Quotes show comments in past were as nasty as today's

"Distory,"

by Robert Schnakenberg

Don't believe the voices clamoring about our 21st-century society being exceptionally rude and willing to belittle others more virulently than ever.

"Distory" proves that people -- especially some in high office -- have been saying ugly things about the rest of God's children for a good long time.

When Charles the Fifth led the Holy Roman Empire, he slammed an entire country: "I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my horse."

Nineteenth-century Speaker of the U.S. House of Representative Thomas Reed blasted congressmen of his time with the cutting remark, "They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge."

And author Charles Dickens once called Henry VIII "a blot of blood and grease upon the history of England."

The whole book is like that, a series of quotations by individuals who have taken the kidgloves off and vented about another.

Insults through the years

Because the quotes are organized into chapters of insults by and about a) Americans, b) Brits, c) military figures, d) other nations and e) miscellaneous, and because they are listed chronologically, "Distory" can claim to teach us a bit of history as well.

Robert Schnakenberg subtitles this St. Martin's Press work "A Treasury of Historical Insults."

"Treasury" might not be the choice of nouns that polite folks would have used. In fact, some of the remarks are clever and witty. Others plain mean and graceless.

But I found it valuable to read the American chapter from beginning to end. It was a refresher course in history -- and a mostly witty one at that. I learned, too, what some of the great names in history felt about others of their time, perspectives that weren't in my elementary or high school history books.

Guess about whom pamphleteer Tom Paine -- the lauded author of "Common Sense" -- called "treacherous in private friendship . . . and a hypocrite in public life"?

Would you believe George Washington?

John Quincy Adams termed Andrew Jackson "a barbarian who cannot write a sentence of grammar and can hardly spell his own name."

General George McClellan called Abraham Lincoln "nothing more than a well-meaning baboon."

Teddy Roosevelt said that William McKinley "has a chocolate eclair backbone."

Press no shrinking violets

Media are often accused of being much more mean than their predecessors, but Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken was as nasty as they get when it comes to insults. He wrote this about Franklin D. Roosevelt:

"If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday."

Journalist Hunter S. Thompson at the end of the 20th century had a poison pen as well. Thompson on Richard Nixon:

"He was a foul caricature of himself, a man with no soul, no inner convictions, with the integrity of a hyena and the style of a poison toad."

And Gerald Ford said, "Jimmy Carter wants to speak loudly and carry a fly swatter."

Brits: Masters of the 'craft'

Our friends across the pond, of course, have made political insults a science. Politico John Bright in the 19th century said of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli: "He is a self-made man and worships his creator."

Disraeli came back with this about the man who was both his predecessor and his successor, William Gladstone: "If Gladstone fell into the Thames, it would be a misfortune. But if someone pulled him out, it would be a calamity."

My favorite quotations, however, are this clever bit of repartee between playwright George Bernard Shaw and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Shaw: "I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play, bring a friend -- if you have one." Churchill replied: "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second -- if there is one." -- bz

Dust Bowl history makes sad era a reality show

"The Worst Hard Time,"
by Timothy Egan

You may have seen photos of the Dust Bowl, but read Timothy Egan's comprehensive history and you can taste the dirt and feel the wind blast against your skin.

Egan's "The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl," paints such a vivid portrait of those 1930s years of dry, violent storms that you'll find yourself coughing and swallowing hard just imagining what it must have been like when nature punished farmers for turning millions of acres of grassland into billowing towers of dust, dirt and sand.

Imagine how hard times must have been that people in the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and southwestern Colorado would be driven to eat pickled tumbleweed to survive.

Imagine going three years without a paycheck.

Imagine your small town newspaper editor describing as "sissies" those who -- after losing all the top soil from their land, not having anything to feed their cattle, watching their children, spouses and relatives die from "dust pneumonia" -- didn't have the "courage" to stick out the hard times.

Through interviews with people who lived through the 1930s in the Dust Bowl counties and terrific research, including amazing diary entries from a farmer who lost everything, Egan helps his readers know this little-known era of American history.

It's a dense work, filled with information, especially information about real people - how they felt, how they cried, how they survived.

It's an honest history, too, one not afraid to acknowledge both the failed recovery programs of the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and the conservation-minded ones that began to work to revive the land in places.

Whether or not you believe that the planet faces climate change today, this is a book that should help everyone understand how connected humanity is to the soil. The consequences of not valuing the soil result in tragedies like the Dust Bowl -- something no one who reads this book would ever want to go through. -- bz

From Shakespeare's quill to our lips

"Shakespeare: The World as Stage,"
by Bill Bryson

William Shakespeare's birth was recorded in Latin, but he dies in English.

It's a factoid that summarizes well the impact that playwright and poet Will Shakespeare had on his native tongue -- and it's been a lasting impact. More than 400 years later; English speakers around the globe use -- without knowing their source -- words and phrases created by the Bard of Avon.

If you've ever said, one fell swoop, vanish into thin air, be in a pickle, cold comfort, foul play, tower of strength, you've been quoting Shakespeare.

Bill Bryson points to a dozen or so words first found in Shakespeare, too, but he digs up little known facts about Shakespeare the man, not just the literary figure, to keep the interest of any reader, not just wordsmiths.

Bryson posits, for example, that Shakespeare exploited the defeat of the Spanish Armada (1586), leveraging renewed British patriotism to stage his history plays to the audiences of the day.

Those audiences were working people primarily, evidence that Will knew how to write for the masses. Although late 16th century laborers were poor, they found Shakespeare's plays worth spending a pence or two to get into the Globe Theater for a "groundling" spot.

A couple times throughout the book there references to Shakespeare's religion. Was he Catholic? Not enough evidence to say one way or the other, Bryson concludes, but what his research offers is insight into the anti-Catholic prejudice of the day.

Catholics were seen as such a threat to the government after the failed "Powder Treason" of 1604, where 36 barrels of gunpowder were found in a cellar beneath Westminster Palace and one Guy Fawkes waiting for the signeal to light the fuse. Bryson reports, "The reaction against Catholics was swift and decisive. They were barred from key professions and, for a time, not permitted to travel more than five miles from home. A law was even proposed to make them wear striking and preposterous hats, for ease of identification, but it was never enacted."

There's much, much more about who Shakespeare knew, who influenced his work, the royalty who supported him and his players, and plenty of investigation into the literary question that continues through the centuries: Did Shakespeare really write everything attributed to Shakespeare?

You aren't likely to be interested in the details that Bryson goes into, but he's such a good writer even those parts go quickly in this brief, 199-page book. Bryson makes even Will's will interesting reading. -- bz

We all need to know this story of going from slavery to freedom

"I've Got a Home in Glory Land: The Lost Tale of The Underground Railroad"
by Karolyn Smardz Frost

What would it have been like to be a slave?

And what kind of courage did a slave have to have to risk escaping to freedom?

Archeologist and historian Karolyn Smardz Frost dug up some facts and artifacts about a Black couple named Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, and she puts together the scraps of her finds and tedious research to answer those questions and more in “I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land.”
This is a great read, one with dramatic turns that keep you turning pages.

And it’s an educational read as well.

If your American History classes brushed by the era of the Underground Railroad in a hurry to concentrated on the U.S. Civil War, “Glory Land” will fill in the missing gap.
It’s a part of history every North American should know.

And I say North America because, for the people Frost traces back to their one-time slave state of Kentucky, “Glory Land” is Canada.

More we were never taught
That was news to me. I thought the end of the Underground Railroad was just somewhere north of the Mason-Dixon Line. In fact, a line of the series of safe houses and sanctuaries for fugitive slaves ran up into Detroit and across the Detroit River to what was then Upper Canada, now Ontario.

How laws in the United States worked against slaves who tried to escape their bondage was news to me, too.

Of course in school we learned about the Dred Scott Decision, the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that protected the rights of slave owners. But legalisms that cooperated with the slave faction abounded. When the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 opened up the Midwest for settlement, its article six provided that runaway slaves be returned to their owners.


As early as 1793 there was even a federal law, the Fugitive Slave Law, that required slaves to be returned to their masters.

Canada deserves some props
The Canadians don’t come off pure as the driven snow with regard to racial bias, but their protection of the right of freedom for any British subject saved the day for the Thornton and Lucie Blackburn and thousands of other former slaves who fled the cruelty and inhumanity of the slave system.

Theirs is a story all should know.

And the refresher course on what slave owners did – how they treated other human beings – is a lesson Americans should never forget. – bz