While researching my questions about Edwin Ford Piper in his archives at the University of Iowa Special Collections Library, did other things occur to me? Yes, a few things did. I’ve warned you, I never seem to be able to tell stories simply.
I tapped this thought on my laptop computer during the first day with the yellowing paper newspaper clippings, cursive correspondence, and paperclipped notes on scraps of paper surrounding me: “Paper or Song?”
I hoped that would be enough to remind me of what occurred off to the side as I worked my way through this somewhat random archive containing the folk songs Piper had collected around the American Midwest early in the 20th century, often from rural settings.
Given the high cost of the more or less instant communication in my rural youth, I easily recognized Piper’s world of correspondence, little journals, and newspapers of the region. If my mid-20th Century had long-distance phone calls, or I suppose telegrams (I never sent the latter, but a couple appear in Piper’s files), long-distance calls were an expensive thing, something you saved for emergencies or life events for the most part. As in Piper’s days, tasks like exchanging folk songs or literary networking was something you might engage in with pen in hand like some medieval monk or courtier.
That information’s travel was slow: what one found in one small town might appear days later in the mailbox of another town, but it had persistence. It opened the possibility of staying around longer than the electronic instants we exchange now on little glowing rectangles. This document I’m entering into a computer gets saved to a solid-state device, and backed up to another — but who would care after I’m gone or know how to access if they did? This blog, widely public as it is today, exists more or less at the mercy of my monthly payment from my no-profit enterprise.
In summary: slow communication in Piper’s time, but a chance it’s kept long. Fast, facile communication now wizzes past in a flying timeline and disappears.
How much did Piper save? I can’t tell, we only have what we have, not what we don’t. In my last day at the Special Collections I read an in-passing comment from his wife written decades after Piper’s sudden death, telling which professor took over his position and classes and of the two of them going to Edwin Piper’s office and cleaning out the stuff there for his successor. Piper was not Robert Frost or Carl Sandburg then or now, but someone saved some things that could be held in hand so I could go on my time travel trip into the boxes in the library Special Collections.
Still, there’s nothing about paper that assures eternal. Beyond paper, Piper seems to have done good work, good things for others. As a professor there’s the legacy of his students and perhaps their students, and so on outward. The unarchived of us will have that too, with no library boxes, indexes, or perhaps even attribution.
But then this occurred to me, there’s something else, an archival format with a potential longer shelf life: songs. It was partly a folk song archive I had come to look at, and I’ve had an interest in folk song since I was a teenager. Therefore, I already knew many of the songs I came upon in Piper’s archive, at least in a version I could recognize were related to his. I’ve heard them sung, sung them myself. Some of them are old, some of them had Child folk song collection numbers since they were British Isles songs that had emigrated to North America and remained to be passed from one singer to another through time. Ford wanted to write them down, but at least at first it was said he just wanted to learn of them to sing them. Singing — that’s an instant, ephemeral communication — but at least for some songs, sometimes, there’s a lasting component that persists.
A folk song for this post? Here’s a song better known from the 1960s folk revival where its haunting supernatural elements started attracting singers in the British Isles, “Reynardine.” While there are older songs with a like-named character, the version we know today descends from a song collected or recast in the first decade of the 20th century in northern Ireland around the time Piper was collecting his songs in the American Midwest. You can read more about this at this earlier post, but here it is simply as a song to pass through your ears via the audio player below, or this backup link.
The walk across town to the University of Iowa main library turned out to be no problem, even in the heat. I walked into the modern lobby of the facility decked out with LCD screen-signage, a set of computer carrels, and airy windows. I used handy lockers with touch-screen set-your-own-combination lock panels there to store my bag and hat.* The library is one of those amended buildings, representing different eras in décor as it was added to over time or remodeled — so it was almost a theme-park-ride effect as I walked further into the main entryway to reach an old elevator with a flickering florescent fixture that took me up to the third floor with dark wood trim that reminded me of the libraries of my mid-century youth.
The special collections staff set me up on a placard-numbered plain table in the reading room. It took only a few minutes for my selected boxes from the Edwin Ford Piper collection to be delivered by cart. Looking around the reading room as I waited, there were filled bookshelves, a globe, a couple of busts,** and a few framed posters. Curiously, there were life-sized carboard standups of 20th Century Star Trek actors in their character costumes in a couple of corners. Why? Generalized nerd culture? LaVar Burton’s following enlistment in Reading Rainbow? I momentarily thought, at the commencement of my time-travel by library collections, that the original Roddenberry Star Trek concept was travel to “seek out new life and new civilizations.” They called it Star Trek, not the second-word choice of the later movie franchise Star Wars, nor something referencing a technology-based science fiction premise. Pitching to SF resistant TV programmers, Roddenberry famously described his show it “Wagon Train in space.”
Transporter or time machine: archive boxes in the University of Iowa Special Collections Reading Room.
.
I don’t know how Piper’s parents came to rural Nebraska. His mother’s family (Ford) emigrated from Ireland first to Canada around 1810. The Ford brothers who emigrated were stone masons. His father’s line had settled in Massachusetts from 17th century, near-Pilgrim times. Piper’s mother was born in rural south-west Ontario and his parents were married there in Zorra township in 1848. The parents moved to Auburn Nebraska in 1869 where Piper was born in 1871. The 1869 date means it was likely by wagon, as that date predates railroads there.
I know no particulars about why the Ford brothers emigrated to Canada. 1810 preceded the infamous Irish famine years a generation later. My guess (by inference) is that the Fords were Anglo-Irish protestants. I don’t know why Piper’s father was in a non-descript rural area of Canada either.***
It’s hard for me to judge his parent’s economic status. Piper speaks briefly in papers in the archive about his father being a rancher who raised livestock and that the barb wire that titled Edwin’s poetry collection came to Nebraska with homesteading post-Civil War farmers who tended crop-fields cordoned off with that fencing, causing his father to move his livestock grazing farther west to Alma Nebraska (southwest of Kearney) and then Box Elder, which is more than halfway to Colorado. In a short biographic note Piper prepared and found in the archives he says he “rode in the movers wagon.” In the same note he says he had “broken sod and raised corn to sell at ten cents a bushel; I have paid three percent a month interest.” Since he went to Omaha and university there when he came of age and was an academic the rest of his life, this would indicate that his family wasn’t exclusively a cattleman or other livestock operation.
In talking about places and names I found in the archives, I get ahead of myself, it’s just clear that the young Piper was a traveling man coming from a traveling heritage. When we speak nowadays about the Midwest as “the heartland” or casually assign it as a homogenous place in stasis we miss that it was (even its rural areas) just as much an immigration site as the tenements of New York City — there was just more space between farms or towns.
In effect I was another immigrant in the library archives. I was eagerly opening the contents brought to the table from first box and on, lifting out folders from inside them and examining the mix of handwritten letters and notes, typewritten pages, fragile yellow newsprint clippings, and occasional whole publications. The libraries abstract of the contents, and the Piper collection’s mixed filing, meant that I never knew what I’d find “over the next hill.” I had been concerned if I could keep my focus on this task for a full workday. I could. Easily. I was back in the era which The Parlando Project so often refers to, the first quarter of the 20th century when Modernism emerged. I’ll look at Modernism later in this series, but the folk songs are things the travelers carried with them from the past. Same quarter-century, Janus like, looking forward and backward.
As the collection abstract promised, the folk music collection materials were considerable. Many of them have marginal notes or material showing either they came from other collectors or that they had appeared in versions in other contemporary published collections. Some of these notes are from a 1934 run through of Piper’s folk song materials by a graduate student who cataloged and categorized the material while Piper was still alive, though his organization is not reflected in the current filing in the archive boxes. That student, Harold Daniel Peterson, no doubt using Piper as an informant, says that Piper first collected the songs to sing himself, that WWI interrupted Piper’s personal collecting, and that post-WWI, his students at Iowa contributed songs their families and locals knew. Correspondence and marginal notes with associated names show that Piper seems to have assembled or participated in an informal network of other folk song collectors. Piper also mentions the Journal of American Folklore multiple times, and that publication and society started in 1888.
There’s a number of files dealing with hobo songs (some with notes presumably by Piper about the particular hobo who shared the song) and articles about hobo culture, Hobos were migratory workers who often hopped trains to move from place to place.
Coincidences can move me, even if I realize I’m the one making chance meaningful. The very last folder in the last box I went through in my days examining the Piper archive folk song collection contained a version of “Jack of Diamonds” a traditional song with a variant that also goes by the name of a commonly included verse: “Rye Whiskey.” Long-time readers here may recall that I was told by uncles that “Rye Whiskey” was a favorite song of my great-grandfather, after whom I am named. In my time travel during this June trip I wasn’t just traveling to the time of Modernism’s emergence, I remembered at that moment opening that folder that I was traveling back to that man’s, a common laborer’s, time too. When investigating something else years back, I was taught that folk culture isn’t uncomplicatedly pure, always the result of children learning songs from the old folks on the porch of an isolated cabin. I recorded a performance with music of a plausible theory of how my great-grandfather might have come to fancy and appreciate that song. You can hear that performance with the audio player below, or with this highlighted link if that player isn’t visible to you.
To be continued…
.
*As is now common in special collections, there are rules about what you can bring into the reading rooms. Alas, theft has been a problem in such places, so bags (much less spill-risk food or drink) are not allowed. I noted the University’s rules also restricted paper notebooks and outside writing instruments.
**Of who? I never left my focus to find out, but the human form amputated to a head and shoulders is already concentrating on the life of the mind. The Piper Archive papers mesmerized me, time passed rapidly as I tried to take in as much as I could. The first day I had packed a bagel in my shoulder bag, necessarily left in the downstairs library locker in case I needed to take a lunch break outside of the Special Collections Reading Room. I ate that bagel in the evening back at my room.
***This basic genealogical detail is from a typewritten sheet titled “Notes on Family History” with some pencil annotations in Piper’s handwriting in the archives. It also says that he was “the tenth child in a family of eleven children” and gives the date of Edwin Ford Piper’s own later marriage to Janet Pressley in Iowa City as 1927.
Very often I find myself unable to tell a story simply. While I find internal joy in expanding complexity there is a painful element too. Even when under the spell of things I’ve experienced and learned, I retain enough self-awareness to see what effect my expression has on others, the burden of strangeness. Then the reach between the teller and the listener becomes haphazard, unstable — pile it too high and it tiresomely topples — and so in some break for breath partway in, I realize I’ve dumped a cluttered mass of thought debris on a listener, long past any interest.
Perhaps this is why I’m attracted to lyric poetry, constrained as it is to moments, often held tight within the stiff glass bottles of forms.
Here’s a personal story that’ll go many places coming from the place I find myself in this June. It starts, I’ll guess, earlier this year when I came upon a poem, “The Last Antelope,” a striking, empathetic account of the end of an animal’s life and wildness after settlers captured it. Edwin Ford Piper was the author, and there were only scattered bits of information to be found about him. Scattered and bits do not constrain my curiosity — if the bits were great distances apart, the space between them could hold a lot of things: born 1871 in rural Nebraska, parents part of early European-origin settlement there. Largely self-educated in a land of necessary child-farmhand-so-never-more-than-half-year schools, still goes on to university in Omaha studying literature with a specialization in Chaucer, and then to the University of Iowa where as a professor he helped establish the idea of teaching and granting degrees in creative writing.
The modern convention of a university as patronage for artists, and the rise of the credentialed MFA-holding poet is not without controversy — but isn’t it odd, this man who taught himself in a small town on the fluid boundary between the 19th Century Wild West and the 20th Century staid Midwest took that journey.
In the middle of this, the same man had a compulsion to collect songs ordinary people brought with them while journeying, the words and music carried in the light baggage of memory. He wrote down songs his relatives and townsfolk knew by heart. He asked others to send him more by mail. He paid particular attention to the songs of those on the move: hobos, cowboys, and other traveling workers. Did this connect with his literary poetry? There are no recordings of Piper reading his poetry, but accounts say he declaimed it with a musical lilt — perhaps like the surviving recordings of Yeats, or maybe like the more bombastic Vachel Lindsay — and at times he would break into full song. His students took to calling him “The Singing Professor.”
Since this Project is “Where Music and Words Meet” you can see why I’d be attracted. And I’m a small-Midwestern-town boy, though without degrees. But did that seem strange then, to mesh high culture and the songs remembered by old women and rude mechanicals?
Piper was born just west of the Missouri River in Nebraska — and in Illinois, just to the east of the Mississippi River and less than a decade later, Carl Sandburg was born to an immigrant railway blacksmith who signed his name with an X. Iowa, the state where I was born in the middle of the next century, and Minnesota, the state where I’ve lived the longest, sit in a delta between those two tremendous rivers. Sandburg too mixed the latest in Modernist poetry with folk songs he collected and sang. Did Piper influence Sandburg? Did Sandburg influence Piper? Or are they the same genus of plant, raised in the same climate, but in separate plots? Questions.
Answers fork like river systems. Even with little information being readily available on Piper, I was already in flood stage. And here’s how much my wife loves me: for our 20th anniversary she agreed to go on a road trip with me to Iowa City and Sandburg’s home-town of Galesburg. My scenery in Iowa City? An archive of Piper’s papers* held in the university library there. Our grand museum of the arts of poetry and song to visit on the trip: a railway worker’s shack in a small rust-belt city, a town worn-out but still running like a paint-shedding Oldsmobile.
Two considerations worried me as I thought about this trip, one for my wife and one for myself. For my wife, I worried if there’d be something rewarding for her to do while I enthused at the library. She was able to solve that one easily, locating nature reserves, parks, and trails within an hour’s drive. I often tell her that she’s a nymph, and I complement her on how seriously she takes her job to supervise the plants and animals when she returns with soggy hiking boots from her hikes with pictures of landscapes, mushrooms, wildflowers, birds, and other critters. I love her pictures and stories on return (her stories briefer and better organized) — but my old joints ache just thinking about hiking for hours.
For myself I worried about my old-ager endurance. The library was two-thirds of a mile from where we’d stay. I’d need to hoof it with my laptop bag back and forth, which would have been a trifle in my youth, but nowadays longer term standing and walking is troublesome. I considered taking a bicycle with me, which would have made the library to-and-from easy, but a lot of hotel/AirBnB places don’t have any good places to lock up overnight, and on further consideration I thought that a bike would just be one more thing to worry about, taking my focus away from the trip’s main goals. And then I worried too about spending full days at the library’s special collections reading room. Because my time was limited, and to minimize the walking, I planned no break for lunch. I’d need to keep my focus and energy up, something that I have not been consistently able to do this year even with all the comforts of home.
On average I bike at least once every day in my normal routine, often in the morning. In the past two years I’ve not been a longer distance bicyclist, but 30-50 miles a week easily exceeds those 150 minutes exercise recommendations, and it lets me get to a café for morning breakfast and handle a lot of routine shopping and other trips. I ride year-round. In 2016 I bought my first 21st Century winter bike with studded tires; and in 2019 I upgraded the winter season bicycle to a Fat Bike with monstrous 4.5-inch-wide tires that handled ice and snow with the challenging ice ruts and potholes that my city’s current “We’ll get to all the streets in 3 days after the snow stops” plowing regime supplies. My overall stamina for the walk wasn’t my worry so much as how well my joints and stiff back would take the more load-bearing walk.** And to make it through the day I’d planned, there’d be no old-man’s afternoon nap either.
Piper, once a “poet of considerable distinction.” A later version of his collection Barb Wire. My Iowa City view, and yes the guitar got some use. Example breakfast.***
.
The first day we arrived at Iowa city was hot and very humid, so I put on my best hot weather clothing. Spouse-nymph headed off at dawn for her day’s supervisory encounter with nature, and I planned a big breakfast fuel-up. I’m a “eat little meat” kind of guy, but for good or ill I take the lacto-ovo part of my lesser meat diet seriously, so I’m a big frittata, omelet, hash, scrambler kind of guy most mornings. I note that I eat like an old-time farmer, despite never farming, but the good thing about this higher fat/protein kind of meal is that it can hold me until supper, and that was my plan.
I put on my best hot weather clothes, slung my bag over my shoulder, and headed for the university’s main library building for my encounter with poet-professor Piper’s papers.
Thus ends Chapter One.
Here’s a musical performance I put together in March of Piper’s “The Last Antelope.” You can play it with the audio player you should see below. No player? This highlighted link is another way to hear it.
.
*When I arrived at the library archives will-call desk, I asked them to pick Piper’s Papers. The librarian suggested puckishly that I was nearly reconstructing the old tongue-twister folk-rhyme, Roud Folk Song index 19745.
**Local papers/forums are full of folks who bemoan bike lanes in my city, often remarking that “not everyone is young and fit.” Despite that, most bicyclists I meet and see on my city’s streets aren’t of the MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra) variety — and I’m maybe 1.5 letters of that acronym. I joke with my wife that as my joints get older, a bicycle is becoming a “fore-and-aft wheelchair” for me, allowing me increased mobility and beneficial low-impact movement for the old joints.
***That’s a St. Paul Sandwich: egg foo young on sourdough with lettuce, tomato slices and mayo. Near as anyone knows, my Twin City of St. Paul has no tradition regarding it, and no restaurant there serves it now. Its origin is something of mystery.
We’re going to travel some ground today, so hang on, it’s a longish post.
Today’s piece has an anonymous author. I’ll write a bit about what I can determine about it later on below, but a lot of the time when I write here of my encounter with the words I use as part of this project, I’ll write at least something about the author. Best as I can determine, I care some about who wrote the words.
I write myself, I know the particulars of my life, my outlook and working beliefs, my location in geography and society enter into what I create—but on the other hand, I don’t seem to care overly much about what these largely dead (and sometimes forgotten) writers believe. I’ve performed religious pieces infused with a variety of religious belief, and writings from Romantics, Stoic Classicists, and Modernists from a range of tribes. As I mentioned recently when I performed a piece unconcerned with matters of ethnicity by odd-ball all-purpose British racist Charles Kingsley: I seem open to occasionally read and perform work by writers whose political and social beliefs are for good reasons widely objectionable, and in that Kingsley post I brought up the foremost case in literary English-language Modernism: Ezra Pound, a man who became an overt fascist,* and who aided the other side in one of the most clearly-cut good guys vs. bad guys wars in history.
Would I choose differently if I was presenting work by living writers? Well, I have used words here by folks who are my contemporaries and whose personal lives include considerable faults and whose politics do not align with mine—evidence there again that I may not care enough to exclude the work that seems of interest and worth because of the author’s lack of personal rectitude. I certainly understand why someone would choose to boycott a living artist for unacceptable writings, beliefs, or actions. Once I accept that, it’s an easy extension to extend allowances for boycotters to advocate for others to do the same. Fair enough, even if the specter of blacklists and non-persons can be said to follow. I do worry that the slippery slope tends to flow more forcefully from the heights of power and can be lubricated with money or blood.
But mostly my choices here are selfish. If a work pleases or interests me, if it works for the purposes of this project, I’m likely to favor it regardless of its author. It’s unlikely that I could imagine a work that itself frankly advocates racism, homophobia, or sexism** as having any pleasure for me, while still I know the authors of the words I use are not unfree of those faults. And yes, I worry that some of the tracks of those faults carry into the work I use. Often when I write about those faults in my reactions to the pieces used here, I caution the reader, as I caution myself, that for what we see clearly as condemnable in dead writers, the future and others will potentially find justifiably equivalent wrongs and faults in us.
But then I also believe, roughly, in the progress of civilization. If we find it unlikely that any fault of our time could be equal to the evils of slavery, near chattel status for women, or human sacrifices for religious beliefs, I ask you only to note that intelligent people, capable of creating art that still pleases us, believed or tolerated such things, and we must consider this part of what humans are capable of—even us.
So, what about “Truth Never Dies?” Well, it doesn’t advocate for any particular thing. It does make a claim that activists or advocates who have lost a battle or a war might find comforting, and in its own non-specific way it’s similar to a contemporary motto suitable for coffee cup or t-shirt and attributed to Neil deGrasse Tyson: “The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe it.” And so even for activists working in expectation or demand for immediate action, a Plan B of some future realization of the truth of their request is not unwholesome. No effective movement can exist that can only live and breathe in the environment of success or potential success at hand, it must endure and continue after defeats.
Kenne Turner’s blog will show you some fantastic color photography. The early 20th century Adventist publications which featured “Truth Never Dies” made do with monochrome.
.
As best as I can tell, this poem was likely written in the first decade of the 20th century. It seems strongly associated with American Protestant Christian circles at the time of its writing. The earliest appearances of “Truth Never Dies” I have found are in a 1909 copy of The Northern Union Reaper an Adventist quarterly from Minneapolis, a Seventh Day Adventist publication from Maryland, and several other Adventist publications from that year.*** I’ve also found it in the Adventist The Sabbath Recorder of 1915, a New Zealand based Adventist magazine of 1917, and another Adventist book of 1917 which associates the poem with the visions in the book of Daniel chapter 8.**** A Carolina Mountaineer newspaper from 1917 includes it, and it appears as a prominent embroidered forward to an 1914 issue of Sky-Land, a North Carolina magazine replete with Lost Cause Confederate reverence. The Scientific Temperance Journal quarterly printed it in Boston in 1918. The Bottle Maker, a 1921 trade union publication for yes, bottle makers, (motto: “Labor Will Not Be Outlawed or Enslaved”) features it. A 1922 issue of The Railway Expressman from Wisconsin, another union publication, does so too. A 1941 The Preacher’s Magazine from the Church of the Nazarene in Kansas City includes it. An Ohio-based United Brethren church bulletin of 1947 has it too, and attributes it to another, Methodist, publication.
The poem appears as from two to five stanzas in these publications, and sometimes it’s subscripted with a note “selected” that indicate that it may be a longer poem. I chose to perform just the first three stanzas, if for no other reason than length today.
From the earliest appearances, and some of the imagery of the poem, my guess is that the author was associated with the Adventists. The Venn diagram of Adventist practices and beliefs, temperance, early union movements, and the connections between Nazarene, United Brethren and Methodism fill in the edges.
The most surprising appearance of “Truth Never Dies?” Easily, the November 14, 1981 episode of Saturday Night Live. In a skit with Joe Piscopo and Mary Gross. Piscopo plays Nick the Knock, costumed as if a puppet, in a sort of a riff on the casual comic violence of the Punch and Judy sort of puppetry. After smashing a music record playing the skit’s opening music, he’s visited by a fairy played by the meek voiced Gross who tells him “I like to think I see beauty in you that others are too busy to notice. So I have brought you this: The gift of truth.” The fairy then speaks two entire stanzas of “Truth Never Dies.” The puppet Nick ends the skit by exclaiming to the poetry fairy “I know what I’m gonna do to you, you little thing! I’m gonna eat your spine!” Which he does as the fairy screams. Rather than Daniel 8 or temperance, I’m going to assume that cocaine had something to do with the inspiration of this skit.
In the end, because we don’t really know who wrote “Truth Never Dies” and because the author doesn’t feel that they need to outline the particulars of a Truth they feel will become self-evident, the poem remains a statement that can be applied quite broadly, and with an effectiveness that remains more than a hundred years after it was written. Readers will not know if they agree or disagree with that unknown author’s vision of Truth, which brings me to one of the things I think I’ve discovered about poetry during this project: that though ideas, including controversial ideas, may be presented in poetry, poetry is more about the experience of ideas than those ideas themselves. So this poem works, not because it’s a religious catechism, a political platform, or a sophisticated philosophical treatise, but because we can read or hear it and share with it’s unknown author the feeling of a truth that will prevail even if it seems underrepresented among the powerful in the world today, or if there are acceptable substitutes for truth that can be endlessly manufactured for short-term tactical benefit.
The player gadget to hear my performance of “Truth Never Dies” is below. Don’t see the gadget. Well, you can then truthfully hear it with this link that will open a new tab with its own audio player.
.
.
*Oh, there are mitigating factors if you had to defend Pound in some debate for points. It was the messier, less efficiently genocidal Italian brand of fascism he aided. It’s sometimes claimed it was all caused by a misunderstood dilettante’s interest in fringe economic theories. And there’s the “everybody was doing it” defense too: he’s not the only literary person of his time to have connections and sympathies to fascism. But let’s face it, if there’s a mid-20th century cancel culture, Pound would be someone we’d want to de-platform. Right now I happen to be reading his ABC of Reading, a book he wrote in the 1930s largely about poetry, coincidently the same time he was finding or writing about his fascist affinities. He has a number of insightful things to say about the art of poetry and the enjoyment of it in this book so far, and I’ve come upon more than one thing where what Pound writes is simply a clearer statement of things I’ve discovered in my own life and during this project about the art of poetry. But he’s also repeatedly making a point I disagree with: that it’s imperative to choose the good art from the bad, and he’s going to tell you how to tell. It’s easy to think that a stubborn insistence in a singular insight into things leads one to larger distrust of democracy along with the ability to hold contrary opinions based on a fixed hierarchy of value.
**Authoritarianism or calls to the purity of violence are heavy lifts for me too.
****Besides Biblical prophecy of the fall of nations, another reference I found to a similar rhetorical flourish was from a 1841 abolitionist speech by Thomas Paul in Boston where he, responding to the notion that abolition’s cause was dying out, said: “Dying away?….Truth never dies. Her course is always onward. Though obstacles may present themselves before her, she rides triumphantly over them….”
Frank Hudson 