TONY JUDT; PERSONAL EXTRACTS AND REFLECTIONS ON HIS ESSAYS

March 10, 2015

Tony Judt “When The Facts Change:  Essays:  1995-2010”

I’m going to record a series of fragments and personal reflections from this superb collection of essays.

 “Europe:   The Grand Illusion” (1996) --  Tony Judt is speculating on the “protective arm of ‘Europe’” which he equated to the European Union and NATO.  He expressed the belief that this would “surely not extend beyond the old Hapsburg Center (the Czech Republic, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia and Poland).”   He went on to opine that the rest of what he described as “Byzantine” Europe (from Latvia to Bulgaria) “will be left to fend for itself, (being) too close to Russia and Russian interests for it to be prudent for the West to make an aggressive show of absorption and engagement.” 

This, of course, is exactly what happened and the impact of which we are feeling to this very day, witness the Ukrainian crisis.

 “The New World Order” (July 2005) --  Here is a wonderful quote from Harry Truman:  “We all have to recognize – no matter how great our strength – that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.” 

Judt goes on to describe our military outreach:  “We are maintaining 725 official U.S. military bases outside the United States, and 969 at home, while we spend more on defense than all the rest of the world put together.”

“The Wrecking Ball of Innovation” (December 2007) --  “If modern democracies are to survive the shock of…capitalism they need to be bound by something more than the pursuit of private economic advantage, particularly when the latter accrues to ever fewer beneficiaries:  the idea of a society held together by a pecuniary interest alone is, in John Stewart Mills’ words, ‘essentially repulsive,’ a civilized society requires more than self-interest, whether deluded or enlightened, for its shared narrative of purpose.”

As Albert O. Harshman wrote, “The greatest asset of public action is its ability to satisfy vaguely felt needs for higher purpose in the lives of men and women.”

This, too, is the greatest asset of a company like Procter & Gamble or Walt Disney or Yale University, for that matter.

“Why the Cold War Worked” -- Judt offers a remarkable perspective on what the senior leaders of Europe faced in terms of the major challenges as you look back at the years 1900-1945: 

1.     How to restore the international balance upset by the rise of Prussia—dominated by Germany after 1871.

2.     How to bring Russia back into the concert of nations in some stable way, following the distortions produced by the Russian Revolution and its international aftermath.

3.     How to rescue the international economy from the disastrous collapse of the inter war years and somehow recapture the growth and stability of the pre1914 era and,

4.     How to compensate for the anticipated decline of Great Britain as an economic and political factor in international affairs.

If you ask me, three of these four challenges or dilemmas, as Tony Judt put it, have been fairly resolved.  The one that has not been resolved is bringing “Russia back into the concert of nations in some stable way.”  We had a shot at this post 1989.  By “we” I mean Russia and the West.  But we squandered it.  The Ukrainian crisis is clear evidence of this.  I hope it can be recovered by making Russia part of a wider Europe, even as it reaches out as it surely would to Eurasia.

“What is Living and What is Dead in Social Democracy?”  Judt asks.  “Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities (are so apparent)?  We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it.”

He continues:  “For the last 30 years, in much of the English-speaking world..when asking ourselves whether we support a proposal or initiative, we have not asked, is it good or bad?  Instead we inquire:  is it efficient?  Is it productive?  Would it benefit gross domestic product?  Will it contribute to growth?  This propensity to avoid moral considerations, to restrict ourselves to issues of profit and loss—economic questions in the narrowest sense—is not an instinctive human condition.  It is an acquired taste.”

Read these words from Adam Smith:  “(this) disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition is the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” 

Smith regarded the likelihood that we would come to admire wealth and despise poverty, admire success and scorn failure, as the greatest risk facing us in the commercial society whose advent he predicted.  It is now upon us.

Judt asserts that we have lived through an era of stability, certainty and the illusion of indefinite economic improvement.  Frankly, I am not so sure of that, but I do believe he is correct in saying that “for the foreseeable future we shall be as economically insecure as we are culturally uncertain.  We are assuredly less confident of our collective purposes, environmental well-being, or our personal safety than at any time since World War II.  We have no idea what sort of world our children will inherit, but we can no longer delude ourselves into supposing that it must resemble our own in reassuring ways.”

He goes on to talk about the importance of our setting high sights for the future.  That we “remind (ourselves) of the achievement of the 20^th century, along with the likely consequences of our heedless rush to dismantle them.”  He sees that in this period we went a long way in “promoting our collective identity and common purposes, the institution of welfare as a matter of right and its provision as a social duty:  those were no mean accomplishments.” 

As we go on now to confront the issues of our own generation “giving every child the opportunity to fulfill his or her own talents and ambitions, confronting the need to work together across the world for peace, recognizing there will always be elements for whatever reason combatting that,” I agree that we will be searching for “imperfect improvements upon unsatisfactory circumstances” as the “best that we can hope for, and probably all we should seek.”

“What Have We Learned, If Anything?”  -- One of Tony Judt’s assertions that I embrace is that we have taken haste to put the 20^th century behind us.  In the United States, at least, he asserts “we have forgotten the meaning of war.”  And indeed for many of us, I am not sure we ever really knew it.  I was a youngster in World War II and recall it only as a distant memory.  The Korean War is no clearer emotionally.  Vietnam became a searing “episode” but that’s about what it was, “an episode.”  Iraq and Afghanistan, other than for those brave men and women who fought in it and their families, were events most of us saw on the news or read about in the paper.  We felt sympathy for returning veterans, but that’s about it.

Unlike the people of many, if not most other nations, we avoided the scar of war in the 20^th century.  In World War I, the United States suffered slightly fewer than 120,000 combat deaths. For the U.K., France and Germany, the figures were respectively 885,000, 1.4 million and over 2 million.  In World War II, the United States lost 420,000 of our armed forces in combat.  Japan lost 2.1 million, China 3.8 million, Germany 5.5 million and the Soviet Union an estimated 10.7 million.  Vietnam, as horrible as it was, recorded the deaths of 58,195 Americans over a war lasting 15 years.

And these combat deaths were far less than the civilian deaths.  The estimated American civilian losses in World War II were less than 2,000.  Contrast that with the British with 67,000 dead, France 207,000 dead, Yugoslavia over 500,000 dead, Germany 1.8 million, Poland 5.5 million, and the Soviet Union an estimated 11.4 million.

If there is one thing we have learned, “war is hell.”  And it should be entered into only as a last resort.  A mandate we have unfortunately not followed in Iraq and Afghanistan and in other ventures where we, knowingly or unknowingly, have set off internal wars, as in Egypt and Libya.

I believe that the reluctance of France and Germany to enter into what could lead to a major war with Russia, Ukraine and the West is influenced by the bloodletting which they and their people have experienced in prior conflicts.

                                                                        J. E. Pepper

JEP:pmc

FM_TonyJudt_031015

"A CRAZY WORLD"

“A Crazy World”

As I think back over the last two weeks, I shake my head, in concern, frustration and even a small part of wonderment.

There is the threatened shutdown of Homeland Security.  Who would have believed that there would be a contingent of 40-50 Republicans in the House who would defy their own leader, not to mention common sense, and threaten to shut down Homeland Security in order to try to hold Obama hostage for what history will recount as a rational humanitarian act to protect a well-defined group of immigrants from deportation, an action made necessary only because Republican House leadership has not had the courage (call it what you will) to put the matter to a vote.  One wonders what foreign governments and citizens think about this at a time of terrorist attacks and high risk.

Then there is the continued assault on Obama’s health care plan.  The Republicans simply won’t give up in trying to overturn the affordable health care legislation.  Forget the fact that 11 million more people now have health insurance than they did before and that millions more have coverage that previously might have been denied because of a pre-existing condition, or students past the age of 26 now being covered on their parent’s insurance, or that the rate of health care cost increases has declined?  No, despite all of that, we are moving toward a Supreme Court decision whether a very small different interpretation of language in the Act might disqualify the subsidies which are being provided to people in all those states which did not adopt plans of their own.  The Republicans have come forward with alternative plans, obscure in their details, and to the extent knowable, representing either a major reduction in coverage (who could want that; we’re already the only developed country providing such narrow coverage), or being what some conservative Republicans are calling “Obama-Lite.”

Then there is the irony of the Iranian military supporting Iraqi Shiite militia in combatting ISIS.  But the United States studiously indicating that in no way will the support we are also providing to the Iraqi Army and Shiite militia be coordinated with Iran.

At the same time, we have a Republican bloc fighting to stop a negotiation on nuclear arms control with Iran before the deal is completed, without identifying a realistic alternative.

Which brings us to Israeli President Netanyahu’s address to a Republican-dominated Congress, receiving multiple standing ovations, even as he defied the President’s position on negotiating with Iran, offering no alternative in its place other than “no deal” which would have Iran proceeding untrammeled in the development of their nuclear capability.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Party so consumed with “dislike” for a President to so reflexively oppose almost every initiative proposed by the President and his administration.

And then there is the Russian-Ukrainian development.  The most perilous development that I’ve seen on a global level since the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Here, we have Republicans, and some Democrats, too, demonizing Putin to a degree that I have not seen imposed on any Russian leader, even during the Cold War.  There are those who have concluded the Minsk ceasefire wouldn’t work even before it had a chance to take hold.  The threat to provide lethal defensive equipment to the Ukrainian armed forces continues even with its all-too predictable consequence of triggering an escalation of Russian involvement.  Where do people think that will end?  There is only one conceivable positive outcome to the situation in Ukraine:  a negotiated settlement that will create a constitutional structure giving reasonable autonomy to Eastern Ukraine and economic support that offers the opportunity for providing a stable, relatively uncorrupt Ukrainian government.

*****

I honestly can’t recall a recent time where I have seen more dysfunctionality in our government.  Still, we have been in this kind of place before, and we have to try to do what we can in our own circle of influence.  And we are doing that here in Cincinnati surely as we work to achieve a ballot initiative that will provide quality pre-K education for all children and home visiting for families who need it.

                                                                                   

"IF IT WEREN'T FOR THEM"

I wrote this more than 20 years ago, in less than an hour.

IF IT WEREN’T FOR THEM

I wonder where I would be in this Company today if it weren’t for them.

If Bob Dillard, then District Manager in Philadelphia, hadn’t been the first P&Ger I met in the interviewing process.  I couldn’t believe the interest he showed in me.  I don’t think I had met anyone who combined so self-evidently the qualities of professionalism and character.

If Jim Cochran, then head of Commercial Production, hadn’t been the first person on my interview panel in Cincinnati and, can you believe it, he was giving me advice on how to improve my interviewing skills as I was leaving his office to meet two other P&Gers.  He told me he wanted me to join P&G.  And he gave me advice on how to make that more likely to happen.

I wonder where I would be in this Company if I hadn’t had Ralph Browning as my first Brand Manager who more than willingly, in fact enthusiastically, let me take on tasks that I thought would await 2 to 3 years of experience, and he worked with me, often long hours into the night, to help me do them well.  He introduced me to advertising long before some other folks were introduced.  He encouraged me to go to New York to learn from agencies.  He really cared about my learning.

I wonder where I would be in this Company if it weren’t for my first Associate Advertising Manager, Jack Clagett.  Jack believed in me – in many ways, more than I believed in myself at that time.  He convinced me I should succeed in a big way, and he helped me, sometimes criticizing, but always in a way that I knew was intended to help me grow and succeed.  He came to Nashville twice when I was on Sales Training, not so much to critique store sets or sales presentations, but to make sure that I felt connected to this Company and learn whatever he could teach me.

I wonder where I would be in this Company if my first Brand Promotion Manager (he would be a Marketing Director today) had not been Ed Artzt.  He was a taskmaster, but far more than that, he was a teacher.  He spent hours and hours with me, going over research analysis and how more information could be drawn from them.  He was patient on proposals that I knew he didn’t agree with, but he let me come back, not just once or twice, but 3 or 4 times.  And he even went on one that I doubt if he agreed with, but he knew the risk wasn’t large.  In fact, it didn’t work, but I learned from it and, more than that, I was stimulated by it to believe that this Company would allow people to learn and try things and that management really wanted to help them learn.  What a powerful impression.  I wonder where I would be in this Company if Ed Lotspeich had not been my first Advertising Manager.  I didn’t see Ed that often, but I didn’t need to.  His character and capability were quickly conveyed.  His understanding of advertising and its principles was tremendous.  That was conveyed in some short meetings and many eloquent memoranda.  But equally important was simply Ed’s stature as a man of principle and character.

I wonder where I would be in this Company if I had not come to know several senior Sales people when I was on Sales Training who told me about the extraordinary lengths to which the Company had gone to help families that were in trouble.  They converted the value of respect for the individual into a reality for me.  They conveyed to me that the Company stood behind its words.

I wonder where I would be in this Company if Jack Hanley, then Vice President of the Soap Division or, some years later, John Smale, hadn’t taken often as little as 5 or 10 minutes to say something to me, the specifics of which I can’t remember, but the net of which was to convey confidence that I had a role to play in this Company.

I don’t mean these short recollections to suggest that “all was right” with the world that I lived in.  I had proposals rejected.  I had tough days ... days when I wondered whether I would make it ... but was it ever stimulating.  And challenging.  Above all, I knew these people really cared about me; about my learning; about my ideas.  There was no doubt about that whatsoever, and it meant a great deal to me.

I could go on with these “if it weren’t for them” stories and they would not be just about people for whom I worked.  No, equally, there are the people who have worked alongside me.  And there are people who have worked for me, dozens, indeed hundreds of them who, as I experienced and admired their work and their commitment, taught and inspired me.

Why do I review these experiences?  I do it in order to emphasize the life-changing difference we can make for each other, especially in the influence we have on people in the earlier years of their careers.

It will be our relationships with them, the expectations we set, the learning we provide, the caring we exhibit; it will be this and more which will have a hugely determining role on their future with Procter & Gamble and, if they are like me, on their entire lives.

It is an enormous responsibility and opportunity each of us has.

May we do it as well as the best of the people who did it for us.  Let us never forget that if it weren’t for them, we might not be here today – and, assuredly, we would not have become all that we are.

Let us so conduct ourselves that others will place us among that group they think of when they step back to consider – “If it weren’t for them”.

                                                                                    John E. Pepper

JEP:jlf

IMPLICIT BIAS--THE INFLUENCE OF STEREOTYPES

REFLECTIONS ON TWO OUTSTANDING BOOKS:  "BLIND SPOT" AND "WHISTLING VIVALDI"

  

These two excellent books have provided perspective on the implicit bias that discloses itself in stereotypes of two kinds – stereotypes we have of others and self-imposed stereotypes we have of ourselves – which have a negative effect on behavior in many cases and, in some (i.e. a positive self-imposed stereotype of ourselves) actually have a positive effect.

 

In “Blind Spot,” we encounter the telling test where we are asked to associate pleasant words and unpleasant words with African-American and European-American children’s faces.  It discloses in a very uncomfortable way the stereotypes that I have which are more likely to link negative connotations with African-Americans.

 

What is most encouraging in this book and in “Whistling Vivaldi” is that it is possible to change existing associations.  Data has shown that hidden bias can be weakened by relatively minimal interventions; for example, showing student research subjects pictures of 10 admirable Black Americans and 10 despicable White Americans show weaker White=good association in a subsequent test.  

 

As Claude Steele writes in “Whistling Vivaldi,” the purpose of his book is not to show that stereotype threat is so powerful and persistent that it can’t be overcome.  Quite the contrary:  it intends to show how, as an unrecognized factor in our lives, it can contribute to some of most vexing personal and societal problems, but doing quite feasible things to reduce this threat can lead to dramatic improvement in these problems.

 

The book underscores that although we have a strong sense of ourselves as autonomous individuals, “evidence consistently shows that contingencies tied to our social identities do make a difference in shaping our lives, from the way we perform in certain situations to the careers and friends we choose.”

 

It presents a set of actions we can take as individuals to reduce the impact of these threats in our own lives, as well as what we can do as a society to reduce their impact in schools and work places.

 

The lack of intimate association, Black versus White, is still with us.

 

When Black and White students were asked how many close friends of a different race they had, among the six closest friends, neither White nor Black students averaged even one friend from the other racial group.

 

As just one example of what an established stereotype can do, when a math test was given to women who were first told that the test would disclose gender differences, when in other words women could feel the stigma of doing poorer in a mathematical test, women did worse than equally skilled men.  However, among women participants who were told that the test did not show gender differences, women performed at the same level as men.  The same thing happened in testing with Blacks where there was a difference in establishing the nature of the test up front as to whether it measured intelligence.

The same impact of a stereotype being reinforced before a test held true among older people.

 

Steele attributes the decline in test performance to “over-efforting” based on the desire to overcome a bias.

 

The book establishes clear evidence that people will tend to favor their own group.  We see that even in learning a language at the very earliest stage.  “No type of person or a nation of people has shown immunity to this ‘minimal group effect.’”

 

One must avoid cues that implicate one’s marginality.  For example, “do I belong.”  This takes me back to that unforgettable encounter I had with Lloyd Ward, our first African-American General Manager at P&G, who when I asked him if there was anything I could have done to have kept him with the company, he answered “no.  I didn’t feel in the house.”  

 

In Steele’s words, there may be “a principle of remedy if enough cues in the setting can lead members of a group to feel ‘identity-safe’”.

 

Another powerful insight in the book, which I can identify with so well, is the story of a professor who had “faith” in the book’s author as a “worthy partner.”  “Somehow his assumptions about what he was doing as a scientist included me as, at least potentially, a capable colleague.”  That captures precisely the cognitive and emotional reaction I had to the chance encounter I had with John Smale when he was two or three levels above me in the company and asked me in the course of a car ride coming back from a presentation by an agency head, what I had felt about that presentation.  He made me feel like a “worthy partner.”

 

There is another question raised by the author on how to provide critical feedback to a student, such as an African-American, or a woman, who might feel negatively stereotyped.  His conclusion was that it didn’t work to try to “be neutral” in giving feedback, nor by prefacing the feedback with a “generally assuring positive statement.”  Black students didn’t trust these forms of feedback, the author writes.  The one form of feedback which did work, for both Black and White students, was described as the feedback-giver explaining that he “used high standards” in evaluating the material.  Having read the students’ essays, he believed the students could meet those standards.  His criticism, this form of feedback implies, was offered to help the students meet his high standards.

 

Another intriguing example that illustrated lessening stereotypes occurred in a racially integrated classroom.  Teachers gave each student an envelope instructing them to write down their two or three most important values and then a brief paragraph about why these values were important to them.  In other words, the value statements were put in the form of a personal narrative.  It took only 15 minutes.  That process resulted in the African-Americans doing better in their tests.

 

In conclusion, the author sites a “preponderance of evidence” which strongly suggests that “under-performance, when not caused by discrimination is likely caused by stereotype and identity threats and the interfering reactions they cause.”

 

A final perspective which opened my mind is that while all of us have identities, they are truly multiple identities.  No one or two or three identities will capture or represent a whole person.  And also, identities are fluid, “their influence on us is activated by their situational relevance.”

 

THE BENEFITS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT PERSIST OVER GENERATIONS

THE UNACCOUNTED FOR MULTI-GENERATONAL BENEFITS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD DEVELOPMENT

On Thursday and Friday of last week,  I  attended a Childhood Development Summit in Helena, Montana. In attendance were about 250 early childhood providers and funders and other NGO leaders.

As one part of the Summit, I participated in a 4-person panel. One of my fellow panelists was the Sheriff of near-by Cascade County, Bob Edwards. 

The Sheriff brought home the agonizing outcome of poor youth development which we have learned about so often. His prison, with authorized 380 beds, now has 420 inmates. Of them, 80% of the women inmates are high school drop outs and 75% of the male inmates are drop outs.

But that was not the most electrifying part of what he had to say! No, that was when he told us that:

-Prisoners whom he brought in to jail 20 years ago, are coming back again and again, calling him by his first name and  congratulating him as they have seen him being promoted. Recidivism is rampant.

-And it gets worse: he now has prisoners coming in who ask to be put in a particular cell block so they can be with their father who is there in prison at the same time. Or a wife comes in, asking to be near her husband who is already there. 

-It gets even worse: The Sheriff is now seeing incarcerations involving three generations of the same family: grandfather, father and son. At the same time. This horrifying spectacle led me to recall being in a P&G plant years ago and having dinner with a Grandfather, father and son, all working there at the same time. What a contrast!

We talk about breaking the cycle of poverty. I have read  that among children born in 1990 to a family in the bottom income  quintile, only 9% will graduate from college. It is no coincidence this is the same percentage (9%) who moved to the upper income quintile. 

But what Sheriff Edwards brought home in an unforgettable way is that we have to break the cycle of criminality. 

Childhood development is critical to this.

Sheriff Edwards' deeply-felt testimony brought home to me that helping a child achieve what early education and caring development  can provide impacts not only them. It will impact their spouse, their children, their grandchildren.

We know that  the return on investment in the development of a child pays out at better than 2:1, considering only the higher income of the child and his or her lower costs of repeat grades, special education, involvement in the criminal system, etc.

Just think how much that return is expanded as the benefits of a mature, stable income-earning adult are passed down through his or her children and then their children.

We have the opportunity to go a long way in breaking the vicious cycle of poverty and criminal behavior. We must seize it.  

We read about nother dimension of the rippling impact of early childhood development  in a column in today's Enquirer written by Catherine Rampell. It recognizes how good child care and pre-K options allow parents and often single parents* to be more fully employed in better jobs. I have included portions of this column below:

y Catherine Rampell  Opinion writer  February 9  

In  2013’s and  2014’s State of the Union speeches, President Obama proposed universal pre-kindergarten as a means of helping poor children catch up with their richer peers. 

In this year’s speech, he eschewed all mention of universal pre-K. Instead he spoke of “ universal child care,” as a means of helping working parents. 

Catherine Rampell is an opinion columnist at The Washington Post.  View Archive

• Google+

Today, both proposals seem to have lost any momentum they may have initially had. Which is a shame, because they are actually two sides of the same coin — and, recognized as such, could provide a sort of double dividend for the American economy. 

At this point, you’ve probably already heard all about how public spending on high-quality preschool helps poor kids achieve more later in life and improves the government’s bottom line as a result. As  research from Nobel economics laureate James J. Heckman has showed, early investment in disadvantaged children improves academic achievements, career prospects and, ultimately, their lifetime income, which brings in more tax dollars. It also reduces public spending on criminal justice, remedial education, health care, and safety-net programs that disproportionately get used by people who grew up poor. Heckman’s work suggests that a dollar spent on high-quality early-childhood education programs produces a higher return on investment than does almost any major alternative. 

But that’s looking only at the effect of early-childhood education programs on kids. Improving access to high-quality child care and preschool offers even bigger returns when you also consider their effect on parents. 

That’s because they can help parents who want to work stay attached to the labor force, thereby improving their lifetime earning potential, too. 

Survey data suggest that many stay-at-home mothers want to work outside the home, at least part time. Why is this? The problem  probably isn’t sexist husbands. Rather, families weigh the costs of paid child care against mom’s post-tax take-home pay and decide that it’s just not worth it for her to take a job. If every dollar of mom’s paycheck goes toward child care and other household help, she might as well handle all these responsibilities herself.  

But that’s the wrong calculus: By dropping out of the workforce, these mothers are not just eliminating their current earnings; they are depressing their future earnings, too. Research shows that women who take time off from paid work to raise kids suffer permanently lower wages. Families are considering only the immediate problem of money coming in and going out today, rather than the long-term problem of how a decision to outsource some household production today might affect the family’s collective earnings tomorrow.  

*Over 50% of children under 6 live with families where all available parents work.  

**********************************************************************************************

We see here two additional reasons why providing early childhood development support through home visiting of the kind offered by "Every Child Succeeds" and quality pre-K pay out abundantly,  financially and in the social health of  our communities and nation.

SURELY THE TIME HAS COME TO ACT. 

"WHAT EXCUSE TO WE HAVE FOR NOT WORKING TOGETHER TODAY?"

WHAT EXCUSE DO WE HAVE FOR NOT WORKING TOGETHER TODAY?”

Helping Others Who Need Our Help

 in Recognition of Our Common Humanity

More than a decade ago, noted historian Jim Horton was commenting about the meaning of the Underground Railroad, and he said something close to the following:

“If people back then would help others, not even knowing who they were and at risk to their own lives, what excuse do we have for not working together today?”

That powerful statement has motivated me from the day I heard it.  It lies at the heart of my commitment to tell the story of the Underground Railroad and other stories like it which demonstrate man’s humanity and one’s willingness to help another who needs help notwithstanding the personal risk involved.

I was recently reminded of this as I read a remarkable diary of a woman named Iris Origo who lived in the Tuscan countryside during the height of World War II.*  The German Nazi Army was in control of the surrounding land, yet there were allied prisoners of war who had escaped from Nazi internment camps and others who had become detached from their units.

This diary includes many remarkable stories which bring to life the same values of courage and cooperation and perseverance which undergird the story of the Underground Railroad.  They are yet another example of why stories like those of the Underground Railroad can provide inspiration on how we can live at our best today by helping others who need our help no matter where we live.

Iris Origo owned an estate not far from Florence.  She, along with other partisans were risking their lives rescuing escaped allied prisoners of war and other allied soldiers who had been detached from their units.  I love the way she explained the motivation of those who were helping these soldiers at the risk of their own lives.  It reminded me of what motivated the heroes of the Underground Railroad.

“What, it may be asked,” she wrote, “was the motive underlying the generous help given to the hunted Allied prisoners of war by the Italian countryfolk, often at the risk of their own lives?  It would be a mistake, I think, to attribute it to any political – or even patriotic – motive.  There was, it is true, a certain amount of anti-German and anti-Fascist feeling, especially among those peasants whose sons had been in the army against their will.  But the true motive was a far simpler one.  It has been described by an Italian partisan as ‘the simplest of all ties between one man and another; the tie that arises between the man who asks for what he needs, and the man who comes to his aid as best he can.  No unnecessary emotion or pose.’” 

*War in Val D’Orcia – An Italian War Diary – 1943-1944 by Iris Origo

An English officer, himself an escaped prisoner of war, who owed his life to the help given him in this manner, expressed views in almost identical words:  ‘The peasants’ native sympathy with the under-dog and the outcast asserted itself.  Simple Christianity impelled them to befriend those complete strangers, feed them, clothe them, and help them on their way.  All over Italy this miracle was to be seen, the simple dignity of humble people who saw in the escaped prisoners not representatives of a power to be withstood or placated, but individuals in need of their help.’”

This example was repeated many times:

Of the 70,000 Allied p.o.w.s at large in Italy on September 8^th, 1943, nearly half escaped, either crossing the frontier to Switzerland or France, or eventually rejoining their own troops in Italy; and each one of these escapes implies the complicity of a long chain of humble, courageous helpers throughout the length of the country. “I can only say,” wrote General O’Connor to Iris Origo, “that the Italian peasants and others behind the line were magnificent.  They could not have done more for us.  They hid us, escorted us, gave us money, clothes and food – all the time taking tremendous risks…We English owe a great debt of gratitude to those Italians whose help alone made it possible for us to live, and finally to escape.”

Iris Origo concluded with these words:

“It will, I think, be obvious that I love Italy and its people.  But I have become chary of generalizations about countries and nations; I believe in individuals, and in the relationship of individuals to one another.  When I look back upon these years of tension and expectation, of destruction and sorrow, it is individual acts of kindness, courage or faith that illuminate them; it is in them that I trust.  I remember a British prisoner of war in the Val d’Orcia helping the peasant’s wife to draw water from the well, with a ragged, beaming small child at his heels.  I remember the peasant’s wife mending his socks, knitting him a sweater, and baking her best cake for him, in tears, on the day of his departure.”

There were other heroes who reached out to save the lives of others.  One of them was the Archbishop of Florence, Cardinal della Costa.  When some of his nuns were arrested because they had given shelter to some Jewish women in their convent, he went straight to the German Command.  “I have come to you,” he said, “because I believe you, as soldiers, to be people who recognize authority and hierarchy – and who do not make subordinates responsible for merely carrying out orders.  The order to give shelter to those unfortunate Jewish women was given by me:  therefore I request you to free the nuns, who have merely carried out orders, and to arrest me in their stead.” 

“The German immediately gave orders for the nuns to be freed,” Ms. Origo writes, “but permitted himself to state his surprise that a man like the Cardinal should take under his protection such people as the Jews, the scum of Europe, responsible for all the evils of the present day.  The Cardinal did not enter upon the controversy.  ‘I look upon them,’ he said, ‘merely as persecuted human beings; as such it is my Christian duty to help and defend them.  One day,’ he gave himself the pleasure of adding, ‘perhaps not far off, you will be persecuted:  and then I shall defend you.’”