For most of us, New Year’s Eve means watching the ball drop in Times Square on TV. For a lucky few, it may mean a fun party. For Abraham Sirkin, December 31^st, 1941 was spent at the White House, ringing in the New Year with President and Mrs. Roosevelt. Invited to the White House by the First Lady, Sirkin had the opportunity to rub elbows with a few political officials and FDR himself, who understandably was not in a very jovial mood. Sirkin was interviewed by Charles Stuart Kennedy in May 1997.

“Why don’t you come over after dinner to the White House?”

SIRKIN: I was drafted [into the National Guard in April, 1941] and sent off to Fort Dix. After a week of this very busy mind-numbing time, I was sent off to Fort Jackson, South Carolina….

During my training…I was very impressed with Norman Corwin’s wartime radio dramas. So I drafted one and an acquaintance who was Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Post said, “Why don’t you send it to Eleanor Roosevelt?” He said she sometimes helps individuals get over bureaucratic problems.” So I put it in an envelope with a note saying this might be of interest to somebody in the war effort in Washington.

Shortly thereafter I got a note from her saying she had sent it over to Archibald MacLeish, Head of the Office of Facts and Figures….

I got a little note from him saying thank you very much; it was interesting….When I came to Washington on leave during Christmas-New Year’s time, this fellow on the Post said, “Well, why don’t you give [Eleanor] a ring? She likes to see all kinds of people in whom she takes an interest.” So I called her office and they said, “Come to tea.” This was December 31, three weeks after the war started….

So I went and had tea. She had three other people there. One was Morris Ernst, a well-known lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union. One was an African-American lady who was a very prominent social worker. I didn’t say very much. I listened to all these interesting people.

She may have asked me a question, I don’t remember. Then we broke up and I was about to go back to my hotel, which was nearby, the Roger Smith Hotel. She asked me where Iwas going and could she give me a lift in her car. En route, she said, “What are you doing New Year’s Eve?” I said, “Nothing,” and she said, “Well, why don’t you come over after dinner to the White House?”

So about 10 o’clock, I showed up at the gate….

I went into the room that was filled with people and Mrs. Roosevelt greeted me and I was goggle-eyed. I saw the President in his chair, I think it was a wheelchair, and I recognized Harry Hopkins and Secretary of the Treasury, Morgenthau, and a fellow I knew in my college days. He was at City College, Joe Lash. He later became her biographer. He was the only person I knew there. One other young person there was the daughter of Secretary and Mrs. Morgenthau.

As I came in I was gawking at the scene. Mrs. Roosevelt was trying to introduce me to a couple of other guests, two elderly Unitarian clergymen from Massachusetts…but I was just staring at everybody and she elbowed me in the ribs to pay attention. Recently, when I went to see the statue of her at the Memorial, I could still feel her elbow in my ribs, saying ‘Pay attention.’

I remember I spent most of the evening hanging around with Joe Lash and I asked a few questions of Harry Hopkins. I realized later, I didn’t know it at the time, that in another part of the White House Churchill was there, and he had been at dinner, but he was with his own people for New Year’s Eve. So I didn’t see any of those people. I just heard about it later.

But, as midnight approached I happened to find myself standing alone next to the President. He was sitting in a chair twiddling the dials on the radio and listening to the noise in Times Square of the crowd waiting for the lighted ball to come down. He turned to me. I had been introduced to him but he didn’t have the faintest idea who I was, just one of Eleanor’s friends. Since no one else was around, he just expressed himself to me with a frown….

This was just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Philippines were going under and I suppose he was getting periodic reports that weren’t very good. We were abandoning Manila and here were all these people screaming and yelling in Times Square.

He turned to me as I happened to be standing nearby and expressed his displeasure. “Why do these people have to make all this noise just because it’s a new year?” I got the impression he felt that way about any new year but especially at this time. He was deploring the fact that people make all this screaming noise when there are obviously very serious things going on….

I was reading complaints about this new statue of a serious looking President in the Roosevelt Memorial in Washington, but that is the way I remember him that evening. Some people want his statue with a cigarette and triumphant grin. There was no triumphant grin on his face that night.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent
— often attributed to Thomas Jefferson

This is not a quote by Thomas Jefferson, though Google would have you believe it is. Google tends to be a poor teacher, in that it’ll list the most popular answer, not necessarily the most accurate. In fact, Jefferson’s Monticello estate (Monticello.org) lists the quote as “spurious”—not found in his letters, speeches or papers. But whoever said it or didn’t, it’s not half bad. And we know, from simply having lived our lives, that it’s mostly true.

The idea behind the quote isn’t complicated. Bad things don’t usually happen because a huge number of people want them to. Bad things happen because enough people look the other way. People who know better—or should—decide it’s safer, easier, less messy, or less exhausting to stay quiet. People also don’t act because, frankly, we have other interests, other concerns. We might have a family member who is not well, or conflicts with a spouse. We might have financial difficulties. Or maybe an ice storm is coming our way, and we’re not prepared. When our choice is whether to pay a healthcare bill or the electric bill, it’s hard to focus on much else.

Silence, in other words, is not simply a failure to engage because “we won’t look.” It’s also that our national government plays itself out in a city far, far away, while we have immediate concerns much closer to home. Far, far away may as well be another galaxy and will just have to wait. Then, when our immediate concerns pass, other immediate concerns quickly replace them.

Besides, most of us have already done our duty. We voted. We voted so that senators and congresspeople that we put in power could fight for us. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Why lay the guilt on us when it’s the system that’s breaking or broken?

Those in power depend on the fact that, in general, people won’t act unless they’re personally affected by a change or a law. And even then, it usually takes a small avalanche of negative changes before people realize they’re in it up to their necks. By that time, it takes a lot of effort and suffering to dig our way out.

We’re living in a time when trust in our representatives is low, misinformation spreads faster than we can stop or contradict it, and people are exhausted by constant conflict, most of it starting from the top. It’s awfully tempting to wash our hands of it, to tune out. It’s tempting to assume that someone else will speak up, someone with a perfect life and no personal problems to contend with. Instead, we should remember that we’re all dealing with personal difficulties, and that those cannot distract us from looking at the bigger picture. Because the only “trickle-down theory” that actually works is this: “A fish rots from the head down.”

The ancient Greeks had a version of this quote. So did the ancient Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, and the ancient Romans. It’s been true, in other words, for five thousand years. We don’t have to be heroes or experts. A healthy society isn’t built by perfect people with perfect lives. It’s built by people with messy, difficult lives who—when the fish starts to stink—refuse to pretend they can’t smell it.

Kareem’s Daily Quote

All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent
— often attributed to Thomas Jefferson

This is not a quote by Thomas Jefferson, though Google would have you believe it is. Google tends to be a poor teacher, in that it’ll list the most popular answer, not necessarily the most accurate. In fact, Jefferson’s Monticello estate (Monticello.org) lists the quote as “spurious”—not found in his letters, speeches or papers. But whoever said it or didn’t, it’s not half bad. And we know, from simply having lived our lives, that it’s mostly true.

The idea behind the quote isn’t complicated. Bad things don’t usually happen because a huge number of people want them to. Bad things happen because enough people look the other way. People who know better—or should—decide it’s safer, easier, less messy, or less exhausting to stay quiet. People also don’t act because, frankly, we have other interests, other concerns. We might have a family member who is not well, or conflicts with a spouse. We might have financial difficulties. Or maybe an ice storm is coming our way, and we’re not prepared. When our choice is whether to pay a healthcare bill or the electric bill, it’s hard to focus on much else.

Silence, in other words, is not simply a failure to engage because “we won’t look.” It’s also that our national government plays itself out in a city far, far away, while we have immediate concerns much closer to home. Far, far away may as well be another galaxy and will just have to wait. Then, when our immediate concerns pass, other immediate concerns quickly replace them.

Besides, most of us have already done our duty. We voted. We voted so that senators and congresspeople that we put in power could fight for us. Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to work? Why lay the guilt on us when it’s the system that’s breaking or broken?

Those in power depend on the fact that, in general, people won’t act unless they’re personally affected by a change or a law. And even then, it usually takes a small avalanche of negative changes before people realize they’re in it up to their necks. By that time, it takes a lot of effort and suffering to dig our way out.

We’re living in a time when trust in our representatives is low, misinformation spreads faster than we can stop or contradict it, and people are exhausted by constant conflict, most of it starting from the top. It’s awfully tempting to wash our hands of it, to tune out. It’s tempting to assume that someone else will speak up, someone with a perfect life and no personal problems to contend with. Instead, we should remember that we’re all dealing with personal difficulties, and that those cannot distract us from looking at the bigger picture. Because the only “trickle-down theory” that actually works is this: “A fish rots from the head down.”

The ancient Greeks had a version of this quote. So did the ancient Chinese, the ancient Egyptians, and the ancient Romans. It’s been true, in other words, for five thousand years. We don’t have to be heroes or experts. A healthy society isn’t built by perfect people with perfect lives. It’s built by people with messy, difficult lives who—when the fish starts to stink—refuse to pretend they can’t smell it.

In his early works, Ong was primarily concerned with revealing the importance of writing and print in understanding the evolution of modern consciousness; in Fighting for Life, he analyzed the place of the word in causing human dissension. Ong had recognized the biological complement to human consciousness in his earlier writings, but he now made more extensive use of the Darwinian concept of struggle for existence. Ong was attracted to evolution’s sense of the present as growing out of the past. In Fighting for Life, he probed how competition is embedded in various levels of culture. He also showed how agonistic structures are present in educational, religious, and political institutions, and how adversary procedures have shaped social, linguistic, and intellectual history. Orality and Literacy is a summary of Ong’s work on the historical technologizing of the word. In this book, Ong makes clear that he belongs to no school of interpretation and that humanity’s progress into a new age will be mainly through a return to the unifying energy of orality. In 1986, Ong returned to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit poet about whom he had written so insightfully early in his career. In Hopkins, the Self, and God, he portrays Hopkins as a product of the Victorian age and his Jesuit education. He sees an evolutionary view of time in Hopkins’s poetry, but he also argues that the Jesuit poet’s faith was deepened rather than threatened by nineteenth century scientific ideas.

In his retirement years, after he became professor emeritus at Saint Louis University in 1984, Ong continued to develop the ideas that had preoccupied him throughout most of his scholarly life, especially his analysis of how humans use various technologies in gathering and communicating their knowledge. Many of his essays on these themes were collected, under the title Faith and Contexts, in four volumes and published as part of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Social Order series. During his eightieth birthday celebrations, as he reflected on his life as priest and scholar, Ong saw a unity in the great variety of his contributions, since everything in the world “hangs together” because “God made it all.”

Ong’s reputation has derived from the insights he developed in dwelling intellectually in several contrasting milieus: the religious and secular, the Renaissance and modern, the scientific and humanistic. In particular, his career centered on the interface of word and culture, and one of his most influential themes was the evolution of the word from oral to script to print to electronic. Some of his analyses show similarities to those of Marshall McLuhan, for whom the medium was the message, but Ong’s work probed more deeply than McLuhan’s and was grounded with more thorough scholarship, and thus he has had a much more lasting influence among literary intellectuals.

In his early works, Ong was primarily concerned with revealing the importance of writing and print in understanding the evolution of modern consciousness; in Fighting for Life, he analyzed the place of the word in causing human dissension. Ong had recognized the biological complement to human consciousness in his earlier writings, but he now made more extensive use of the Darwinian concept of struggle for existence. Ong was attracted to evolution’s sense of the present as growing out of the past. In Fighting for Life, he probed how competition is embedded in various levels of culture. He also showed how agonistic structures are present in educational, religious, and political institutions, and how adversary procedures have shaped social, linguistic, and intellectual history. Orality and Literacy is a summary of Ong’s work on the historical technologizing of the word. In this book, Ong makes clear that he belongs to no school of interpretation and that humanity’s progress into a new age will be mainly through a return to the unifying energy of orality. In 1986, Ong returned to the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the English Jesuit poet about whom he had written so insightfully early in his career. In Hopkins, the Self, and God, he portrays Hopkins as a product of the Victorian age and his Jesuit education. He sees an evolutionary view of time in Hopkins’s poetry, but he also argues that the Jesuit poet’s faith was deepened rather than threatened by nineteenth century scientific ideas.

In his retirement years, after he became professor emeritus at Saint Louis University in 1984, Ong continued to develop the ideas that had preoccupied him throughout most of his scholarly life, especially his analysis of how humans use various technologies in gathering and communicating their knowledge. Many of his essays on these themes were collected, under the title Faith and Contexts, in four volumes and published as part of the American Academy of Religion’s Religion and Social Order series. During his eightieth birthday celebrations, as he reflected on his life as priest and scholar, Ong saw a unity in the great variety of his contributions, since everything in the world “hangs together” because “God made it all.”

Ong’s reputation has derived from the insights he developed in dwelling intellectually in several contrasting milieus: the religious and secular, the Renaissance and modern, the scientific and humanistic. In particular, his career centered on the interface of word and culture, and one of his most influential themes was the evolution of the word from oral to script to print to electronic. Some of his analyses show similarities to those of Marshall McLuhan, for whom the medium was the message, but Ong’s work probed more deeply than McLuhan’s and was grounded with more thorough scholarship, and thus he has had a much more lasting influence among literary intellectuals.