From the Easy Chair

Remarkable People We Have Known

Professor: Dr. R.J. Rushdoony

Subject: Conversations, Panels and Sermons

Lesson: 89-214

Genre: Speech

Track:

Dictation Name: RR161BV133

Year: 1980s and 1990s

Dr. R. J. Rushdoony, RR161BV133, Remarkable People We Have Known, from the Easy Chair, excellent colloquies on various subjects.

[ Rushdoony ] This is R. J. Rushdoony, Easy Chair number 237, March the fifth, 1991.

This evening Otto Scott and I are going to discuss something a bit different from any other discussion we have had and the suggestion for this comes from one of you. We have lived a good many years and so we have had an opportunity to meet, in the course of those years, some very interesting and truly remarkable people. So we are going to talk tonight about remarkable people we have known.

I am going to so skip over my family and my close associates. I feel I have had a remarkable heritage and I feel that I am privileged to work with the kind of men I do. So I am going to look outside that immediate circle and in the course of this tape I shall discuss a number of people, but, first of all, I would like to discuss someone whom I have never forgotten and whose name I cannot remember.

I was about 20 when I met him. He came to see my father and his was a rather unusual quest. He was Armenian, but he had been reared in France. He had just barely been in his teens or about in his teens when the war broke out. His parents were massacred. I believe it was French Franciscans who rescued him when the rest of the family was killed. He grew up, then, in France and, being a very brilliant student early, was in the university and then medical school and then went to Africa as a doctor in French equatorial Africa.

He was there some years and in the course of that time he saw both English and French colonies. And in that particular year he had a year’s leave, a sabbatical and he had traveled around Europe to Armenian communities and then to the United States to try to locate in some of the Armenian communities men who had been his father’s college classmates, men who had been his father’s friends or family friends.

So he had from memory a limited number of names that he wanted to locate, persons he wanted to locate and talk to them about his father. He arrived one day and my father was out for a time and I had an hour or so before going to my college class and we chatted. He was, in some respects, the most pessimistic person I have ever met. He saw nothing good ahead for Europe and he had been in a good deal of Europe.

I asked him if it was Hitler or Stalin that he saw as the greater threat and he said if there were no Hitler nor Stalin it would be no different. Europe’s day in the West is about over. We are at the end of an era in the civilization and he saw very little hope ahead.

His account of things in Africa was startling. He quoted a proverb which I have encountered since, a native proverb about dealing with the English and French in the various colonies. They said it took two hands to milk the French, but only one to milk the English. And this young man, he had two names, an Armenian name and the adopted French name that had been given to him by the Franciscans. And I remember neither name.

He said most people seem to think of the natives as being exploited by Colonialism. And he said there may be some truth to it, but he said it is also true the other way around to an even greater degree. The French and the English are being exploited by the natives. And the natives feel they are getting the better part of the bargain.

But basically, because he saw the decline of the West and the decline in the Christian churches, Catholic and Protestant and nothing but barbarism in the world outside, he felt that civilization was going heedlessly towards its doom.

I found that I could not disagree with his analysis although I felt a great deal of hope where he felt none. But his analysis was so penetrating I have never forgotten him. He probably, if living now, is 85 to 90 years of age, a very remarkable man, a man of insight and vision. He was also a man of faith and I expect to see him some day in heaven and will then know his name.

Well, Otto, would you like to discuss someone now?

[ Scott ] Well, yes, I ... I think Paul Blazer of Ashland Oil, the founder of Ashland Oil, one of the most remarkable men I have ever met. I had never heard of him. I was running a trade magazine that covered the rubber industry. The rubber industry, one of the components of that industry is the carbon black industry which is used to make rubber firm. Carbon black, the mixture of carbon black with rubber makes automobile tires possible and things of that sort. Nobody knows why.

And the various oil companies had bought up the carbon black companies and I began to write a series of articles about the carbon black companies. And as I recall it was only one that was unpurchased and that was Cabot, Cabot Carbon. So I went down to Houston, Texas to interview the president of United Carbon which had been... which had been acquired by Ashland Oil. And at the end of this very pleasant interview with him, he said, “Of course, you have to go and see Mr. Blazer.” And I said, “Well, Mr. Blazer is the ... he is your boss.”

He... he said, “Well, he is my boss.”

I said, “ Yes, but he is an absentee landlord. You are sitting here running the company, why should I bother to go see him?”

Well, he said, “It would ... it wouldn’t look good if you interviewed me and wrote me up and didn’t talk to my boss. It might get me into trouble.”

I said, “Well, I don’t want to do that.”

So I went up to Kentucky and called upon them there. I was tired. I had been on the road for a couple of weeks and I had had a lot of interviews and I was not interested, really. And they made a big to do about it, a bit fuss as to whether Mr. Blazer was available or not or would be. I found out later he was in very bad health. He was 76.

Finally they came in very excited and said, “Mr. Blazer is going to be available for lunch.”

And I said, “Oh, you know, great. Wonderful.”

Well, we went into a ... an executive dining room, which was a very small room and a tall elderly white haired man came in followed by an entire crew, a parade of men in dark suits who arranged themselves around the table. He sat at the head. I sat next to him. And we began to chat. The black out had just occurred in New York City and we talked about that briefly. And then I began to ask him questions about the acquisition of United Carbon. And they were rather embarrassing impertinent questions. I mean, first he described the acquisition and said that it was very a well managed company and all that and he had made the president of that company a director of Ashland and made him a vice president and all kinds of things.

And I said, “Well, in that case, why did he leave?”

And there was a little gasp around the table as apparently nobody talked to the CEO in that frame... with that tone. And he was very calm. He... he answered it very well. He said, “We were... of course, we called him in to ask him various questions about how he managed the firm.” He said, “In the beginning he was very knowledgeable, but as these sessions increased,” he said, “And became more searching they came into more and more areas that he couldn’t answer. And after one particularly gruesome session of that sort,” he said, “on his way back to Texas he dropped a post card in the mail box and it said simply, ‘I quit.’”

Well, I said, “That is interesting. What did you do?”

Well, he said, “We had given him stock options and also his colleagues at the company. We didn’t want him to leave empty handed, because he had done a good job.” And he said, “We therefore lent him the money to pick up his stock options and realize a fair amount of money when he left.” And he said, “We had already one man down there, one young man,” who, by the way, is now the head of the company, head of Ashland. He said, “We sent another man down for him to straighten matters out.”

And I said, “How did it work?”

He said, “Well, they were making about a million dollars a year when we bought them,” and he said, “now, this is about two years ago, they are making a million dollars a month.” So he said, “Things have gone very well.”

And then the conversation went on into other areas, into areas of management. And I found as the conversation continued that he was very much against the Harvard school of business of management. He felt that men had to be... had to have their destinies involved with the destinies of the enterprise, because he said, “They will otherwise turn out like the heads of Standard Oil when I was a young man.” He said, “They were all elderly and they were all very rich and none of them really cared whether the company made money any more or not, because they had theirs.” He said, “It was falling apart. Little companies like mine or friends of mine,” he said, “Were taking big pieces away from standard oil of New Jersey. And the men at the top didn’t even notice it.” He said, “There was no need for the Supreme Court to step in to save anybody from that company, because it was dying.” And he said, “In the normal course of events it would have died.” And he said, “We would have dismembered it and shared it amongst ourselves. “ And he said, “Other and younger men come up. We really do not need the government to protect us from competition, because competition is always with us.”

And he went on to various other areas, very clearly I interjected a question from time to time and he would pause and answer the question and then pick up the threat of the narrative. All in all we chatted for about three hours and one of the men who was forced to sit there and listen to this said to me later, “We thought the old man had finally gone around the bend.” They said he was spending all this time with an editor from some little publication none of us had ever heard of. But Paul or Mr. Blazer would do that. He talked to everybody and he found everyone he came in contact with of some interest and he had at one time, I understand later, had some inclinations toward writing himself. He actually had begun as a salesman.

He had taken a group of 24 people, including his office staff, his secretary and so forth, one salesman, 20 odd people in a little refinery and he had built it into an impressive operation that employed almost 30,000 people on the edge of Appalachia. He did this practically alone, but as he added men he trained them and expanded the company. It was the biggest anti poverty program on the edge of Appalachia that that area has ever seen. And instead of getting money from the government, it paid enormous amounts of money to the government. And it was interesting to later on ... later on we came back together and he asked me to write the history of the company. And I interviewed... I only had a few weeks with him. He died and I had to interview the men who worked with him and around him. And it was very interesting. They were almost to a man had found it almost impossible to live under the strain of that sort of genius. They couldn’t forgive him for his superiority. He had made them rich. But the found it so painful that they couldn’t forgive him for it.

The people who were not close to him, but who were only, let’s say, at the middle and lower echelons of the company who only saw him as the man who had created this great company, felt much warmer toward him than his closest associates, because they weren’t under the search light, so to speak. They were... didn’t have to be subjected to an analysis of what they were doing and why they didn’t do it better and so forth and so on.

But in the short... relatively short time that we had together, he explained himself to me without really doing it in a direct way. The great curse of genius, I believe is lonesome, lonesomeness. And nobody to talk to, no peers, no equals, nobody with whom it is safe to relax, because, don’t forget, we live in a jealous world. And I found that Mr. Blazer everywhere he went aroused jealousies which men were ashamed to admit, but which, nevertheless, were present. He avoided the penalty of genius by deciding to listen to other men. He listened to every man that he came across that had any sort of ability or knowledge at all. And he would continue what amounted to a running conversation with that individual until he had found out what he knew. It was like someone else reading a book.

And then whenever they came together again, the conversation would resume on the previous level, but Mr. Blazer’s real attention would have moved on to some other individual.

He was not a great reader. he didn’t have time to read. And at one point we got into ... and I went into the office. At one point they said, “Well, Mr. Blazer changed the refinery run last night. And if you are not too busy, maybe you could ask him why he did that.”

I said, “Oh, I understand you changed the refinery run last night.”

He said, “Yes, I did. Yes.” He said, “I had to get up.” He said, “As you know, my health is bad. I had to get up in the middle of the night. And I didn’t want to waste my time,” he said. “In the bathroom and I had a phone so I called the refinery,” and he said, “unfortunately the foreman was not available, but there was a worker there at the control station and he couldn’t tell me what was happening. So asked him where he was standing. And he told me. And I asked him what gauges he was near and he described that.” So he said, “Well on the left hand gauge, change the needle from, say, 60 to 80.” And in that fashion he had the workman change the refinery run. He could visualize it from where he was sitting in his bathroom.

And he had taught himself this. He said, “Chemistry I discovered,” he said, “is mainly a matter of vocabulary. The chemical words are put together in some way that what... how the Germans put words together. And once you begin to understand that sort of language the chemical term itself describes the situation.”

And, of course, he did this little by little in the course of building the refinery. He died ... he died. The day he died he was still running the company. He got up in the morning and weighed himself and his weight had increased quite a bit so his wife told me later he realized that his body was retaining fluids. And he regarded himself almost as a man regards a piece of machinery. He took... he watched his pulse and he watched this and he took lots of medicine. And I said, “Don’t you ever say the hell with it?”

He said, “I have no emotional problems.”

Well, on this particular morning he discovered that his body was retaining fluid so that called for some special attentions and in his bathrobe, pajamas and slippers the doctor said, “Well, you had better come in if that is the case.”

He went in and, of course, they put him to bed. And he died in the course of that particular evening rather peacefully.

One of the men that I met before Mr. Blazer died I met an oil man who said, “I understand you went to Ashland and you interviewed or you spoke with Mr. Blazer.”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “How long did you talk with him?”

I said, “Well for probably about 10 days or so for most of the day.”

He said, “Ten days for most of the day with Paul Blazer?”

I said, “Yes.”

He said, “What was it like?”

I said, “It was like sitting beneath a great light that illuminated the landscape. It made me feel very smart. I could see everything that he was talking about. And it wasn’t until I left that everything begot cloudy again that I realized that I had been listening to an illuminating mind, very clear, very clear.”

And the man looked at me with envy. When he died the Wall Street Journal didn’t mention it. There was a big {?} of course in Kentucky and in the town where the... where the company was headquartered, but beyond the confines of his industry, nothing. And I can’t help when I contrast that sort of send off, you might say, with all that has been said about John Lennon...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] All that has been said in Britain about unworthy individuals.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And I think that is probably one of the most difficult aspects of modern life is to see the worthy ignored and the unworthy elevated.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] But I will never forget Paul. I will never forget Mr. Blazer. He changed my life as he changed the lives of almost everyone that he ever came in touch with. And for the better.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, I know when I was at the university the handful of good, truly good professors there were resented bitterly by the others because they looked so poorly by comparison. These great minds, just a bare handful of them, were out of place at the university.

Well, I would like to discuss a very, very remarkable woman next. Her name was Donaldina Cameron. I knew her in her old age, a white haired, slender, Scottish gentlewoman. You would have thought she had never done anything but pour tea as the most difficult task in all her life. And yet she had been the person who rescued countless girls from slavery in the old Barbary coast in Chinatown.

Chinese girls who were 12 and 13 were being brought over by the ship load. They were told in some instances that they were being brought to marry some of the Chinese miners up in the mountains. In other instances they were purchased from starving parents.

When the girls arrived they were sold off to houses of prostitution to be worked to death in just a few years. Usually by the time they were 18 they were finished. They were diseased and looked terrible. They were given a bowl of rice and then starved to death in a cupboard and then dumped into the bay.

Well, in 1895 this Scottish girl Donaldina Cameron arrived in San Francisco to begin work there. She was to work under another woman, a Miss Margaret Culbertson who died before the year was over, so Donaldina Cameron was on her own. She came from the clan Cameron in Scotland. She told me about her grandfather. She had been named after Donald Cameron, a big man among the Camerons. They were a very fine family. One of her cousins was in the British diplomatic service and was knighted.

Her grandfather was an old Scottish Calvinist who took his faith very seriously. His pastor wanted him to become an elder, but he felt very strongly about the requirement that a good elder is one who rules his house well and whose faith is manifest in the lives of his children. Old Donald Cameron until he could see it in the lives of this grandchildren and then all the Camerons turned out for that proud day when the old man with trembling hands served communion for the first time.

And Donaldina Cameron came to the Barbary Coast to work in Chinatown. Her task was rescuing these girls in these houses of prostitution, Chinese girls. It was amazing how she did it. She had a Scottish canniness. These houses were the property of the {?} and behind the {?} were corrupt San Franciscans making money out of the whole enterprise. Anyone who interfered was dealt with by the {?} hatchet men and they were literally hatchet men. They had small sharp hatches with which noiselessly they eliminated a man in a matter of seconds.

But Donaldina Cameron before she would move had an excellent intelligence network so she was usually in and out of a place with the girls before they knew what had happened. She was marked for death, but was never killed. After a while another Celt came to her side, a big Irishman, Jack Manion was his name, Inspector Jack Manion of the San Francisco police.

Every attempt was made to get rid of Jack Manion for helping Donaldina Cameron in the work that she did, but some how or other he escaped all of those attempts to hurt him.

It was remarkable. Two Celts, one a very dedicated and devout Roman Catholic, the other a dedicated Scottish Calvinistic Presbyterian working together with a great deal of relish.

Once you have been with Jack Manion five minutes you would be sure to love the Irish for life, because he was the epitome of the Irish cop: fearless, totally honest, a man of faith, a man who did what he did with a great deal of zest and he considered it the privilege of his life that he had Miss Cameron to help.

In Chinatown I worked for the Donaldina Cameron house working among teenage Chinese boys. And in the course of my work I met a great many of those who were rescued by Donaldina Cameron. One of them, I remember with delight, Mae Wong. Mae was the only one who remained single all her life. And she was a member of the staff there at Cameron House. And Mae and I got along beautifully, because one of the things that distressed Mae Wong was what the Church was becoming.

Now Mae didn’t know much about theology. I am not sure she would have known what the word meant, but she believed every word of the Bible. And she felt that you either stood firmly in terms of the Bible or the world would run over you. But if you were unequivocally someone who stood in terms of the whole Word of God you had a power not your own. And she had seen that in Donaldina Cameron. And she saw all around her people who were becoming diplomatic and compromising and she liked me because I wasn’t. So I always felt a great deal of affection for Mae Wong because, like her, I was totally against compromise.

If you can find—and it is not the best book in the world, but at least it is the only one available—Carol Green Wilson’s book Chinatown Quest: The Life Adventures of Donaldina Cameron, published by the Stanford University Press in 1931 and 32 and I believe later in the 30s there was still another edition. You will find it worthwhile.

Well, Otto...

[ Scott ] That is very interesting. Well, when I was 14 Mr. Franklin Delano Roosevelt came to campaign for the presidency to Newburgh, New York which was right across the river from Hyde Park and the home of his mother. The Delano family lived there. And they put up a platform in the middle of a field and they had camp chairs lined up. And there were no ropes or guards or anything. I don’t believe there was any police, because the country was serene at that point.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Even though it was a depression.

[ Scott ] Yes, it was a depression. It was 32. At any rate, I went over to the platform and it was just about on a level with my eyes. And I could see men sitting in chairs in the back, Mr. Roosevelt in the middle. I didn’t know who he was until an introduction was made at the dais. And then a man on either side of him grabbed him by the forearms and he stiffened himself and they lifted him straight up and they carried him very swiftly to the dais. And I could see his feet, his toes being dragged. And then, of course, he got there at the dais. He steadied himself and from the shoulders and so forth he was a big man.

And I never forgot that impression of a cripple. Very few people in the country ever seem to realize that they... that the president was a man in a wheel chair who could not walk. And it was one of those indelible memories because at that point it seemed to me a tremendous effort of will to maintain cheerfulness and to go so far in that state of disability.

Later on when I was working for United Features Syndicate in New York Mr. Roosevelt cheated United Press of 100,000 dollars. And, of course, the impression that came to me then was an entirely different one because I received the news through... it was relayed. It was almost like a billiard shot where you get... it is... it is banked from the left towards you.

George Carlin, Mr. Carlin, the general manager of United Features Syndicate spent two weekends in the White House. He sent us all little notes on White House stationary because it was {?} in those days. And he signed Mr. Roosevelt up to an exclusive contract for the public papers and addresses of FDR.

Judge Samuel Roseman of the United States ... of the New Your ports was the editor of record. Mike Mulligan was the actual editor and I was the assistant to Mr. Mulligan. And about a week or two before we were absolutely ready to release this syndicated through all the Scripps Howards papers, the very same manuscript edited and all had apparently been handed over by justice Rosenman at the president’s instructions to Bernard McFadden the owner and publisher of Liberty Magazine. So Liberty Magazine beat us to the punch and we have learned later that Liberty had given the president the same 100 dollars for an exclusive contract.

[ Rushdoony ] 100,000.

[ Scott ] 100,000. Yes. So the ... on top of the image of a heroic cripple, I received another image, you might say, of a man whose word was not good. And that was a very heavy piece of information for all of us at the time. I believe I am the last person even remotely involved who is still alive. The story has never been in print. But it brought to mind then and now the mixed nature of individuals, especially an individual whose life goal was power and position and who would do anything to maintain either a standard of living or a position, knowing full well that Roy Howard at the United Press could not afford to sue him because I feel very few Americans today, you do, and, of course our generation does, very few Americans today will appreciate the dictatorial power that the personality and presence of Mr. Roosevelt achieved over this country.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] He was in every sense of the word the most complete master of the American people that we have ever had in our history. Mr. Lincoln never had it.

[ Rushdoony ] No.

[ Scott ] George Washington was reviled. We have had some very interesting men, some big men in the White House. But Mr. Roosevelt who was not one of the biggest or one of the best, achieved the greatest personal control during his life and I think any contact, you know, it reminds me of stories that used to appear every so often about elderly ladies who remembered seeing Mr. Lincoln and we have reached that stage where the fact that we have seen some of these people...

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Is of great interest to those who only read about these periods.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I can remember Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone...

[ Scott ] So can I.

[ Rushdoony ] Thomas Alva Edison and a great many others.

Well, a very remarkable man whom I often remember with very great fondness was one of the Indians on the reservation where I was a missionary for eight and a half years. The elder were all very remarkable men, three men: Tom Freemo, Louis Dave and Guy Manning. Guy Manning looked, well, he was about your height and billed, blue eyed, gray... white hair really. And...

[ Scott ] Indian?

[ Rushdoony ] He was more than half Indian, but he had English and Chinese blood as well. He was a quiet, good humored man with a kindly sense of humor, but a real force. Again and again he was chairman of the tribal counsel. Whenever things got too bad they voted in Guy Manning to clean up the reservation and restore law and order. But they would get weary of law and order because it wasn’t too congenial to the average Indian and then vote him out. And when things got down on all fours again, why, Guy Manning was the one they sent for.

The war had begun when I went there. And Guy’s sons were in the army. One of them became a highly decorated Marine. And here he was an old man and it was his daughter who was helping him with the ranch work. His wife and daughter would have to help him on to a horse so that he could ride during the round up. He was too crippled with arthritis to be able to get on by himself.

When he was irrigating the hay fields his granddaughter would go out there, because if he stumbled and fell he couldn’t get up on his own. And she would run and get help so that he could get back on his feet.

One summer day after church he and his family went on a picnic to Land’s Reservoir. And after eating he stretched out on a blanket with his hat over his eyes to nap while the others fished. Then he heard his granddaughter scream, “Grandpa, grandpa. There is a rattle snake on you.”

And he stretched out his back, lift under the brim of his hat and the was this huge rattle snake crawling right over him and part of it on one said and part on the other. And Guy told me he said, “Before I knew where I was I had jumped from a lying position to a spot 10 feet away.” And he said, “That snake turned and struck at me and hit my coat and halfway clung to me and fell off as I was flying across that distance.” He said, “I never jumped that far as a boy.”

And he said, “As I stood there shaking I thought, if I can jump like this when a rattle snake scares me, there is no reason why I can’t function again.” And by sheer will power he overcame his condition and was soon getting up on horseback and functioning.

[ Scott ] Interesting.

[ Rushdoony ] Very, very effectively. Once he was absent two Sundays in a row and I could understand why with all of his sons gone he had their spreads and his wife’s spread and his own to look after and his daughters as well. So I went out and, because I thought me might be sick, and he said, “No.” And he said, “I was working.” He said, “Now the Lord says if your calf falls into a pit on the sabbath it is legitimate to pull him out.” But he said, “I guess if you let your calf fall into the pit two Sundays in a row, then the Lord is going to say, ‘What is wrong with you and your management?’” So he said, “I will be there next Sunday.” And he was every Sunday after that.

He was a very judicious man, calm, good humored. And before he spoke he had the picture well in mind.

At one point he was in the headlines from coast to coast, because he dug up evidence of a ... an Indian agent’s misappropriation of funds. And this was when the war was over and his son carried it for him to the Elko newspaper and it was picked up by the wire services from coast to coast. And there were reporters up there. And the Indian service was furious with him, because, of course, they had to do something about it. They stalled for some time so it would not look like it had been Guy Manning’s work. The idea of an Indian correcting the Indian service was repellent to them. That did not bother guy in the slightest. His mission was accomplished.

He was a man who relished preaching. The last time I was at the reservation two or three years after I left he was in a hospital up in Idaho and he sent word and he said, “Tell Rush that I would have liked nothing better than to hear him preach once more before I die, but I cannot make it, but I have the memories of so many sermons.”

He was a remarkable man. His sons who were good friends of mine, my age, some of them, were very fine men. He was one of the most memorable men I have ever met, Guy Manning, a Shoshone.

[ Scott ] Well, as you know, I went north... I went east some years aback to talk to Hamilton Fish.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And Mr. Fish was in his 90s, if I remember correctly, early 90s. And he had an apartment just off Park, well, really on Park, the entrance was around the corner from Park. And the ... he opened the door. He was wearing bedroom slippers, but he was otherwise in a business suit. He had a terrible little dog that was yapping all around the place.

He took me into his study where he had everything in the world in that study. I am sure if I lived long... into my 90s, my study would look like that, too. It is already pretty messy.

[ Rushdoony ] You are not far from the 90s.

[ Scott ] Don’t give away any church secrets. The ... and he was a bit hard of hearing. But he was very lucid. And he began to talk and, I think, to a very great extent his life was shadowed by Franklin Roosevelt’s. And Hamilton Fish and Roosevelt were.... Roosevelt was a few years older, I think six years older. But they both went to Harvard. They knew one another socially. When Roosevelt left the New York State Assembly to become assistant secretary of the Navy his, Hamilton Fish took his place. And Hamilton Fish spent his summers at the family home in Oyster Bay right next to the Theodore Roosevelt part of the Roosevelt family. He was very much an admirer of Theodore Roosevelt and apparently had lots of conversations with him and, of course, was very close to Kermit and the Roosevelt boys. He also knew the Taft family and he was very close to them.

And he had the excellent manners that Roosevelt had, that Paul Blazer had for that matter. That particular generation which grew up, which was born at ... toward the close of the 19th century and which matured before World War I had excellent manners and they were very democratic. They knew and remembered everybody’s name. They were terribly polite and they made no effort in that area. It came naturally to them and it is something that has gone out of American life. I ... I have some very good friends across the country and some of them are very good positions. But I must say that by and large they don’t know what manners are. They are not ... they don’t fail deliberately. They simply do not know. And they will let letters go unanswered and telephone calls go unreturned and things of that sort. They get busy.

But Mr. Fish spoke not only about Mr. Roosevelt, but he spoke about the United States. He spoke about the meaning, the true meaning of the Monroe Doctrine which most Americans don’t seem any longer to recall. It was not to acquire American... North American hegemony over Latin America that the Monroe Doctrine was announced by President Monroe. It was to keep Europe out of the western hemisphere and to say that we will not permit any further European adventures in this part of the world.

Well, of course, when the world... it was very difficult to maintain that. In World War I the Germans were very active in Mexico and so were the British. And, in fact, in the Civil War, during our Civil War we sought for our own uniforms. When the combined Spanish and French army went into Mexico and tried to make Maximillian the emperor.

Mr. Theodore Roosevelt had great problems with the Caribbean republics and great problems with Colombia, ran Colombia. And the idea that we seized the Panama Canal or that we seized Panama as a country from Colombia is a canard. It was floated by later muck rakers and so forth.

Colombia wanted to keep North America out of the Caribbean and worked very diligently toward that area and Theodore Roosevelt and his colleagues felt that Germany was going to move in. There was a civil war in Colombia and Panama was a break away republic. It had nothing but jungle. It had no industry. It had no railroad. It had absolutely nothing. It was not a land that anybody wanted and certainly not the United States. The United States later built at great expense of money and men a canal which helped all international traffic in those days.

But Mr. Hamilton Fish whose great, great grandfather had fought in the War of Independence alongside George Washington, who was on his staff, who was a very, very close friend of Alexander Hamilton’s and whose grandfather was secretary of state, the secretary of state, had been raised in this early American tradition, knew that... knew the history of this country and went on to talk about it in a most fascinating way.

He ... he brought up the question of our foreign aid program. Isn’t it strange, he said, that congress which investigates so many things had never investigated the manner in which foreign aid has been handled. He said, “Do you suppose that there is some banker some place whose nephew might be a broker in some of these immense loans?” He said, “Would you suppose that when multi billions and billions of dollars of American tax payer’s funds are concerned that congress would recall itself to its duty?” He said, “During World War II we had Senator Truman as an oversight committee to see that the public’s money was not wasted in the war effort.” But he said, “In this tremendous program which has been going on for years nobody knows who gave what to whom.”

And he spoke all told, I guess, two or three hours. It was ... history came to life, not just his, but his forbearers and his grandson, you know, is very, very left and liberal and his son is much more sold than his father. He ... he spoke of them in very kindly terms, but it was obvious that he was greatly disappointed that he felt that his family, well, let us say, declined. That is a very hard realization to come to. And he left an unforgettable memory.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, there were four generations from Washington’s day to Hamilton Fish and his time of distinguished men in that family. It was only a matter of weeks ago that he died, wasn’t it?

[ Scott ] That is right.

[ Rushdoony ] At 103.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] Now Will Durant had a phrase covering that, a different sort of a phrase. He put it... he put long... he allied long life to courage. And I think there is something to that.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] I mean, others might say faith, but courage because life... what was it the old Episcopal prayer says? This veil of tears. Deals a lot of blows.

[ Rushdoony ] Well, speaking of life and longevity with Hamilton Fish, of course, do you know what particular group of men have the most remarkable record for longevity?

[ Scott ] No.

[ Rushdoony ] The popes.

[ Scott ] Oh, really?

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. The popes usually do not get named a pope until they are old.

[ Scott ] That this true. The church paid no attention to the chronology.

[ Rushdoony ] And, as a result, when they have the responsibilities, it rejuvenates many of them. When we retire people at 65 or at 70 at the latest we are saying you are no longer useful. And that is not conducive to a long life.

[ Scott ] Well, this is the first culture so far as I know, well, not the first. I will take it back. In a way the treatment of the elderly in the United States reminds me of primitive societies. It reminds me of the Eskimo he put the... used to put the elderly on an ice flow.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And the various and sundry primitive tribes who would stop feeding the elderly. We haven’t gotten that far, but we are moving in that direction.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Scott ] And there is a complete lack of respect for the elderly in the America society today. There is the worship of youth which is like worshipping folly and a lack of respect for those who have managed to endure.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. Well, I can remember how powerful Hamilton Fish was in congress. Roosevelt considered him his number one road block and would regularly denounce him.

[ Scott ] He was a very tall, handsome man.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes. And he had a distinguished career in World War I.

[ Scott ] Yes, he did.

[ Rushdoony ] Commanding black troops.

[ Scott ] Yes.

[ Rushdoony ] And yet they tried to make a racist out of him.

[ Scott ] Well, the racist is anybody who disagrees with a liberal.

[ Rushdoony ] Yes.

[ Voice ] Authorized by the Chalcedon Foundation. Archived by the Mount Olive Tape Library. Digitized by ChristRules.com.