Sandburg's Unversalism

The second poem we did not read. Mrs. Locke said something about it being too political, and she moved on to Sara Teasdale. My interest stimulated, I ignored Teasdale and read the political poem.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work--
I am the grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?

I am the grass.
Let me work.⁽¹⁾

Indeed, it was political! To a young man facing Vietnam, the words hit home. I owe a debt to my teacher, who by avoiding this political poem, focused my attention on it. Impressed by the simple power of "Grass," I began to study the life of its author.

Carl Sandburg was born on a corn husk mattress, a little after midnight, January 6, 1878, one hundred and twenty years ago this Tuesday. The birth occurred in a three-room house on Third Street, the second house east of the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad tracks in Galesburg, Illinois. His mother made his diapers from Pillsbury Best flour sacks. His father was a blacksmith at the C.B. & Q. railroad shop. He worked at his trade eleven hours a day, six days a week. His mother raised seven children.

Sandburg's parents were immigrants from Sweden, with no formal education. They knew little of the complex culture in the big cities. Their life involved the simple tasks of working, caring for home and family, and attending church. Not being authorities on literature, they could not have imagined in their wildest dreams that their son would grow up to become a great American poet.

Sandburg attended the Swedish Lutheran Church with his family. In a chapter called "Judgement Day" in his autobiography, he described a memory that illustrates the theology preached in the church and the impact it had on his family. He wrote:

After dinner the talk slowly shifted to the sermon of the day. Slowly the talk got around to where the preacher had so solemnly told us nobody knows for sure who will be among the saved on that last day. It might be you, it might be him or me. There would be loved ones separated, some going to the blessed happiness of heaven, others to the everlasting fire. And then, not slowly but suddenly, everyone at the table was in tears. Down our cheeks the tears ran and we looked at each other. It had never happened before in our house. We had seen the mother crying once or twice and us children blubbering plenty of times. But never the father. This was the first time we had seen tears in his eyes and running down his face. . . . We children looked out of the corners of our eyes. No one was either ashamed or proud. . . . Had we not heard that loved ones would be torn apart on that last day? My feeling one moment was that my mother looked at my father and believed there was no certainty that he and she would not be separated on that last day--no one could tell. The matter of the faithful and the faithless would not be cleared up till the last day. So we wept, in unison we wept. Slowly we gulped and choked down the sorrow that had come suddenly, the sorrow that arose out of that mystery of what the judgement will be on us in the last day.⁽²⁾

There was only one religious group in the town of Galesburg that differed from the traditional theology of the Lutherans, Baptists and Methodists. This religious group had in 1851 established a school called Lombard College in Galesburg.⁽³⁾

Within the school was a seminary to train Universalist ministers.⁽⁴⁾ Sandburg wrote about this strange religious group:

Mama spoke in hushed tones about the Universalists. I was eight or nine years old when I asked her about them. She shook her head with a grave face. She gave her ideas about the Universalists in two short sentences. "They say there is no hell," and "They believe in dancing in the church." On the first point I found out she was correct and that Universalists were saying there is no hell. On the second point I learned that she had been listening to gabmouths. I came to see later that most of the preachers in town spoke from their pulpits against dancing, either square or round, while the Universalists said little or nothing about dancing, either in church or out, claiming only that since there is no hell you couldn't dance your way to hell. I didn't know what to make of it. My mother had a large and loving heart and a wide compassion, and her two brief and absolute points about the Universalists had me looking at Universalists with suspicion. I had a vague notion that maybe there ought to be a hell and there might be something wrong about people who said positively there is no hell.⁽⁵⁾

When he was thirteen years old, Sandburg graduated from grammar school and immediately went to work to support the family. He was a newspaper boy, a milkman, a firefighter, a porter, a bottle washer, a water boy, an ice cutter, and for four months when he was eighteen, a hobo traveling around the country riding freight trains. One of his hobo stories tells about his youthful understanding of religion:

A hobo knocked at a back door and asked a woman for something to eat. The hobo explained that he had not had a bite to eat for three days. The woman said she would get him something. The hobo waited. Finally the door opened and the women's skinny hand went toward him with a thin dry crust of bread. She said, "I give you this not for your sake nor for my sake but for Christ's sake." As he took the crust of bread and looked at it he turned his face toward the woman and said, "Lady, listen to me. I beg of you not for my sake nor for your sake but for Christ's sake, put some butter on it."⁽⁶⁾

In 1899 Sandburg entered Lombard College. The school had been founded because Universalists chose not to send their children to schools controlled by other religious groups. Other schools tried to turn the children of Universalists against the beliefs of their parents. Many a Universalist family found that children returning home during school vacations would denounce their parents for their belief in universal salvation and announce that they would end in hell.

Under the circumstances it was inevitable that 19th century Universalists would respond by establishing their own schools. Consistent with their resentment of the treatment of their young people at the hands of the orthodox, in their schools Universalists did not require religious courses and did not attempt to indoctrinate the students under their care. Schools established by Universalists that are still in existence today include Tufts University, St. Lawrence University, the University of Akron, and California Institute of Technology.

Like other Universalist schools, the faculty did not require students attending Lombard College to study the Universalist religion. However, the president of the school and many teachers were drawn from the Universalist ministry, insuring that students like Sandburg would receive a good dose of liberal religion. Also, to earn part of his tuition Sandburg got a job at the school ringing the bell that summoned and dismissed classes. He sat in the bell tower with a watch and every hour pulled the rope. Sitting in the tower hour after hour Sandburg found his eyes wandering to the walls of the small room. It so happened that the school used the bell tower as storage space to hold the overflow from the college library. The extra books stored in the tower consisted primarily of books about Universalism. Often when Sandburg was waiting during the hour between classes to ring the bell, he would sit on the floor of the tower room and read Universalist theology.

Universalists of the nineteenth century were the sons and daughters of farmers and laborers. They lacked the grace and sophistication of the upper class. They wanted simply to establish a more loving religion, a more inclusive religion, a more humane religion for all people.

As the son of a railroad blacksmith from Galesburg, Illinois, Sandburg found it easy to identify with their origin and their dream. He had been born into a climate where religion focused on predestination, on a fear of hell, and on a vindictive God. He found it refreshing to discover a religion that believed in the notion of free will, in the idea that all people would go to heaven, and in the vision of a God who was loving and kind. Although he did not join the Universalist Church, its theology became his theology. He developed a Universalist belief in the goodness and dignity of every human being. About religion he wrote: "I am a Christian, a Quaker, a Moslem, a Buddhist, a Confucian and maybe a Catholic pantheist or a Joan of Arc who hears voices. I am all these and more."⁽⁷⁾

In the fall of 1913 a Chicago magazine called Poetry agreed to publish Sandburg's "Chicago Poems." He received words of praise from fellow writers. Ezra Pound wrote from Italy. William Butler Yeats sent his complements. Edgar Lee Masters praised Sandburg. But not everyone liked the style of this new poet. Edmund Wilson wrote: "Carl Sandburg wouldn't know an abstraction, if he met one on the street."

Sandburg replied: "According to Edmund Wilson my trouble is that when I want to write about smoke and steel, I write about smoke and steel and not something else."

I have liked Sandburg's poems since my first encounter with "Grass" in school many years ago. Living near Chicago for eight years renewed my interest and appreciation of his poetry. In his poems I hear the clanging of Chicago's elevated trains, the noise of the factory gate at quitting time and the language and the pain of the street people. He wrote:

I asked the Mayor of Gary about the 12-hour day and the seven-day week. And the Mayor of Gary answered more workmen steal time on the job in Gary than any other place in the United States. "Go into the plant and you will see men sitting around doing nothing --machinery does everything," said the Mayor of Gary when I asked him about the 12-hour day and the seven-day week. And he wore cool cream pants, the Mayor of Gary, and white shoes, and a barber had fixed him up with a shampoo and a shave and he was easy and imperturbable though the government weather bureau thermometer said 96 and children were soaking their heads at bubbling fountains on the street corners. And I said goodby to the Mayor of Gary and I went out from the city hall and turned the corner into Broadway. And I saw workmen wearing leather shoes scuffed with fire and cinders, and pitted with little holes from running molten steel. And some had bunches of specialized muscles around their shoulder blades hard as pig iron, muscles of their forearms were sheet steel and they looked to me like men who had been somewhere.⁽⁸⁾

Sandburg was not a simple-minded reformer. In another poem he points to the weakness of a radical socialist friend:

"So you want to divide all the money there is and give every man his share?"
"That's it. Put it all in one big pile and split it even for everybody."
"And the land, the gold, silver, oil, copper, you want that divided up?"
"Sure--an even whack for all of us."
"Do you mean that to go for horses and cows?"
"Sure--why not?"
"And how about pigs?"
"Oh to hell with you--you know I got a couple of pigs."⁽⁹⁾

As he describes his daughter at the age of seventeen months, I remember my own children's efforts at learning to talk.

This girl child speaks five words.
No for no and no for yes, "no" for either no or yes.
"Teewee" for wheat or oats or corn or barley or any food taken with a spoon.
"Go way" as an edict to keep your distance and let her
determinations operate.
"Spoon" for spoon or cup or anything to be handled, all
instruments, tools, paraphernalia of utility and convenience are SPOONS.
Mama is her only epithet and synonym for God and the Government and the one force of majesty and intelligence obeying the call of pity, hunger, pain, cold, dark --MAMA, MAMA, MAMA.⁽¹⁰⁾

The sides of our church auditorium remind me of another Sandburg poem.

I was foolish about windows.
The house was an old one and the windows were small.
I asked a carpenter to come and open the walls and put in bigger windows.
"The bigger the window the more it costs," he said.
"The bigger the cheaper," I said.
So he tore off siding and plaster and laths
And put in a big window and bigger windows.
I was hungry for windows.
One neighbor said, "If you keep on you'll be able to see
everything there is."
I answered, "That'll be all right, that'll be classy enough for me."
Another neighbor said, "Pretty soon your house will be all windows." And I said, "Who would the joke be on then?"
And still another, "Those who live in glass houses gather no moss."
And I said, "Birds of a feather should not throw stones and a soft answer turneth away rats."⁽¹¹⁾

A poem about death and dreams is one of his most compassionate:

Mildred Klinghofer whirled through youth in bloom.
One baby came and was taken away, another came and was taken away.
From her windows she saw the corn rows young and green
And later the final stand of the corn and the huddled shocks And the blue mist of a winter thaw deepening at evening.
In her middle forties her first husband died.
In her middle sixties her second husband died.
In her middle seventies her third husband died.
And she died at mid-eighty with her fourth husband at the
bedside.
Thus she had known an editor, a lawyer, a grocer, a retired farmer.
To the first of them she had borne two children she had hungered for.
And deep in her had stayed a child hunger.
In the last hours when her mind wandered, she cried imperiously, "My Baby! Give me my baby."
And her cries for this child, born in her mind, in her final moments of life, went on and on.
When they answered, "Your baby isn't here" or "Your baby is coming soon if you will wait," she kept on with her cry, "My baby, let me hold my baby!"
And they made her a rag doll
And laid it in her arms
And she clutched it as a mother would.
And she was satisfied and her second childhood ended like her first, with a doll in her arms.
There are dreams stronger than death.
Men and women die holding these dreams.⁽¹²⁾

In 1967, at the age of eighty-nine, Sandburg died. Although he was not a member of any church, the minister selected by his wife and daughter to lead the memorial service was a Unitarian Universalist.

In the writings of Carl Sandburg the Universalist faith of farmers and laborers lives on:

• The words point to the beauty and meaning of our ordinary commonplace world.
• The words cry out against injustice, against greed, against poverty.
• And the words speak clearly about the dignity of every human being.

In one of his last poems he wrote:

The best preacher is the heart . . .
The best teacher is time.
The best book is the world.
The best friend is God.⁽¹³⁾

Amen!

Closing Words:

There are dreams stronger than death.
Men and women die holding these dreams.

Opening Words Selections from "To a Contemporary Bunkshooter" The Complete Poems p. 29.

Reading Selections from "Tentative (First Model) Definitions of Poetry" The Complete Poems p. 317

1. The Complete Poems p. 136.
2. Always the Young Strangers, 1953.
3. Knox College absorbed Lombard College in 1930.
4. Today part of Meadville-Lombard Seminary in Chicago.
5. Always the Young Strangers, 1953, p. 93.
6. Always the Young Strangers, 1953.
7. Harry Golden, Carl Sandburg, 1961 p. 63-37.
8. The Complete Poems, p. 161.
9. The Complete Poems, p. 481.
10. The Complete Poems, p. 412.
11. The Complete Poems, p.415.
12. The Complete Poems, p.415.
13. Harry Golden, Carl Sandburg, 1961, p. 66

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