The Northcountry Chronicle

Getting Real

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I’ve written previously about not being able to shake my formative experience as a child, reveling in being outdoors and working with my hands, which lead to my first career as a stonemason. Perhaps I needed that hands-on, physical release because, like many men of my generation, I was divorced from my feelings. I loved theories and ideas, living in my head most of the time. I needed the physical escape of lifting rocks in the here-and-now to release the pressure of countless competing thoughts, swirling in my head. Due to occupational infirmities as I approached 50, I enrolled at Antioch New England Graduate School …

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Smedley Darlington Butler: What a True American Hero Looks Like, Part Two

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In our issue of July 17, 2020, W.D. Ehrhart wrote about the the extraordinary early career of Smedley D. Butler. by W.D. Ehrhart Butler was not without his warts and blemishes. He loved the adrenalin rush of combat, the sheer challenge and excitement of it. As a young lieutenant, he complained in letters to his congressman father that the policies he was enforcing in countries like Nicaragua, Honduras, and Haiti were corrupt and immoral, benefitting only the white wealthy ruling class in America, yet he continued his career in the Corps for nearly three more decades. He began to speak out only after he’d gotten …

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Smedley Darlington Butler: What a True American Hero Looks Like

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by W.D. Ehrhart I went through Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina, in the summer of 1966. We learned all sorts of things that summer, but one thing we learned was the names of the two Marines who had each won not one, but two Medals of Honor: Dan Daly and Smedley Butler. Butler would have received three Medals of Honor if the award had been available to officers during the Boxer Rebellion in 1900 China. Every enlisted man on a patrol he led as a teenaged lieutenant received one, but he was instead awarded the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, the highest …

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Who was Smedley Darlington Butler, and why is he important?

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Many Americans can’t believe that political coups are part of our country’s history—but consider from the Wall Street Putsch of 1933. Never heard of it? It was a corporate conspiracy to oust Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had just been elected president. With the Great Depression raging and millions of families financially devastated, FDR had launched several economic recovery programs to help people get back on their feet. To pay for this crucial effort, he had the audacity to raise taxes on the wealthy, and this enraged a group of Wall Street multimillionaires. Wailing that their “liberty” to grab as much wealth as possible was being …

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Ominous Clouds Are Gathering

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No more excuses! Forced into isolation by the pandemic, we now have the time and space to “to think what we are doing,” as Hannah Arendt long ago urged. Arendt, perhaps the foremost political philosopher of the 20th century, observed that in the past we didn’t have to think: “tradition, religion, and authority told us how to behave and defined our moral options of right and wrong, the mass of humanity did not need to think for themselves…” However, nowadays, she wrote, its a free-for-all, with no guard rails on how we should act. “Adrift in a world in which everything and anything is possible, …

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As American as Apple Pie

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For much of my adult life, I have taught high school English and history, most recently including eighteen years at the Haverford School for Boys in suburban Philadelphia, retiring in June 2019 at the age of 70. In my U.S. History course, I always teach a unit I call “Race in America,” which begins with the first shipload of Africans arriving in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, and goes right up to Rosa Parks and the modern Civil Rights Movement. I sugarcoat nothing. We cover slave life on the plantation with its whippings and brandings and castrations and amputations, the almost infinitely repeated rape of female …

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