A Nation of Victims

William J. Lederer wrote a book called A Nation of Sheep, published in 1961. I never actually read the book but over the years I have often reflected that Americans are getting more ovine every year. The media tell us how to spend our time and money, how to look, how to feel, and what to care about. In short, how to be cool. Those of us who choose not to take their edicts to heart are punished by ridicule and threats. To be uncool is to risk being ostracized or viciously attacked, sometimes physically.

With the massive defection of parents from the home, our children are more and more being raised by TV and each other. Teachers and daycare workers are unable to completely bridge the gap between children's needs and parental duties. Parents have two primary duties -- protection and education -- and the two must be finely balanced if our children are to become responsible, independent adults. Children must be protected against physical, intellectual, and psychological dangers. They must be taught to recognize these dangers and how to circumvent them.

Without such protection and education, the children remain vulnerable to attack and grow up being victimized and remaining victims. It's a very complex process but the solution is apt to be very sudden: either a dictator will arise who is ruthless enough to impose his or her will on the nation or a handful of patriots will whip up enough fervor to fuel a revolution. After many years of intense suffering, a semblance of freedom will again be implemented and the people will repeat the process.

In the sentence above, I first wrote that the process will repeat itself, which is utter nonsense. The process has no will, no intellect, no emotions. The process is created by people who own those attributes. Historically, people aren't very much interested in their own freedom. Americans give lip service to the ideal of freedom but the actions of the electorate prove the opposite. I have often heard people say things like: "We may not be able to articulate our freedoms, but just try to take them away you'll soon see that we know what they are all right."

Nonsense. In just the sixty-odd years of my lifetime, I have seen our freedoms erode while the populace cheered the perpetrators. When I was a child, it was not necessary for a middle-class home to own a filing cabinet or hire an accountant. Now it is commonplace to need both in order to keep track of all the various government reporting requirements. Federal, state, and local governments require increasingly numerous and complex forms for permits, licenses, insurances, and taxes. Well, we have to have taxes. Right?

Yes, of course, we have to have taxes. And as long as we have to have them, we might as well make maximum use of them. So we send our money to Washington and the state capitals and the county seats and in return we demand to be taken care of. That's fine with the politicians. They are very pleased to take our money and give it back to us in driblets for our own good. This is where our freedoms erode. Once we make this exchange -- our money for relief from responsibility -- we have lost a big chunk of freedom. We no longer have the freedom to decide what's best for ourselves and our children; the people who have our money will make many of those decisions. Education, housing, savings accounts, medical treatment, insurance policies, transportation, utilities -- there is no facet of your life that is not regulated. There is no facet of your life in which you have the freedom to make your own choices from the full range of possibilities.

Say you want to save a portion of your money to use later, for your kids' college, your retirement years, to give away, or even to spend foolishly. If you don't follow the rules very carefully, the government will take some of it, maybe most of it, away from you in taxes and penalties. Why should this be? Why must we consult accountants and lawyers in order to protect our money from government predation? Why can't I put it in a savings account and add to it as I see fit and withdraw it as I see fit? Because the federal government has set up various intricate mechanisms to prevent you from doing so. If you are very wealthy you can easily afford to pay specialists to protect your wealth; the less money you have, the greater proportion the government will take away from you because you can't afford to pay people to protect it. And if you try to navigate the financial savings laws yourself, not only may the government confiscate the “improper” savings, you will be assessed penalties for breaking the law. Fifty years ago you had the freedom to save your money all by yourself and to keep it, too.

With all the reporting and oversight made possible by computers and required by government, maybe it would be better to simply stash your savings in a dresser drawer or a home safe or a hole in the back yard. Then, when you're ready to spend it, there it is. Right? Maybe, maybe not. If it's a large sum, you'll have to account for how you got it. You'll have to prove that it is in your possession legally and that the proper taxes have been paid. If you are a financial wizard or a crook, you will know how to do that. If you are an ordinary, honest person, you probably won't know and the government will confiscate your savings and you may even end up in jail because you can't prove you aren't a crook.

We have betrayed the American Revolution. We have betrayed the ideals of personal freedom. We have made America into a nation of victims.

Up from Virtual Slavery: Millard Fillmore

Millard, the eldest son and second of eight children, was born January 7, 1800, to Nathaniel and Phoebe Fillmore. He was a curious child and showed signs of ambition even as a youngster. He was a handsome boy, blond with blue eyes and a ruddy complexion. He was robust and strongly built.

Nathaniel and Phoebe worked hard at farming in upstate New York. In 1802, Nathaniel took a perpetual lease on 130 acres situated about a mile from the village of New Hope and built a log cabin and began clearing the land. As he got old enough, Millard was given chores to do, the main one being to clear the fields of rocks. He loved to roam the woods and swim in nearby Skaneateles Lake but Nathaniel objected to him wasting his time.

Millard also loved to hunt and fish but Nathaniel, oddly for a frontiersman, considered hunting and fishing a waste of time. Nevertheless, whenever Millard could get some free time, he went fishing or hunting. He had to borrow a rifle, so he didn’t get to hunt much. He had more chances to fish. He had acquired a canoe and loved to paddle out into the lake, which was pure and clear. He could look down and see the lake bottom and the fish even in the deepest parts.

Millard’s life experiences were restricted to his immediate neighborhood. Only rarely did he spend a night away from home. There was no major road in the vicinity so he had no chance of meeting anyone except his neighbors. He attended a log school in New Hope, walking to and from the village, after the crops were harvested in the fall and before the snow got too deep in the winter. The teacher when he was nine and ten was Amos Castle. There were serious gaps in the school’s resources. There were no maps, no atlas, and no dictionary. There was a book of geographical questions and answers that gave him some idea of the rest of the world. He was bright and quick and learned to read, write, spell, and work arithmetic problems. At the age of nine Mr. Castle awarded him a certificate for the feat of spelling 224 words correctly. In 1815, when he was 15, Millard left school to begin making his way in the world.

Nathaniel wanted his sons to learn trades. He didn’t want them to undergo the hardships and uncertainties of farming and he had no money to educate them for the professions. Millard wanted to join the army. Neighbors returning from the War of 1812 told exciting tales of their exploits so Millard wanted to go as a three-month substitute for a draftee. Nathaniel refused permission and persuaded him instead to learn the wool-carding and cloth-dressing trade.

Benjamin Hungerford of Sparta, now West Sparta, was a former neighbor who operated a wool-carding and cloth-dressing business. He needed a helper and Nathaniel worked out a deal for Millard to give it a try for three months. William Scott was foreman of the factory and he and Millard became lifelong friends, Millard said in later years that it was his talks with Scott that first awakened his ambitions. Scott has left a description of the boy when he first reached Sparta. He wore a suit of gray homespun wool and cowhide boots; his hair was light-colored and worn long; he seemed bright and intelligent, good-natured and thoughtful.

Millard was disappointed with his new life. He had imagined that he would be learning new skills but at first he was put to work chopping wood. The food was disappointing, too. He was inordinately fond of bread and milk but found that milk was a luxury in Sparta and he had to make do with dishes that he disliked. After a few weeks of chopping wood, Millard rebelled. He considered it unjust and tyrannical of Hungerford to set him any task other than those to do with carding wool and dressing cloth. After an ugly confrontation during which the boy threatened his employer with an axe, he was put to work in the factory. At the end of the trial period, Millard went home.

Alvan Kellogg and Zaccheus Cheney had a similar wool-carding business in New Hope and Millard was apprenticed there under an agreement that he would stay until he was 20. He was to receive $55 per year, which must have seemed a princely sum to the boy, most of his earnings to be paid directly to his father. In addition to learning how to card wool and dress cloth, Millard kept the firm’s books. The factory work was evidently seasonal or intermittent in some way because Millard continued to be an apprentice there while taking other jobs. Some were undertaken in the hours after the factory shut down for the night but others were undertaken full time in other villages. He considered the three years he spent in the cloth mill as virtual slavery and he became a stanch abolitionist, although as president he would enforce the law without fear or favor, even the Fugitive Slave Law.

In 1816 and 1817, in addition to working at the factory, Millard helped out on the family farm in the spring and went to school in the winter. Some time that year he spent $2 on a membership in the circulating library. His next purchase was a dictionary. He had little time for study so he propped his dictionary up where he could read the definitions and memorize them as he tended the carding machines.

The winter of 1818 found Millard on the other side of the teacher’s desk. He taught the school at Scott, about eight miles from New Hope. There were some rowdies in the school who had actually driven the last teacher way. Millard had to quell a rebellion one day when he undertook to whip one of the boys and they undertook to stop him. He accomplished his purpose but the boys told such exaggerated stories at home that the parents called a meeting for him to explain himself. He told them bluntly that he would be master in his school or they could seek another teacher. He stayed the full term and they paid his $10 fee in wheat.

He worked in a sawmill for a couple of months that spring then decided to do a little traveling. He walked to Buffalo, where he found the people still struggling to rebuild after the British burned the town. He crossed the Tonawanda Indian Reservation on the way but returned home by way of Geneseo. He said the rich bottom-lands of the Genesee River and the village of Canandaigua were so beautiful that they seemed like paradise on earth.

By June 1819, he was back at New Hope, working out his apprenticeship. But travel and his little stint at teaching had showed him that he needed more education. He enrolled in an academy in Kelloggsville on a part-time basis. This school was better equipped than any he had seen before and for the first time, at the age of 19, he saw maps and learned to read them. He was excited to be learning but he was still working at the factory and had to do his studying by firelight at night, even tallow candles being beyond his means.

His teacher, Abigail Powers, two years older than he, was the daughter of a Baptist minister of Saratoga County. She was quite well educated, her mother having encouraged her to study and fill in the gaps left by the village school curriculum. She was an attractive young lady with a quick mind and studious habits. She had been teaching for two years when Millard matriculated.

Millard was a handsome and charming young man. In spite of the hardships and setbacks he had endured, he had a good sense of humor and was of a gregarious nature. He stood five feet, ten inches tall and had the deep chest and wide shoulders of a man who has chopped a great deal of wood. Abigail admired his determination to acquire an education and helped him make up the deficiencies in his learning so he could make faster progress. He stayed at the academy for six months and it will be no surprise to us that these two soon found themselves in love.

It was also in 1819 that the Fillmores decided to give up trying to squeeze a living out of the farm and moved to Montville, nearly 10 miles from New Hope and six from Kelloggsville. Nathaniel must have been impressed with his eldest son’s stubbornness in attending school in the face of hardship and privation. And no doubt Phoebe urged her husband to give the boy what little help he could. So Nathaniel spoke to Walter Wood, a man of wealth who had many business interests in several counties, in addition to his legal practice and judgeship. The judge accepted Millard as a clerk and reader of law for a few months.

Millard had had no inkling of his father’s intention so when Phoebe told him it was settled at dinner one day, he cried tears of joy. He immediately presented himself at the judge’s office. Judge Wood handed him Blackstone’s Commentaries and told him to read it. The judge gave him no instruction or explanations so Millard read doggedly until he discovered that Blackstone was talking about English law. No one had told him that New York law was based on English law. But he saw that he was learning some New York law through acting as clerk so he stayed. When it was time for him to return to the carding factory, the judge advised him to leave his apprenticeship and continue reading law with him. Millard was not bound to the factory by law but he had given his word and his time had not run out. Millard worked out a deal to pay Kellogg $30 out of his future earnings and be free to pursue another career.

He taught school during the winter of 1820 and paid Kellogg out of the $36 he earned. He borrowed some law books and studied diligently until spring when his school let out. He then returned to Judge Wood’s office. He taught school again in the winter of 1821, returning to the judge’s office in the spring. Somewhere Millard learned to survey and the judge often asked him to survey land he owned.

At that time every hamlet, village, and town had a big Independence Day celebration. In 1821 Millard was asked to deliver the address at Montville. This seems to have been his first public speaking experience and he acquitted himself well. That same summer Elias Rogers of Moravia asked Millard to represent him in a lawsuit to be heard by a justice of the peace. He won the case and collected his $3 fee but the judge took him to task for violating professional ethics. He remained adamant in the face of Millard’s plea of poverty and asked him to promise that he would not repeat the offense; if he would not promise, the judge would no longer be able to help him. At that point, Millard suspected that Judge Wood intended to keep him as a clerk as long as possible, using this promise to keep him from advancing. He acknowledged the judge’s past kindness and assistance but said he would leave. The judge accepted his note for the $65 owed him and they parted. A couple of years later, the judge asked Millard to act for him in the collection of a debt. He accomplished the task and they entered into a cordial correspondence.

In August Millard joined his parents on the farm they had recently bought, situated about a mile from Aurora. At that time Aurora boasted several businesses, including a tannery, a gristmill, and a tavern. His uncle, Calvin Fillmore, owned the tavern. There being no lawyer in town with whom he could read, Millard decided to open a law practice. New York required seven years of reading law before practicing and Millard had only read for two but he went ahead with his plans. He handled several cases and won them but it was not lucrative enough to support him. He went back to teaching school, this time in the nearby hamlet of Wales. His monthly salary was $7 in cash and $6 in wheat or rye. He taught there from the first of October to the end of January and on Saturdays he practiced law.

Seeing that he needed more experience and of a different kind, Millard decided to try Buffalo. He arrived with $4 in his pocket. Before long he had obtained a job teaching in a district school and another as clerk in the law office of Asa Rice and Joseph Clary, where he would also read law. Even after he got the clerkship, he needed the teaching position, as the lawyers paid him no salary. Finally, in February 1823, he passed the bar exam and was certified to practice law by the Court of Common Pleas. He put his student and teaching days behind him and returned to Aurora, once again opening a law office, this time on the principle street in town. He continued to hone his public speaking skills and again gave the address on Independence Day. He and his brother Almon joined the Aurora Union Debating Society and Millard helped to write the bylaws.

Aurora was 150 miles from Kelloggsville, where Abigail was still teaching but they maintained their courtship by letter. He could not yet afford to go by stagecoach and he couldn’t take the time to walk. It was not until the winter of 1825 that Millard was able to make her a visit. Their love had withstood the five-year separation; Millard proposed marriage and Abigail accepted him. They did not set a date beyond deciding that the marriage would take place the next year, which it did, in February 1826.

In the meantime, Millard worked at building up his law practice. In order to indulge his love of reading and perhaps make a few dollars on the side, he incorporated a lending library with his law office. In 1825, at the age of 25, Millard was firmly on the road to success.