An Unfortunate Condition
Thanks to everyone who offered to adopt the last batch of Over Here magazines. They were spoken for in a matter of minutes after my last post.
I have some not great news about my 1958 issues. There are missing numbers. I have a friend who likely has some of mine in storage. I messaged him a while back and he is not able to put hands on them just now. Perhaps this summer.
In the meantime, even some of the issues I do have are marred by condition issues. April ‘58, for instance, must have gotten damp as there are mildew spots on the cover and the ink on the back cover has apparently peeled off onto whatever other issue it was stored against at the time. It’s not good. BUT the contents are pretty legible, with the exception of the last page’s Americans to Remember column.
I was able to clean it up with a dry cloth, scan it and do a pretty good job of transcribing it. It is the story of the founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams and his wife Mary.
Pelley was fond of Elbert Hubbard’s biographical series Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Americans and so started his own similar series called Little Visits. These were later bound into 3 scarce volumes, Bright Trails, Cabin Smoke and Marching Spires. They are fun reads, and entries into yet another genre category for Pelley’s writings… that of historical revisionism.
Here below is a transcription of the Roger Williams column which seems to be an even further condensed version of something like the Chief’s Little Visits.
When I offer the next batch, I will adjust the asking price to reflect consideration for gaps and condition. Keep reading! Have a great week.
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Americans to Remember..
Roger Williams
from Over Here, April 1958
One city in this American Republic was founded—believe it or not—by a stenographer. It was none other than Providence, R.I. and the stenographer was Tailor Williams’ youthful son, Roger. The lad came into realization of himself in London Town, England, in the year 1604. Twenty years later he was to upset the complacency of such New World communities as Boston, Salem, and points south, with his ideas on Tolerance. Meanwhile, before he was fifteen he was to master the art of making pothooks so expertly—in days long before the invention of typewriters—that he would engage the interest of none other than Sir Edward Coke, one of the most famous British lawyers of the Seventeenth Century, best known as the public prosecutor who sent Sir Walter Raleigh to the block. Coke employed the tailor’s son to transcribe his speeches. Soon Roger—seventeen years old, mind—had a regular job reporting the minutes of the various Star Chamber courts.
Coke, it seems, had found time in the midst of a tempestuous public career to defend the legacy which founded the New Sutton Hospital, later known as Charter House School. Of this school he was one of the Governors and soon appointed young Williams to a scholarship. His natural inclination to industry was quickened by the example and encouragement of Coke, who was wont to say that “he who harrowed what Roger Williams sowed must rise early.” So from Charter House School Roger went to Pembroke College, Cambridge. He early manifested sincere piety and a tendency to go to extremes in his Puritan scruples. Even at home he soon began to taste the bittersweet fruits of persecution. His eager temper transformed his convictions into downright passions, but his integrity was an aggressive force. In the language of the day, in short, Roger was becoming what is known as a Live Wire. But his voltage ran to his challenge of religious doctrine.
Some wag has described it that the Puritan Fathers sought religious freedom in this new world to worship God as they pleased and see that all other settlers worshiped as they did. Young Roger took note of all the Separatists clearing out of England for plantations overseas, proposed to a girl named Mary, and married her. Thereat he quit Coke’s employ, and took ship with his girl-wife for New England. He was only 27 when he stood with Mary in the stern of the craft that bore them westward away from hectic Albion and watched the lines of the Welsh hills fade on eastern skyline. It was a beardless boy who would presently fight the bigots at Salem and be ostracized in mid-winter to mush southward with his girl-wife and found Providence among the Narragansett Indians.
Roger got into an immediate jam with his fellow settlers because he had no more use for their theologic bigotry than he had had for the ecclesiastical authority of the Church of England over Papists and Separatists in the Old Country. Intolerance was intolerance, no matter who espoused it. Puritans in general couldn’t see this for snakebite. All Chosen People consider that they alone have the inside track to God’s favor and mercy and all others must be anathema. So when this new arrival from Pembroke College bade fair to start a New World Separatist Movement with themselves as religious Simon Legrees, the many New England congregations voted that he be kicked out forthwith, winter or no winter. Scarcely giving him time to collect his luggage in shoulder-packs and adjust his and Mary’s snowshoes, they conducted him to the edge of the settlement and gave him a symbolic kick in the pants. Being reasonable gentlemen they forbode duplicating this on Mary but she plodded along in her youthful husband’s wake and they made their ways south to set up the State that we know as Rhode Island. Almost to their own astonishment the Narragansett redskins received them with open arms, they not fancying Intolerance any more than Coke’s youthful stenographer now very much out of a pothooks job. Two years went by, with Roger and Mary living in the tepees of the Indians, then others becoming dissatisfied with the arbitrary nonsense of the Salem and Boston elders, joined them. They formed a Commonwealth in the form of a pure democracy and the system had its influence on the whole political background of the State.
He was among our Greatest Americans because he dared to speak his mind, say the thing that needed saying, refuse to compromise with principle, and preserve his sanity when human nature generally was reverting to blither and misnaming it Intellect. Yet it is the doughty soul striding through winter woods with a loyal woman mushing behind him that presents the portrait by which we remember them..
And Mary’s devotion became legion!