Flashes of Panic

On my way to the pool or the weight room, I usually avoid the sidewalk on Route 116 and instead take the college paths over the hill between the Octagon and College Row. This takes me daily past a statue of Henry Ward Beecher, Class of 1832, according to the pedastal.

Beecher, who is now probably better known as the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin,) was the greater public figure in their own time. As a preacher, he was a driving force behind one of several religious revivals that have periodically swept the U.S. (Some say we’re in the midst of one now, before you think they’re a thing of the past.) As such, he set up much of the abolitionist movement his sister set aflame. If I sound vague about details, it’s because I’m working from my distant memory of what I read as a guide at the Dickinson Homestead in my previous round of student days; since there’s so little solid fact about Emily, we wound up with masses of background detail about the political and social climate of the town and the College. It’s hard to separate the Dickinsons from the College, and the College from Beecher, in that context.

Vague as it is, it explains why they have a statue of one of their earliest graduates (I figure the class of 1832 was, if not the tenth graduating class, in the single digits,) and not one of their most distinguished (that would be President Calvin Coolidge.) It might also explain Beecher’s somewhat sanctimonious scowl. I’ve only recently noticed that he appears to be looking directly at College Hall, a dramatic-looking building which is hard to miss when you’re passing through town.

College Hall used to be the town meeting-house (read “church,” from the days when “religious tolerance” meant allowing Catholics to live in town, and colleges were founded to allow right-thinking Trinitarian Congregationalists to be educated without the need to trek out to the wilderness of Williamstown or brave the Unitarian cesspit in Cambridge.) Beecher preached there on more than one occasion, if I’m remembering my Dickinson biographies properly. How it passed from the town to the College has escaped my memory, but it now houses many of the administrative offices; I clearly remembering standing in line there with various last-minute FinAid tasks (sign this form, write this check, thanks, you can stay for the semester.)

In that perspective, I wonder if perhaps Beecher’s scowl is more a reaction to the changes in his immediate view than a reflection of character. Somehow I think better of anyone who glares at FinAid.

(Actually, it looks like the statue is a duplicate of the one pictured in Wikipedia, which is located in Brooklyn.)

Now Playing: Came On Lion from All of Our Names by Sarah Harmer