Culture and the Voice of Wisdom: Rediscovering America Through Stories

The Center for the Study of Lives
10th Anniversary
University of Southern Maine
October 15, 1998

William Ferris, Chairman, National Endowment for the Humanities

Thank you, President Pattenaude, for that kind introduction. My congratulations to you on this, the 10th anniversary celebration of the Center for the Study of Lives.

My congratulations to Bob Atkinson, you've done an incredible amount of work getting this Center up and running, I know it has been a labor of love, and we're all enriched by your efforts—he state of Maine and the country.

Thank you for inviting me here to share in the celebration. I'm very glad to be back in Maine, in many ways I consider it a second home because of my wife Marcie. Her parents spend half the year in Kennebunkport, so we spend a lot of time with them. And, when I was young, my uncle used to take me fishing in Maine and we'd buy all our equipment at L.L. Bean's. As a teenager, I used to listen to Bert and I. So I have many fond memories and they're much more than magnet memories—more than a little red lobster to take home and stick on the refrigerator.

I grew up on a farm outside of Vicksburg, Mississippi. My hometown of Vicksburg is a community on the Mississippi River where Jewish, Lebanese, Chinese, Irish, Italian, Greek and many other ethnic families have lived for more than a century. As vice-president Gore has observed, "Diversity is not an idea or agenda; it is a fact of our world."

Another fact of our world is that we are in danger of losing our memory as a culture. Pulitzer prize-winning historian James McPherson has warned, "We confront the danger of historical amnesia. As the sources for understanding our national past deteriorate and vanish, we will gradually lose our sense of identity, our capacity to understand who and what we are, how we got that way, and why." The Center for the Study of Lives is a source for understanding our national past—and our present. That's why the work of the Center is so important.

Essentially, my job as chairman of the National Endowment of the Humanities is to help "keep track" of our stories. Who we are and where we have come from as Americans.

Zora Neal Hurston wrote a story that, in part, explains my job. Let me read a brief passage from her novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain. At this point in the story Moses is in the mountains building his own tomb.

Under one stone [Moses] found an ancient lizard and asked him,

"What are you doing under there, old lizard?"

"Oh, just resting from living and thinking about the time when my ancestors ruled the world. That was a glorious time."

"How do you know your ancestors ruled the world? Your life span isn't very long, you know," Moses said, sitting down on a rock to listen and rest.

"Oh, we lizards don't try to keep our memories in our bodies. We have a keeper of memories and when we want to know what used to be, we go to him to find out."

"Do all lizards go to ask?"

"No, Moses,…. No, some lizards never ask."

My job is to be the "keeper of memories." That's what the Center for the Study of Lives does also. We all have to remember to ask about those memories. We can't be like those lizards who never ask. Or we'll all end up fossils.

These memories are vitally important because the are stories of human connection. That's what the humanities are all about. The humanities explore how we connect to each other.

How do we connect? It's a crucial question: for adolescents tying to discover their identities, for artists trying to communicate, for families trying to stay together, for immigrants coming to a new land, for all of us in our daily struggles. It's not easy. We connect through these stories. They help point the way. Stories that tell of joy, fear, growth, pain, courage, and humor.

General Beauregard Story/Maine Moose Hunter Story

Those stories are amusing because they play on stereotypes from Maine and Mississippi. To shatter such stereotypes, you have to get to know each other. Just like there's more to Maine than lobster and pine trees, there's more to Mississippi than moonlight and magnolias. A few years ago, I was fortunate to be involved in a teacher exchange program between Maine and Mississippi.

"Region and the Imagination: New England and the South," was a joint project of the Maine Humanities Council, the New England Studies Program here, and the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi.

After attending the summer program, one teacher wrote, "I now have an understanding of what shapes our differences and therefore shapes our similarities."

Another teacher wrote, "The similarities between Maine and Mississippi came through again and again-families steeped in tradition, haunted by their pasts, and drawn to region." That's why the stories are important. That's why region is important.

I have believed for a long time that people everywhere define themselves through the places where they are born and grow up. Eudora Welty calls this, the "sense of place," as she wrote:

It is by knowing where you stand that you grow able to judge where you are. Place absorbs our earliest notice and attention, it bestows upon us our original awareness; and our critical powers spring up from the study of it and the growth experiences inside it". One place comprehended can make us understand other places better. Sense of place gives us equilibrium; extended, it is sense of direction too.

Now, perhaps my philosophy runs against the grain, for we Americans are taught to devalue the places we come from. We are taught that to achieve success and make a mark on society, we must separate ourselves from our roots. I believe that these places, memories and values are essential to life and should not be abandoned in the name of progress.

The story of Martha Ballard is just such an essential memory. In 1980, Professor Laurel Ulrich discovered the eighteenth-century diary of midwife Martha Ballard. NEH and the Maine Humanities Council were early supporters of Laurel Ulrich's work. In 1982 and 1985, she received NEH support to research and write A Midwife's Tale. The book won almost every important award for which it was eligible, including the Pulitzer Prize. Many of you have seen the film, A Midwife's Tale: The Discovery of Martha Ballard.

With the Maine Humanities Council, the Endowment is working hard here. In the last five years, institutions and individuals in Maine have received more than $6 million from the Endowment and the Maine Humanities Council for projects that help to preserve the nation's cultural heritage, foster lifelong learning, and encourage civic involvement.

All of these projects tell the story of Maine people, American stories.

The Century Project: Modern Times in Maine and America 1890 1930 uncovered many great, sources for understanding our past-and preserved the stories in print and on film. The project involved more than 100 of Maine's smallest towns, many of them through intergenerational oral history projects.

Many great stories were discovered, listen to what a woman in her late 90s from Aroostook County remembers about the old days, "I left school about age 14 or 15 and kept house for a family with several boys. I cooked, made butter, raised chickens, turkeys. Helped with various farm chores. During harvest time we boarded all of them and I did most of the cooking. It was hard work."

Clayton Johnson of Bailey Island, Harpswell remembers hard work. "My father had two, three vessels. When I got big enough, why I was with him, went in the dory. God, that was wicked work, you know…. We'd haul over the bow of the dory. We had to haul by hand and I'm telling you that was hard work."

And I know what Bob is doing at the Center for the Study of Lives is hard work. But it is incredibly worthwhile. There's an expression, when an elder dies a library burns to the ground. Bob is preserving many great "libraries." Let me briefly quote from two stories captured here at the Center.

Rafael Papa was born in Manila, the Philippines. He lived in Spain and the U.S., and now retired lives on the Maine coast. He can speak ten languages. He said:

There is value in a multicultural upbringing, learning all the languages and different cultures. It helps me to respect other people and other cultures.

Did I tell you that I have fourteen nationalities in my family? I can't afford to be prejudiced-I might be prejudiced against…one of my own!

Gerald Talbot, equal rights activist and Maine's first black legislator, said:

I can tell you a lot about some history, some pain. I will wear a lot of scars that I had then, about jobs, about housing, about name calling, about one thing and another. But those are the scars that I wear. And what I've tried to do is I've tried to work to make your lives and my life a little better. I don't want you or anybody else, whether it's you, your children, or your grandchildren wearing those kind of scars…. I don't think it's necessary that we do that. Because we all have to work together. We have to think together. We have to respect each other.

In today's society none of us can afford to be prejudiced. But we still are. Look no further than the tragic story of Matthew Shepard, a young gay student at the University of Wyoming. He was pistol-whipped, tied to a fence and left to die. In the hospital Monday, he did die. The humanities can not prevent murder—but they can promote greater understanding.

We need to learn more about each other. Our special new NEH project, My History is America's History, encourages all Americans to learn more about their family's history—and then relate their history to the broader sweep of American and world history. It will make them better citizens, and that's part of our job. Why?

Because in 1965, Congress established the Endowment, saying, "Democracy demands wisdom and vision in its citizens." That is a towering task, Wisdom—vision—democracy. At the Endowment, we take our charge very seriously. We're using every tool at our disposal to do so-including technology.

I urge everyone here to call, write, or visit our website and find out more about us. From there, you can link up to EDSITEment. This new web site identifies the best educational websites in English, history and other humanities subjects. It provides a single, accessible site for parents, teachers, students, and citizens across the country. Check it out and spread the word. The Endowment is accessible and ready to help. I know you can also easily access the Center for the Study of Lives on-line. Pay a virtual visit. Let's use technology to preserve memory.

Milan Kundera, speaking from his memory as a Czech whose nation was targeted for extinction first by the Nazis and then by the Soviets, wrote, "When a big power wants to deprive a small country of its national consciousness, it uses the method of organizing forgetting. And, a nation which loses awareness of its past, gradually loses itself."

The truth is that NEH, the Maine Humanities Council, the Center for the Study of Lives, the American & New England Studies Center—and you—are part of the national cultural bloodstream, critically involved in the work of deepening knowledge, broadening our historical base, preserving memory, and creating new works of scholarship and history.

Please keep up this essential work.

It is not possible to discuss culture without discussing music and song. I could talk about the blues for hours, or I could just play it. So if you'll indulge me.

[Songs/discussion]