James Monroe, an Extraordinary American (Part II)

Chair purchased in Europe by the Monroe family 

Photo: Ileana Johnson 2023

Monroe was recalled in 1796 by George Washington, at the urging of Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, a Federalist, under the shadow that he may have worked against the interests of the U.S. by favoring the French over the British. Monroe was angry because he felt that the never got an explanation for his recall and he was sure that he never did anything improper to deserve recalling.

James Monroe was elected Governor of Virginia in 1799-1802 and he had to move his family to Richmond, but the mansion was so dilapidated that they were unable to move in until the fall of 1800. Despite the repairs, the Governor’s mansion was torn down eventually and a new one built in 1811.

James Monroe's desk where he sat to write the Monroe Doctrine 

Photo: Ileana Johnson February 2023

As Governor, James Monroe had to contend with a constant fear of slave revolt, with the most decisive moment being Gabriel’s Rebellion of August 1800. Slaves from a local plantation were planning on attacking the city, burn it, and seize weapons and powder supplies stored at the penitentiary. The attack was impeded by a thunderstorm during the night and slaves were arrested. Thirty-one were put on trial and executed for their roles in the conspiracy.  

In 1803 James Monroe was assigned to diplomatic service again, this time in London. His assignment in Great Britain was extended several times even though the family disliked the polluted air and the chilly reception from the city’s high society. While in London, they lived in three different homes, two of which still stand today.

Between 1803 and 1807, James Monroe served as extraordinary envoy to France, Spain, and England at President Thomas Jefferson’s request to restore negotiations with France. According to the archives, “The American economy was being threatened by Spain’s refusal to allow free navigation on the Mississippi River and the use of New Orleans as a port. Spain had then ceded control of the Louisiana Territory to France. Robert Livingston was Minister to France at the time, and was having no success in negotiating use of the Mississippi with the French.”

The negotiations with the French were meant to gain the right to use the Mississippi and perhaps buy some land around New Orleans for a port. When Monroe arrived, the French negotiators asked the Americans if they were interested in buying the entire Louisiana Territory. Taken by surprise, Livingston and Monroe discussed a price on their own, and the French eventually agreed to $11.2 million for 828,000 square miles, doubling the size of the new nation. In 1803, James Monroe was thus responsible for the largest land purchase ever made by the United States.

James Monroe continued to serve Virginia and the United States:

-          1810 Virginia Assembly

-          1811-1817 Governor of Virginia (three months of a 4^th term) and then Secretary of State under the Madison administration (dealt with the British impressment of Americans into the British military and other issues on the Northwest Territories; in 1812 U.S. declared war on Great Britain)

When Madison was appointed Secretary of State in 1811, he moved to Washington but his family stayed at Highland. In 1812 they were set up in a furnished townhouse at 2017 Eye Street (the exterior of the home is the same but the interior has been changed). They were still in debt from the time spent in Europe.

In August 1814, Secretary Monroe and President Madison decided that it was best to evacuate Washington as the British ships were sailing up the Potomac to sack the city. Monroe’s reconnaissance culminated in the Battle of Bladensburg, a failed attempt by American forces to slow down the advance of the British troops towards Washington.  Monroe and Madison returned to Washington and decided to evacuate the city and the archives state that on August 24, 1814, they were the last cabinet members to leave the city as the British were arriving. Monroe is said to have spent the night at Rokeby farm outside Washington.

In 1814 President Madison appointed James Monroe Secretary of War. Monroe resigned his position as Secretary of State, however, because President Madison did not appoint a new secretary, James Monroe served for a short time as both Secretary of State and Secretary of War.

James Monroe was elected president in 1816, following his friend, James Madison. The Monroe family did not move into the White House (called then President’s House) right away, as it had been burned by the British during the war of 1812. They brought their own furniture but it was not enough to fill all the large rooms of the mansion.

Congress allowed funds and Monroe appointed several buyers to purchase furniture from Europe. According to the archives, “the oldest furnishings on display in the White House are those that were placed in the mansion by the Monroes.” Mrs. Monroe presided over formal visits, state visits, and brought entertaining customs to the President’s House. She held open houses, when anybody in Washington could come in and meet the President.

His two terms, 1817-1825, are known as the Era of Good Feeling. There were few conflicts during that time. His presidency is recognized for the Missouri Compromise and the statement called the Monroe Doctrine.

The Missouri Compromise which he signed into law on March 5, 1820, allowed Missouri, a slave holding state, and the free state of Maine, to join the Union, and established the 36^th parallel as the dividing line between northern free states and southern slave states.

Monroe himself had slaves but advocated for “eventually ending the slave trade.” A New York representative had proposed to free all slaves over the age of 21 as a condition to join the union. The country was in turmoil debating the issue. “Senator Barbour of Virginia worked a plan that would admit Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a new free state.” Forty years later the issue would erupt again into a Civil War.

On December 2, 1823, during his annual message to Congress, now called the State of the Union, President Monroe made a statement in support of the people of South America who had gained their independence from Spain. This statement, known now as the Monroe Doctrine, established three things:

1.      The Americas were no longer going to be colonized.

2.      The U.S. had no interest in interfering in the European internal affairs and therefore European nations should stay out of the affairs of American nations.

3.      Any attempt by a European nation to control an American nation would be seen as a hostile act against the United States.

The Monroe doctrine reaffirmed George Washington’s policy but “it also asserted that, if provoked, the United States would retaliate.”

The Monroe Doctrine has been invoked several times:

-          1836 to protest the alliance between Great Britain and the Republic of Texas

-          1864 to protest Napoleon III’s invasion of Mexico.

-          1870, interpreted that U.S. had the authority to mediate border disputes in South America

-          1904, Roosevelt Corollary, he extended the doctrine to include Central America and Caribbean nations when they could not pay their international debt

-          1962, J. F. Kennedy used the Monroe Doctrine to “isolate the communist menace in Cuba.”

-          1980s, the Monroe Doctrine was used to justify U.S. involvement in civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua; the new interpretation resulted in public outcry of the Iran-Contra Affair

-          2003, George W. Bush used the Monroe Doctrine to justify the invasion of Iraq, the Bush Corollary

The Monroe Museum in Fredericksburg contains a piece of furniture bought in Paris, ca. 1795, which the family legend calls the Monroe Doctrine desk, brought back to the U.S. in 1817. The desk has a secret compartment in which a cache of letters written between Monroe, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and others, was discovered in the 20^th century. The letters are found in the Ingrid Westesson Hoes Archives at the museum.

Highland estate - Wikipedia photo

James Monroe bought another farm in Albemarle County in 1793 which he named Highland. The family owned this farm from 1793 to 1825 and they used it as official residence from 1799-1823. Monroe called Highland his “cabin castle” because it was rustic and remote with a beautiful view of the mountains. Highland was close to Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s estate. Highland is now known as Ash Lawn-Highland, and it is open to the public.

The Monroes spent time between Highland estate near Charlottesville, Virginia and the plantation outside Washington, D.C. called Oak Hill. After 25 years at Highland, James Monroe decided that going back and forth was too stressful for his wife, so he sold Highland in 1825.

Museum Archives

Oak Hill still stands today but it is not open to the public.

Elizabeth Monroe was often ill throughout her entire life, allegedly suffering from epilepsy. She had a seizure in front of an open fireplace, was burnt terribly, and died three years later, in 1830, having suffered constantly from those burns. Her husband lived one more year without his beloved Elizabeth. He died on July 4, 1831. 

James Monroe was one of the most remarkable American Presidents and statesman, a man of integrity and honor, who served his country in so many ways, with intelligence, wisdom, courage and dedication. He left behind a rich historical legacy that Americans should be proud of, admire, and emulate.

NOTE: It is truly sad that so few Americans care about their history, good or bad, and the remarkable men who built our nation. It takes foreigners like me who are American citizens by choice to appreciate history and the events and men who shaped who we are today.

If Americans would spend as much energy, time, and money to watch football and other sports, collegiate and professional, our country would be in so much better shape and communists would not take over our country as they are currently doing.

The Medical Journey of Dr. Mircea, Part II

A fresh graduate in September 1961, Aurel described his six years of medical school quite succinctly – four years filled with communist propaganda, basic science classes, political classes, and the Russian language; two years focused mostly on hospital training, public health, and hygiene.  He wrote, “very little practical experience was accumulated during those final years. The final exam consisted of three medical subjects and the mandatory Marxism-Leninism oral test.”

The Marxism-Leninism test required the memorization of about 50 volumes of communist propaganda. The wise classmate Valeria managed to condense the 50 volumes into 2. It was easier to regurgitate two volumes of the worthless rhetoric that nobody will ever need, including the Useful Idiots.

To pay back the free education, graduates had to accept assignments wherever the communist party sent them. To make sure they complied, the health authorities in Bucharest withheld their medical diplomas until the rural assignment was completed or a replacement was found.

Aurel’s assignment was in two villages in Oltenia which had no electricity, no phones, no running water, no medical supplies, and no medical clinic. One room provided by the local “Feldscher” doubled as occasional examination room and bedroom for the Barefoot Doctor. A feldsher was a term derived from the German word Feldscher coined in the 15^th century, given to medieval barbers who practiced ancient medicine in the army.

Patient care was provided on foot, making house calls, rain or shine. After eight months of torture and deprivation of human rights, Aurel resigned, telling the medical commissar in Bucharest to keep his diploma and dropped out of the medical profession temporarily and became a musician.

During his last two years of medical school, students were exposed to some surgery but most of the hands-on medicine was accomplished during the 3-year long mandatory service in rural areas, practicing on desperate people who needed medical care the most.

After graduation, the privileged few, with connections to the Communist Party, remained in large cities as employees of the urban healthcare authorities or enrolled in a specialization course if they met the affirmative action criteria.

One night’s chance encounter with a Polish dentist and his wife in a dance club at the Black Sea where he was performing would eventually change Dr. Mircea’s life. The possibility of postgraduate studies in Warsaw under his sponsorship was discussed.

Poland, although a socialist country under the rule of the communist party, “preserved some degree of freedom of the press, religion and even allowed a certain degree of private enterprise including medical and dental practices. Realizing that the government is not the answer to all problems, the Polish authorities obliged its people’s demand for the preservation of private businesses and family farms.”

At the request of Comrade Ghiorghi Preda, Aurel had performed monthly concerts during medical school years. He would lie to him about the composers – Comrade Gershwinowsky (George Gershwin) and Comrade Portersky (Cole Porter), both graduates of the Moscow Conservatory of Music. Comrade Ghiorghi would nod his “brainwashed communist head in approval. As long you don’t play any imperialist tunes from America, which I hate with passion!” Boiling on the inside, Aurel never told Ghiorghi how much he hated his communist Romania which destroyed the people’s souls and spirit.

Aurel passed the indoctrination Marxist-Leninist written and oral tests with a perfect score, not because he knew the material, he despised it.  Thanks to his group of colleagues who had prepared beforehand all the correct answers to questions 1-60. What they thought the communist agitators wanted to hear as answers were lining the pockets of his jacket. With agile prestidigitation, he took out the correct and embellished answer to his question and dazzled the committee on which, surprisingly sat his medical school colleague and commissar Ghiorghi who never showed up for any exams but passed everything with a perfect score of 10.

Had Aurel and his group been caught cheating on the Marxist-Leninist test which counted 25 percent of the graduation score, they would have been expelled and sent to Siberia in a Gulag and would have never be seen or heard from again.

Aurel had picked up his temporary doctor’s diploma - the real one would be held hostage and locked up in the dean’s safe for the duration of the three years of mandatory service as a Barefoot Doctor in a rural area.

Luck intervened again. His prayers were answered when he met a colonel on campus who was looking for a doctor for one of his three non-combatant battalions staffed with young peasants drafted by force under the new conscription law which made them work from dawn to dusk for three years with an axe and a shovel, building roads, bridges, and other infrastructures.

The newly minted battalion physician reported to his job Monday through Saturday, tending to his motley crew in Buzau. The soldiers were healthy and strong, and his job involved only issues of hygiene and nutrition. The sixty-mile train and bus commute were pleasant, and he made friends with the regular riders, all pissed off at the communist regime but helpless to do anything about it.

Through the years, besides his native Romanian language, Dr. Mircea became fluent in French, Russian, Polish, English, and a bit of Afrikaans and Fanaglo, the Bantu People Esperanto of the subcontinent, a mix of Zulu and English.

The military commissar asked Comrade Doctor one day why he was studying foreign languages. Aside from the personal joy of being able to swear in Polish at the totalitarian commissar, Dr. Mircea answered the Comrade Captain with a straight face that he liked to study the history of the Soviet Union in the Russian language.

He wrote, “I was surrounded by soldiers who hated every minute of their forced conscription, by officers who were spying on each other and by a military commissar who tried every day to put someone in jail, including me.” You were never innocent until proven guilty, you were always guilty, it all depended on what charges the commissar would manufacture about a person they wanted imprisoned.

His stint with the battalion ended when he was forced by the new commander to swap his post so close to the capital with his son’s post far away. This son was addicted to drugs and Aurel’s post was much more enticing and closer to him and to the capital.  He used threats of many years of jail time against Aurel because he never stopped his correspondence with the Polish dentist, Dr. Kim-Ru, whom he had met at the Black Sea.  He knew, of course, all his letters were opened and read by Security Police, a huge apparatus formed to spy on citizens.

Additionally, to improve living conditions for the poor conscripts, they traded medicine they did not need, the soldiers were generally healthy, with the peasants in dire need of antibiotics and anti-inflammatories missing in commercial pharmacies, for meat and wine, improving their pathetic diet.  Bartering was a way of life if you wanted to survive under socialism, under the boot of the Communist Party because the economy was a centrally planned mess. Everybody wanted bribes and most people took things from where they worked in order to trade with others and survive. The commissars always wanted their cut until it became politically inconvenient.

Aurel’s constant dream was to have the Polish Ministry of Health give him a stipend for a postgraduate medical program in Warsaw, a suitable position in a good teaching hospital. To thwart those who constantly watched him, he wrote, “Dear Dr. Kim-Ru, I hereby express my total dedication to the cause of socialism in the Soviet bloc. I also voice my desire for Peace on Earth and my willingness to serve the great Marxist-Leninist ideology. I reaffirm that my fate is now in your hands and I’m waiting for your next move. Long live the Proletarian Paradise!” Dr. Mircea explained that, after writing such sentences exclusively for the communist censors monitoring the post office, “he puked three times in protest and hatred of dictatorship.”

Aurel’s chance encounter one night with the famous Russian composer Aram Khachaturian at the Black Sea, who was there on a therapeutic visit to the famous saprophytic muds of Eforie Nord, had lifted his spirits temporarily.

At the end of the summer, Aurel had to choose between being a Barefoot Doctor again or change countries. But fate had other plans.

The place he exchanged with the colonel’s son was in the villages of Tulburea and Aninoasa, a fifty-mile train ride from Craiova towards the Carpathian Mountains. As his mother had told him, all the riches and greatness had gone into the pockets of the communist oligarchy as part of the open-theft, centrally planned economy. The villages were poor places in the hill country, filled with “hard-working old women, sick old men, and hungry children.”

But he was glad that he was not “in some Siberian concentration camp crushing hard rocks with wooden hammers.” His modest rent bought him one room and access to a kitchen and bath. He had one bed, “one wash basin with a suspended water container and a small tea table.

For six working days and nights he slept in the same bed on which he examined the occasional visiting patients. The rest of the time, he had to trek through mud and snow to reach some of the out of the way farms with sick residents.

As a young 25-year old doctor, sent to this God-forsaken place for allegedly “stealing medications and selling local wines,” Dr. Mircea kept repeating to himself that he would not be a communist victim of the healthcare disaster he was witnessing. He wanted a professional career in freedom.

When the heavy snows came and the roads became impassable, the cooperative manager gave him a “living, hungry stallion” for which the villagers donated oats and corn. They also gave Dr. Mircea boiled eggs, bacon, and bread. The local priest gave him a sleigh which was a good thing because the horse was too old to be ridden and could not make it up the difficult hills.

When Dr. Mircea spent two nights a week in his rented one-room adobe in Craiova, condensation from running the gas heater fell from the ceiling onto his face and bed all night like a “small discreet rain.”

The Siberian Express winter storm of 1962-1963 brought weeks of misery and pain for the villagers and for Dr. Mircea. In February he found his beloved horse in the barn mauled by hungry wolves. He cried, overwhelmed by his loss and by mountains of snow.

Freezing temperatures had turned most rivers into easy to cross two-feet deep ice bridges and Bulgarian grey wolves came in packs across the Danube. Hungry and skeletal guard dogs were no match for the ravenous wolves. His beloved pet and friend, with whom he talked as if he could understand him, was dead. He was so deeply attached to him in his rural loneliness.

Dr. Mircea waited weeks until the roads and the rail became passable again and returned to Craiova where he checked himself into a local hospital ward for tests. He was afraid that his daily diet of expired sardine cans may have poisoned him. Under socialist medicine, you had to be checked into a ward in order to have any serum or x-ray tests.

While on medical leave for two months, fate intervened again and he received the opportunity of his life – an offer for a post graduate course, a two-year residency in Ear Nose and Throat surgery at a teaching hospital in Warsaw. The letter with the proposal arrived from Dr. Kim-Ru, just as he had promised. It was delivered through the production manager of a traveling Polish circus in order to escape the eyes of the communist censors. The door to freedom had finally opened for Dr. Mircea!

TO BE CONTINUED

Interview Across Cyber Space with Mircea Brenciu - Part II

On the question, why would people put their faith in career politicians, fighting with each other fiercely on social media, looking for purity, honesty, and perfection in a person’s character, qualities that are often lacking in the political world, Mircea Brenciu’s answer was not a surprise.

The main stream media models and shapes the news and the thinking of the voting populace based on the candidates and what platform they offer – the more socialist, the more popular. The problem arises after the election when, in the “laboratories of democracy,” the two Parliamentary chambers, behind closed doors, unabashedly vacate the will of the voting people.

There is no law that prohibits the candidates elected to migrate to other parties and to change representation to that party’s interest and ideology. “Influenced by blackmail, bribery, and other means, some representatives leave their parties under whose banner they ran for office, and join another party or political organization, thus altering the results of the general vote.” This way, a party or an alliance that was previously in a majority, becomes a minority, further eroding the will of the voters.

These Machiavellian political alliances, made before or after the election, often lack the ideological unity necessary to address the strategic, political, or economic issues of the day and thus decisions are generally made arbitrarily and not in the best interest of the population.

Parliament members are inhibited by fear that they will be arrested under real or trumped up charges and would have to defend themselves for years in a court of law and potentially serve time. Romanian politics must pass through the microscope of the bureaucracy called the National Anti-Corruption Directorate. (DNA)

In Brenciu’s opinion, the DNA is necessary but often abusive. Those who control this institution, also control the direction of national politics. For example, Brenciu added, the “infractors of the Social Democrat Party (PSD) are treated differently than the Liberal Democrat Party (PDL) of former President Traian Basescu.”

Some corrupt politicians are better protected under the law than others, escaping prison, which results in a loss of trust by the general public in the fairness and justice of government.  Using this loss of trust, other politicians shamelessly campaign under the slogan of curbing abuse, corruption, and illegality, and deliver nothing.

While the politics of corruption continue unabated, national interest is forgotten, “with a disgrace and arrogance worthy of historical traitors,” said Brenciu, and the idea of nation-state and sovereignty overlooked in the wave of internationalism coming from Brussels.  “The negotiation of individual liberty is the only politics in Romania that seem worthy of sincere, huge, and herculean efforts.”

Take for example, the development funds allocated to Romania by the European Union in Brussels. Based on passed history, under the banner of curbing corruption, the funds are draconically controlled, and those who are charged with dispersing them realize that it is almost impossible to obtain or demand bribes, and it is thus not in their interest to try very hard to allocate the funds to those who need them for development.

It is difficult to prove such financial corruption; however, why should someone complicate their lives with foreign funds from EU when there is nothing to be gained from the effort, only a lot of paperwork, hard to obtain approvals, and the long wait for funds that must be spent exactly as they were earmarked and in the given amount of time.

“For the EU bureaucrats, this would justify to view Romanians as an inferior category in the grand multinational scheme of EU wannabes.” Romania’s membership in the EU is important but their land, strategic, and economic potential are much more important to these globalist elites.

As Brenciu explained, following in the footstep of history when colonists eliminated people who already resided on the lands sought after, history has an annoying tendency to repeat itself.  He explained, “Romania must be emptied of Romanians, as they are incapable to resist the western bulldozer, and must leave the gold for the explorers who came to the Old Continent in the name of the Crown with 12 gold stars and a blue flag.”

On the question of the economic situation in Romania, following the execution of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, Brenciu had this to say.

After the Revolution of December 1989, the first government, that of Petre Roman, launched the competition which Brenciu dubbed, “Getting Rich at Any Cost,” an effort to privatize the economy.

One such method of privatization called MEBO, gave factories, industrial complexes, and economic centers to the new managers, chosen by workers’ meetings, supposedly democratic. In this new brand of “savage and primitive capitalism, devoid of any rules and regulations,” the newly appointed managers robbed everything and anything that belonged to Ceausescu’s communist state and thus became owners without any payment made to the state.  The “proletariat,” who continued to work for the new owners, received shares in this new “enterprise,” shares which they later sold to the new owners/directors who became millionaires overnight.

Brenciu clarified that the majority of the new owners/directors were former security officers and communist apparatchiks who were traitors to the communist regime, turning the anti-communist tide into their financial favor. They were opportunists, aided and abetted by a corrupt judicial system and a mentality of two wolves and a lamb deciding what’s for dinner.

The poor of yesterday, members of the proletariat, the much touted “workers,” remain the poor of today.  Many jobs have disappeared thanks to the sale of unproductive factories, piece by piece, or the sale to foreign investors who bought entire plants, whether productive or unproductive, to dismantle them or to modernize them, and thus eliminate any competition possible.

Even though Romanian economy functioned under communism with old and outdated technology, it had an industrial base. Today, Brenciu added, Romania has become an “industrial-agrarian, tourist, and service economy.” And the agricultural sector is also suffering as more arable land is left unused, while food is imported from far away.

TO BE CONTINUED

 

 

Butler on Business, My Radio Commentary on Common Core Part II, October 14, 2013

http://host1.cyberears.com//21989.mp3
I come on at the 43 minute mark.