occupied the center, while Judas was placed on the opposite side of the table, closest to the viewer. While the beholder might be tempted to identify with Peter, John or Matthew at that moment, Judas’ proximity reminded the viewer that he or she had more in common with the betrayer than with any other apostle. Fruit trees in the background might indicate paradise, dogs or cats might underscore the theme of fidelity or betrayal, yet the arrangement was fairly standardized.

Leonardo balanced human and divine drama, interpreting the Gospel of John (13:21-28) by capturing the immediate effect of Christ’s words, “One of you will betray me.” He painted a spacious yet simple room, seemingly an extension of the refectory itself. The ceiling recedes in neat, proportionate coffers, and the wall hangings articulate the perception of depth in an orderly, almost austere fashion. It is a perfect set for his actors, whom he has positioned at the front of the stage, separated from the viewer by the slender width of the table. Three windows open at the end of the space, the center window framing Jesus—the center of the composition and the vanishing point of the work. A little nail mark on his right temple left by Leonardo reveals the careful construction of the space that inexorably leads the eye to Christ.

Leonardo drew Jesus so that his head, outstretched arms and open hands would form a triangle, evoking, like the three windows behind Him, the Trinity—a few lines later in the same Gospel, Jesus will explain to the apostles: “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves” (John 14:11).

Once again anchoring his art in the natural world, Leonardo’s painting employed geometry, proportion and light to evoke the divine element of the story.

Christ’s words drop like a stone in still water: Jesus isolated in the center, with the apostles rippling away from him with their varying reactions. Each reaction is different—shock, denial, bemusement, aggressiveness—this universality of expressions, gleaned from Leonardo’s observations of people on the streets, makes the painting seem more spontaneous, even more real, than any of its predecessors of successors.

The most striking group is placed to the right of Christ, where John leans away from Christ towards Peter, who pushes forward to find out who is the traitor. This movement thrusts Judas forward, closer to the viewer’s space, yet still among the apostles. Leonardo contrasted the serene face of John, the aggressive action of Peter and the slightly distorted face of Judas, already lost in the shadows, to profound effect. Leonardo’s art brought viewers into the heart of one of the greatest mysteries of faith, but the modern age either prefers to dwell on Dan Brown’s silly suggestion that Mary Magdalene is Jesus’ wife as depicted in the novel The Da Vinci Code, or simply focus on the psychological responses of the apostles rather than the sacred import of the whole.

“St. John the Baptist,” oil on wood panel (27.16 in. x 22.44 in.), circa 1513-16, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre, Paris.

Deliberate Misreading Unfortunately, this is not always simple naiveté. Particularly in Anglo Saxon literature, Leonardo has been deftly retouched to appear distant from the Christian world that he lived in. One particularly problematic example is in the English translation of Leonardo’s Treatise on Painting. Leonardo wrote of experience as the “mother of all certainties” and noted, when discussing the senses: “E se noi dubitiamo della certezza di ciascuna cosa che passa per i sensi, 71

quanto maggiormente dobbiamo noi dubitare delle cose ribelli ad essi sensi, come dell’assenza di Dio e dell’anima e simili.” This translates as: “If we doubt the certainty of all that passes through our senses, how much more should we doubt those things that rebel against those senses, like the absence of God or of the soul or the like.” Yet this line is translated in English as “the existence of God or of the soul.” Leonardo’s words were twisted to imply that he thought the idea of God rebelled against the senses, when indeed the opposite was the case.

While it seems that Leonardo did not have much time for God in his youth, this later changed. As he grew older, the pleasures of youth were gradually replaced with thoughts of eternity. There is much in Leonardo’s life to suggest that he was attracted to men: He was arrested on charges of sodomy at the age of 24 (and then released) and maintained a lifelong relationship with a troubled young man, whom he had nicknamed “Il Salai” (derived from the Italian for “devil”). But it is an anachronistic step to suggest that Leonardo was “gay,” implying a lifestyle and self-definition based on his sexual activity. The Renaissance era was not without rampant sexual activity, heterosexual or homosexual, but adultery, sodomy or fornication were all considered sinful nonetheless, and those who engaged in such sins were expected to be repentant and make reparation to God, while the modern age has turned them into trivial titillations.

Last Days, Lasting Vision

“Mona Lisa,” oil on poplar panel (30 in. x 21 in.), circa 1503-06 and then continuously until circa 1517, Leonardo da Vinci, Louvre, Paris.

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Leonardo’s last years were spent in Amboise in the Loire Valley, as a guest of King François I, of France. At age 64, the Florentine artist moved into the Château du Clos Lucé with the grand title of “First Painter, Engineer and Architect to the King.” He passed the final three years of his life comfortably compiling his notebooks and working on the “Mona Lisa” and “Saint John the Baptist,” which he had brought with him.

He also, according to his biographer Giorgio Vasari, “asked to have himself diligently informed of the teaching of the Catholic faith, and of the good way and holy Christian religion.” Then “with many moans, he confessed and was penitent and … he was pleased to take devoutly the most holy Sacrament,” before dying on May 2, 1519. In his will, he made extensive bequests for Masses to be said for his soul.

Leonardo’s road to God was not an easy one. Distracted by the things of this world and searching for the best outlets for his gifts and inclinations, Leonardo, like Dante Alighieri, the Florentine poet whose works he owned, did “get lost in a dark wood” (as at the beginning of the “Inferno” section of “The Divine Comedy”) but found his way back to light, blazing an artistic trail for others along way, should they care to look for it. ±

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Literature

On Creating Monsters Dr. Frankenstein, A Modern Deadbeat Dad Barbara Stuart, MA, Systematic Theology

L

ightning bolts … man playing God … a reanimated corpse rising from an operating table … science versus nature. Two hundred years after the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, (original title: Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus), readers and audiences of movie versions still focus on the book’s “science—now, technology—run amok” plot. This Promethean theme certainly plays a central role, but perhaps Mary also had something quite different and a little closer to home in mind when she wrote the novel.

In the July 1994 issue of Natural History Magazine, Stephen Jay Gould wrote about Frankenstein, titling his monthly column “The Monster’s Human Nature.” Gould was the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology at Harvard University and won many awards as an author, scientist and historian of science. In the article, Gould argued that the usual interpretations of Frankenstein often miss the main issue: Why is the monster evil? The answer, put simply, is bad parenting. The novel that started the science fiction genre has, as its foundation, a moral lesson about how not to screw up the kids.

In contemporary America, extensive research has shown conclusively that parenting and family structure are among the most important factors in short- and long-term outcomes for children. Does Frankenstein shed light on raising kids—or monsters?

Mary & Parenting A brief examination of Mary Shelley’s life makes it evident she was thinking about parenting as she wrote Frankenstein. When Mary was just 16 years old in 1814, she defied her parents and chose passion over propriety and wealth by eloping with Percy Bysshe Shelley—who would become known as a major English romantic poet. When Percy ran off with Mary, he was still married to Harriet Westbrook, who was pregnant with their second child.

Opposite, steel engraving,

by Theodore Von Holst, from the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein, published

by Colburn and Bentley, London. The illustration depicts Victor Frankenstein becoming disgusted at his creation.

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Mary’s first child with Percy was premature and died in infancy, in the midst of the couple’s debt-ridden struggles and family rejections. Shortly afterward, she conceived again, and this child was 6 months old when she began to write Frankenstein. Traveling at the time, Mary feigned marriage to Percy, calling herself “Mrs. Shelley” despite his continued marriage to Westbrook. The ideas of creating life, rejecting progeny (as Percy did to his children with Harriet) and suffering loss as a parent were the things Mary was living when she began the novel.

Frankenstein

Boris Karloff as Dr. Frankenstein’s monster in “Frankenstein: The Man Who Made a Monster,” released in 1931.

The first edition of Frankenstein was published in 1818. The novel’s plot is familiar and simple enough: Dr. Victor Frankenstein sets out to create life through scientific means, succeeds and is promptly horrified at the results. The remainder of the work details Dr. Frankenstein’s encounters with his creation, most of which involve revenge and violence, but also several that include intellectual conversations revealing the monster’s apparently human soul.

The tale has an enduring sophistication that begs philosophical questions, including: What is man’s place in the creation of life? What are his or her responsibilities due to participation in that creation? Does Dr. Frankenstein’s use of science to animate a cobbled-together corpse change this responsibility?

However, several of the themes commonly associated with the book, Gould pointed out, are not accurate representations of Dr. Frankenstein’s thoughts.

He never denounced science or technology, and he never seemed to regret man’s use of them, even though the story illustrated that these things can go very wrong.

What, then, was Dr. Frankenstein’s error in creating the creature?

The Doctor’s Flaw “We do learn that ardor without compassion or moral consideration can lead to trouble,” Gould wrote, “but Shelley applies this argument to any endeavor, not especially to scientific discovery.” Dr. Frankenstein’s first error lay in his unmitigated ambition and single-minded pursuit of his goal.

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turned, and decided to dedicate himself fully to his pursuit without any guiding influence. In so doing, he cut himself off from any community in which he could discuss the ethical ramifications of his creation of life. As a scientist this is irresponsible and ignorant. There was no one to “parent” his ambitions or to help him discern what is good in his work or discern the far-reaching consequences of his actions. Because of this, he does not question the ethics of his choices or even think of what the outcomes might be after he has accomplished his task.

As Dr. Frankenstein’s ambition becomes obsession, his isolation becomes more extreme—sleeplessness, malnourishment and anxiety plague him: All things that a community or family would have encouraged him to address.

“Every night, I was oppressed by a slow fever, and I became nervous to a most painful degree; the fall of a leaf startled me, and I shunned my fellow creatures as if I had been guilty of a crime ... [T]he energy of my purpose alone sustained me.” Dr. Frankenstein abandoned himself entirely to his ambition to create life, sacrificing any obligation to, or benefit he could derive from, family or community.

Revulsion & Rejection Dr. Frankenstein’s deteriorating health and mental state led directly to his extreme reaction to the life he created. Strung-out, exhausted and ill, he reverted to what Gould (who was an evolutionary biologist and paleontologist) identified as a basic human instinct: abhorrence of dreadful appearance. Gould cites this as the main reason Dr. Frankenstein rejected the monster. The inborn instinctual rejection of what is ugly, Gould wrote, causes “our aversion toward seriously malformed individuals.” This reverberates through the novel as more and more people reject the monster based on his appearance alone. But Dr. Frankenstein’s flat-out rejection—he runs away from the creature and falls into months of fevered delirium—is the first interaction the creature has with another person, and the one with the most dire implications.

Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster and Elsa Lanchester as his bride in “Bride of Frankenstein,” released in 1935.

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Robert De Niro as Frankenstein’s monster in “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” directed

by Kenneth Branagh, released in 1994.

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Why is the Monster Evil?

The word “monster” derives from Old French monstre (meaning “frightening physical deformity”) and Latin monstrum (meaning “an omen”), according to etymonline.com. Humans or animals born with severe birth defects used to be seen not only as repulsive, but also as a warning or sign of impending evil. By the 1550s in English, “monster” was used to indicate “a person of inhuman cruelty or wickedness.”

Gould’s initial question— “Why is the monster evil?”—is explained by the monster’s reaction to this experience of repeated rejection. The monster displays evidence of a human soul throughout the novel, and its ultimate question might be exactly who is the monster: the creation or Dr. Frankenstein? Ultimately, both became wicked.

Dr. Frankenstein had little concept of what it would mean to create life. He never considered what would happen after he achieved his ambition, never questioned what responsibilities he would have regarding it. As a scientist, he had an obligation to ask questions about what his experiment would mean for others. As its “parent,” he had an obligation to ask himself in what ways did he intend to influence that life once it began. The creation of life, Shelley’s warning seems to be, is a lot more than just bestowing animation.

It goes into the depths of the human person and asks for a real connection between creator and creature. Or between father and child.

Even today, studies show family involvement and stability of home life are key to a child’s well-being. A lack of parenting can result in emotional,

psychological and social maladaptive behaviors and strongly impact the entire life of the child. Community is a basic human need, and the family provides the first and most formative instance of it in life. In addition, research shows that families who participate strongly in the education of children produce better intellectual, emotional and social outcomes for children.

Dr. Frankenstein provided the monster with no family, no community, and no formation or guidance of any sort. Accordingly, Gould identified Dr. Frankenstein’s true lack in the book: no sense of fatherhood. “Victor’s sin does not lie in misuse of technology or hubris in emulating God; we cannot find these themes in Mary Shelley’s account. Victor failed because he followed a predisposition of human nature—visceral disgust at the monster’s appearance—and did not undertake the duty of any creator or parent: to teach his own charge and to educate others in acceptance.” Dr. Frankenstein failed because of his lack of foresight, but more fundamentally because of his inability to recognize the need for a community’s (or a family’s) checks and balances, which would have helped him develop such foresight. He rejected community and failed to provide it for the creature he had created.

Through education and personal formation, Gould argued, Dr. Frankenstein could have given his creation a place in the world. “His countrymen could have been educated to accept him, but the person responsible for that instruction—his creator, Victor Frankenstein—ran away from his foremost duty and abandoned his creation at first sight.” As the monster’s father, Dr. Frankenstein’s rejection was far more damaging than the other characters’ in the novel.

Would Frankenstein’s monster have been able to live a life resembling a human one had his “father” given him the chance and tried to help him instead of reacting out of fear and disgust? Shelley gave enough evidence in the story to lead the reader to assume the monster might have thrived if given the opportunity, despite his appearance and unusual conception.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Parenting & Success Does being a good parent always ensure the success of a child? No, but it certainly impacts the child’s life. Children who grow up missing a parent— most often, a father—have significantly worse outcomes. This is a growing problem. In the United States, from 1980 to 2013, the percentage of children living with a single mother increased by 300 percent.

Compared to children living with married parents, children without fathers are 300 percent more likely to grow up in poverty. They are also significantly more likely to develop emotional problems and, long term, experience less upward mobility. Children from single-parent families, 79

Benedict Cumberbatch as Victor Frankenstein and Ray Stevenson as the monster in the stage play “Frankenstein,” adapted

by Nick Dear and directed

by Danny Boyle. The play premiered at the Royal National Theatre in London, England, on February 5, 2011.

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84 percent of which are mother only in the United States, show significantly lower academic achievement, which is “a key economic driver of economic prosperity for both individuals and society as a whole,” according to “An International Look at the Single-Parent Family” written by Ludger Woessmann, Professor of Economics at the University of Munich, and published in Education Next Journal in 2015.

Obviously, children from families without fathers do not automatically become “monsters.” However, they join gangs and commit crimes at a much higher rate than peers living with married parents. They tend to struggle more in life in general. Shelley undoubtedly became intimately aware of this as she and her husband raised their infant son without the support of their own families. Her depiction of the lack of fatherhood in her novel gave a clear indication of how strongly she believed in its impact.

Mary and Percy married in 1816 shortly after Harriet’s untimely passing.

Percy had set up more than sufficient provision for his children with Harriet (three-year-old Ianthe and two-year-old Charles, at the time). After Harriet’s passing, he fought for legal custody of their children with her family. In the end, the courts awarded custody to the care of Harriet’s mother’s family.

Modern Prometheus Shelley’s Frankenstein is an extreme and fantasy-based example of the consequences of the breakdown of the family and, in particular, the willful absence of a father. Shelley successfully dramatizes how just one generation’s rejection of family can precipitate terrifying consequences. A father’s rejection of a child causes immense suffering, which that child might inflict on many others—especially when the larger family, the community, rejects in kind.

Percy wrote a review of Frankenstein (published posthumously in 1832) in which he claimed that “the central moral of the novel is intolerance, describing innocent victims of prejudice in society … . Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked.” He was striving to make, as he put it, “the most universal application” of the novel’s meaning. Just as universal, intolerance and ill treatment begin and are formed largely in the family—as are the remedies.

For all its influence, the family is also a precarious unit. Nine months after the publication of Frankenstein in January 1818, Mary and Percy lost their second child, one-year old Clara, to illness. Two years later, Elena—an adopted child fathered by Percy—died after only 18 months of life. Then, in 1822, Percy drowned after being caught in a storm while boating. Mary dedicated the rest of her life to raising and guiding their remaining child, Percy Florence Shelley, and to her husband’s legacy. Fortunately, Mary had support from friends and some from family. However, she and her son struggled financially. Still, she succeeded as a single parent, showing that a father’s absence is not always fatal to a child’s upbringing.

It was far more devastating for Dr. Frankenstein to outrightly reject his “child” who had no other family or friends and who was likewise abhorred by society. “[T]oo often in society,” Percy warned in his review, “those who are best qualified to be its benefactors and its ornaments are branded by some accident with scorn, and changed, by neglect and solitude of heart, into a scourge and a curse.”

The novel is subtitled The Modern Prometheus, indicating a bitter irony.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is a Titan who created man from clay and then, in defiance of the gods, stole fire and gave it to humans. In contrast, Dr. Frankenstein steals fire for himself, in the form of harnessing electricity that he used to create what turned out to be a monster—for he refused to champion his creation, instead contributing greatly to the tragic forging of his “child’s” demise. ±

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Religion

Long Live the Aberration First Feminist & Pro-Life Movement Mike Aquilina, Author & Executive Vice President, St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology

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he world in which Christianity arose—the Greco-Roman world— was a culture of death; Christians made it into something better, especially for women.

Life in first-century Rome ought to have been something like paradise.

The world was at peace. Material prosperity had never been greater.

Caesar Augustus—the emperor when Jesus was born—was praised as a savior by the Roman populace. Through military might and diplomacy, he unified lands and peoples stretching from Great Britain to Egypt, from Morocco to Georgia. He suppressed rebellions and practically eradicated piracy on the high seas, creating the conditions for unprecedented trade and prosperity.

What were once luxuries of the rich became necessities for the middle class. Taxation of the provinces ensured that no one in Rome need ever want for food or entertainment. There would always be bread and circuses.

The people should have been happy. Wasn’t this a perfect world in which to raise a family?

Roman Demographic Crisis But already during Augustus’ reign, Romans were facing a crisis. With all their wealth, they grew accustomed to an unmoored, leisurely lifestyle, drifting from pleasure to pleasure without the encumbrance of children.

There was little incentive to marry. The tendency was to wander from one gluttonous dinner party to another, one wine-inspired hookup to the next.

Augustus noted this problem and foresaw that it would be disastrous for the economy and for homeland security.

He needed his people to reproduce. So he tried to legislate a solution.

He outlawed adultery, fornication and homosexuality, and threatened transgressors with flogging or death. He imposed punitive taxes on men and women who remained single. Similar taxes were laid upon married couples who had few or no children.

Opposite, La Vierge aux Innocents, bronze sculpture by Daphné du Barry, which stands almost 6 feet high, was erected in September 2019, in Menton, France, on the French Riviera. When asked in an interview in LifeSiteNews.com why there are seven lifeless unborn babies at the Virgin’s feet, du Barry answered, “[Seven] is a sacred number, and for me, the seven children and the seven continents are very linked. These babies have their umbilical cords to show that the child without the mother dies.”

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So great is the skill, so powerful the drugs, of the abortionist, paid to murder mankind within the womb.

Juvenal (57/67-127 AD)

And yet the pagan historian Tacitus was moved to lament that “marriages and the rearing of children did not become more frequent, so powerful were the attractions of childlessness.” His contemporary Pliny the Younger spoke of the “burden” of having even one child and the “rewards of childlessness.”

In one of the great ironies of ancient history, all of Augustus’ familyoriented laws were enacted during the consulship of two bachelors, Papius and Poppaeus. Both had chosen to remain single and childless in spite of the penalties. Their flouting of the emperor’s policy set the tone for the enforcement. The laws were a joke, and the emperor himself was hardly a model of the kind of citizen he was trying to encourage. Augustus was married three times before he ascended to the throne and had only one child, a daughter whose life was somewhat scandalous. In times of prosperity, people looked at the fines and decided they could afford them as lifestyle expenses. Various emperors after Augustus tried to encourage childbearing through legislation, but their efforts uniformly failed. Rome could not require spouses to trust each other. Rome could not require a person to defer gratification of any desire for the sake of another person.

Rome could not impose a requirement for citizens to transcend their petty desires for the sake of the common good.

The imperial government in Rome, for all its marvelous achievements— which included clean water and the rule of law—could not compel its citizens to trust in the future. Lacking that hope, Romans didn’t want children..

Surely they had sex. Sex dominated their entertainment industry, along with violence, and the playwrights concerned themselves with little else.

And surely they conceived children. What then?

Abortion & Infanticide Well, they had choice, they might tell you. They could choose between two options: abortion, or they could wait and choose infanticide.

Abortion and infanticide were commonplace, requiring no moral deliberation. In all of history, only one culture had forbidden these practices, that of the Jews. But by the end of the first century, Jews were an insignificant minority, exiled from their homeland.

Every other nation, empire, kingdom, people—the Assyrians, Babylonians, Egyptians Hittites, Persians, Greeks, Romans—routinely killed their young. Plato and Aristotle commended abortion and infanticide. Killing babies is just what people did and what everyone had always done, through all recorded history. As the philosopher Seneca said, getting rid of useless children was simply the reasonable thing to do.

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We knock mad dogs on the head, we slaughter fierce and savage bulls, and we doom scabby sheep to the knife, lest they should infect our flocks: we destroy monstrous births, and we also drown our children if they are born weakly or unnaturally formed; to separate what is useless from what is sound is an act, not of anger, but of reason.

“What is good,” he concluded, “must be set apart from what is good-fornothing.”

The decision wasn’t even up for debate. To dissent from the practice of abortion and infanticide seemed as outlandish as refusing to use electricity seems today.

Plato, in his Republic, has his master Socrates work out the business of childrearing pretty thoroughly. When men and women have children, those children are born for the state. And the state has a strong interest in having the best possible children. Therefore, children should be born of parents who are in peak physical condition.

But what happens to children conceived by parents who don’t meet his criteria? What about children conceived (as I was) by parents who are 47 years old?

Well, Socrates tells us that the state should “prevent any child so conceived from seeing the light—but if that cannot sometimes be helped, to dispose of the infant on the understanding that the fruit of such a union is not to be reared.”

A child so conceived is life unworthy of life, said the pagan father of philosophy. Older men and women can be as promiscuous as they like, in Socrates’ ideal world. They just have to understand that if any children are conceived through their frolicking, those children will have to be thrown away. Abortion is preferable, but infanticide will do if abortion doesn’t work.

Aristotle, the other big name in classical philosophy, agreed rather forcefully with his master Plato. He put it plainly: “Let there be a law that no deformed child shall live … . But where public opinion is averse to [infanticide], let abortion be procured.”

It’s interesting to notice that Aristotle takes into account public squeamishness about infanticide. It’s interesting that he concludes that abortion would be the better course, because done privately, without the risk of social stigma. It’s interesting that there might be any social stigma in such a world.

By the time of Caesar Augustus, the world had largely got over its squeamishness. Infanticide was part of life. It happened in most families. In cities like Rome or Antioch or Alexandria, it happened every day.

Archaeologists have unearthed vast dumps of infant corpses from the 85

Roman period, in places as distant as Palestine and Scotland. In Ashkelon, in the Holy Land, an ancient sewer was found clogged with the bones of more than ninety newborns.

For what sort of “defects” could a newborn child be killed? Well, for anything out of the ordinary—missing fingers, extra fingers, misshapen limbs, Down Syndrome.

Female as Prime Birth Defect But by far the most common “defect” that merited death was girlhood. A baby born female had little chance of survival.

Because a girl was a burden on her father. She couldn’t get a job and contribute to the family’s wealth; instead she represented a colossal expense because she would need a dowry at marriageable age. The Roman playwrights referred to female offspring as “odious daughters.”

Daughters were costly. And that’s why many girls—in some places most girls—never lived to see the day after their birth. Killing a newborn was a matter of no moral or legal consequence whatsoever; and killing a girl could only be good for the family’s budget.

This is no exaggeration. We have the census records from ancient Delphi.

Out of 600 families, how many, do you suppose, raised more than one daughter? Only six raised more than one daughter, while many families had multiple sons. Where did all the girls go?

Down the dry well in Athens. Into the sewer at Ashkelon. Out to the town dump in Scotland.

Just a few decades ago, archaeologists retrieved a cache of papers from a garbage dump in the sands of Egypt. Among them was a letter from the sublimely symbolic date of 1 B.C. It was a letter from a businessman named Hilarion, writing home to his pregnant wife, Alis. Amid the usual endearments, he tells her he looks forward to her childbirth: “If you are delivered of a child [before I come home], if it is a boy, keep it, if a girl discard it.”

If a girl, discard it. Those girls were of no use in the Roman world. They had no personhood, no rights, no protection before the law and no standing in the philosophy that undergirded the law.

Hilarion wanted a child, but it had to be the child he wanted. It had to be a son, and a son in healthy condition.

Dogs Over Daughters In Rome, children did not achieve personhood until they were recognized by the head of the family, the father. When the mother had given birth, a midwife placed the child on the floor and summoned the father into the room. He examined the child with his criteria of selection in mind.

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Was the child his? If the man suspected his wife of adultery, he might reject the child without a glance.

If the child was an “odious daughter,” he would likely turn on his heel and leave the room.

If the child was “defective” in any way, he would do the same. Remember Seneca’s adage: “What is good must be set apart from what is good-fornothing. ” Life or death? It all depended on the will of a man. Human life began when the child was accepted into society. A man did not “have a child.” He “took a child.” The father “raised up” the child by picking it up from the floor.

The nonpersons who were left on the floor—while their mothers watched from a birthing chair—would be drowned immediately in a bucket of water or brought to the town dump to be exposed to wild dogs and vultures. If they survived for any considerable time there, they might be rescued by pimps and raised up as child prostitutes. It was all legal and above board. It was the right thing to do, as any reasonable and well-adjusted pagan philosopher would tell you.

Painting of Romulus and Remus, infant twins whose mother was the daughter of a former king, being abandoned.

The current ruler, King Amulius, saw the twins as a threat and ordered them killed. The twins were saved and suckled by a she-wolf before being adopted by a shepherd. The spot where they were left was the future site of the City of Rome. The tale of Romulus and Remus became Rome’s foundation myth. The painting is housed in the Riegersburg Castle, in Riegersburg, Austria.

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The people exercised their choice to get the life they were sure they wanted. Their vacations were unhindered by children. They were free to put their effort into the pursuit of pleasure. Dogs became the new children.

Clement of Alexandria observed that the same people who killed their newborns nevertheless lavished attention and money on their pets. “They expose children that are born at home, and take up the hatchlings of birds, and prefer irrational to rational creatures.” The wealthy who put their children out with the trash sometimes buried their dogs and cats in elaborate tombs.

That’s what Roman family values looked like.

Christian Revolution I apologize for the dreariness of that information. But that was a world in need of redemption, and such a world is an overwhelmingly sad place.

When the Christians came along, they brought completely alien ideas that threatened to overturn everything the Romans believed about the family, because Christians had completely different assumptions about what it meant to be a person.

In Roman culture at the time of the early Church, the father had absolute control over every member of his family, including power over life and death.

Under the Roman Republic, a paterfamilias —the head of a household— could legally execute his son if he thought that the son deserved it. And the father alone determined whether the son deserved it.

In contrast, Christian teachings held that human life was sacred. The fact that God had created each individual meant that the father’s power was not absolute. “Honor your father and your mother,” yes, but that commandment is tempered by “You shall not kill.”

“You shall not kill” was an idea that had to be explained to educated Romans, who had no notion that human life was sacred just because it was human. When Christians were accused of being secret cannibals—for eating the flesh of Christ—Saint Athenagoras explained that Christians could never be murderers, because they refused even to kill an unborn child. He said: The same person could not regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being, and therefore an object of God’s care—and then kill it when it has passed into life. The same person could not refuse to expose an infant, because those who expose them are guilty of childmurder—and then agree to destroy it when it has been brought up.

Killing was a “normal” part of life in ancient Rome, an unsurprising final act in an afternoon’s entertainment at the circus. But Athenagoras, like the other Christian apologists of the second century, said that taking human life was opposed to Christian principle and could never be assimilated as 88

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“normal” in a Christian life.

These are not isolated cases of Christians harboring what were seen at the time as strange ideas. What was universally accepted in Greco-Roman paganism—abortion and infanticide—was universally rejected by Christianity.

Athenagoras was speaking for the whole Church. Abortion was condemned in the first century in the Christian manual called the Didache and in the Epistle of Barnabas; in the second century in the Apocalypse of Peter, and by Saint Justin Martyr, Saint Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian of Carthage, Minucius Felix in Italy and Hippolytus in Rome; and in the third century by Origen of Alexandria, Saint Cyprian of Carthage and many others. The condemnation has been consistent through time and universal in the Church—from Africa and Asia through all of Europe.

Culture of Life vs Culture of Death The Didache is the earliest surviving extra-biblical document, which begins with these words: “Two Ways there are, one of Life and one of Death, and there is a great difference between the Two Ways.” The Didache discusses abortion explicitly as characteristic of the “Way of Death.”

Around the year 155, Saint Justin Martyr wrote to the emperor: “We have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly born children … . For we would then be murderers.”

These were the strange ideas that Christians were forcing the Roman world to face for the first time—sticks of dynamite planted at the base of the Romans’ assumptions about the world. In a world that tolerated only the useful, Christians demanded protection for the most vulnerable and “useless” persons. Early Christians created the first truly tolerant, welcoming and all-inclusive society—with a remarkable social welfare system..

Christians not only tolerated the poor and weak, they loved them with a human affection. They saw the least members of the human family as images of God, as other Christs who must be welcomed, as angels requiring hospitality. They saw every human being as a person. A Church manual of the third century instructed the clergy: “Widows and orphans are to be revered like the altar.”

That’s what the third century Church proclaimed, and it’s what Christians believed. In the ancient world, widows and orphans were among the faceless poor. To Christians, they were like the Holy Eucharist.

The [Judaic] Law orders all the offspring to be brought up and forbids women either to cause abortion or to make away with the fetus; a woman convicted of this is regarded as an infanticide, because she destroys a soul and diminishes the race.

Josephus (37-100 AD)

What’s in a Name?

From such reverence for life came true social security, true stability and prosperity. And we have some very interesting evidence of the difference Christianity made in the lives of some individual children.

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Detail of a processional frieze on one of the exterior walls of Ara Pacis (Altar of Peace), which is on display inside the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome.

The Ara Pacis was a sacrificial altar presented, circa 9 BC, as a peace offering from the Roman Senate to Emperor Augustus. The various friezes show the Imperial family and Roman families in general in a positive light, to honor the emperor’s authority and bid for dynastic rule—and his pro-family policies, which the predominance of men and boys in the friezes ironically belies.

Romans continued to shirk marriage and raise few children, as they practiced abortion and infanticide especially on female newborns.

Not long ago, Italian archaeologists completed an exhaustive survey of inscriptions and graffiti in the Roman catacombs, including the names bestowed and taken by Christians. How many took biblical names? How many were named after early martyrs? How many Christian parents stuck with traditional Roman names?

An illuminating subsection of the survey covers “humiliating names or nicknames.” We learn some Christians chose to bear names such as Proiectus—names that mean “cast off ” or “thrown away like trash.” Others went through life with the Roman name Stercorius or the Greek Coprion.

Those names are hard to translate in polite company, but they are vulgar terms for human excrement. Why would Christians choose such names?

Those Romans were likely rescued as infants by Christians from the dung heap where Romans abandoned “defective” or female newborns. They had been exposed there, like trash, to die quickly from the elements or be attacked by the claws of scavenging beasts.

Proiectus, Stercorius, Coprion—all of these people were lucky to be alive, but as children they must have had to suffer the taunts of playmates, who were pleased to remind them of their lowly origins. Who’s your daddy? Your daddy is the dung heap. Your name is trash.

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Those who were rescued by Christians could, at the time of their baptism, choose any new name they wished: Matthew, Mark, Mary or Martha. Yet many of them chose to keep those insulting names. Saint Hilary, in the fourth century, names a Stercorius among his fellow bishops.

Historians believe that Christians kept their foul nicknames as an act of humility—or perhaps triumphant irony. These children who were dung in the eyes of imperial Rome knew they were precious in the sight of God. Having been created in the image of God, they were persons, with as much right to live as the richest senator in Rome.

A helpless child is a person. A blind widow is a person. A crippled slave is a person. This awareness was a revolutionary change that Christianity brought to the world, and all the other positive revolutions depend on this one.

The Best Aberration What were the other revolutions that Christianity made possible? How about the very idea of human equality? Human dignity. Human rights. How about the rights of women? The rights of children? These ideas are now universally accepted. If unobserved, at least they get lip service at the United Nations. They’re really a unique product of the Judeo-Christian tradition, as characteristically ours as the Christian rejection of abortion and infanticide.

And that is probably no accident. The same Gospel that teaches us to love the fetal child teaches us to love the poor, and for all the same reasons. We do not make exceptions to the rule of charity. We do not make exclusions.

Not long ago, Harvard University Press brought out a history of abortion

by John Riddle, titled Eve’s Herbs, which portrays the Christian era as an historical aberration—a break in the chain of “knowledge.” In every age, Riddle argues, every culture accepted abortion; only Christianity made it to seem shameful.

I agree. The Hittites, Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, Egyptians and Persians—all accepted abortion. Yet Christian society and culture did not.

Christianity’s opposition to abortion is an historical aberration, as are the ideas of human dignity and rights. Gradually, our ancestors in the faith cut loose the weight of all previous history. In three centuries, they managed to make abortion seem the outlandish thing, the unthinkable violation, a hallmark of barbarous cultures.

If our Christian ancestors could—with God’s help—overturn millennia of human custom and entrenched social dogma, we should certainly be hopeful about what we can do.

History should give us hope. ±

The moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; those who are in the shadows of life; the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Hubert Humphrey

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Film Commentary

The Power of Witness Taking on the Abortion Industry Christopher Collins, PhD, Assistant Professor of Theology, Program Chair of Theology, University of Mary

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he film “Unplanned” is a recent biopic of Abby Johnson, the youngest-ever director of a Planned Parenthood clinic, who committed the abortion corporation’s most heinous sin: she quit to become a pro-life spokesperson. For ardent pro-choicers, this is the ultimate horror movie. For pro-lifers, “Unplanned” is a story of courage and hope that looks forward to defeating the abortion industry—in which Planned Parenthood is the prime house of horrors—and harkens back to early Christianity. By the film’s end, prayer and vigil defeat Planned Parenthood (in Bryan, Texas), just as such witness led not merely to the end of the persecution of Christians in ancient Rome but to the conversion of the entire empire.

Opposite, the movie “Unplanned” is based on the book of the same title by Abby Johnson.

“Unplanned” was produced on a $6 million budget and opened on March 29, 2019. Despite media attempts to suppress the movie, it grossed over $19 million in 1,516 theaters worldwide.

Witness From the moment Johnson first arrives at the Planned Parenthood clinic, where she volunteers while still a university student, pro-life protesters are standing outside the iron fence around the facility. Most belong to 40 Days for Life, an organization that uses prayer and vigils to bear witness to the sanctity of life and to the violation of that sanctity in the clinic. The pro-lifers also invite women to talk—without guilt or blame—about alternatives to abortion.

The organization’s prime strategy is the 24-hour prayer vigil that lasts 40 days outside Planned Parenthood clinics.

At first, Johnson sees pro-lifers as an annoying obstacle to Planned Parenthood’s mission, which focuses, she believes, on improving women’s health and decreasing the number of abortions.

Interestingly, all the people in Johnson’s personal life—other than her first husband—are also witnesses: her parents and second husband. Just as the members of 40 Days for Life, they believe that abortion is morally wrong but stand by Johnson even when she becomes the clinic’s director. They hate the sin but love the sinner.

To witness is quiet and seems utterly impotent at first. Wisely, the directors of “Unplanned,” Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, avoid anything political or judicial, including any reference to overturning Roe v. Wade. Nor 93

Members of 40 Days for Life holding a prayer vigil outside the Planned Parenthood clinic in Bryan, TX. The vigil is held 24 hours a day for 40 days.

is there any discussion of legitimate exceptions, such as risks to the mother’s health. The focus, instead, remains solely on the long-term power of moral presence as the means of conversion.

POC & Other Rituals The film’s narrative arc portrays Johnson’s transformation from Planned Parenthood worker then executive, who sees what the organization has convinced her is true, to an independent woman who sees what is really going on. She becomes a witness to the truth.

One important inflection point occurs early in the film when an office worker jokes about entering the clinic’s POC room. “POC” stands, insensitively enough, for “Products of Conception.” An employee calls the room “Pieces of Children,” a rough jest that reveals the utterly brutal nature of that space. When Johnson, soon to become the clinic’s manager, strides into the POC room for the first time—tellingly, many employees seldom if ever see the procedures first-hand—the moorings of her personal life and career begin to shift.

In the POC room, Johnson is initiated into the inner sanctum of Planned Parenthood’s real business and must partake in the gruesome work. Since it is medically necessary to ensure that no physical trace of the baby’s body remains inside the mother, the staff lays out the body parts—limbs, organs, head—of the aborted child, who has ceased becoming a member of its family

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or society. Instead, the dismembered body parts of the newly sacrificed child are reassembled or, ironically, “re-membered” in a grossly inverted homage to reproduction within a place, again ironically, of ritual sterility.

Other ritualistic depictions of Planned Parenthood include the scene where Johnson recounts the second abortion she had as she worked there, while also stuck in an awful relationship with her first husband. She returns home, having picked up the drug cocktail that will cause an abortion in the proverbial comfort of her home. Her experience, however, is horrific.

Between intense cramping and bleeding, and the emotional toll incurred through the lies and unbelievable stonewalling from her colleagues about the severity of the abortifacient, Johnson begins to see there’s something wrong with the way her clinic talks about abortion.

At first, Johnson’s experience makes her into a transformative leader at Planned Parenthood with renewed ardor to care for women. The visual of Johnson passed out on her bathroom floor, strewn with blood splatter and pieces of fetal tissue, is surely what allows the censors to give the film the “R” rating, thus deliberately limiting the film’s exposure. But there is a profound truth in this rating. This is restricted knowledge; unholy things for the unholy.

Presciently, the audience too has been transformed but into witnesses to abortion’s sickening rites.

Distance & Loneliness This religious ritual imagery is not over the top, and upon first inspection, few will notice it. While the material isn’t delicate, the directors portray it with intentional nuance. At the spiritual level, they convey that abortion is not about people, as the principal agents, but about participation in demonic work. This point is stated in a gentle, unsophisticated manner that succeeds in neither dismissing the supernatural nor making it a central focus.

However, the film is not completely effective in integrating these either, since the connection between the supernatural and the natural is not clearly illustrated. Faith is articulated in a superficial, binary fashion: Either you have it or you don’t.

Whenever the film seems that it might veer into the intricacies of abortion as profoundly evil, the directors, aware of their inability to treat the complexities of the supernatural well, fold religious implications neatly into the characters’ experience. There are repeated juxtapositions of secular religious with traditional religious settings—for example, the walking across a Planned Parenthood parking lot (twice) versus walking down the aisle at Johnson’s two weddings. In each scene, there is a palpable sense of the definitive and immanent moment, together with accompaniment by a trusted father or

The greatest destroyer of peace is abortion because if a mother can kill her own child, what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me? There is nothing between.

Mother Teresa

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Abby Johnson (Ashley Bratcher) being held by her supportive second husband, Doug (Brooks Ryan).

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clinic worker. Yet in these depictions, loneliness highlights the crux of the abortion debate.

The emphasis of the film’s religious imagery is less on good or evil than on the psychological experience of the moment. The camera focuses on the spatiotemporal separation and distance rather than the presence of immensely real supernatural things. The emphasis is not on the vows that Johnson and her first husband make, nor on what happens to her upon entering Planned Parenthood for her first abortion. Instead, the camera accentuates the empty distance that must be walked down the aisle in Johnson’s first marriage or by women seeking abortions across the parking lot. The distance isn’t insurmountable, but rather the manifestation of psychological space, embodying the question, for example, of whether Johnson can really trust that her first husband will love her. Distance, sadly, prevailed.

The common theme is that while abortion is tied up in questions of eternal things, it is actively a by-product of disappointed loneliness: divine implications, yes, but more pressingly, interpersonal consequences wrought with psychic loneliness.

This turn to the eminently personal is a wise decision for the filmmakers. However, in portraying the humanity and drama of loneliness, the film falls short in that the supporting characters are too flat. This is illustrated most clearly in terms of the nascent heroes of the story, a pro-life married couple (Shawn and Marilisa) who protest daily outside the clinic.

Despite their importance, they are given no character development. Shawn and Marilisa have great faith, we are told, but it is a faith seemingly without costs, without struggles and, amazingly, without disappointment. Did Marilisa have an abortion, too, for example, and then go through a painful process of regret and seeking?

Instead, the protesters function as mere witnesses, more akin to angelic hosts than a group of people or even a church congregation. Still, their role is pivotal. Without Shawn’s and Marilisa’s ever-present witness, Johnson could easily dismiss their concerns as mere therapeutic self-com-

forting expressions of faith. There is no doubt about their sincerity, but their faith is otherworldly, making it less interesting and their characters less authentic or engaging.

It seems the film’s directors want to tell a story that is supernatural but not kooky. In that, they succeed. The complex layering of supernatural and human themes is on target. The directors are well-intentioned in trying to convey the depth of the faith that drives the pro-life characters, but the audience cannot clearly see the dynamics, and therefore the drama, of that faith.

Witness & Clear Perception The filmmakers are prudent not to make Johnson’s new understanding of abortion too much of a religious awakening, which non-believers can easily dismiss. Johnson’s conversion doesn’t flow from an encounter with Jesus but from witnessing a 13-week-old fetus fighting for its life in the womb before being suctioned out of its mother’s uterus. The fetus clearly seems to sense the presence of the doctor’s probe and moves away. Just as clearly, Johnson realizes that what Planned Parenthood told her and what she had been telling pregnant women—that the fetus wouldn’t feel anything during the procedure—is a complete lie.

The medical consensus is that the fetus doesn’t feel pain until about 26 weeks of gestation. However, reflexive responses can occur much earlier. What Abby sees is a living person, regardless of the level of neuroanatomical development.

Thankfully, the pain criterion for permissibility of life termination of fetuses is not applied to born patients who are under general anesthesia, in a coma or rendered unconscious.

The directors clearly want faith to be the conclusion rather than the driver of the film’s action, so they bury faith’s role. Johnson, her parents and family are outwardly religious.

At the movie’s outset, Johnson goes to church weekly and, in measurable ways, is a decent Christian, even though she works to provide abortions for thousands of women a year.

Johnson is versed in Christian thinking but has no real experience with the faith she sees living in Shawn and Marilisa outside the clinic. Moralizing Christianity is not a problem for her, as she can moralize right back with the language of women’s rights. But faith as

Marilisa (Emma Elle Roberts) and Shawn (Jared Lotz) pray over fetal remains, which are shipped in 55-gallon plastic barrels for disposal as medical waste.

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Above, the critical scene in which Abby sees a 13-week-old fetus fighting for its life as a probe enters the womb and then suctions the fetus completely out of the uterus, ripping it apart.

Right, Abby Johnson, holding the Employee of the Year Award she just won, being berated

by Cheryl (Robia Scott), her superior at Planned Parenthood, for questioning the directive to increase the number of abortions at all clinics. “Non-profit,” Cheryl says angrily, “is a tax status, not a business model.”

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an abiding friendship with and understanding of God, a faith that informs every aspect of one’s life? Johnson is both perplexed and attracted by the abundant faith of the pro-life protesters.

The problem is that the audience is also left as perplexed about the nature of the protesters’ faith. It is presented as worthy of desire, though not worthy of complex questions or challenges. One either has the absolute, innocent faith of Shawn and Marilisa, or one has faith in Planned Parenthood.

In reality, Johnson as clinic manager and the other Planned Parenthood employees, like many Americans, have faith in the contemporary notions of freedom that allow women to transform their living children into mere material detritus. But, like most Americans, they don’t only have this faith.

They also continue to believe in traditional conceptions of human worth and even the Divine, all of which contradict abortion’s rationale.

In the film’s depiction of Johnson, this conflict between secular progressive and traditional faiths drives her struggles. Rather than philosophical or theological arguments illustrating this clash of worldviews, Johnson’s transformation is mostly a matter of shedding the ideological blinders put on by mainstream culture (which predominates at most educational institutions, media outlets, major corporations and non-profit organizations) and Planned Parenthood. Once Johnson can clearly see abortion for what it really is and Planned Parenthood for the deceitful, greedy and murderous organization that it is, no argument or enticement could possibly blur that perception. There is nowhere for her to go but with the pro-lifers—other than embracing outright evil.

From the film’s beginning, this is what the pro-lifers and Johnson’s family members see, and they can only bear patient witness until she awakens.

This response to abortion has produced impressive results. According to 40 Days for Life’s website, their vigils and witness have served to close 104 abortion centers, to save 16,004 lives and to convince 191 abortion workers to leave the industry nationwide.

The difference between killing unborn children and killing your neighbor may only be a distinction in time.

Otto Lang, Canadian Minister of Justice

From Russia with Questions In 1973, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision, legalizing abortion nationwide, American culture had already slid far from its traditional roots. Still, the decision marked a major turning point. Abortion did become a safer procedure—for the mother. But when the state sanctioned killing babies in the womb—60 million over the last 46 years—what moral anchor remains?

Last year, on a study trip abroad, I traveled to Russia, which has been heading culturally in the opposite direction. The Russian Revolution imposed communism—totalitarian, materialistic atheism—on its people.

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Russian Army cadets walk across Red Square in front of St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square next to the Kremlin in Moscow on March 27, 2009. iStock photo.

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Without traditional Orthodox Christianity as its social foundation, the Soviet Union had no moral issue liquidating millions of its people and sending millions more to the gulags. Not surprisingly, since human life has no intrinsic worth in such a system, the Soviets were the first to legalize abortion in 1920—and for all circumstances at no monetary cost.

In 1964, the abortion rate throughout the Soviet Empire was 169 per 1,000 women—the highest in the world for decades. The rate declined with the fall of the Soviet Union to 19 per 1,000 women today. This is still higher than the American rate (13.5 per 1,000 women) and not exactly evidence for a thriving culture of life, but the decline marks a crucial turnaround. Not coincidentally, this parallels an attempt to return to the Orthodox faith that shaped the Russian soul for centuries.

The Kremlin is the great medieval fortress at the center of Moscow, which, like many Eastern European castles, once stood replete with Christian monasteries and cathedrals. In the 20th century, the Kremlin was adorned with Soviet gold stars over every tower. The Soviets tolerated St. Basil’s Cathedral at the center of Red Square, but only as a museum of religious artifact. The Soviets, however, couldn’t tolerate the rich iconography adorning the Kremlin Wall’s gates, which recalled the lived faith that enveloped and infused the Russian people. Entering and exiting the Kremlin, everyone recognized who God is and the role that He played in Christianizing the people. For centuries, to be Russian was to be Russian Orthodox, and that tautology was the problem for the Soviets. They had to break the faith, but not the people. Thus, the icons had to be shrouded.

Now, to recover authentic Russian culture, the government has begun removing the whitewash the Bolsheviks used to cover Christian icons.

Whether Russian society will be successful in reviving Orthodox Christianity is an open question. Seeing churches there filled mostly by young people was edifying. However, the country has a long way to go regarding free speech, free markets and other components of a flourishing, humane society.

Meanwhile in the U.S., the political factions supporting unrestricted abortion also tend to push for limitations to free speech, sexual libertinism and, contradictorily, the end of sexuality altogether in transgenderism, and now the complete crushing of the human spirit in full-blown socialism.

Is this really the world we want to create? Such a society is not the one the Founding Fathers envisioned. In fact, to avoid any form of state oppression, they formulated a life-affirming basis for our laws and institutions in the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Roe v. Wade made the right to life, upon which the others depend, highly alienable. If an innocent, defenseless child in the womb is merely a lump of cells that can be trashed at will or whim, does it not follow that we all are?

The “My Body, My Business” defense, as placards at pro-choice rallies read, has validity until the moment of conception. Then there are two lives, two bodies. In a recent survey, 96 percent of 5,337 American biologists affirmed that life begins at conception. That 85 percent of these scientists also identify as pro-choice speaks to the cognitive dissonance as the heart of the abortion debate.

Johnson lived that contradiction until she saw what abortion truly is. The recent Guttmacher Institute’s Abortion Incidence and Service Availability Report seemed to indicate that the pro-life movement is gaining ground.

From 2014 to 2017, there was a 7 percent drop in elective abortions to the lowest level since 1973. However, the causes are unclear, and there are disturbing trends, including that 70 percent of adults under 30 years old support abortion in all or most situations, To counter this, pro-life organizations provide strategies—which need constant updates for digital generations. Pharmaceutical companies are now pushing for the legalization of abortion pills online. Already, 39 percent of abortions are chemically induced. The ability to “do it yourself ” at home via an online order greatly increases abortion’s availability and further dehumanizes and isolates women.

Happily, “Unplanned” enjoyed moderate box office success that was truly phenomenal considering the enormous suppression efforts by the mainstream media and on social media. Then, without any promotion or ads, the “Unplanned” DVD became Amazon’s top bestseller even before release.

Now, that was unplanned. ±

What has made this nation great?

Not its heroes but its households.

Sarah J. Hale

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Contributors u Jerry Anderson is the Art Director at the University of Mary. He earned a Bachelor of University Studies from North Dakota State University and a BS in Design from Minnesota State University Moorhead. Anderson has published photos in many publications, including the New York Times, US News & World Report and Newsweek. He has also published photos in numerous books, including Every Place with a Name (State Historical Society of North Dakota, 1976) and North Dakota 24/7 (Penguin Random House, 2003). u Mike Aquilina is the Executive Vice President and a trustee of the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology, a Roman Catholic research center based in Steubenville, Ohio. He is also a contributing editor for Angelus Magazine. Aquilina has authored more than 50 books, many involving Church history and especially patristics, the study of early Church Fathers. His books include A History of the Church in 100 Objects and How the Choir Converted the World: Through Hymns, With Hymns, and In Hymns. Aquilina’s articles and essays have appeared in numerous magazines, including First Things, Touchstone, Crisis and National Catholic Register. In recent years, Aquilina has hosted 11 television series on the Eternal Word Television Network (ETWN) and hosted feature documentaries on St. Perpetua and St. Augustine. He is a frequent guest commentator on Relevant Radio and EWTN Radio. u Christopher Collins, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Theology and Chair of the Theology Program at the 102 3 6 0

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University of Mary. Collins earned a BS in biology and an AB in philosophy from the College of Charleston. He then completed an MA in Theology and PhD in Moral Theology at Ave Maria University, where he wrote his dissertation on St. Augustine’s understanding of virtue.

Collins serves as the faculty advisor for Collegians for Life at the University of Mary. Both inside and outside the classroom, he seeks ways to advocate for the defense of life and marriage. Collins wrote a chapter, titled “Psalm 79:8 and St. Augustine’s Vision of Education,” in Wisdom and the Renewal of Catholic Theology: Essays in Honor of Matthew L. Lamb, foreword by Michael Novak, edited by Thomas P. Harmon and Roger W. Nutt, published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. u Ivan Jankovic, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Mary. He earned a BA in Philosophy at the University of Belgrade and a PhD in Political Economy at Simon Fraser University. Jankovic’s writings focus on free market economics, political theory, and American history and culture. His articles have appeared in many prestigious economic and political journals, including the American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Journal des Économistes et des Études Humaines, and American Political Thought. In January 2019, Jankovic’s book, The American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty: How Americans Resisted Modern State, 1765-1850, was published by Palgrave Macmillan. u Elizabeth Lev, PhD, is a best-selling author and art historian who lives and works in Rome, Italy. She earned a BA at the University of Chicago and

a PhD in Art History at the University of Bologna. In 2001, Lev became a licensed tour guide in Rome and began teaching art history at Duquesne University’s Rome campus, where she is still a faculty member. Lev is also on the faculty of the Pontifical University of the Angelicum in Rome and Christendom College. Lev has authored three books, including the Amazon bestseller, How Catholic Art Saved the Faith: The Triumph of Beauty and Truth in Counter-Reformation Art. Lev has also written articles for many publications, including First Things, Inside the Vatican Magazine and a regular series of articles for Aleteia.org. As well, Lev is a sought-after public speaker who has presented a TED talk on “The Unheard Story of the Sistine Chapel” and has appeared on many television and radio interviews, from ABC’s Nightline to the Today Show. She was featured in the series “Museum Secrets” on History Television Canada and was the host of “Catholic Canvas,” a 10-part television series on the art of the Vatican Museums, which aired on EWTN TV. u Patrick J. McCloskey is the Director of Research and Publications at the University of Mary and serves as the editor-in-chief of 360 Review Magazine. He earned a BA in Philosophy from Carleton University and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University. McCloskey has written for many publications, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, National Post and City Journal. He served as the press secretary for the Minister of Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. His books include Open Secrets of Success: The Gary Tharaldson Story and Frank’s Extra Mile: A Gentleman’s

Story, published by the University of Mary; and The Street Stops Here: A Year at a Catholic High School in Harlem, published by the University of California Press. u Mark Mills is a Manhattan Institute Senior Fellow, a Faculty Fellow in the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University and a partner at Cottonwood Venture Partners, a boutique venture fund focused on digital oilfield technologies. He writes a tech column for Forbes and co-authored a book titled, The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, 2006). Mills has written for numerous publications, including City Journal, The Wall Street Journal and New York Times Magazine.

Early in Mills’ career, he was an experimental physicist and development engineer in the fields of microprocessors, fiber optics and missile guidance. Mills was also a partner at a venture fund and co-authored a tech investment newsletter. Mills served in the White House Science Office under President Ronald Reagan. u William J. Olson, PhD, is a retired distinguished professor, editor and high-ranking public servant with expertise in international security, intelligence, Middle Eastern history and organized crime. He earned a BA in History and a PhD in Middle Eastern History at the University of Texas. Olson was a professor at the Near East and South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University working with senior military and civilian officials from North Africa, the Middle East, and South and Southwest Asia on long-term civil-military relations, strategic planning and

combating transnational threats. Olson served as a senior analyst on Southwest Asia at the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College, dealing with Iran, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf. He served as Deputy Assistant Secretary (acting) for Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) in the Department of Defense, where his office had primary oversight of LIC-related policy, dealing with terrorism, insurgency and organized crime. Olson was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State in the Bureau of International Narcotics Matters at the Department of State.

He then served as the staff director for a U.S. Senate select committee on International Narcotics Control.

Olson’s final position was Distinguished Professor for International Security Studies, Chairman of the Department of Strategic Studies at the College of International Security Affairs, National Defense University. During his career, Olson founded the Small Wars and Insurgencies Journal and cofounded the Journal of Transnational Organized Crime. u Barbara Stuart earned a BA in English from the University of North Dakota in 2008 and a MA in Theological Studies from the Notre Dame Graduate School of Christendom College in 2018.

She worked as the Center Director of FirstChoice Clinic-West from 2010 to 2013, establishing it as a satellite pregnancy resource center in Bismarck.

Currently, she works as a social aide for a student on the Autism spectrum, studies ancient Greek and homeschools her children. u Joseph Stuart, PhD, is an Associate Professor of History and Catholic

Studies at the University of Mary. He earned a BA in Humanities from the Franciscan University of Steubenville, an AAS in Surveying Technology from Ferris State University, an MLitt in Modern History from the University of St. Andrews and a PhD in Modern Intellectual History from the University of Edinburgh. Dr. Stuart has published articles in numerous academic publications, including The Newman Rambler and Logos. u Springs Toledo is an author and award-winning essayist. He earned a BS in Criminal Justice and an MS in Criminology from Northeastern University. He spent 20 years working with juvenile offenders and at-risk youth and was a unit director in a secure behavioral treatment program for violent and sexual offenders at the Justice Resource Institute. He also worked as a behavioral specialist in Massachusetts public schools. Toledo is the author of an historical literary non-fiction book, titled The Hanging of Old Brown: A Story of Slaves, Statesmen and Redemption (2002). Toledo has also written four literary non-fiction books about boxing: Smokestack Lightning: Harry Greb, 1919 (2019), Murderers’ Row (2017), In the Cheap Seats (2016), and The Gods of War (2014). A respected boxing historian, he has appeared in “Mysteries at the Monument” on the Travel Channel and in the documentary “I Am Duran” (2019). Toledo has written articles for numerous magazines and websites, including Salon, City Journal, Boxing News and The Sweet Science. Toledo has been honored 35 times by the Boxing Writers Association of America, including six annual first-place awards.

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The University of Mary is a private, co-educational Catholic university that welcomes students of all faiths and backgrounds. The university has its origins in the St. Alexius College of Nursing, opened by Benedictine Sisters in 1915. In 1947, these Sisters established Annunciation Priory in Bismarck, a monastic community independent of the original motherhouse in St. Joseph, Minnesota. Meanwhile, the nursing college evolved into a two-year women’s junior college, and in 1959, the Sisters founded Mary College as a four-year, degree-granting institution. Full university status was achieved in 1986. The University of Mary has been accredited by the Higher Learning Commission of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools since 1968, and continues under the sponsorship of the Benedictine Sisters of Annunciation Monastery.

Since its beginning, the University of Mary has sought to respond to the needs of people in this region and beyond. Enrollment grew quickly from 69 students to more than 3,000 students today. The university offers 57 undergraduate majors, 12 master’s degree programs and four doctoral degrees. Classes are conducted at the main campus and other facilities in Bismarck; online; at satellite locations in Arizona, Montana, Kansas and North Dakota; and at campuses in Arequipa, Peru and Rome, Italy.

The University of Mary educates the whole student for a full life, characterized by moral courage and leadership in chosen professions and service to the community. Every aspect of academic and social life is infused with the Benedictine values of community, hospitality, moderation, prayer, respect for persons, and service.

Already one of the most affordable, high-quality private universities in the nation, the University of Mary now offers “Year-Round Campus,” a unique college-career option that enables students to earn a bachelor’s degree in just 2.6 years and a master’s degree in four years. This greatly reduces costs and allows students to begin their careers much sooner. The University of Mary offers exceptional educational value, as well as outstanding scholarship and financial aid opportunities. Within six months of graduation, 95 percent of graduates are working or pursuing additional education.

Student athletes at the University of Mary participate in 17 varsity sports in NCAA Division II. Go Marauders!

An uncompleted symbol of a master’s genius One of Leonardo da Vinci’s drawing of the

models and inventing new techniques for its

Sforza Monument Horse (1480s), which he

production. The scale and elegance of the

intended as a 24-foot-high bronze equestrian

project would have memorialized da Vinci’s

monument, dedicated to Francisco Sforza, the

creative genius more than the duke’s stature.

Duke of Milan. Da Vinci worked intensively for

However, Sforza fell from power in 1499, and

17 years designing the horse, making clay

regrettably the sculpture was never cast.

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