"History and Time"

 If my Apple watch is correct, this should be the last of the blistering hot days here in Connecticut. Tomorrow, Sunday, the high is expected to be 80 degrees. A quick look at Connecticut’s historical weather records is instructional. The hottest temperature recorded in Connecticut (106 degrees) was set thirty-one years ago, on July 15, 1995, in Danbury. It matched the temperature set on August 23, 1916 in Torrington. Despite our discomfort, we are lucky to be living today when 90% of Connecticut’s homes have some form of air conditioning. Only about 50% did thirty years ago and virtually none in 1916. I wonder if our ancestors complained as much as do we?

 

The photo of our flag was taken here at Essex Meadows. Long may it fly!

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

More Essays from Essex

“History and Time”

July 4, 2026

 

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

                                                                                                                L.P Hartley (1895-1972), English novelist

                                                                                                                The Go-Between, 1953

 

We have lived near the shore in eastern Connecticut for thirty-five years, in Old Lyme and Essex, and we have driven to Madison – a village less than twenty miles to the west – hundreds of times. During the final months of World War II, with my father in the army, my mother went to stay with her parents in Madison. Thus the town became the place of my earliest memories.

 

Driving into Madison on a late June day, I thought of her as she would have been in 1926, the year of the sesquicentennial of the Declaration of Independence. She was then fourteen and would turn fifteen in July, the second child, and the only girl, in a family of four children. The boys loved sailing; she loved horses. She would ride or take a cart into town, or out into the back country, to visit friends. How different was her life from ours today!

 

And I thought of the passage of time, and how changed everything is today from that summer of 1926. After 20 million deaths during the “Great War” and an estimated 50 million during the Spanish Influenza, relative peace and prosperity reigned. 

 

By the mid 1920s the world seemed a happy and peaceful place. The United States was experiencing what became known as the “roaring Twenties.” The economy had rebounded sharply from a steep downturn that lasted from January1920 until July 1921. Even as prohibition was unsuccessfully trying to ban alcohol, flappers were dancing to Jazz-Age music, and the Harlem renaissance was in full swing. By July 1926, the Dow Jones Averages had more than doubled since it had troughed near the end of the recession. With the introduction of the Rentenmark and the negotiation of the Dawes Plan, Germany had resolved its hyperinflation problem and was in the midst of what was called the “Golden Twenties.” Japan was pushing toward democratic, parliamentary reform. While still recovering from war, the world was at peace.

 

Yet change was in the air. A world-wide Depression and a Second World War were on the horizon. In the U.S. consumer debt “sky-rocketed” to $7.6 billion in 1929 from almost nothing in 1920, driven by “buy now, pay later” installment plans. Stocks could be bought on 10% margin, sparking a speculative bubble by the decade’s end. 

 

Subsequently, between September 1929 and June 1932 the Dow Jones Industrial Averages lost 90% of its value. A world-wide depression ensued, which only ended in the late 1930s with preparation for war. In Germany, Hitler was making a name for himself. While in prison in 1924, he wrote Mein Kampf. By July 1932, the Nazi Party was the largest in the Reichstag. On January 30, 1933, German President Paul von Hindenburg appointed Hitler Chancellor of Germany. In Asia, a growing militaristic Japan invaded Manchuria in September 1931. While the predictability of these events, with the benefit of hindsight, seem obvious to us today, none were foreseeable during that happy, somnolent summer of 1926. 

 

Driving around Madison I thought of all this – the inability to know the future and to marvel at the changes wrought over the past century – the ubiquity of the automobile and the interstate highway system, jet planes, computers, cell phones, digital photography, air conditioning, robots, and the dramatic changes in medicine: antibiotics like penicillin, the mass production of vaccines, the discovery of insulin, organ transplants, medical imaging and gene editing; and an American actually walking on the moon – and wondered: were these changes greater than those in the one hundred years from 1826 to 1926? 

 

Perhaps, but maybe not. By 1826 industrialization had begun. The number of Americans living on farms had declined modestly, from roughly 90% in 1800 to about 80% in 1826. Harnessing water power from natural falls and dams, mills and factories were beginning to proliferate, moving people off of farms and into cities and towns. By 1926, the percent of Americans living on farms was approaching 25 percent. (Today that number is less than two percent.)

 

Those hundred years between 1826 and 1926 saw dramatic advances – railroads; cars and highways; planes; power generation, including electricity; the telegraph, telephone and typewriters; photography, movies and flush toilets. (Franklin Pierce was President when the first modern bathroom was installed in the White House. By 1926 the White House had thirteen bathrooms.) In 1826, it would take one to two weeks to travel from Washington, D.C. to Boston, and almost as long to send a message. By 1926, travel time had been cut to 10 or 12 hours, and a message could be sent in minutes. (It would be another twenty years before scheduled commercial flights between the two cities were instituted.)

 

Most important, those hundred years saw the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the abolition of slavery in 1863. Two years later on December 6, 1865, the 13^th Amendment was ratified. The first women’s rights convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York in July 1848. It witnessed the beginning of the women’s suffrage movement. Seventy-two years later, on August 18^th, 1920, the 19^th Amendment was ratified.

 

In both hundred-year periods progress was made. Both amendments in the earlier period helped fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence. The United States is not and never will be a finished product. It is a work-in-progress and always has been. While we can speculate, none of us know the future. The Country has gone through rough times and internal squabbles have grown heated – at no time as violent as they were in 1861 – but we have always emerged an improved society. It is not important to determine which period was most productive, but to remember that both eras brought improvements.

 

There is much that concerns me regarding our current state of affairs – the anti-Semitism that pervades extremists on both sides of the aisle; a refusal to respect those who disagree; a President who uses his office as a piggy bank; the recent rise of those favoring of socialism over free-market capitalism; the sorry state of many of our public schools, into which we pour money but with diminishing results; federal and state debt levels; the speculation that has propelled risky investments – like prediction markets, leveraged ETFs, cryptocurrencies and sports betting; a decline in the number of people who read books, and the increase in those isolated on social media. In Federalist No. 51, James Madison wrote that men were not angels, which is why government is necessary, but also explains why the Founders created a government constrained by three separate but equal branches.

 

Despite concerns but because of the genius of Madison and others, I remain an optimist. Warren Buffett is right in his foundational investment philosophy: “Never bet against America.” Common sense will, I believe, return and with it the realization that we are in this together – that we are lucky to live here; that we all want a better future for those who come after us; and that we are adaptable to change. However, we must ensure that the ladder to success is available to all, even if not all avail themselves of it. After all, we are all different in looks, abilities and aspirations, but we are all equal in our rights as American citizens.

 

Happy birthday, U.S.A.!

"But You Did Not Come Back," Marceline Loridan-Ivens - A Review

When I hear and read of the anti-Semitism that has become rampant in the U.S., but perhaps more particularly in Europe, I cringe. When I hear U.S. politicians condemn Israel for genocide I wonder, what has he or she been smoking? Do they understand the harm they do, the ignorance they show of history? Certainly, there is room for political differences, but these accusations and attacks go beyond what is fair or decent. In seventy-eight years of existence, Israel – a nation poor in natural resources – has created a country with the second highest GDP per capita in the Middle East, second to Qatar, a nation with massive offshore petroleum reserves. It is also the freest and most democratic. 

 

This book, really a memoir, is a reminder that the past is never the past.

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

But You Did Not Come Back, Marceline Loridan-Ivens

June 26, 2026

 

“Writing to you has helped me. When I talk to you, I don’t 

feel consoled. But I release what is clasped tightly in my heart.”

                                                                                                                         Marceline Loridan-Ivens

                                                                                                                          But You Did Not Come Back, 2015

                                                                                                                          Marceline Loridan-Ivens (1928-2018)

 

Around 1950, my father, five years back from having served in the Italian theater with the 10^thMountain Division, admonished me to never forget what the Nazis had done to the Jewish people. And I never have. While there are specific excuses for the rise of Nazism in the 1920s – the humiliation of defeat in the Great War and the subsequent demand for reparations under the Treaty of Versailles – we should not forget that these state-sanctioned atrocities were committed by a country that had produced Beethoven and Bach, Goethe and Schiller, Dürer and Friedrich, Kant and Hegel. Nazism rose not from the barbarism of a tribal people but from the universities, churches and theaters of a civilized nation. The potential for cruelty lies within all of us. We must all be guardians.

 

Marceline Loridan-Ivens story is a reminder that France, another civilized country and the birthplace of Debussy, Hugo, Renoir and Descartes, conspired with Nazi Germany to send Marceline and her father, along with thousands more, to the French internment camp of Drancy. From there she was sent to Birkenau and he to Auschwitz, where he perished. In 1935 Sinclair Lewis published his dystopian novel, It Can’t Happen Here. It can, and it will – if we lose sight of the past, and if we ignore the responsibility we each bear to continue and pass on the civilization we have inherited. 

 

In February 1944 when they were arrested at their chateau in southern France, she was fifteen and he was forty-three. Yet he suspected what was to come. Her book is a letter to her father, a response to a note he smuggled to her (since lost, but which began “To my darling little girl...”), and to his telling her when they were arrested by French police: “You might come back, because you’re young, but I will not come back.” Marceline’s short (100 pages), haunting story makes clear why memories of the Holocaust should never fade. She writes: “If you only knew, all of you, how the camp remains permanently within us. It remains in all our minds, and will until we die.”

 

Anti-Semitism has been rising in Europe and in the United States, often masked as anti-Zionism to make it acceptable. Marceline’s memoir is testimony that evil is ever-present. French Jews fared better than, for example, those in Germany or Poland. Even so, according to the World Holocaust Remembrance Center, about 76,000 French Jews were arrested by French police and sent to extermination Camps between 1942 and 1944. Only 2,500 survived.. Millions of Jews, from more than a dozen European countries, were sent to mass extermination camps in Germany, Poland, Croatia, Belarus and Serbia. It is estimated that between six and seven million Jews, approximately 70% of Europe’s pre-War population, were killed. Like many of you, I have read several books on the Holocaust. But You Did Not Come Back is perhaps the most moving.

"Polarization - Political Theater?"

 

 

 

Sydney M. Williams

www.swtotd.blogspot.com

 

Thought of the Day

“Polarization – Political Theater?”

June 14, 2026

 

“Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the

most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party,

generally...of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge.”

                                                                             George Washington (1732-1799)

                                                                             Farewell Address, September 19, 1796

 

In his 1983 book Modern Times, Paul Johnson wrote that Otto von Bismarck, who led the unification of Germany in the 1870s, was, like George Washington, concerned about the negative influences of political parties – that they would prove divisive, that it would mean that political parties would never produce “...a leader who appealed beyond the narrow limits of his own following.”

 

But has that been the case in the United States? Republican President Ronald Reagan worked closely with Democrat Speaker of the House Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, and Democrat President Bill Clinton was able to find common ground with Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Despite the partisanship that has spread so widely and dug so deeply into our politics today, would having a dozen political parties better serve our 174 million registered voters? And would a consensus be found to govern Congress with multiple parties represented? Politics is not about finding perfection, but about getting the most of what one wants. As President Reagan once said: “Politics is the art of the possible.” 

 

It is not uncommon to believe we live through the worst of times. Yet we get up every day, go to work or school, and life goes on. When one looks back at our history and compares our lives today with that of those who lived earlier, the vast majority live well. While we complain, most of us are happily resigned to the government we have. Of course, whether it is the mercurial President Trump, the cognitively-challenged President Biden, or the ethically-challenged Ken Paxton in Texas or Graham Platner in Maine, we don’t always elevate the most desirable candidates. But we never have. Thieves, scoundrels, racists, misogynists and homophobes have sat in Congress, representing both parties. Yet, despite these challenges the United States has progressed, demonstrating that the wisdom of the Founders was far greater than the inanities offered by TV commentators, or “influencers,” especially as it is possible for any nut to use the bullhorn of social media to promote any cause no matter how extreme. A government “of the people” is superior to a government of “elites.”

 

Nevertheless, polarization is real. Egged on by social media, we see our neighbors as either “Woke” or “MAGA” – we believe the center as gone. Yet, a Washington Post survey in January found that 86% of the population does not fall into the category of “extreme right” or “extreme left.” Politicians in Washington and in many state capitals and large cities put party interests above what is good or right for the country. And the media feeds the partisan divide. For example, TV news is either anti-Trump or adoring of him. 

 

But, while these blowhards appeal to a small – albeit noisy – percentage of the population, the typical voter appears more settled. According to Gallup, over the past fifty years, Independents have been increasing their share of registered voters, from 28% in 1977 to 45% today, reflecting dissatisfaction with the two parties. That number, in my opinion, would be higher if states like Connecticut and fifteen others, allowed registered Independents to participate in either Congressional or Presidential primaries.

 

In 2016 Paul Taylor and Pew Research Center published a book, The Next America. In it, Mr. Taylor wrote: “There’s no evidence from decades of Pew Research surveys that public opinion, in the aggregate, is more extreme than in the past.” Certainly, sectional partisanship was far more extreme in 1860, and even in the late 19^th Century when “free silver” advocates battled monied easterners, and during the Civil Rights and Vietnam War era. Partisanship certainly exists today, but among the bulk of American voters it seems limited to extremists. Nevertheless, in the interest of party unity – of maintaining or taking control of Congress, many “mainstream” politicians ignore the frailties of their party’s candidates – to win at any cost. 

 

Like many Americans, over the past sixty-four years, I have been a Democrat, a Republican and an Independent. While I like to think I have always been guided by a north star of conservative principles, favoring limited government, free markets, rule of law and individual freedom, in my youth – heavy on idealism and light on common sense – I was a Democrat. I felt that government should play a bigger hand in promoting equality of outcomes and dispensing social justice. While I am now registered as a Republican, I would prefer to be Unaffiliated, but registering as such would deny me participating in primaries.

 

Simply put, the most significant difference between the two parties is that Republicans favor smaller government and Democrats prefer larger government. But there are gradations, both in the beliefs of voters and in the policies preferred by politicians, which is why the willingness to compromise is important. 

 

I don’t pretend to have an answer to this pressing problem of polarization. Sadly, it is more than simply political theater. Identity politics has worsened the situation. But a good education would help – familiarity with the history of our country, in contrast to that of other nations; knowledge of different political systems, from monarchies and fascism to socialism and communism; and a basic understanding of economics, including comparisons of Karl Marx and Adam Smith. In the absence of a better educated electorate, I fear that political partisanship – pervasive among the political and media classes – will spread, leading to worsening times. 

 

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What is a problem, but one ignored by politicians on both ends of the political spectrum (and a subject for another day), is the looming debt crisis.