The best evidence of conscious intent in this well-crafted commercial image lies in the near invisibility imposed upon the largest building and biggest employer in the region—Amana Refrigeration, Inc., covering 1.2 million square feet in the territorial heart of Middle Amana. The company is not mentioned in the official brochure, and its location goes unannounced on the official map. No leaflet or flyer can be found at the official visitors center, although every tiny shop and country product receives copious notice and advertisement. Yet, surely, most Americans know the name Amana through the fine refrigerators, air conditioners, and microwave ovens manufactured by this exemplary company.
We might attribute this strange silence to justice or oversight if Amana Refrigeration bore no relationship to the villages, or if the factory sought some form of local anonymity, but neither argument holds. The company was founded in 1934, by George C. Foerstner, an Amana resident freed to indulge his commercial skills by the Great Change. Foerstner’s dubious and personal use of the Amana name created tension with the Amana Society, the joint stock company formed to manage village businesses after the Great Change. This tension ended creatively in 1936, when the Amana Society bought the plant and made Foerstner its principal manager. The society ran the factory with outstanding success until 1965, when Raytheon purchased the name and works to the great benefit of the villages (a deeper source of current prosperity, I would guess, than apricot bread or rhubarb wine).
Moreover, the factory does not hide itself behind a facade of corn stalks. Hourly tours are offered to the public from a spacious and well-appointed visitors’ center (though no notice of the tours can be found in any standard tourist literature available everywhere else within miles). You will not, I trust, charge me with unwarranted cynicism if I conclude that the villages are trying their damnedest to sequester the most prominent bearer of their name in the interest of a bucolic vision that has become eminently profitable itself.
In any case, I confess that the new image of the old is entirely infectious. I was having a wonderful time reading old German hymnals and samplers in the museum, watching the inevitable blacksmith at work, even copping a free sip of that rhubarb wine. I almost began to picture myself in this better and innocent world, supping freely with my fellows and bringing in the sheaves: no more essay deadlines, and no more suffering with the Boston Red Sox; no nukes, no seatbelts, no sweat but by the honest brow.
Then I came upon the Great Reminder (make that capital G, capital R) so freely available in any town as the ultimate antidote to waves of romantic nostalgia for a simpler past—the gravestones of dead children. In 1834, as the True Inspirationists began to contemplate their move to America, Friedrich Rückert wrote the set of poems that Gustav Mahler would later use for his searing song cycle of 1905—Kindertotenlieder, or “songs for dead children.” Rich or poor, city or country, all nineteenth-century parents knew that many of their children would never enter the adult world. All my Victorian heroes, Darwin and Huxley in particular, lost beloved children in heartrending circumstances. I cannot believe that the raw pain could ever be much relieved by a previous, abstract knowledge of statistical inevitability—and, on this powerful basis alone, I would never trade even the New York subways for a life behind John Deere’s plow that broke the plains. Imagine the mourning, or just the constant anxiety:
In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus
nie hätt’ ich gesendet die Kinder hinaus!
(In this weather, in this rainstorm, I would never have let the children outside.)
The graveyard of Middle Amana is spartan in its simplicity. The identical, small white stones are laid out in rows, by strict sequence of death date, starting in the upper left corner and proceeding in book order. The German names are a panoply of objects, professions, descriptions, and moral states—Salome Kunstler (artist), Frau Geiger (violin), and Herr Rind (cow). The longer names do not fit across the small stone, and inscriptions must depart from ultimate simplicity by arching the many letters between the severe borders—Herr Schmiedehammer (sledgehammer), Morgenstern (morning star), and Schuhmacher (shoemaker).
I was looking for more of the arching names when I came upon a particularly stark example of the Great Reminder. The stone read, simply: “Emil Neckwinder, died 23 Nov. 1897, 1 day olt” (a conflation of the German “alt” and the English “old”—an example of languages and cultures in transition). Emil’s twin sister Emma lies just beside him—“died 11 Dez. [again the German spelling], 3 weeks olt.”
The loss of twins, though tragic, would not mark an unusual event. But the neighboring disruption of symmetry caught my attention, for two stones broke the severe geometrical pattern of even arrays. They stand in the space between two rows, directly in front of Emil and Emma’s last resting place. In 1904, Frau Neckwinder bore another set of twins, and named them once more with E. Again, they both died—Evaline on May 23 “0 week alt” (fully in German this time), Eva on September 27, “4 months olt.” The geometry itself is so eloquent; what more need be said?—the exception in an otherwise unvarying order of even rows, the intercalation into a linear sequence, permitted so that both pairs of infant twins might lie together in death.
Nearer my home in Lexington, in the graveyard just behind the Commons where our nation began in blood on April 19, 1775, a larger stone marks another kind of dying during our Revolutionary War: “This monument is erected to the memory of 6 children of Mr. Abijah Childs and Mrs. Sarah his wife.” All died between August 19 and September 6 of 1778, presumably in an epidemic of infectious disease now quickly and eminently curable: Sarah at age thirteen (on August 28), Eunice at age twelve (on August 23), Abijah, Jr., at age eleven (on September 6), Abigail at age seven (on August 29), Benjamin at age four (on August 24), and Moses at “3 wanting 8 days” (on August 19.)
The gravestone of the infant Emil Neckwinder who died in his first day of life. Photograph by Deborah Gould.
Abijah, Sr., and Sarah lie behind, the husband dead at age seventy on August 30, 1808, his wife at age seventy-eight on March 3, 1812, as another war began. Sarah had to endure the death of at least one more child—Isaac, who must have been but a year old when a plague swept six siblings away, and who died on November 20, 1811, at age thirty-four. Isaac’s grave bears one of the four-line doggerels so common on headstones of the time:
Death like an overflowing flood
Doth sweep us all away.
The young, the old, the middle aged
All to death become a prey.
My hands are on the gravestones of one pair of Neckwinder twins. Note the markers of the second set of twins in the foreground. Photograph by Deborah Gould.
These inscriptions are particularly poignant on the gravestones of children and young adults. Most state a rote acceptance of the Lord’s inscrutable will and read like a mantra copied from a pattern book (the source, I suspect, for most inscriptions, given their incessant repetition). Good psychology for mourners perhaps, but forgive a modernism if I doubt the sincerity of stated calm and understanding. Sometimes, a lament of sadness strikes closer to immediate reactions—as in this verse for three-month-old Nathan, on a stone for another family, but standing right next to the grave of Abijah Childs, Sr.
This lovely babe so young and fair
Call’d hence by early doom
Just came to show how sweet a flow’r
In Paradise would bloom.
The common gravestone for six children of Abijah and Sarah Childs. All died in an epidemic within one month. Photograph by Deborah Gould.
But bitterness sometimes breaks through. In a tiny cemetery on a windswept hill in Lower Island Cove, Newfoundland—a plot that also contains a monument for the four La Shana brothers lost at sea on May 25, 1883—I read of William Garland, who died in 1849 at age twenty-five:
Wherefore should I make my moan
Now the darling child is dead
He to rest is early gone
He to paradise is fled.
I shall go to him
, but he
Never shall return to me.
The message is so simple, so commonplace, so often made—yet infinitely worth repetition in light of the curious human psychology that paints our past rosy by selective memory of the good. Koko burst this bubble in his “little list,” while another Gilbertian character, the sham-sensitive poet Reginald Bunthorne, understood the path of exploitation:
Tombstone of Moses Childs, youngest child to die. Photograph by Deborah Gould.
Of course you will pooh-pooh whatever’s fresh and new,
And declare it’s crude and mean,
For art stopped short in the cultivated court
Of the Empress Josephine.
A foolish or self-serving man like Bunthorne may make such an argument for realms of taste that admit no objective standard. But the directional, even the progressive, character of human knowledge and technology cannot be denied. Medicine, properly called the “youngest science” by Lewis Thomas, has not been among the most outstandingly successful of human institutions. Most improvements in longevity can be traced to a better understanding of nutrition and sanitation, not to any “cure” of disease. The germ theory of disease provided our one conspicuous triumph under conventional models of cure based on causal understanding, but more lives have been saved, even here, by prevention due to better sanitation, than by direct battle against bacteria. As for chronic conditions of aging and self-derailment—including most heart disease, strokes, and cancers—our success has been limited. Even so, and with all these strictures, modern medicine allows our children to grow up. The death of a child is now an unexpected tragedy, not a grim prediction. For this one transcendent reason alone, what sane person would choose any earlier time as a favored age for raising a family?
Technological progress is often less ambiguous and more linear. (I need hardly say that I define progress, in this sense, by internal standards of design and efficiency, not by resulting benefit to human life or planetary health. Technological progress will as likely do us in as raise us up.) If you need to get somewhere fast, airplanes beat horses, and if you need to rise, elevators are more pleasant than shank’s mare.
I have only one reason for taking up this old subject within a series of essays devoted to evolutionary biology. We evolutionists do hold a key to appreciating the universal (or at least the planetary) significance of this progressive potential in human technology. At least we know how bizarre and unusual such short-scale linearity must be in the history of our part of the cosmos. Human culture has introduced a new style of change to our planet, a form that Lamarck mistakenly advocated for biological evolution, but that does truly regulate cultural change—inheritance of acquired characters. Whatever we devise or improve in our lives, we pass directly to our offspring as machines and written instructions. Each generation can add, ameliorate, and pass on, thus imparting a progressive character to our technological artifacts.
Nature, being Darwinian, does not work in this progressive way with our bodies. Whatever we do by dint of strength to improve our minds and physiques—from the blacksmith’s big right arm in Lamarck’s Amanaesque metaphor to the accumulated knowledge of a modern computer wonk—confers no genetic advantage upon our offspring, who must learn these skills from scratch using the tools of cultural transmission.
This fundamental difference between Lamarckian and Darwinian styles of change explains why cultural transformation can be rapid and linear, while biological evolution has no intrinsic directionality and follows instead, and ever so much more slowly, the vagaries of adaptation to changing local environments.
Cultural transformation, in its Lamarckian mode, therefore unleashed a powerful new force upon the earth—producing all the ills of our current environmental crisis, and all the joys of our confidently growing children. But we should not scoff at poky, old, biological evolution, for this Darwinian style of change also placed a potent source of novelty into the cosmos.
By contrast, passage of time in the physical universe either lacks directionality (therefore excluding the essence of history, defined as a pattern of distinctive change imparting uniqueness to moments) or possesses only the longest-scale linearity of stellar burn-out or universal expansion from a big-bang dot. Our planet did not know the full richness of history until Darwinian change bowed in with the evolution of life.
I thought of this key distinction between physical and biological time as I searched for long, curving names in the cemetery of Middle Amana: Schuhmacher und Morgenstern—shoemaker and morning star; the human technologist vs. the planet Venus, bright in the sky just before dawn. And I remembered that Charles Darwin had drawn the very same contrast in the final lines of the Origin of Species. When asking himself, in one climactic paragraph, to define the essence of the difference between life and the inanimate cosmos, Darwin chose the directional character of evolution vs. the cyclic repeatability of our clockwork solar system:
There is grandeur in this view of life…. Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.
Shoemaker vs. morning star.
Authenticity
15 | In Touch with Walcott
I GREW UP in New York and, beyond a ferry ride or two to Hoboken (scarcely qualifying as high adventure or rural solitude), never left the city before age ten. But I read about distant places of beauty and quiet, and longed to visit the American West. I fulfilled my dream during a family automobile trip at age fifteen. I remember my first views of Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, Carlsbad Caverns. Yet, for reasons that I have never fathomed, my strongest memories of awe are reserved for the vast flatness of the Great Plains, for hundreds of miles of wheat and corn in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Minnesota. I loved the symmetry of the fields, the endless flatness broken by Victorian farmhouses and their windbreaks of trees, the adjacent silos, the small towns marked by their signatures of water towers and grain elevators (the analog of church steeples for navigation in any old European village).
I feel no differently today. Two summers ago, I drove west with my family from Minneapolis, not on Interstate 90 (the enemy of regionalism), but on Route 14, with sidetrips to the lovely Victorian mainstreet of Pipestone, built of beautiful, soft red Sioux Falls quartzite, and to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota. Only one town breaks the pattern of solitude and timelessness in 350 miles between Mankato, Minnesota, and the state capital of Pierre, South Dakota. Right on Route 14, midway between Sleepy Eye, Minnesota, and Blunt, South Dakota, stands De Smet, little town on the prairie, childhood home of Laura Ingalls Wilder.
The success of Wilder’s wonderful books about her pioneer childhood (I have read them all to my kids), not to mention the inevitable TV spinoff series, has converted De Smet into a commercial island (either desert or oasis according to your values) of hagiography. The main gift shop for Wilder paraphernalia sells an amazing array of items, from expensive furniture down to tiny bits of memorabilia at two bits a pop (bookmarks, pencils, cottonwood twigs from Pa’s trees). As testimony to our odd desire to possess, even in replica, some tangible property of a heroine or her bloodline, I was most amused by one of the twenty-five-cent items—the calling card of Laura’s daughter Rose (who became an ultraconservative journalist, an opponent of income taxes, social security, and all New Deal programs).
As something of a squirrel myself, I dare not be too critical. I confess that I also own some calling cards, but only two and both genuine. For what item could better symbolize the continual presence of an intellectual hero than this most overt testimony of personal presence from an age without telephones? I proudly own cards associated with two remarkable men who shared both a name and a calling: Charles Darwin and Charles Doolittle Walcott.*
The calling cards of Mr. Charles Darwin and Mrs. Charles Doolittle Walcott.
The subject of calling cards, with its overt theme of personal greeting, inevitably raises th
e question of intellectual genealogy. If I actually own his card, how far back must I go to touch Charles Darwin? Since Darwin died more than one hundred years ago in 1882, a metaphorical handshake might seem so distant as to be uninteresting in contemplation. But intellectual genealogies tend to be surprisingly short since people of importance touch so many lives, and at least a few of the anointed will be blessed with great longevity. (True bloodlines, by contrast, tend to pass through many more generations in a given length of time both because children arrive early in life and because connections must pass through small numbers of progeny, often including no one with a long lifespan.)
In fact, I can touch Darwin through only two or three intermediaries. I studied vertebrate paleontology with Ned Colbert. Ned, as a young man, was the personal research assistant of Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History. I now touch Darwin either directly or by one more step, depending on which version of the most famous Osborn legend you endorse.
Osborn was a very smart man, but his immodesty greatly outran his considerable intelligence. He once published an entire book, dedicated to listing his publications and photographing his medals and degree certificates. (He cites, as a specious rationale in his forward, a simple and selfless desire to encourage young scientists by demonstrating the potential rewards of diligence.) Tales of Osborn’s smugness and arrogance continue to permeate the profession, more than fifty years after his death. The most famous story begins with W. K. Gregory, who took over Osborn’s course in vertebrate paleontology after the great man retired. Once a year, Gregory would take his students to visit the haughty professor emeritus. At one such meeting, Osborn rose from his desk and stiffly shook each student’s hand. An interlude of increasingly uncomfortable silence followed, for no one knew how to address a person of such eminence. Osborn himself finally broke the silence, saying: “When I was a young man about your age, I worked for a year in the laboratory of E. Ray Lankester in London—and one day Charles Darwin [T. H. Huxley, in the other version] walked in—and I shook his hand, so I know how you all feel now.” Thus, my short linkage to Darwin needs only two or three steps—either Colbert-Osborn-Darwin or Colbert-Osborn-Huxley-Darwin.