The Myth of Self -Reliance

Phlox is an old-fashioned flower, one I'm privileged to have in my yard now because a former resident planted wild phlox as part of a natural butterfly garden. I remember pink phlox growing in my grandmother McElyea's perennial border when I was a child. As I have spent the last year looking up facts about my great-grandmothers and their families, sometimes tracking down where they might have lived and taking pictures, sorting through sometimes contradictory data, I'm slowly beginning to see my project acquire a shape and direction. I'm starting to feel like it's time to start to write. But while I am still thinking about that, I thought I might start writing some short impressions that have come to me as I've thought about what I have learned about them. And today, I realized that the lives of all four were at one time or another dependent on family cooperation, and sometimes the kindness of strangers. Here in America we celebrate the self-reliance of our ancestors and sometimes lament its lack today. But then I considered these items from my research:

• When Jesse and Emma eloped to Memphis from Arkansas in December 1891, one of their witnesses was a neighbor their age, who may have helped arrange the trip in addition to being the Best Man. I don't think they could have pulled it off on their own in the middle of winter.
• When Belle and Roscoe moved to Oklahoma Territory in 1903 after their tobacco crop failed in Kentucky, they brought with them some of Belle's younger brothers. They gave these young men a start they badly needed, being the youngest of 11.
  
• When my grandmother, one of Belle and Roscoe's daughters, had graduated from Normal School, it was a postcard from a family friend, the young minister in Sayre, that told her about a teaching job in that relatively new town. She took the job, met my grandfather, and the young minister performed the wedding a couple of years later.
• When Martha's sister was widowed in the Civil War, she moved back into her father's house with her infant daughter. Later, on her own and re-married, she took in to her household her younger brother who had never married.
• When Martha was widowed in 1901, she moved to Lockwood from the farm at Mt. Vernon and kept house for her unmarried daughter who was a printer and publisher in that small town. After this daughter died unexpectedly, another of her daughters, recently widowed herself, invited Martha to live with her.
• Sarah and her husband William were charter members of the First Christian Church in Everton, Mo., and freely supported it. The church was in a community where people helped one another in hard times.
  
• When Belle and Roscoe were in their 80s, never having become eligible for Social Security and before the existence of Medicare, they went on "general relief" and were eligible to receive a monthly supply of "commodities" from a federal government program that bought up agricultural surplus to help stabilize farm prices. That supplemented the canned goods my grandmother took to them, and what my aunt, who lived with them, could afford to buy from her meager retirement income. This couple had, in their prime, offered a meal to every traveling preacher who came to town, and in the horse and buggy days, saw that every guest's horse received a fine ration of oats.
  

These are just a few of the instances I can think of. When families moved westward, they often went not only as a clan, but also in a group with their former neighbors. Frequently the men were bonded to guarantee a son's or brother's or nephew's land purchase. Sometimes their generosity was costly; my grandfather Mc, who finally was able to buy his own gasoline service station in the spring of 1929, hung on through the early part of the Great Depression but finally lost it in late 1931, because he had extended too much credit to his neighbors, unable to cut them off when they needed gas for transportation to look for work. So "self reliance" is mostly a myth. In my ancestors' time, the interdependence was mostly between friends and family members. As families have grown smaller, and jobs and careers more demanding and farther from home, the circle of dependence has grown wider--the city, the state, even the country.

Today I got an e-mail warning me that the Other Party wants to take over Congress so it can start cutting Social Security. There are many competing claims about how solvent the system is, and for how long, and the best way to "fix" it. I won't add to the debate here, except to say I think the fix is simpler than most politicians are willing to support. But I am grateful that both of my parents received Social Security benefits (and Medicare) when they retired, after years of work and contributing to the system that sustained THEIR parents. I know that my contributions during my working years may have helped to support my parents, and others of their generation. I'm counting on the contributions of those who are working today to help support me and Norm, something we earned during our own years of working and contributing. Sometimes I feel the rhetoric aimed at "cutting" Social Security sounds like it is coming from those who never wanted it in the first place, because they think it is somehow un-American, a kind of welfare, even socialistic. They think everyone should provide only for themselves and not owe their neighbor, or the generation that came before them or the ones that come after, anything. I don't agree with that view, and I don't agree with that interpretation of our nation's social history. Back in the rosy "self-reliant" days, most people (at least, most of my ancestors) were anything but. And yet they built communities and sustained institutions that persist to this day.