Tocqueville was supposed to study American prisons…but what he ended up chronicling was far more compelling: the work ethic of 19th Century Americans.
The date is July 29th, Monday, and today I’m coming to you from Portland, Oregon.
Today is the birthday of Alexis de Tocqueville, French politician and historian.
Born in 1805 in France, Tocqueville’s lasting mark in history is his work De la démocratie en Amerique or Democracy in America.
A typical aristocratic upbringing saw Tocqueville seamlessly enter politics. When Tocqueville was 26, the French Monarchy sent him and a partner to America. They were to study the American prisons and prison systems and report back. Tocqueville returned after nine months in North America and, three years later, published an account of his travels. Democracy in America published in 1835 is not what the Monarchy had asked for, but it is undoubtedly a more interesting read.
Tocqueville did pursue a line of inquiry into American prisons, but he was much more impressed with cultural differences between America and Europe. Tocqueville found that while Europe clung to the vestiges of an idle aristocracy, American democracy championed and rewarded hard work. He noted that hard work in Europe was often looked down upon (for certainly if you were working so hard you must be poor). But Tocqueville noted a staunch individualism in America meant that men of all classes enjoyed a sense of dignity. The common man was lauded for dogged work ethic and was not afraid to defy elites or nay-sayers.
And today is the birthday of Maria Latigo Hernandez, Mexican-American activist.
Born in 1896, just across the border in Mexico, Maria Latigo was a schoolteacher in her young teens. At 18 she fell in love with Pedro Hernandez from Texas. She moved to Texas to be with him and they were married not long after.
Maria Latigo Hernandez was no dunce. Although her formal education was limited to small-town schools, her father was a professor. There’s no doubt he valued education and saw to it that his daughter was just as quick and intelligent as he was.
She became keenly aware of the rife discrimination that Mexican Americans and African Americans faced in Texas. She and her husband got involved in politics when the last of her ten children were still babes. She became a force to be reckoned with and fought her whole life for civil rights.
She believed strongly in the role of the mother in society. She argued in a 1945 essay that mothers (or the stay-at-home parent) were of the utmost importance to society as they wielded considerable influence over the next generation during their formative years.
In 1968 at the age of 72, she testified to the United States Commission on Civil Rights that increased education for all children and adults was necessary in order to rewrite “deformed historical narrations.” She continued her activism until her death at age 99 and was known as an “untiring fighter.”
I Never Saw That Land Before
Edward Thomas
I never saw that land before,
And now can never see it again;
Yet, as if by acquaintance hoar
Endeared, by gladness and by pain,
Great was the affection that I bore
To the valley and the river small,
The cattle, the grass, the bare ash trees,
The chickens from the farmsteads, all
Elm-hidden, and the tributaries
Descending at equal interval;
The blackthorns down along the brook
With wounds yellow as crocuses
Where yesterday the labourer’s hook
Had sliced them cleanly; and the breeze
That hinted all and nothing spoke.
I neither expected anything
Nor yet remembered: but some goal
I touched then; and if I could sing
What would not even whisper my soul
As I went on my journeying,
I should use, as the trees and birds did,
A language not to be betrayed;
And what was hid should still be hid
Excepting from those like me made
Who answer when such whispers bid.
Wishing you a good morning, a better day, and a lovely evening.