A letter from Kansas: dreams of democracy, past and present

It’s 48 hours to Election Day and I’ll let you in on a secret.

I’m terrified.

For the past few days, I’ve battled my fear by thinking about other times in American history when the outcome was uncertain, the consequences were dire, and ordinary people made it through.

Not all of the examples even qualify as turning points or great moments or any of that other Stephen Ambrose kind of stuff, even though the people I’m thinking about were swept up by history, just as we are now. They endured, mostly, and so has the country, mostly. We’re a little rougher around the edges and badly torn across the middle, but with a little luck and a lot of civic duty we’ll come out of this thing OK.

“OK” being a relative term.

I am suspicious of flag wavers, but I have an abiding respect, if not downright reverence, for American democracy. It is the greatest collective experiment in government in the history of the world. It is an experiment that sometimes wobbles or often works only for the few, but which has the capacity to right itself for the benefit of the many. If it seems we’re being tested in the crucible of the possible, we are.

Here in Kansas, we have a long history of being tried by fire.

We entered the union a Free State in 1861, at the start of the Civil War, and by the time the shooting had started back east, the bullets had already been flying out here for some years. Anybody with even a passing familiarity with the state’s history could probably identify John Brown as a seminal figure, if only because of the iconic panel from the John Steuart Curry mural in the Statehouse. In the mural and in popular culture, Brown is a larger-than-life abolitionist whose shadow tends to obscure people and events around him.

One of those people is Narcissa Daniels.

Before Brown’s failed attempt at the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, he lived in Kansas Territory and sometimes conducted armed raids into Missouri to free enslaved people. In late December 1858 he returned with 11 or so individuals he had liberated from Vernon and Bates counties, Missouri, seeking passage along the Underground Railroad to freedom in Canada. Because of the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision, no fugitive Black person was safe on American soil, because they could expect no protection from the federal government or the courts. It is generally regarded as the most notorious Supreme Court decision on record and likely hastened the Civil War.

One of those freed individuals in the Brown party was Narcissa, a young Black woman who was pregnant. In early January 1859, between stations on the Underground Railroad, Brown and his group paused near Garnett, Kansas Territory, so Narcissa could rest a few days after giving birth. This account comes from the website of the Grover Barn at Lawrence, a stop on the Underground Railroad that has been preserved and designated a historic landmark.

The child born to Narcissa and her husband, Jim, was christened John Brown Daniels. The Daniels family did eventually reach Canada, according to a history page from Fremont County, Iowa.

That a fugitive Black child was born on Kansas soil at the threshold of the Civil War speaks more powerfully to what was at stake than any political oratory could.

We know, of course, what happened to Brown.

After a failed attempt to ignite an insurrection of the enslaved at the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, he was hanged Dec. 2, 1859. One of those witnessing the execution at Charles Town was an actor and newly enlisted militiaman named John Wilkes Booth.

While our national crisis is not as fiery as that which engulfed us during the Civil War, it might be near enough to see from some of our front porches. The parallels are striking. We are a deeply divided nation with grievance on one side, righteous indignation on the other, and a Supreme Court making historically bad decisions. We have regressed as a nation.

Religious conmen are thumping the Bible and claiming to know God’s will, just as they said slavery was ordained by scripture.

State lines have again become the borders where rights for some end and others begin.

The stain of slavery continues to haunt us, with voter suppression efforts targeting minority voters who are the descendants of enslaved and otherwise marginalized people.

We are again in the battle for the soul of the nation.

My ears are fairly bleeding from listening attentively to the arguments from both sides of the divide, because it is our civic duty to know the best case for each and decide wisely. But little can be said at this point in the campaigns that has not already been shouted a hundred times over.

What should give us hope is the story of Narcissa Daniels and her child. It is impossible for me to understand the hardship the Daniels family faced, or the fear they must have tamped down every day until they reached Canada. That others, with no fortunes or particular influence, have survived tough times and in doing so strengthened the nation should be comfort to us all.

In November 1944 my father was a sailor on the battleship USS Pennsylvania. He was a kid from the Missouri Ozarks, really, barely 20 years old and chafing at having to wear shoes so often. He manned a typewriter, not a gun, tapping out the ship’s orders for the officers. Even though he was an excellent typist, he was a private individual, not one to put his thoughts in letters to home.

I wish he had.

I know he was scared, especially when the Pennsylvania took a Japanese torpedo off Okinawa, because he told me so decades later. But I would like to have some glimpse of his personal life, what he thought about the war and whether he thought his job was important (it was) and if he ever gave much thought to democracy.

Even though I don’t have his letters, I have a few other things from his time on board, and these offer some clues to the man. There are black-and-white photos of him in uniform, but also mementos from his time with my mother when they were in San Francisco before he shipped out, especially photos from bars and nightclubs. But the thing that gets to me most is a carefully preserved Thanksgiving 1944 ship’s menu. Turkey, dressing, all the fixings. I’m not surprised he kept it because, as a kid during the Depression, he never had enough to eat. That was always his standard for success. Do you and your kids have enough to eat?

My Dad died at 73, a success.

Remembering my father softens my regard for those who think about elections in strictly personal terms. Things are tough for many even when our economy, as the Economist magazine puts it, is the “envy of the world.” While too many families still go hungry in America, perceptions of scarcity are subjective. My Dad was always afraid of not having enough. Others have too much and still want more. My wife, Kim, and I have enough food, but I still buy peanut butter and rice in bulk, and my father’s memory probably has something to do with it. A fear is still a fear even if it’s irrational, and there’s been plenty of irrational these days to go around.

Curiously, the things I see that are truly cause for alarm don’t seem to have made much of a blip of some people’s radar this election.

Climate change is an increasingly dire threat, but it’s not driving many votes. George Will declared the other day that World War III has already begun, in the same way the previous world war began years before Germany invaded Poland. I’m inclined to agree, even though I don’t agree with Will all that often. The new axis powers have already aligned and the theaters, in Europe and the Middle East, have been defined. In a year or two the price of a gallon of milk might be the least of our worries. Think of the nuclear arsenals.

There it is again, that gnawing fear.

And along with that fear is a peculiar loneliness, a sense of isolation, even though we are never truly alone anymore even when we’re by ourselves. Social media is always at hand, that teeming abyss of insecurity and alienation, the technological monkey on our backs. What should be a boon is instead a bane, deepening our divisions.

But things could be worse. Americans are not currently shooting at each other, at least not in ranks. There’s going to be enough food on our dinner table this Thanksgiving. And I’m not sitting in a battleship in the middle of the Pacific worrying about the next torpedo bomber attack — or crouching in a jungle holding an M16 and eating C rations and smoking Marlboros from the little pack that was included.

I’m not going to talk much about my brother here, because his 2022 death is still too recent for me. And like our dad, he was a private individual. He was a kid from Kansas, an American Legion ball pitcher, and an Army ROTC graduate. He came back from Vietnam a captain, and was a little worse for wear for having been shot down in a helicopter.

I don’t know what combat was like for him. We talked about it a little, but never in detail. But I do have from him something he made while in country, not a letter but a cassette tape.

My father, who was never good at writing letters, bought a pair of cassette tape machines at Katz Drug in Joplin, Missouri, before my brother shipped out. One of these relatively new gadgets went to Vietnam. It was my father’s idea that he could exchange tapes with home. For many years I thought it was my dad’s reluctance to write letters that prompted the cassette machines purchase, but I think now it’s because he wanted to hear my brother’s voice.

I know I do now.

What I have is a white cassette tape, more than 50 years old, which Jim recorded at someplace called Firebase Mace, which I now know saw intense fighting. On the tape you can hear the diesel generators in the background and my brother’s voice, which sounds a lot like mine. He is trying to sound cheerful and he talks about what is going on at home. My mother has written him letters — many letters — so he is pretty up to date, and he asks about some school play I’m in.

The most important thing about the tape is his voice.

The tape is so old now I dare not play it, for fear it will crumble into nothing. But I remember the recording well. There seems a longing for the ordinary in my brother’s voice, but I could just be projecting.

Certainly there is a wish for home.

Most of us may be longing for the ordinary these days, in a chronic kind of way. We aren’t targets in a world war or being shot at in jungles or giving birth as fugitives in a supposedly free territory, but unraveling of norms and civility have left us with our kinds of hundred-yard stares. But to reach ordinary, to return home, we just have to wait, and to work, a little while longer.

How much longer until the ordinary returns?

Nobody knows.

But we can remember what ordinary democracy looks and feels like. It is in the average things, the Thanksgiving dinners and the homecomings and sometimes the funerals of those we love. It is holding our family and our friends close and tamping down our fear and allowing our judgment to be unclouded by hate or misinformation.

It is doing the right thing through your fear.

So consider this a letter to the present and the future. Take comfort where you can. Know that others have gone through worse. Be prepared that things might get darker before they get better. Remember to hold close those people that matter most to you — and be prepared to fight for the right of others to do so as well.

Max McCoy is an award-winning author and journalist. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.