rf "- A }x T4I iiuieuy l kiLJi.II yI I .g.. THE MICHIGAN DAILY Pae Eiht THE MICHIGAN DAILY Thursday, February 7, 1957 k nursacy rearuary i 7] , _ 1W New Englan d Sints:" THE RECORD OF A SHIF It Can Even Cast Its Spell on Activities of the Lan "New England Saints," by Aus- tin Warren; Ann Arbor, Uni- versity of Michigan Press; 192 op.; $3.75. O strains compose the New England character, according to Professor Austin Warren, the Yankee trader and the Yankee saint. This book is about his can- didates for sainthood who often have been "a complex of scholar, priest and poet." He says the saints he writes about illustrate the spiritual life of New England through four centuries, for he he- 'ieves "New England character Ind mind have remained conspic- uously constant from the seven- teenth century to the present." The first quarrel comes with the rather slick definition of New ..ngland character, or at least with the use of the definite article, for a quality scarcely so definite. The differences separating Jona- than Edwards, say, from John Brooks Wheelwright are more in- teresting than the similarities, un- less both are seen through the rather specialized consciousness of Professor Warren. Nothing is true but believing makes it truer: Professor War- ren's New Englanders are saints because he believes them so. His saint-making is but a slightly re- fined variation of the idolatry that would make a hero cult sur- vive the dead actor James Dean. Professor Warren's saints in- clude Anne Bradstreet, Michael Wigglesworth, Edward Taylor, Jonathan Edwards, Convers Fran- cis, Bronson Alcott, R. W. Emer- son, Fenelon, Henry James, Sr., For the Finest in Printed and Recorded x music *.*. University Music House Incorporated 340 Maynard Phone NO 8-7515 Charles Eliot Norton, Irving Bab- bitt and a few others distinguished by their deserved obscurity. Pro- fessor Warren dealt with some of the outstanding omissions in an earlier book, Rage For Order, which is to say his own spiritual progress is clearly visible if his bibliography is considered chron- ologically: from "Pope As Critic and Humanist" (-1929) to an essay "Fenelon Among the Anglo-Sax- ons" (1956.) All Professor War- ren's writings seem to constitute a literary critic's solitary walk through literature in the convic- tion that sainthood is at the end of it all. IF the cited names are the Yan- kee saints, think on the traders. The saint-complex must be much less complicated than the trader- complex. By omission from Pro- fessor Warren's hagiography, Sar- ah Orne Jewett, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Herman Melville, the Adamses, William Bradford and Orestes A. Brown- son, some who were concerned with the human and the divine situation, all must be traders. If traders they are, almost anyone except Professor Warren would choose first-rate Mammonites to' third- or fourth-rate divines, how- ever superficially pious and well- instructed. One quality that most of Pro- fessor Warren's saints possess is this, that they were typical of nothing except themselves, mean- nig their own peculiar, sometimes perverse, natures. This may be, New England; it is not necessari- ly saintly. No one, hagiographer or other, can make a major figure of Hen- ry James, Sr. His claim to fame, his Swedenborgian meanderings notwithstanding, is the produce of his loins - Alice, William and Henry, Jr. James, Sr. will be al- ways more interesting for his (Continued from Page,15) government was going to tolerate a apparently independent sover- eignty within its own boundaries. Prompted by uneasiness and the coming presidential election, Presi- dent Fillmore placed the Michigan at the disposal of the United States District Attorney-in Detroit for purposes of re-establishing the sovereignty of the government over the Islands. Meekly surren- dering to the Detroit District At- torney, the leaders of the Mormon community, including St. "James' himself, were brought to Detroit for trial, where, upon their arrival, the District Attorney proclaimed he had "just returned from the Kingdom of God with the Prophet of the Lord and the Saints in lim- bo." Despite the DA's courageous and triumphant announcement, all the trial proved was that the accused were Mormons; they were return- ed to their Island"Kingdom. E'L TRNAL hostility was tempo- "rarily allayed, but the auto- cratic Prophet was having his own internal struggles. One of the'few capable members of the Kingdom eventually decided -that 'the 'only way to get rid of Strang and his fantastic plays upon the credulity of the "saints" was to assassinate him. Having made this decision, the plotter schemed to have the Michigan dock at St. James on June 16, 1856, in front of his store. There two other members of the Kingdom lay in wait as an officer of the ship was dispatched to summon Strang on board. As he approached the pier, Strang was shot in the head from behind, the assassinators racing up to the ship to plead for protection which they readily received. Even the sheriff of the country, of which St. James was the seat, was refused custody of the murderers, who left the ship at Mackinac where they were lionized by the residents for hav- ing destroyed the Kingdom of the Earth. Though such names remain as St. James, Font Lake, Gennesaret, Galilee, and the King's Highway, no Mormons have lived on Beaver Island since the summer of 1856. OUTSIDE of the part she played in the St. James episode, the Michigan's activities were confined from the time of her launching until the Civil War to recruiting Navy personnel and relieving other Great Lakes vessels in distress. With the outbreak of war be- tween the states, the unguarded lake frontiers, together with Canada's lukewarm enforcement of the neutrality laws, became ripe for Confederate plots, and the Michigan was ordered to patrol lake borders and scare off Con- federate raids, thwarting trans- portation of arms from-Canada to rebel installations. The Iron Ship was the only armed vessel the original launching site at Erie, Pennsylvania. The Navy little ex- pected her guns would be so still when it built her in 1844 to answer Great. Britain's increased arma- ment on the Great Lakes. Renamed the Wolverine in 1905 when a new Michigan was christ- ened, the Iron Ship was used as a training ship for the Naval Re- HISTORY records little of note on the success, of her immedi- ate successor for whom she was obligated to change her name. And for a time it looked as though the State of Michigan's intimate as- sociation with the United States Navy would die with the ship's slow death at Erie. But the traditions of service by the old Michigan received a short rebirth in the form of a lake excursion steamer. The new Wolverine, like her dying ancestor, contributed signi- ficantlytora new segment of the Navy's development: naval avia- tion. As the original namesake of the State was a pioneer develop- ment of iron-hulled ships, the new Wolverine provided valuable training for participants in the first large-scale use of Navy air- craft. 1 HE old Michigan remedied many of the problems created by wood-hulled ships and the dif- ficulties involved in navigation of iron-hulled ones, just as the Wol- verine remedied many of the war- 'time problems involved in training naval pilots. Prevalence of many enemy sub- marines and torpedoes in the sea would have necessitated destroyer protection for training activities. The necessity for radio silence to prevent detection would have also made night operations impossible. The solution was found in the conversion of the excursion steam- er into an aircraft carrier. Based t f '{ X f t c YY F J r f ' A ti i i 1 ] .j t ,i : c '.. it .r , . t SECOND 'USS WOLVERINE' ... carried on the long standing tradition PROF. WARREN'S NEW BOOK .. 'a complex of scholar, priest and poet' crotchets than for his literary contributions, for .his children rather than for his books. JOHN Brooks Wheelwright be- came a pathetic kind of Tol- stoyean figure without Tolstoy's grandeur and nobility. Wheel- wright, dressed in top hat and evening dress, would stand in Bos- ton Common exhorting the hu- man derelicts to do away with people like himself - when suf- ficient spirits had moved him to dialectical eloquence. Wheelwright was doing the intellectually fash- ionable thing for the 1920's and '30's - preaching an uninformed communism, Wheelwright's attempts, after two years and the threat of a third, ring about as true as Marie Antoinette's attempts to be a shepherdess or milkmaid. How- ever noble Wheelwright's ideas, he was blessed with an enormous lack of self-knowledge and politi- cal awareness. Saints begin their understanding of man and of God by knowing themselves and introspective writing is not iden- tical with self-knowledge, nor even with sincerity. The writing is marred by fool- ish punctuation, paragraphing reminiscent of a French novel. and ill-constructed sentences. (The book itself was given a hand. some production by the University of Michigan Press.) In the essay on Charles Eliot Norton is this sentence: "Sometimes, to be sure, he feared that emancipation from belief in the supernatural might come so rapidly as to leave the masses unprovided with other Inducements to right living: he was unoffendedly comprehen- sive of the alarm entertained at his skepticism, when his ap- pointment to the faculty was under consideration, by some. trustees of Harvard College; but habitually he trusted that, through moral education in home and school, and througn the appeal to men's best selves, there should emerge a human- istic civilization built upon self- knowledge, self-control, grate- ful and intelligent recollection of the past, concern for the state, responsibility to the neighbor, loyalty to loyalty." There are sentences equally som- nolent in their effect, whatever the author's intention may have been. HE point of the whole book is this, it represents a phase in the spiritual development of Pro- lessor Warren more than it ex- posits or analyzes anything. ere is another stage through which he has passed on the road to Wher-. ever he is going, and the people he writes about are his personal images of affirmation, human Navy had to check these plots. Among the many duties the Michigan was required to perform was the guarding of Johnson's Is- land in the mouth of Lake Erie's Sandusky Bay. Here 2,700 Con- federate prisoners of war were confined. And here was the pivotal point fora southern plot, hatched in September, 1864, which would have included the capture of the Michigan, release of the prisoners, eventual burning of Sandusky and Cleveland and liberation of thou- sands of prisoners in Columbus: all designed as a link in furthering Confederate plots. Realizing the capture of the Michigan (then carrying a battery of 15 guns) was a necessity, the plotters boarded and took control of a small passenger steamer, the Philo Parsons, while she was plow- ing through the waters between Detroit and Sandusky. Had the steamer ever reached sight of the Michiggn, she probably would have been blown out of the water, since the Michigan's officers had been notified of the raid. BUT as the Confederates became aware of the difficulty in at- tacking the iron ship with hat- chets and pistols, they mutinied against their leaders and the plot exploded with no assistance' from the Michigan's guns. Nor did the ships guns fire once during the rest of her career, again occupied with general peaceful activities, which came to a climax when she was placed out of commission in 1912 near her Ii~ serve until 1923, when she was permanently anchored at Erie. She was loaned as a relic to the City of Erie in 1927 and soon be- came a ,hunting ground for van- dals and sightseers. A 1948-49 campaign to raise $300,000 for her restoration failed despite pleas from the late Governor Sigler and former Senator Ferguson, a cam- paign . receiving commendation from President Truman; the Wol- verine was towed to the scrap pile in June, 1949. offices t * MAIN OFFICE 101-107 S. Main St. * NICKELS ARCADE 330 S. State Street * NEAR 'ENGINE ARCH' 1108 South University * PACKARD-BROCKMAN 1923 Packard * WHITMORE LAKE 9571 N. Main St. Final 3-Day Clear On Our Complete ofO te w a fO uterwear TOPCOA including GENUINE HARRIS T and ALLIGATOR WOOL 40 I TICK & WI "Clothes For Men 1107 SOUTH UNIVERSITY~ Drectly Across From Anrn Arbor serve you For the past 28 years we have been the fashion headquarters for the Michigan Coed. Come in and see our exciting spring styles in sports- wear, dresses, suits, coats and accessories. F BUYING A CAR? 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