Sorry for the Paul Harvey imitation, but IMHO this one needs to be told again, for those who didn’t know it.
110 years ago, a lady professor from a women’s college and the woman who was her life partner took a trip across the U.S., from the Northeast where they lived, to Chicago and Denver, for their summer vacation.
In Chicago, they attended the World’s Columbian Exposition, visiting the famous “White City” – an architect’s rendering of what the new and better world would be like in the upcoming 20th Century, built all in white.
Riding the train west from Chicago, they observed the fields, beautiful, golden, and full of corn and wheat. And on the western horizon, the violet-with-distance Front Range of the Rockies was looming ahead of them.
She spent some time thinking about the courses she’d taught during the previous semester – the Puritan writers of colonial New England, and the Founding Fathers who fought the Revolution and wrote the Constitution.
She realized that almost no church would accept her marriage as anything valid rather than sinful. But she saw in their teachings the call to a brotherhood among men that gave her hope. And in the guarantees of freedom under law in the Constitution, she saw the hope of a brighter tomorrow.
It was a time much like our own – the Republicans were courting big business, and putting down the populist Democrats, who were responding in kind. The President (soon to be replaced) was smarting from a series of sexual allegations. Soon to come would be an attack on American property that would get us into war, under a conservative Republican President.
But in it all, the lady professor saw hope. And she expressed that hope in these words:
Go for it, Polycarp! What a wonderful and timely post during these difficulties.
You just managed to (impossibly) increase my respect for you another notch! While I might not agree with all of the lyrics’ meanings, it is difficult to disagree with your intentions.
While moving, the Paul Harvey imitation is lacking, I’m afraid. You forgot to seamlessly segue into shilling some sort herbal-magnetic pills that make hearing aids at five times the cost obsolete.
On a serious note, till nobler men, indeed. There’s a lot of wilderness ahead.
Fisher Queen, it’s true to the best of my knowledge; I put it together from a bunch of reading over the years about the song and Katherine Lee Bates.
I got the “long version” including the mention of climbing Pike’s Peak from here, which also has a Bowlderized version of her life story.Deb White’s column in the Detroit News discusses Bates and Coman.
