Richard Barnes

“Are They Natural?” — Charles Lindbergh in Venezuela

August 6, 2020August 6, 2020 Richard Barnes

On May 21, 1927, not far from Paris, France, the first modern traffic jam developed.

Colonel Charles Lindbergh, having flown for 33 hours and 30 minutes, and not having slept for 55 hours, touched down and was instantly swarmed by tens of thousands (some estimates range up to a million) of men, women, and children, all seeking to see, touch, embrace, and take mementos from the man and his plane. Incredibly, only 10 people were hospitalized. Parisians feted Mr. Lindbergh like no one else before. By the end of the week, millions (no debate on this estimate) had seen or greeted him as he was driven from ceremonies, to banquets, to historical sites, such as the Champs-Élysées. Throughout, the twenty-five-year-old pilot behaved with modest aplomb and his speeches were gems of diplomacy.

The adulation and joy followed Mr. Lindbergh to Brussels and London, where the behavior and lionization exhibited by the phlegmatic British could not be distinguished from that of the exuberant French.

By mid-June, Charles Lindbergh was back in his own country, where New York City feted him with a ticker tape parade in which several millions joined in the celebration.

President Coolidge, whose July 4th, 1926 speech on the 150th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence (see here) evinced a disquietude with the spiritual reality of the country, and who urged a return to eternal verities, apparently saw in the young pilot something of a personification of what he had in mind. Below is the transcript of President Coolidge’s welcome and Charles Lindbergh’s response before a large crowd in Washington, D.C.:

Calvin Coolidge: On behalf of his own people, who have a deep affection for him, and have been thrilled by his splendid achievements, and as President of the United States, I bestow the distinguished Flying Cross, as a symbol of appreciation for what he is and what he has done, upon Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh.

[Applause]

Intelligent, industrious, energetic, dependable, purposeful, alert, quick of reaction, serious, deliberate, stable, efficient, kind, modest, congenial, a man of good moral habits and regular in his business transactions.

[Applause]

Charles Lindbergh: When I landed at le Bourget, a few weeks ago, I landed with the expectancy, and the hope, of being able to see Europe. [Laughter and applause]. It was the first time I had ever been abroad [Laughter], and I wasn’t in any hurry to get back [Laughter and applause]. And I was informed, that while it wasn’t an order to come back home [laughter], that there’d be a battleship waiting for me next week. [Laughter and applause].

President Coolidge requested Lindbergh, who the world saw as an embodiment of America, to fly to South America as a goodwill ambassador for the United States. Lindbergh did so, taking off on December 1, 1927, on the famed Spirit of St. Louis, the same plane he flew across the Atlantic Ocean. His itinerary took him to Mexico City, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, Tegucigalpa, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panamá, Cartagena, Bogota, and Maracay (Venezuela), where he touched ground on January 29, 1928.

Although Caracas was the capital of Venezuela, the president, General Juan Vicente Gómez (see here and here) had made his home in Maracay, about 75 miles west. And that is where Lindbergh landed and where he was met by Gómez. But, first, he had flown over the capital city where enormous crowds had gathered in plazas, streets, and balconies, cheering loudly and waving frantically. In this, Venezuelans behaved like Parisians, Londoners, and New Yorkers.

Along with the crowds from Maracay and multitudes from Valencia, Puerto Cabello, and Caracas, innumerable automobiles invaded the roads converging towards the airport, creating Venezuela’s first massive traffic jam, immovable since the early afternoon. Many of the cars’ hoods displayed the national colors of Venezuela and the United States. By the time the plane landed, the airport was encircled by vast and loud multitudes, who gave the Águila Solitaria (Lone Eagle) an apotheotic reception.

The president himself walked to the hangars urging the crowds to give distance to the plane. Colonel Lindbergh had stayed a few minutes in the hangar, checking his plane’s fuselage and engine. The president’s entourage, seeking favor (a common phenomenon in all countries), expressed “concern” to the chief of staff that the American was being rude. But the chief brushed them aside, reminding them that President Gómez respected a man who “first took care of his horse”. This was true of Gómez. He was known to enjoy and to converse and seek good counsel on ranching and cattle breeding.

Two of Gómez’s daughters came forward and handed a magnificent bouquet of tropical flowers to the the famous aviator. “Are they natural?”, he asked. The president replied, “Yes, they are, but they are recognized and come from good families.”

This anecdote quickly made the rounds throughout the country, as the president had 74 children from numerous concubines. Lindbergh was referring to the flowers; however, depending on context, natural also refers to the status of children, in which case the word alludes to offspring of an unmarried couple. These become “legitimate” once the couple marries. It was in this sense that Gómez had understood the question, and he wanted to make clear that he “recognized” his daughters, having given them his name. But Gómez genuinely liked Lindbergh and no offense was taken, as none was intended.

The next day had been declared a national holiday, with Lindbergh being feted and honored in Maracay and Caracas, where he laid flowers adorned with Venezuelan and US flags at Simon Bolivar’s grave. Upon exiting the National Pantheon, he was instantly greeted with deafening ovations by the thousands who had gathered to see the American hero. The festivities culminated in a sumptuous banquet and dance in Caracas. Lindbergh did not dance, but, as in Paris and London, he was a gracious guest.

On January 31, 1928, the third day after having arrived, he took flight again and, after visits to St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, Port-au-Prince, Havana, he flew back to St. Louis.

Upon Lindbergh’s departure, Presidents Coolidge and Gómez exchanged warm greetings by diplomatic cable and Lindbergh himself wrote the following farewell:

I wish to give my thanks to President Gómez, to the officials of the army, to the functionaries of the government, and to the people of Venezuela, for the heartfelt reception they have so graciously given me during my visit and I also wish to express my gratitude to the press for their cooperation.

I am very impressed with the efficient manner in which the Corps of Venezuelan Aviation prepared the landing field and for the warm manners and gracious behavior of the people of Venezuela towards me.

Colonel Lindbergh returned to Venezuela in September of 1929, inaugurating the first experimental flight of Pan American Airways on a Sikorsky S-38.

The Spirit of St. Louis was donated by Charles Lindbergh and is displayed in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The aluminum exterior of the plane reflects the national ensigns of all the countries visited by the young man. Among those ensigns is the flag of Venezuela.

With the President of Venezuela, General Juan Vicente Gómez, January 29, 1928

Charles A. Lindbergh posing with the *Spirit of St. Louis*

Locusts

July 30, 2020July 30, 2020 Richard Barnes

I recently read a fascinating book, Vida de Hacienda en Venezuela (Hacienda Life in Venezuela), by José Rafael Lovera. The author performed meticulous research into the lives, customs, and mores of Venezuelans from the early days of her colonial era to the mid 20th century, when haciendas had largely disappeared (see the series on ranchitos, here, here, here, here, here, and here.). I found it to be an absorbing study.

A section of the book focuses on the wars, earthquakes, plagues, heartbreaks, and deaths that ravaged Venezuela. They were events which, added to the hard work, would seem to have made life unbearable, if not impossible.

As an example, this post addresses one of the many disasters that the haciendas, their owners, laborers, and slaves confronted for about a decade in the latter half of the 19th century. Locusts may be something we read about in the Bible, but it is a plague most of us know little about experientially.

The first extract is from a letter written by the English Baroness, Lady Annie Brassey, who made a brief visit to the port of La Guaira and Caracas in 1883 and who, on her way from the port to the capital, encountered a locust invasion. Let us see how she described this:

At each step, the landscape changed, till we finally came to an open space, sown with sugar cane, bananas, sweet potatoes, and other crops. Here we discovered the source of some extraordinary noises which, mixed with the far more harmonious birdsong, we had been hearing during our ascent. A vast cloud of locusts was fluttering, and, as is also done by the peoples of Chile and Peru — actually in all of South America where these plagues ravage the land — the inhabitants were beating drums, tin trays, pots, pans, and any other like objects they might have at hand, besides screaming and calling out and blowing horns and firing weapons, to drive away the swarms of these cruel devastators, whose brightly transparent wings trembled agitatedly in the sunlight reflected thereon, like silver snow caps.

As beautiful as it might be to see them so, the damage that these insects cause is terrible to behold. At that moment the traces of their visit were very obvious in the great banana leaves, reduced to their naked veins; the sugar canes and other crops slashed to the ground, and all trees stripped of their leaves, sprouts, and small branches.

Even the robust plantain … with her glossy yellow stalk and her scarlet flowers — like to an ancient galleon — were reduced to naked trunks and branches.

Elizabeth Gross, the wife of a German businessman, was in Venezuela in 1883 and 1896, and in a letter to her friend, told of her travel by mule back to the interior regions:

It was almost impenetrable, since the trees were very near to one another, covered with vines, parasitic plants, and others which hung picturesquely from them. The vegetation beneath the trees consisted of palms and other magnificent tropical plants, within and between which slid snakes, lizards, and perhaps also, towards the deeper interior, monkeys and tigers.

We observed as an interesting fact how the lower plants were covered with small, brown creatures, like grasshoppers. It was a depressing discovery, because as these grow and lift flight, they can travel as far as Maracaibo where, about seven years ago, they caused a total devastation.

[Mrs. Gross, now back in Maracaibo, writes her friend a few months later]….

… the locusts that we had seen in … the jungle are already here. A while ago I wanted to go shopping in the afternoon, with Mrs. Lüdert and her husband told us to not delay because it looked very dark over the lake [Lake Maracaibo], as if rain was threatening, even though we are not in the rainy season.

We had visited two stores when, suddenly, it became night and nothing could be seen. Clouds of locusts obscured the daylight. They came with such density that we had to defend ourselves with our umbrellas in order to advance. It was somewhat disgusting how these frightful critters slapped against our faces. They demolished absolutely everything.

After a half hour, the beautiful coconut trees had become brooms. The locusts had devoured all the greenery in the gardens. Despite our having closed all shutters and windows, two men had to dedicate three hours to kill the locusts which had slipped into our house. They got into everything: in closets, in the seat backs, and in the smallest corners. Five of them penetrated through my mosquito screen and were on my bed in the morning. They had also begun to eat the socks that were on the chair in front of my bed, as also the hairdresser cushion. They eat everything that has any starch whatsoever. They got into my dresses.

It was something truly disgusting. When it becomes dark, they fall where they are, thereby dirtying our roof. Tens of thousands of them were swimming on the lake….

The repulsive spectacle described by Mrs. Gross during her stay in Maracaibo was seen across other cities in Venezuela. We’ll conclude by citing a French traveler in Caracas in 1886. He writes of resting near a window of Hotel St. Amand where he was residing:

Suddenly, an infernal noise compels us to rush outside. Gunshots sound from all sides. In this country of endless revolutions, were we about to witness yet another? No, we see a cloud of locusts. It comes bleakly, threateningly, darkening the daylight, and stinking the air.

Everyone immediately arms himself. Some with wire plates, others with iron pots or cauldrons, or whatever might be at hand, metal or not, to make the most noise as possible. They also fire weapons into the air, they light fires everywhere and all this is done to somehow prevent the cloud from falling over Caracas.

For more than two hours this cloud has overflown the city which is submerged in a grey darkness. The amount of locusts was such that, the cloud having passed, there were three centimeters of excrements on the streets. In certain points outside the city, where the tail of cloud fell, we have walked over a thickness of two to three centimeters of dead locusts.

In a twinkling of an eye, the yellow ground has turned black. We could hear a horrible crunching sound of insects as they moved their jaws. All vegetation had disappeared in a few minutes. Not even a leaf remained on the trees. The branches bent down under the weight of the mass of insects. It was a lamentable spectacle, a ravaging even worse than our hail.

Such eloquent descriptions require no further commentary. They transmit the horror that the inhabitants of major cities fought against and the ravages that the numerous conucos, small farms, and haciendas endured. The losses were immense.

The United States has also had its share of this plague in the mid 19th century, perhaps the most (in)famous being the Rocky Mountain Locust Invasion of 1874 of which Laura Ingalls Wilder would write in terms similar to those used by the travelers cited above, including descriptions of the critters invading the houses and the horrible sound of “millions of jaws biting and chewing….”

And the desperate defense measures taken by the Americans mirrored those of the Venezuelans, including fires, shotgun blasts, and beating of metal plates or anything that would make noise.

As Job tells us, “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.” So, Venezuelans and Americans, like folks around the world have done throughout history, arose, shook the pests and dust off, and carried on.

Plaza Baralt, Maracaibo, Venezuela, mid-19th century

Plaza Mayor in Caracas, mid-19th century

Aftermath of the Jerusalem Locust Plague of 1915

The Rocky Mountain 1874-1875 Locust Invasion

Short video for interested readers

Concierto en la Llanura

July 25, 2020July 25, 2020 Richard Barnes

A dear family friend celebrated her 90th birthday recently in Caracas. She and my mother were born a few months’ apart in the same year: 1930.

I replied to our friend, “Ah, Mrs. A.! How good are the memories that this brings to mind! I will see my mother next week, God willing, and will share with her. Thank you.”

I did share with my mother and sister this week and we had a conversation marked by genuine thankfulness for friends who remained friends unto the third and fourth generations. Matthew Henry notes, “It is a duty we owe our parents, when they are gone, to love their friends and consult with them. Solomon’s son undid himself by forsaking the counsel of his father’s friends.”

How fortunate we have been to have had our father’s and mother’s friends as our friends also! Those of you who have been so blessed fully understand the sentiment. Many are now gone, but the aroma of their company and the bracing nature of their hearty counsel remains. Yesterday, I looked up and said to my mother, “When I am here, I often think of Mrs. E. I miss her.”

My mother understood.

As for the piece below, the composer was Juan Vicente Torrealba, also a well-regarded harpist, who died in May, 2019, at the age of 102. His compositions reflected Venezuela’s plains (llanos) and the folks who scratched out a living therefrom, mostly from cattle. His songs also called forth the rivers, fauna, and flora of those vast regions of the country.

The piece linked below is Concierto en la Llanura and is a good representation of his compositions, especially the use of the harp.

Americans in the mining camps appreciated this genre of music. I think they still would.

July 14, 1789: Further Comments

July 18, 2020July 18, 2020 Richard Barnes

The fall of the Bastille and its attendant, macabre events (see here) were a sinister foreshadowing of what was to come to Paris and to all of France, not to mention much of the world in the ensuing centuries, including the bloodletting in Spanish America.

The King, Louis XVI, had been awakened long before dawn in Versailles to receive the news of the Bastille. The Assembly had been meeting in Versailles. In the morning, as the deputies listened to themselves give speeches, the King was announced, entered, and spoke, “You have been afraid, well it is I who have confidence … in you.”

He then announced further that the troops would be removed not only from Paris, but from Versailles as well. As if to say, “You see? No need to fear me at all.” The announcement was greeted with thunderous applause and cheers.

Two days later, the king journeyed to Paris to further demonstrate his goodwill. But Maximilian Robespierre, one of history’s most blood-soaked names, in a surviving letter to a friend, wrote, “The present Revolution has produced in a few days greater events than the whole previous history of mankind…”

“A patriotic army of 300,000 men, composed of every class of citizen, accompanied by Gardes Françaises, Suisses, and other soldiers, has captured the Bastille and punished its Governor and the Prévost des Marchands for their treachery. The fear that this army might march to Versailles has decided the Revolution.”

That’s how the more astute revolutionaries saw, interpreted, and described the king’s supine actions.

The crowds had been admonished, upon pain of death, to not dare shout out, “Vive le Roi“. Unsurprisingly, they humbly obeyed.

After touring the city, surrounded by deputies and armed crowds, he returned to Paris.

The following is from Otto Scott’s Robespierre. I quote it as a microcosm of what was to follow throughout the country and, through the next two centuries, many corners of the entire globe, but especially Eurasia and China:

“Five days later … on July 22, 1789, ex-Minister Foullon [whom the newspapers had accused of saying the ‘people could eat hay’; this was never proved or sourced] was … surrounded … a bundle of straw [tied] to his back and … a necklace of nettles and thistles around his head. He was dragged to City Hall….”

“The new Mayor Bailly orated about the law. Lafayette, summoned to the scene, argued that if Foullon was taken in safety to prison instead of being summarily lynched, he could be brought to disclose his ‘confederates’. After several hours of this the fiery crowd seemed placated. But when the old man — he was seventy-four — and his guard emerged from City Hall, a man suddenly jumped forward, caught Foullon by the neck, and threw him into the crowd. A cluster closed around [him] immediately. Beating him energetically … [dragged him] across the Place de Greve to the lamp iron at the corner of the rue de la Vannerie. A noose was thrown over him; one man hoisted him up while others pulled on the lower end of the rope. After he was strangled to death his cadaver was lowered, his head cut off and stuck onto a pitchfork. The rest of the body was stripped, mutilated, and carved into pieces. A horrid parade through the streets started.”

A side note, Alexander Hamilton had expressed concerns about the nature of the French Revolution to his friend Lafayette, who paid no heed as he hastened back to France. Hamilton’s warning likely rang in his ears a few short years later, when he escaped just ahead of the mob.

Many men and women, including the king and queen, were executed after days, months, and years of imprecations and insults hurled at them, culminating with the same accusations painted on placards and posters as people trudged behind them, shortly before their lynchings.

Words are powerful. And effective. All revolutionaries understand that.

Clarence B. Carson wrote, “What particularly intrigued revolutionary socialists, Karl Marx among them, about the French Revolution was the drastic changes it made in the lives and ways of a people. It demonstrated, at least for them, in embryo form, the potentialities for changing man and men in society by revolution. The relentless thrust to equality especially caught the attention of socialists….

“In sum, society would be completely reconstructed.”

The French Revolution expressed those ideas loudly and made attempts at such. It moved to change the calendar with Year 1 being the first year after the Convention of 1792. But the most virulent attacks were on the church and its priests, nuns, adherents, and property. In Nantes the guillotine could not kill priests quickly enough so the representative-on-mission there, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, conjured up an even more effective way to rid the revolution of clergy, and entire families of men, women, and, children too. “Wolflings grow to be wolves,” he explained.

Boatloads of people were towed to the middle of the Loire and scuttled. Other boatloads were merely emptied into the river and, should any unfortunate attempt to grasp the side of the boat, his or her fingers or hands were slashed or cut off, ensuring drowning. Reports survive of many cases where Carrier ordered men and women stripped, tied together, and thrown into the river. “Republican Marriages” he called them. Modern historians tend to discount this, although they cannot deny the fact of thousands of cruel, inhumane deaths.

Carrier later became yet another fulfillment of Jacques Danton’s exclamation at his execution, “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children!”

But the main objective must be kept in sight at all times: the de-Christianization of France. In this hatred of Christianity, revolutionaries have been consistent throughout the centuries. And this hatred is very knowledgeable, it not only attacks the church and churches, it attacks the home. One of the first acts of Revolutionary France was to make it much easier to dissolve the marriage bonds. It also decriminalized abortion. This was re-criminalized in 1810 with the Napoleonic Code.

As noted before, all this was studied with great interest by Karl Marx. As for Vladimir Lenin, an absolutely pitiless man, he said that he had learned much from the French Revolution, but that the revolutionaries had made one major mistake which he would not make: they had ended the Terror. This he was determined to not do.

The king and the queen were executed by guillotine. Their young son, born in 1785, died in prison ten years later, in 1795, days before physicians were called to perform an autopsy which revealed countless scars reflecting indescribable torture. The people whom the king loved and trusted had repaid him with their own currency.

It pains me to say, yet again, that Venezuela, the land of my birth, had its own birthing pangs in the philosophies and anti-clerical fervors of the French Revolution, however much lip service her revolutionaries paid to the American Declaration of Independence.

Simón Bolivar said, “We need equality to recast, so to speak, into a single whole, the classes of men, political opinions, and public custom,” thereby neatly encapsulating The One while ignoring The Many. His executions of defenseless prisoners of war, his pitiless emptying of Caracas, and his Declaration of War to the Death follow logically from such sentiments.

May Venezuela see better days soon. Meanwhile, may those of us in the USA, learn to push back and not acquiesce so easily as did Louis XVI.

Whenever you hear lofty sounding words and ideals, be sure to check the fruit. That’s always a dead giveaway.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité, sounds marvelous. But the fruit is seen in the original’s last three words: ou la mort.

Joseph-Foullon shortly before strangling and beheading.

Depiction of executions by drownings in Nantes. Jean-Baptiste Carrier is in the center.

King Louis XVII, the dauphin in captivity. He died at 10, likely of torture, certainly of neglect. Some believe he was poisoned.

Simón Bolivar. His political philosophies were steeped in Rousseau and other French thinkers.

Maximillian Robespierre. An absolutely ruthless politician utterly convinced of his own virtue and superiority to other men while proclaiming equality for all. His political thinking was steeped in Rousseau. He too fulfilled Jacques Danton’s cry, “The Revolution, like Saturn, devours her own children!”

July 14, 1789

July 16, 2020July 16, 2020 Richard Barnes

I was on an audit in Mexico City on July 14, 1989. The radio station dedicated hours to the meaning of July 14, 1789, Bastille Day, two-hundred years before. The reason I know the program was hours long is that when, close to noon, I got back in the car to drive to another location, it was still going on.

The seemingly erudite, and fawning, discussions about liberté, égalité, fraternité brought back childhood memories from my Venezuelan history classes and my utter frustration at my inability to understand just what the multiple Venezuelan 19th century wars were all about. See here.

If my teachers had told me that the phrase originally ended with three additional words: ou La Mort, it might have helped my understanding. Those last words were eventually dropped. Clever move. “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” sound much friendlier than “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death.”

And death was certainly a prominent guest on July 14, 1789.

The King, who was determined to not offend the people, ordered his troops to withdraw from Paris. He was in Versailles, hosting and groveling before the National Assembly while assuring them of his utter acquiescence to their demands. As his troops withdrew, crowds converged at the Bastille carrying countless pikes and wearing tricolor pins that appeared seemingly from nowhere. But, of course, nothing appears from nowhere.

The Bastille had a hereditary governor, the Marquis de Launay, who, a few days earlier, had been visited by a delegation of Paris who told him the cannons in the building were an insult to the people. He promptly removed them and blocked the embrasures with wood. Then, on the 14th, “the people” began firing and demanding the drawbridge be lowered.

The Marquis appears to have finally realized that his appeasement had only emboldened the mob and, believing the Terms of Surrender the mob had sworn to, he lowered the draw bridge, as the crowd had been demanding.

A few minutes later, the Marquis de Launay’s head, had been severed and was atop a pike, dripping with blood, as it bobbed in the crowd. Several soldiers who had negotiated the Terms of Surrender with the mob, had their heads severed, but not before they had been disemboweled. The entrails carried amongst the crowd did not seem to elicit any horror or reproach from the bloodthirsty rabble. On the contrary, heads, hands, torsos, genitals, and more entrails were soon seen bobbing among the multitudes.

Seven prisoners were released. Seven. Who were astounded to see the head of their former warden, known to be a hesitant, mild sort, with a placard underneath: “De Launay, Governor of the Bastille, disloyal and treacherous enemy of the people.”

The king’s reaction, to the applause of the multitudes, was to send more troops away in order to not further provoke the people. We all know how his acquiescence ended for him, for his family, and for his country. A country that has never, to this day, recovered the heights and glories of its past.

The events of the storming of the Bastille were an ominous foreshadowing of what awaited France, including the French Revolution’s progeny, culminating with the Russian Revolution of 1917, a little over a century later.

This year, on July 14 (when this is being written), I checked a different Latin American land’s radio stations and, sure enough, inevitably, a paean to Bastille Day emerged. As noted in several posts on this blog (see here and here for two examples) Venezuela’s and much of Latin America’s intellectual heritage looks more to Paris than to Madrid. It has always been so in the modern era. And that helps explain the differing trajectories taken by North and South America.

As we observe and react to the current disturbances, let us ask ourselves whether these resemble 1776 or Bastille Day. They are not the same.

And whenever you hear or read liberté, égalité, fraternité, or similar sentiments, be sure to remember to add the remaining words from the original: ou la mort.