Thoughts on a Gloomy Saturday Morning in St. Louis

By Chuck Nichols

“Democratic governance will be the more successful the more public opinion ruling it is enlightened and inspired by full and thorough discussion…The greatest danger threatening democratic institutions comes from those influences which tend to stifle or demoralize discussion.” —Carl Schurz (inscription carved into the face of the Kiel Opera House, at 14th and Market streets in St. Louis, Missouri)

The Kiel Opera House, located at 14th and Market streets

An interesting quote by a onetime resident of St. Louis, Carl Schurz, can be found carved into the front of the Kiel Opera house on Market Street. I happened to notice this inscription, and the less eloquent one by Woodrow Wilson on the west side of the same wall, while driving back from an attempt to find St. Stanislaus, the jubilantly renegade, predominantly Polish, Roman Catholic parish whose nose-thumbing of the local embarrassment of an archbishop had dominated local news of late. Carl Schurz was one of the most famous of the so-called ‘48ers, natives of Germany who immigrated to the US after the failed revolutions of the fateful year of 1848. I have no idea the precise means by which his astute quote ended up emblazoned on the face of the Kiel Opera House, but his life was an interesting one, and we ignore his epigraph at our own peril. After getting involved as a student radical in the revolutions of 1848, Schurz was forced to flee Germany for his safety. After sampling ex-patriot life for a while in such places as Scotland, Paris, Philadelphia and New York, Schurz and his wife settled in rural Wisconsin. There his wife, Margarethe, founded the first Kindergarten in America, and Carl became active in Republican Party politics, running unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor of Wisconsin in 1857 after having lived there only shortly. A vocal opponent of slavery and skillful campaigner for Abraham Lincoln in his successful presidential bid, Schurz also passed the bar exam and began a law practice. After Lincoln’s victory, he named Schurz U.S. Ambassador to Spain. When civil war ignited in America, Carl was made a general in the Union Army while only in his early thirties, and took part in battles including Chancellorsville and the 2nd Battle of Bull Run. Following the war Schurz worked as a political correspondent briefly and edited the Detroit Post for a year. In 1867 Schurz moved to St. Louis to run the Westliche Post, an influential German-language daily newspaper. At the Westliche Post, Schurz mentored a young journalist named Joseph Pulitzer who later went on to found his own media empire, which included the St. Louis Post Dispatch. From 1869 to 1875 Schurz represented Missouri in the US Senate, making him the first German-American to serve in that body. He later went on to serve as Secretary of the Interior, to run the New York Evening Post, and to campaign against what he saw as the imperialist behavior of the US in the Spanish American War. He died in 1906.

Cool cultural and historical artifacts litter the geography of the Lou, and perhaps it takes precisely the kind of brooding melancholic state of mind brought on by weeks on end without sunlight in order to notice them. Across the street from the Kiel Opera House in Memorial Plaza can be found a large statue of the German poet, playwright, and philosopher, Friedrich Schiller. I’d probably noticed the statue there before, but since it looks fairly founding-fatherish (what with the telltale foofy hair and apparel apparently so popular during the latter 18th century) I assumed it was of Thomas Jefferson or some such personage. But no, the statue is of Schiller, who lived in the general area of Germany from 1759 to 1805. It is a replica of a statue in Marbach, Germany, the author’s birthplace. When it was donated to the city in 1898 by Colonel Charles Stifel, owner of a local brewery, the city held a party that went on for three days and included an elaborate ceremony and a large parade. But I digress…

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales

After visiting a friend in Bayless, I decided to return downtown to copy down the quote that leads this article. As I drove north on Truman Parkway I noticed a high speed police pursuit coming my direction in the southbound lane. Two city Impala cruisers were chasing after a dark Chevy Lumina. The Lumina’s passenger door appeared to be pushed open, and shortly before passing me in the opposite lane, a man’s body went tumbling out the door and onto the pavement. As the car barely slowed down and had to have been traveling in excess of 40 miles per hour at the time, the man rolled a good distance before coming to rest in a crouch, attempting to stand up, and then collapsing face down on the ground. It wasn’t clear if the man had been pushed out or had jumped out voluntarily. One of the pursuant cops broke chase, stopped his vehicle before the jettisoned passenger who was again struggling to stand up, drew his handgun, and yelled at him to put his hands up (or some such cliché). The man who had been belched from the Lumina made a valiant attempt to comply, before again collapsing, this time on the hood of the cop car. While it probably wasn’t yet clear what his role in the affair was, the officer wasn’t taking any chances with the semi-conscious ill-Luminati, a young black guy with an understandably sour expression and large hair pic still sticking out of his now disheveled head of longish hair. The officer approached him with his gun drawn, and proceeded to cuff and assist the now pissed off and protesting man to the back seat of the cruiser. After retrieving a cell phone and cigarette lighter still lying on the pavement, the officer hopped in his ride and sped off. I was able to witness all of this because I was waiting at the end of a line of cars for a red light to turn green and was less than thirty feet from the cop.

For some reason I seldom witness this high frequency of crazy shit in Mid-Missouri, or for that matter anywhere more than a few miles outside of the limits of the city of St. Louis. But in the STL, crazy shit stalks me. This is fine and good, as crazy shit is a necessary component of life, or at least of “the good life” properly conceived. That’s why I believe it is good for the soul to visit the city, hang out at Del Taco on Grand Avenue for a while, catch up on the latest school board politics, and basically just reacquaint oneself with one’s roots. Those living in outlying suburbs should pay particularly close attention to this advice: The suburbs are boring! There is an understandable allure to residing in a neighborhood that is at a safe remove from the Hobbesian “war of all against all” that is sadly still ongoing throughout so many forgotten rural and urban regions of our fine, economically self-segregated homeland. But, spend too much time in some middle class suburb and you inevitably will run the risk of becoming anesthetized to the psychological life force or élan vital without which continued physical existence is pointless, inner life having already been extinguished. I don’t know what it is—is the incessant corporate propaganda of America’s mass media monoculture truly so effective at its goal of homogenizing, atomizing, and rendering cripplingly insecure our tuned-in populace, or do people in general simply incline toward blandness when continued survival is robbed of both challenge and meaning? Whatever the cause, there is now convincing evidence from NIH-supported studies that if you spend too much time walled off in some god-forsaken leafy bourgeois ghetto, you will likely lose your soul. And you will have no one to blame but yourself, at least now that I warned you.

Which brings up an interesting point about missionaries... Presumably an omnipotent, omni-benevolent God would not punish a person by consigning him or her to damnation for eternity for the supposed sin of not accepting The Truth if that person through circumstances beyond his or her control never even gained any exposure to said Truth during his or her life. So Joe Schmo from some tribe in the highlands of Papua New Guinea cannot justifiably be held responsible for not accepting Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior if he never even heard of the name. But then along come some damn missionaries spreading the Good Word. And through their actions, and through the logical consequences of their own theology, they potentially put all kinds of “heathens” at risk of eternal hellfire. Sure the converts are saved—but the rest of the unconvinced evangelized get more or less screwed in the equation, do they not? Or is exposure to proper religious training simply a sign of some internal virtue or grace possessed by the “chosen,” who are picked on the basis of some predestination merit system. Under which rationale, all nonbelievers just fry, plain and simple, no exceptions needed. 

Calvinistic nonsense aside, I’m sure some nice sights can be seen while on mission. A Christian friend with whom I play basketball is leaving this summer for southern Russia with his wife and newborn baby to mission to young people, “Campus Crusade for Christ”-style. I wish him all the best. But for my money, those looking to do God’s work might find their energies better spent attending to the task articulated by Carl Schurz of beating back the forces, both foreign and domestic, that want to change our nation from an Open Society into a dissentophobic Fortress America. Such forces can be predicted to arise like clockwork at least once each generation. It has often been a lonely and difficult battle to fight back such forces, and there have been times when they got the upper hand for a while (the Palmer raids at the end of WWI, the Joe McCarthy era, and don’t forget the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts not long after our nation’s founding). Thankfully, the federal department tasked with ensuring “Justice” is no longer headed by the former Senator from Missouri, John Ashcroft, one of the more ridiculous and loathsome national figures not named Tom DeLay, and a man who on the floor of the Senate made the shamelessly self-serving declaration: “to those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty, my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to America’s enemies, and pause to America’s friends.” However, his successor as Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, considers the rights afforded by the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war to be “quaint,” and championed the Administration’s unprecedented and ultimately unsuccessful constitutional legal argument that the American citizens, Jose Padilla and Yasser Hamdi, could be imprisoned indefinitely without trial, counsel, or notice of pending charges for as long as the President so wished.

Yes, these are dark times we are living through, but there is light on the horizon (be quiet!—I’m trying to convince myself here). Sure, a clear majority of Americans reelected the incumbent gang of war criminals, and supermajorities in several red states felt the need to amend their state constitutions to fend off the great threat of gays sharing the same rights as everybody else. Sure people inherit the better part of their political affiliation from their parents, and social conservatives are breeding faster than the rest of the population. But (dictators/megalomaniacs/anything?) always overreach. People will put up with only so much before their common sense kicks in and says, “Stop! Hold up!” Anyway, that’s my little light, and I’m gonna let it shine. 

Author note: Chuck Nichols is a noted social critic and gentleman farmer who currently resides in central Missouri.