Perhaps today’s troubles began with who signed the Declaration of Independence
ON JULY 4, 249 YEARS AGO, 56 white men got together in the city of Brotherly Love to sign a not-so-loving letter to their absentee landlord informing him that they didn’t like the way he was running the place, so they were going co-op.
The recipient of the letter was Great Britain’s King George III. The men assembled in Philadelphia were an elite class of lawyers, doctors, merchants, and plantation owners who were aspiring to wrest control of the 13 original colonies.1 These guys were America’s first aristocracy, or what would be today’s “1 percent.”
Only two or three of the signers came from humble origins, most significantly Benjamin Franklin, who worked his way up and out of indentured servitude as a child.2
Of the signers, 45 were affluent landowners. These included Thomas Jefferson, who owned 5,000 acres and Richard Henry Lee (great-uncle of the infamous Robert E. Lee), who was the largest landowner of the group, with 20,000 acres. Most of the signers — as many as 40 — inherited their wealth.
These men, known as the Founding Fathers, represented the upper class of this era who made up 10 percent of the population but controlled between 50 to 70 percent of the land.
The prize goes to the Van Renssalaer family, which controlled 1 million acres in New York.
Of the signers, 41 were slaveholders, including Jefferson, who was at the time subjecting 600 people to captivity and forced labor while avowing equality for all. He took one of these slaves, Sally Hemmings, with him to Paris at the age of 14 and she would soon thereafter bear his child as a child herself.3
George Washington, also a plantation owner and slave-owner, didn’t sign the Declaration because he was out of town running the Revolutionary Army. Washington accepted the position as general of the colonial military at least in part because he felt snubbed by King George III. Washington believed he was deserving of a commissioned officer’s title for his role in the so-called French and Indian War.4 Said commission was never granted and the nation’s first leader bore a grudge, which is all that is needed these days for a rich white man to assume the highest office.
Washington inherited a respectable fortune of 2,500 acres and 30 or so slaves, but had a bit of an inferiority complex, which may have been part of his motivation for marrying up. Martha Washington, née Dandridge, was a widow and one of the richest individuals in Virginia. Matrimony conveniently increased Washington’s income tenfold.5
What all the complaining was about
WHAT WE REMEMBER MOST about the the 27 grievances in the Declaration of Independence is No. 17, which is etched into every American schoolchild’s skull as the catchy phrase: “No taxation without representation!”
This was certainly a concern, but paled in comparison to the charges of political oppression, military tyranny, judicial injustice, economic oppression, and willful neglect of the individual states.
It would not be difficult to match each of the 27 complaints then with similar charges lodged against the current despot ruler of the United States. Just to highlight some of the originals with their modern-day doppelgangers:
No. 9:Making judges dependent on his will alone
No. 10:Sending officers to harass civilians
No. 12:Rendering the military above civilian power
No. 14:Quartering troops among civilian populations6
No. 18: Denying trial by jury
No. 19: Abducting and shipping civilians overseas for pretended offenses
No. 27:Exciting domestic insurrection
These illustrate precisely why the Founding Fathers wrote the document in the first place and why they then undertook a multiyear battle to become independent.
A most telling omission
ANOTHER PHRASE THAT HAS BEEN indelibly pressed into the American lexicon is that “all men are created equal.” Yet, even while writing this in the Declaration’s introduction, the Founding Fathers knew it was hypocritical to exclude slavery from the narrative.
Jefferson, to his credit, did try to blame the king for America’s system of subjugation. Almost immediately, though, what would have been a 28th grievance was stricken. The south, of course, was dependent on slavery and had no economic motive to change their business model. Apparently the Christian Golden Rule to “do unto others as you would have others do unto you” did not weigh on their consciences. So calling out England for a system the Southern Colonies had no intention of eliminating was just silly. They were also no doubt acutely aware of the growing anti-slavery movement in the Kingdom of Great Britain.7
Washington, according to folklore, could not tell a lie, but he was not above looking the other way. He privately made it known that he thought slavery should be abolished, but in a phased out approach, preferably after he was long gone.8
None of the 13 colonies at the time considered slave-owning illegal. It wasn’t as pronounced in the north for economic reasons mostly. The south’s economy was dependent on large crops such as tobacco and cotton that required large amounts of manual labor. The north was made up of smaller farms and trades, such as ship-building, metal-working, milling, and printing, and the maritime industries of fishing and whaling. Especially for the trades in the north, free labor was readily available in the form of indentured servitude, in which kids were sent to work without pay to learn a craft. After five or seven years, they might earn their freedom.
Putting pen to paper: 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence.
The “all men are created equal” clause in the Declaration is taught to students to mean all people, but that, of course, was not how the Founding Fathers meant it. They would later clarify this by establishing in the Constitution that black men were equal to three-fifths of a white man. It was no oversight that women were excluded altogether since married women at the time were considered the legal property of their husbands. Indigenous people were not considered at all and described as “savages.”
A little thought experiment
IMAGINE FOR A MOMENT that on that balmy day in July 1776 it was not just wealthy white men who congregated to “form a more perfect union.”9 What if, in a moment of true enlightenment, those distinguished 56 gentlemen sought the input of people such as Joseph Brant (Thayendanegea), a Mohawk leader fluent in English who had actually held court with King George and who was a skilled negotiator among the Iroquois, colonialists and British. What if William Lee, Washington’s black valet and confidante, had been asked for his input? Or perhaps Prince Hall, a black soldier who joined the charge of Bunker Hill and was a leading advocate for the rights of his people?
Or what if Abigail Adams, a feminist ahead of her time, held an equal voice at the table alongside her husband John? How about if enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley, who challenged the stereotype of her people, had also been asked to speak?
What do you suppose the Declaration of Independence, and later the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, might have looked like had they been written by an assembly truly representative of all the people at the time?
Of course, we can only speculate. But we can do more than that when we scrutinize the output of the 56 men who were there. They were certainly successful in laying the groundwork for freeing the fledgling nation from a far-away monarchy. But the system they put into place was, when viewed from a truly objective perspective, not altogether that different.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
TODAY, CITIZENS ARE MARCHING in the street chanting “No Kings,” which is a proxy for “We’re not going back to an autocracy.” But, ironically, King George III’s powers back then were limited. The British already had a parliamentary form of government. It was that legislative body that voted to pass onerous laws on taxation in the states, that managed the states’ trade with England, that held the “power of the purse,” controlling spending for all the government’s affairs, including the military. They also collectively decided the governors of each state.
And even though the king was the recipient of the Declaration, there was a strong sentiment among the Founding Fathers that it was parliament, not the king, that had overstepped its authoritative line. The original idea for revolting was to circumvent that British legislature and remain loyal to the king, essentially just cutting out the “middle man.” Franklin was an early proponent of this strategy. 10
Moreover, monarchies were beginning their final chapter in Europe. The Western World was rapidly moving to a political-economic system based on capitalism, where money, rather than bloodline and inheritance, equaled power. It was the new system taking over the old, a system that required insatiable growth through the exploitation of “new” lands and the occupants therein.
The name of the socio-economic model got re-branded from parliamentary monarchy to democracy, but it was pretty much the same thing. And the result was the same as well: One colonizing empire swapped out for another. It was still rich white men running the world, co-mingling their personal financial interests with the public’s interest. If you write the rules for the game of government, and can change the rules whenever you want, you will always win. Money buys power and power is the root of all evil, especially in politics.
That is why the type of “equality” laid out in the Declaration holds pretty true today, where 63% of U.S. senators are white men, despite being only 29% of the population, where more than half of all Congressional members are millionaires. Today, 30% of the wealth in the U.S. is concentrated in the hands of 1 percent of the population, of which 90 percent are white and mostly male. And these are the people that pour obscene billions into lobbies and elections to get what they want. And when they get what they want, they want more.
The Founding Fathers undoubtedly considered their work to be sowing the seeds of democracy, but what they actually planted was the root of unfettered capitalism, a root that took hold and propagated like an invasive species, one that is all but impossible to weed out today.
All of this is to say that the Founding Fathers’ dream came true, just not the way it is taught in elementary school.
FOOTNOTES
The 13 original colonies were: Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, and Virginia. ↩︎
Franklin started his career at the age of 12, assigned to a 9-year indentured-servitude contract as a printer’s apprentice, under the ownership of his own brother. ↩︎
To Hemming’s credit, while in Paris, where slavery was illegal, she negotiated with Jefferson that she would only return to the United States in exchange for extraordinary privileges compared to the other slaves at the time. Jefferson conceded. She went on to bear four of his children. SOURCE: Monticello.org.↩︎
Source: Peter Stark, Sins of the Founding Fathers↩︎
The actual size of the combined estate of Martha and George Washington is a bit difficult to ascertain, since her fortune was tied to her previous husband. George Washington took control of those affairs, but could not legally own them outright. Nonetheless, his wealth increased about tenfold as a result of their marriage. ↩︎
This grievance is generally interpreted to mean a complaint in which soldiers had the right to sleep in civilian homes. But U.S. marines in tents in California cities at the time of this writing has an equally threatening effect. ↩︎
Slavery would be abolished in the British Empire in 1833, although one could argue that it survived in other forms of involuntary servitude. ↩︎
In his will, Washington stated that all his slaves should be freed after Martha’s death. But Martha decided to free them immediately after George’s death, because she feared the slaves might simply kill her to obtain their freedom. Source: mountvernon.org. ↩︎
This is written in the preamble to the U.S. Constitution of 1787. ↩︎
The Royalist Revolution, Monarchy and the American Founding, by Eric Nelson. ↩︎
TODAY, I ACCOMPLISHED AN AMAZING FEAT without even trying. I completed 70 repetitions on the Solar Elliptical Circuit. Yeah, just finished. Going to take a well-deserved nap and then start on 71.
Image of Earth and its moon taken from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, at a distance of 142 million kilometers. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
If that’s not impressive enough, consider this: I am now officially a member of the Trillion Kilometer Club, having earned the distinction when I surpassed that distance as a traveler through space aboard the good ship Mother Earth. I took the scenic route just to rack up more frequent flier points.
You, too, are hitchhiking a little ride through the galaxy, without a guide, I might add.1 But enough about you; it’s my birthday and what I want to delve into is the relationship between time and space and how time flies, except to a common housefly, who doesn’t see time fly by, though the fly can certainly fly.
If you are not thoroughly confused yet, I suggest you continue reading and I’ll do my best to get you there.
Acting my age
YES, I’VE BEEN ALIVE A LONG time. I am now older than the Pope. I didn’t see that one coming. Nor did I ever expect the Pope to be a guy from Chicago named Bob, but I digress. If I really want to feel like I have been occupying Earth for a very long stay, though, I look to the average housefly.
I’ve been thinking about these unwanted creatures as of late because we are residing in a cozy flat in London, where the weather has been uncharacteristically warm and this being Europe, our only source of ventilation is open windows, which have no screens. This provides our friends musca domestica easy access to our abode. Despite being informed that they are very much not welcomed here, they continue to come and go as they please. Maybe they don’t understand “shoo!” in my American accent.
The only redeeming quality of these winged nuisances is that they live but a few short weeks. So I can gloat that I have outlasted any member of this insect family by a factor of 1,100 to one.2 Compared to them, I have been in existence for eons. But, as the saying goes, there’s always two sides to the story.
A different point of view
FROM THE FLY’S PERSPECTIVE, my way of viewing the time-space continuum is obviously lacking.
That’s because this little insect has vastly superior optic sensors, compared to a human’s.
A human’s eyes scan at the rate of about 60 hertz, which means that in one second we are seeing 60 separate, sequential flashes of light as it reflects off objects into our field of vision. But a fly scrutinizes its surroundings at a refresh rate of between 250 to 400 times per second.
The higher scanning rate means that to the fly, paradoxically, time moves more slowly than it does to humans.
This is why it’s so darn difficult to nail one of these guys. When you extend your arm with a swatter in hand and swing at that unwanted visitor perched on the window sill, you see your action as a blur of motion. With your wrist and your elbow acting as a compound fulcrum, the flat surface of the fly swatter is being leveraged to move at almost 100 kilometers per hour. But to that little speck of an organism, you are reenacting a slo-mo replay of a batter striking out at the World Series. You think you almost had the bugger, but it is actually observing you approaching at a snail’s pace and, biding its sweet time, the critter nonchalantly performs an acrobatic airlift-evacuation out of the strike zone.
While the speed of the world appears to be dragging to that miniature entity in an exoskeleton, its brain is actually operating at a very rapid rate. Compared to a human, the information gleaned from the fly’s vision is analyzed nearly instantaneously. Part of that is bio-mechanics. The neurons have a shorter distance to travel,3 allowing the information from its eyes to reach the processing unit, aka the brain, more quickly. So the entire cycle — information input, computing, then firing of neurons — triggers a near-instant reflex.
A minute in the life of a human brain
THE FLY HAS ANOTHER ADVANTAGE. Its minuscule brain (a millionth the size of a human’s) is unencumbered by all the cross-channel talk, the ambient noise that is rattling around and interfering with the signal of electrical impulses that are pulsating through the frontal, parietal, temporal and occipital lobes inside our skulls. We are thinking about the past, the present and the future, usually all at once and muddled with emotions — regret, ambition, anxiety, anger, surprise, sadness, love, grief, and fear among others– when we should be trying to focus on being in the moment.
For example, imagine you are stuck in stop-and-go traffic while on a conference call because last quarter’s numbers were down and now your boss is rambling on about another reorg and of course replacing everybody with AI and you are wondering why you are even trying to keep your job maybe now is the time to open that studio in the Andes where you can teach dance to little Peruvian children — did you just think “children?” Oh geez you are late picking up your own kid you know something’s going on with them they are at that age but this could be something else should you send them to a doctor and if so what kind of doctor and — look out! That guy is obviously texting. Idiot. Jesus! — You mean the guy is an idiot, not Jesus — Doctors what about them did you or did you not already pay that $1,250 deductible to the hospital can’t believe it for just an outpatient procedure to remove a tiny benign mole what good is health insurance anyway premiums always going up better keep the job though just for the insurance — The Andes some little Peruvian village like that one in the David Attenborough special he is such a treasure you just want to be anywhere other than in this traffic do you even remember a plié from a pirouette? — Look out for that guy in the Camaro weaving in and out like he’s going to win some race — we’re all stuck in this traffic buddy — he thinks he’s special everybody thinks they’re special — Oh, what to do about dinner are you really going to see family for Thanksgiving you know how that will end whose turn is it to cook tonight should you pick something up you just missed the exit for Whole Foods well you have to get off in two exits to pick up the kid, did you forget, again? — You are a good person and a good parent, aren’t you? Of course you are. Yes, you are, at least you try that’s what’s important. Did your very best friend really say at lunch you should maybe switch to a different therapist what a thing to say, weird — Uh oh there’s the exit maybe you can still make it nope whoa nope — wow, that was close, focus, focus — yeah everybody quit your honking gotta get out, just let me get off yeah I get it you’re pissed OK got it. Jesus. People. What is with them. Your back hurts who designs these car seats they’re made for chimpanzees not humans.
Indeed, the fly has none of that stuff going on in its noggin so the little guy can just relax and when necessary react, all by reflex. Lickety-split.
Time is qualitatively relative, according to Einstein, sort of
THE FLY’S LIFE IS ABOUT QUALITY, not quantity. In just 28 days, this tiny being goes through four stages from egg, to larva, to pupa and then adult.
Day twenty-eight is the culmination of a fulfilling life. By the end they are wistfully reminiscing about the crazy things they did as pupae and how did they even make it to adulthood? Seems so long ago, now. And it would seem long ago to you, too, if you viewed the entire world at the pace of a Powerpoint™ presentation. Dear God, next slide, PLEASE.
This perspective is a nice twist on Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The relativity part is just that: Time is relative to the observer, based on the observer’s motion through space.
Einstein’s explained his most famous theory with a description of a bolt of lightning striking a train and how it might appear at different times to two people based on their positions and movement. Photo by Doris Ulmann. Creative Commons license.
Fun fact: Flies love life. Sure, they have some work to do propagating their species, laying or fertilizing eggs, and of course watching out for predators, but other than they are thoroughly enjoying themselves. That’s why they are always buzzing with excitement and I have the empirical evidence to prove my assertion.
Now, at this point, you may be questioning my authoritative proclamations in the field of etymology or entomology, whichever of those has to do with insects. True, I’m no scientist, but my cousin was and so I think I’m qualified in today’s government to run pretty much anything from NASA to the NIH. But I digress.
Anyway, the reason flies buzz with excitement is very simple: Everything smells and tastes great!4 And, of course, I mean EVERYTHING.
So what’s not to like when you’re a fly? We are repulsed at the thought of some lowly bug having such an unrefined palate, but that’s just how we humans are, always looking at the world as though it revolves around us, despite being schooled by Copernicus hundreds of years ago to the contrary. We wallow in denial while the fly is just eating up life. And then it dies. But what a life, right? That’s what all that buzzing is about.
We are evolution’s latecomers
SHORT THE FLY’S LIFE APPEARS TO US, but that is just another human judgment. As I think about it now, I’m being very egocentric in just comparing my individual life to be worth more than one thousand generations of these insects.
That’s because members of musca domestica have been gracing the earth for 65 million years. Homo sapiens entered the picture just 300,000 years ago.Compared to flies, we are maybe in the larval stage of evolution.
Flies, as I mentioned, are not burdened with all the crazy thoughts going through our brains. But if they could think, they would undoubtedly wonder why it is that after being on this planet for so long without a care in the world they were invaded by this ugly bipedal beast that seems compelled to continually thrust one of its giant limbs at them in very slow motion. And, undoubtedly, they would find that very annoying and maybe decide to put together some type of eradication program. What to use? Hepatitis, typhoid, cholera might come to their diminutive minds.
Let’s do some fun math (yes, that is a thing)
OUR WAY OF MEASURING TIME is at once arbitrary, parochial and one-dimensional.
We are gauging our existence based on our travels aboard one watery orb as it completes one ellipse around an incandescent fireball. We mark that complete orbit as a unit of time we call a year.
We are traveling in multiple cosmic planes all at once.
But we are actually advancing in four distinct directions across the x,y, and z axes (height, width and depth) all at once. First, we are zipping around as the earth itself rotates. While we move in that circular motion, we are also orbiting the sun. Meanwhile, the sun itself is completing its own 240-million-year spin around our galactic neighborhood we call the Milky Way, and it’s dragging the entire solar system along for the ride. And finally, the Milky Way is spiraling around a black hole. So we are moving in multiple directions simultaneously. Makes me dizzy just thinking about it, never mind doing it. If you really want to be a daredevil, you can add a fifth cosmic plane just by, well, jumping out of an airplane.5
So here’s how a 70-year-old human achieves the Trillion Kilometer Club:6
Earth’s rotation for 365 days X 70 years = 1.025 billion Km
Earth’s orbit around the sun X 70 years = 65.8 billion Km
Sun’s orbit around the Milky Way = 441.8 billion Km
Milky Way’s spiral around a black hole = 866.9 billion Km
Grand total = 1.376 trillion kilometers
That’s why measuring time based on just the one dimension of Earth’s orbit around the sun is pretty silly if you ask me.
And here’s a fun thought: As you will notice from the numbers above, we’re going faster in each of those cosmic planes until we get to the Milky Way, which is spinning at .07% of the speed of light. As we approach the speed of light, time decelerates. This phenomenon neatly parallels the fly’s paradox, in which its vision –viewing the world at a higher scanning rate — creates an impression of time slowing down.
The sun, by the way, is just one of about 400 billion stars in our galaxy and our little heat pump is in a rather remote location at that. There may be 2 trillion or so galaxies in the universe. So 2 trillion times 400 billion is … well, let’s just say it’s a pretty big number.7 All that inter-spinning and gravitational pull and there are black holes creating a warp in the space-time fabric and now scientists think time can go backwards. So what does a “year” really have to do with anything?
Our measurement of time is subjective, but it gives us humans comfort, a sense of relevance. Some folks, as they reach my age, like to console themselves by saying “70 is the new 60.” But I prefer another aphorism: “You’re only as old as you feel.” And I feel old. I’ve got the typical aches and pains to prove it.
But I’m not that old when compared to the universe, which in a blaze of light blasted into reality some 13.8 billion years ago. My time on Earth is only .0000000005 percent of the existence of our universe,8 which means I have been around for only a very, very, very small fraction of all that has happened.
From that perspective, I feel like someone who arrives at some shindig a little late and then blurts out: “What did I miss? Let’s get this party started!”
Approximation. If the average fly lives three weeks, then the math would be (52/3) X 70 = 1,213. If we use 4 weeks, then the math is (52/4) X 70 = 910. So I’m splitting the difference at 1,100. ↩︎
Neurons, which move through nerves, are actually slow travelers when compared to electrons zipping through a copper wire. ↩︎
Flies do not possess an olfactory organ or taste buds, of course. They use tiny sensilla, or hairs, that cover their body to do the equivalent of smelling and use tiny organs on their feet for tasting. ↩︎
Technically, just moving in any direction will provide you with the Fifth Cosmic Plane, which sounds like a recently discovered bootleg album by Pink Floyd from the 1970s. ↩︎
The details on those calculations were computed using perplexity.ai and are as follows: 1. Earth’s Rotation At the equator, Earth spins at 1,670 km/h. Over 70 years: Distance = Speed × Time = 1,670 km/h × 24 hours/day × 365.25 days/year × 70 years = 1.025 billion km. 2. Earth’s Orbit Around the Sun Earth travels 940 million km/year in its orbit: Total distance = 940,000,000 km/year × 70 years = 65.8 billion km. 3. Sun’s Motion Through the Milky Way The Sun moves at 720,000 km/h relative to the galaxy: Total distance = 720,000 km/h × 24 hours/day × 365.25 days/year × 70 years = 441.8 billion km. 4. Milky Way’s Galactic Rotation The Milky Way rotates once every ~240 million years, and the Sun orbits the galactic center at ~720,000 km/h. Using the galaxy’s diameter (100,000 light-years ≈ 9.461×10¹⁷ km) and its rotation fraction over 70 years: Circumference = π × diameter ≈ 2.973×10¹⁸ km Distance traveled = Circumference × (70 / 240,000,000) = 866.9 billion km. Total Distance Traveled Summing all components: 1.025B km (rotation) + 65.8B km (orbit) + 441.8B km (Sun’s motion) + 866.9B km (galactic rotation) = ≈1.375 trillion km (1.375×10¹² km). ↩︎
That would equal 80 quintillion stars. This is estimated to be 10 times the number of grains of sand on Earth. ↩︎
The Tesla brand is in meltdown and the moral of the story is worthy of an Aesop fable
LET ME TELL YOU A TALE and it’s a good one. It’s about a Boy Genius who came to a place known as the Land of Opportunity and thanks to his privileged heritage he rose quickly to a prominent position and was then able to convince the Smart People of the Land of Opportunity that he was going to create a new kind of car that could help humanity and at no extra charge save the entire world. He built the car and he sold many of them, because the Smart People really, really believed in his vision and the cars were pretty sporty.
The Tesla brand is in meltdown mode, thanks to Elon Musk’s inability to understand the Golden Rule of Business: Know Thy Customer.
He had the Midas touch.
He then erected and launched rockets and said, “Saving Earth is cool and all but why not invade some other planets? That would be cooler.” And the Smart People thought, “Well, he did build that car. And now these rockets. He is superhuman. We should listen to him some more.” And they did. And he became the richest Boy Genius in the world.
And then things got weird, or rather the Boy Genius got weird. Very weird. He became addicted to his power, fame and fortune and many, many pharmaceuticals. And then he not only joined but became a leading proponent of the Vile Movement.
The Vile Movement was everything the Smart People did not like. This made it clear to the Smart People that the Boy Genius didn’t mean any of that stuff about saving the world or helping anybody but himself. All he was doing was using the money that he got from the Smart People to finance causes that would destroy everything they believed in.
And that’s when his Midas touch backfired. That’s when he realized he could not eat his gold. You see, these Smart People became very angry. Many unloaded their cars. Some plastered bumper stickers making it clear they hated this Boy Genius despite owning the car. Protestors took to the streets. His company went into what the Boy Genius might describe as a “rapid unscheduled disassembly.” That’s a nice way of saying it imploded.
The Boy Genius earnestly and without a hint of irony asked: “Why are people so mean?” And then he announced that he would get back to making stuff, really cool stuff that nobody but he — the Boy Genius — could make. But the Smart People who bought his cars and had supported his vision didn’t believe him anymore, because the Smart People now realized he was not a genius, he was just a boy like the one who craved attention so badly he cried “wolf” too many times. The Boy Genius was just someone who could never be trusted again.
Will the Boy Genius rise from the ashes like Phoenix or better yet save his own company like Steve Jobs?1
Stay tuned for next week’s episode!
To be honest, no one knows just yet, so don’t expect a subsequent installment. But I do think I know what the moral of the story is and it is worthy of an Aesop fable.
I bought the vision with U.S. dollars
I MIGHT AS WELL ADMIT IT it right up front: I was sold the first time I rode in a Tesla. It was 2014 and a colleague of mine offered a ride to some meeting in San Francisco. As he hit the pedal, the torque threw my head into the headrest. It was exhilarating. We zipped through traffic on 101 North as he regaled me with stories about over-the-air updates. “It’s just an iPhone with wheels,” he said, as the autopilot app merged us into the left lane.
It was cool. It was unlike anything else on the road. And it was a unique approach to using renewable energy. A luxury vehicle that rode you around in style and saved the environment. What’s not to like?
At the time of this little excursion, I had spent just over 20 years in Silicon Valley. And, to be honest, I was jaded. I had seen lots of technologies come and go. The pattern was abundantly clear to me: A New Shiny Thing appeared and promised to disrupt some big bad legacy industry and in the process the New Shiny Thing would make the world a better place for all.
That was the promise of the World Wide Web, social media, business intelligence, the cloud, you name it. All we got out of it was the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon scraping our private data and harnessing our very personal proclivities for fun and profit.
Tesla checked all the boxes to qualify as the New Shiny Thing and then some. It wasn’t just disrupting the auto industry, it was upending the entire power grid as well by creating a new model for the production and consumption of renewable energy.
I watched with amusement as auto execs scrambled to join the EV parade and as the PG&Es and ConEds of the world struggled to adapt their monopolies to a distributed energy network that they couldn’t control.
All of that was impressive. But what really sold me was the Tesla mission statement to transition the world to renewable energy. It was based on a manifesto supposedly written by Elon Musk himself.
Funky AI image, but the sentiment is real for many Tesla owners.
And so that glimmering, shimmering object, that silvery emblem with a “T” was the lure that caught my eye. And despite my experience-based cynicism, this time I bit: hook, line and sinker.
I even chuckled to myself that I had missed a golden opportunity with Musk years before.
A kid named Elon who wasn’t kidding
HE WAS JUST ANOTHER 20-something nerd, one with a prematurely receding hairline and a latent outbreak of acne, when I met him in 1996. He had called me up and asked for a meeting. At the time, I was running the Java Developer Ecosystem at Sun Microsystems. My voice mail and email were clogged with similar requests because Java, a programming language invented by James Gosling, was fortuitously just the right platform for Internet-based applications. Java was red hot. Every start-up in a garage had an idea for the next big thing using Java.
But Musk was quite persistent and so I did meet with him, and his brother — Gimbel, Gumball or something like that. It has come to light recently that the two Musk boys had overstayed their visas in the United States around this time. So, apparently, I bought breakfast for two illegal aliens and then listened to their pitch. (Please do not tell ICE.)
Elon did all the talking. His patter was fast and his Afrikaans accent was thick. All I could glean from his running monolog was that he wanted to sell his company, called Zip2. Naturally, I assumed the enterprise had something to do with replacing snail mail with email, which had already been done. But it turns out Zip2 was even more boring: It was just online classified ads. And he never once mentioned how Java fit in. So I passed on the opportunity.
But now, here he was, 18 years later in 2014, proving me wrong. He had sold Zip2 for a tidy sum, started another company that got acquired by PayPal, which then got gobbled up by eBay. He cashed out and funneled those funds into Tesla, where he financially elbowed his way into the CEO position. He turned out to be the Boy Genius after all. I wondered how I could have gotten him so wrong.
Shortly thereafter in 2015, I had the chance to meet J.B. Straubel, one of the founders of Tesla. That’s when I learned who was the technical mastermind behind much of the company’s technology and operations. It was Straubel who invented the battery cell design that was the breakthrough for electric vehicles, giving them the range of gas-powered cars.
Straubel was the guy behind new manufacturing processes, including the Gigafactory. And he created a whole new market with another idea: the PowerWall.
Bumper stickers for sale on Etsy. The anti-Musk movement is worldwide.
So, I thought, Musk was the prancing show horse, Straubel the diligent — but brilliant — work horse. This was not an uncommon arrangement in Silicon Valley. Behind every Steve Jobs, usually there was a Steve Wozniak. This just reinforced my appreciation for what Tesla was doing.
In the following months, I wrote several positive pieces about the company in my blog and in CIO magazine. And then, starting in 2017, I went fan boy. I ended up buying the whole package: First the solar panels, then a Tesla Model 3 Long Range, then the Powerwall II. I signed up for Starlink beta as soon as it was available. I bought Tesla stock.
Today, I own none of those things. And I am just one of perhaps hundreds of thousands of formerly loyal customers who have shed all their Tesla assets in direct protest against Musk.
He never saw it coming, and still doesn’t understand why
HONESTLY, I WAS AS SURPRISED as many other FTOs — Former Tesla Owners — at how quickly the anti-Musk movement achieved its formidable momentum. That surprise was not without a tinge of schadenfreude.
But, I am reasonably sure, no one was more shocked than Musk himself. I think I know why there was such animosity from the FTOs toward Musk, and why he can’t comprehend what is happening.
What Musk — who believes that empathy is a weakness — either forgot or never learned was the Golden Rule of Business:
Know Thy Customer
I’m going to profile the Tesla buyer, of which I was one. We are mostly Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers with a decent chunk of disposable income. We are educated and liberal. We are technically savvy. We voted for Hillary even though Bernie was the better choice. We voted for Kamala even though we are inspired by AOC.
We take climate change seriously.
We advocate for equal rights for all people, regardless of ethnicity, color, sexual orientation or religious beliefs.
We make fact-based decisions. We trust science.
We started Earth Day. We lobbied worldwide for fixing the ozone and it worked. We bought into recycling, organic foods, renewable energy, hybrids. Some of us were hippies, and then yuppies. We abandoned organized religion and leaned into New Age with Buddhism and meditation. And then we became parents and then grandparents who only want a better place for our kids and grandkids.
The anti-Musk vitriol being expressed now reminds me of another story, this one from Aesop, titled “The Farmer and the Viper.”
A farmer finds a viper outside in the freezing cold and decides to be kind to the animal, so he takes it inside. After the viper warms up, the snake bites the farmer.
Moral of the story: Don’t be kind to Evil.
Tesla buyers, at the risk of stating the obvious, are the farmer in this fable. We thought we were doing the right thing helping the viper. But we learned our lesson. We have banished the viper from the house because we absolutely do not want to be kind to Evil.
Once bitten, never again
SO WHEN MUSK WENT FULL-ON MAGA and entered Washington D.C. with a chainsaw, this is the nucleus of the population that collectively lost it. This guy was supposed to be our salvation. Instead, he sold us down the road.
What made it all the more aggravating was that there was considerable merit in what Tesla the company was doing; thank you J.B. Straubel.
This was not ENRON. In fact, it was even worse than being swindled by some fraudulent accounting scheme. We expended our hard-earned dollars not as just a financial investment but as an emotional one, supporting Musk to lead the cause. It made him obscenely rich. Now, here he was funneling our dollars into the very antithesis of what we believed in.
And we still want that better place, damn it.
Time to do some soul searching
BUT WHAT IS EVEN MORE TROUBLING for many of us, and I include myself in this group, is that we were duped in the same fashion as the Conservative Cult Crowd.
For 40-plus years, we have watched in disbelief as Republicans slipped into their dystopian mind-numbing coma, starting with Ronald Reagan, then George Bush aka Dick Cheney, and culminating with the Charlatan Clown. We wondered how it was possible voters could not see what was happening right in front of them. And, I might add, right to them.
Yet, we Tesla owners smugly assumed we were too wise to get conned, all while we were being led by the nose by a scam artist of our own making.
To be very clear, all the ideas about climate change and what’s needed to save the planet are valid, scientifically proven. But we should have been listening to Greta Thunberg, not Elon Musk. We should have been investing in mass transit, in urban planning, in shutting down the fossil fuel industry and reining in the Military Industrial Complex. Yes, Tesla has some interesting technology. But the environmental mission statement — the manifesto — is gone from Tesla’s website, and all we got were several million more cars clogging our already overburdened streets and highways. All we ended up with was another disappointing New Shiny Thing failing to live up to the hype.
And here is the trap that we all fall into, regardless of our ideology, political affiliation, religious beliefs. Once we’ve invested, we tend to want to double down to justify our actions. Throw some good money after the bad in a vain attempt to regain our original investment. We live in denial that we made a mistake. This is the sunken cost fallacy.
We knew about Musk’s true character long before January 2025. But we had already bought in.
He spouted disinformation about COVID and violated laws to keep his Fremont factory running at the height of the pandemic. But we looked the other way. He displayed his racist-misogynist views on Twitter and then bought the platform and turned it into his own crowd-sourced Elon Musk adoration society. We again gave him the benefit of the doubt.
Unsafe at any speed
YET, IT WASN’T JUST THE dangerous political views that we conveniently dismissed. Even more egregiously, we forgave the “safety idiosyncrasies” of the Tesla car’s overall road worthiness.
We knew that Ralph Nader and many others had been warning U.S. regulators about the inherent design flaws in Tesla’s automated system for years. We not only chose to ignore the warnings, we drove the damn vehicles. Since 2014, the National Transportation Safety Board has tracked hundreds of accidents and 51 fatalities involving Tesla’s guidance system. I can personally relate one incident while driving our car that came close to adding my spouse and me to those statistics.
We were driving on I-5 north of Bakersfield, California on a clear day with perfect visibility. The road was straight. There was very light traffic. We were cruising along at 80 mph, using FSD (full self-driving). I was in the driver’s seat and I can attest that both my hands were on the wheel, when the system, without warning, slammed on the brakes.
The car skidded and swerved into the right lane before I regained control.
What caused this malfunction? This is known in the Tesla world as “phantom braking.” Whether there is a ghost in the machine or not, I don’t want it activating a “sudden unplanned deceleration” to a dead stop, especially when I’m moving almost 120 feet per second.
Here is my analysis of what happened:
There was nothing directly in front of us. But, about a quarter mile up the road, there were two white 18-wheelers side by side, as one overtook the other. My guess is the reflection of those two vehicles, which were just underneath a white concrete overpass, confused the Tesla cameras and software, which interpreted the three distinct white objects as one large obstruction. We were heading at high speed toward a giant wall, as far as the computer was concerned.
Even worse, the system misjudged the distance to this imaginary barrier as not a quarter-mile ahead, but directly in front of us. That is the only feasible explanation for why the car functioned the way it did.
This is a well-documented problem with Teslas. Musk insists the cars don’t need radar or LIDAR but obviously the cameras alone are not good enough as sensory input for full self-driving or any kind of assisted driving. Fortunately, there was no one behind us or in the right lane when this occurred, as has happened on the Bay Bridge and elsewhere.
That was the scariest incident, but not the only one for us. The car easily got confused whenever roads had been widened or repaved and residue from the old white lines remained faintly visible, or when there were traffic cones or other temporary modifications to the surface or surroundings. The car would swerve and brake without warning. We used FSD only a few times, and paid diligent attention whenever we had it activated. It never, ever felt safe.
Adding it all up
NOW IN RETROSPECT, as I think about it — the 180-degree change in politics, the disturbed behavior of the man both personally and professionally, the clearly dangerous condition of the cars — I feel like Homer Simpson, slapping my forehead. How could I have not seen it? I might as well have given $100,000 to that Nigerian prince. At least his emails were polite.
And here is the hardest realization to face: I can deride the MAGA crowd who believe in Jesus Christ and yet can justify voting for a convicted rapist and felon who doesn’t even know which end of the Bible is up (literally). Weren’t the other Tesla owners and I compartmentalizing our actions as well?
I didn’t think I could be that easily persuaded to look the other way. So I’m angry, not just at Musk, but at myself. And I bet the other FTOs (Former Tesla Owners) are feeling the same way.
How did this happen to a bunch of well-education, well-informed people?
The power of myth
THERE IS A SCHOOL OF THOUGHT, led by some serious thinkers such as Yuval Noah Harari and Karen Armstrong, that posits that there was one very key distinguishing characteristic that led to homo sapiens surviving and even thriving, while the Neanderthals, Denisovans and other species went extinct. It wasn’t our biology, superior tool making, or language. It was fiction: Telling ourselves stories that give meaning to things we don’t understand.
Where did we come from? Viracocha, or Brahma, or God. Take your pick.2Why do we die? We don’t! We just go somewhere else in another form. Why was there a flood just when we were bringing in the crops? Oh, the gods must have been angry. Maybe we need to slaughter a lamb to appease them.
Myths are the easiest path for our minds to take to explain these intractable problems.
Once humans developed this line of thinking, some interesting behaviors appeared, because believing in a common set of myths can act as an organizing principle. If one person can convince the others that he or she has been designated to act as the messenger for a god or gods, it’s pretty easy to get those people to fall in line.
The Code of Hammurabi is considered one of the most important and influential ancient legal documents in the world. But the Babylonian king for which it is named did not profess to write the 282 laws himself. He was just the messenger, delivering this fiat directly from Shamash, the Babylonian god of justice.
Moses and the Ten Commandments has a similar plot.
In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson cites that …”all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights … ” Jefferson was just acting as the scribe for a divine being when listing those rights.
Humans conjured up religion, the concept of money and monetary systems, laws and moral codes. But by convincing ourselves these abstract notions were either handed down from on above or have some higher sense of purpose, we have a convenient way to create order out of chaos.
Oh, how we love a good story.
And this is how humans were able to organize in bands of not just 50 but 500, 5,000, even 5 million. It’s how you build pyramids (and pyramid schemes), how you wage crusades, how you get millions of people to put their hands on their hearts and tearfully pledge allegiance to a fictitious entity called a country.
You can motivate a heck of a lot of people to work in concert and accomplish some pretty crazy things just by convincing them they are parter of some bigger, mysterious force.
Neanderthals never saw us coming.
The Silicon Valley myth
SOMEWHERE ALONG THE WAY in the 1990s, when our generation elected the hip, saxophone-toting Bill Clinton to be the first Baby Boomer president, we thought that maybe, just maybe we could forge a different economic model, where capitalism meets altruism, where we could throw out all the old rules for business and society, thanks to microprocessors and software.
We sincerely believed that Silicon Valley ideas, fueled by a few million in venture capital dollars, could, like alchemy changing lead into gold, make the world a better place and if some people got rich cashing in their ISOs and NSOs3 in the process, well that was pretty cool, too.
Here’s what we really did: We created our own story. It’s the Silicon Valley Myth. Its a recipe made up of all the beliefs we already know and trust: You just add a slight twist of technology, a dash of religion, a sprig or two of Adam Smith, seasoned with Utopian philosophy. Sprinkle in some goofy company names to pretend work is fun, toss in some free meals and Pilates for good measure.
Many great things have come out of Silicon Valley. Many people got rich. But, let’s admit it, the business model is no different than the Industrial Revolution: Make things and services faster, cheaper and better.
In both eras, as technology rapidly changed the status quo, humans had trouble keeping up. Some, like the Luddites revolted. Today, maybe a similar trend is the anti-vaxxers. We get overwhelmed. We look for shortcuts to the answers.
And that’s when we elevate certain people we consider successful to that myth-like status of Moses and Hammurabi.
In the Gilded Age it was the likes of Rockefeller, Edison and Carnegie. In our times it is Steve Jobs4, Bill Gates, and yes, Elon Musk. Good story tellers all who conveniently fulfill what we ask of them: to pretend they are superhuman and have all the answers.
So when a Musk comes along and says “I’ve got the solution to climate change and it’s actually cool and fun!” we fall into the same trap as all those humans before us.
We love a good story.
So, it should be no surprise that Silicon Valley employees and residents were among the earliest of early adopters of Teslas. It was the story for all Silicon Valley stories.
Rise and shine!
BUT HERE IS WHERE I GIVE MYSELF and my fellow FTOs some credit. We woke up. Yeah, think about that: We’re WOKE. And us Woke Folk woke the fuck up. We have chased that viper out of our house and it shall be banished forever.
We took to the streets and pulled the road out from under Tesla at a very critical juncture in the company’s existence.
Tesla had already been falling behind. It’s cash cow Model 3s and Model Ys were outdated at a time when EVs were fast on their way to being commoditized. BYD can deliver a better vehicle at half the price. And they aren’t just copying, they are innovating. Meanwhile, Tesla’s newest offering, the Cybertruck, is an unmitigated flop, the 21st Century Edsel.
This is all happening just when Musk needs that Tesla revenue and profit to propel the next big plays for the survival of the company: robotics. Without that financial fuel, he is going to fall further behind investing in these highly competitive and potentially very lucrative new opportunities, at the very time he is losing the lower end of the car market.
This reminds me of another story, about the famous French wit Voltaire. On his deathbed, the prolific author was being administered the Last Rites by a Catholic priest, and the conversation went something like this:
Priest: “Do you denounce Satan?” Voltaire: “No.” Priest: “Why not? Voltaire: “Now is not the time to be making enemies.”
Musk should have thought twice, even thrice, before biting the hand that carried him into a warm house, before pissing off the very customers he needed to move onto to the next big thing. It was the very wrong time to make enemies. But, of course, a viper does what is in its nature.
The only thing sustaining Tesla’s insane stock valuation now is Musk’s smoke-and-mirror show. Investors didn’t mind as long as the cash was rolling in. But the money is drying up, the smoke has dissipated and we see the man behind the curtain for who he really is. There is no path to winning back the hearts and minds of the FTOs any more than Bernie Madoff will arise from the grave and convince his old marks to invest in his latest Ponzi scheme.
I promise you this: I will never give Musk another dollar.
Musk — and Tesla — may survive, but he and the company inexorably linked with him will be forever tarnished, forever relegated to a case study in business school. It will be among the cautionary tales: Don’t do what these guys did. He will be right in there with John DeLorean of the eponymous car company, Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, Inc., Kenneth Lay of Enron, and Adam Neumann from WeWork.
And to me, being in that company is the best place for Musk.
Unless he wants to go to Mars. I’ll break my promise and pay to send him to Mars.
FOOTNOTES
Having met both Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, I can say with certainty he will never be Steve Jobs. Jobs asked questions. He was a diligent listener. Musk is in love with his own voice and ideas. ↩︎
Virtually every organized religion in every culture has a remarkably similar story of the creation of humans. ↩︎
ISOs: Incentive Stock Options, NSOs: Non-qualified stock options. These are “options” to buy a stock at a particular price, sometimes zero and then sell them at at market rate, almost always at a very healthy profit. Stock options drive much of the employee pay packages in Silicon Valley. ↩︎
Steve Jobs died in 2011, but he is still among the top quoted and studied business gurus . ↩︎
The wind-swept sand dunes of the Colorado Desert in California.
We may think we’re Great, but, alas, we’re still Apes
ON A DRIVE FROM Yuma, Arizona to San Diego, California, I was captivated by the ever-changing, surreal topography. But two human-made structures punctuated the natural landscape in a way that got me to thinking about how much our species has in common with baboons.
Yes, baboons. But first, a bit about the scenery.
Sherry imitates a towering saguaro cactus in the Arizona desert.
On Interstate 8, it seems the moment you traverse the border at the Colorado River, the saguaro cacti disappear. It’s as though these succulents, with their iconic outstretched arms reaching for the sky, are a proprietary brand of the Copper State.
Not to be outdone, the Golden State immediately presents you with the quintessential sand dunes of the Colorado Desert, sculpted by the wind into smooth giant hills, resembling mounds of poured sugar. Except for the occasional Joshua tree, yucca plant, or creosote bush struggling to survive, the dreamy-yet-desolate terrain seems right out of Lawrence of Arabia. You might expect to see the titular character bouncing astride a loping camel, kicking sand in the air with its hooves. The distant silhouette of the Chocolate Mountains adds to the backdrop, as though painted on a movie-set canvas.
It is just past the dunes that I-8 veers directly south and then hugs the international border with Mexico. It is here that you will be introduced to The Wall.
Structure No. 1: The Wall
DEVOID OF EVEN A SEMBLANCE OF AESTHETICS, the giant black fence of solid steel thrusts discordantly out of the terrain. To put it in today’s lingo: the wall is photobombing the vast, arid landscape. The Wall serves its utilitarian purpose, but with mixed results, as has been true of such barricades for millennia. Its xenophobic ancestry can be traced to the Great Wall of China, Hadrian’s Wall, and in more modern times, the Berlin Wall.
Ineffective though it may be, The Wall’s brutalist design sends an unambiguous political message: KEEP OUT.
The Wall separates the town of Jacumba Hot Springs from its sister pueblo of Jacumé, Mexico.
Continuing west on I-8, the next section of The Wall you will spot is in the diminutive town of Jacumba Hot Springs. This hamlet of 800 or so souls has the privilege of sporting one of the first incarnations of this ugly fortification, erected during the Clinton administration.
I’m not sure who had the bright idea to construct this monstrosity with steel plates left over from the Vietnam War. Maybe some political consultant thought this could be spun as a “swords to plowshares” narrative.
But the irony is just too delectable to ignore. After using this material to violently (and unsuccessfully) invade a far-off land, all in the name of democracy, the U.S. then recycles this war-machine detritus to “protect” itself from huddled masses yearning to be free… Give me your tired, your poor,1 but not if they are your next-door neighbors, I guess.
All of this is worthy of a treatise on its own, but I’ll have to save that for a later day.
Although the wall in Jacumba is technically on the edge of town, it’s perceived by the villagers as having cleaved their lives in two, since many residents had or still have relatives in the sister pueblo of Ejido Jacumé on the Mexican side. What was once a casual 10- or 15-minute walk can now take a half day of driving — via the nearest “official” border crossing.
There’s plenty more diverse scenery to savor on this leg of the journey, including the Anza Borrego Desert and the Jacumba Wilderness itself. Also worthy of note is Smuggler’s Gulch, named in the 1880s for the cattle rustling that occurred between the U.S. and Mexico — in which direction I’m not sure. Here, in a very narrow canyon, giant sandstone boulders, many the size of a McMansion, teeter on cliffs. These car-crushing rocks appear ready to roll any minute.
Structure No. 2: The Bridge
The Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, more commonly known as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge, rises some 440 feet, or 134 meters, from the ground. Photo by George J. Janczyn. Used with permission2.
AS YOU CONTINUE YOUR JOURNEY to San Diego, you’ll ascend once again and eventually enter the Cleveland National Forest. You will then be confronted with a deep canyon that would be impossible to traverse in any vehicular manner were it not for a unique marvel of engineering.
This is the second of the two aforementioned structures that brought baboons to mind (yes, I’m getting to that). And it is officially known as the Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, named in honor of the engineer who managed the project. But it is more commonly referred to as the Pine Valley Creek Bridge.
Now — full disclosure — I’m a bit biased when it comes to comparing walls to bridges3. The former is there to exclude one group of humans from another. The latter, on the other hand, intends to unite us.
At the time of its completion in 1974, the Stone Valley Creek Bridge was the highest concrete girder viaduct in the world. That is impressive. But for me, what is even more inspiring is how Greer and his team accomplished this feat utilizing such an elegant design.
The segmented cantilevered method used to hold the road bed aloft is a clever Y-shaped row of pillars. Moreover, the entire ensemble seems to at once blend in with its environs and enhance the scenery at the same time.
I can’t think of many “man-made” structures that can do that.
The backstory on this span across Stony Creek is a fitting juxtaposition to The Wall in Jacumba. Greer rerouted I-8 to save the town of Pine Valley, for which I’m sure its citizens are forever grateful.
The Wall cuts a town in two; The Bridge saves a town. You can see where this is all heading and that is why it is now time to cue the baboons.
EQ vs. IQ
I CAN’T SAY I HAD EVER HAD even a modicum of interest in learning about these distant primate cousins of ours until 2019. At the time, Sherry and I were hiking in the Table Mountain National Park at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa.
Although the Cape feels like the edge of the world, this walk did not seem particularly remote. There’s plenty of fellow tourists and the trail is clearly marked. There is even a restaurant at the summit.
A baboon mother and child, resting in the shade in Table Mountain National Park, on the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa
But to our surprise that day, a mother baboon with a child in tow casually crossed our path and then nonchalantly sat on a wall, seemingly oblivious to our existence. We stopped for a while to grab a video but kept our distance, out of respect.
I was inspired by that incident to read up on baboons and came across A Primate’s Memoir, by renowned primatologist Robert Sapolsky, who had spent decades living among and studying these animals in eastern Africa.
To look at them, you’d notice very few physical characteristic similar to homo sapiens. Baboons walk on all fours, have a snout that seems to be a cross between a dog and a bear, and possess enormous, menacing canines just for good measure. They have tails and sleep in trees.
And to be sure, baboons do not make things, like walls and bridges. So what do we have in common?
Baboons are very social creatures, notes Sapulsky. They live in groups ranging from a few to fifty. They “work” a four-hour day, which is all the time they need to forage for food. They sleep another 10 hours. And that provides them with a full 10 hours to interact with one another.
And interact they do. They make friends; they make enemies. They establish hierarchy that can be inherited. If you are the offspring of the alpha male, you have it made. There are prom kings and queens, and wallflowers. They woo, they mate, they raise their offspring.
They can be snobby. They might bully. They can be empathetic. They can plot and form alliances to outmaneuver rivals. They seek revenge, often very viciously. They are not above kidnapping.4
Sounds a lot like a Netflix eight-episode dramatic series. It should not be surprising, then, that baboons seem to reflect so much of human behavior, since we still share 94% of the same DNA.5
We have certainly progressed intellectually far beyond the capacity of any of our ancient ancestors. We have self-awareness, sophisticated language, arts and sciences. We build not only walls and bridges but amazing technology. But let’s face it: our emotional intelligence, or EQ in modern parlance, hasn’t evolved at the same pace. That stuff has gotta be buried very deep in that 94% DNA we have in common.
As the old saying goes, we’re just apes with nukes. And that’s never been truer — or a scarier thought — than it is today.
Curiosity, the cat, and the Doomsday Clock
FROM THE MOMENT OUR ANCESTORS descended from the trees, we have been testing the law of unintended consequences. We discovered fire, brought it into our caves, where, along with warming our hands, we inhaled smoke and developed lung cancer. We hunted megafauna to extinction. We created factories and vehicles that burn fossil fuels that are cooking our planet, which, by the way, is our one and only ride through space.6
The list of things we have tried that have backfired is seemingly endless.
The Wall hasn’t stopped people from attempting to cross the border. It has, however, created a thriving underground economy — literally. Tunneling under the wall is a big business. And coyotes — guides who charge a fee to smuggle people across the border — are making money, sometimes simply scamming destitute El Norte-bound travelers out of their last pesos.
For the most part, we’ve tested this law of unintended consequences in the physical world. We more or less understand this tangible realm. We can sense it. We can feel it. We can grasp it not only intellectually but emotionally.
But the virtual world is different. Whereas in the physical world, the intended purpose of a bridge is obviously distinct from a wall, in the virtual world, things get blurry in a hurry.
Our past meets our future: A prehistoric human hand connecting with a robot hand. Image, appropriately enough, is AI-generated.
In the 1990s I was working in Silicon Valley at the very infancy of the Internet. In those days, the buzz phrase du jour was “democratization of information.” Everyone would have an equal voice and be able to project that voice to the world. That bridge quickly became a wall when corporate interests privatized the internet, rewarding our worst instincts to drive their ad-based revenue models. And that’s where our baboon behavior just became amplified. Bullying, hate crimes, tribalism.
Emotionally, we just can’t keep up. Technology is advancing at a logarithmic pace, but the areas of the human brain that deal with emotion — the prefrontal cortex, amygdala, limbic system, hippocampus — continue to evolve linearly at, well, a snail’s pace.
In the brave new world, the scale at which our endeavors are likely to backfire is exponential.
With Artificial Intelligence (AI), we are being promised new and greater opportunities without any idea of what the scope of the consequences will be. It reminds me of the story about the moment just before the first test of an atomic weapon, when Enrico Fermi mused that there was a greater-than-zero chance the explosion would ignite the entire world’s atmosphere. 7
And yet, we did it anyway.
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but humans somehow keep on ticking.
Yes, we have somehow survived — so far. But there’s something else ticking, coming from the Doomsday Clock, which is now at a mere 89 seconds before midnight, its most dire setting since the metaphorical instrument was created in 1947. To put this into perspective, the clock stood at 7 minutes during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Eighty-nine seconds before midnight. Will you look at the time? It’s getting late. And on that note, sleep tight.
.
FOOTNOTES
Paraphrased from the poem, The Collosus, by Emma Lazarus. The poem is inscribed at the base of the Statue of Liberty. ↩︎
My reverence for bridges was further instilled by my father, a civil engineer who designed and oversaw construction of numerous spans in his career. I remember as a child driving to Long Island and crossing the newly opened Verazzanno-Narrows in 1965, then the longest suspension bridge in the world,3 as dear old Dad regaled his offspring with myriad facts about the engineering marvel holding our rattling little Rambler station wagon some 228 feet (70 meters) above the water. ↩︎
Sapulsky cautions against anthropomorphism, using terms such as kidnapping to describe baboon behavior. ↩︎
Humans would not survive the massive doses of radiation they would sustain in a journey to Mars. The proposals by megabillionaire oligarchs to inhabit other planets is pure folly with today’s technology. ↩︎
Fermi jokingly offered to take bets, but it’s hard to imagine anyone wagering that such a catastrophe would occur, because if it did, collecting one’s payout in a planet engulfed in flames might be a tad difficult. ↩︎
SOME YEARS AGO, I was on a business trip to Buenos Aires, Argentina. On the way from the airport to my hotel, I asked the driver to show me around a bit, which he readily obliged. It was early January, which is the start of summer down under. The narrow streets were shaded by poplars and flowering jacarandas. The European architecture could easily have been mistaken for a city on the other side of the pond.
At one point, we stopped at a memorial.
“Para la guerra,” he said. My Spanish was limited, but I figured it out.
“Falklands War?” I inquired.
Monument honoring the Argentinian soldiers who fought and died in “La Guerra de Las Malvinas,” otherwise known as the Falklands War in 1982.
“Aquí decimos Malvinas,” he said, with perhaps a slight tinge of reprobation. And to ensure I got the message, he repeated in halting English: “Here, we say, ‘Malvinas War.” I guessed he had made this correction to other English-speaking visitors in the past. Whatever title is used, the fact remains that the military conflict between the United Kingdom and Argentina lasted 74 days and cost 649 lives and wounded another 1,657, all in a contest over the very remote, sparsely populated, wind-swept chunks of land known as South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, located a mere752 mi (1,210 km) from the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula.
Newspaper clipping from a full page of coverage in The Gazette, Montreal, Canada, 29 May 1982.
“Of course,” I said, shaking my head in the affirmative to underscore that I got the point.
As I stood looking at the monument that day, it brought back memories of my career in journalism. At the time of the war in 1982, I held a position known as a “wire editor” at a tiny daily newspaper in Alameda, CA, just across the bay from San Francisco. A wire editor’s job is to monitor incoming posts from syndicated news agencies such as Reuters, Associated Press, and others and then edit those stories to fit the news space allocated by the newspaper.
What I recall clearly during that conflict was that those news agencies, which were all English-speaking, held a very pro-British narrative.
But one life to live
A statue of Nathan Hale.
AND THEN, JUST a few weeks ago, I was browsing through old newspaper articles. I mean very old, from 1776, a pivotal year in the history of the United States. My eye caught a one-paragraph missive that referred to Nathan Hale, who every American child learns to idolize as a patriot of the Revolutionary War.
Nathan is right up there as an icon alongside Paul Revere and George Washington.
As the story goes, young Nathan, all of 21 years old, volunteered to spy on the British in their camp in New York during the conflict. On Sept. 22, 1776, he was caught, tried, and sentenced to be hanged.
His final words, so often repeated, were: “I regret that I have but one life to live for my country.”
(Many historians have doubted the veracity of this quote, but to this day the sentence persists.)
The British had a different opinion of the hanging and made that quite clear in a letter datelined the day after Hale’s hanging and published two months to the day after the execution. (Mail was a little slow in those days.) In the Derby Mercury, from Derbyshire, England, the writer pronounced that: “Yesterday, we hanged a Colonel of the Provincials, who came as a Spy. Our Army is in good spirits, very healthful, and long to attack the Rebels …”
The letter goes on to optimistically predict the defeat of the “Rebels” within the year. And we know, of course, how that turned out.
TODAY MARKS the one-year anniversary of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. The Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, who as a KGB foot soldier had a front-row seat to the collapse of the Soviet Union, has offered a considerable amount of rhetoric to justify his actions, which, is obviously to put the USSR back together again.
University of Rochester illustration / Michael Osadciw
But I think the words of war correspondent and political analyst tells it best. In his prescient 2015 book, Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World, Tim Marshall postulates that Russia, the largest country in the world, spanning 11 times zones and covering six million square miles, is, ironically, at a disadvantage because of its terrain.
From the north, facing the wide expanses of frozen tundra that give way to the Arctic Ocean, it has little to worry about. The Ural Mountains protect the European portion of Russia, especially Moscow, from any incursion from the east.
But Russia has been invaded many times in the past five hundred years. And nowhere is it more vulnerable, according to Marshall, than in the flat grassy plains that give way to the Ukraine, which, in Putin’s mind, is the gateway to the decadent West.
“Vladimir Putin says he is a religious man, a great supporter of the Russian Orthodox Church. If so, he may well go to bed each night, say his prayers, and ask God: “Why didn’t you put some mountains in the Ukraine.”
Author Tim Marshall
After one year, it’s clear the war is not going as planned for Putin. He did not anticipate such a fierce, consolidated, purposeful resistance from the Ukrainian people. And he was counting on NATO and especially the United States, providing little assistance.
How it all ends up, I do not know. But his dream of putting the USSR back together seems to be fading day by day.
John Wilkes Booth, the most infamous of thespians and perhaps the only one of his profession to actually change the course of history in the United States, was unabashedly in favor of The Confederacy. He made no secret of his dislike for Abraham Lincoln, and Booth was even jailed and fined a hefty some for his treasonous comments toward the 16th president.
So, it’s fair to say, the two men were never on the same page, at least figuratively speaking. They were, however, on the same page literally on at least one occasion.
It was by chance that I caught this on page 3 of The National Republican’s edition of Nov. 12, 1863.
Here, you can see a legal announcements for Lincoln, who is endorsing several candidates for various government positions. Across the page, we have an advertisement for Booth, who is performing at the Ford Theater, the very establishment in which he effected the dastardly deed in 1865.
Actor John Wilkes Booth, who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln and then leaped to the stage of the Ford Theater pronouncing to the audience: “Sic semper tyrannis,” Latin for “Thus, always to tyrants.”
ON AN UNSEASONABLY chilly spring day, the passengers of the S/S California1 stood on the deck while the captain and crew navigated the busy waters of New York Harbor. The misty salt air must have been a welcome reprieve for the majority of the souls on board. Most of the 773 travelers had been traveling in “steerage,” 2 where they had endured at least two and possibly three weeks of existence in the crowded, stuffy, odoriferous, infested bowels of the ship.
The day was Thursday, May 20, 1897. The passengers possessed surnames such as Guiseppe, Pasquale, Luigi, Monaco, Durante, Gallo, Amelio, de Mitro. They had boarded the craft in Napoli (Naples) sometime earlier in the month. They had listed their occupations as shoemakers, carpenters, barbers, spinners, musicians, stone cutters, bootmakers, photographers, housewives, and laborers.
Among those laborers was one with a surname that stands out for me. It was 28-year-old Fazio Paolini.
The S/S California was built in 1872 in Glasgow, Scotland. She weighed 3,410 tons and measured 361 feet in length. The hybrid ship had three sailing masts and one smokestack for the steam engine. She could reach 13 knots (15 mph), which would have been capable of traveling from Naples to New York in 15 days at best. More than likely, the trip took closer to 3 weeks.
As the ship’s horn announced its imminent arrival at Ellis Island, Fazio, sporting a neatly trimmed handlebar mustache and sharply dressed in his best Victorian-era style suit, no doubt joined his fratelli in a bit of anxious sight-seeing, as they peered over the railing to catch a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, now coming into full view on nearby Liberty Island.
The iconic colossus was not even a teenager, erected just 11 years before. And she had yet to earn the nickname as the Green Lady. Her flowing tunic — made of copper — would have still reflected its amber hues. It would be many more years before the moist salt air would oxidize the sheathing into its now-familiar patina.
FAZIO PAOLINI
Fazio was just six days shy of his 29th birthday, but at that moment, it is unlikely he had any sort of celebration of this anniversary on his mind. Everything he knew and everyone he loved had been left behind in Italy: his young wife, Francesca Giansanti Paolini, an infant daughter, Consetta, his mother, Vittoria, and brother, Sabatino.
And now, thousands of miles from home in a strange land, unable to speak the language, with little money, no job, no place to live, he would have to quickly find his way and get established. Then, if all went well, he could earn and save enough to finance passage for his wife, his daughter, and his brother.
Family folklore
As with all families, there are stories about ancestry, and one I recall my father relaying about his father — Fazio Paolini — was the arduous passage to the New World. It went something like this:
Fazio and his father traveled for 30 days on a creaky sailing ship. Upon arrival, Fazio’s father was turned away because he did not have the proper paperwork. So he had to return on that ancient vessel to his homeland.
Claude Albert Paolini
As to the description of the ship’s antiquated condition, that is accurate. The S/S Californiawas built in 1872 in Glasgow, Scotland. As the fuzzy image demonstrates, it did have sailing masts, three by all available data that I could find. It also housed a steam engine. By 1897, this vessel, operated by the Anchor Line, also of Scotland, would have been far beyond its prime. The ship was tiny, and the engine was puny by standards of the turn of the century. (The S/S in the name actually stood for “single screw,” meaning the ship had only one propeller.)
It was a slow, outdated steamer at the very end of its lifespan. In fact, Fazio and his fellow passengers that day would have been on one of the boat’s last excursions. It would be decommissioned and then scrapped for its metal and other materials just a few years later.
But other information in my father’s story about Fazio’s sojourn doesn’t add up. For instance, Carmine Paolini, Fazio’s father, could not have been on that journey with his son since Carmine died in 1890, seven years before this event. Now, the S/S California ship manifest does list another Paolini, one Domenico Paolini, age 28. There are several Domenico Paolinis in the family tree, and they can be traced back as far as the early 1700s. None of them were alive at this time, however.
So who was Domenico? And, did he have to return to Italy for lack of paperwork?3 This remains a mystery that warrants further investigation.4
Leaving home
Imagine a bucolic village nestled in rolling, verdant hills, sculpted by thousands of years of farming. Orchards and vineyards, stone walls, copses of deciduous trees frame the landscape. This pastoral setting is nestled between the majestic, glaciated Apennine Mountains and the balmy, turquoise waters of the Adriatic Sea. That fits the description of Cepagatti, located in the province of Pescara, Italy. And by all appearances, it is an idyllic place.
Farmland in the hills of Cepagatti, Italy, with the Apennine Mountain range in the background. Cepagatti is located in the province of Pescara, in the Abruzzo region on the Adriatic Sea.
It was there that Fazio Paolini was born on May 26, 1868. Both his parents, Carmine Paolini and Vittoria Mirabilio, were Cepagatti natives as well. And Carmine’s family goes back yet another generation, all the way to 1757. So this was indeed the homeland for my ancestors on the Paolini side.
Fazio’s name is recorded in the birth registry in Cepagatti. The date is May 26, 1868.
Why leave?
The home in which Fazio was born. (Photo by Carl Aiello)
The pristine beauty of the place belies the turmoil — both natural and political — that enveloped not only Italy but most of Europe in the period of 1870-1920 when 11 million citizens — 4 million from Italy alone — emigrated to America.5
The ship’s manifest listing Fazio Paolini. Although it might look like the surname is “Pastine,” all available evidence and process of elimination lead me to a near certainty that this is our guy. The age is right, the date is right. The surname “Pastine” does not exist in Italy. Note that the mysterious Domenico Paolini is listed as well.
Fazio and his fellow passengers on the S/S California were undoubtedly motivated to find a new life, away from disease, poverty, political upheaval, and uncertainty. But making that decision could not have been trivial. Imagine what it must have been like for Fazio’s mother, Vittoria Mirabilio Paolini, when she heard the news. She had already lost her husband and a daughter.6 And now her son was leaving her, with the prospect that in a year, he would take Vittoria’s only other son and her only grandchild.
In the coming chapter of this saga, I’ll provide a glimpse of what life must have been like as a passenger in “steerage.”
1 Based on all available data that I could find, the S/S California operated by the Anchor Line is the right vessel. Between 1870 and 1930, numerous ships were christened with some variation of “California.” Perhaps the most famous — or infamous — ship to carry the California name was built in 1903 and was operating in the waters near the Titanic on its fateful day. By all accounts, the captain of that California had the ability to rescue most, if not all, of the passengers but declined to help.
2 Contrary to popular belief, the term “steerage” was not initially a reference to packing people in like cattle. Steerage is the section of the vessel containing the pulleys, ropes, and levers that comprise the mechanics necessary to navigate or “steer” the ship. It was the cheapest place to house those passengers who could not afford first class (sometimes referred to as “saloon”) or second class. Either way, of course, the term is appropriate.
3 Contrary to popular belief, the derisive term “WOP” was not an acronym for “without papers” or “without a passport.” It was actually derived from the term “guappo,” which sounds to the English-speaking ear as “WHOPPO” and roughly translates into “a guy who swaggers.” Italian laborers referred to each other with this term, perhaps much like the term “dude” is used today. English speakers heard the word as “WOP.”)
4 I did find two other Domenico Paolini individuals who roughly fit the time frame, one who lived in Illinois and the other in Massachusetts. Neither, however, seems to fit within the family tree. And so, the Domenico onboard the S/S California in 1897 remains a mystery. There are no other individuals with the Paolini surname in the registry. And, unfortunately, the registration record of Domenico and Fazio at Ellis Island went up in flames only a month after their arrival. So all we have to go on is that document from the S/S California.
6 As noted previously, Vittoria’s husband and Fazio’s father, Carmine Paolini, died in 1890. In addition, Vittoria and Carmine’s daughter, Annunziata, died in 1868, just shy of her 14th birthday and just days before the birth of Fazio.
In a previous installment, paternal grandfather Fazio Paolini had announced to his mother and family his plans to travel to America. In this chapter, I will attempt to recreate that journey in as much detail as possible, beginning in Cepagatti, Italy, and arriving in New York.
EARLY MAY 1897. Fazio and Domenico Paolini have said goodbye to their respective families. Perhaps there had been some family dinner or tearful farewell party the night before.
Railroads in Italy in 1897 would have provided Fazio Paolini a fairly easy trip from Cepagatti to Napoli, where he could board a steamship for America.
Fazio and Domenico needed to travel from their tiny village on the eastern side of Italy, along the Adriatic Coast. They had to traverse the Apennines mountain range to arrive in Napoli on the Tyrrhenian Sea. It was there they would board the S/S California for the voyage across the Atlantic.
The overland journey today by car is a mere 3-hour drive (169 miles or 282 kilometers). But in the 1890s, automobiles and paved roads were at best a novelty. So, it is more than likely that Fazio and Domenico took a rather circuitous route by train.
Maps of the railway infrastructure at the time show a robust network. But there was no direct path over the mountains. Chances are good that they took the route outlined here. This was likely a one-day trip. But then there would have been traveling to and from the train stations — either on foot or by carriage — to reach the port of Naples (Napoli). My guess is that it took them two and possibly three days before they were able to board the ship.
Napoli must have been exciting enough for the two “country” boys. At the turn of the 20th Century, the metropolitan region ranked as the third-largest in the new Kingdom of Italy.
Naples (Napoli) Italy was one of the largest metropolitan areas in Italy at the turn of the 19th Century.
Once at the port, the passengers had to plunk down $30 for passage. This would be the equivalent of just under $1,000 today. They also needed to provide a passport, the name of a friend or relative in the new country, and proof they possessed an additional $25 to financially support themselves upon arrival in their new homeland. But they were not done yet. They had to answer 31 questions. Ex-convicts and those interested in arson or polygamy need not apply. Then they were examined by a ship doctor. Vaccines for cholera, typhoid, tetanus and bubonic plague were new then but may have been administered.
If they met the requirements, the passengers were allowed to board, climbing the gangplank to the main deck and then descending a set of stairs, past the labyrinth of engines, boilers, and machinery to find a spot in steerage.
Life in steerage was communal living with very little privacy in the late 1800s. Travelers were provided a sleeping berth, three meals (of questionable nutritional value) a day and they had the use of public restrooms. But in most cases water for washing was saltwater. Drinking water was rationed. Newer ships had electric lighting. The S/S California, on which Fazio Paolini traveled, did not. Harper’s Weekly Supplement, 22 November 1890
By now, the engines1 of the S/S California would have been rumbling, as workers with titles such as coal trimmers, firemen, stokers, and water tenders endured the back-breaking labor required to power the vessel, all performed in a soot-choked environment.
In the ship’s manifest, Fazio and Domenico are listed as being housed in “No. 1 MDSF.” There is also a “No. 2 MDSA.” I could find no definition for the acronyms. My best guess is mid-ship fore and mid-ship aft.
Although the S/S California could accommodate 150 first (or saloon) class, 80 second, and 700 third class,2 the ship’s manifest for this trip lists only 730 passengers without distinguishing their type of service. My guess, since virtually all the surnames listed are of Italian descent, is that the vast majority of these were steerage class.3
The S/S California ship manifest for May 20, 1897, including Fazio Paolini (No. 7) and Domenico Paolini (No. 9).
Once settled into their new home for the next few weeks, the passengers would no doubt have been excited and perhaps marveled at the thrill of traveling on a steamship. The boat likely made a stop at Palermo, Sicily, and possibly Gilbraltar, Spain. Relying on the ship’s manifest, I see only Italian surnames but none of Iberian origin.4
From there it was through the Strait of Gibraltar and out into the wide and often turbulent Atlantic Ocean.
It appears, based on weather reports from various newspapers on both sides of “The Pond,” that the weather was fortuitously uneventful in May 1897. There might have been some high winds when the S/S California departed Naples. Otherwise, it appears the barometric pressure was high5 for the Atlantic crossing, according to TheTimes of London, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe, indicating no storms. There were reports of an “anti-cyclone in Ireland” (a fancy term for a high-pressure system) and a volcanic eruption in Iceland. Temperatures were unseasonably chilly, with frost in parts of France and England. But that was about it.
A cutaway of the S/S Frisia, displays the fore and aft steerage compartments. The ship was launched the same year (1872) as the S/S California on which Fazio Paolini traveled. Both are very similar in design, as hybrid sailing/steam-powered vessels. And both had iron hulls. By the 1890s, steel was the prevalent material.
Still, for those unaccustomed to traveling by sea, the ride must have been quite bumpy and nauseating. Waves of 2 meters (6 feet) would not be uncommon in the open ocean, and swells much higher would certainly have been encountered. This would have given a boat the size of the S/S California quite a bouncing about.
By 1897, the Golden Age of steamship travel was well underway. But, as routine as traversing the seas was by this time, the voyage was not without its perils. There were icebergs, of course, which could be seen as far south as Bermuda. The fog was always a challenge. And, although the Atlantic is a big place (41 million square miles), it was becoming quite crowded with vessels.6 This was the era before radar and other modern collision-avoidance systems. Even wireless telegraph was not yet available.
As dangerous as the open sea might be, it was the shores and harbors that were of most concern. Sand barges, rocks, shoals, or other ships in relatively close proximity all created challenges. The Utopia, for instance, collided with another ship in 1891 near the port of Gibraltar, costing 591 Italians their lives.
And when the steamers weren’t colliding with one another or other natural obstacles, there were boiler explosions, fires, and leaks to contend with. There were, by my count, 228 maritime accidents in the year 1897 alone.
Unimaginable living conditions
Those were not the only dangers lurking about. Inside the ship, in the congested, the infested, the dark, and nearly airless world of steerage, other hazards lurked.
Although, as previously noted, there were vaccines available and likely administered for cholera, typhoid, tetanus, and bubonic plague, there were many other contagions all too prevalent and easily transmissible in this type of environment. They included: tuberculosis, diphtheria, influenza, pertussis, yellow fever, polio, measles, and mumps, to name a few.
Death was a common enough event that the ship’s manifest included a column to register any passengers who might have died on board.
Children and babies were especially vulnerable. The passenger-ship mortality rate for children between the ages of 1 and 12 was 7.5%, and for infants, 19%. This was after the enactment of several U.S. laws, starting in 1872. Before this, the overall mortality rate for all passengers was even higher.
Ship doctors were, by most accounts, unqualified and unable to address the infirmed with any measure of success.
‘This has been a sad day, we have had 5 deaths, all children, the people seem to think it is a doomed Ship & have lost all heart …”
Conditions in steerage remained vile at best well into the 20th Century. Inadequate ventilation, substandard (and often unusable) bathrooms, lack of lighting, virtually no privacy, and inedible food are among the myriad violations cited during ship inspections. Rats, cockroaches, ticks, and lice ran rampant. Many passengers were seasick for most of the trip. The odors of rotting food, body odors, and engine fumes made it nearly impossible to breathe. And by most accounts, the companies running these vessels looked the other way.
In 1912, the British steamer Orteric was fined $7,960 for its abusive treatment of steerage passengers. The report detailed the following:
Among her 1,242 passengers, there were in the eight weeks of her voyage 58 deaths, 57 being children; the births numbered 14; the sexes were not properly segregated during the larger part of the time, the ventilation of the ship was inadequate and greatly increased the mortality rate; the hospital facilities were ill-ventilated and without proper equipment; while the sanitary conditions of the vessel were almost beyond belief.
On top of all this, women and girls faced not only routine harassment but sexual assaults. A report to the U.S. Senate in 1909 notes just how appalling conditions were, leaving little to the imagination.
And in those incredibly inhumane conditions, there was the overwhelming boredom. Passengers might try to pass the time by playing cards, talking about their plans in the new land, or even singing and dancing. There were at least 2 musicians on board the S/S California for this voyage; perhaps they helped provide some entertainment.
And so, after two or three (or more) weeks of these unbearable conditions, it is not hard to imagine the overwhelming feeling of relief that must have been felt upon first sighting land again.
And you can imagine the thrill when they spotted the Statue of Liberty welcoming them to their new home.
1 The ship, built in 1872, had its engines overhauled in 1881.
2 The ship was later modified to accommodate up to 1,200 steerage class passengers, but as noted, the total number of passengers on this trip was 730 in all classes.
3 [North Atlantic Seaway by N.R.P.Bonsor, vol.1, p.457]
4 My father, Claude Albert Paolini, claimed that Italian surnames ending in “i” were from Northern Italy, and those with “o” from the south, especially Sicily. I have only recently uncovered corroboration of his theory.
5 Barometric pressure readings in Rome (just north of Napoli), London, Paris, and New York during this timeframe were between 29.9 and 30.1. These are normal “high pressure” readings and indicate little chance for a storm.
6 Among the ship companies transporting emigrants were:
Immigrants arrive at Ellis Island, at the turn of the 20th Century.
AFTER THE SS California steamed past the Statue of Liberty, the aging vessel berthed at Ellis Island. As Fazio Paolini and the passengers disembarked, they joined the daily throng of 5,000 or so fellow emigrants who had made the same arduous oceanic voyage and were now on their way through the same hallowed facilities. For first- and second-class passengers, there was little wait time. But even for steerage passengers, the process was efficient. If all went well, 98% of the applicants would be successfully admitted to their new homeland within hours. Contrary to common folklore, there were scant “lost in translation” moments, in which immigration officials arbitrarily spelled the new arrivals’ names in some Anglicized variation (changing “Paolini” to “Pauline,” for instance). Interpreters were available for all major European languages.
The next stop was an exchange station to convert currency. The passengers then purchased tickets for the ferry ride to the mainland, with a box lunch provided (courtesy of their new country) to enjoy on one last boat ride.1
An Italian passport, turn of the 20th Century.
A view of Ellis Island. The structure that Fazio would have seen upon his arrival was made of wood and burned downed a mere 3 weeks after he had passed through the facility. The iconic stone structure seen here was completed in 1900. It closed down operations in 1954 and opened as a tourist destination in 1976.
Imagine the sights and sounds of New York City in 1897. The five boroughs (still separate municipalities at the time) were already congested to the tune of 3.3 million people and 200,000 horses. By all appearances of film footage from the era, the “New York minute” was already a thing. The city was rapidly rising in its status as a world financial center, trading capital, shipping hub, and entertainment center.
A traffic officer guides pedestrians across the busy intersection of Broadway and Union in New York City, Sept. 25, 1896
For the middle and upper class, this was the Gilded Age, a sardonic term coined appropriately by Mark Twain, which referred to the era of excessive wealth. The New York affluent resided in Victorian mansions made of marble and granite, and the burgeoning middle classes occupied the iconic brownstones. There was electricity and steam heat, and trolley cars for transportation. Bicycles were all the rage, ranging in price from $10 to $100.2
Life was comfortable — and even entertaining — for the higher members of society.
One could catch a performance of The Belle of New York on — where else? — Broadway, or perhaps hear Italian baritone Mario Antonio at the Metropolitan Opera House. For those who appreciated more prosaic forms of entertainment, there was Vaudeville, where acts included juggling, trapeze artistry, comedy, bawdy humor, and popular song. One of the more renowned shows in town at Madison Square Garden was none other than William F. Cody and his Congress of Rough Riders of the World. Tickets for this spectacle started at 25 cents.
Little wonder, with all the frivolity the city could offer, the last decade of the 19th Century would earn another nickname: The Gay Nineties.
At the turn of the 20th Century, New York City was well on its way to becoming a major scene for arts and entertainment.
BUT FOR THE MAJORITY of people in this megalopolis — some 2.3 million souls — the glamour of the upper class was just an elusive dream. Life for the underprivileged was as dismal as the boat ride that brought them to these strange environs. This disenfranchised mass of humanity was housed in one of countless, flimsy tenement houses that contained little to no running water, no bathrooms, and very little heat. And these wooden structures were prone to conflagration.
Not surprisingly, living in such close quarters also meant the rapid spread of communicative diseases, such as yellow fever, cholera, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and others.
The factories in which the lower class labored for 10 to 12 hours a day, six days a week, were either stifling hot or bone-chilling cold and noisy. Ventilation was inadequate, compounded by dust and other airborne particles. The workers toiled at machines, performing mind-numbing tasks. Factory workers might even be locked in during their work shifts, potentially condemning them to death in the event of a fire, as was the notorious case of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.
For immigrants such as Fazio, the discrepancy between the haves and have-nots would have been of little importance. He was ready to start a new life and to do what was necessary to succeed. In his first full day in the new land, Signore Paolini and the other 4,999 or so newcomers just off Ellis Island that day would have squandered no time seeing a show or the sites. They needed first to find shelter and food, and then to earn a living.
Newly-arrived immigrants crowd into a single room for a night’s sleep in 1898. Rent might have been as little as 7 cents.
Securing a place to sleep on the first night would have been the highest priority, yet it would not have been difficult. For 7 cents, one could find a sleeping bunk in a crowded room with a dozen or so other individuals. This would have been an improvement to the hull of the ship, but probably not by much.
Attaining gainful employment would have been the more difficult task. There were plenty of jobs to be had, but not for everybody. Discrimination was not only rampant, it was unapologetically blatant.
It is most likely that Fazio took whatever job he could find to get established.
Discrimination was rampant in 1897.
If he did not work in the myriad sweatshops at first, there were other options for Italians, almost all of them very dangerous. Among them were digging tunnels, laying railroads, and construction, most notably skyscrapers and bridges, such as the Brooklyn Bridge.
“I came to America believing the streets were paved with gold. The streets were not gold. They weren’t even paved. And then I learned that it was my job to pave them.”
Italian immigrant saying
There were three other occupations, however, that were available to Italian immigrants, and for the rest of his life, Fazio would be identified by one or all of them. These included:
–Brickyard worker
–Fruit vendor
–Farmer
It is quite likely that he began by laboring in the brickyards.
The evidence to support this postulation is largely based on two factors:
In order to become a fruit dealer or farmer, an immigrant would have had to have possessed considerable capital to finance the new enterprise. There is no evidence to support the theory that Fazio was a man of such financial means.
The location Fazio chose to settle was in the middle of New York State, along the Hudson River. This makes it very, very likely that he was working in the brickyards there.
Approximately 70 miles north of New York City, on the Hudson River, towns such as Newburgh, Beacon, Haverstraw, and New Windsor were humming with activity. The riverbanks of the renowned waterway on which these towns were situated were being mined for the massive amounts of clay and sand that lined the shores. These materials were then manufactured on-site into the ubiquitous rectangular building blocks used to erect the skyscrapers and other structures of New York City.
The brickyard jobs paid relatively well and even included housing. Italian, Irish, Romanian, and Hungarian immigrants were recruited right off the boat. At the time Fazio landed in the U.S., there were some 135 such manufacturing sites in Ulster and Orange counties, cranking out hundreds of millions of bricks each year. Virtually all the bricks used in The Big Apple from that time period until the early 1930s were supplied from the Hudson River manufacturers.
Brick manufacturing in New York State along the Hudson River Valley, circa 1900. It is likely that Fazio Paolini started his career in one of these factories when he arrived in 1897.
A remnant of a bygone era. Millions of old abandoned bricks still line the shores and banks of the Hudson River Valley, vestiges of the era between 1880 and 1930, the Golden Age of brick manufacturing in the area. Fazio Paolini was employed by Brockway Brick Company for 25 years. Photo courtesy of Robert Yasinsac.
As welcoming as the jobs in the brickyards might have been, they were not without peril.
Some clay mines descended 200 or more feet into the Hudson River bank. Sand and clay are not the most stable soils. Mine collapses were a very serious risk. The most notorious incident was in the town of Haverstraw in 1906, when mine shafts were bored directly under the town. A good portion of the enclave’s commercial buildings and homes collapsed into the void, causing a landslide and fires. Miners and residents alike died in that tragedy.
Whatever Fazio did to earn a living in 1897, this much is known: he earned enough in the first year to finance travel for his wife, Francesca, daughter Consetta, and brother Sabatino. Almost a year to the day from Fazio’s arrival in America, the three family members departed Naples, Italy on the SS Fulda, arriving on May 5, 1898, just in time for Fazio’s 30th birthday.
No doubt, that voyage was a difficult one, especially for Francesca and little Consetta. As noted in the previous chapter, traveling in steerage was dangerous at best for a woman. But, at least, Francesca had brother-in-law Sabatino to protect her against unwanted advances. And tiny Consetta clearly beat the odds of infant mortality aboard steamers, much to her mother’s gratefulness.3
Sabatino Paolini (listed here as Paolino) and Francesca Paolini (listed here as Giansante) arrive with baby Consetta on May 8, 1898, just shy of a year after Fazio Paolini came to America. Fazio is listed as the relative they are going to meet.
In 1899, daughter Mary Victoria Paolini was born, and the birthplace is listed as Wappinger Falls. Located on the east side of the Hudson, this town was bustling with factories (20 of them). Wappinger Falls is adjacent to the town of Fishkill, where Brockway Brick Co. had mining and manufacturing operations. Whether Fazio was employed by Brockway at this time, we do not know for sure. But it does seem to be more than a coincidence.
But by 1900, the family was firmly established in Newburgh, New York. The census in that inaugural year of the new century lists Fazio and family at 225 Pine Street, Newburgh.9 And it is here that we see the Fazio listing his occupation as “fruit dealer.” My guess is that Fazio’s entrepreneurial endeavor was a side hustle more than his principal gig since he was an avid (and from accounts, successful) gardener. Sharing the “fruits” of his labor via a vending cart was a profitable hobby that he pursued his entire life.
The 1900 Census lists Fazio, Francesca, Consetta, and the newest family member, Mary. Note that Fazio and Francesca had not yet been naturalized as U.S. citizens and are listed as being unable to speak, read or write in English, according to the census form.
The Verplanck years
AS WAS VERY TYPICAL of new immigrants, Fazio and his family moved quite a bit. There is no record of homeownership during their lifetimes. But without a doubt, the one place they called home that generated the fondest memories was a large, rather run-down mansion on Plum Point, overlooking the Hudson River in New Windsor, New York.
The structure was built by and once inhabited by one of the very first European families to settle in America: the Verplancks, a family of Dutch lineage that can trace its American ancestry to 1633, when New York was still known as New Amsterdam. (This was a mere 24 years after Henry Hudson sailed up the river that now bears his name.)
By 1915, Fazio and Francesca had changed their names to Frank and Frances. Nearly all their children would also be given Anglicized given names.
By 1920, the younger boys — Joseph, Anthony, and Claude had joined the family.
Water Street in Newburgh, circa 1906. Sadly, these buildings were demolished as part of a federal “urban renewal” project in the 1960s. (Public domain photo)
The Verplanck home was at this time owned by the Brockway Brick Company, which provided the domicile — as well as a few acres of land on which the house was situated — rent-free to Fazio, who was by this time a foreman of that company.
The exact dates during which Fazio Paolini and his family lived in this mansion are not clear. But a little guesswork, based on available records, suggests it was between 1911 and 1929. It was in this home that most of the children of Fazio and Francesca were born. My father, Claude, the youngest of the children, regaled his prodigy with stories of life on the farm. And I’m sure Claude’s siblings relayed similar stories to their children. Among the tales are these little anecdotes:
The home had a unique design, with two identical entries. Each of these doorways was framed by a two-story-high portico, supported by six massive Doric columns. The younger boys — Joseph, Anthony, and Claude — would ride their bikes from one porch to the other, directly through the house, no doubt to the chagrin of their mother.
Uncle Ray, the second oldest of the boys, was ever the prankster and troublemaker, teasing sister Madeline (Molly) to her wit’s end. One such escapade involved tying a string to the “water closet” and tripping the flushing mechanism from another room while Molly was seated.
It was in this home that Raymond fell down the main stairway. His mother was in tears, believing him to have died in the descent. But he lived many years beyond that accident to tell the tale.
Fazio had a massive garden that included prize-winning watermelons and grapes for fermenting his own wine.
At some point, Fazio held the ceremonial title of deputy sheriff for Orange County. He took his role seriously, however, since on more than one occasion petty thieves or drunkards were held in the chicken coop until they could be remanded to official custody.4
Fazio was also active in local society. According to newspaper articles, he helped to organize an annual town picnic at Plum Point. And, apparently, he remained active with his fruit cart, selling not only fresh produce but cigars, cigarettes, and ice cream at these town gatherings.
A plow horse once suffered an intestinal obstruction. A veterinarian had the unenviable task of removing the blockage using nothing more than his hand and some lubricant. For the younger boys in the family, observing this “operation” was more entertaining than sneaking in the side door of the movie theater.
The Verplanck Mansion on Plum Point in New Windsor, New York, was the residence of Fazio Paolini and his family for many years.
Every farm must have a dog, of course. And the story of the family canine named Pat could have been the inspiration for the Disney tearjerker “Old Yeller.” Pat, apparently, became rabid, and eldest son Paul received the sad task of putting down the infected animal with his father’s gun. Before pulling the trigger, however, Paul bid his farewell to the beloved canine, with the now memorialized phrase: “Goodbye, Pat.” 5
Fazio’s brother, Sabatino, was apparently quite the carpenter. He built, among other things, a beautiful dining table, crafted from cherry wood. He also made his own wooden vice, carving the screw by hand.
There must have been some boisterous family dinners. One involved Fazio getting so angry that he pounded the corner of that cherry table with such force that the edge broke off.
From left to right, Anthony, Claude, and Joseph as boys at the time the family resided in the mansion on Plum Point. Could this be Pat the dog in the foreground?
It must have been one busy household. Sabatino (who changed his name to Samuel), was married and had children. If he and his family were not living with Fazio and his family at this time, he apparently was spending a considerable amount of time there.
And Consetta, who changed her name to Catherine (and was known to us as Aunt Kate), was married to Ercole Totonelly, and they had two children by 1915 as well. Records indicate they also lived in this home for some time.
Life during the Verplanck years had its share of grief, as well. Sabatino’s son, Anthony, died in his first year of life in 1914.
Albert Paolini, the twin of my father, Claude, died either in childbirth or as a result of the pandemic sweeping the country in 1918.
Daughter Mary died giving birth to her second child, John, in 1920.
There is no clear record of when the family moved out of the Verplanck residence. But it is highly likely that the Great Depression, which began to sweep across the country in late 1929, was the cause. By 1930, the homestead had been relocated to 245 Grand St. Apparently, Fazio maintained his job as foreman for the Brockway Brick Co. Records also show that daughter Lena was now married to Sebastian Scrivani and that they were living at that address as well.
The Fatal Fall
WHAT BEGAN AS A PROMISING spring day turned into a disaster of unimaginable proportions. And the Paolini family would never be the same from that moment on.
Sunday, March 9, 1930 was unseasonably warm and clear. Fazio, Francesca, and the family walked the 12 or so blocks from their home at 245 Grand St. to attend Mass at the Church of the Sacred Heart, in Newburgh.
It was the first Sunday of the Lent season. What sermon the Rev. Cyrus Falco6 delivered in the relatively new church that day, we do not know. But it is likely that Fazio, a devout Catholic, and an active church member, had not paid much attention to the pastor’s words on that morning. He had other things on his mind, especially regarding what was to transpire after the service.
The church, erected in 1912 to serve the needs of Italian Catholics in Newburgh, was not only close to home but was also located just one block from the Ford Motor Company’s dealership on Mill St. And immediately following Mass, Fazio and Francesca began to make the short walk to the auto showroom, while the children and grandchildren returned home. This was the day that Fazio and Francesca would purchase their first new automobile.7
This was a rather tenuous time to make such a large purchase. A new car, such as the Model A, was selling for somewhere between $500 and $800 (approximately $8,000 to $10,000 in today’s currency). That was a sizeable amount of cash to spend, especially since the stock market crash of the previous October ignited a panic that included runs on banks, in which panicked citizens were demanding to withdraw their savings. Banks could not keep up with the demand, and the institutions started failing.
But none of this would you know reading the front pages of the newspapers at the time. There was news, to be sure: William Howard Taft, the former president, and, at the time, Supreme Court Justice,8 had died that very day. Babe Ruth had just signed a record-breaking deal to renew his contract with the New York Yankees, and world-renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh had been thrown from a horse but survived intact, save the embarrassment.
And, if the advertisements in the newspapers were any indication, the economy was as robust as ever, with a high demand for new gadgets, such as an Atwater Kent Electro Dynamic Radio for $109 (or just $2 per week for one year after making a $5 down payment).
Advertisement for a 1930 Ford Model A.
But there were hints of unrest. Unemployment was already on the rise to the extent that citizens took to the streets to protest. In New York City’s Union Square, apparently, 6,000 people showed up and were promptly labeled as Communists. Hence, the news was more about a “Red Scare” than the average citizen’s reaction to the historic economic collapse that was unfolding.
Yet, Fazio must have felt confident enough in his management role at Brockway Brick Company to not only contemplate but follow through with such a large purchase. Perhaps the acquisition of the automobile was to ensure he could continue to work on-site at the company since he would have had to commute the 5 or so miles from the family’s new residence to the Brockway factory. Whatever the incentive was for purchasing the new automobile that day, it all became moot within minutes of leaving the church.
What really happened
For years, we knew the story. Grandpa Frank (Fazio) had died from a fall down a flight of stairs. As kids, we just assumed this fatal descent occurred on the farm and that his death came quickly. Whether our father knew the actual story or not, I’m not sure. He would have just turned 12 at the time. But his older siblings — Paul, Lena, Raymond, Molly at least — certainly knew.
News of Fazio Paolini’s death made headlines in March 1930.
Exactly what happened on that fateful day is not entirely clear. But thanks to newspaper articles and legal documents, we know this much: Fazio and Francesca Paolini left the services at the Church of the Sacred Heart, walked around the corner, and entered the Ford dealership at 60-64 Mill St. with the intent of buying that new car. Once in the showroom, Fazio apparently went into the garage, presumably where the vehicles were serviced; quite likely he was planning to inspect the operation. But, unfortunately, he entered a doorway in the garage that, unbeknownst to him, led to a stairwell. Perhaps there was inadequate lighting. But somehow, Fazio fell down the flight of stairs, fracturing his skull.
From that moment, Fazio was unconscious and rushed to St. Luke’s hospital. He remained in the medical facility for two weeks, at which point he finally succumbed to his injuries. His funeral was held at the very same church that he had left that fateful Sunday morning, and the body was interred in Calvary Cemetery.
After getting over the shock of the accident, the family regrouped and decided to press charges against the Ford Motor Company. Paul, as the eldest male in the family, assumed command of the situation, spearheading the lawsuit. After 18 months, the litigation was settled out of court, and either the Ford dealership, the Ford Motor Company, or both, agreed to pay $700 without admitting guilt.
Settlement of the lawsuit against Ford and its dealership.
But even that pittance of remuneration must have been welcomed. By the time the suit was settled, the Great Depression was in full force. Every member of the family had to find a way to contribute. Even young Claude, who by this time was almost 14, dropped out of school to work.
Francesca Giansante Paolini in her later years.
The family persevered through that awful incident and the depression. Francesca would survive her husband for another 29 years. I only remember meeting her once, when she was very ill. She died on my fourth birthday: June 22, 1959. Her memorial service was held at the very same church as Fazio’s, and she rests next to him in the Paolini plot in Calvary Cemetery.
This is about all we know about Fazio and Francesca’s history and life. But, there are many things we can infer. To begin with, all of their children were decent, caring individuals, parents, aunts, and uncles, who made their contributions to family and society through honest and earnest work.10
The reunion of the progeny of Fazio and Francesca Paolini in 2014 at the location of the family’s most renowned home at Plum Point, on the Hudson River, New York.
The last reunion of their progeny — grandchildren and great-grandchildren — occurred in August 2014, at the very site of the Verplanck Mansion, which had been torn down many years prior. Well over 100 relatives from all corners of the United States attended.
Over the course of that weekend, we celebrated our common heritage and the uniqueness of our story. It is, of course, just one story, among the 12 million or so that passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954.
Acknowledgements
For as long as I can remember, I have had a fascination with my family’s history. Fortunately, that enthusiasm has been shared by my siblings and many cousins. My goal in this narrative has been to put together the story for current and future generations.
Fazio and Francesca’s names are memorialized in the Great Wall at Ellis Island, honoring the millions of immigrants who began their new lives on that spot.
I’d like to thank a number of people for their guidance, assistance, and support.
My late cousin Linda Paolini Gauthier was a big inspiration. She had visited the relatives in Cepagatti, Italy, and continued to research the family history beyond that trip. It was Linda and her sister, Joanne Paolini Diaz, that organized the reunion in 2014 and put together the framework for our family history that got me thinking about crafting this into a story. Cousin Carl Aiello also helped in this regard.
I was very fortunate to find a number of individuals who, despite having no incentive to help me, did just that. These include Glenn Marshall, the town historian in New Windsor, New York, and Pierangela Badia, who holds a similar title in Cepegatti, Italy.
Hand-drawn family tree, created by Claude Albert Paolini circa 1980.
Family tree of Fazio and Francesca’s ancestry and of their children.
Footnotes
Contrary to popular belief, the process at Ellis Island was quite efficient. Passengers disembarked their ships with a passport and copy of information related to the ship registry and entered the Immigration building. There, they were interviewed (a list of 29 questions) to ensure they would qualify as upright citizens. The interview was conducted in their native tongue, to ensure accuracy. Interpreters of every major European language were available. The passengers were also required to undergo a physical exam to determine whether they were carrying any infectious diseases. Only 2% of all applicants were either detained for further questions or turned away altogether.
In today’s dollars, those new bicycles would have cost between $337 to $3,378.
As noted in the previous chapter, the passenger-ship mortality rate for children between the ages of 1 and 12 was 7.5%, and for infants, 19%.
For years, I held in my possession a small leather notebook with a pen and pencil set, given to me by my father. On the cover, the words: “Frank Paolini, Sheriff” were embossed. New Windsor Town Historian Glenn Marshall assures me that the title was ceremonial in nature since there is no record of any Paolini being elected as a law enforcer in this time period.
The story of Pat was told by Paul Paolini to his son Frank, who shared the anecdote in an essay memorializing his father.
Reverand Falco is listed as the pastor of record at Newburgh’s Church of the Sacred Heart in 1930.
I found it unusual that the Ford dealership would be open on a Sunday. (Even in the 1960s, when I was a child, very few stores were open on a Sunday.) But legal documents regarding the incident confirm this to be the date. Perhaps this was a grand opening for the dealership or some other special event.
Taft is the only individual to hold the offices of the U.S. President and Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
The structure at 225 Pine Street in which Fazio and family first lived must have been demolished. A new home was built there in 1949, according to city records.
There were tales of Uncle Ray Paolini smuggling booze from Canada during Prohibition. Legend has it that Ray drove a Packard wagon with a roof that had been modified into a flat tank to store and transport the contraband.
Fun facts
The five boroughs of New York — Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, Staten Island, and Queens were still separate cities in 1897. On Jan. 1, 1898, they incorporated as New York City. New York’s five boroughs were the home to myriad types of manufacturing at the turn of the 19th Century, including the making of drugs, chemicals, paint, furniture, and housewares such as china and glass. The processing of paper, raw cotton, and tobacco for shipping to other countries were also big industries.
At the time Fazio Paolini landed in New York, there were still 200,000 horses used for the transportation of people and goods. Each of these four-footed friends produced 24 pounds of manure and up to a half-gallon of urine per day. There was no adequate system for removing this animal waste.
Animal waste, garbage, and snow could pile up to six feet high in New York City. This is one of the reasons the famous Brownstones required a flight of stairs up to the first level, to rise above it all.
With the massive influx of 12 million new citizens, there was an abundant supply of labor, which kept wages excessively low. Regulations limiting worker hours and clamping down on the exploitation of child labor were still a few years away.
ACCORDING TO LEGEND, George Washington could not tell a lie. But, he was not above bribery.
To be clear, Washington was the one making the bribe. Yes, it appears that, in addition to his military prowess, he was an astute businessman who came up with a clever — albeit dubious — twist on what today is known as the “leveraged buyout.”
Washington tried to bribe British officers to quit their posts in exchange for land. The only hitch was that the provisional government didn’t actually have the land to give away.
In the Spring of 1776, fresh from his victory in the Siege of Boston, Washington decided to see whether there might be a more expeditious, non-violent path to victory in the overall war. Although he won that battle in Beantown, it took a staggering 11 months. Soon thereafter, no doubt, he reviewed this hard-fought win and calculated how many more of these engagements would be necessary to achieve independence from England. He concluded that he needed a different approach, which was to appeal to British soldiers and officers with a carrot rather than the stick. The carrot was this: Leave the King’s Army, and the “Rebel Alliance” will reward you for abandoning ship.
If this is a revelation to you, join the club. I certainly don’t remember hearing or reading about this in any history class.
But it was front-page news in 1776. This proclamation, signed by Washington, was printed in newspapers throughout the country starting in March of that year. The image below was published in the Hartford Courant July 8, which, of course, was just four days after the Declaration of Independence was ratified.
The type is a bit hard to read, but here are some salient points:
— Washington reaches out directly to the British soldiers, presuming their “reluctance” to partake in this “odious” war, which is “in support of tyranny, against the rights and privileges of their American brethren …”
— For those willing “to quit the King’s service and settle in this country,” Washington is bequeathing land — lots of land — from 200 acres for a lowly private to 10,000 acres for “every” field officer.
— One minor detail is that, in order to give away this terra firma, Congress must first buy it “from the Indians.” As to what price Congress would pay and whether this was an offer the Native Americans “couldn’t refuse,” we do not know. Nor is it clear why anyone would have agreed to accept Continental Currency, since in most cases the money wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on.
Perhaps I’m reading too much into this, but it seems significant that Washington would offer funny money to the “Indians,” but he did not make such an offer to the British soldiers, who most likely would have scoffed at the currency and hence the whole deal.
Mount Vernon, George Washington’s estate in Virginia, was just one property he owned.
But land, on the other hand, was something real and tangible. Nobody understood this better than Washington, a former surveyor and a man who made land speculation a serious avocation. In his lifetime, Washington amassed 52,194 acres in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Kentucky, the Ohio Valley and what is now West Virginia.
BUT, I SUPPOSE, this legal if somewhat questionable entreaty to the Native People was better than stealing the property outright, which, according to University of Georgia History Professor Claudio Saunt, is exactly what the U.S. government did between 1776 and 1887, to the tune of 1.5 billion acres. That’s “billion” with a “B.”
So, the “Indians” would have had every right to question this proposition. But imagine being on the other end of the deal, as a British officer, reading this offer. In his eyes:
Washington is Enemy No. 1 to the British Crown.
Enemy No. 1 is informing you that he is in charge of the country that your boss (the King) says is his.
Enemy No. 1 is enticing you to quit what you’re doing in exchange for remuneration in the form of property.
The only minor detail is that Enemy No. 1 doesn’t actually have the acreage to give you at the moment. You’re just going to have to trust him to work with his rag-tag team of rebels to acquire the property from “Indians,” who, by the way, aren’t all that amenable to losing more of their hunting grounds to invasive White People.
As to how many British soldiers or officers took Washington up on this offer, we do not know. It’s also unclear whether there might have been an additional set of Ginsu knives for those who “acted now.”
It’s also unknown whether there was an expiration date on this deal. It might have come in handy for Benedict Arnold, who had played a decisive role in aiding Washington to win the Siege of Boston and then, a few years later, infamously, switched sides to aid the British.
Nonetheless, this episode is a fascinating piece of trivia on this most revered of American holidays.
George Washington’s letter to British soldiers and officers, offering them land if they would quit their jobs and settle in the colonies.
IRON-AGE EPILOG 
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