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Stories from the American Journey: Men and Women Whose Lives and Deeds Express the Ideals of a Nation – A New Book by Karl Fredrickson

By Karl Fredrickson

This is a book of my favorite stories from forty years in the classroom, teaching history to eighth through twelfth graders. I am glad to be able to offer them to those who bring history to the next generation of Waldorf students.

I feel deep gratitude for having had the opportunity to share in the life of this great Waldorf community. My thanks go to all of you who carry on this work.

There are some 80 stories in this book. Feel free to open to any place within these 525 pages and dive in. They will take you to many famous people and events, but also to others less well known.

I wrote them with teachers in mind, but they may also be enjoyed by students, parents and the general public. And you will find more history resources on the website.

I began my teaching career keenly aware of the deeply troubling sides of our history. I soon discovered that it is often in those darkest moments, when injustice raises its head or when the nation is in crisis, where we find the best examples of heroic action, where the human spirit shines most brightly.

These stories are meant to help us reflect on the ideals we have come to live by, to bring us closer to the American spirit. As I wrote them, I kept coming back to several key themes.

Liberty

This is a theme that leaps out to us right from the opening story of the Minnesota Liberators, those 38 all but forgotten Civil War soldiers who stood up to their officers—at the threat of court-martial—to defend a family that was on its way to being sold in the slave markets of Kentucky.

We shift then to much earlier times, back in the 1630s, when Roger Williams risked his life to stand up for the right of all people to live and speak according to their conscience. From there we go to William Penn and his “Holy Experiment” of Pennsylvania, followed by Peter Zenger’s stand for freedom of the press.

As we come to the American Revolution, we meet such patriots as John Adams and George Washington, but we can also see it through the eyes of Tom Paine from Britain, who saw it as “the birthday of a new world,” and the Marquis de Lafayette, who defied the king of France to fight at the side of the colonists, attracted by the “new breeze of freedom,” writing that “Such a glorious cause had never before rallied the attention of mankind.”

The new nation gave birth to many new impulses towards liberty. We meet Elizabeth Cady Stanton and her good friend, Susan B. Anthony, who traveled thousands of miles over six decades on behalf of gaining more rights for women.

Looming over the new nation was the dark shadow of slavery, and those early decades of the 19th century bring us the voices of abolition, including Frederick Douglass and Harriet Beecher Stowe, along with the quiet heroism of Harriet Tubman.

Over my four decades in Waldorf classrooms, I often turned to such stories for inspiration. Much of the center of the book tells the story of slavery, abolitionism, the Civil War, and how the intertwining lives of Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass helped bring the nation past “the dogmas of the quiet past” to “a new birth of freedom.”

It would be a full century before the whole country could embrace this vision of liberty, and the book culminates with a long presentation of the Civil Rights Movement, beginning with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, followed by the nine courageous students who integrated Little Rock Central High School, and then those courageous children of Birmingham who walked out of the doors of a church to face a phalanx of Sheriff Bull Connor’s police.

Their remarkable stories shine a bright light both on the moral challenges that have faced the people of this nation and the determination to act out of our highest ideals.

Moral Awakening

As a second, and very related theme, we consider some people who stood up for others, even when it meant rejection from the people they loved or a threat to their own well-being.

Imagine, for instance, that you are growing up in a world of stability, of prosperity, a world where everyone thinks alike and where this unanimity of feeling brings a comforting sense of belonging and security. And then something in you flips. You see anew and act anew, and in the process are driven—or drive yourself—out of the only world you have known.

That is what happened to Sarah and Angelina Grimke. Growing up in the privileged world of a Southern plantation, they lived amidst a society where no one ever questioned slavery or challenged the dehumanization—the physical and emotional abuses—on which it was based.

And so it was a shock to their family when they left it all behind, traveled to Pennsylvania, and embarked on a tour of 67 cities, telling 40,000 people of the horrors that they had seen. The stories they told of the brutal punishments they had seen, the daily humiliations, the breakup of families, made it clear that slavery degraded the soul of the slaveholder, not just the human beings who were enslaved.

Moral awakening takes many forms. There is the remarkable Dorothea Dix, lying as an invalid in her Boston apartment—until she learned of the frightful conditions which the insane had to endure, locked in prisons across the state of Massachusetts.

Up she rose, setting off on a journey through scores of towns, sometimes by carriage, sometimes by horseback, often on foot down muddy lanes, visiting one prison after another, recording what she saw and then describing it in vivid terms to the Massachusetts legislature: “Insane persons confined in cages, closets, cellars, stalls, pens! Chained, naked, beaten with rods, and lashed into obedience.”

Few stories are more inspiring than that of this remarkable woman, whose inner fire took her on a 10,000 mile journey through a dozen states, fundamentally changing the way insanity was treated in the nation.

Such stories fascinated and inspired Americans. There was Lillian Wald, who gave up her comfortable way of life to move in with the poorest of the poor in Lower Manhattan, serving their medical needs and developing the Visiting Nurse Service.

There was the journalist Jacob Riis, who with his camera and pen began a campaign to expose the horrible conditions of the slums. And sometimes it took a horrendous tragedy, such as the fire at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory that took 144 lives, to stir the conscience of the nation.

The work of such Americans reveals one of the important principles of our American heritage: that truly effective change first arises from the passion of an individual or group of people who see a wrong and set out to make it right.

And what greater wrong is there than failing to provide the human spirit—whether in a person who suffers from insanity or someone trapped in a dismal tenement—with a welcoming home on the earth, a place where one can live a life of meaning and dignity?

The Creative Spirit of Enterprise

At the heart of such moral awakenings is the belief that every individual deserves a chance to freely unfold his or her highest capacities. One form this takes is the unleashing of creativity.

We see it in Benjamin Franklin, a man so creative that his fame spread throughout not only the colonies but Europe, as well. His experiments with electricity had led to the lightning rod, and his inventions included bifocals and the first efficient wood-burning stove.

Students of eighth and ninth grades love to meet those who bring their ideas to fruition, often in the face of great challenges.

One of my favorites is Frederic Tudor, the son of a prominent Boston banker who decided to fill ships with ice from New England lakes and send them down to the Caribbean. People laughed at the idea. It would never work. Yet, despite bankruptcy and a time in debtor’s prison, he at last managed to make it work, bringing ice all the way to India, where having an ice-cold refreshment became a passion.

Fresh thinking was a way of life for Thomas Alva Edison. Arising out of poverty in Michigan, with little formal education, he embarked on a path of self-development. With his earnings as a telegrapher he purchased Faraday’s Experimental Researches and spent months following along with the hundreds of experiments it contained; through electricity, he believed, he could transform the world.

By age 23 he had earned enough to announce his retirement from business—and plunge into life as an inventor. The result was his workshop in Menlo Park, New Jersey, where he gathered fellow tinkerers, along with chemists, machinists, and glassblowers. In the coming years there flowed from his “Invention Factory” hundreds of new inventions—most famously the lightbulb, the power plant, the phonograph and motion pictures.

No single invention inspired Americans more, however, than the airplane. In December 1903 many thousands of people watched as an “aerodrome” was launched out over the Potomac River, only to crash into the water. What no one knew was that, not far south, in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, two obscure bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio were attempting a flight of their own.

The “aerodrome” had been paid for by massive amounts of government money, but the Wright Brothers had nothing but the few dollars they had saved from their workshop. The problems they faced seemed at times insurmountable—finding the right shape for wings, controlling them in the wind, managing turns, designing a propeller, building a light-weight engine. It is an astonishing story of sheer ingenuity and determination.

Moral Initiative

The American spirit of invention was all about collaboration…..we might refer to it as reimagining together. But what if we take this spirit of reimagining and focus it directly on the needs of those who are poor and disadvantaged? The result is that special breed of American, the social entrepreneur.

Consider, for instance, Jane Addams. Born in 1860, she entered medical school, only to have to leave due to ill-health. Now 23 years of age, she suffered from depression. Her stepmother urged her to join her on a trip to Europe.

During those two years of travel, she met many other young American women like herself. Theirs was a remarkable generation, the first large group of women to become college-educated. What surprised Addams, though, was that they, too, suffered from depression.

Their parents gave them every pleasure and freedom from care, but it left them “pitifully miserable.” Despite their college education and their European travels, “their uselessness hangs about them heavily.” What was there to do?

Jane Addams returned to Chicago and found a mansion in the midst of one of the city’s poorest neighborhoods, overflowing with recent immigrants: Italians, Bohemians, Irish, Germans and Russian Jews.

The filthy streets were lined by tenements with no indoor plumbing. Together with her friend, Ellen Starr, she cleaned the trash and grime from the mansion, and got their friends and family to donate furniture. In the afternoons they would sit on the front porch, greeting passersby and inviting the ladies to come in for a cup of tea. Bring your children, she told them. So was Hull House born.

Over the following years there emerged a remarkable feature of the Chicago landscape—a “settlement house” where thousands of immigrants could come together to receive help finding homes and work, learning English, getting legal help, a place where the wealthy Chicagoans would come to help and join them in fellowship.

Hull House became a beehive of activity, with a special focus on the needs of the children. Jane Addams spoke all over Chicago, inspiring people to recognize that “the good we procure for ourselves is precarious and uncertain, is floating in mid-air, until it is secured for all of us and incorporated into our common life.”

For Jane Addams it was all about helping people become strong, capable, caring individuals—in short, character-building. And no one took this up with greater passion than Booker T. Washington.

Booker Taliaferro Washington had been born into slavery in Virginia in the spring of 1856. He and his siblings never knew their father and saw their mother only for a few moments in the early morning before her work began. The children slept on rags on a dirt floor and for food received only a piece of bread here and a scrap of meat there.

The end of the Civil War brought freedom, so the family moved to Malden, West Virginia, where from an early age Washington was sent to work in the salt and coal mines. But with his mother’s support he set himself to learned to read and write, ultimately managing to gain admittance to Hampton College in Virginia.

This was a new world, with regular meals, laid out on a tablecloth. He was introduced to clean bedsheets, to the bathtub and the toothbrush.

Everything was a thrilling experience, especially public speaking, where he learned the technique of rhythm, emphasis, and proper breathing—all, he was told, so that they could better serve their people. Washington was such a bright light that he was soon sent to rural Alabama to start a new college.

This was 1881 and he was just 25. He arrived to find that the school had no buildings. What it did have was “hundreds of hungry, earnest souls who wanted to secure knowledge.”

Starting with 37 students in a “rather dilapidated shanty,” he managed to rally the whole community into providing what was needed for new buildings—with the construction done by hand.

They made the bricks, sawed the lumber, wielded hammers—not only for classrooms, but for the barns and other farm buildings that would allow them to tend the crops and care for the livestock. This would be a self-sufficient community of learners.

But Washington’s true genius lay in attracting the best teachers, most famously a young man from Iowa, George Washington Carver. His fame grew throughout the nation, leading to an invitation to dine with the Roosevelt’s in the White House in 1901, the same year his autobiography was published, Up From Slavery.

To Booker T. Washington, as well as to Jane Addams, the support of someone’s personal development is perhaps the greatest gift one can give another. Many people contribute to the shaping of our character, but at heart it requires the individual effort to make one’s life fruitful. This is a theme that goes far back in our nation’s history.

Justice as Respect for the Other

We all want to see justice done, but for it to occur rightly it often requires us to recognize our own biases, and to see with new eyes.

Boston, March 1770. Tempers were running high. The presence of British soldiers—there to enforce the king’s unpopular taxes — had brought tensions to a boiling point.

Then came the March evening when an unruly crowd gathered around the customs house. The British sentry banged on the door to get reinforcements, soldiers spilled out to form a line facing the colonists, snowballs began to fly…and then came the crack of guns. The Bostonians fell back, leaving many lying wounded, their blood seeping into the snow. Five would die that night.

The soldiers were marched away and kept under lock and key until they could be tried for murder. That they were guilty of a heinous act seemed clear. No lawyers could be found to defend them—until John Adams stepped forth.

At great risk to his career and very life in Boston, he agreed to defend the soldiers against what everyone felt was overwhelming evidence. He soon realized that the soldiers had had good cause to be fearful. Perhaps it truly was a case of self-defense. The question was, would the jury—or the outraged citizenry—care enough to let the evidence speak?

It is a court case that has many twists and turns, but in the end, Adams did manage to get the jury to listen, and then to acquit the men of the charge of murder. What’s more, the townspeople—by and large—managed to lay aside their moral fury and accept the verdict as just.

It had been a huge risk to his career and to his family, but for John Adams one thing was clear. No society deserved to be free if its members weren’t prepared to put aside their own opinions, their own prejudices, and let the facts—just the facts—speak for themselves.

The purpose of the law is not to satisfy our sense of outrage or to “send a statement,” but to find the truth, and out of this, to bring justice.

But this spirit of justice points to something very closely related: the willingness to step into the shoes of others, even those whose actions we condemn. It means taking the time to look into the heart of the one who opposes you, even one who acts with violence.

We move ahead two-and-a-half centuries, to in Nashville in 1960. Diane Nash was a student at Fisk University; having grown up in Chicago, she had never known segregation. John Lewis came from Alabama and had known nothing else. But the winds were shifting and it was time for a change.

Nash and Lewis began meeting with other students, all of whom had experienced the humiliation and degradation of being refused service in a store, or being forced to go up the back stairs into a movie theater, or being turned away at a motel, or having a taxi pass them by.

They began to meet with a young professor named James Lawson, recently returned from India, where he had studied the Gandhian method of non-violence. How shall we take a stand, the students asked, there in segregated Nashville?

Soon talk turned to the lunch counters of the department stores. Black customers were welcome to shop, but never could they take a seat in the restaurant. How unfair! It is time to act, to sit at the lunch counter and demand service.

But Lawson was less concerned about what they would do but how they would do it. What would be living in their hearts? If you sit at the lunch counter, he told them, you may well find yourself at the mercy of some of those violent people who are bent on keeping things as they are. Are you ready to suffer?

“Suffering puts us and those around us in touch with our consciences. It opens and touches our hearts.” Yes, they all said. They were willing to absorb the blows that came their way, without responding with violence.

What then happens to those who are attacking us? What good is making a demand if it only hardens the hearts of those who oppose them? Nothing good can come of it, Lawson explained, unless each of us carries in us “a graceful heart, an accepting and open heart, a heart that holds no malice toward the inflictors of his or her suffering….” Unless we can recognize “the spark of the divine” in each of us, even those who assault us with words and fists, we will not find the way forward.

The sit-ins in Nashville did bring out the worst in many people. Students were dragged from their seats and beaten, but there was always another group stepping forward to sit down. It is a dramatic story of endurance and love, and after weeks it did bring about desegregation. It set the stage for so many non-violent actions, from the Freedom Riders to the marches in Birmingham to Selma to the voting rights drives.

Boston and Nashville—two very different sides of justice, but both requiring us to lay aside our ordinary selves and see others in fresh, new ways. We no longer think of “getting” justice, but allowing it to shine forth, brightening the lives of all concerned.

But there are other themes, as well, which should be at least briefly mentioned.

Life As Adventure

Back in the 1820s, the most romantic figures in America were the flatboatmen who opened up the Ohio River. Later in the century it was the cowboy, herding cattle along the Chisholm Tail.

Their stories still fascinate us today, as do those of the pioneers moving West in their “prairie schooners.” And as the 20th century opened, this spirit of adventure was exemplified in two lives: Theodore Roosevelt and Charles Lindbergh.

Courageous Determination

We still look with awe at the Chinese who in the 1860s laid railroad tracks up and down the mighty Sierra Nevada mountains. Theirs is an amazing story, but so is that of the Japanese-Americans who during World War II were shipped off to internment camps.

How they endured, educated their children, and even sent their young men to serve valiantly for the American army in Europe—this is a sad and yet inspiring story.

The Spirit of Community

When in the 1830s the Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville visited the American hinterlands, he was astonished at how those pioneers, so far from “civilization” were able to achieve such a high level of community, building their own schools, hospitals and even prisons.

Many in the early 19th century sought to form intentional communities, some religious and some, like Brook Farm, as utopian communities. This spirit of community led to a host of civic organizations that, by the early 20th century, involved millions of people.

Where Are These Ideals Today?

The final section of the book deals with examples of how such themes are at work in our society today, although we often have to look below the headlines to find them.

There is the story of Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat For Humanity, who gave up his wealth to building homes for the poor.

There is Robert Woodson, who has pioneered inner city community revitalization programs since the 1960s, encouraging such people as Toni McIlwain in Detroit, who, having suffered domestic abuse and homelessness, has worked tirelessly to restore hope and community spirit in her Ravendale neighborhood.

There is a renewed sense for the land, as well as the needs of local communities, as manifested in the Community Supported Agriculture Movement. The building of Makerspaces offers support to the thousands of creative people who want to build new products—often with powerful effects on the community, as with Bart Eddy and the Brightmoor Makers in Detroit.

We can all find such examples of creativity, moral awareness, and community spirit, but some fear that the current political situation is pulling us apart, preventing the working of “the better angels of our nature” (to use the words of Lincoln.)

But there are organizations like Better Angels (now Braver Angels) who set up such conversations in communities around the country, where we can learn to listen with utmost respect to those with whom we may disagree. It is my hope that a search for common ideals can help inspire such conversations.

Please take these stories, expand them as you will, find your own themes, and discover your own stories from the rich tapestry of our nation’s history. And please feel free to send me your comments and ideas.

Karl Fredrickson taught history at Green Meadow Waldorf High School in New York’s Hudson Valley for 35 years. Having grown up in the prairies of Minnesota, he now lives near the highlands of New Jersey.

Karl can be reached by email at kfredson@gmail.com.

When to teach American History in the Waldorf High School? Ninth grade? Eleventh grade? Twelfth grade? It is a long-standing question, raising important questions about the education of adolescents.

Join the conversation at asenseofhistory.org.

Stories From the American Journey: Men and Women Who Express the Ideals of a Nation. 525 p., $15.95 in paperback from Amazon. Also available in hardcover and Kindle. Further resources (soon including audio versions of the chapters) can be found at asenseofhistory.org.