Steve Bailey's Blog : August 2024

I can't remember ever having a vice-presidential candidate that I can relate to more than Tim Walz. First, he is from Minnesota, where I came of age, attending high school at Shattuck School, followed by Gustavus Adolphus College, and finally, The University of Minnesota, Duluth. As an outsider from the Panama Canal Zone, I learned about these people and their friendly ways. There is such a thing as "Minnesota Friendly." I pondered why and concluded that they were descendants of a frontier people mainly from Scandinavia and lived in a place with winters that could get dangerous. Experiencing some of this weather for myself gave me a deep appreciation of why Minnesotans are how they are. They knew from pioneering days that if they did not look out for each other, their godforsaken winters would kill them all.

So many times, in my tropics-reared adolescent stupidity, I would put myself in danger of those extreme temperatures and be rescued by a Minnesotan who, rather than let me die from my stupidity, got me to someplace warm. What surprised me was there was no chastising, just calm, friendly advice about not going out when it is thirty below to hitchhike on an empty country road without proper winter attire.

Minnesotans don't dislike their freezing temperatures; they embrace them, and this makes them a hardy bunch. When Cindy and I moved to Duluth to start our lives together, she went to work at an abstract company and soon learned that complaining about the cold brought on swift rebukes. "This is Minnesota. What did you expect? If you don't like our winters, you should move." Eventually, we took that advice and moved to warmer Virginia.

So, I can relate to Mr. Walz being a Minnesotan, but that is not all. He was a social studies teacher, and so was I. Now, that draws me even closer to this fellow. You see, social studies teachers know there are two sides to an issue and practice presenting both sides without giving away too much of their beliefs. The job is not to indoctrinate. The job is to make young people think. And that kind of work not only enriches the minds of the youth, but it also enriches the soul of the teacher.

And then there is the China thing. He went to China and taught school. So, did I. He taught in Guangdong, and I taught in Hangzhou. It fits so nicely with the social studies motif. Here you have a country that went communist in 1949 and has been an adversary of the United States for decades. Now, with a more modern mixed economy, it has opened its doors to Americans, and while still a competitor to our country, they no longer consider us "foreign devils." A country like that would attract someone with a sense of history and social science. I learned a lot in China, as I am sure Mr. Walz did. Reports indicate he can speak some Mandarin. He is no doubt ahead of me on that one.

Kamala Harris was not my choice for candidate, but then my choices are rarely in the final rounds. She is the best choice in this contest by a long shot, and I think she added to her chances by putting Tim Walz on her ticket. At least she firmed up my vote.

BOOK REVIEW

History has not paid much attention to first ladies and Jefferson Davis’ wife, Varina, less than most. The Civil War itself took up most of that space. Still, the woman's story in Charles Frazier’s book Varina is of a woman who married a man much older than herself and did not share in his political philosophy. This mother lost all but one of her children before they had grown up and lived out her life with the legacy of the failed Confederacy that she neither sought nor wholly accepted. This is a framed story, that is, a story within a story. Varina Davis, the only first lady of the Confederacy, tells her life story in a disconnected fashion to a young black man, James Blake, who begins visiting the eighty-year-old widow in a sanitorium where she is trying to recover from drug addiction. Blake wants to understand his own identity as Jimmie Limber, the black child whom Mrs. Davis rescued from a savage beating on a city street in Richmond, Virginia, and took in to be raised among her children. In response to Blake’s questions, Varina starts her story with her escape from Richmond, as this capital of the Confederacy fell to Union troops in the final stages of the American Civil War. She and her husband travel separately from each other physically and in the goals they have in mind for their respective journeys. She wants to escape and not return. Jefferson Davis, on the other hand, delusional that the confederacy had not been thoroughly defeated, wanted to head west toward Texas, where there was a small pocket of resistance, and keep up the fight, a fight that had already cost the American people over 600,000 lives. A climax to this part of the story is reached when Jefferson Davis reunites with his wife in Georgia and, in doing so, brings on the wrath of the Federal troops who were pursuing him. He is arrested, and during this period, Jimmie Limber is separated from the Davises. Varina, whom Frazier refers to as V throughout the book, was convinced that had her husband left her alone, she would have made it to Cuba. Varina Howell was a young woman with no dowry when she met Jefferson Davis at a party in 1843. She was seventeen, and he was thirty-five. For her, it was not about love as much as her need for security. She was more interested in his property and material wealth than his political career or ideology. And yet she stood by him throughout his ill-fated venture as the one and only president of the Confederate States of America and campaigned to have her husband freed from incarceration in Fort Monroe, Virginia, Charles Frazier’s debut novel Cold Mountain, about the journey home of a Confederate deserter in the closing days of the war, came out in 1997 and was a runaway bestseller. It was made into a movie starring Jude Law and Nicole Kidman. He uses a lyrical style, his descriptions are deep, and he puts a lot of meaning in a few words. Varina is Fraizer’s only other book with a Civil War setting. A phraseological slip-up appears when one character uses the expression “no worries,” an Australian phrase that was not part of the parlance of the nineteenth-century American language. Nevertheless, this is an engaging story about a woman few people know much about, probably because she was an outlier in the Civil War drama.

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