Thanksgiving through the Years

In early September of 1620, 104 men, women, and children crowded aboard a leaky ship that was about 90 feet long and 26 feet wide amidships and set sail for the New World. The ship, named the Mayflower, would be at sea for 66 days before making landfall on the point of the fish hook we call Cape Cod, where it anchored near the location that would become Provincetown. It was well north of its intended destination of Virginia and therefore the passengers had no patent from the English crown to settle in this place.

The passengers continued living on board for a month while a few men first explored the Cape area. Finding curious mounds, the explorers punched holes in several revealing some to be granaries for corn and beans but others to be graves whose desecration didn’t endear the trespassers to the natives. A boat was built to explore the leeward shoreline of Cape Cod, and finding the natural harbor at modern day Plymouth and a defensible hill above it, they decided to make their settlement there. With winter approaching, shelter had to be built before the majority of passengers could disembark.

The long ocean crossing and the additional month crammed aboard ship had done little to improve the disposition of the passengers, which was compounded by the fact that 44 of them were religious dissenters from the Church of England while 66 made the voyage as a business venture. The dissenters called themselves the “Saints” and called the others “Strangers” – hardly a good way to create unity. Despite having more differences than similarities, their survival depended on cooperation, of which there was little on board the ship. Therefore, William Bradford, who had emerged as the informal leader, recommended that before disembarking every passenger should sign an agreement that set forth rules for self-government, which later came to be called the Mayflower Compact.

The first winter was ghastly. Now calling themselves Pilgrims, over half of them died in three months. They were buried at night, fearing that the surrounding Indians would learn that their number was dwindling which might encourage an attack. Unlike the Indians encountered on the Cape, however, the Pilgrims had settled among the peaceful Wampanoags. And in March the tribal chief, Massasoit, sent Samoset as his ambassador to the settlers because Samoset spoke English which he had providentially learned from sailors who had fished the coast and briefly lived on land nearby. After his first encounter with the Pilgrims, Samoset returned with Tisquantum, known in history as Squanto, an Indian who had been kidnapped in 1614 by an English slave raider and sold in Málaga, Spain. There he had learned English from local friars, escaped slavery, and found his way back on an expedition ship headed to the New England coast in 1619 – the year before the Pilgrims arrived.

Since Squanto spoke better English than Samoset, he became the technical advisor to the Pilgrims, teaching them how to raise corn, where and how to catch fish, and how to make things needed for working and hunting. He showed them plants they could eat and others the Indians used for medicinal purposes. Squanto was the reason that the settlement survived during its first two years.

The first year the Pilgrims farmed communally and nearly starved. However, William Bradford’s diary tells us that it was decided thereafter that each man should farm for his own family’s food needs instead of communal farming. "This had very good success," Bradford wrote, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been. By this time harvest was come, and instead of famine, now God gave them plenty, and the face of things was changed, to the rejoicing of the hearts of many." The Pilgrims’ experiment in socialism was a valuable lesson.

After taking in an abundant harvest in the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims invited Squanto, Samoset, Massasoit, and ninety other Wampanoag men to join them in a three-day celebration of their success, which consisted of games and feasting – and a not-so-subtle display of Pilgrim musketry just in case the natives became unfriendly in the future. This celebration is recorded in history as the first Thanksgiving – which it wasn’t.

In fact, two years earlier on December 4, 1619, a group of 38 English settlers arrived at Berkeley Hundred, part of the Virginia Colony, in an area then known as Charles Cittie (sic), It was located about 20 miles upstream from Jamestown, the first permanent settlement of the Virginia Colony, which had been established in 1607. The Berkley settlers celebrated the first known Thanksgiving in the New World. Their charter required that the day of arrival should be observed yearly as a "day of thanksgiving" to God. On that first Thanksgiving day, December 4, Captain John Woodleaf presided over the service. The charter specified the thanksgiving service: "Wee ordaine that the day of our ships arrival at the place assigned for plantacon in the land of Virginia shall be yearly and perpetually keept holy as a day of thanksgiving to Almighty God."

But not for long. Nine of the Berkley settlers were killed in the Indian Massacre of 1622 which also wiped out a third of the population of the Virginia Colony. Therefore, Berkeley and other outlying settlements were abandoned as the colonists moved back to Jamestown and other more secure points and Thanksgiving was forgotten.

The first national celebration of Thanksgiving occurred in 1777. This was a one-time only Thanksgiving in which the 13 colonies, rather than celebrating food and God’s providence, celebrated the defeat of the British at Saratoga in October by Washington’s Continental Army.

In 1789 President George Washington made the first presidential proclamation declaring Thanksgiving a national event. Under this proclamation it was to occur later that year on November 26. Some were opposed to it, particularly those in the south, who felt the hardships of a few Pilgrims did not warrant a national holiday and besides, such proclamations were excessively Yankee and Federalist – so they thought.

John Adams, the second president, issued a Thanksgiving proclamation in 1798 enlisting the help of the Almighty not only in cosmic struggles but also in the more pedestrian battles of his administration. He seemed to be asking God to side with the Federalists against his struggles with the Jeffersonians. When he later revealed that the proclamation had been recommended by a Presbyterian assembly, it set off a firestorm that Adams, a devout Unitarian, was leading a movement to establish the Presbyterian Church as the national religion. Adams became the first one-term president – a fact that he attributed to his proclamation.

In 1779, as Governor of Virginia, Thomas Jefferson decreed a day of “Public and solemn thanksgiving and prayer to Almighty God.” But as the third president, he opposed national Thanksgiving proclamations. Writing to a Reverend Samuel Miller, Jefferson said, “I consider the government of the United States as interdicted by the Constitution from intermeddling with religious institutions, their doctrines, discipline, or exercises …”

In 1817, New York became the first of several states to officially adopt an annual Thanksgiving holiday. Each state celebrated it on a different day, however, and the South remained largely unfamiliar with the tradition. Therefore, for almost 60 years following Jefferson’s presidency, Thanksgiving remained a non-event on the national scene with no advocate until Sarah Josepha Hale.

Hale was no nationalist shrinking violet. She raised $30,000 for the construction of the Bunker Hill monument in Boston and started the movement to preserve Washington’s Mount Vernon home for future generations. She was a fervent believer in God and the American Union, as well as being a fierce abolitionist. Hale had made it her business to advocate and get action on symbols that celebrated America and what today is known as American exceptionalism.

Hale had more than 15 minutes of fame. She authored the words to “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and was the editor for two prominent women’s magazines of her day. Since 1846 she had written editorials calling for a uniform national celebration of Thanksgiving, writing four presidents and dozens of congressmen to push her cause. In October 1863, America was embroiled in the American Civil War where the concept of "Union" was very much at issue. Hale tried again, this time writing to her fifth president, Abraham Lincoln.

Hale’s proposal found a place in the Lincoln psyche – perhaps because the battle of Gettysburg had been fought three months earlier and he would travel to the battlefield the following month to dedicate a military cemetery with a 278-word dedicatory address that would become his most famous utterance.

Touched by Hale’s pleas, Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation on October 3, 1863 setting its observance on the last Thursday of November.

After Lincoln’s assassination, his successor, Andrew Johnson, ever the contrarian, issued an 1865 Proclamation to “observe the first Thursday of December next as a day of national thanksgiving to the Creator of the Universe …” Yet the next three proclamations of the quirky tailor from Greeneville Tennessee returned Thanksgiving to the last Thursday in November.

Notwithstanding the presidential proclamations, the states were free to go their own ways, and Southern governors often opted for idiosyncratic observances or none at all. Oran Milo Roberts, governor of Texas in the late 1880s refused to observe Thanksgiving in the Lone Star State, snorting, “It’s a damned Yankee institution anyway.” But the South, too, eventually succumbed.

Then along came Franklin D. Roosevelt whose finagling with the date of Thanksgiving created a national uproar.

In 1939 there were five Thursdays in November and the last one was the 30th, leaving only three weeks and change before Christmas. This wadded the boxers of the presidents for Gimbel Brothers, Lord & Taylor, and other retailers concerned less with tradition than sales in the waning years of the Great Depression. They asked Roosevelt to move Thanksgiving to the 23rd allowing an additional week for shopping. Although I’ve never understood why Christmas shopping couldn’t start before Thanksgiving, when Roosevelt acceded, the country went ballistic.

Polls showed that 60% of the public opposed the change in date. Republicans in Congress were affronted that Roosevelt, a Democrat, would change the precedent of Lincoln, a Republican.

In New England, from which the Thanksgiving tradition sprang, resistance was particularly intense. The selectmen of Plymouth, Massachusetts informed Roosevelt in no uncertain words, “It is a religious holiday and [you] have no right to change it for commercial reasons.” Massachusetts Governor Leverett Saltonstall harrumphed that “Thanksgiving is a day to give thanks to the Almighty and not for the inauguration of Christmas shopping.”

Methodist minister Norman Vincent Peal was outraged, calling it "...questionable thinking and contrary to the meaning of Thanksgiving for the president of this great nation to tinker with the sacred religious day with the specious excuse that it will help Christmas sales. The next thing we may expect is Christmas to be shifted to May first to help the New York World’s Fair of 1940."

Nor did all merchants favor the presidential rejiggering of the Thanksgiving date. One shopkeeper hung a sign in his window reading, “Do your shopping now. Who knows, tomorrow may be Christmas.”

Usually the states followed the federal government’s lead on Thanksgiving, but they never relinquished their right to set their state’s date for the holiday. Predictably 48 battles erupted. As usual, New Deal Republicans had all the wit, if not the votes. Republican Senator Styles Bridges of New Hampshire urged the President to abolish winter. The Republican mayor of Atlantic City recommended that Franklin Roosevelt’s holiday be renamed "Franksgiving," while the Republican Attorney General of Oregon came up with this bit of doggerel:

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one.
Until we hear from Washington.

Twenty-three states celebrated Thanksgiving 1939 on November 23, and another 23 stood fast with November 30. Two states, Colorado and Texas, shrugged their shoulders and celebrated both days—Texas did so to avoid having to move the Texas versus Texas A&M football game. The 30th was labeled as the Republican Thanksgiving, while the 23rd became the Democrat Thanksgiving.

Roosevelt’s experiment in moving the Thanksgiving date to improve Christmas sales continued for two more years, although 1940 and 1941 had four-Thursday Novembers. But the evidence was against the assumptions – more shopping days did not increase sales. Roosevelt conceded and agreed to move Thanksgiving back to the last Thursday in November.

Under public pressure, the US House of Representatives passed a joint resolution in October 1941 to put Thanksgiving on the traditional last Thursday beginning in 1942. However, when the resolution reached the Senate in December, the Senate converted the resolution to law and changed one word: “last” was amended to “fourth” so never again would Thanksgiving fall on the 29th or 30th of November. The states followed suit, although Texas held on to the last Thursday until 1956.

So on this Thanksgiving, and all the future ones, let’s raise a drumstick in salute to Sarah Josepha Hale, who instituted its observance, and to Franklin Roosevelt, who went on to convince Americans that he could “save” daylight by moving an hour from the morning to the afternoon.

The Boomers’ Last Hurrah

The first of the 78 million baby boomers will reach 65 years of age in just six weeks – a milestone that will be celebrated again and again over the next 20 years by the remaining boomers.

Boomers are the cohort of people born between 1946 and 1964. Their parents endured the Great Depression and fought World War II either in uniform or on the industrial front. The war put their lives on hold, and when it ended in 1945, one in eight Americans – 16 million in all – was in uniform and half of them were in 55 combat theaters around the world. Their goal at war’s end was to resume a normal life as soon as possible. Among other things, that meant getting married and starting a family. They succeeded at both more than any previous generation.

In the depression decade prior to the war, families produced an average of two children. But in the years following the war, family sizes jumped almost immediately to three and peaked at 3.8 children in the late 1950s. Average family size would not settle back to the pre-war level until the early 1970s. US population increased 44% during the 20-year span of the baby boom.

The baby boom became a veritable “pig in the python” as it has moved through the various life stages of society to the present. When the firstborn boomers reached school age, it started a school building boom. About 45% of all public schools were built between 1950, when the oldest boomer was four, and 1969, when the oldest boomer was graduating from college and the youngest was entering kindergarten.

Up through the years of WW II, only 5% of the population aged 25 or older had a college degree or higher and only 25% had graduated from high school. By 1980, high school graduation rates were 67% and 27% of boomers had college degrees or higher. Baby boomers enjoy a higher level of education than any generation before them.

Boomers began entering the workforce from the mid-1960s through the late 1980s. Mostly well-educated, they created a boom in white collar jobs, fed the transition from a manufacturing to a service economy, and with the advent of the PC in the 1980s, boomers virtually eliminated middle managers using PC networks to access business knowledge and facilitate intra-organizational communications – the functions once provided by middle management.

Baby boomers represent about 28% of the population but about 45% of the workforce. The good news is that their Social Security payments enabled the program to take in considerably more than it has paid out during the boomers’ working years. The bad news is that politicians used the Social Security Ponzi scheme to spend surplus funds on unrelated government excesses in the true spirit of Bernie Madoff. The boomers have substantially supported the expansion of the New Deal-era Social Security, which has paid their parents’ retirement, and the Great Society-era Medicare, which has provided them healthcare.

As the “pig in the python” approaches 65, what’s next? Retirement? Don’t count on it.

The age of 65 as the milestone age for retirement was conceived by Otto von Bismarck of Germany in the late 1800s when old Otto was conniving to find a way to combat the German Socialist Party. He created a social security system to appeal to his country’s working class but being the ethically-challenged politician that he was, Bismarck knew his program would cost very little. The average German worker of that time never lived to age 65, and the few Germans who did only lived a year or two beyond.

One of Bismarck’s most ardent American fans, Franklin D. Roosevelt, saw the gimmickry in the German social security system and thought, “That’ll work,” when he fobbed off the Social Security Act of 1935 on Americans whose life expectancy was then 61 years. In the America of 1900, life expectancy was about 50. Recently it’s about 78. Either Roosevelt couldn’t conceive of people living well beyond 65 – the upward trend of life expectancy during the century notwithstanding – or he got it and decided it was a problem for a future generation of politicians to wrestle with. We don’t know.

But life expectancy has exceeded 65 since the end of WW II (ironically helped by WW II) and people will shortly be living 15 or more years beyond that age. Centenarians now constitute the fastest-growing segment of the U.S. population, increasing in number from 3,700 in 1940 to roughly 61,000 today. The Census Bureau projects that one in every nine baby boomers (nine million of the 78 million people born between 1946 and 1964) will survive into their late 90s, and that one in 26 (or three million) will reach 100. And Census projects life expectancy to rise to 86 by 2075 and to 88 by the end of the century.

Since Roosevelt set by fiat the retirement age at 65, that age has gotten younger with each generation for three primary reasons: improved public healthcare delivery, less dangerous and debilitating working environments, and healthier lifestyles.

The killer diseases of children and young adults, for example, have been all but defeated. Non-invasive scanning has eliminated exploratory surgery and helped detect disease before it becomes unmanageable. Drugs control cholesterol and hypertension. That Americans have the best healthcare delivery in the world is an unimpeachable fact. It has contributed to longevity more than any other factor.

As work shifted from manufacturing to services and knowledge – from the shop floor to the offices – jobs became safer. They also caused less “wear and tear” on the body during a person’s work career, so people weren’t compelled to retire around the age of 65 because their bodies were broken down as happened to earlier generations.

The third contributor to longevity – lifestyle – has a bright and dark side. The bright side is that we know unhealthy lifestyle practices – smoking, excessive alcohol, diet, and inactivity – contribute to increased morbidity and shorter life spans. The darker side is, while smoking, and to a lesser extent alcohol consumption, have been on the wane, exercise and diet management in recent times have been going in the wrong direction. Obesity is becoming a major health problem, especially among the older cohorts of Americans who are less inclined to exercise regularly. Unless exercise and weight management begin moving in a positive direction, the gains in longevity will slow down.

Most of the advances in longevity have been due to preventing premature causes of death. There’s little evidence that maximum lifespan has been increased because no one knows what it is. (The bible suggests in Genesis 6 that it’s 120 years.) As the causes of premature death are eliminated, the health status of older people will improve, shortening the duration of morbidity near the end of life. In other words, instead of a long descent of chronic bad health prior to death, punctuated by episodes of acute crises, people will live (more or less healthily) until they die.

It seems safe to say, therefore, that 65 is no longer the demarcation of a major change in a person’s life. Nor does a longer lifespan mean an extended period of life lived in diapers, dependent on three shifts of caregivers to push us around in wheelchairs while warehoused in a nursing home inhabited by zombies. Boomers were a rebellious bunch in their teen years, and I predict they won’t go quietly into retirement. If anything, they will reinvent what retirement means.

For one thing, many people will choose to work past 65 and indeed into their 70s. If you enjoy what you do, why would you stop doing it, assuming that you’re physically able to continue? Conversely, why would a person spend a career doing something that they can’t wait to stop doing so they can do something else?

The more educated people are and the more successful their careers are, the more likely they will continue working for many years beyond 65. After a career with one company, some people leave to start a second career in volunteer work, or consulting, or to start their own business. Colonel Harland Sanders, at age 65, used $105 of his Social Security check to finance the launch of his franchise venture for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

The notion of a golden age of leisure following a career of work is heavily glossed by the values of society in the mid-20th century when work was physically demanding and often as intellectually stimulating as reading the Manhattan telephone directory. In the late 1950s, a third of the jobs were in manufacturing and one-third of those jobs required union membership. But unions won guaranteed pensions and Social Security pitched in a tranche on top of those pensions, making retirement at 65 or earlier an economic no-brainer. The work was awful but the retirement was great.

Research into the post-retirement years, however, paints a darker picture. Today’s retirees held good jobs in service industries and knowledge work. Usually those jobs carried considerable responsibility and were important to the success of their companies. In retirement, these same people watch a mind-numbing 43 hours of television each week. One-third of those recently retired return to some kind of work within two years citing sheer boredom. Health status often declines after retirement due to idleness, loneliness, depression, alcohol consumption, weight gain, and marital stress. The suicide rate spikes among the newly retired. On balance, the golden age has been grossly oversold.

The Genesis story of mankind’s creation has them made in the image of God and put in a garden with instructions to care for it by working in it. From the beginning mankind was made to work and create. He was not created to relax and be served. And because mankind was made in God’s image, it must be God’s nature to work. Indeed, the Genesis story has God resting after He has worked.

The thing that makes vacations and travel and weekend homes fun is that they aren’t the norm. They are exceptions – a break from a routine to which we will return. When the exception becomes the norm it’s no longer an exception. Retirement into perennial vacations and constant travel and permanent stays at weekend homes causes them to lose the attraction they are intended to have.

The baby boomers have changed every institution in society that they’ve touched. I expect them to do the same with retirement by redefining how to live it.

That will be their last hurrah.

The 11th Hour on the 11th Day of the 11th Month

Ninety-two years ago this past Thursday at the 11th hour, on the 11th day, of the 11th month, the guns fell silent along what was then known as the Western Front of World War I. In a railway carriage secretly parked on a siding in the Compiegne Forest of France, the Allies and Germany signed an armistice after more than 1,500 days of fighting to stop “The War to End All Wars” on November 11, 1918.

World War I was without precedent. Never before had so many nations taken up arms to fight on so large a battlefield and inflict so many casualties. Sixty million soldiers from all sides of the conflict – mostly Europeans – took up arms and killed nine million of each other, including 50,000 Americans, wounding 20 million more and causing the collateral deaths of 12 million civilians.

Because trench warfare became the method of fighting World War I, enemies spent months if not years several hundred yards apart instead of maneuvering as military units did in subsequent wars. As stationary targets, each side was able to inflict ghastly casualties on the other using machine guns, artillery, and the most notorious weapon – poisonous gas. Predictably, stationary warfare made battles costly beyond comprehension in lives lost and wounded.

The first and second Battles of the Marne, for example, claimed 500,000 lives in 30 days, the Battle of the Somme, one of the bloodiest, claimed 1.5 million in less than 20 weeks – the British had 57,000 killed in one day – and in the First Battle of Ypres, four months of heavy fighting produced casualties of 750,000 on the German side and 995,000 on the French side. The four battles which collectively made up the 17-day Second Battle of Ypres saw the first use of lethal gas warfare in which the French suffered 70,000 casualties and the Germans, 35,000.

The Battle of Verdun, the longest battle and one of the most destructive of the war, cost 250,000 French and German lives and 500,000 wounded. Gallipoli cost 43,000. Chateau-Thierry/Belleau Wood had the single bloodiest day in Marine Corps history — until Tarawa in 1943 — 9,777 casualties in a single day, of which 1,811 were fatal.

It’s hard to believe that this carnage arose out of the assassination of a relatively minor political figure in Sarajevo, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. But German Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, had predicted, “If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans.” Indeed it did.

The assassination on June 28, 1914 triggered the network of military alliances formed during the prior decades so that within weeks the major powers of Europe were at war and their colonies around the world joined in the conflict, reaching far into Africa and what would become the modern Middle East.

These interlocking treaties ensured that once one power went to war, all of Europe would quickly follow. Events happened so quickly that the war they produced was likely not what any one of the treaty signatories expected. The allies — chiefly Russia, France and Britain — were pitted against the Central Powers — primarily Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Eventually, the war spread beyond Europe as the warring continent turned to its colonies and friends for help. This included the United States, which joined the war effort in Europe in 1917 as President Woodrow Wilson called on Americans to "make the world safe for democracy."

In fact, the event that brought America into the war had nothing to do with making the world safe for democracy. America’s entry was triggered by an intercepted telegraph, famously known as the Zimmerman Telegram, which was decoded by British cryptographers and later turned over President Wilson. The telegram was dispatched by the German Empire’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, on January 16, 1917 to the German ambassador in Washington, D.C.

It instructed the German Minister to Mexico that if the United States appeared likely to enter the war, he was to approach the Mexican government with a proposal for a military alliance with Germany. He should offer Mexico Germany’s help in reclaiming territory lost during the Mexican-American War and the Gadsden Purchase, specifically the American states of Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. At the time American popular sentiment was anti-Mexican because General John Pershing had long been in pursuit of the revolutionary Pancho Villa, who had carried out several cross-border raids.

The Zimmerman Telegram was released to the American press on March 1, and on April 6 the United States declared war against Germany and its allies.

The insanity of World War I becomes even more bizarre when it is realized that most of the heads of Europe who were fighting each other were related by blood. The British monarch George V's predecessor, Edward VII, was the German Kaiser's uncle and, via his wife's sister, uncle of the Russian Tsar as well. His niece, Alexandra, was the Tsar's wife. Edward's daughter, Maud, was the Norwegian Queen, and his niece, Ena, was Queen of Spain. Marie, another niece, was to become Queen of Romania.

When Edward VII died on the eve of the war, nine Kings attended his funeral. But despite these familial relations, European politics was all about power and influence and the protection of territorial possessions. In a sense, World War I was a family quarrel which cost some family members their countries and others – the Tsar and his family – their lives.

The Tsarist Imperial army threw itself into the fight against the Austro-Hungarian army along the eastern front. However, with the Bolshevik revolution in October 1917, the Russian Empire collapsed, the Tsar and Tsarina and all of their children were executed, and Russia was pulled out of the war. By the end of hostilities, the German, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman Empires had been militarily and politically defeated.

The Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires ceased to exist as countries. The Allies dismembered the Ottoman Empire and created the modern Middle East from it. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the surviving relic of the millennia-old Holy Roman Empire, ceased to exist, as did the relatively new German Empire. Maps of Eastern Europe and the Middle East were redrawn in a manner which still causes conflict. The centuries-old Russian Empire was replaced with a socialist system and later the Stalinist system which led to the death of millions.

The peace settlement of World War I remains a controversial topic. The international order created by this settlement lasted barely twenty years. The 1919 Versailles settlement failed to establish a stable international order, illustrating that winning a war does not always mean winning the peace. In the aftermath of the war, major geopolitical changes occurred. The center of wealth moved from Europe to the United States, the political map of Europe was significantly redrawn, and Germany was left in financial shambles, its people driven to the brink of starvation – a situation that helped create the rise of Adolf Hitler and, ultimately, World War II.

The Versailles treaty’s declaration that Germany was entirely to blame for the war was a blatant untruth that humiliated the German people. Furthermore, the treaty imposed steep war reparations payments on Germany – the equivalent of $400 billion today – meant to force the country to bear the entire financial burden of the war.

The principal representative of the British Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference, John Maynard Keynes, resigned in 1919 in protest at the scale of the reparation demands, warning correctly that it was stoking the fires for another war in the future.

When Wall Street crashed in 1929, the Weimar Republic spiraled into debt. Germany had to print money to pay off the war debt, triggering inflation in the country to the point where ten billion marks would not even buy a loaf of bread.

It has taken 92 years for Germany to repay its World War I debt, but remarkably the last $93.8 million installment was paid just six weeks ago on Sunday, October 3, 2010.

In historical retrospect, it’s hard to imagine that the political leaders in 1914 really understood the savage killing machine they had turned loose on themselves. Like the beginning of many armed conflicts, the citizens and leaders of that time believed this one would be over by Christmas 1914. But by the end of the first year, it became apparent that a new kind of war emerged on the battlefield like none that anyone had ever been seen before – or thankfully repeated since. This was total war – horribly stuck in a stalemate.

Even in the most gruesome human experiences there are those who can see glimpses of beauty. Lt. Col. John McCrae, a Canadian surgeon attached to the 1st Field Artillery Brigade was just such a person. In civilian life he had authored several medical texts but also a growing collection of poetry.

With the 1st Field Artillery, McCrae spent 17 days treating injured men – Canadians, British, Indians, French, and Germans -- in the Ypres salient. It was an ordeal he hardly thought could be survived as he later wrote:

"I wish I could embody on paper some of the varied sensations of those seventeen days... Seventeen days of Hades! At the end of the first day if anyone had told us we had to spend seventeen days there, we would have folded our hands and said it could not have been done."

One death particularly disturbed McCrae. A young friend and former student, 22-year old Lieutenant Alexis Helmer of Ottawa, was killed by a shell burst on May 2, 1915. He was buried later that day in a little cemetery outside McCrae's dressing station, and McCrae had performed the funeral ceremony in the absence of a chaplain.

The next day, sitting on the back of an ambulance parked near the dressing station in Flanders, McCrae could see a profusion of wild poppies growing in the torn up earth of the Ypres battlefield and its improvised cemeteries. There, as he mourned Helmer’s death and the deaths of all the soldiers, he scribbled in his notebook the poem that elementary school students in my generation were required to memorize and recite each year on November 11 – In Flanders Fields.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved, and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Two years later while serving as the command surgeon of the No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Boulogne, Belgium, McCrae contracted pneumonia. It became complicated by pneumococcal meningitis and quickly led to a brain hemorrhage.

John McCrae died on January 28, 1918,

He was only 45 years old.

The 2012 Election

When the polls opened this past Tuesday, the 2012 election began. It might have been called the 2010 midterm election, but it was really Round One in the 2012 election and it’s in nowise over.

While one Senate seat has not been determined (AK) by the election returns, six seats left the Democrats Tuesday and went over to the Republicans. The Republicans, by contrast, didn’t lose a single Senate seat. Republicans will have at least 47 seats going into 2012 – not a majority, but enough to filibuster and enough to force Reid into tough compromises.

Eight House seats have yet to be settled by the election, but at least 64 switched from Democrat to Republican. Only three seats switched from Republican to Democrat. The Republicans will have at least 240 seats (55%) next year.

Moreover, the Wicked Witch is dead. Pelosi’s Kool-Aid rule is over – forever. Usually, a Speaker who loses the House retires (the political equivalent of hari-kari). This one has decided she is so indispensable to the Democrat party that she wants to run for Minority Leader now. Maybe she can help them lose the 2012 election.

One governorship (IL) remains undecided by the election, but the Democrats so far have lost 11 gubernatorial seats versus the Republican loss of five – one of which went to a Republican-turned-Independent, Lincoln Chafee. The Republicans will have at least 28 governorships (54%) going into 2012, which along with state legislatures, will allow them to tear up state electoral maps across the country.

Republicans now control 54 state legislative chambers – taking control of at least 18 state chambers from Democrats – a net gain of at least 680 seats in state legislatures. Republican governors and state legislatures will redistrict electoral maps in their states next year to assure that they add between 15 and 25 Republican House seats through the redistricting process. Four chambers are still in play, but even if Republicans lose them all, the party will hold more state legislative seats until 2012 than it has filled since 1928.

That’s Round One. For a president seeking to mount a second term election, it’s hard to imagine a more difficult starting point. But Truman, Reagan, and Clinton saw disastrous midterm elections and came back for second terms. This midterm, however, seems different. The Republicans didn’t win; the Democrats lost – big time. As P.J. O’Rourke observed, this wasn’t an election; it was a restraining order.

At no time in the history of this country has the people’s government shown such utter contempt for them as in the last two years. Massive interventions in healthcare and “stimulus” spending ignored howls of opposition. American politics is always played to the left and right of midfield – never in the red zone as Obama and friends have done since his election. The election results were, therefore, the people’s verdict on two years’ of arrogant governance.

This election drove a stake in the heart of Obama’s leftist agenda to transform America into a European clone. His agenda can never be revived. Knowing better than ever that they must always face a local election, no future Congress will again ignore its constituents and rush over the cliff lemming-like in obedience to its congressional leaders. This instinct will be patent in the elections of 2012.

In 2012, Democrats will have to defend 23 additional seats in the Senate’s three-year staggered election cycle. Should they be worried? Eight of those seats are in trouble with constituents because of their shenanigans in the last two years: Bill Nelson (FL), McCaskill (MO), Tester (MT), Ben Nelson (NB), Conrad (ND), Brown (OH), Cantwell (WA), and Webb (VA). If they had been up for reelection this cycle against credible opponents, they would have likely lost – and they know it. Look for them to get busy with some serious fence-mending over the next two years.

To these eight can be added newly elected Joe Manchin (WV) who is only a placeholder for the seat of Robert Byrd until Byrd’s reelection cycle would have come up in 2012 had he lived. In the 2010 campaign, Manchin was often trailing his Republican challenger, despite his popularity as the now ex-governor, and he had to engage in lots of anti-Obama electioneering to convince the gun and bible-totin’ West Virginia hillbillies that he would be one of them in Washington. Obama’s “cap and trade” would put WV into bankruptcy, so Manchin’s electoral theatrics included shooting a rifle bullet through a copy of it.

We could add to that list of nine the four seats of Stabenow (MI), Klobuchar (MN), Menendez (NJ) and Bingaman (NM) who saw the other senatorial seat in their states shift to the Republicans last Tuesday. And then there is Herb Kohl (WI) who watched Russ Feingold get trounced and may decide at age 77 that he doesn’t need that grief and will therefore choose to retire.

Question: what happens when Reid comes skulking around in the search for votes on an issue opposed by the 14 states these senators represent? After the 2010 bloodletting, is he likely to get those votes? I don’t think soooooo. Having seen what happens to kamikazes, Reid will have a hard time imposing discipline on his caucus.

In contrast, McConnell need only remind Republicans who want to get along with Democrats by going along with their agenda that Bob Bennett and Mike Castle were punished in their primaries for straying too far into bipartisanland. There are ten Republicans who are up for reelection in 2012. RINOs (Republicans in name only) could find a Tea Party challenger in their 2012 primaries. So McConnell should find lots of votes from moderate 2012 Republicans and scared 2012 Democrats that give him majorities during the next two years. For example, if the House eviscerates ObamaCare, as it’s likely to do, and sends a bill to the Senate for reconciliation, the Senate Democrats up for reelection in 2012 might say, “Ah, you know what? Let Obama go on record by vetoing this so I can tell my constituents that I voted for it.” Round Two of the 2012 election has begun. McConnell will have more influence over the endangered Democrats than Reid will have.

Obama is going to have to face a new reality in legislating during the next two years. During his first two, he had absolute majorities in both houses and consequently an easy time of it. Vetoes weren’t necessary. Now he has two formidable opposition leaders in the House and Senate, and he is going to have to find a way to work with them. Neither McConnell nor Boehner is an exciting guy, so Obama’s proclivity for arrogance and talking down to people he feels intellectually superior to could be a real handicap in their working relationship.

If the White House thinks that this midterm is a replay of the 1994 midterm, which brought Gingrich and the Contract with America into conflict with Clinton, it will be mistake. Obama is no Clinton. He lacks Clinton’s political shrewdness and his ability to craft win/win deals. Obama understands only win/loss deals. Remember his classic comment at the disastrous Blair House summit last year – “I won” – meaning he didn’t have to negotiate.

Likewise Boehner is no Gingrich. He lacks Gingrich’s bright mind. But Boehner is also not as gaff-prone or self-destructive as Gingrich and therefore will be more difficult for Obama to maneuver into a corner. Boehner will stay on task, count votes, and raise money for the party – the mundane stuff of House leadership. He understands the mistakes of the Gingrich regime and won’t repeat them. Don’t look for him to threaten to shut down government or to let it happen. His message after Tuesday’s election lacked the messianic zeal of a Gingrich: "The new majority here in Congress will be the voice of the American people," Boehner said. "This is a time for us to roll up our sleeves and go to work on the people's priorities: creating jobs, cutting spending and reforming the way Congress does its business." Not a message that would bring a crowd to its feet, but ploddingly practical.

However, look for Boehner and McConnell to get the Democrats and Obama on the record on the hot button issues of the election – spending, taxes, healthcare, and government regulations. They will make a good tag team in forcing votes repeatedly in anticipation of the 2012 elections. The healthcare piñata will get swung at more than once during the next two years in order to force endangered Democrats to campaign on their votes against its repeal. If the Senate defers to Obama’s veto, then the president must campaign on his vote against reforming his hated healthcare law.

“We can’t expect the president to sign [healthcare repeal],” McConnell said this week. “We’ll also have to work in the House on denying funds for implementation, and, in the Senate, on votes against its most egregious provisions.”

On tax cuts, if Republicans hold firm on cutting them for everybody (actually they only have to leave the rates where they are), they can force Obama and Senate Democrats facing re-election in 2012 to oppose an extension of tax rates for the middle class in order to punish the rich. Given the Hobson's choice, it’s likely that the Democrats will fold.

Spending bills originate in the House, and with their new majority, Republicans will find more maneuvering room to cut spending. Obama will be trapped in his “tax and spend” liberal image unless he works with the Republicans going into the 2012 election to scrub his awful spending record. Boehner doesn’t deserve to be Speaker if he can’t leverage Obama’s reelection aspirations into spending concessions to get outlays back to at least 2008 levels. If he does this, Boehner will renew the traditional Republican image of fiscal conservatism, which was tarnished mightily during the Bush years.

To that end Boehner must do two things to signal to conservative stakeholders that Republicans have learned from the errors of their ways during the Bush years. First, he must come down hard on the profligate spending that has afflicted Republicans in recent years. He should clean house on the Republican side of the House Appropriations Committee as a demonstration of his commitment to a new beginning on spending, appointing one of the “Young Guns” as the Chairman. This would show the Tea Party Republicans that the 112th Congress won’t be “business as usual.”

Second, Boehner pledged in a Friday Wall Street Journal editorial “no more earmarks.” Hallelujah! Voters showed their wrath and disgust with the Cornhusker Kickback and Louisiana Purchase during the healthcare debate. “Bringing home the bacon” was raised to a new art form by Robert Byrd (D-WV) and Ted Stevens (R-AK). It is wasteful, silly, and out of touch with where the voters are with this spendthrift administration. Eric Cantor, one of the “Young Guns” and the presumptive House Majority Leader when Boehner becomes the Speaker, is passionately opposed to earmarks. Boehner could show his earmark resolve by appointing an earmark hawk like him to first or second chair in Appropriations.

Don’t expect Obama to fall into step with the Republicans in some new-found spirit of cooperation. Last week he said Republicans had driven the economy into a ditch and then stood by and criticized while Democrats pulled it out. “Now that progress has been made,” Obama continued, "we can't have special interests sitting shotgun. We gotta’ have middle class families up in front. We don't mind the Republicans joining us. They can come for the ride, but they gotta’ sit in back."

Strange that a man whose race suffered the indignities of sitting in the back of buses would use it to put down Republicans, unless doing so has a Freudian implication. What is really objectionable, the racial putdown notwithstanding, is Obama’s obvious ignorance of what elections are all about. Even if he dislikes having people disagree with him, which Obama obviously does (I won), he doesn’t get to say who can sit where on the public’s metaphorical bus; the people of the United States determine that. I predict, therefore, that Obama will struggle trying to find the right blend of conciliation and confrontation to assert his authority with this Congress on one hand, and yet navigate the congressional Scylla and Charybdis to avoid defeat in 2012 on the other.

Likewise, after four years in the wilderness, Republican leaders will not find it easy to resist flaunting their new-found power in a Congress dominated for the past four years by Reid-Pelosi’s congressional version of the Nine Circles of Hell. Last week McConnell said:

“Over the past week, some have said it was indelicate of me to suggest that our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny President Obama a second term in office. But the fact is, if our primary legislative goals are to repeal and replace the health spending bill, to end the bailouts, cut spending, and shrink the size and scope of government, the only way to do all these things it is to put someone in the White House who won’t veto any of these things. We can hope the President will start listening to the electorate after Tuesday’s election. But we can’t plan on it.”

In addition to pledging a stop to earmarks, Boehner pledged in his Wall Street Journal editorial to post all bills online for three days before they are voted on (where have we heard that before?) but more importantly to include a clause in every bill citing where in the Constitution Congress is given the power to pass it. Bills that can't pass this test, Boehner said, shouldn't get a vote. Amen, brother, say on!

Boehner’s editorial further promised to “put an end to so-called comprehensive bills with thousands of pages of legislative text that make it easy to hide spending projects and job-killing policies.” The American people, he observed, are not well-served by "comprehensive" bills; the Speaker should insist on smaller, more focused legislation that is properly scrutinized by Congress and the public, constitutionally sound, and consistent with Americans' demand for a less-costly, less-intrusive government. I’m there!

Have I heard words like these from the conservative side of Congress before? Sho nuff, I have! I’m willing to give Boehner and McConnell the first six months of 2011 to prove they are selling a pony not the poop. After two years of the 111th Congress, that’s more time than I expect the American people will give them.

Going forward, I expect elections to be more about voting against actions – the seen – than voting for promises – the unseen. The leaders and the conservative members of Congress had best understand then that, no matter how popular they think their program is now, they are one election away from a humiliating defeat. Just look at where the Democrats are today versus two years ago. And – (big “and”) – no matter how badly a political party seems defeated today, it is one election away from an historical recall. Just look at where the Republicans are today versus two years ago.

Forewarned is forearmed.