Apollo’s Laurel in Nebraska

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Apollo’s Laurel in Nebraska—a little back story

A year ago, I had the privilege of serving on the ad hoc committee to recommend to the Governor of Nebraska a new State Poet.  I had no idea at the time our family had been involved in this once before. Shortly after this, however, my wife, the former Nancy Resler, discovered a bit of a treasure amongst what we jokingly call the “next to the largest archive” in the state—our boxes of family memorabilia.

The first installment of the treasure was an item Nancy’s mother, Mildred Snow Resler, had clipped from the Lincoln Journal Star.  The clipping was the January 27, 1974, column of Helen Haggie entitled “The Arts of Living.”  The headline for this issue’s column read “Poets Laureate Unpaid; Many States Lack Them.”  We were intrigued—why would Mildred have kept this particular clipping?

We soon discovered the answer in this paragraph from the column: “The late Mr. Neihardt was named Nebraska’s poet laureate when George C. Snow of Dawes county introduced into the state House of Representatives and Senate (the legislature was bicameral at the time) a concurrent resolution that Mr. Neihardt be named. Gov. Samuel McKelvie signed the unanimously passed resolution.” (Pay no attention, please, to the rather strange lapses in style here that slipped by the editors!)

This George C. Snow was Nancy’s mother’s father and a prominent Nebraska figure.

Installment two came when Nancy discovered a copy of George C. Snow’s biographical sketch from Vol. III, History of Western Nebraska and its People, Grant L. Shumway, Editor-in-Chief, 1921. (Yup, this is in our “archive,” too!)

According to the sketch, George C. Snow was (as of the date of publication) “the oldest editor, in point of service, in this part of the country.” He was not only editor of the Chadron Journal, but served in the State Legislature and was subsequently the Secretary of the Senate and President of the Nebraska Press Association.

Subsequent research discovered the Laureate Address given by John G. Neihardt. (Finally, something not in our archive! How did we miss this?)

Neihardt’s address itself is preceded by the announcement that “On April 18^th, 1921, the Senate and House of Representatives of the Nebraska Legislature passed a joint and concurrent resolution naming John G. Neihardt Poet Laureate of Nebraska . . . the official notification ceremony . . . was held in the Temple Theatre at Lincoln.”  There follows the account of the introductory remarks of the Chancellor’s representative, Dean Sherman, who stated that “No other state, it appears, has, by legislative recognition, a poet laureate. No other state, we may fairly say, has such a reason.” (The reason given—Neihardt’s Cylcle of the West, still today a grand verse narrative, a genre that now includes David Mason’s Ludlow.)

No wonder he could compare the occasion with those celebrations in which “the sons of Apollo were crowned publically with his laurel.”

A subsequent newspaper article (possibly from the Chadron Journal and, if so, likely written by George Snow) notes that “It was only after he had for years been called back and forth across the continent to read and lecture in the principal universities and culture clubs on both coasts that the people of Nebraska began to realize that they had a real genius living in their midst.”

George C. Snow died August 11, 1942.  Among other deceased legislators, Snow was memorialized by the 56^th Session of the Nebraska Legislature in Resolution 42, signed by long-time Clerk Hugo Srb. The memorial singled Snow out as a “recognized . . . leader and . . . a man possessed of high intellectual attainments.”

The little volume in which Neihardt’s address appeared also included the text of House Roll No. 467, “Introduced by George C. Snow of Dawes County . . . A Bill for a Joint and Concurrent Resolution declaring John G. Neihardt the poet Laureate of Nebraska.”  The “whereas” portion of the resolution tells the audience that “there is the closest connection between the growth of civilization and the development of literature” and “wise commonwealths, in all ages, have recognized this relation by lifting the poet to the same plane as the statesman and military chieftain.”

I don’t know any longer about “commonwealths,” but at least the Nebraska Arts Council, Humanities Nebraska, and the Nebraska Center for the Book still feel the same way, and so the tradition continues. The title of Poet Laureate was retired with Neihardt’s passing; the honor now comes with the title State Poet.  Titles notwithstanding, I imagine that both Neihardt and Snow would have been proud to see what they began continue with the late and inimitable Bill Kloefkorn and the current State Poet, Twyla Hansen.  I know we are proud of our family’s roles in launching the position and continuing the tradition of Poet Laureate/State Poet.

Oh, yes—most states now have one. And they are still much or totally unpaid!

[A version of this article appeared in the March issue of the newsletter for the Nebraska Center for the Book.]

The Times They Are A ‘Changing

The Times They Are A ‘changing

So many things lately have recalled the sights and sounds of the ‘60s.  Recent rock star deaths have reminded us of the rise of Rock and Roll; street shootings and films have redrawn our attention to Civil Rights.  Specific sites occupy the news. Think Ferguson (where my wife took her Confirmation training) or Edmund Pettis Bridge (where I missed the call to be).  On cue, we find ourselves re-playing the sound-tracks of the times.  Notice the rise in folks echoing the words of “We Shall Overcome.”

Looking back from 2015 it is easy to forget that all the elements of the ‘60s formed a kind of “synergy”—feeding each other.  I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that there would have been no Civil Rights Movement (as we knew it) without Rock and Roll, Rock and Roll owed a lot to the conflicts over the military action in Vietnam, Vietnam made many skeptics regarding the place and role of the USA, skepticism fed Rock and Roll, and round and round the mulberry bush the monkey chased the weasel.

In the wake of new violence in our streets (some perpetrated by criminals against law and order, some by the representatives of law and order), many have been led to ask themselves whatever happened to the ‘60s, to their rich promise of change, to the Age of Aquarius that then seemed to be dawning.

President Obama was no doubt right when he reminded us in his speech from Selma that much has changed.  The ‘60s did bear fruit.  Many things we take for granted today would never have come about, at least not in our lifetimes, were it not for the upheavals of those days.  But, as he also reminded, there is much of that promise yet to be fulfilled.  The voices for violence at home and abroad are more numerous and louder now than ever, the forces that divide us are currently in the driver’s seat, and the gaps between the wealthy and the struggling grow greater.

People in the broad middle of American politics seem surprised these days to discover that there remain among us plenty of people increasingly angry at the very changes most of us embrace.  They miss the days of white male adult dominance at home and nearly unrivaled American power abroad.  They see only negatives where most of us see gains, improvements, progress.  That people still make racist and sexist remarks seems incredible, that they get a lot of votes (and dollars) for doing so seems disgusting, and that their children sing racist chants on their excursion bus zooms up to the top of the Richter scale of shock.

So much meanness on the one hand; so much naïveté on the other! Water, water everywhere—and not a drop of it satisfying the thirst for critical intelligence!

It has been striking me that we might do well to look back on the era that moved America in a new direction.  I think we’ll find something unsettling.  When we gave up the “decadence” of the times, we took a lot of the oomph out of the “movement.”  The lifestyles that drove a generation of parents crazy were not an unfortunate incidental but among the many catalysts necessary to the chemistry.  There were indeed unfortunate consequences to these life-styles, but that alone did not put the kibosh on them.  They died from a new resurgence of the old moral “certainties” of our Puritan forebears.

In that resurgence, many forgot that the nights spent at The Captain’s Table singing along with the Clancy Brothers or Peter, Paul, and Mary were as important as the days spent collecting money for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or registering voters or standing as “peace marshals” between opposing sides in intense struggles.  Evenings over schooners of beer at Casey’s were as much a part of it all as was being stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again. As hearing Nina Simone assure a whole forgotten people that they were young, gifted, and black. As burning a draft card or a bra!

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll” was not just a slogan.  It described the attitude that dared disrupt the norms in which we had been raised, defy authority, and insist that the world could be a better place.  Rebellion is often dangerous–think police taking night sticks and hoses to protestors.  It is often misguided—think Professor Paul Olson saying that if he could just get those kids to cut their hair and major in engineering he could change the world. And, of course, decadence attracted no few people who were only seeking an excuse to behave badly.

But it all occurred because conventional morality had done what it always done—lurched to an extreme of judgmentalism, exclusivism, and intrusion into other’s consciences, life-styles, and bedrooms.  There was a revolution of sorts because our society had become revolting!

Nothing in this world, Kant reminded us, is absolutely good but a good will.  Cleverness is great in its own right but the last thing you want in someone intent on burgling your house is a clever thief.  Patriotism, family, modesty—all are capable of being virtues, but all are capable of being vices as well. We want to support our soldiers in the field of battle?  Of course.  All well and good.  Let’s never again let young men and women return home from military service to be spit upon.  But, then the camel gets its nose under the tent and pretty soon you are not a patriot if you don’t want to put boots on the ground every time there is any provocation.  We forgot that soldiers being spit at is terrible…but not as terrible as prolonging wars that ruin America as fast as they kill and maim soldiers . . . and civilians.

So, as drugs took their toll on a generation, as Veterans made legitimate appeals, as the nature of the workplace changed, we turned away from all those wild, uncontrollable kids, rediscovered family values, and assumed whatever were the good aims of the “revolution” would remain and survive.  Instead, along came a “me” generation who cut their hair, accommodated themselves to a new sexual and ethnic makeup of the workplace, and lost almost all passion for social welfare.  Turn a few pages and you get the Koch Brothers, money equals free speech, 47 members of Congress willing to deal with an enemy (members of the same political stripe who thought Jane Fonda was guilty of treason), Ferguson, and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon bus.

The ‘60s were not the first decadent era; we weren’t the first to challenge authority. In Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms, among the characters lost in the Great War’s disillusionment, Lt. Henry tells us how he came to distrust big, abstract, misused words like ‘patriotic.’ John Dower, in his Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, credits Japanese writer Sakaguchi Ango’s description of decadence: in the wake of the abuse of words like “healthy” and “wholesome,” Sakaguchi wrote “We must discover ourselves, and save ourselves, by falling to the best of our ability” (157). Our mothers or grandmothers “took the fall” by bobbing their hair—and then failed to understand when their sons or grandsons grew beards!

No, we weren’t original.  Still, the ‘60s are closest to our own times, and so the most immediate place we can turn to rediscover that neither morality nor decadence are what they are often cracked up to be! Maybe we need now nothing so much as to shed today’s glib “respectability”—and the shoddy attribution of the fear and avarice that power it to some supposed ‘will of God.’

Charles Peek

“I have discovered in 20 years of moving around the ball park, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats.” Bill Veeck, Owner, White Sox