Posterity (2 page)

P
REFACE

In the fall of 2000, I began compiling an anthology of letters from great Americans to their children—a collection of the personal letters from those we, as a nation, admire most, those whose lives have mattered in the long run. Included are letters from artists, writers, politicians, scientists, actors, businesspeople, activists, and explorers. From the outset I wondered: What did these Americans tell their children? And how did they tell them? What lessons did they feel were important for their children to learn? What might the letters reveal about the writer and the time in which he or she lived? And, perhaps most importantly, what can we as parents, children, and Americans learn from their words?

These letters of our fellow Americans are treasures. They are genuine, of the moment, free of self-consciousness, and, with the exception of an important letter from Henry Louis Gates to his two young daughters, none included here was written explicitly for publication. Nearly all are a pleasure to read, but there are some that are tough to take—heartbreaking, shocking, hypocritical, mean. Yet, it is through some of these most unkind and difficult letters that we are provided with an immediate and unique access to times past and significant personalities. Overall the letters are full of heart, temper, wisdom, sensitivity, disappointment, humor, heartbreak, joy, and again and again the thoughtful, beautiful use of the English language. Take, for example, lines from the nineteenth-century poet Sidney Lanier to his twelve-year-old son, “I admire the sight of a man fighting his own small failings, as a good knight who never ceases to watch, and war against, the least blemish or evil: You may therefore fancy how my heart warms with loving pride in you and for you.” Or, from photographer Ansel Adams during the Korean War to his son in the U.S. Air Force, “I am wondering, in the afternoon of my own life, just what your day will be.”

With the intention of creating something more like a gallery of fine and important pieces, rather than a comprehensive catalog, I chose letters for the book using essentially two guidelines. First, the letters had to be written by a person who made substantial and worthwhile contributions to our country. Second, they had to reveal something of value. For a variety of reasons, many undisputed American greats are not included: Abraham Lincoln, because his letters to his children were mostly brief communications of a logistical nature; Martin Luther King, because there are no letters to his children; Rachel Carson, because she destroyed all of her letters to her adopted son. Then there are many, many greats who are not here for the obvious reason that they had no children at all—Henry David Thoreau, Mahalia Jackson, Dr. Seuss, Louisa May Alcott, Winslow Homer, Martha Graham, Margaret Bourke-White, Louis Armstrong, Willa Cather, Billie Holiday, Orville and Wilbur Wright, Janis Joplin, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Walt Whitman, Mary Cassatt, and the list goes on and on.

There are very few letters from modern or living Americans. Numerous requests were sent out, and over and over came the response—there are no letters. From the brilliant economist Milton Friedman came an answer that clearly describes our contemporary predicament, “I am sorry to say I have [no letters] that I would be able to contribute. We have always been close to our children, have been able to communicate with them more directly by personal conversation, telephone calls, and the like so that we have no systematic collection of letters. Sorry.” Sorry indeed are we all, and future generations may be sorrier still.

This raises the question of e-mail, as people have often asked if I would include electronic messages in the book. I made the decision that I would not. E-mail is efficient, inexpensive, and instantaneous, but it is not the same as sitting down and composing a letter. Letter writing is generally a thoughtful art and typing e-mail often is not.

Letters in the book are arranged thematically, with chapters such as “The Developing Mind,” “Love,” “Loss,” “Aging,” and “Rules to Live By”—categories that evolved from the letters themselves. Within each section, the letters are in chronological order. Printed in their entirety, the letters appear as they were composed. Asterisks or ellipses shown here also appear in the actual letters. I have not corrected misspellings, grammatical errors, missing words, idiosyncrasies, or repetitions, nor have I cut any lines or passages. A single exception is the letter from Anne Bradstreet where some now unusual seventeenth-century spellings were updated for ease of reading. Occasionally, it may seem that the writer goes on too long or too often repeats a point, but these letters are as they were written, as they were read, and as they were intended. Sometimes kernels of true wisdom are embedded within the pedestrian, but that is how it was—it's authentic, and often it is just that quality that makes the letters so wonderful. For example, it is important for the reader to know that when Theodore Roosevelt, while president of the United States, wrote his son a stern dissertation on the proper role of athletics in one's life and the importance of character above all, that he concluded the letter with a jovial update on the doings of the younger siblings and news about several of the family animals. It says so much about what kind of father he was, what kind of man.

There are several previously published letters included that were, or may have been, cut or “cleaned-up” by another editor at another time. Every effort was made to find the originals for inclusion here, but in some instances it proved impossible. For clarity, I have included, in brackets, information that is now available, but did not appear on the original, such as the date, or approximate date, or where the parent was when he or she was writing. Nothing else but the bracketed information has been added.

Letters illuminate emotion, humanity, and fortitude in a way that is always fresh and enduring. They are the color, heart, and personality of history. Families, good or bad, are a vital force in most every life and they certainly have been so in the life and ideals of our country. Parents everywhere and throughout the ages know firsthand the visceral sentiment expressed by Sherwood Anderson in a letter to his son, John, “My heart is set on you.” As I worked with the following letters from American parents from many walks of life, spanning centuries, again and again I came back to the realization that family ties and compelling stories surround us—in history, in the lives of those around us, and in our own lives.

—Dorie McCullough Lawson
Rockport, Maine

First page of William Henry Seward's letter
to William Henry Seward, Jr.

Continuity

W
ILLIAM
H
ENRY
S
EWARD TO
W
ILLIAM
H
ENRY
S
EWARD,
J
R.

“How good and virtuous and just ought we to be and
how thankful to God that we have blessings secured by
the virtue and sufferings of our ancestors.”

One of the most important political figures of the mid-nineteenth century, William Henry Seward was governor of New York, then senator, then secretary of state under Abraham Lincoln. As a leading voice in the condemnation of slavery, it was he who delivered the courageous line on the floor of the Senate evoking a “higher law.” Later, in 1867, it was Seward, the ever-devoted proponent of American expansion and progress, who secured the purchase of Alaska for the United States. With thick, disheveled hair and a prominent nose, Seward, according to Henry Adams, looked like a “wise macaw.” Charming and relaxed, he was a welcome guest and a favorite among the Washington hostesses.

In the fall of 1848, he was running for the first time for a seat in the United States Senate. He campaigned in his home state, New York, and traveled about the East Coast speaking on behalf of the Republican Party. Here, with his characteristic broad sense of time, William Seward, the grandson of a Revolutionary War colonel, writes to his son Willie, a nine-year-old boy at home with persistent eye troubles.

[October 7, 1848]
Wilmington in the State of Delaware, Monday

My dear Boy

I am very much obliged to you for your letter which gives me much interesting information. I will try to procure in New York a filter which will purify the water of the new pump.

I have been at many places in Pennsylvania where I wished that you were strong enough to be with me. When you grow strong enough I shall want you to travel with me. I saw on the banks of the Schuylkill, Valley Forge the place where General Washington had his camp during one of the most severe winters which occurred during the American Revolution. His camp extended four miles long with two entrenchments in front and high mountains on the one side and a deep creek on the other. From the mountain in rear he could see with his spy glass the British army in Philadelphia seventy miles off. He was almost destitute of ammunition to protect himself. The Congress was not able to supply him with money, the army was in deplorable want of bread and meat clothes and shoes. They suffered exceedingly. The poor horses and dogs died of hunger and diarrhea and death extended to the men, a dozen were buried in a day and in one place, scarcely beneath the frost in the surface of the ground. The farmer now often turns up the bones of the lost men when plowing his fields. Mrs. Washington was a good woman, she spent the winter in the camp and she served and consoled the sick and dying. It was by such sacrifice that Liberty was obtained for the American people. How good and virtuous and just ought we to be and how thankful to God that we have blessings secured by the virtue and sufferings of our ancestors. I hope you will get Peter Parley's history of the Revolution and ask Ma to read to you the account of the Revolution and then I hope you will resolve to be a good man like General Washington that all people may love and bless you.

I saw canal boats on railroad cars in Pennsylvania loaded with freight, and what is very strange is that as the boats are too long for the curves of the Rail Roads, they build the boats into three pieces, and when they get on the mountains they put them together with hooks and let them down into the Canal and float them to Lake Erie. Yet they do not take in a drop of water. Can you guess how this is done?

Your affectionate father
William H. Seward.

E
LIZABETH
C
ADY
S
TANTON TO
M
ARGARET
L
.
S
TANTON

“. . . I feel that . . . I am making the path smoother for you and Hattie and all the other dear girls.”

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a plump and jolly mother of seven, was a revolutionary. Dressed in yards of black silk and lace, with her white hair curled neatly beneath her bonnet, she charmed and excited audiences across the country. She often began with talk of children and motherhood and then deftly moved on to property rights, divorce reform, and the right to vote. “You may never be wives, mothers or housekeepers,” she explained, “but you will be women.”

Nineteenth-century American women could not vote, could not sign a contract or serve on a jury. Married women were not permitted to own or inherit property, or to earn or invest money, and in the case of a divorce, the custody of the children automatically went to the father. For fifty-four years, from 1848 until her death in 1902, Elizabeth Cady Stanton fought vehemently for overall social justice for women. In organizing meetings and writing speeches, she was tireless; for eight months of each year during the 1870s, she toured the country lecturing. Spreading the word and earning a living, Stanton delivered one speech a day and two on Sundays in town after town. Here, describing a typical day on the road, she writes from Austin, Minnesota, to her twenty-year-old daughter, a student at Vassar.

To Margaret L. Stanton
Au[st]in, Minnesota, December 1, 1872

Dear Madge:

Imagine me to-day sitting in a small comfortable room in the railroad hotel about a half mile from this little Minnesota town, where I do not know one soul. But as everybody is polite and attentive, I suppose they all know me. I spoke last evening at Waterloo, and in order to reach here, my next place, I was obliged to leave at midnight. So after my lecture, I had an oyster supper, packed up my finery, and, all ready to start, took a short nap on the sofa. I was called at two. But as the horses were sick and I was the only guest going from the hotel westward, I was toted, I and my baggage, in a little cart drawn by a mule through a fearful snow storm, the wind cutting like particles of glass. Having arrived safely at the depot, my escort, a good natured, over-grown boy, deposited me and mine beside a red-hot stove. Learning then and there that the train was two hours behind, I rolled my cloak up for a pillow, laid down on the bench and went to sleep, listening to a discussion in an adjoining room on the merits of my lecture. One man vowed in a broad Irish brogue that he would leave the country if the women voted. Gracious, I thought to myself as I dozed into slumber, what would become of our experiment if one “white male” should desert the flag! In due time I was waked by some gentle Patrick,—perhaps my very critic—tickets bought, valise checked and I transferred to a sleeping-car, where, in a twinkling, I at once “flopped” asleep again, without even taking my bonnet off. At eight, I was roused by an African for this place, where, it being Sunday, the train lies over. So I ordered a fire, washed my face, ate breakfast, undressed regularly, went to bed and slept soundly until one, when I arose, took a sponge bath, had dinner, read all the papers I could procure and now sit down to answer your letter, which was the only one I received at Waterloo. I read it alone at midnight, and, though I am always advising you to write short letters, I did wish this time you had written more at length. You ask if it is not lonely travelling as I do. It is indeed, and I should have enjoyed above all things having Hattie with me. But you see, dearest, that would double my expenses, and as I am so desirous of making money for the household, I must practice economy in some direction. And above all considerations of loneliness and fatigue, I feel that I am doing an immense amount of good in rousing women to thought and inspiring them with new hope and self-respect, that I am making the path smoother for you and Hattie and all the other dear girls. You would laugh to see how everywhere the girls flock round me for a kiss, a curl, an autograph. They all like so much my lecture, “The Coming Girl.” I am so glad, dearest, to know that you are happy. Now, improve every hour and every opportunity, and fit yourself for a good teacher or professor, so that you can have money of your own and not be obliged to depend on any man for every breath you draw. The helpless dependence of women generally makes them the narrow, discontented beings so many are. With much love for yourself, kind regards for your chums and pleasant dreams for all in Vassar,

Good night,
Mother.

A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN TO
H
ANS
A
LBERT
E
INSTEIN

“What I have achieved through such a lot of strenuous
work shall not only be there for strangers but
especially for my own boys.”

When Albert Einstein first arrived at Princeton University in 1933, he was asked what equipment he needed for his office. “A desk or table, a chair, paper and pencils. Oh yes, and a large
wastebasket . . .” he replied. In essence, all the Nobel Prize–winning scientist really needed was his brain. His mind operated at the highest reaches of human capability and his theories of relativity thoroughly revolutionized our understanding of light, matter, and energy.

He was an endearing character who loved his violin and said that he thought and daydreamed in music. He was inherently shy, utterly disinterested in the “trivialities of living,” and emotionally he was often indifferent, even with his own family.

In November 1915, Einstein was living in wartime Berlin with his cousin Elsa, the woman who eventually became his second wife. His estranged wife, Mileva, lived in neutral Zurich along with his two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, “Tete.” Following eight years of effort, Einstein spent a final five weeks in the fall of 1915 completing “one of the most beautiful works of [his] life,” the theory of general relativity. The theory—supreme thought expressed in just two pages—was the work that launched him into worldwide celebrity and secured his place among the greatest thinkers of all time. Here the thirty-six-year-old Einstein, flush with his recent accomplishment, writes to his eleven-year-old son, Hans Albert.

[Berlin,] 4 November [1915]

My dear Albert,

Yesterday I received your dear letter and was very happy with it. I was already afraid you wouldn't write to me at all any more. You told me when I was in Zurich, that it is awkward for you when I come to Zurich. Therefore I think it is better if we get together in a different place, where nobody will interfere with our comfort. I will in any case urge that each year we spend a whole month together, so that you see that you have a father who is fond of you and who loves you. You can also learn many good and beautiful things from me, something another cannot as easily offer you. What I have achieved through such a lot of strenuous work shall not only be there for strangers but especially for my own boys. These days I have completed one of the most beautiful works of my life, when you are bigger, I will tell you about it.

I am very pleased that you find joy with the piano. This and carpentry are in my opinion for your age the best pursuits, better even than school. Because those are things which fit a young person such as you very well. Mainly play the things on the piano which please you, even if the teacher does not assign those. That is the way to learn the most, that when you are doing something with such enjoyment that you don't notice that the time passes. I am sometimes so wrapped up in my work that I forget about the noon meal. Also play ringtoss with Tete. That teaches you agility. Also go to my friend Zangger sometimes. He is a dear man.

Be with Tete kissed by your

Papa.

Regards to Mama.

J
OHN
D
.
R
OCKEFELLER,
J
R., TO
J
OHN
III
,
N
ELSON,
L
AURENCE,
W
INTHROP,
AND
D
AVID
R
OCKEFELLER