Quote of the Day (Leo Buscaglia, on the Opportunities ‘To Make Our Love Felt’)

“The majority of us lead quiet, unheralded lives as we pass through this world. There will most likely be no ticker-tape parades for us, no monuments created in our honor. But that does not lessen our possible impact, for there are scores of people waiting for someone just like us to come along; people who will appreciate our compassion, our unique talents. Someone who will live a happier life merely because we took the time to share what we had to give. Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have a potential to turn a life around. It’s overwhelming to consider the continuous opportunities there are to make our love felt.” —American educator, author and motivational speaker Leo Buscaglia (1924-1998), Born For Love: Reflections on Loving (1992)

This Day in Vice-Presidential History (Indicted Burr Presides Over Senate)

Nov. 5, 1804—On what was supposed to be the opening day of the second session of 8^th Congress, so few Senators attended—13 in all—that those present quickly met and adjourned. But, though activity was slim to nonexistent, the spectacle on display at this early point in the history of the American republic was extraordinary: the official presiding over the proceedings, a member of the Executive Branch, was under indictment.

But I’ll let someone else fill you in on the background, a sharp-eyed witness who wrote in his diary about what brought matters to this pass, Senator John Quincy Adams of Massachusetts:

“The Vice-President, Mr. [Aaron] Burr, on the 11th of July last fought a duel with General Alexander Hamilton, and mortally wounded him, of which he died the next day. The coroner’s inquest on his body found a verdict of wilful murder by Aaron Burr… The Grand Jury in the County of New York found an indictment against him, under the statute, for sending the challenge; and the Grand Jury of Bergen County, New Jersey, where the duel was fought, have recently found a bill against him for murder. Under all these circumstances Mr. Burr appears and takes his seat as President of the Senate of the United States.”

Don’t let the matter-of-fact tone of Adams’ account fool you. The court cases, juxtaposed with Burr’s appearance in his usual spot in the chamber, could only have left the son of the prior American President shaking his head as he scribbled down his thoughts at the end of the day—a practice he had begun 25 years before, and would continue doing for another four decades.

Four words in Adams’ account especially made me sit up and take notice: “Bergen County, New Jersey.”

More specifically, less than two weeks before the senator wrote these lines, in modern-day Hackensack, only a few miles from my hometown, the consequences of the first bitterly contested Presidential election in American history—with Jefferson triumphing in the House of Representatives over Burr only after unexpected help from Hamilton—were being played out, in a way that few if any participants or observers could have foreseen.

I am writing this post on a day filled with its own tension between two rival political parties, with a former President trying to reclaim the office, even after being convicted on 34 felony counts. I confess that it gives me comfort to get away from the TV, radio, and Internet and revisit a time when the young United States managed to survive its own crisis, generated by an earlier politician seeking desperately for a way out of his own self-generated dilemma.

The politician that Adams balefully eyed lacked a political base but not swirling intrigue around him. Federalists abominated him for killing their de facto leader, Hamilton. As for the Democratic-Republicans, though Thomas Jefferson was dining with him a good deal more often in hopes he would deliver favorable rulings in the upcoming impeachment trial of Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase, Burr's too-clever-by-half maneuvers for the Presidency four years before left the President and the other Virginia leaders of the party profoundly distrusting the northerner.

Over 50 years ago, a syndicated column by Garry Wills compared Burr to Richard Nixon, a more recent Vice President (and eventual President) whose career was truncated by scandal. But many observers have noticed uncanny similarities with another New Yorker, Donald Trump.

One quote they frequently cite came from a letter by Hamilton 12 years before his appointment with Burr in Weehawken. Glimpsing the rise of a fellow Revolutionary War veteran in his state’s politics, George Washington’s Treasury Secretary did not like what he saw:

“When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may ‘ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

Except for that phrase about “military habits,” this description of Burr as a potential American Caesar sounds an awful lot like Trump.

Not that the Vice President has been without advocates. Over 220 years after his political career effectively ended, Burr critics and revisionists among historians still debate his intentions and legacy.

Controversy lingers over Burr partly because of lack of documentation about his life, as discussed in this June 2019 American Scholar article by Penelope Rowlands. Some of his papers were lost while he was in transit as a kind of Flying Dutchman of the young republic; others, in the December 1812 shipwreck that took the life of his beloved daughter, Theodosia.

But, even when correspondence and diary entries are available, their content is often cryptic.

Burr could switch to writing in a different language in the middle of a document if he suspected it was being secretly read by someone else. He employed ciphers, but even when these messages were decoded, their actual meaning might only be understood by the recipient.

For example, in a letter written by son-in-law Joseph Alston in July 1804, as Burr awaited the results of grand jury investigations in New York and New Jersey, even his decoded message is not necessarily easy to infer:

“Immediately on the receipt of your letter on finance, I put the thing in a train of inquiry – The person employed has not yet met with success – your name is not used –

                The jury Mentioned in my last have adjourned over to Monday Eveg (23d.) – The result will determine my Movements –.”  

The Burr quality admitted by both detractors and admirers, charm, won to his side people who thought they discerned his ambiguous plans, and disarmed and confused those predisposed against him. 

Even the likes of Senator Adams and his wife Louisa, as related in this 2021 blog post by Gwen Fries of the Massachusetts Historical Society, ended up “fallen under his spell” on a March 1805 boat ride from Baltimore to Philadelphia.

Adams’ grandson, historian Henry Adams, right after introducing the “quiet, gentlemanly, and rather dignified” Vice President into his epic narrative of the administration of Thomas Jefferson, swerved toward assessing him, in the most scathing terms, as “a new power in the government…an adventurer of the same school as scores who were then seeking fortune in the antechambers of Bonaparte and Pitt…[and] the certain centre of corruption.”

A little over three years after Adams’ November 1804 diary entry, the New Jersey Supreme Court quashed the Bergen County indictment because, though shot in the state, Hamilton had died across the Hudson River in New York.

Another legal escape came that same year (much like Trump a few months ago) via the U.S. Supreme Court, when Chief Justice John Marshall, narrowly construing the Constitution’s definition of treason, ruled in Burr's favor when Jefferson’s Department of Justice brought charges related to the disgraced politician's attempt to separate the Western states and the Louisiana Territory from the Union.

Shortly afterward, Burr fled for Europe, dodging creditors, courts, and all manner of rumors (including that he was planning an assassination attempt against Jefferson). But, two years after this controversial acquittal in the conspiracy case, Burr’s travel plans and schemes had become the subject of speculation again.

Adams, now out of the Senate and back into a more congenial role as America’s greatest diplomat, was informed by Czar Alexander I’s Chancellor, Count Romanoff, that while in Gottenberg, Sweden, Burr had applied for a passport to Russia.

In February 1810, Romanoff told Adams of another Burr attempt to go to Russia, and asked the American minister if the former Vice President had violated any laws. Adams responded, “as well as its complicated nature would admit in the compass of a short conversation.”

Recent biographers of Burr have thoroughly examined aspects of his life formerly given relatively short shrift that now deserve more attention, including his challenge to the politics of deference that allowed the Virginia Dynasty to enormously influence the Presidency in the first four decades of the nation’s founding.

But these revisionists have a harder time explaining why Burr, as noted by Henry Adams, “made himself intimate with every element of conspiracy that could be drawn within his reach.” The United States was fortunate that, for all his energetic conspiracy-spinning, his implementation was maladroit. The republic may not always be so blessed.

Quote of the Day (Archibald MacLeish, on Why ‘Democracy is Never a Thing Done’)

“Democracy is never a thing done. Democracy is always something that a nation must be doing. What is necessary now is one thing and one thing only, that democracy become again democracy in action, not democracy accomplished and piled up in goods and gold.”—Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, playwright and statesman Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982), The American Cause (1941)

When MacLeish wrote these words, Americans would shortly unite in the most dramatic fashion possible: to defend their nation following the attack on Pearl Harbor, and in the process take up arms against dictatorships overrunning Europe and Asia.

But democracy depends on quieter moments, too—like voting. (Only, since the turn of the millennium, even this action has become unexpectedly fraught with tension.)

Nevertheless, it remains the case that, if this country desires to remain intact and to preserve what Abraham Lincoln termed “the last best hope of earth," performing this civic, and profoundly patriotic, duty in an informed, non-frivolous manner remains a prerequisite.

(The image accompanying this post, an example of a voting booth in the Old State House in Hartford, CT, was taken Dec. 22, 2023, by Kenneth C. Zirkel.)

Quote of the Day (Charles Dickens, on ‘Real Love and Truth’)

“I hope that simple love and truth will be strong in the end. I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world.”—English novelist Charles Dickens (1812-1870), David Copperfield (1850)

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Tootsie,’ on How a Woman Experienced ‘A Wonderful Party’)

Sandy Lester [played by Teri Garr]: “Well, good night, Michael. It was a wonderful party. My date left with someone else. I had a lot of fun. Do you have any Seconol?”—Tootsie (1982), story by Don McGuire and Larry Gelbart, screenplay by Larry Gelbart and Murray Schisgal, with an uncredited Barry Levinson, Robert Garland, Robert Kaufman, and Elaine May

Remembering Teri Garr (1944-2024), Oscar-nominated for her role in this classic comedy. 

Movie Quote of the Day (‘All the King’s Men,’ on a Would-Be Dictator Warding Off Peril)

Jack Burden [played by John Ireland] [narrating]: “He roared across the state making speeches. All of them adding up to the same thing: 'It's not me they're after. It's you!' Willie hollered 'foul.' He knew if you hollered hard and loud enough... people begin to believe. Just in case they didn't, he organized demonstrations.”

Willie Stark [played by Broderick Crawford]: “Tell the boys to get the hicks out. Bring them in from the sticks. Empty the pool halls. Turn ‘em out! Turn the yokels out!”

Jack: “In case anyone hollered back, he organized spontaneous slugging. Willie pulled every trick he ever knew and added a few more.”—All the King’s Men (1949), written and directed by Robert Rossen, adapted from the novel by Robert Penn Warren

Seventy-five years ago this Thursday, this adaptation of All the King’s Men premiered in New York City. Though a remake came out in 2006 starring Sean Penn, the earlier version remains, for many, the gold standard, going on to win Oscars for Best Picture, Actor (Broderick Crawford) and Supporting Actress (Mercedes McCambridge).

During production of the first version, the cast and crew involved in translating Warren’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen never uttered the name “Huey Long,” recalled star Broderick Crawford.

In fact, the state depicted onscreen was left intentionally unnamed, even blurred, with not even a Southern drawl, let alone the down-home Louisiana cadences of Long.

The plot of the movie, when you get right down to it, could even have been set in the American Heartland—a place like Ohio, maybe even Michigan.

Michigan—these days, the state is no longer the uncontested world center of the automotive industry, as it was during the making of this film, but a laboratory for far-right coups—not only against its governor, but, through the courts and otherwise, the Presidency of the United States.

At least Stark/Long started out with good intentions, and actually built things while in office: a highway program of 13,000 roads, free textbooks for schoolchildren, LSU Medical School, and an expansion of the state Charity Hospital System. The former occupant of the Oval Office now seeking a return only destroyed while in office. 

Re-read some of that dialogue above: “It’s not me they’re after. It’s you!” It’s all too easy to supply the contemporary follow-up: “And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution."

Back in 1989, the late New York columnist Jimmy Breslin, sourly surveying a local real-estate developer who’d just taken out a full-page ad calling for the execution of the Central Park Five, warned, “Beware always of the loudmouth taking advantage of the situation and appealing to a crowd’s meanest nature.”

That loudmouth runs from the semi-fictional Willie Stark to the all-too-actual Former Guy.

Photo of the Day: Sportsplex, Votee Park, Teaneck NJ

Three days ago, while early voting was still available in my state, I drove to the next town over from me, Teaneck, to make my political preferences manifest at the Richard Rodda Community Center. With my civic duty performed, I looked across the lane outside the building and saw a vast expanse of green: Milton A. Votee Park.

With sunlight pouring down that afternoon, I decided to do something I’d never gotten around to doing in my 60-plus years in Bergen County: walk around the perimeter of the 40-acre park.

I was especially taken with this hillside view of the park’s sportsplex, and so I took this picture.