So it Goes....Vonnegut’s Life Skating on the Edge

Kurt Vannegut and some of his work.

“I want to stay as close to the edge as I can without going over.  Out on the edge you see all kind of things you can’t see from the center.” —Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut was born on Armistice Day, November 11, 1922 in Indianapolis, Indiana. He would go on to become a veteran of another war and the experience shaped him as a human being and one of the great iconoclasts of his time.

His death on April 11, 2007 at the age of 84 was, as he predicted, not an emphatic period at the end of a long life, but a mere semi-colon (he despised semi-colons.)  He died of a brain injury sustained after slipping and falling in his Manhattan apartment several days earlier.  It was the kind of comic, anti-heroic departure he could have written himself.

And Vonnegut would have noted the connection to the announcement in Washington the same day that all American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan were having their tours in the war zones extended by another 120 days.  He despised the war and the men who started it.  Leaving behind such brutal stupidity would have been a pleasure for him.

But I myself feel that our Country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers.  Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened instead is that it was taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’état imaginable.  (From A Man Without a Country.)

Unitarians Universalists, in our insecurity, are always making lists of “greats.”  Having dominated 19th Century American literature, there is often a kind of desperately wide net thrown to haul in contemporary writers so as to keep up our cultural bona fides.  Vonnegut shows up on these lists. 

He was, after all, very publicly avowed Humanist, the successor to another science fiction writer, Isaac Asimov, as honorary chair of the American Humanist Association. A Man Without a Country, his last book, was something of a Humanist scream in a world corrupted by fake Christianity.  It was largely assembled from his essays in the Chicago based socialist magazine In These Times.  We all know that Humanism has also found a home in Unitarian Universalism.

Kurt Vonnegut, Sr. and his family, wife Edith, eldest son Bernard, and daughter Alice.  Kurt, Jr. would arrive in 1922 shortly after this picture was taken.  The family came from a long line of German Free thinkers and the family attended the Indianapolis Unitarian Church for which architect Kurt Sr. designed a building.

Vonnegut was proud to claim descent from generations of German-American free thinkers, just the sort of folks who found a congenial home with the radical brand of Unitarianism espoused by Jenkin Lloyd Jones and the old Western Unitarian Conference  at the turn of the 20th  Century.  Vonnegut’s parents were married by a Unitarian minister and the family belonged to the congregation in Indianapolis.  Architect Kurt, Sr. even designed a building for the congregation.  Although not much of church goer later in life, he liked to tell of visiting a Unitarian congregation and hearing the minister joke about the bells peeling “No Hell! No Hell!” (surely a Universalist sentiment.)  He sometimes referred to himself as a Unitarian and was glad to be called to give the prestigious Ware Lecture at the 1986 UUA General Assembly.  He was also asked to speak on the occasion of William Ellery Channing’s 200th birthday at First Parish in Cambridge, Massachusetts. 

But Vonnegut was hard to pin down—and idealist and a cynic, a humorist who’s satire was tinged with the deepest melancholy of man who had been brought up to believe in human progress “onward and upward forever” only to witness the gravest savageries of the 20th Century.  He genuinely believed in the pieties of civics lessons learned at James Whitcomb Riley School in Indianapolis.  Yet he saw his father, a sensitive and creative architect, ruined by the Depression, and his mother sink into mental illness and suicide. 

Kurt Vonnegut as a young soldier.  He dropped out of Cornell to join the Army.

Then it was off to war as an infantry scout for Patton’s 3rd Army.  In the confusion of the Battle of the Bulge Vonnegut was separated from his unit and wandered for several days behind German lines before being captured.  As a prisoner of war, in the defining moment of his life, he survived the Allied firebombing of the historic city of Dresden and was put to work collecting and disposing of the incinerated corpses of the old city.  This was the central event of one of his most famous novels, Slaughter House-Five, named for the actual facility in which he and his fellow prisoners rode out the fire storm.  The incident also figures in at least 5 other novels.

In post-war America he participated in the rush to corporate security when he took a public relations job with General Electric in Troy, New York.  The job didn’t last long, but the bitter experience of corporate corruption, power, and arrogance lingered.  Troy became the Ilium of several Vonnegut novels beginning with his first novel Player Piano, a savage corporate dystopia.  The book was a publishing failure in 1952, but slowly gained a cult following as paperback editions followed.

Many of his novels involved organized religion on one hand and a drive for spiritual honesty on the other.  In Sirens of Titan gave us The Church of God the Utterly Indifferent.  In Cat’s Cradle it was the transparently fraudulent, but serenely comforting—and perhaps actually saving—Bokononism. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater even distills what might be called a theology of atonement, forgiveness and kindness.  In it Eliot Rosewater says:

 Hello, babies, welcome to Earth.  It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter.  It’s round and wet and crowded.  At the outside, babies, you’ve go about a hundred years here.  There only one rule that I know of, babies—‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’

Vonnegut thought so much of that last passage he repeated it in his swan song A Man Without a Country.  

About a year before his death Vonnegut and his second wife Jill Krementz in 2006, about a year before his death.

He had his heroes.  His fright-wig hair and droopy mustache were surely homage to Mark Twain (for whom he named a son) and Albert Einstein.  He admired Abraham Lincoln of whose speech attacking the Mexican War he wrote “Holy shit! And I thought I was a writer!” He paired Jesus and Socialist—and fellow Terre Haute native—Eugene V. Debs.  He liked to quote Debs, “As long as there is a lower class, I am in it.  As long as there is a criminal element, I am of it.  As long as there is a soul in prison, I am not free,” and follow up with the Beatitudes.  

Vonnegut was a fearless opponent of war and injustice—any war and all injustice.  He despised hypocrisy.  He despaired for humanity.  People like that are hard to come by.

Other Fires Could not be Pinned on a Cow

A logo for a centennial commemoration of the Peshtigo Fire.

You may have noticed that this is National Fire Protection Week.  The annual event is marked by news stories extolling the virtues of smoke alarms and family fire evacuation drills.  Your local fire station may host school field trips or an open house—maybe they will let you climb on an engine or even slide down a pole.  Ask and you will be told that this week was selected because the Great Chicago Fire broke out on October 8, 1871.

That fire was certainly memorable.  After breaking out in an immigrant south side neighborhood, winds whipped flames north and west across the sprawling city.  It burned for two days consuming 4 square miles, including the downtown business district, killing an estimated 200-300 and leaving 90,000 people homeless.  The fire originated in the O’Leary family barn (the house was spared being up wind) but neither the lady of the house or her cow had anything to do with it.  Apparently neighborhood layabouts set it off while shooting craps.  

A popular contemporary lithograph print showed an imaginary aerial view of the Great Chicago Fire after it jumped the Chicago River burning the North side of the the city.

Word of the fire spread rapidly across the country and within a week national publications were carrying firsthand accounts and illustrations of the carnage.  The city famously rose from the ashes, replacing its largely ramshackle wooden buildings with modern—and fire resistant—brick and stone.  In less than a decade the city had not only fully recovered, it had doubled again in size.

But the fire in Chicago was not the only conflagration that day.   

After an extended long drought that covered the entire upper Midwest, a fast moving cold front drove intense winds before it.  Fires swept Holland and Manistee, Michigan and swaths of surrounding areas on the east shore of Lake Michigan.  More than 200 died when another fire consumed Port Huron, Michigan on the southern shores of Lake Huron.

A family seeks refuge from the Peshtigo fire in cleared farm field.

As devastating as those fires were, they all paled compared to the great fire in Wisconsin’s North Woods centered on the lumber town of Peshtigo.  Despite tinder dry conditions, careless neglect sparked several fires in the area that had burned more or less unchecked for several days before the fire.  These fires were attributed to cinders from railroad locomotive smoke stacks, small heating and cooking fires left unattended by hunters, farmers burning to clear brush of the tree tops stripped from logging operations.  Local experience was that these fires would burn themselves out or be extinguished by the early snows expected in the region by mid-October.  The night before the big fire survivors reported seeing several small blazes on surrounding hills.

By the evening of the October 8 high winds were merging the fires, which began to move on broad fronts burning, among other things, the telegraph lines that Peshtigo and another dozen small towns could have used to signal for help.  By the time a wall of flame erupted over a ridge near town, the fire was roaring with unprecedented fury, moving at high speed directly on the town.  Residents had little time to gather possessions and attempt to flee before the town itself was engulfed.  By then the fire was traveling from tree-top to tree top creating its own cyclonic winds, including at least one “tornado of fire” witnessed by several survivors.  The firestorm fed itself creating internal winds of up to 80 miles an hour ripping the roofs of houses, blowing over barns, uprooting trees, and tossing a 1,000 lb. wagon like tumbleweed.

High winds carried burning embers from the Pesphtigo file all the way across Green Bay.

Before it was over the fire burned over 1.2 million acres.  Winds carried embers to both sides of the Peshtigo River and across Green Bay where it burned the Door Peninsula from Dykesville almost to Sturgeon Bay to the north.  Sixteen towns were totally destroyed.  In Peshtigo alone, 800 lives were lost.  The total death toll will never be known exactly because town records across the region were destroyed and whole families wiped out.   In addition hundreds of lumber workers, isolated small farmers, hunters, and trappers were in the woods with no way to determine their fate.  Best estimates of the death toll range from 1,200 to over 2,000.  

Word of the Peshtigo fire and the other disasters in the north was overwhelmed by news from Chicago.  To this day the largest loss of life by fire in American history remains little known outside of Wisconsin and among fire historians.  

During World War II, however, the Army Air Force was aware of the historic firestorm.  It commissioned American and British scientists to study it to find ways of duplicating the firestorm through incendiary bombing.  The destruction of Dresden, Germany by fire storm, which took more lives than either of the atomic bombs used against Japan, was partly the result of that research.

Today a museum in Peshtigo commemorates the fire.  It has very few relics of the town—almost everything burned up except for one house freshly built of green lumber.  Among the few artifacts of the fire are the Tabernacle from the Catholic Church which was saved by survivor Father Peter Pernin by submersing it in the river, a melted can of peas, some fused ceramics, a charred piece of lumber from the surviving house, and artifacts recently dug up, including a Bible discovered opened to Psalms.

Despite the fact that conditions across the region were perfect for wide spread fire, that many eyewitness accounts of numerous fires burning for days around the town, and that the origin of the Chicago fire can be traced to the O’Leary barn, speculation that the fires had some common origin has gone on for years.  As early as 1883 there was speculation that the fires across the region might have been caused by impact of debris from the Comet Biela, which was observed to break up in its 1854 appearance.  The intersection of the projected route of the comet’s return in November 1872 was marked by an intense meteor shower.  

The 1985 book Mrs. O’Leary’s Comet: Cosmic Causes of the Great Chicago Fire by Mel Waskin revived that theory.  In 2007 Robert M. Wood published a scholarly article in the Journal of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics which calculated that gravitational pull of Jupiter when debris of the comet crossed its path may have accelerated the arrival of that debris by as much as a year.  Observations of “fire balls” falling from the sky in both the Peshtigo and Chicago fires might have actually been burning gasses from the dead comet.   

A firestorm in Montana this spring replicated the conditions that burned the Upper Midwest in 1871.

Other experts remain skeptical of this theory.  Many dismiss it as the kind of pseudo science peddled on the History Channel.  The skeptics point out that the extreme and prolonged drought and gale force winds over a wide area is a sufficient explanation. Their argument has been fortified by the scores of independently started but near simultaneous fires that swept the Western United States and Canada earlier this year in very similar conditions.

One thing we know for sure.  Mrs. O’Leary’s innocent cow had a better press agent than the victims of the Peshtigo inferno.