Vachel Lindsay: another ‘eagle’ that’s been forgotten

Bill Knight column for Dec. 17, 18 or 19, 2018

Eight-seven years ago this month, Illinois writer Vachel Lindsay committed suicide, leaving a legacy that reached the world but started in Illinois. However, Lindsay’s voice from the New Poetry of the early 20th century has been nearly silenced by literary or commercial Powers That Be.

Despite generations of young students – especially in Illinois – learning Lindsay’s work in pieces such as “General William Booth Enters into Heaven” and “The Eagle That is Forgotten” (about Illinois’ reform governor John Peter Altgeld), he’s been virtually ignored for decades.

One of the “prairie poets” with Carl Sandburg, Edgar Lee Masters and others, Lindsay was considered an eccentric in his hometown of Springfield, but he’s credited with helping revive poetry as an oral art form for common people. A performance artist of sorts, Lindsay’s verse was intended to be chanted or sung, and his readings had a theatrical delivery. After his death, his standing changed with popular and critical attitudes, and now he’s omitted from basic English texts like the “Norton Anthology of American Literature” and Macmillan “Anthology of American Literature.”

Ken Bradbury, who co-wrote a two-act play based on Lindsay’s work (“Vachel with a V”), said, “The book business blows with the wind. What’s included frequently is what will sell”

Critic Granville Hicks in Saturday Review wrote, “Vachel Lindsay has long been out of fashion. No poetry could differ more from that which is currently esteemed than his. He was exuberant and open, whereas the moderns are disciplined and intricate. He was a preacher, enthusiastic and hopeful; the moderns are secretive and dark. As [William Butler] Yeats observed, [there is] a strangeness in his poetry that lifts it above provincialism.”

Born Nicholas Vachel Lindsay in 1879 to Esther Frazee and Dr. Vachel Thomas Lindsay (the poet’s birthplace and deathplace is a two-story house on Fifth Street in Springfield, across Edwards from the Governor’s Mansion), Lindsay was plain in a blissful sense, blending ordinary and extraordinary. He fancied himself an intellectual but seemed to touch people most with an hypnotic boldness.

With curly, sandy hair and deep-set blue eyes, Lindsay tried higher education in Ohio, New York and Chicago, but he learned by thinking, doing and traveling the country – early as a hiking traveler and later as a touring celebrity. Before World War I, he grew fond of vagabonds’ romantic restlessness, and he walked the continent subsisting by reciting poetry or showing drawings. His life had struggles, from a love affair with poet Sara Teasdale to recurrent emotional crises, including a mental collapse. However, there was joy, too. In 1925 he married Elizabeth Conner, a teacher 22 years his younger, and they had a daughter and a son.

Lindsay was a populist character yet spoke of thoughts, dreams and visions. His heroes ranged from St. Francis to Shakespeare, Jefferson to Jesus. He scoffed at “art for art’s sake,” believing substance more important than style. Recalled for poems such as “The Congo,” “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” and “The Proud Farmer,” Lindsay “represented a tendency much richer and more indigenous than the imagists,” wrote Poetry editor Harriet Monroe a century ago. “His roots run deep into the past of American literature: Mark Twain and [James Whitcomb] Riley and Brer Rabbit Harris were his relatives. All the wild lore in our western blood -- our love of wilderness, the magic in nature and life, the instinct of sympathy with all kinds and races of men -- is in Vachel Lindsay.”

A journalist in spirit, interacting with everyday people, recording his observations and sharing many, the poet and illustrator also contributed to The Nation and New Republic magazines and the Spokane (Wash.) Daily Chronicle. As a newspaperman, Lindsay wrote about architecture and museums, poets Ezra Pound and William Borah (both from nearby Idaho), wild flowers and wheat, Johnny Appleseed and the Pacific Northwest’s scenery, and aviators as heirs to lumberjacks as genuine outdoorsmen.

The writer’s relation to central Illinois sometimes had locals ridiculing him as a burden to his parents; other times indulging him as an oddball, and occasionally respecting him as an artist praised elsewhere.

“I am not going to be robbed of central Illinois by anyone, however deft and powerful they may be,” he wrote. “I am emphatically a citizen of Springfield, Illinois, and Sangamon County. All my future life involves a very special attitude toward Springfield, toward the Middle West.

“Everything begins and ends there for me,” he added, prophetically, it turned out, as he died at home in 1931 after drinking a bottle of Lysol.

Literati, historians or Midwestern readers can have short memories or fickle judgments. Today, some 12 miles south of the State Capitol is Lake Springfield, spanned by a bridge dedicated on July 12, 1935: the Vachel Lindsay Bridge.

From Christ to Scrooge, we can learn – and change

Bill Knight column for Dec. 13, 14 or 15

Advent is a time of preparation, for celebrating Christ’s arrival at Bethlehem and for his eventual return. Christmastime also is when we again appreciate Christ’s devotion to everyday people, recorded in passages like the Gospel’s Luke recounting Christ reading Scripture: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” he said, “because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.”

Between Christ’s love of the needy on the one hand, and Ebenezer Scrooge’s overnight realization that compassion means more than money on the other, Christmas can cause us to reflect and re-prioritize our values.

One reflection concludes that the U.S. “market economy” is broken. That’s despite once-progressive economic and social values, which were discarded like once-bright Christmas trees dragged to the curb in dismal January.

Ten weeks of a gloomy Wall Street performance is one reason to reassess strategies that aren’t functioning for most Americans. Two other reasons are history and the future.

First, there’s that apparent stock market “correction” the economy is enduring. The Wall Street Journal described the New York Stock Exchange’s Dec. 7 finish as “another rout,” putting it “into the red for the year,” adding that the first week of the month was “the worst start to a December since 2008.”

Last month, the Dow fell 223.08 points (.008%), the S&P declined 26.02 (.009%), and NASDAQ went down 32.82 (.004%). Relatively modest losses, November’s slide followed the stock exchange’s substantial drop in October, when the WSJ commented that it was “the worst October for the S&P since 2008.”

Next, some history helps illuminate how the economy has deteriorated for most Americans in the last 40-plus years. An article in Fortune magazine’s October 1944 issue – “The Economics of a Free Society: A Declaration of American Economic Policy,” by corporate executive William B. Benton – outlined a plan for post-war America. A founder of the Benton & Bowles ad agency, Benton represented a corporate lobby when he suggested an economic route for the road ahead. His call for recovery and prosperity focused on having strong unions and rising wages, maintaining government regulations on business, and avoiding the creation of profit at the expense of communities.

His vision was largely enacted and functioned for most of the 1950s and ’60s, when business leaders at least acted like they cared about their communities and labor relations. That started to change in the ’70s.

Corporations’ sense of overall responsibility; duties to employees, customers, suppliers and communities; obligations to a “greater good” beyond financial performances; and a notion of shame all seemed to get discarded like toys or tools once treasured but later deemed obsolete. Since, even when economic growth has been OK (as it’s been since 2008), most gains went to the wealthy. Median weekly earnings since 1979 improved 0.1 percent; families’ net worths are lower than decades ago and, as recently reported, even Americans’ life expectancy is falling.

Reasonable responses are to restore higher taxes on the rich, and to return controls on corporations.

That leads to the third reason for the season’s reflection on the situation and our actions: the Accountable Capitalism Act, introduced in August by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). As I previously wrote, her bill takes a step toward reviving the economic standing of working and middle-class families by changing corporations from entities focusing on maximizing shareholder value to enterprises operating to benefit all corporate stakeholders – stockholders, workers, vendors, customers and communities.

Warren’s key reforms would move big corporations’ charters from states to the federal level, where charters could be revoked; prohibit political expenditures by corporations unless 75 percent of boards of directors and shareholders approve; and require corporations to have 40 percent of their boards elected by employees (like Germany, where company boards must include half owner representatives and half worker representatives).

“There’s a fundamental problem with our economy,” Warren said. “For decades, American workers have helped create record corporate profits but have seen their wages hardly budge. To fix this problem, we need to end the harmful corporate obsession with maximizing shareholder returns at all costs, which has sucked trillions of dollars away from workers and necessary long-term investments.”

The nation needs an economy where business once more invests in workers and communities.

This Advent, it’s time to prepare to punish or praise businesses and business leaders who are “naughty or nice,” and to organize to ensure the country learns from the holiday and the reason for the season.

Much business reporting misses regular Americans

Bill Knight column for Dec. 10, 11 or 12, 2018

Accurately and consistently predicting corporate stocks – much less taking credit (or blame) for Wall Street – is like cutting diamonds in a bouncy house. But forgotten amid exclamations of a vibrant economy or sensational handwringing about volatility is news coverage that regular working people are suffering losses – in jobs – even as stock prices bounce back or tiny improvements in wages start a crawl back from the abyss of stagnation.

Sometimes, it seems that workers just can’t win for losing.

Shown in last week’s heavy losses – all three major U.S. stock exchanges closed deep in the red Dec. 4 – Wall Street seems to be heading toward a “correction.” That usually, ultimately falls on the shoulders of people who work for a living instead of those who amass fortunes by buying and selling shares of companies.

The worst downturn in seven years, last Tuesday finished with the Dow plunging 799.36 points (3.1 percent); Nasdaq dropping 283.09 (3.8 percent); and the S&P falling 3.2 percent, a slide that could eventually mean hiring freezes, layoffs or bankruptcies.

Yes, things would be getting better if they weren't going so badly.

For example, a snapshot of U.S. county employment and wages from April-June, released last month by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, seems to show that wage improvements in a handful of geographic areas, such as McLean County, may have actually contributed to increases in joblessness.

McLean overall showed wages rising 9 percent then, when its employment fell 2 percent.

Statewide, the percentage change in wages from the 2nd quarter of 2017 to this year was 3.4 percent, while employment mostly held steady, growing a meager 0.8 percent over the same period.

Meanwhile, the most recent national unemployment rate was marginally unchanged, at 3.7 percent, BLS said. However, joblessness actually increased slightly, according to Economic Policy Institute analyst Heidi Shierholz, who said, “The unemployment rate rose 0.06 percentage points in October, from 3.68 percent to 3.74 percent.”

The nation had 6.08 million jobless – 111,000 more than the month before, BLS reported.

Illinois in October saw an increase in unemployment to 4.8 percent, up from 4.5 percent a year ago, according to the state Department of Employment Security, which estimated an additional 8,700 jobless people.

The only exceptions to worsening employment in Illinois were the Chicago area and Danville, both of which had slight gains in employment.

In October in McLean County – where the number of nonfarm jobs was unchanged, at 95,000 – the jobless rate went downhill, from 3.5 percent to 4.1 percent.

Likewise, other metro areas in the state saw higher unemployment:

Peoria weakened 0.3 percent, to 4.8 percent; the Quad Cities worsened 0.1 percent, to 3.9 percent; and Springfield deteriorated 0.3 percent, to 4.1 percent.

As far as major corporations and companies of special interest to Illinois, Tuesday’s nose-dive saw these precipitous declines: Amazon -103.6, Google -53.89 and Netflix -14.97, with Boeing -17.46, Caterpillar -9.63 and John Deere -10.62. Thursday was tumultuous, too, with Amazon, Google, Netflix and John Deere all recovering slightly, but Boeing and Caterpillar sliding further, -10.60 and -0.97 respectively.

As forecasts get wild and looser, the labor market is getting tighter, helping to get employers to raise pay. However, whether it’s cutbacks, consolidations or closings, the number of available jobs make it tougher on everyday Americans.

Like financial analysts trying to be precise (or at least comforting) for investors, business journalists trying to be complete, fair and accurate can be daunting, like doing electrical work in an earthquake.

But: Where is the news about the Rest of Us.