from "Down North"

Jesse Halsey on the Labrador "Esquimau" | c1932

I started to tell about the country and I wandered to here.

There are esquimau in Labrador. For two hundred years, the Moravian missionaries have lived among them; they are educated and Christian and support themselves from the fur and the fish, and from the fur the missions also derive their support. Strangely, the Moravians never had a full-fledged doctor on their staff. There are immigrant Indians in the interior, but most of the “Liveyeres” are descendents of English, Welsh, and Scotch fishermen who began to come there in the time of Queen Elizabeth and either stayed of choice or were wrecked on the shore. Many of their descendants show traces of Indian and Esquimau in their features and color. (Anyone who goes through a Labrador springtime with its glistering snow-reflected-sunshine will burn an Indian brick red—and some of us, I think have never quire washed it off or reabsorbed it.)

We brought a boy and girl to the States with us when we came home. They went to school on Long Island and came with us to Cincinnati. The girl studied to be a nurse and the last we heard was head nurse at Dartmouth College infirmary. The boy went back home after high school. Their name was Evans. “Heavens” some of their people said. Their father was our chief herder for the reindeer. Alice, the girl, had come to live with us in St. Anthony. One day, Mrs. Halsey had found her reading Browning—intelligently. It seems their great-grandfather had been wrecked in the Straits of Belle Isle sometime in the early nineteenth century. He was a Welchman [sic], own “home” (boat) and had had an education. He stayed on the shore, married and became, ultimately, the patriarch of a community made up largely of his numerous progeny. He had taught his children the things he knew, imported books, and this girl Alice had been more or less his pet in his old age, and he had given her a fine appreciation of English Literature.

This case is an exception, undoubtedly, but I always found in the night school that we conducted in our cottage that a fair number were quick to catch on and that most of the boys (especially the Esquimau halfbreeds) were born mechanics.

There was Wilson Jacques, for instance. Half Indian, I would guess. Will Hillis (a Cincinnati man) gave me the money to bring Wilson to Pratt Institute. It was my job to get him ready to enter. This was that first short summer that I spent on the shore; myself still a student. Well, after fifteen or sixteen hours of hard work plumbing, when Wilson would work with me and out work me, we started in to pole up math for entrance exams to Pratt. He had had common fractions, in one night he mastered decimals and in six weeks had cleaned up advanced arithmetic and advanced algebra and plane geometry and a little trigonometry (I forget which kind) and about that time my own knowledge was getting pretty thin; I was glad when September 20^th came. That winter he was doing Calculus and what-not at Pratt—but without my help. He had ability.

Again, take my friend, Joe Souley. He couldn’t read or write. But he was one of the wisest men I ever knew. He could quote Solomon and Ben Franklin with equal ease. He knew his Bible—and could stump me. He had sailed the seven seas and could describe Singapore or the Sachel Islands with accuracy (I suppose it was accurate because London and the few placed I knew about tallied with his description). I, a swelled-headed sophisticate with some graduate study, etc. learned a very salutary lesson—that wisdom and knowledge are quite different things, that information, and perspective and human interest and a host of other things, are not necessarily acquired in schools; and that illiteracy is not a synonym for ignorance. That was a salutary lesson for a young preacher, at least.

Don't Spit

Weaving Mats "Don't Spit": Young woman at the loom, Grenfell Mission, St. Anthony, [ca. 1906]

from Coastal Women - Arts and Crafts Gallery 

Interior view of the loom room, Industrial Department, Grenfell Mission, St. Anthony. The motto "Don’t spit" was used extensively by Grenfell staff as part of their tuberculosis prevention campaign and was incorporated into some crafts, including mats. The Rooms Provincial Archives, VA 118-51-2, International Grenfell Association photograph collection.

49 No. Main | 1891

The Old Halsey House
April 23, 1891

"Grandfather, with his two brothers, had been apprenticed to a mason in New York City, where they built many of the buildings in Greenwich Village and on Canal Street. Some of these are still standing; one on Grove Street has the identical trim and fireplace and mantle as that in our Southampton house which grandfather acquired when business reverses in 1832 drove him back to the country. He bought a farm, with the help of an unpopular brother-in-law, and rebuilt an old house Cape Cod style. I am told (or was told) that my mother used to say that if she ever built a house, even though it was no bigger than a pepper box, it would have two stories. The ceilings were (and are) low, the doorways more so, and upstairs in only half of a room can one stand upright. Dormer windows have corrected this to some extent but added little to the exterior appearance of the house. Forty years ago I raised up the old lean-to kitchen and superimposed another storey with a gambrel roof so that the house is now half Dutch and half English—like historical-geographic Long Island itself." --Jesse Halsey

In 1891, the residents of 49 N. would have been: Charles, son Harry, daughter Abigail, and son Jesse Halsey--as Charles's wife, Melvina, had died about five years earlier. His eldest daughter, Lizbeth Halsey Post, was already married. In addition, Melvina's sister, Augusta Terry Halsey, and her daughter, Edna, became a de facto part of the household in 1889 after Wilman Halsey (Charles's brother and 'Aunt Gussie's' husband) died, although they continued to live across the street in the Halsey/Ruland/Honnet home. In addition, Harry married Ida Pettet at some point during these years. My best guess on this photos is that the child on the fence post is Jesse (age 10), the two men leaning on the fence on either side of him are his father Charles and his brother Harry, the woman in the center is likely Aunt Augusta, and the two younger women in the back, Lizbeth and Abigail (though one or the other might also be Edna or Ida).

Photo courtesy collection of Con Crowley.

Sermon Notes: Little Things

Sure-Enough Pies

Several years after the war, our postman came in one morning saying, “Well, I see they’ve got you written up in the Saturday Evening Post.” He showed me the article—some American soldiers were telling a reporter how a Chaplain had made them pancakes. I have never heard one echo of the sermons I preached (around the world) during the war, but now and then I hear, to this day, about the grub we had here and there. It is most humiliating to one’s professional pride.

There was little at times to be had but black bread and soup and tea, this was the Russian’s regular diet. A few Americans came along one day to my place talking about “pancakes.” I set them chopping out a mill-race; we got some poor barley and ground it. I got a little reindeer milk and let it sour on the back of the stove, then using the bicarbonate of soda from my medicine kit, I got them to rise (a little). We had some poor treakel [sic] for sweetening and then I made a griddle (as I told you) from a locomotive boiler.The cakes stuck to the griddle—until I greased it with a Swedish turnip cut in two—then we had pancakes. Somehow that got into print.

Then there was pie.Thanksgiving and Christmas and some other holidays whenever there were any Americans that came together, someone would say “pie.” I experimented a little in the house (a palace) where we happened to be in Moscow and found that the product was passable. So several times I ventured. In Mourmansk [sic] and along that front it was difficult to get anything to make a crust OR filling. Lard was unobtainable, but I begged a little white flour from the cook on the flag-ship and having lived in Labrador, I knew the value of seal fat (Parenthesis—Labrador skippers have told me that they have sailed for Spain with seal oil and on arrival without changing cargoes have trans-shipped at the Custom House, for New York where they have arrived with a cargo of olive oil. It is likely a sailor’s yarn, but it gave me an idea.) So I made pie crust with seal oil, secured a mess of (wormy) dried apples from a Lapland village and made a batch of pies of flaky crustiness (they were all right—delicious in fact—if you held your nose while swallowing for seal oil has an odor sui generis).

My last venture with pies was at the Eagle hut in London a few weeks before the Armistice. When I landed in London in August of ’18, I had had no word from my family—no mail—since Christmas. I immediately looked around to find, if I could, someone from Cincinnati, and ran across Claude Shafer. He was giving cartoon lectures at the Eagle Hut. I went with him and found the boys all fed upon English Raspberry tarts (and other kinds) so Claude suggested I make a batch of sure-enough pies. There was plenty of good material available there and I made a big batch while Claude drew a cartoon of me, which he sent home to his paper (in those days, The Post). The English cooks caught on to the upper crust business and their tarts thereafter became sure-enough pies. --from Rev. Jesse Halsey's account of his service with the Y.M.C.A. during World War I

August 6, 1918: ORDER BY THE PEOPLE’S COMMISSAR MILITARY AND NAVAL AFFAIRS

To the member of the Board of the People’s Commissariat for Military Affairs Comrade Kedrov, to the Kazan Revolutionary War Council and to the Vologda Province Militia Commissariat, August 6, 1918

The circumstances under which Archangel was temporarily lost [78] show that certain representatives of the local Soviet power far from always display those qualities which are obligatory for every revolutionary occupying a post of responsibility: endurance, energy and courage.

It has again been confirmed that there are Soviet representatives who, at the first sign of danger, hasten to take to their heels, considering that their most important task is to save their own lives.
Creatures of this sort have nothing in common with the revolution. They are not fighters or Communists, but wretched Soviet careerists who have temporarily attached themselves to our great cause.

Any representative of the Soviet power who leaves his post at a moment of military danger without having done all he could to defend every inch of Soviet territory is a traitor. Treachery in wartime is punished with death.

I instruct you immediately to detain and arrest all those Soviet workers in Archangel who, according to evidence strictly verified by you, must be regarded as deserters, so that they may be brought to trial before the Supreme Revolutionary Tribunal.

Published in Izv.V.Ts.I.K., no.166, August 6, 1918

77. Archangel was occupied during the night of August 2-3, 1918. The following is a summary of preceding events on the Northern front. On July 4 a British cruiser landed a party on Solovetsky Island and put the Russian wireless station out of action. On July 11 the British occupied Soroki (30 versts to the south of Kem) and began preparing to occupy Archangel.

Nor were the White organizations dozing. With the help of the British counter-espionage center in Petrograd and also on their own initiative, White Guards of various political nuances had begun to assemble in Archangel already from May onward. The naval authorities entered into relations with the Allies, and a Volunteer partisan unit was formed from White officers. Colonel Potapov facilitated the freedom of action of this unit by his distribution of the forces of the Archangel garrison. Fleet Commander Veselago failed to take any measures to block the channel. On July 31 Onega was taken, on August 1 the island of Mudyug, and during the night of August 2-3 a White-Guard revolt broke out in Archangel, accompanied by a landing from the sea. With the direct assistance of the French ambassador, Noules, the American ambassador, Francis, and the Italian ambassador, Della Toretta, a Supreme Government of the Northern Region was formed, consisting of Chaikovsky (Popular-Socialist) [The Popular-Socialists were a right-wing breakaway from the SRs], Liathach (SR), Maslov (SR), Ivanov (SR) and Gukovsky (SR).

The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky
Volume 1, 1918
Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive by David Walters

from THE SOCIALIST FATHERLAND IN DANGER

Report to the extraordinary joint session of the 5th All-Russia Central Executive Committee, the Moscow Soviet of Workers’, Peasants’ and Red Army Men’s Deputies, the trade unions and the factory committees, July 29, 1918

Comrades capable of going into each unit and forming a close nucleus of five to ten members can be found only among the most conscious workers. And we have them both in Moscow and in Petrograd. Moscow has already furnished some two or three hundred agitators, commissars and organizers, a considerable number of whom have gone into Red Army units. But Moscow will, I am convinced, furnish twice as many as that. You, the organs of Soviet power, and you, the factory committees, look around you: everywhere, in the districts, in the trade unions, in the factory committees, you will find comrades who are now performing work of first-class importance but who are more urgently needed at the front, for, if we do not overcome the Czechoslovaks, that work they are doing, and all the forces of the factory committees, the trade unions and so on, will go for nothing. We must overcome the Czechoslovaks and White Guards, strangle the serpent on the Volga, so that all the rest of our work may possess meaning and historical significance. You are required to furnish some hundreds of agitators – first-class, militant Moscow workers who will go to the front, join the units and say: ‘We shall stay with this unit till the war is over: we shall go into it and carry on agitation both among the masses and with every individual, for the fate of the whole country and of the revolution is at stake, and, whether there be an offensive, a victory or a retreat, we shall be with the unit and shall temper its revolutionary spirit.’ You must and you will give us such people, comrades! I was talking yesterday on this very subject with the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, Comrade Zinoviev, and he told me that the Petrograd Soviet has already supplied a quarter of its membership, that is, about two hundred, sending them to the Czechoslovak front as agitators, instructors, organizers, commanders and fighters. In this lies the fundamental condition for the turn that we have to bring about. What the old armies provided through months of prolonged schooling, correction and drill, which mechanically forged a unit, we have to provide, as I have already said, spiritually and by ideological means, introducing into our army the best elements of the working class, and this will fully ensure our victory, despite our weakness where commanding personnel are concerned.

We have irreproachable, devoted commanders at the lowest level, but only at the lowest level, of the military hierarchy. Where higher commanding personnel are concerned, we have too few officers who are devoted to the Soviet power and who honestly carry out their obligations: worse still, as you know, some of them have actually gone over to the enemy’s camp. There have been several such cases lately. Makhno went over on the Ufa front, and Bogolovsky, a professor at the General Staff Academy, went over almost at once when he was appointed to the Yekaterinsburg front. He has disappeared, which obviously means that he has fled to the Czechoslovaks. In the North the former naval officer Veselago has sold himself to the British, and a former member of our White Sea commissariat has also gone over to the Anglo-French imperialists, and has been appointed by them to the command of armed forces. The officers seemingly do not take full account of the acuteness of the situation which is created for us not only by their past but also by their present. You all remember how harshly the soldiers and sailors of the old army dealt with their officers at the critical moments of the revolution.

Since power passed into the hands of the workers and peas- ants, we have opened the doors to experts and specialists in military matters, so that they may serve the working class as in the past they served the bourgeoisie and the Tsar, but a considerable section of the officers evidently think the situation is changing in their favor, and they are mounting adventuristic conspiracies and openly going over to the camp of our enemies.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch32.htm

The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky
Volume 1, 1918
How the Revolution Armed THE CIVIL WAR IN THE RSFSR IN 1918

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Transcribed and HTML markup for the Trotsky Internet Archive by David Walters