Civics lesson

Soldiers to Citizens: The G.I. Bill and the Making of the Greatest Generation

by Suzanne Mettler ’84

(Oxford, 2005)

Nearly eight million veterans of World War II benefited from the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (better remembered as the G.I. Bill), with 2.3 million drawing tuition and living expenses for college and the remainder gaining support for other educational and vocational-training ventures.

As is widely known, economic growth—of the personal and national variety—was a primary return on this investment, and so was public order. For the first time in U.S. history, a large army reentered civilian life following a war and its veterans didn’t subsequently riot, rebel, or march on Washington. Now, to this already substantive set of benefits, Suzanne Mettler, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, adds that the G.I. Bill seems also to have boosted the civic wealth of the nation, in that veterans who drew upon the bill later engaged in fraternal, labor, service, and political life and organizations to a significantly larger degree than did veterans who were similarly educated or trained but without having received this special help from Uncle Sam.

Soldiers to Citizens is not a sprightly book. A social scientist with a clean prose style, Mettler does take a swipe at personalizing her veterans by way of quotes from interviews, but her main pursuit is analyzing data she solicited from 2,000 veterans who responded to her 12-page survey form at a 74 percent clip. That stunning response rate—20 percent on much less onerous over-the-transom surveys would be considered an achievement—may yet be another link in the chain of tables, graphs, and regression analyses that Mettler uses to secure her main thesis, which, paraphrasing Auden, is that those to whom good is done, do good in return. Or as Mettler herself puts it more formally, “In a democracy, reciprocal obligations bind citizens and government.”

Soldiers to Citizens opens with a quote from Lincoln’s remembrance of another greatest generation, where he formulated a United States that was a “nation” rather than a republic and, moreover, a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people.” In an era when the idea of government “for the people” seems to have less currency than at any time since Herbert Hoover muddied his wingtips in a flooded Louisiana, Mettler’s report is a reminder that there’s more to gross national product than appears on any balance sheet.

A fine romance

The Sedgwicks in Love: Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic

by Timothy Kenslea, MA’90, Ph.D.’99

(Northeastern, 2005)

In western Massachusetts on an April day in 1774, Theodore Sedgwick, 28, married Pamela Dwight, 20. He was a shopkeeper’s son who’d been tossed out of Yale (he seems to have “injured” the college’s president during a student riot) but who had made something of himself in the local practice of law. She was the treasured scion of a patrician family. The marriage would last 33 years, until Pamela Dwight’s death, and produce seven children who lived to adulthood and who, along with their parents, would generate thousands of documents that Timothy Kenslea has used to create a mosaic of seven marriages, one spinsterhood, and half a dozen or so aborted courtships that occupied this family’s hearts and thoughts and busy pens between 1774 and 1842.

The mosaic’s tiles are the Sedgwicks’ letters, diaries, informal notes, and novels, but mainly thousands of letters, every one written well, it seems, and some masterfully. Here is Henry Sedgwick, writing from New York City to his fiancée in Boston, in 1817: “Dear Jane, when as now in the late and silent hours of the night I sit, and think of you . . . [t]he time which precedes our marriage is annihilated; my imagination becomes fixed; my thoughts and feelings are too concentrated for variety or succession. . . . If you were with me now, I should scarcely speak to you. I would for hours press you silently to my heart.” Jane, we are told, “devoured” this letter when it reached her. And what girl wouldn’t have? (The marriage, by the way, turned dispassionate early but persevered.)

The mortar that gives structure and depth to Kenslea’s mosaic is his deep sympathy for, and reading in, the era’s social, political, and artistic culture. A high school history teacher in Norwell, Massachusetts, for whom this is a first book (it’s a reduction of his doctoral dissertation), Kenslea writes history with a practiced air: here an illuminating aside on friendships among single young women in early 19th-century Boston; some light discourse on where letter writers sat to write their missives and read the responses (in privacy); a gentle and convincing correction of “a knowledgeable historian of women’s lives” who had imagined that Sedgwick women believed that they would not conceive while still in the habit of breast-feeding a child.

Privileged and haughty members of an ungenerous class, the Sedgwicks do not make for a terribly sympathetic crew, even when in the throes of heartache, illness, or a violent marriage; however, it needs be said that the women are a great deal easier to enjoy than the men, and some seem nearly likable—particularly Catharine Maria, the youngest of the seven children, who never married but wrote successful novels and continued, with admirable discipline, to maintain a warm friendship with the brother nearest to her in age even after he abruptly married late in life and guaranteed her a lonely old age.

But Kenslea is not a novelist. He works with the adulterated clay as it comes from the ground. And he has breathed life into it in this learned, sympathetic, and wisely unsentimental book about how men and women once practiced love.

Hooked

The Innermost Waters: Fishing Cape Cod’s Ponds & Lakes

by Peter Budryk ’60

(On Cape, 2005)

Wisconsin Wild Foods: 100 Recipes for Badger State Bounties

by John Motoviloff ’90

(Trails Books, 2005)

Budryk is a former college administrator who summers on the Cape, winters in Cambridge, and fishes and writes about fishing; and Motoviloff lives with his wife, daughter, and dog in a riverside cabin in Wisconsin and, according to his author ID, “spends a hundred days afield each year—and nearly as much time in the kitchen” working on his recipes. Can they be this fortunate and also have written books of interest? The answer is yes, though for different reasons, in spite of topical overlap.

The Innermost Waters is a straight-ahead guy’s and gal’s guide to 994 freshwater lakes and ponds. It is rich with maps, charts, typefaces, natural science, the voices of experts, lore, snapshots of people with fish, and sentences such as, “The important thing is the color of the bugs” and “Fly fish drop offs with sinking line, bead head nymphs.” Surely the bookshelves of Cape Cod’s gift shops are stocked with more sophisticated treatments of fishing, but I can’t imagine a volume more useful. Opening it is like setting up on the shore of a strange pond and finding that the guy in jeans and battered fedora standing nearby has been fishing this hole for 50 years—boy and man—and doesn’t mind talking about it. You can always retreat to your car if you need a little quiet.

Motoviloff, on the other hand, is a literary man who also fishes, hunts, and gathers. (He has published a book of essays on hunting, one of which appeared in this magazine and drew the predictable letters.) Finely, though simply, designed and produced, Wisconsin Wild Foods contains the 100 advertised recipes (along with bread, salad, and wine recommendations) and the requisite finding, hunting, butchering, and cleaning how-tos. It also includes some concise and graceful pieces of memoir and natural history. Most impressive to me, however, were the instructions (they are written as essays) on butchering and cleaning—practices to which Motoviloff has clearly given considerable thought, and that he renders precisely, unfussily, and with solemnity, as though describing ritual. He reports in this book that from the day he killed his first deer, he has said grace over every meal that included the flesh of an animal.

Ben Birnbaum

A list of recently published books by alumni, students, and faculty is maintained at bcm.bc.edu/readerslist. Publishing houses and authors are invited to send books or book announcements to the editors.

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