Barry Sanders What We Hold in Common
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B. Sanders What We Hold in Common Barry Sanders What We Hold in Common in this Uncommon Era “Great spirits now on earth are catch its meaning, know by heart the song’s sojourning. These, these will give the powerful, almost intoxicating, opening image: world another heart/And other pulses: “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming hear ye not the hum /Of mighty of the Lord; /He is trampling out the vintage workings?” where the grapes of wrath are stored.” We face a reckoning, Howe insists, for this --Keats, to a friend, 1816 transgressive act of brother killing brother on and off the field of battle: We face a Last Sunday, we celebrated something in reckoning with the Maker. There must be an America called Mothers Day. Restaurants end. There will be an end. serve more meals on that occasion than at New Year’s Eve; florists sell more roses than In spite of 700,000 or more men killed in the at Valentine’s Day. Sweet shops typically run war, and another three hundred thousand out of chocolates. Though many people think wounded, Howe believed that all human of that holiday as ridiculously commercial, it beings hold in common a desire for peace. came about in quite the opposite way, through Her own experience told her that such a the agitation of a single person of heroic peace, however, would never come from men. persistence, a woman named Julia Ward For her, the radical transformation of the Howe. She has fairly well faded from history, world could only be generated by mothers. but at one time the mere mention of her name The question, Howe wrote, “forced itself on would make Howe’s toughest opponents me, ‘Why do not the mothers of mankind stammer and spit. She fought passionately interfere in these matters to prevent the waste her whole life for the freedom of slaves, for of human life, which they alone bear and the recognition of the poor, and for the rights know the cost?’ I had never thought of this of women. She saw the bloody Civil War up before. The august dignity of motherhood close, and it shocked her to realize that the and its terrible responsibility now appeared to newest republic in the world could wind up me in a new aspect.” short-lived—in continuous turmoil if not utter and absolute destruction. Perhaps influenced by ancient Greek celebrations for Cybele, a great mother of the She shaped her entire life in the pursuit of gods, and Rhea, the wife of Cronus, Howe peace. After an evening spent comforting a conceived of an international day for the cadre of dying soldiers in a Civil War camp, in celebration of motherhood. To set the idea in 1861, she returned to her own tent and, as she motion, she wrote a proclamation, in 1870, in reports, in one sitting wrote the anti-war her favorite literary form, the poem: “Arise anthem, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” then, women of this day! /Arise, all women In the song, God extends his mighty hand and who have hearts, whether your baptism be of crushes hate until it’s gone for good. While water or of tears! / Say firmly: ‘We will not few people know anything about Julia Ward have questions decided by irrelevant Howe, almost every American can hum “The agencies./Our husbands shall not come to us Battle Hymn” and, even if they can’t quite reeking of carnage for caresses and International Writing Program, The University of Iowa 1 B. Sanders What We Hold in Common applause./Our sons shall not be taken from all that may be left of home for a great and us to unlearn all that we have been able to earnest day of counsel. teach them of charity, mercy, and patience./We women of one country will be Let them meet first as women, to bewail and too tender to those of another country to commemorate the dead. allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs./ From the bosom of a devastated Earth a Let them solemnly take counsel with each voice goes up with/Our own. It says: other as to the means whereby the great ‘Disarm! Disarm! /The sword of murder is human family can live in peace, each bearing not the balance of justice./Blood does not after his time the sacred impress not of wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate Caesar, but of God. possession.’” She had her statement translated into French, Spanish, Italian, In the name of womanhood and humanity, I German and Swedish, and then distributed earnestly ask that a general congress of thousands of copies around the world. women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed In 1872, she traveled to London to organize most convenient and at the earliest period what she hoped would be the first of many consistent with its objects, to promote the conferences for peace. Group after group, alliance of the different nationalities, the however, shut her out because none of them amicable settlement of international questions, wanted to work with a female leader. So she the great and general interests of peace. returned to America to begin promoting her yearly festival, and held her first one, significantly, on the Commons, in Boston, on June 2nd, 1872. She proclaimed it Mothers Howe’s festival of peace morphed over the Day for Disarmament and Peace. For many years into a more placid, more general holiday, years after, thousands upon thousands of a sunny day that salutes mothers for making it women, along with an increasing number of through yet another year. Howe would have men, gathered in Boston, New York, seen the change, I am convinced, as just Philadelphia, Edinburgh, London, Geneva another act of aggression. In 1914, President and even Istanbul, to celebrate Howe’s Woodrow Wilson declared the second Sunday founding vision of Mothers Day. in May as the holiday Americans now know. Although he made his announcement just Howe thought big. She wanted nothing less several months before the start of World War than an international congress of women that I, he mentioned nothing at all of the holiday’s would make the issue of world peace its only roots buried deep in a movement dedicated to priority—an international witness for that ridding the world of wars of any kind. radical political commons called peace. Women across America carried with them While I have always had my doubts about copies of Julia Ward Howe’s impassioned plea Wilson, I believe in Howe. Like her, I believe to rid the world of war. Declaiming it that we all desperately crave peace, even wherever they could find an audience, they though it seems strangely naive these days to gave voice to Howe’s political ambitions. In utter such a sentiment. Still, what we hold in the deepest meaning of conspiracy, they common does not, I firmly believe, change. shared one breath. They breathed together: At times, because of a rapid-fire life of getting and spending, our priorities shift, and what’s As men have forsaken the plow and the anvil common—including common sense itself— at the summons of war, let women now leave International Writing Program, The University of Iowa 2 B. Sanders What We Hold in Common gets occluded or distorted or, worse yet, that this quality that we all once recognized as deferred and slowly forgotten. so defiantly universal has been knocked aside by that negative meaning of common. I focus on one such moment. I am indebted here to Raymond Williams and his bracing I ask you to keep Julia Ward Howe in mind little book, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and her nineteenth-century singing and and Society. He points out that the root word trumpeting and trampling for her beloved for common, the Latin communis, derives from commonweal. I wish to use her century as my two separate sources: com-, “together” and decisive break, when community started munis-, “under obligation”; and com-, “together turning common, that is, cheap and vulgar. In and unis-, “one.” In practice, the word refers the early decades of the nineteenth century, sometimes to a concept or idea common to through the intrusion of technology, in the humankind in general or to a specific group. West at least, the idea of the common began The idea of the common can thus create to fracture in that most fundamental area to community, but it can also cause serious which Howe calls our attention—the spirit of divisions within the larger community. mother. The relationship between mother Because of its dual nature, the word has and child got demeaned, brushed aside, always carried a political charge. replaced, and we have paid a high price for that loss. This is true from its earliest use, where common celebrated a serious political division between Mother is the ultimate host. All other forms the noble, knightly or gentle ranks, as of graciousness, of unconditional reception, opposed to the lower orders. So, for instance, derive their model from the idea of while the sixteenth-century phrase, the motherhood. Witness this week. Our own commons, reveals what’s blessedly hosts have wrapped us generously in a most undistinguished and ordinary—what’s powerful Greek innovation—what Homer shared—it does so by granting power to those refers to as philoxenia—or simply, hospitality. lower ranks or orders. The upper crust, as we In Homer, alone, I count eighteen instances know, does not cede power without a of hospitality.