Land Ho! — The Gold Rush voyage of Henry Weld Severance

"Barque" by Thomas Somerscales (detail)

Presented to the Club on Monday Evening, November 18, 2013 by Charles F. Sawyer

It is December 31, 1848. A young man of 19 from Augusta, Maine boards a sailing ship in Boston Harbor, bound for San Francisco, some 10,000 miles away. He is among 25,000 who will take that treacherous journey around Cape Horn in 1849. Between 1848 and 1850, San Francisco grows from a sleepy little town of 1,000 to a bustling city of 35,000. By 1852, California's non-native population increases from 14,000 to 250,000.

This great migration is, of course, occasioned by the discovery of gold at John Sutter's saw mill on the south fork of the American River. The young man from Augusta is my great -grandfather, Henry Weld Severance, who, in his own words, was "leaving all most near and dear, to seek a fortune among strangers in a distant land." He kept a journal of that journey, which I recently discovered among some family papers. I found the journal fascinating, even beyond the fact that this was my great -grandfather speaking. It provides a look into a very different time, when The world, and especially America, were young and expansionist. When self reliance and self improvement were critically important. When colonialism and the idea of manifest destiny were redefining political and geographic lines.
So my paper this evening will be to join Henry on his 10,000-mile adventure on the high seas.

He begins.

To you, my dear parents, I now dedicate my journal, and although its various incidents may not be so interesting, as while detailing them gives me the hope that they will be, still I know that wherever I am, you feel interested in my welfare, and especially so at the present time. There may be trifling scenes connected with the voyage, which you will probably ascribe to me folly in detailing them, but still, any occurrence, however minute, seems to me worthy of note. Our voyage thus far has not been entirely monotonous, but some parts deeply fraught with peril, aye with danger from which we knew we could not escape, without the aid and guidance of him whose home is on the mountain wave, whose eye o'er spreads the deep.

What would Thomas Paine do?

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, Nov. 14, 2011 by Charles F. Sawyer

In 1989, I delivered my first paper to the Monday Evening Club. The subject of the paper concerned the implications of a book written by Bill McKibben, entitled “The End of Nature." Published that year, after having been serialized in the New Yorker, it is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than twenty languages. A recent updated version was published in 2006. The message of the book was that true nature, which was independent of human influence, has been replaced by an artificial nature that had been created by the actions and interactions of human beings. He pointed out that human activity had changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, with enormous implications for the quality of life in the future. He pointed out that our influence on climate, with changing temperatures and sea levels would likely lead to less predictable and more violent weather events. McKibben’s discussion of the issues presented by these changes was both broad and detailed and illustrated in both scientific and human terms. He listed possible consequences of environmental degradation including floods and famine, worsening asthma and hay fever. He points out that we way in which we live, with our cars, our houses, plastics and pesticides, are as much a part of our world as the trees, waters and hills that are the natural landscape. He takes the position that we will have decide between our material world and the natural world. He envisions a “humbler world” where we would make do with less and thus take a less dominant position with relation to nature and where nature might once again establish itself as independent and constant. In the end, he does not think that likely. He sees a managed world, in which human beings control the climate, genetics and ecology as the most likely scenario, short of ecological catastrophe.

Those activist judges: On the expansion of marriage rights

Presented to the Club by Charles F. Sawyer on Monday evening, March 22, 2010

As was noted by Bill Moyers in his February PBS program, the Bill Moyers Journal, the quest for marriage equality has created some unlikely allies in attorneys Theodore Olsen, a conservative, and David Boies, a liberal. The two became nationally famous as the opposing counsel in Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that halted the Florida recount and resolved the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush. Now the two lawyers, who have successfully argued many cases before the Supreme Court, are lead co-counsel in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, a case that was recently argued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. That case is a challenge to Proposition 8, California’s ballot initiative that amended the State Constitution so as to put an end to same sex marriage. A decision will likely be issued this spring by the presiding judge, Vaughn Walker.

Bill Moyers interviewed the two lawyers on February 26. Here are some of the things they each had to say:

Conservatives, just like liberals, rely on the Supreme Court to protect the rule of law, to protect our liberties, to look at the law and decide whether or not it fits within the Constitution. And I think the point that’s really important here, when you’re thinking about judicial activism, is that this is not a new right. Nobody is saying, ‘Go find in the Constitution the right to get married.’ Everybody, unanimous Supreme Court, says there’s a right to get married, a fundamental right to get married. The question is whether you can discriminate against certain people based upon their sexual orientation. And the issue of prohibiting discrimination has never in my view been looked at as a test of judicial activism. That’s not liberal, that’s not conservative. That’s not Republican or Democrat. That’s simply an American Constitutional right.