On the 200th Birthday of Thomas Starr King

At a time of crisis, the survival of a society lies in its citizens rising to a higher level of being as leaders.

We confront such a situation today, but this was also true in the years preceding the Civil War. Andrea Ingraham, author of the new book, "The Lincoln Revolution in California," celebrates the birthday, this week, of Thomas Starr King, virtually unknown to most Americans, who was one of three contemporaries of Abraham Lincoln who led a successful fight to save California for the Union. He fought with ideas and his own courageous example. His mastery of the language allowed him to communicate ideas profoundly. Here, Andrea discusses one of his most popular orations.

December 17, 2024 marks the 200^th birthday of the great American preacher, lecturer and patriot, the man known to have saved California to the Union, Thomas Starr King (December 17, 1824-March 4, 1864). It is fitting to remember him by reviewing one of his most popular lectures, written in San Francisco and delivered throughout California. It is called, “Books and Reading,¹” and is just as thought-provoking today as it was then. First delivered at the San Francisco Mercantile Library Association on January 17, 1861, it was scheduled for the Odd Fellows Library Association on March 1, but was pre-empted by his lecture, “Washington, or Greatness,” as the Civil War loomed.

The Supreme Privilege

He begins by asserting that printed literature is the supreme privilege enjoyed by modern society over that of 500 years earlier. “. . . Over all secular boons, this one is sovereign,— the printing-press, which arrests and cheapens, which accumulates and scatters, the victories of genius and stores of intellectual toil.”

He argues that one can know much more from books than from experience. You can observe the stars or walk the Alps, but will know far less about astronomy or geology, and have a far feebler sense of sublimity, know less of the thought of the Creator, than from reading a book about the same. “To the mass of the world, who have not the leisure or the ability to wrest truth at first hand from its hiding places, contact with books is of more account than immediate contact with all of the Divine wisdom that is directly poured into the universe.”

Several examples follow.

“Plato, in one of the most charming of his Dialogues, disparages books as a means of instruction, in comparison with conversation,” because the book or a painting for that matter, cannot respond. They are fixed. “Now it is by the grace of the printing press that we are able to know this criticism of the great Plato, and make Plato repeat his best sayings at our pleasure. By books we, in fact, go into the society of the best men of all ages, and hear them say their best things. I know that a man is greater than his noblest book,. . . and to know him is better than to know all his editions by heart, but no talk with Milton could give “Paradise Lost” or “Comus” or even “Il Penseroso.”

Likewise, you would have been happy to meet Shakespeare, but could a meeting have carried you up to the region of his genius where Imogen and Hamlet started into life, or down into the depths of his feeling whence the richest sonnets issued?

Knowing Jesus

Many Christians wish they could have met Jesus, seen his miracles, heard the Sermon on the Mount. Yet, have we ever thought of the fact that by means of a book we know more about Jesus than any inhabitant of Nazareth, Cana or Sychar could have known?

“They knew only a fragment or two of his experience. They heard only a parable, or saw only one wonderful act performed as he went through their streets on his way to Jerusalem. Which has had the ampler earthly opportunity to get into communion with the mind and spirit of the Saviour, the woman of Samaria, who listened to his talk with her by the well, and misunderstood the most of it, or you, who are present, whenever you please, through the printed biographies, at that interview, and within ‘earshot’ also of his dialogue with Nicodemus, his parable of the Good Samaritan, his conversation with the young Pharisee, his various calls to consecration, his interpretation of God’s character in the picture of the prodigal’s father,— you who have the whole outline of Christ’s career, and scores of avenues, by his acts and his instruction and his prayers, to reach the inmost riches of his soul?"

“Books are our crowning privilege in modern civilization. With a taste for books and music, let every person thank God, night and morning, that he was not born earlier in history.”

“’Books and music,’ did I say? Books are music. What was it to know Beethoven personally, compared with knowing and hearing the andante of the Fifth Symphony, the scherzo of the Seventh, the adagio of the Ninth?” We can know them because of printing. An organ, no matter how great, cannot play itself."

The Steam Press is a Democrat

"No aristocracy can control knowledge. . . we do not say the empire of letters, the kingdom of letters, the aristocracy of letters, but the republic of letters. Knowledge of the alphabet is your card of invitation and your unquestioned ticket of entrance to its sessions and feasts. The steam engine is a democrat, one of the boys, though not a disunion democrat. Likewise the steam press is a democrat, which declares, “If there is any truth uttered in any part of the world, and you want it, let me know and you shall have it cheap.”

While there may be great libraries like the Imperial Library of Paris with 800,000 volumes, any citizen with access to the Mercantile Library, committed to reading five hours a day, can select 100 volumes, the mastery of which would make him better furnished with instruction, and better able to comprehend and enjoy the advances of knowledge, under the lead of the explorers of this generation, than any scholar or literary man we have in our country today.

Books of Science, History, Biography

Books may be divided into three general categories: Natural science, books of life and books of art. On books of astronomy and geography, King says,

“No man has a right to go on living in a world whose upholstery is so gorgeous and foundations so sublime, without knowing something of both. Everyone should be able, if awakened at 2 in the morning, to tell you the number of full grown planets in the solar system, (not counting the straggling litter of asteroids), the millions of miles which the earth beats in a year, the reach of the sun’s gravitation, the number of states, territories and square miles in his country, the salient facts and dates of its history, the probable number of years that the Mississippi has been running, and the dead certainty that he is against secession. . .”

“Of the two millions of forms of organic life which the zoologists have enumerated, though you never hear or read the names of a hundred of them, you may become acquainted with the thoughts of the Creator which they express, and the exact plans of structure on which all the myriads have been strung from this hour back to the morning of the fifth day of the creation.”

Then there are books of life, meaning history and biography.

“In both departments human genius and industry seem to have been exerted to the utmost strain, since this century began, to increase the resources of easy knowledge and delight for the average mind.” While history is an endless task, one winter’s reading could decipher the most important events. But the richest region in the literature of life is biography – “the proper study of mankind is man.”

Books of Art

The third class, books of art, includes all works in verse and prose, in which form is as necessary as content, in which “truth appears robed in beauty, for purposes of inspiration.” This includes poems, dramas, fiction and everything included in “belles lettres.”

In this regard he elaborates on the musicality and form mastered by Shakespeare.

“One of the strangest things which a deep student of Shakespeare learns is the variety of his music and rhythm in the same ten-syllable blank-verse. No other writer of his age commanded such music; and the movement and measure of his Macbeth and Romeo, Hamlet and Antony, Lear and Tempest, are as different as if different writers – on the Shakespeare level – had given each the training of a life to one of these plays. And in each case the movement or melody is a subtle accompaniment to the passion or the law that informs and ensouls the piece.”

He acknowledges that fiction can take bad turn too, as in modern French novels.

“Sans-Culottism in 1789 broke up into Paris from the pit of flame. The Byronic spirit in literature is often characterized as the Satanic school. But as Milton’s fiend could never get to the bottom of his abyss, finding beneath each deep ‘a lower deep still threatening to devour’ him, we see in the latest schools of French novels the presiding demon of all cancerous corruption in the human heart. . .”

After discussing many writers, in closing,

“The distance of a star, the age of the planet, the flow of history, the stores of biography, the vast and crowded spaces of fiction, the richest music borne from infinite deeps through the rarest pipes of genius,—such knowledge, such society, such inspiration, or such solace may be ours through a library of a hundred books; no more. If you have taste, you may find leisure to win something of the luxury of truth or art in the busiest life for the uplifting of your spirit.”