The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

The Mayflower Compact was signed on this date in 1620 (November 11 in the Old Style calendar). The Mayflower had set sail from Plymouth, England, on September 16, with just over 100 people aboard; about half of them were religious separatists — known as Saints or, later, Puritans — who had broken away from the Church of England. They were originally bound for a tract of land set aside for them in the colony of Virginia, which at that time was much larger than our current state; the Mayflower’s tract was along the Hudson River in what is now New York. But they were blown off course by bad storms en route, so they ended up arriving off of Cape Cod instead. Because they had failed to arrive within the bounds of the Virginia Colony, they were not bound by their original charter with King James. They felt the need to establish a provisional system of government while they waited for a new royal charter from England.

Pilgrim leaders, including William Bradford and William Brewster, drafted the compact in part to ease tensions between the Puritan Separatists and the other passengers. They felt it was important to do so before anyone went ashore. So, while the ship was still anchored in Provincetown Harbor, they wrote up a brief, 200-word document based loosely on a Puritan church covenant. The Mayflower Compact created a civil body politic “to enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony.” Every adult male passenger had to sign the compact before going ashore.

The compact was the first attempt at forming a democratic government in what would become the United States of America, and it remained in use until the Massachusetts Bay Colony absorbed the Plymouth Colony in 1691.

It’s the birthday of French satirist, philosopher, and social revolutionary François-Marie Arouet, better known as Voltaire (books by this author), born in Paris (1694). The son of an influential lawyer, Voltaire showed little interest in toeing the line or respecting authority from an early age. His father’s attempts to remove him from the bad influence of freethinkers and libertines — periodically sending him abroad and promising that the next trip would be to prison — had little effect.

In fact, his father hadn’t needed to threaten jail time; others followed through on the idea soon enough. Voltaire was just 21 when he was expelled from Paris for writing a satirical poem about the decadence at Versailles; within months of his return he offended another member of the royal family, which landed Voltaire in the Bastille. He was reportedly delighted, having visited a friend there many times, and hoped he would not be set free before completing some work. His wish was granted, and he wrote his first play, Oedipe, behind bars.

The tragedy was a great success, and helped establish his career in the theater. It was there, several years later, where his biting wit got Voltaire into trouble yet again with a nobleman. This time his cleverness was repaid with a beating and a direct order from the king to be thrown back in the Bastille. Voltaire secured his release by promising to leave the country altogether. He fled to England, where his involvement with the country’s leading intellectuals helped shape his future philosophy. Upon his return to France in 1733, Voltaire wrote Letters Concerning the English Nation, an ironic criticism of the French religious and political establishment. This time the book’s publisher was sent to the Bastille, and Voltaire hightailed it to Lorraine, where he lived and wrote for the next 15 years, until the death of his mistress, when he began yet another cycle of relocating, offending someone in power, and fleeing. He returned to his hometown of Paris only months before he died, in 1778, a hero among the common people.

Voltaire was not as logical or systematic a philosopher as most in the Age of Reason, which is in part what made his writing the most influential. His were not the standard philosophical treatise, but instead relied heavily on satire and humor to make his case, and used forms like fiction, poetry, and plays to reach a broad audience, despite being widely censored and banned. Voltaire’s views on religion, for example — that Judaism and Christianity were essentially corrupt and superstitious, and that any cosmic Designer or Creator was very possibly amoral — were radically polarizing, but he expressed them with such wit and irony that his writing was immensely popular. (Some consider Voltaire the founder of modern anti-Semitism because of his arguments against Judaism, which were cited to prevent Jews from becoming citizens during the French Revolution.)

The novel Candide, Voltaire’s most famous work, argues against the prevailing philosophy of the time: that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that everything that happens is ultimately for the best. The book’s laughably naïve protagonist, Candide, trusts his corrupt and insufferable teacher despite every imaginable evil, believing that it must all be for the best despite all appearances, until at last he retreats to spend the rest of his life tending his garden. Looking on the bright side was simply an excuse for those in power to remain in power, Voltaire argued, a way to ignore injustice and shirk responsibility.

He has been called the conscience of Europe for his call for social reform, and the Genius of Mockery for his blistering ridicule of anyone who opposed him.

Voltaire said, “If God did not exist, man would have to invent him.”

And he said, “As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.”

It’s the birthday of jazz saxophonist and pioneer Coleman Hawkins, born in St. Joseph, Missouri (1904). His musical education began when he was a lad of five years old. His mother, who played the organ, taught him the piano. Then he learned the cello, and — for his ninth birthday — he asked for a tenor sax. By 12, he was playing sax for school dances. He studied harmony and composition in college, and had his first professional gig in 1921, when he was 16. He was hired by Mamie Smith and her band, the Jazz Hounds, the following year and toured all over the country. He was the first tenor sax player to make it big as a jazz musician, and he was so versatile that he took over for an injured trumpet player on a moment’s notice, playing the first trumpet part on his sax. By 1934, he had made a big enough name for himself that he could strike out on his own.

In 1939, he made his most famous record: “Body and Soul.” He later said: “I never thought of ‘Body and Soul’ seriously as being anything big for me. I’d used it occasionally as an encore, something to get off the stage with. [...] Sometimes at night, after a couple of quarts of scotch, very late, I’d sit down and kill time and play about 10 choruses on it, and then the boys would come in and play harmony notes in the background while I finished it up. That’s all there was to it.” He recorded it as a favor to his producer, and it became such a hit that he had to play it at every gig for the next 15 years. The recording consisted of a brief intro, followed by a three-minute solo, during which Hawkins didn’t actually play any of the standard melody of the 1930 classic. His recording represented a great leap forward in the evolution of jazz, and his improvisational style helped pave the way for the development of the bebop style of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker. The record entered the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry in 2004.