The Humility Factor

When I was growing up, my Dad would sometimes caution me with the words “don’t get a big head over it.”  It was advice which usually came when I was bragging about some great accomplishment I thought I had achieved. My father was a proponent of the biblical admonition: “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, that he may exalt you in due time.”  Touting your own accomplishments was not something my Dad favored.

Probably, because of his influence, I have always put humility right up there at the top of human virtues along with “faith, hope and love.”

For that reason, I cannot see how my father could have become a big supporter of our current President.  Humility to President Trump is a bad word connoting weakness.  Donald Trump is all about being the biggest, the greatest, the best… and he tells you that all the time.

My Dad was a Republican and served as Supervisor of the Town of Kiantone and on the County Board of Supervisors.  Yet, I remember him telling me that he had supported President Harry Truman, a Democrat,  in 1951 when he had fired General Douglas MacArthur.  MacArthur had become “too big for his britches,” and had disobeyed orders from the President.  MacArthur was known for being a self-promoter with a big ego, and that also didn’t sit well with my father. 

Coming back from a recent trip on I-86, we drove into Corning and past Amo Houghton’s family home.  I was always a big Amo fan, and on occasion was in that home to have breakfast with him to talk about old times and current events.  Amo, though wealthy and the only Chairman of a Fortune 500 Company ever to serve in Congress, was also a principled, down-to-earth and humble man.  He was my Dad’s kind of Republican… and, I guess, my kind too. 

In 2016, Amo wrote these words for newspaper publication:  “Donald Trump is not a man in whom I have great respect.  He represents, sadly, all the things I reject in a leader—he is a bully; he fudges the truth; he turns on those who think differently.  He hides critical parts of his life—business failures, tax returns—and I could go on.”

Though Trump carried Chautauqua County that year, it did not deter Amo Houghton from repeating similar views when interviewed by a reporter in 2018.  They bear repeating this year, especially since three other former New York Republican Representatives, Jack Quinn, Susan Molinari and James Walsh, recently announced their support for Joe Biden.  They find Biden to be a decent, honorable man who has shown as Senator and Vice President that he can work with others to help solve the problems of the country.

Some might think this is just partisan talk because I am a Democrat.  But I am a democrat with a small “d” these days and I primarily want to see someone elected who can help unify and bring the country back together.   We have had enough of grandstanding and the politics of fear and blame.

Besides, it is my country too and so I thought I should weigh in on the choice before us.  You can’t really poll people on such an intangible concept as humility, but I think it could be a deciding factor in this year’s election.

Rolland Kidder  
September 5, 2020

Lincoln’s Second Inaugural

U.S. CAPITOL BUILDING, MARCH 4, 1865

In reflecting on the recent focus on race relations in the country, I thought it might be useful to revisit the words of our sixteenth President on the occasion of his Second Inaugural. 

It was gray and raining in Washington, D.C. on that March morning, 1865. Yet, crowds thronged around the Capitol Building waiting for the speech. Inside the building, because of the weather, the ceremony had already begun. One of the speakers, Vice President Johnson, was suffering from a cold and, as an antidote, had taken 3 glasses of whiskey to alleviate his symptoms. His speech had not gone well. President Lincoln whispered to a Senator – “Do not let Johnson speak outside.”

The skies finally lifted, the sun came out and the ceremonies were shifted outside, to the east side of the Capitol for the President’s speech and oath-taking.

Many in the crowd expected Lincoln to brag about recent Union advances in the Civil War –“We have taken Atlanta, Savannah, Charleston and now Columbia, South Carolina. Grant has surrounded Lee’s forces at Richmond. God has given us victory after victory!” That is what some thought he would say.

But, he disappointed. Instead, he spoke of his own spiritual struggle during the War. How could a good God have willed such a thing? How could two sections of the country who both believed in the same God and read the same Bible come to such different conclusions? “The prayers of both could not be answered–that of neither has been answered fully.”

God had allowed slavery to be, but the matter of the continuance of the scourge would be left for mankind to decide by war: “Both parties deprecated war but one of them would make war rather than let the nation survive, and the other would accept war rather than let it perish. And the war came.”

Lincoln was speaking to a people who had been raised in church and Sunday school. He, as President, had struggled with the theological and spiritual dimensions of slavery and the war, listening to sermons almost weekly from a pew in a Presbyterian Church in Washington.

Now, near the end of this awful war where one out of every 11 men of service age had been killed, Lincoln would not gloat or celebrate a Union victory in the traditional sense. He, instead, walked his people through his own thoughts, doubts and spiritual struggles. How could this terrible war be explained or rationalized? The speech would be a reminder that many of the questions related to the war still remained unanswered and unresolved in the minds of many Americans.

Then, at the end of this brief 6-7 minute speech, he pivoted from remonstrating about the past to the challenges lying ahead with these words of hope for his listeners and his countrymen:  

“With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and orphan–to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” 

With that sentence, the speech ended.

We could use such words today.

Rolland Kidder