Let's write about the history of the ubiquitous "pickle"

 (Julie's note: Remembering how much I enjoyed eating the pickles at the Broadway Market in East Baltimore.  Of course, they came right out of a big barrel and they were huge!)

New York Is a Pickle Kind of Town by Emma Allen
The Dutch authors of a new book, “The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles,” stop by the brined-delicacy staple Russ & Daughters. By Emma Allen
Not all foods endure—ortolan, aspic, candy cigarettes—but the pickle may be as close to immortal as a snack can get. The world’s oldest known cookbook, from around 1700 B.C.E. Mesopotamia, includes a recipe for a pickled-fish-and-grasshopper sauce. 

Shakespeare wrote, in “The Tempest,” about being “in a pickle”; pickles were served aboard the Titanic. Carlos Alcaraz and Frances Tiafoe have both been known to drink pickle juice in lieu of Gatorade—no unfair advantage there. The U.S. pickle industry has an estimated revenue of three billion dollars per year.
Paul van Ravestein and Monique Mulder, two principals at Mattmo Creative, a branding agency in Amsterdam, have become surprising experts in the preserved-cucumber field. 

In 2022, they published “De Zure Stad” (“The Sour City”), a history of Dutch pickles, then shifted focus across the Atlantic for “The Pickled City: The Story of New York Pickles.”

“It’s an obsession, basically,” van Ravestein said the other day, in the hundred-and-twelve-year-old Russ & Daughters appetizing shop, on East Houston. During their New York pickle research, Mulder and van Ravestein had come upon a trove of tax-archive photographs from the early twentieth century, featuring a man posing with numbered placards in front of thousands of Lower East Side storefronts, nearly a hundred of which were pickle purveyors.
“For us, suddenly, it became alive,” Mulder said. “A guy is waking up early in the morning and saying to his wife, ‘I go to my work.’ ”
The pair showed the photos to Niki Russ Federman, a fourth-generation owner of Russ & Daughters, who was wearing the shop’s traditional white lab coat and doling out pickled herring in cream sauce. Her Polish-émigré great-grandfather got his start selling schmaltz herring wrapped in day-old Yiddish newspapers from a barrel, then upgraded to a pushcart, then to a horse-drawn cart, then to the original store, around the corner.

“I’ve never seen it zoomed in like this!” Russ Federman said, peering at an image. “This was the J. Russ National Appetizing Store—there was nothing national about what he did. It was taking care of Jews within four square blocks.” Joel savvily rebranded as Russ’s Cut Rate Appetizing. 

Now Russ & Daughters has a nationwide shipping operation and a restaurant that serves eighteen-dollar Break-Fast Martinis.
“Why are you still here?” van Ravestein asked. “Is it resilience or flexibility?”

“Luckily, whether it was by choice or by obligation, in each generation there’s been someone in the family who made this their life,” Russ Federman replied. In 1935, the store became the first in the country to have “& Daughters” in its name. “Joel needed cheap labor,” Russ Federman said. “But also, who better to sell pickles than three cute girls with their hands in herring barrels?”

“It’s a matter of communication, branding,” van Ravestein posited.
“You tell the story,” Mulder added. “The food is an interface that is also your legacy.”
Van Ravestein munched on a half-sour and recalled an article, from 1890, that likened pickles to alcohol or coffee: “So kids couldn’t eat them, because it gives you a kick.”
Russ Federman mentioned a contemporary listicle of ten “superfoods,” most of which were sold at her store: “It’s herring, sardines, salmon, sauerkraut, liver—caviar was on the list!”
“You know what we had yesterday evening?” Mulder asked, as she sipped a shrub (pickled-beet juice and vinegar, popular with the marathon-runner set). “A vermouth with pickle juice.”
The Dutch visitors headed south to Sweet Pickle Books, on Orchard Street, a hip used bookstore with a pickle side hustle that was opened, in 2020, by a millennial named Leigh Altshuler, who previously served as marketing director for the Strand. Shoved in a corner was an adult-size pickle costume by the designer who made Katy Perry’s Super Bowl halftime-show sharks.
Before opening her store, Altshuler had prepared three hundred and sixty jars of pickles to sell, and eventually started giving them away to people who donated books. “I was, like, ‘This for sure will last me forever. It’ll be a gimmick,’ ” she told the Dutch duo. A year later, her shop was bursting at the seams, and she kept selling out of pickles. “People had been putting it on TikTok,” she said. Altshuler had to outsource pickle production upstate, and began cranking out pickle merch. “All of a sudden, Harry Styles was wearing it,” she said. “It was a whole drama.”
Mulder and van Ravestein mentioned the frenzy surrounding the Heinz pickle pin, a coveted souvenir at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.
“People are obsessed with pickles!” Altshuler said. “People come in and say, ‘Oh, look at my pickle tattoo,’ or, ‘My dog’s name is Pickle.’ ”
“In Holland, a lot of young people, they’ve started fermenting at home,” Mulder added.

The Sweet Pickle Books building—near where “Lower East Side cool girlies” (per Altshuler) had dumpster-dived for Timothée Chalamet’s old “Marty Supreme” costumes—has been in its landlady’s family for a century and a half. 

Altshuler said, “Her grandfather sold melons from a pushcart outside.” ♦

Published in the print edition of the July 20, 2026, issue, with the headline “Pickle People.”

Let's write about John Grisham's inspiration as a writer

From Mr. John Grisham:  (Maine Writer:  I am anxious to read his novel as described in Mr. Grisham's letter.)  

Author John Grisham and his wife Renee in Paris

As I write this letter,  I am finishing the last edits of The French Illusion, my next novel, to be published in the Fall. I usually spend about six months writing a novel, and when I'm finished I quietly pat myself on the back for another job well done, then try to forget about it, and start thinking about the next story.

But, not so fast❗ Although writing is often enjoyable and challenging, the editing is not. It takes weeks, even months, to slog through the manuscript again and again, tossing out sections here and there, tightening up the plot, adding and discarding characters, tweaking sentences, and trying to remember what I was thinking when I wrote such dreadful dialogue only four months ago. The editing process is a drag, but it is crucial to the completion of a novel. Editors are professionals who can spot small weaknesses that are easily fixable, as well as major problems that require overhauls. Good writers never stop listening to their editors.

Outlining the story beforehand and editing it after the first draft are two exercises most writers prefer to avoid. But both are important to the success of the book, and often fatal if ignored.

Anyway, back to The French Illusion. So, when A Time To Kill was published in 1989, its reception was rather low-key, to put it mildly. There was no second printing, no paperback, no mention of foreign translations. Hollywood never called. However, when The Firm arrived 18 months later, things were far different. After selling the U.S. and U.K. rights, my agent took the book to Europe where it was well received. Renee and I watched in disbelief as the Germans, French, Italians, Spanish, and Portuguese lined up to buy the translation rights. Then Scandinavia, then Asia. By the end of 1990, we had contracts to publish the book in 30 languages.

We had never been to Europe and couldn't wait to see Paris. We've always read a lot - Renee has a degree in English literature - and we knew the legend of the "Lost Generation," a collection of disillusioned and struggling American writers and artists who gravitated to Paris in the early 1900's. They included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, and Ezra Pound, and they hung out with the likes of T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, and James Joyce. We found their old haunts, had coffee and drinks in their favorite bars, enjoyed long meals in the same timeless bistros, and spent hours on the sidewalk cafes of Boulevard St. Germain. We also visited the famous sights, poked around galleries and museums, and roamed the streets for hours. Like millions before us, and after, we fell in love with Paris and have returned many times.

My French publisher is JC Lattes, one of many imprints of Hachette, the Paris giant that owns Little, Brown and Grand Central in the U.S. The Lattes office is on Rue Jacob, a busy, narrow side street with the usual assortment of shops and small hotels. The building is centuries old (aren't they all?). It is tall and narrow with four or five levels connected by a baffling configuration of stairways. ADA would not approve. It's a throwback to the old days of publishing with small offices, sagging shelves stuffed with manuscripts, unsteady air conditioning, and walls covered with artwork and book jackets. Though thoroughly tech-wired and modern, the offices, like many in Paris, seem timeless, as if little has changed since the dark ages before the internet. The Lattes team is young, enthusiastic, and eager to publish books that will satisfy and entertain their audiences.

I adore the Lattes offices and visit as often as possible.

Anyway, back to The French Illusion. One day I was at Lattes being interviewed by a radio journalist, a Parisian, and we were talking about his beloved city. He asked why I had never used it as the backdrop for a novel❓ I had set books in Italy, Brazil and the Caribbean, among other places, so why not Paris❓ 

I tried to explain that I can't simply "create" a story. It takes inspiration, an idea captured from somewhere, and once I have the beginnings of a plot I can start to think about the characters and the setting.

Finally, the inspiration arrived with The French Illusion, a suspenseful story that begins and ends in Paris.

So, what am I reading❓👀📗📘🕮

I just finished two good books, both non-fiction. The first is Redemption, by Lawrence Wright, a longtime journalist for New Yorker: The story takes place in the author's native Texas and is about a group of nuns in a convent outside of Waco. Through the efforts of a Catholic deacon, they visit the eight women on death row at the prison in Gatesville, Texas. At first, the nuns are afraid of the women, all convicted killers, and the inmates are suspicious of the nuns. Before long, though, they realize they have more in common than they could imagine. Friendships flourish as the women begin to understand one another.

Redemption will be published by Knopf in October.

The second is Up On Cove Mountain by Earl Swift. As a young man, Swift hiked all 2200 miles of the Appalachian Trail, an experience that not only changed his life but gave it direction. However, his trip was haunted by tragedy. Along the way, he met and befriended a young couple. They hiked together for three days before he picked up his pace and left them behind. Two weeks later, he heard the news that they had been murdered at a campsite he had used. The killer was arrested, tried, and given the death penalty. Thirty-three years later, Swift returned to the trail - older, wiser, and somewhat slower, but still haunted by its memories.

Up On Cove Mountain will be published by Mariner Books in August.

So, what am I writing❓

Finishing The French Illusion, and in a holding pattern, waiting for inspiration.

Let's write about the 70th anniversary of the blockbuster "Peyton Place" and the tragic life of the book's author

(Maine Writer:  I recall how our Dundalk, Maryland public library kept this book hidden under the distribution desk so minors like me would be unable to read it.)

70 years since the scandal surrounding the publication of 'Peyton Place'. Echo report published in Elmundo America by Luis Fernando Romo. 

Grace Metalious and her husband, George, at home in front of the typewriter.

The anniversary of the provocative 'best seller' that made a poor American housewife rich and famous is celebrated. She ended up ruined, alcoholic, and estranged from her family.

Grace Metalious' name may have been forgotten, but not her scandalous novel Peyton Place, which is now celebrating its 70th anniversary. Fame exacerbated her alcoholism, she fought with her three children, and her lover inherited everything.

A poor housewife, uneducated and addicted to alcohol, overnight became one of the great literary phenomena of the 1950s. Amidst the scandal involving Ingrid Bergman after leaving her husband and daughter for Roberto Rossellini and Elizabeth Taylor's excommunication by the Vatican for her affair with Richard Burton during Cleopatra, there was another uproar that left conservative American society disturbed.

In 1956, Grace Metalious published Peyton Place, the most transgressive and sinful novel to date, exposing the most shameful human miseries such as domestic violence, racial and class hatred, corruption of religious power, and taboo conversations like childhood sexual abuse, the right to abortion, and women's sexual awakening, among others.

But, until success came, Grace couldn't shake off the memory of that lonely girl who escaped the poverty of her home by taking refuge in her aunt's bathroom where she wrote poems and fairy tales.

An avid reader with an unfathomable imagination, Grace wanted to erase any trace of the impoverished ghetto in which she was trapped. The small Franco-American community of Manchester, a town in New Hampshire, New England, was not meant for her.

Therefore, she didn't hesitate to change the spelling of her last name, DeRepentigny, to invent a French aristocratic lineage while in high school. She tried to convince everyone that her full name was Grace Marie-Antoinette Jeanne d'Arc de Repentigny, but she became the laughingstock of almost everyone.

In her quest for a glamorous past, she took after her mother, who used to sell trinkets like antique French furniture at flea markets. She never heard from her father again after he enlisted in the Navy.

Despite opposition from both families, Grace married at 18 years old her high school friend George Metalious, from whom she took her last name and with whom she had three children, Marsha, Christopher, and Cynthia.

Once again, writing helped her cope with a tubal ligation, her husband's service in World War II, and their infidelities.

After moving to Gilmanton, New Hampshire, Grace sought a way to type her first major novel while enduring severe poverty. To concentrate, she sent her hungry, blue-lipped children out into the street, while neighbors criticized her behavior. To them, the writer was a strange specimen sabotaging the strict conservative norms by dressing in an androgynous manner.

Rising above adversity, in the summer of 1955, she completed her first manuscript titled The Tree and the Flower.

Several publishers ignored the story until it landed in the hands of Kitty Messner, the founder of a small independent publishing house and one of the few women in the field.

After changing the title to Peyton Place, the novel was released in September 1956. The story exposed the hypocrisy, scandals, and dark secrets behind the moral façade of a small town in New England. On the 70th anniversary of the work, the publisher Blackie Books releases Return to Peyton Place, which the writer marketed in 1959.

The puritan and self-righteous society collapsed. How dare she, a woman, insult the image of so many respectable citizens? Critics called the work sensationalist garbage, immoral, obscene, and devoid of literary value.

Some bookstores even displayed a sign saying: "We don't have any copies of Peyton Place. If you want this book, go to Salem." Punishment soon followed. Children didn't want to play with her kids, her husband was fired from his teaching job, the townspeople thought she was talking about them, and they tore her apart with gossip.

Revenge also came. In the first month, she sold 100,000 copies, and Twentieth Century Fox paid her 250,000 dollars for the film and television rights. In 1957, the movie was released under the title "Peyton Place" starring Lana Turner and Hope Lange, receiving nine Oscar nominations. And in 1964, the TV series of the same name was created with Ryan O'Neal and Mia Farrow.

Wealth revealed the dark side of fame for Grace Metalious, who succumbed to alcoholism and stopped speaking to her children. 

After divorcing George in 1958, she married a DJ, from whom she also separated to return to her first husband. Tragically, she passed away at 39 from cirrhosis after becoming a grandmother.

Shortly before her death, her last lover, the journalist John Rees, persuaded her to leave everything to him. The family contested the will when he had already spent it all.

Let's write about rare times when politics was fun!

When Maine Politics Was Fun—and Sometimes Funny
By Tom Porter published in Bowdoin News

Yours truly Maine Writer is among the contributors.

Chris Potholm ’62: government scholar, political strategist, and author

Politics is, of course, a serious affair, but that doesn’t mean it should be devoid of humor, says Chris Potholm ’62, Bowdoin’s DeAlva Stanwood Alexander Professor of Government Emeritus.

It was this rationale that prompted Potholm—a seasoned political strategist and former Maine guide as well as a Bowdoin scholar—to help compile a newly released collection of humorous essays called Real Life, Real Funny: The Way Maine Humor Should Be (Down East Books, 2026).

Potholm says the book came out of a conversation he was having with a couple of friends who are also old hands from the Maine political scene—PR guru Dennis Bailey, a veteran of many campaigns, and former Congressman David Emery, a GOP insider and political consultant.

“We were talking about how miserable politics is today and how when we were on opposite sides of a campaign, of course we wanted to win, but we didn't think it was ‘all or nothing.’ We had friends on both sides, and if you lost, it wasn’t the end of the world.” In fact, adds Potholm, you might even hire your opponent to work on your next campaign. Politics today, he laments, is much less convivial and more divided. “People just didn’t do the sorts of things that they’re now encouraged to do.”

As a result of their conversation, the three friends decided to put together a collection of more than forty essays from dozens of contributors. In addition to contributions from the book’s three editors, there are vignettes from a number of well-known political figures, such as former US Defense Secretary and US Senator William Cohen ’62, H’75, former Maine governors John Baldacci and Angus King H’07 (currently a serving US Senator), as well as the current state governor, Janet Mills.

Potholm visibly cracks up as he recalls some of the anecdotes: Bill Cohen trying for a photo opportunity with “Andre the seal” while campaigning in Boothbay Harbor and promptly getting bitten on the backside by said mammal; John Baldacci failing miserably in a cow manure throwing contest at a Maine county fair (“I never was good at slinging the bull,” quipped the politician); or Maine Governor Janet Mills being attacked by a goose!

“Angus King also had some great stories,” says Potholm, “as he used to roll around the state on a motorbike, dressed in leather.” Many of the people he encountered weren’t used to seeing a politician looking like that. Some were incredulous. “Yeah, sure, and I’m Queen Elizabeth,” said one woman after King introduced himself as the state’s governor.

On another occasion, King and his motorcycling buddies had pulled over at a rest stop when they met a couple of fellow bikers from Massachusetts. “Welcome to Maine, I’m the governor,” said King, only to be reminded that they were in still in New Hampshire at the time!

A number of Bowdoin alumni are featured in the book: Apart from Potholm and Cohen, there are contributions from Jed Lyons ’74, Spiros Droggitis ’74, Bob Whelan ’62, Kevin Delahanty ’74, and Edie Smith ’81. Also featured is Bowdoin’s longtime communications director Scott Hood, who writes amusingly about his dog’s tendency for bringing roadkill into the house.

The book also includes stories from outside the world of politics, several of them featuring stock Maine characters such as farmers, fishermen, and hunters. Many of the tales are imbued with the deadpan humor so common in the Pine Tree State, says Potholm. “For example, if a Mainer runs into a friend at Hannaford, a typical greeting might be, ‘Hey, I didn't know you were out on bail,’” (said with a straight face).

Mainers are known across the nation for their dry sense humor, he observes. As the opening sentence of the book notes, “Maine humor is not an oxymoron, whereas Utah humor is.” The key trait is its understatement, explains Potholm. “It’s just a couple of clicks from reality.”

Juliana L'Heureux of Topsham, Maine, is honored to be among the book's contributors. 

Lets write about how America's past has the power to frame our future: The American I Have Known

I Remember America Before the Measles Vaccine
And I wish Robert F. Kennedy Jr. did too.
By Fran Moreland Johns published in The Atlantic June 2026

Lately, I’ve come to notice that the strangest and most terrible pieces of my childhood are roaring back. I was born in 1933, and much of what I remember as a little girl was defined by either the war or what we called, simply, sickness.

I myself was blessed with exceptionally good health, but my friends, family, and community were regularly struck with childhood diseases. Neighborhoods were frozen in fear when maladies suddenly erupted: pool closures during polio epidemics, quarantines when mumps or measles raged. I remember one particularly galling time when my older sister Mimi and I were confined to the house, morosely watching our friends playing on the construction site of a new house across the street. We were fine; they all had whooping cough. Whooping cough was often deadly for babies and toddlers but among the less debilitating of childhood diseases past for older children, thus the freedom to play while coughing. Neither Mimi nor I ever caught it—a fact I was grateful for 40 years later, when I met with a pulmonologist about my cigarette-compromised lungs and he remarked, “At least you never had whooping cough.”

We did, however, catch chicken pox simultaneously with our older sisters, Jane and Helen; we were then 5, 7, 11, and 13. Just thinking of it can resurrect the itch. (And lest I forget, some 70 years later, following a time of extended stress, that long-dormant varicella-zoster virus returned as a bout of shingles.) But that was nothing compared with the measles Jane contracted. Memories of those days, among the most vivid of my early life, still evoke tremors in the bottom of my stomach. There was widespread fear of measles causing blindness, which had indeed happened to a young family acquaintance. So for several days at the height of her illness, Jane was quarantined in one bedroom while Helen moved in with Mimi and me. The shades were drawn and curtains closed in Jane’s room, and the door was opened only after the hallway was darkened. She survived—and later went on to become a wife, mother, and well-regarded artist. But that was just the luck of the draw. Measles killed some 10,000 American children in the 1930s and ’40s—roughly 500 kids died every year. In my generation, we were the guinea pigs for what science would soon discover: This pesky childhood sickness increases the risk of stroke, chronic lung problems, and impaired neurodevelopment.

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was not born yet when all of this took place. By the time he turned 13, in 1967, most of the diseases that ravaged my childhood had been eradicated by the vaccines he now disdains. The unfortunate thing about that disdain is that Kennedy has the power to impose his bizarre notions on the entire country. It’s too bad that we have no way to time-capsule him back several decades (or time-travel forward, for that matter) in hopes that he might understand the havoc he will wreak upon future generations.

RFK Jr. would have liked my friend Jack, a rambunctious child given to sudden mischief. Jack was part of a foursome, the others being Mary Sue and Tommy and me. We bonded days after I arrived in Ashland, Virginia, having just turned 6. For several years we were inseparable, even when Jack developed rheumatic fever and was bedridden for weeks. We simply detoured from climbing trees and playing ball into spending afternoons staging battles with toy soldiers on his bed or listening, enraptured, to his favorite radio serials, including The Lone Ranger and Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy. Jack was isolated even from the three of us when whooping cough rampaged through the town, but he still managed to catch that too. He died of heart failure at age 19; how much of that good young heart’s failure was due to those earlier illnesses, we’ll never know. That was more than half a century ago. 

I never forgot Jack. I wish I could tell JFKjr, Kennedy about him, and the pain his death caused everyone who loved him.

The other childhood friend I would most like our health secretary to know is Susan, who moved to our neighborhood in second grade and contracted polio when we were in our early teens. I remember being taken to visit her when she was in an iron lung. Though she was in a highly restricted part of the hospital, I was allowed to visit, largely because she was not expected to live and we were desperate to see each other. In those days of family doctors who made house calls for everything but major emergencies, I had been in a hospital once or twice at most. I knew all about the iron lung and was thoroughly familiar with Susan’s precarious state; still, I was not prepared for the sight of a giant monster of a machine on sturdy legs, with only my friend’s head protruding from one end.

There were six of them in all, I think, in a cold room smelling of ether and rubbing alcohol: six futuristic creatures with human heads. Nurses in starched white uniforms and rubber-soled white shoes walked wordlessly among the machines, which kept up a steady thrum as they forced air in and out of failing lungs. Susan’s mother stood on one side, stroking her daughter’s hair, while Susan and I talked in voices just above a whisper, as if we were in church. She wanted to tell me about the boy who had been in the iron lung behind where I sat, who was there when she arrived but a few days ago had vanished. There was only one other visitor, another mother stroking another small head. Happy as I was to see Susan, I couldn’t help wondering if I would be able to summon the courage to endure such hardship just to survive. But survive she did, unexpectedly, to live to adulthood with some disabilities.

The disabilities resulting from those childhood diseases far exceeded the recorded life-and-death statistics: the compromised lungs, the weakened hearts, the bones and muscles and systems unable to develop as they might have. It’s impossible to calculate the awful toll. Vaccines, though, changed it all, essentially vanquishing those diseases in the United States and much of the rest of the world. The rejection of science is sending us back to those dark ages.

When I was 12 years old, Americans everywhere threw what can only be described as a two-day party. It was 1945, and Japan had surrendered. Euphoria swept across the country, including in small towns like Ashland, where my friends and I had pulled red wagons around to gather scrap for the war effort. There had been a slight exhaling of breath the previous May, on what came to be known as V-E Day, and another one after the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August. (Only later would I learn the grim moral complexity of such weapons.) 

Yet, the end of the two front devastating war brought a widespread belief that lasting peace was no longer just a dream. Flags went up on every front porch, the sounds of long-hoarded firecrackers pierced the air, perfect strangers hugged each other on sidewalks, and high-school bands paraded in the streets.

Those of us who are now in our 90s might be forgiven a twinge of nostalgia for that moment. But this is no plea to return to some imaginary good old days. Indelibly etched into my brain are memories from the decade leading up to our entry into the war. I was 4, at most, the night my father awakened Mimi and me in what seemed the middle of the night and gently carried us downstairs into the living room. He deposited us on the floor in front of the Philco radio. We sat at the feet of our mother, who was on the sofa darning socks. There were crackling sounds coming from the radio, someone speaking over the noise of a crowd. My father explained that we were in no danger but that terrible things were happening in the world, largely because of one very bad man, and he wanted us to hear what this madman sounded like: Adolf Hitler on a shortwave-radio broadcast. We, of course, had no idea what Hitler was saying. But the angry shouts to a cheering crowd, sounds reinforced later in newsreel clips shown at movies we occasionally attended, carried a powerful message I have never forgotten. They were the sounds of evil, the antithesis of “Love thy neighbor.”

Americans survived those years on kindness and collective effort. In the 1930s, when hunger, poverty, and despair were at levels hard to imagine today, you could have nothing and still be kind. As a child who never went hungry, I was spared the traumas suffered by many, but I witnessed hardship in the nation’s psyche. My father had a job that paid enough to feed four daughters and cover the mortgage on our tiny three-bedroom house, albeit just barely. Several times a week, men in worn coats and brown fedoras in search of food and work would knock on our back door. My mother would make peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches, hand them to me with glasses of milk, and instruct me to be very polite to “our visitors.”

Throughout World War II, we knitted socks for soldiers and went with our mother to deliver hot cross buns to neighbors when a new Gold Star was hung in someone’s front window. 

We kids were also serious about collecting scrap and were occasionally enlisted to help watch the skies from a small rural hut for the rare passing airplane, whose description we would carefully record in a government logbook. My memories of these long-ago years are spotty; I was just a child.

Far more clearly I recall the aftermath, when all of those men (and a few women) in uniform came home—Jane married one of them—and war stories were left behind. Everyone was in a hurry to move forward into a newly peaceful world, a world without the tragedies of war abroad and the curse of sickness at home.

It was a time of singular, optimistic patriotism. No one thought the road ahead would be easy; everyone believed that peace and shared prosperity were possible. For nearly a century, I’ve been privileged to watch the fits, starts, and swings of that optimism: the forward leaps of science and technology, the backward falls into tragic wars, the sidesteps into misguided ideologies. But the collective effort behind those hot cross buns and front-porch flags? That is still who we are, if we choose to be.

Let's write a different point of view about the American Revolution and the 250th national anniversary

Why the American Revolution Brought
Liberty — And the French Revolution a Reign of Terror

“Oath o

“Oath of La Fayette at the Fête de la Fédération,” Unknown, ca. 1790-91, Musée Carvavalet, Paris

Echo COMMENTARY by Solène Tadié
published in the National Catholic Register: 

The experiences of Lafayette and other veterans of the American War of Independence reveal why many came to see the French Revolution as the opposite of the freedom they had defended across the Atlantic.

“Humanity has gained its suit. Liberty will never more be without an asylum.”

When the Marquis de Lafayette wrote these words in 1781, shortly after the Continental Army’s victory at Yorktown, he believed he had witnessed an event that the rest of the world would emulate: a people freeing themselves from tyranny to govern themselves as they had always wished.

Within a decade, this Frenchman would be forced into exile from his homeland, which was tearing itself apart in the name of the very ideals his example had helped inspire, and would spend years in an Austrian prison.

The 250th anniversary of American independence is an occasion to celebrate the long-standing Franco-American friendship. But it is also an opportunity to address a question absent from official commemorations: Were the American and French revolutions truly events of the same nature, separated only by time and geography?

The men who lived through both knew the answer. Many of the French officers whom King Louis XVI sent across the Atlantic to fight alongside the colonial insurgents found themselves on the other side of the barricades when revolution broke out in their own country (1789-1799) — hunted down, imprisoned and executed by a regime that proclaimed itself the legitimate heir to the freedom for which they had fought in America.

Political vs. Ideological Revolutions

“People are wrong to compare the two revolutions,” historian Reynald Sécher, one of France’s foremost scholars of the counterrevolutionary movements and author of A French Genocide: the Vendée, told the Register. “The American Revolution had for its sole aim to free itself from the tutelage of the king of England — a tutelage that expressed itself almost exclusively through fiscal obligations. Fundamentally, the insurgents did not call into question the nature of society.”

France was a very different matter, Sécher said.

“The revolutionaries had a specific program,” he explained, “which consisted of destroying the divine right monarchy and the traditional, ordered society, to replace them with a new world, a new order, a new man.”

He argued, moreover, that the American Revolution was political in nature — aimed at breaking away from a distant crown that had overstepped its rights — while the French Revolution was purely ideological. In Sécher’s view, it was a project of fundamental transformation that targeted everything beyond its control, including the faith of ordinary people.

The Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the systematic persecution of resistant priests, and the forced de-Christianization of entire regions were not merely excesses of this movement, Sécher insisted, but its natural corollary. This campaign against the Catholic faith also resulted in the public execution of the 16 Carmelite nuns of Compiègne during the Reign of Terror in 1794 for refusing to renounce their religious vocation.

King Louis XVI had entered the war in the U.S. for reasons that were far less philosophical than strategic; the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) had cost France its first colonial empire, and supporting the insurgents was a way to settle scores with England.

But what the officers sent across the Atlantic discovered would leave a lasting impression on them. They encountered a society that aspired to autonomy without, however, upending the world in which it existed. Churches remained active and local institutions retained their vitality, even playing a key role in the independence process. 

Actually, it was this experience of an orderly and deeply rooted freedom that these men brought home with them. And it was precisely this that enabled them, when the time came, to recognize the opposite.

The Men Who Knew the Difference

France officially allied itself with the American insurgents in 1778. Among the officers deployed alongside the Americans were several men who would later become leading figures in the armed resistance against the French Revolution. “In reality,” noted Sécher, “the majority of the French Royal Navy officers rejected the revolution in their own country, which led to mass resignations and numerous exiles.”

Perhaps one of the most revealing examples of this paradox is that of Armand Tuffin de La Rouërie. A nobleman and personal friend of General George Washington, he distinguished himself by fighting in America, forging a reputation as a courageous commander.

“A parliamentarian and heir to an illustrious family, this man was a rebel who had risen up against his own world — the world of tradition — in the name of individual and collective freedom,” explained Sécher. “It was with this logic that he enlisted alongside the American insurgents.”

Yet, as soon as he set foot on his native soil again, a bitter reality dawned on him.

“He immediately understood that the nature of the revolution underway was contrary to natural law — and that the only true guarantor and protector of this natural law was the king, the divine right monarchy.”

He organized the resistance in his native province of Brittany and founded a counterrevolutionary movement that would come to be known as the Chouannerie.

Another veteran of the American campaigns, François-Athanase de Charette de la Contrie, would go on to become the most iconic figure of the Vendée counterrevolution. In 1793, this French naval officer was approached by Vendée peasants to lead their uprising against a republic that was closing their churches and conscripting their sons. The army he commanded called itself the Catholic and Royal Army.

“He did not fight for the monarchy out of nostalgia,” Sécher insisted, “but because it seemed to him the regime best suited to defend the natural rights set forth by Christ, St. Thomas Aquinas, and the Declaration of the Rights of Man. This is the paradox that his contemporaries struggle to grasp.”


At the Treaty of La Jaunaye in 1795, the terms he secured for the Vendéens were unambiguous: freedom of worship and exemption from conscription — the defense of local rights and individual freedoms against a revolution that, in his experience, was synonymous with de-Christianization, authoritarian centralization, and conscription forcibly imposed on the countryside. He was captured and executed by republican authorities in 1796.

This story remains in the collective consciousness of a segment of the country. At Puy-du-Fou, the famous historical theme park in the Vendée where Charette’s epic is reenacted every year before hundreds of thousands of visitors, Nicolas de Villiers — whose father Philippe, the park’s founder, considers himself an heir to the White Vendée fighters — keeps a certificate on his office wall attesting that his family is among the “Sons of the American Revolution.” This paradox, it seems, has never required explanation.
Burke’s Verdict

No contemporary grasped the stakes more clearly than Edmund Burke, one of the greatest minds of his time, as early as 1790. The Irish statesman and philosopher who had passionately defended the American colonists in the British Parliament — while opposing their complete independence — was dismayed by what he saw unfolding in France, viewing the revolution as the end of chivalry and the extinction of the glory of Europe.

As he wrote in his pamphlet “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” the revolutionaries were jeopardizing their posterity by failing to preserve the legacy of their ancestors, unlike the Americans. 

Burke put into powerful and definitive words what figures such as La Rouërie and Charette had already come to understand through experience on the ground.

“You began ill,” he wrote, “because you began by despising everything that belonged to you. You set up your trade without a capital.”

To Burke, freedom detached from moral restraint inevitably became destructive: “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

These reflections remain as relevant as ever 250 years later.

What set the American Revolution apart from the French Revolution was, above all, a conception of freedom that Western societies are now compelled to reconsider: the idea that freedom without roots, without heritage, and without a moral order is merely a prelude to tyranny.

Keywords:
liberty
american revolution
french revolution
marquis de lafayette
united states
freedom


Solène Tadié Solène Tadié is the Europe Correspondent for EWTN News. A French-Swiss journalist based between Rome and Budapest, she has covered religious, political, and cultural affairs across Europe for several years. She previously worked on the Culture section of L’Osservatore Romano, the Vatican’s Italian-language daily newspaper. In addition to her reporting, she is a frequent speaker and moderator at international conferences on major societal and civilizational issues. She is the author of a forthcoming book-length interview with Cardinal Péter Erdő, Le Royaume et le monde (Cerf, 2026), and is currently working on a book on the renewal of the Catholic faith in Europe, to be published in the U.S. in 2027. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from Roma Tre University (Italy) and a degree in philosophy from the Pontifical University of Saint Thomas Aquinas (Angelicum, Italy).

Let's Write about protecting the rights of trees! Who speaks for the trees?

Who Speaks for the Trees❓ 🌲🌳A Tiny Quebec Town.

Echo report by Ephrat Livni published in The New York Times.

QUEBEC- Terrasse-Vaudreuil has adopted a resolution to protect trees, which its mayor called “indispensable allies,” as living beings.

The small town of Terrasse-Vaudreuil, Quebec, was carved out of the forest about 75 years ago. But until recently, the trees had no rights.

A few countries and local jurisdictions around the world have recognized the rights of nature to varying degrees. This town of about 2,000, just west of Montreal, is the first governing body to adopt the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Trees, according to the global environmental law tracker, Eco Jurisprudence Monitor. The resolution recognizes that trees, as living beings, have the right to exist, thrive and receive protections in the law.

“If we live in Terrasse-Vaudreuil, it’s because we love trees,” said Sylvie Trépanier, a member of the town’s environmental committee, which drove the resolution. “We want to keep what we have.”
Trees, Please

Last spring, about 60 residents attended a screening of “Des Arbres et Des Arts,” or “The Trees and the Arts,” a documentary by the Quebec filmmaker André Desrochers that proposes trees should receive legal rights. “We decided we really need to do something,” Ms. Trépanier said

The town’s environmental committee wrote a proposal to prioritize tree protection for the health of the canopy and the broader community, and it gained widespread support.

When councilors adopted the resolution unanimously, Mayor Michel Bourdeau declared, “Today, we affirm that trees are not merely a backdrop in our community. They are indispensable allies for our health, our climate resilience, and our quality of life.”

The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Trees was drafted in France in 2018, and 2019, by lawyers, ecologists and lawmakers. It mandates that humanity “act with the Tree in a spirit of fraternity and solidarity” and has been presented as a petition to the United Nations and the European Parliament, among others.

Adopting the resolution was not merely symbolic, Mr. Bourdeau said in an interview. In Terrasse-Vaudreuil, practically, the resolution requires the town to prioritize canopy protection across all municipal planning. The next step is to review existing regulations and strengthen tree protections, the mayor said, followed by plans to plant and distribute trees to schools, businesses and residents in an ongoing effort to protect and diversify what has now been deemed a collective asset.

This month, a bill was introduced in the British Parliament to recognize the rights of nature. More than three dozen communities in the United States, and a handful in Canada, Mexico, Peru, Australia, Ireland, and Northern Ireland have adopted laws or nonbinding resolutions recognizing such rights, according to Mari Margil, who heads the Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights. And Ecuador enshrined rights of nature in its Constitution in 2008.

Nature has long been considered property in legal systems around the world and treated as a resource. The rights of nature movement advances laws recognizing nature’s independent right to exist, thrive and regenerate.

In 2008, the organization Ms. Margil leads worked with delegates to Ecuador’s constitutional convention to develop rights of nature provisions. Since then, laws and court rulings in Panama, Colombia, Bolivia, Uganda, Bangladesh, and Spain “have recognized that nature possesses legally enforceable rights — including the most basic of rights, the right to exist,” she wrote. “This is a movement that has grown quickly,” she added.
But it took decades to gain traction.

Once Unthinkable:  “Throughout legal history, each successive extension of rights to some new entity has been, theretofore, a bit unthinkable,” wrote Christopher D. Stone in a 1972, Southern California Law Review article proposing legal rights for “natural objects” like trees.

He argued that “the rightlessness of rightless ‘things’” seems inherent or fundamentally true, rather than “a legal convention acting in support of some status quo.” Just as laws denying rights to women, children and people of various abilities, races, ethnicities, nationalities and religions were once considered just before becoming unacceptable, views on nature could similarly change, Mr. Stone suggested.

“It is no answer to say that streams and forests cannot have standing because streams and forests cannot speak,” he wrote. “Corporations cannot speak either; nor can states, estates, infants, incompetents, municipalities or universities. Lawyers speak for them.”

That same year, United States Supreme Court Justice William Douglas echoed this view, dissenting in a case that ruled the Sierra Club lacked standing to challenge development in California’s Sequoia National Forest. Justice Douglas argued people should be able to sue on behalf of “environmental objects” for their preservation, and that if inanimate objects, like ships, can be parties in litigation, “so it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life.”

The justice’s stance more than a half century ago is “still pretty far out,” said Carl R. Gold, a Maryland lawyer and naturalist who has written about tree rights. But, he praised Terrasse-Vaudreuil for taking “a terrific first step.”

“Trees need someone to speak up for them,” he said.

Ephrat Livni is a Times reporter covering news around the world.