Welfare? How About a Log Cabin?

I am fond of recalling this anecdote from the life of Horatio Storer, a man who would graduate from Harvard and become the father of American gynecology and one of the most influential doctors in the nation. His family lived in the Boston area, but they sent him to a school for boys, run by Quakers, on the shores of Cape Cod. We have his letters back to his parents at home — they are a small treasure of Americana, and they bear witness to what boys once did, if given liberty and encouragement for their natural boldness and ingenuity. They also bear witness to much that is out of order in America now.

It was July 4, 1840. Storer was ten years old. Because it was a holiday, all the boys expected a grand time, but when morning broke it was raining hard, so they trooped on down to the schoolroom for their lessons.  Then the rain stopped and the day was bright and clear, so the schoolmaster told them that since they hadn’t prepared any lessons that day, they might go enjoy themselves. And that they did. “Who’s for building a log cabin?” suggested one of the boys, and they all thought it was a grand idea, so they asked the schoolmaster if they could, and he gave them permission.  That meant chopping the wood and hewing the logs to fit; it meant that they needed a plan, a vision of the finished cabin, and that they knew how to use the tools, such as axes, adzes, and saws. When Horatio wrote home on July 16, he said, with a boy’s matter-of-factness, “It is now about done. The top is clapboarded over. It has 2 United States flags with a portrait of General Harrison and a picture of his log cabin on them.” That would be W. H. Harrison, the hero of Tippecanoe, who in a few months would be elected President of the United States.

That Monday, the boys had another free day, which they spent by trooping on over to Barnstable, several miles off.  Here is Horatio’s description: “At the village several accidents happened a boy broke his leg but I believe there was none beside that of a very serious nature.  On Monday we dressed in our best and got into 2 stages and a carry all to go on our intended visit to Barnstable. We stopped at Eldridge’s hotel and then went to the bowling alley and staid some time. A good many of the boys then went about some one way and some another. I spent 3 quarters of a dollar while there. At noon we were called together to partake of a din[n]er. There were 2 large flags which the man said were hoisted to give notice of our presence. A few days ago I saw a paper containing an account of us while there. I went all over the court house then I went up to the cupola where I had a fine view of all around me.” They returned home at 6 PM, the boy says, cheering.

The sheer neighborliness is astonishing. So is the liberty that accompanies it. A group of happy and noisy lads comes to your village all of a sudden, and you raise the flag to greet them. They are welcome at the hotel. They go to the bowling green. No adult is there to oversee what they do. They spend some money, which is fine for the villagers, and it appears that Horatio gets to tour the county courthouse and even to walk up to the cupola to look at the view from up there. No one appears to have been worried that he would pitch himself from it to his death.

There is, I think, a common bond between the boys who built their log cabin and the craftsmen who built the courthouse and its cupola. Obviously, the boys knew how to do things, and certainly they were not all of them ten years old. Some were younger, some were older. Knowledge passed along from man to boy, and from the boys to each other, naturally as it were, without special training, though you might get that special training by apprenticeship, if you chose. The building Horatio toured still stands, a handsome structure in the American neoclassical or “federal” style. It is a rather gloomy thing to turn from that courthouse to those that have been built in Barnstable since. The old courthouse is built mostly of granite, with both dressed and undressed blocks, and fluted columns; the plasterwork and the woodwork in the interior are exceptional, yet tastefully austere, as are the vaulted hallways. Then you look at the modern district courthouse and the probate courthouse, the former a squat and flat building of brick and cement, the latter a tall and hulking building of brick and glass unrelieved by a single hint of whimsy or a single gesture toward any meaning beyond its dreary function, and you wonder how a whole nation could seem to have lost the delight in craftsmanship altogether.

But we can, I believe, go farther. It is not only difficult, now, to find anybody who can fashion plaster moldings in the old styles, with the knowledge in his hands. It is difficult to find workers to build up the brick eyesores. Why is it so? The foundation is missing. The log cabin, if you will, is that foundation.  If I may use the specific to stand for the general case, there are no boys building log cabins.

Why not? We can point to several apparently unrelated causes that unite in their stifling and smothering effects. The boys are not outdoors (no one is outdoors). They are not working with their hands. Safety smothers: they are not allowed the liberty of using axes, adzes, saws, and all other tools, whether or not they are powered by electricity or gasoline. They are not in one another’s company to experience that synergy that is at the heart of all crazy male enterprises. They often do not have fathers.  They usually do not have older brothers or older male cousins nearby. Perhaps they have no such at all. Their schools are like black mold, spreading everywhere, taking up more and more hours of the day with less and less to show for it in learning and accomplishment, and shortening that last blessed outpost of liberty, the summer, by parceling out vacation time by little and little through the rest of the year.  And then there are the screens: and make no doubt about it, dear readers. Those screens are like the walls of prison cells that shut your child away from reality and life. Imagination is built up from encounters with real things, with grass, briars, trees, sand, washed-up sharks on the beach, stone, iron, wood, tools, other people with their own eyes and their minds, their voices and their hands.  Then it is built up into great towers of thought and feeling by encounters with the thoughts and feelings and the artistic mastery of other people far and near in place and time, through the most sophisticated software ever invented, and perhaps that can ever be invented: the book.

What if we took a small portion of welfare payments with their perverse disincentive against marriage, and diverted it to schools for boys who might grow up to build things again, the “log cabins” of our time?  I am not here speaking about the education of girls, or of boys and girls together, which seem to me to be somewhat separate issues. Certainly no one can defend our current miserable record in raising boys and channeling their natural energies.  Anything at all would be better than what we have now.  For many boys, doing nothing would be better: they would at least have their young lives handed back to them. In any case, what has been done can be done again, with vision and will.

So then, “Who’s for building a log cabin?”

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