Kurt Vonnegut: Ode To America’s Freshwater People

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from In These Times:


Ode To America’s Freshwater People
On Abraham Lincoln, Carl Sandburg, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, and other Midwesterners.

BY KURT VONNEGUT

As a young man, Kurt Vonnegut considered becoming a labor organizer, and he admired and honored those who fought for the rights of wage earners everywhere. As a member of Pen International, he fought for the rights of writers around the world. On receiving the Carl Sandburg Award on October 12, 2001, the late Indiana-born author and In These Times senior editor celebrated some self-taught Midwesterners who made waves from sea to shining sea.

We are America’s Great Lakes people, her freshwater people, not an oceanic but a continental people. Whenever I swim in an ocean, I feel as though I am swimming in chicken soup.

I thank you for this honor, although it is a reminder that I am not nearly the passionate and effective artist Carl Sandburg was. And we are surely grateful for his fog which came in on little cat feet. But tonight seems an apt occasion as well for celebrating what he and other American socialists did during the first half of the past century, with art, with eloquence, with organizing skills, to elevate the self-respect, the dignity, and political acumen of American wage earners, of our working class.

That wage earners, without social position or higher education or wealth, are of inferior intellect is surely belied by the fact that two of the most splendid writers and speakers on the deepest subjects in American history were self-taught workmen. I speak, of course, of Carl Sandburg of Illinois, and Abraham Lincoln, of Kentucky, then Indiana, and finally Illinois.

.....(snip).....

Socialism is no more an evil word than Christianity. Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal, and should not starve.

.....(snip).....

Another of our freshwater ancestors was Eugene Victor Debs, of Terre Haute, Indiana. A former locomotive fireman, Eugene Debs ran for president of the United States four times, the fourth time in 1920, when he was in prison. He said, “As long as there is a lower class, I’m in it. As long as there is a criminal element, I’m of it. As long as there’s a soul in prison, I am not free.” Some platform. .................(more)

The complete piece is at: http://inthesetimes.com/article/16698/ode_to_americas_freshwater_people

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