Exorcising toxic Trump: An intentional alternative in our back yard?

Hancock Shaker Village — photo by Massachusetts Office of Tourism, used under Creative Commons License

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, March 9, 2020 by William P. Densmore

I’ve been thinking a lot about furniture lately as my sisters and I assess the provenance and best disposition of fine furniture in our parents’ Worcester home. We’re learning that “dark furniture” isn’t very valuable anymore. Kind of like the stock market after today, and quite out of our individual control so not to worry. But thinking about furniture and value inevitable leads to the mass-market tag line for the Shakers furniture. Excellent, simple, stripped of vanity and excess — furniture.

But it is not Shaker furniture on my mind for tonight. Rather, I wish to digress in perhaps contrarian fashion to a set of difference considerations about the Shakers — their status as the longest running intentional community in America — an effort at utopia which has tested a set of values in many respects relevant not only to contemporary American society but as well perhaps to some of the attributes of the culture which occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Fifteen years ago I spent six months working at Hancock Shaker Village. Like most people, I knew about furniture and celibacy and that was about it. I learned somewhat more, but ever since I’ve wanted to spend a chunk of time digging into Shaker values and practices.  This talk is the result and it stems from sit-down interviews last month with five Shaker experts — and an admittedly fast literature review.

What I will highlight, using with attribution the words of my interviewees as well as published authors is this: The Shakers can teach our contemporary politicians, and maybe Donald Trump, much about gender equity, caring for “others,” housing and economic security and the management of dissent. Seventy-five years before emancipation, and 150 years before suffrage, Shakers were already practicing social, sexual, economic and spiritual equality. For the most part, the Shakers just lived their politics, although in 1852, Shaker elder Frederick Evans was proselytizing that women should have the right to vote.

There are multiple sources — from Wikipedia to scholarly volumes, to fill in the basic Shaker history so I’ll rewrite to a few sentences. Factory worker “Mother” Ann Lee and her husband arrive near Albany, N.Y., in 1774 from Manchester, England and after several frustrating years begin to attract converts to her Protestant-offshoot idea of a community that sees women as a natural representation of God after the death of Jesus. The three tenets: celibacy, confession and community. At its peak, the Shaker movement involved 6,000 members and followers at 19 sites from Kentucky east to Maine; only two (or is it three) members remain — at Sabbathday Lake, Maine.

Fatal Choice: Choosing no longer to live

Photo by Alberto Biscalchin, used under Creative Commons Licens

Presented to the Club on Monday evening, Dec. 4, 2017 by William P. Densmore

One day in March, 1981, a short obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune about a fatal choice — the suicide of Earl Russell Marshall, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. It mentioned that Mr. Marshall was a supervisor at the Tulsa maintenance base of American Airlines.

Colleagues of Mr. Marshall at American Airlines had also made a fatal choice two years earlier, a choice primarily responsible for the deaths of 271 people.

Those 271 people had been passengers May 25, 1979 on an American DC-10 jumbo jet which dropped an engine and crashed on takeoff from Chicago O’Hare International Airport. The engine had been worked on at American’s Tulsa maintenance two months earlier. The day after his death, Mr. Marshall, then 47, was to have been questioned by lawyers for the aircraft maker.

The airline said Marshall had no involvement with the accident aircraft. The Tulsa World newspaper talked to Mr. Marshall’s widow in 2004, 25 years later. “He had very bad guilt feelings, and the accident gave him something to attach his feelings to,” Marilyn Marshall to the daily. ‘He was a casualty of that crash.”

DC-10 maker McDonnell Douglas Corp. and American sued each other after the crash and the National Transportation Safety Board investigated. The companies and the government learned that a maintenance work shift ended on one of the nights the DC-10 was in Tulsa and the crew left a 15,300-pound wing engine and attached pylon hanging overnight partially disconnected from the wing – and supported only by the forklift’s hydraulics. The result – a hidden, 13-inch crack formed in one of the three attachments of the engine to the wing.