Wednesday, April 21, 2021
Milhouse Cousins
(first draft of play)
MILHOUS COUSINS
NARRATOR
JESSAMYN
RICHARD
NARRATOR:
It is now 1977, after Richard Nixon has resigned, and after a famous interview with David Frost. Both Richard and Jessamyn West are looking back at their lives. Richard Nixon and Jessamyn West were second cousins, and both grew up in the same religious community, the East Whittier Friends Church. It’s evangelical, and has more in common with other evangelical churches than it does with liberal Friends Meetings.
JESSAMYN:
I was a little older than Richard Nixon, but yes, we were in the same church. I was born in 1902, but he was born in 1913, so yes, it’s possible that I held him as a baby or watched him for a while. His father, Frank Nixon, taught my Sunday-School class; he was a fiery persuasive teacher. Richard Nixon and I were actually second cousins – my mother’s father’s father and mother, Joshua and Elizabeth Milhous, were also his great-grandparents, and his mother Hannah Milhous Nixon was my mother’s cousin.
RICHARD:
I was born in Whittier, California, and brought up in the East Whittier Friends Church. My mother was a devout Evangelical Quaker. My father converted when he married her. She was a Milhous, so, yes, Jessamyn West was my second cousin. We both grew up in the same church community. We were poor; there was a lemon farm that had gone broke, and my father ran a store in the neighborhood which he kept open all the time.
NARRATOR:
The East Whittier Friends Church clearly had an influence on both of them.
JESSAMYN:
Richard’s mother, Hannah, was a devout Quaker. She had five sons, but two died, and it was tough; they had to take care of them, and watch them die. His father once said that he was afraid he was being punished for keeping his store open on the Sabbath. But Richard rejected Quakerism pretty much; he joined the Navy and went into politics.
RICHARD:
My mother was a saint. I always tell everyone that. She took care of my brothers; she took care of me; she never spanked me. Not once. People told her she would spoil me, but she didn’t care. She didn’t believe in spanking, and she didn’t. My parents were trying to avoid the bad influences that affected my brother before he died, so they sent me to a larger school which meant I had to ride a bus an hour each way every day, but they let me transfer back to Whittier in my junior year.
NARRATOR:
Richard Nixon and Jessamyn West grew up in the same church, with the same teachers, but they went very different directions. Nixon joined the Navy and went into politics, and didn’t mention Quakerism except when asked how he grew up. In other words, he didn’t consider himself a Quaker. Jessamyn West, on the other hand, wrote about Quakerism and spent considerable time thinking about the religion and practices she had inherited through her family.
JESSAMYN:
I grew up hearing stories about Indiana; in fact I’d been born in Indiana. The Milhous side of the family was all from Indiana, and they lived in the southern part, where the underground railroad came up to the north before the Civil War. I myself was not devoutly evangelical, and when I became old enough, I started looking into those ancestors in southern Indiana. They were all Milhouses, and yes, they were Richard Nixon’s ancestors too. Friendly Persuasion is about Joshua and Elizabeth Milhous, his and my great-grandparents.
RICHARD:
As a birthright Quaker and a government service worker, I could have got a deferment from the service. But I joined the Navy, and then went into politics. I figured you couldn’t be in politics and be a Quaker at the same time. What are you going to do, tell Russia, or China, you won’t go to war under any circumstance? It seemed to me to be fundamentally incompatible. So I gave up Quakerism altogether. I didn’t give up seeking peace, or believing in respecting people. I gave up telling people I didn’t believe in the military, or in force. I do believe in the military and in force.
NARRATOR:
Richard Nixon, as you may know, was Vice President under Eisenhower, and then became President in 1968. It was often pointed out that he had grown up Quaker, and he didn’t deny it. But he never said he was a Quaker either. His view toward religion was that a person could turn to it for personal moral issues, but it had no place in the politics of a country.
RICHARD:
To me it was all about politics, being successful. I wanted to make a difference in world diplomacy, with Russia and China, and to that end I made friends with Billy Graham and other leaders. I was friends with Catholic and Jewish religious leaders, especially the conservative ones, and I helped them. But I never pretended to be a Quaker or to use Quaker principles in my leadership. To me peace is something you get through strength, military strength.
JESSAMYN:
I myself thought a lot about what it meant to be a Quaker in the modern world, and even wrote a book about the history, and what it meant to be pacifist in wartime. I got tuberculosis at one point, and was sent home to die, but my mother stayed by my side and healed me. It was in talking to her that I became interested in my Quaker ancestors.
NARRATOR:
Jessamyn West wrote Friendly Persuasion, a book that was turned into a movie in 1956. It was about a Quaker family in southern Indiana facing the reality that the Civil War was coming through their area. It was a serious drama about the Quaker faith, and probably one of the only serious portrayals of Quakerism in the movies. Richard Nixon, on the other hand, had success in politics. In 1967 his mother died.
JESSAMYN:
Richard Nixon used to say that his mother was a saint. When they asked her one time if she would support his campaign, she said of course. And she said his whole life was one big campaign. But Richard Nixon didn’t talk about growing up Quaker because he didn’t consider himself Quaker. He had joined the Navy, and from then on, it was all political for him. I don’t think he even thought about what it would be like to be a Quaker and a President; to him it was a contradiction.
NARRATOR:
Jessamyn West went on to write many other books and short stories. Friendly Persuasion is one of her first, and definitely the best known, but she wrote many others. Nixon became president in 1968; he was re-elected in 1972. But the Watergate scandal broke, and he was forced to resign. Five men were caught breaking in to the Democratic party headquarters at the Watergate complex, and slowly their actions were revealed to have come from him.
JESSAMYN:
He wanted to be known for his diplomacy, for opening things up with China and Russia. Instead, he was known as the man who said “I am not a crook” and then was revealed to be a crook.
NARRATOR:
He was sick immediately after he resigned, but then recovered and tried to restore his legacy. It was not easy. When Frost offered to interview him, it was said that he was down to his last $500. Frost paid him $600,000 for the interviews, which aired in 1977h.
RICHARD:
I said this in the David Frost interview, and I’ll say it again. 1970 was a stressful time. We thought that foreign influencers were going to alter the election, and that it was a matter of national security. As president, I have the authority to take drastic measures, and I did. I told those men to break in to the Watergate Hotel, so they did. Because they were told by the President of the United States to do what they did, they should not be punished. They were doing what I believed was best for the country.
NARRATOR:
Some people say that if his mother were alive to see him go on national television saying that burglary and stealing were ok, she would have been horrified. We’ll never know.
Thursday, April 15, 2021
These are some links on Nixon. One can argue that Nixon is not Quaker, and I would argue that, since he more or less renounced it as president. But he did attend a Quaker meeting in Washington as president, and he did have to account to his mother, who was a devout Evangelical Friend. Here are some links: Frost's interview with Nixon: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/transcript-of-david-frosts-interview-with-richard-nixon/, Teaching American History
Friday, April 09, 2021
Bartram's Flower revisited
They did a good job, and I'm sure the audience noted the advantages of putting on a play on zoom: You can have your script. Zoom tells the audience who is speaking. Sound and visuals are good. And there's no way you can trip on stage.
It has long been my contention that zoom plays will catch on and become a thing very shortly if they haven't already, with the Quakers either at the forefront of the trend or, more likely, coming along as possible. But that's for another post. I was at least proud to see them come forward for this play, which was well performed.
Bartram's Flower is on this very weblog (see template), and, if you can find the post before it (I suggest December 2009), you will find some links for resources on Bartram's life. I have to leave some of the questions open that were raised at the performance; in 2009 I knew what was fact and what I'd embellished, but now I have forgotten. I believe that most of the basic outline of the story is true and recoverable from the information out there. He is, after all, a pretty well known character.
I enjoyed the performance and it makes me look forward to putting out another book of Quaker plays, as soon as I can pull it together!
