Let's demand the immediate release of Americans wrongfully detained in Russia

Journalism is not a crime.

Russia must release Evan Gershkovich and Paul Whelan❗

An editorial echo published in the Maine newspaper, the Bangor Daily News:

Editorial - There are far more questions than answers about what happened in Russia when the Wagner group was marching toward the Kremlin in Moscow.  (Maine Writer- when the attempted coup turned out to be not so much of a coup.) What will continue to happen? What may have been an almost-coup and uncertainty about the strength of President Vladimir Putin’s position. 

Amid the uncertainty, at least one thing remains clear: Russia must release the people it has wrongfully detained.

For example, Maine’s two U.S. senators joined with a bipartisan group of their colleagues recently to show support for journalist Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter and Bowdoin College graduate detained in Russia since late March. 

Symbolic steps like this are necessary until Russia gives up on its wrongful detention and releases someone who was just doing his job.

“We are fully committed to bringing you, Paul [Whelan], and every wrongfully-detained American home at the earliest opportunity. Every day you spend in Russia is a day too long,” U.S. Sens. Susan Collins, Angus King and colleagues wrote in a June 13 open letter to Gershkovich. “Please know that the support for you and Paul go well beyond the walls of the United States Senate, and that the American people are with us in demanding your release.”

A Russian court rejected Gershkovich’s appeal to be released from his pre-trial detention. 

He is accused of espionage without Russian officials offering any evidence to back up the charge — a charge that he, his employer and the U.S. refute. One federal official described the legal proceedings against Gershkovich as a “sham” ahead of the hearing.

“We’ve been very clear that Evan is wrongfully detained — being wrongfully detained and targeted for simply doing his job as a journalist,” State Department spokesperson Vedant Patel said on Wednesday.

Journalists from the U.S. and abroad have rallied to Gershkovich’s cause, condemning Russia’s hostility to press freedom and calling for his release. The senators highlighted Gershkovich’s critical role as a truth-teller in their recent letter as well.

“We believe that a free press is crucial to the foundation and support of human rights everywhere,” the group of more than 30 lawmakers wrote. “We applaud you for your efforts to report the truth about Russia’s reprehensible invasion of Ukraine, a conflict that has resulted in untellable atrocities, tragedies, and loss of life. Your courageous efforts have demonstrated how these atrocities have affected everyday Ukrainians and helped inform accountability efforts here in Washington.”

Gershkovich had lived and reported in Russia for several years before his arrest. Both of his parents, Mikhail Gershkovich and Ella Milman, left the former Soviet Union for the U.S. decades ago, and were in the Moscow courtroom for Thursday’s hearing.

“Any parent who loves their kid would travel to the end of the world to be with them for five minutes,” Milman told the Wall Street Journal after a previous hearing in May.

Gershkovich was able to chat and smile with his parents when they attended the Russian hearing. But this moving and brief interaction once again put his wrongful detention in stark focus. 

Sadly, Gershkovich and his parents should not be spending a few minutes together through a glass cage. They should be at home, free from the authoritarian whims of a Russian government that has shown little regard for press freedoms — and has seen significant instability in recent days.

“His wrongful detention is a blow to press freedom, and it should matter to anyone who values free society,” Wall Street Journal leaders said in a June 13, statement welcoming the bipartisan show of support from the group of senators. “We will not rest until he is free.”

As we did with basketball player Brittney Griner, we will continue to call on Russia to release wrongfully detained Americans like Evan Gershkovich, and Paul Whelan and to push President Biden's administration to help secure that release.

Let's write about bridges and the people who remember them

Remember Maine writer Glenna Johnson Smith

An echo blog published by the Bangor Daily News by Juliana L'Heureux

ECHOES: Rediscovering Community magazine was a publication created to honor Maine Acadians. An ECHOES Acadian keepsake edition honored the World Acadian Congress in 2014, hosted by Maine and Canadian communities on both sides of the border in the St. John Valley, including Aroostook County. This special edition 2014, is a treasure trove full of excellent articles.

“We wanted to celebrate the international event with an issue that represents the presence of Acadian culture on the pages of Echoes since Issue No. 1 in 1988,” said Kathryn Olmstead, editor. “I think this issue achieves that goal, even though it contains only a fraction of the more than 90 Acadian stories that have appeared over the years.”

One of the articles in this ECHOES attracted my attention because it tells the story about the days before there was a Hancock-Sullivan bridge and after it was built, published in a personal essay titled “A Ferry Tale”, by “Old County Woman”, the late Glenna Johnson Smith. I located the loving obituary published about her life and received permission from her granddaughter Jasmine Rae Smith and her father Melbourne Smith to republish in this blog article. “She was a wonderful grandmother, teacher and human,” wrote Jasmine in her response to my request.

Stories about bridges and ferry crossings draw my attention because the symbolism brings people together. “A Bridge and Its History”, is about the swinging bridge across the Androscoggin River in Brunswick (visit blog here). Another story I wrote is about The International Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial Bridge, connecting the community of Lubec, Maine in the United States with Campobello Island, in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, across the Lubec Narrows (visit blog here). So, now I am pleased to have contributed a trilogy of articles about Maine’s bridges in this blog. I also added Glenna Johnson Smith’s life story told in her obituary, after the essay.

A Ferry Tale by Glenna Johnson Smith included her own photographs.

I remember reading a story about Charon, a ferryman who transported the souls of the dead across the river Styx, and on the on to the underworld. That ferryman had much in common with the one who carried me across the Taunton Stream from Sullivan to Hancock.

Today, a ride from Sullivan to Ellsworth is short and the roads are good, but back in the 1920s, the ferryman made it an unpredictable journey.

Mama, Papa and I would climb up into the Model T and drive over a dusty road to the riverside. Then we would sit there and wait. The ferryman on the other shore would ignore us until he had a car to bring across. Because there was little traffic back then it could be a long wait.

Sometimes I’d tell Mama I had to go and Papa would say, “You should have thought of that while we were driving through the woods.” Filling stations with restrooms were far into the future. Mama carried spare bloomers, in case of an accident.

At last, Papa would drive the Model T onto the moving scow, which wasn’t much wider than the car, and which didn’t have any railings that I can recall. Just below us, the river erupted into falls, not high ones like Niagara, but still they were rock falls. Mama needed a powerful reason for going to Ellsworth since she was sure some day the ferryman would lose control and we’d go over the falls to our deaths. If Papa had errands in Ellsworth, Mama and I sat in the car and watched the people on the street. Yet, that pleasure was tainted by the fear of the return trip on the ferry.

I may have been seven or eight years old when the new bridge was built. How wonderful to go to Ellsworth without driving on a ferry.

The bridge was hinged, however a piece of it would more to the side to allow a tall-masted schooner to go upstream for a load of Sullivan granite on its way to pave the streets. Only once we had to wait for a schooner to pass. Now that “new” bridge, too narrow for present-day traffic, has been replaced by yet another new bridge. The bridge that would “sing” when a car drove over it is now just a memory. There aren’t many of us left who remember the ferryman or the singing bridge. A ride from Sullivan is now quick and comfortable, smooth roads and cars with windows that roll down or have air conditioning and big tires for a smooth ride.

Yet today’s traveler lacks the suspense and the adventure of the ferry ride over our River Styx.

Gloria Johnson Smith lived and wrote from Presque Isle, after her retirement as a Presque Isle High School English teacher, in 1990. She wrote and directed plays, led elder hostels and classes for senior citizen groups, conducted workshops on writing for schools and volunteered at ECHOES magazine. Her essays and stories have been collected into two books, “Old Maine Woman”, published in 2010, by Islandport Press in Yarmouth Maine and “Return of Old Maine Woman”, released in June 2014.

Obituary from the funeral announcement: Family, friends remember Presque Isle teacher, writer famous for ‘old woman’ tales of the County.

PRESQUE ISLE, Maine – Glenna Johnson Smith, passed away on Saturday, August 8, 2020, surrounded by her family. She was born in Lincolnville, Maine and grew up in Ashville, Maine, the daughter of Seth and Kathleen Proctor Johnson. She was predeceased by her parents and by her sister-in-law Pauline Smith Kirkpatrick and Pauline’s husband Kenneth of Easton, Maine, her sister-in-law Natalie Smith Henness of Brandon, Florida and her dear friend Louise Findlen of Fort Fairfield, Maine. She attended Sullivan, Maine schools, graduated from the University of Maine in Orono and did graduate work at the University of California @ San Jose, the University of Minnesota and the University of Maine at Orono and Presque Isle.

Glenna married Donald C Smith of Easton, Maine in 1941 and lived on a potato farm in Presque Isle, Maine. The greatest joy of her life was watching her sons Steven, Byron and Melbourne grow up. She is survived by her three sons, Steven’s wife Sylvia, Melbourne’s daughters Jasmine and her fiancé Brian and Hillary and her husband Rick, Melbourne’s step-daughter Ashley and her husband Mark and Melbourne’s step-son Joshua and his wife Bethany. She is also survived by Jasmine’s daughter Ella, and son Calvin, Hillary’s son Kevin, Ashley’s son Tim and daughter Abby, Joshua’s children Meti, Enoch, Tigist, Justice and Erbeka, the four beloved nieces Shirley, Diane, Linda and Lorraine and lifelong friends Kerry and Kent.

“The time has come” the walrus said, “to talk of many things: of shoes and ships and sealing wax – of cabbages and kings.” * Sullivan High School had only three teachers: the principal taught math and science, one woman taught English and the other woman taught French and Latin. A teacher, Miss Ruth Belknap, encouraged Glenna to learn a dramatic piece each year to present at local, county and state contests. Glenna’s college years were not satisfying. She had been strongly urged to major in home economics and she hated everything about the course. She was invited to join a sorority but did not have the money to do so. She admired at a distance —runner from her window and her friend Sally Culberson introduced her to him — Don Smith, her future husband. Don and Glenna saw each other briefly every night from 6-7:30, when they walked to Orono to have whoopee pies and milk at Pat’s Pizza. Soon after graduation, Don & Glenna married and moved to Easton, where they lived in a farmhouse that had neither running water nor electricity. Glenna had no idea how to be a farm wife and she didn’t fit in with Don’s family. In fact, they made fun of her at Sunday gatherings. After 30 years, he wanted a divorce and she was devastated. However, she soon learned that she was better-off single; she no longer feared his temper and she could make her own choices. When her sister-in-law Polly asked if she’d like to buy Richard Hoyt’s house, she said yes before she ever saw it. She had recently sold her father’s house in Sullivan, so she could afford it. She was tired of being cooped up in her tiny apartment. Ever after, she loved her small house on a quiet street. She loved her trees and her little flower garden. Mary, across the street, was a good friend and neighbor. Glenna was sad when Mary moved away.

Glenna taught school for nearly 40 years in Easton, Fort Fairfield and for most of that time at Presque Isle High School, where she assisted with the drama program. In later years, she wrote seven plays which were produced in Maine and New Hampshire schools as well as community and summer theaters. Two of her plays represented her state at New England drama festivals. She had poems published in Maine Speaks, an anthology of Maine writers, and in a New England anthology and other journals. Some of her essays appeared in Yankee Magazine. She wrote two books: Old Maine Woman and Return of Old Maine Woman, published by Islandport Press. After retiring from public-school teaching, Glenna worked for Northeast Publishing Co. and she taught courses and Elder Hostel classes at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. She wrote a column for Echoes Magazine for 25 years and she belonged to a writing group of friends.

Although her sons and grandchildren were the center of her life, she was thankful for her dear friends and colleagues, for her teaching, writing and theater experiences and for all her days in the changing landscapes and seasons in Northern Maine.

“Oh, Oysters” said the carpenter, “you’ve had a pleasant run. Shall we be trotting home again?”* Lewis Carroll from Through the Looking Glass.

In her long and successful career as a teacher, Glenna Johnson Smith certainly inspired multi-generations of young and not so young Franco-Americans in Northern Maine and beyond.

Let's write about Acadians!

This blog I wrote titled "Learning About Acadian Blind Spots", was published on the Bangor Daily News Franco-American News and Culture website. By republishing on Let's Write, I am able to send it to readers who live outside the United States. Unfortunately, the Bangor Daily News blogger page is blocked by many international security screens.

Learning about Acadian “blind spots”

January 21, 2022

Franco-American News and CultureKerri Arsenault, Sanford Maine, Thibodeau 

By Juliana L'Heureux

L’Heureux family photograph dated 1909, in Sanford, Maine. Lumina Savoie L’Heureux is on the top row, far right.

Writer Kerri Arsenault was spot on when she explained the meaning of “Blind Spots”, the sub title in one chapter of her autobiography titled “Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains,” during a book talk, hosted on ZOOM, on January 17, by the Franco-American Collection at the University of Southern Maine at Lewiston Auburn College.

“Blind Spots” is a sub-section of the book, where she describes the Arsenault’s family’s history, and how her ancestors came to Mexico, Maine from Prince Edward Island, in Canada. But, conceptually, the sub-title captures the lack of awareness about Acadian history and information about the impact the Franco-American immigration had on Maine and, particularly, in her home town of Mexico.

As a matter of fact, this “blind spot” was revealed in our family, as described below in an article I published in September, 2006. The article (below), gives evidence to the point Arsenault makes in her book.

Merci beaucoup to Kerri for the excellent presentation she gave to nearly 100 on-line participants, when she was the guest speaker for the Franco-American Collection’s community program series. Moreover, she presented “virtually”, speaking from an apartment where she is temporarily living in Paris, France, while working on a special project.

Her autobiography “Mill Town, Reckoning with What Remains” is about growing up in Mexico, where her family lived while her father worked at the Rumford, Maine paper mill. Her family experienced middle class prosperity as a result of the employment provided by the mill, but, at the same time, the toxins produced by the paper production also polluted the local environment, and likely caused her father’s death from lung disease and asbestosis.

In “Blind Spots”, Arsenault opens up a discussion about how many of Maine’s people and others are unaware, or choose to not become aware, about Acadian American history and Franco-American immigration from Canada. These blind spots are not taught in the schools. Therefore, she found ways to locate the sources of her family’s blind spots by researching her genealogy.

Some blind spots she identified, because they are not taught, includes:

• Blind to Franco-American and Acadian American history.
• Blind to the impact that immigration has had on Maine’s manufacturing companies.
• Blind to the impact of the Franco-Americans who built the workforce in the paper, shoe and textile mills.
• Blind to the history about the Acadian deportation of 1755.

All of which reminded me about our family’s “blind spot”, described in a September, 2006, article titled “Acadian Connection 8 Generations Back”.

We were actually surprised to discover Acadian ancestors in the L’Heureux family, traced to the Thibodeau name.

In fact, numerous Franco-American families are connected through 11 generations of genealogies from Canada, but ancestors with Quebecois heritage are often distinguished from those with Acadian ancestral roots. In other words, colonial Quebec’s French settlers did not intermarry with the families that lived in Acadia (today being in western Nova Scotia). This was because the two groups developed, independently. Until 1755.

Some Acadian settlers managed to escape the brutal British deportation of 1755, known as Le Grand Dérangement. Many refugees that escaped ultimately fled to territories in Quebec and the Madawaska region, where they eventually started a new lineage. Later, many of those that were deported and sailed away to random destinations on the east coast, where they were abandoned, are among those that ultimately settled in Louisiana. The Acadians and Quebecois began to intermarry after the deportation.

My husband’s family immigrated into New England and Maine in the early 20th century, but it wasn’t until 2006, when we figured out how they are connected to the Acadians. Up until then, the family believed all of the ancestors were Quebecois. Family oral history did not appear to support Acadian connections into the genealogy. Franco-American genealogies can be complicated and may be tedious to figure out beyond four generations, because so many family names are interrelated.

Therefore, we missed the sixth generation great-grandfather connection with Charles Thibodeau, an Acadian through the genealogy of Marie-Lumina Savoie, who was my husband’s paternal grandmother.

All the Thibodeau ancestors are related to the first generation Pierre, who settled the Pine Grove area of western Nova Scotia, around 1690. Thibodeau’s eldest son of 12 children was also named Pierre. Therefore, my husband’s genealogy through his grandmother is directly descended from Charles Thibodeau, one of Pierre’s siblings. In fact, the lineage leaps directly from Thibodeau, to Savoie, to L’Heureux, although it took eight generations to reach my husband’s family group.

Marie-Lumina Savoie and Narcisse L’Heureux married and are my husband grandparents. Charles Thibodeau is, therefore, my husband’s sixth great-grandfather.

Kerri Arsenault, author of "Mill Town"< presented background information in a book talk sponsored by the Franco-American Collection at the University of Southern Maine Lewiston Auburn College on January 17, 2022, via ZOOM.

Consequently, as Arsenault pointed out, the Acadian “blind spot” was found and confirmed by checking with Kennebunk summer resident Dick Thibodeau*. He studied genealogy and knew quite a bit of detail about his ancestors and the family’s ties to Nova Scotia.

Thanks to Thibodeau’s meticulous research, we can reveal our family’s Acadian blind spot. Every L’Heureux family member who was born in Sanford and descended from Marie-Lumina Savoie are directly connected to the Thibodeau family and they are therefore Acadian through the “Savoie” name. On the L’Heureux side, the family name is totally Quebecois.

*We are delighted to have met Dick Thibodeau and to learn about his interest in genealogy. Sadly, he died a few years ago, but you can read more about him in a research paper submitted to the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine Fort Kent, submitted by Anne Chamberland and available in the public domain at this link here.

Although our family has revealed our blind spot, American history continues to overlook the Franco-American “fact”, being, the French precedence over the arrival of European settlers in North America.

More information about the Franco-American Collection at USM LAC is available at this site here. 

About Juliana L'Heureux

Juliana L’Heureux is a free lance writer who publishes news, blogs and articles about Franco-Americans and the French culture. She has written about the culture in weekly and bi-weekly articles, for the past 35 years.

When a bridge transcends literature and time

The Brunswick-Topshamm Maine "The Swinging Bridge" with Roebling Ropes suspension- art in engineering.

There is a picturesque bridge in Brunswick Maine called "The Swinging Bridge". This bridge was constructed with a purpose to create a footbridge from Topsham Maine across the Androsgoggin River to Brunswick (and back to Topsham), for Franco-American workers to use, because they were needed to provide labor for the Cabot Mills and other manufacturing plants that were reliant on hydropower.

The Swinging Bridge is historic because it was designed by John Roebling and the suspension is supported by Roebling Ropes. This is the same engineering concept as was used to construct the famously picturesque Brooklyn Bridge, in New York.

I have reported on the historic preservation of Brunswick and Topsham "The Swinging Bridge" for over 20 years, as in my blog link in this report.

Therefore, I was pleased to read this review about a new biography about Robeling, published in the History News Network. Although The Swinging Bridge in Brunswick-Topsham Maine is not mentioned in this particular HNN article, I have posted the link to my article to the CUNY Twitter announcement about the biography:
Bangor Daily News:
http://francoamerican.bangordailynews.com/2019/08/09/franco-american-news-and-culture/androscoggin-swinging-bridge-franco-american-mill-workers-history/

History News Network- engineer Roebling in literature

by Richard Haw

Spiritualism and Suspension Bridges: John Roebling and a Biographer's Sympathy for the Weird 19th Century

John Roebling was one of the nineteenth century's most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the nineteenth century's most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn. (And the Brunswick, Maine "The Swinging Bridge).

Richard Haw is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the author of the newly released Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling (Oxford UP), as well as The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History and Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History.

Two things that have often seemed in short supply in our national politics over the last few years are a respect for history—not just the lessons it can teach us, but what forces and factors drove those lessons—and empathy for the people stuck in that history.

People live their lives situated in time and space and are forced to make choices with the knowledge and context available to them. They are often fooled or foolish—also often astute or fortunate—but there are usually sound reasons for the way people act, whether we agree with them or not. Keeping that in mind is what makes the job of a biographer such a humbling practice.

About eleven years ago, I set out to write my first biography, of John Roebling, the man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling’s life seemed grand and exciting, full of ideas and incident. Born in Prussia, he attended Hegel’s lectures in Berlin, emigrated to the US to start a utopian farming community in rural Pennsylvania, wrote passionately of his abhorrence of slavery, and went on to become one of the nineteenth century’s greatest engineers and manufacturers, and certainly its greatest bridge builder. He built bridges over the Niagara Gorge (over which Harriet Tubman transported formerly enslaved people to Canada) and over the Ohio at Cincinnati (the first structure to link a Northern with a Southern state after the Civil War). He had just begun the colossal New York and Brooklyn Bridge—one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century—when a random accident at the bridge site claimed his life.

I thought Roebling was a genius. He could wrestle thousands of tons of wood, granite and iron into beautiful and intricate bridges, far longer and sturdier than anyone else on the planet could. He combined advanced mathematics and physics with the eye of artist and a master craftsman to produce sublime artifacts of the industrial age, great icons of the nineteenth century.

I also thought he was a complete weirdo. Roebling believed in spirits; wrapped himself up in a wet sheet before going to bed (a friend of mine thought my book should be called “More Wet Sheet”: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling); assiduously attended séances; ate his own bodyweight in charcoal; treated himself with cold running water when he had tetanus; thought he could ward off cholera by pacing up and down repeating “I have it not, I have it not!”; created huge long lists of things he wouldn’t eat, including nearly all fruits and vegetables, which he seemed to think were somewhat toxic; believed in Odic Force, that space was a substance (“ether”), and that the afterlife consisted of seven spheres of existence that you slowly worked through to get to the final state, disarmingly named Summerland.

This all seemed so rich and wonderful to a first time biographer. The guy was clearly bonkers and it would be such fun to rake over it all, I thought.

But I don’t see him as a weirdo now, even though much of what he believed we would now call mumbo jumbo. And I have no interest in poking fun at him, laughing at his failings (ok, maybe a chuckle about the wet sheet), or wallowing in my superiority. I have learned, I think, the first lesson of biography: that we need to take people on their own terms, not on ours. And Roebling’s terms were the nineteenth century, not the early twenty first.

The nineteenth was an age of invention, belief, and exploration. People believed they could find answers to everything, Roebling more so than most. He was at heart an ideas man. He had thousands over the course of his life. Most missed the mark in one form or another, but some didn’t, and those ideas helped change the face of a nation. His views on medicine may strike us as misguided and delusional but the medical profession had barely entered its infancy by the mid-nineteenth century. To one degree or another almost all ideas about medicine were wrong. (The doctor attending Roebling’s brush with cholera blamed the disease on “the epidemic constitution of the air,” “high heat and humidity,” and “soil poison,” for example.) But the point was not so much the accuracy as the effort at understanding itself.

Roebling’s life and beliefs showcase a society struggling to reconcile the rising influence of science with the declining authority of faith and religion, a hallmark of the nineteenth century and a process we mistakenly regard in hindsight as linear. Yet even for someone like Charles Darwin, shrugging off religion was the work of a lifetime, “like confessing a murder,” he wrote his good friend Joseph Hooker. Beliefs were in flux. New knowledge was created at a bewildering pace, much of which refused to sit easily next to established ideas. A surprisingly large number of prominent Americans—judges, journalists, abolitionists, historians, military officers, politicians, businessmen, and poets—took to spiritualism, for example, precisely because of this. In a climate of change and creation, new things seem possible and within reach: new ways to build, communicate, and think; new places, materials, and laws to discover; even perhaps communing with the dead. In this, the nineteenth century was a time of optimism, but also of huge loss. War, disease, and large-scale migration separated family members, often forever, as it did with Roebling, who lost a beloved child in infancy, had a son fight in the Civil War, and never saw any of his immediate family after leaving Europe when he was twenty-four. This confluence of discovery and loss fed the spiritualist movement, which in turn reflected the age in which it appeared. If the religious impulse represents the search for answers in the face of profound grief, then spiritualism offered a comforting, plausible solution to a bewildering era that took away as much as it promised. Spiritualism sought to bring science into the world of faith: to make the afterlife a verified, observable fact. We might scoff at a nation as taken with séances as hard science but it’s entirely possible that, during Roebling’s life, more people believed in spirits than suspension bridges.

Roebling, of course, believed in both.

Roebling was a believer and a scientist. He belonged to the blurred line that ran straight through the nineteenth century, shaping its unsteady but inexorable march. Roebling helps us remember that the achievements of industry and engineering—what we take to be the triumphs of applied reason—are often created by people with a decidedly different perspective on the world than our own.

He is also a reminder that people can be many things, and that contradictions aren’t always as clear as with hindsight. Arthur Conan Doyle—the mind behind literature’s most rational brain—was a doctor, ophthalmologist and botanist who studied at one the UK’s most prestigious medical schools. He was a full-throated advocate of vaccinations. He also believed in fairies.

Roebling’s achievements in applied science stand in somewhat stark contrast to his ideas about other branches of the natural arts. But his failings in this regard aren’t his own alone: they belong to the times, just as his successes do. One might also say they weren’t even failings at all. We think of people like John Roebling as embodying great contradictions but they are only contradictions to us. They weren’t contradictions to him or to others of his era. Instead they were the creaks and groans of a culture working things out, moving itself forward in time and in understanding, trying its messy best to incorporate new aims and new ideas into an existing order.

The nineteenth century is not our century. It’s easy to judge but harder to understand, which is why we need to have empathy for those that lived in and through it. We have the gift of hindsight. They had only the unknown.