To Hale Or Not To Hale

Hale -- Where We Live.org

There is no nation on earth powerful enough to accomplish our overthrow. Our destruction, should it come at all, will be from another quarter: from the inattention of the people to the concerns of their government, from their carelessness and negligence. I must confess that I do apprehend some danger. I fear that they may place too implicit a confidence in their public servants and fail properly to scrutinize their conduct; that in this way they may be made the dupes of designing men and become the instruments of their own undoing – Daniel Webster

Governor Ned Lamont, feeling his oats, has decided that Noah Webster would be a better “state hero” than Nathan Hale.

Nutmeggers — We still haven’t figured out what precisely to call ourselves -- no doubt should be thankful that Lamont has not suggested his political patron, Lowell Weicker Jr., father of the nutmeg income tax, as a replacement for Hale.

"I know the legislature made Nathan Hale our state hero a few years ago," Lamont said. "Nice enough guy who was captured after a week. If he had two lives to give for his country, (he) would have been a spy for us for two weeks. I’ll put in an early vote for Noah Webster. He put together the American language as distinguished from what’s going on in Great Britain. Helped bring our country together. I think I’ll go with Noah Webster.”

Webster created a dictionary of little use in the age of Google and the Collins Dictionary. Noah was no Ben Johnson or Henry Mencken, both of whom assembled dictionaries, and his moral prescriptions are not likely to please fans of Taylor Swift, who has a residence in Connecticut. None of the deracinated postmoderns have suggested that Swift replace Hale as “state hero” -- yet

Let’s face it, in the postmodern period, rife with historical revisionism, all “history is bunk,” as Henry Ford once memorably said.

President Joe Biden, who has a genius for plagiarism, has been in the habit  of reinventing himself at infrequent media availabilities. Columbus has long been devalued, his statues unceremoniously removed from Connecticut’s collective memory. Columbus, who knew more about trade winds than many modern sailors, owned no slaves, nor did Hale. Philanthropist Elihu Yale (1649-1721), did own slaves and yet managed in the pre-postmodern era to get a university named after him. Webster also owned a slave and cheerfully accepted the Fugitive Slave Laws that so offended Henry David Thoreau, a sardonic privileged white male who authored “Slavery in Massachusetts.”

Defamers of Columbus rarely mention that the sole Indian brought into the Columbus household was adopted by Columbus for the following reason: Since the Roman imperium, only citizens were fully invested with the panoply of Italian rights, and Columbus apparently wanted the Indian he formally adopted to enjoy full citizen rights, hardly the mark of a rabid racist.

Among famous Democrat politicians, Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and Jackson, the first populist Democrat President, also have been degraded by saintly historical revisionists.

Hale was executed as a spy by the British in New York. A statute of Hale stands today before the FBI building in Washington D.C., and his presence also graces the state Capitol building in Hartford.

The history of the Hale hanging is sketchy for obvious reasons. No one among George Washington’s spy network would likely have mentioned Hale, and – a big plus! – Hale was hanged at the age of 21. His life was cut short, which means there is little matter for revisionist historians to sift through in search of humiliating imperfections. Unlike Biden, full of years, all on public display, there is in Hale’s brief life much room for mythologizing. Americans love their myths, and they do not want historical revisionists tampering with them. It is the mythic halo surrounding the heroes of the nation that raises frail humanity to the level of heroism.

No mythic heroism, no heroes.

Abolitionist John Brown, a native of Torrington, Connecticut is a mythic hero whose statue will not appear anytime soon among the necklace of heroes adorning the State Capitol building.

Benedict Arnold and Aaron Burr both have Connecticut attachments. Though highly courageous – Arnold was twice shot in battle, and British Secretary of State Lord Germaine called him “the most enterprising and dangerous” of all the American generals – both Arnold and Burr were riven with gross imperfections. The unappreciated Arnold arranged to turn over West Point to the British. And former Vice President Burr, a Fairfield Connecticut native, also undervalued, made arrangements to carve out for himself and conquer a section of the United States, after his political future had been aborted by a duel in which his arch antagonist, Alexander Hamilton had been fatally shot.

No such imperfections scar the short life of Hale, born in Coventry, Connecticut, one of nine children, a Yale graduate and country school teacher in East Haddam and New London.

Lamont apparently has some time on his hands and would do well to spend a portion of it deciding what we are to call ourselves. “Nutmegger” initially was is a term of abuse. Sharp “Yankees,” another abusive term, used to include wooden nutmegs in their sales, to fool their customers and make money. But at least the nutmeggers were not political grifters who relied upon monetary devaluation – i.e. inflation, fake nutmegs – to sell themselves to voters.