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Drumming Up Hope in Camden

Thus John Dryden 1631-1700) celebrates the creation of the world as a response to divine music in his poem, A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day.

Much of Camden, New Jersey, today is a “heap of jarring atoms” and hope lies beneath it.“More than dead.” It needs “the tuneful voice” to call life into “the dry bones” as Ezekiel would say. Thus Camden because of its history cries for a symphony.

One is reminded of Dr. Zhivago, Pasternak’s marvelous novel, where Nickolai Nikolaievich asks, “What is history?” And he answers: “It is the centuries of systematic explorations of the riddle of death, with the view to overcoming death. That’s why people discover mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves. That’s why they write symphonies. Now you can’t advance in this direction without a certain faith. You can’t make such discoveries without spiritual equipment and the basic elements of this equipment is the gospels.>What are they? To begin with, love of one’s neighbor, which is the supreme form of vital energy. Once it fills the heart it has to overflow and spend itself.” Camden is a casualty of the progress of the United States. Left behind. Out of tune. Its weak voice needs amplification, amplification of its cry. Where is that "love"? Where is the "the vital energy"? If its sorrow could become a song and its struggling hope could be an alleluia, then maybe it could be said one day, "the tuneful voice was heard from high, 'Arise, Ye more than dead'." And restoration and transformation could come to pass, called hopefully to reality by the inspiration of a divine symphony.

There was art before there was anything … the dream in the mind of God. Let's make the successes and the tragedies and the unrelenting hope of Camden, New Jersey, into a symphony.

Let's call its people to its rescue. All the people. The dead who are gone. The living who have left. The living who are here still. Let's call the first peaceful natives of this sandy land that became a city. Here for 10,000 years on a once river-bounded island before the Europeans came. Here by the great river that we call the Delaware. A big, mile wide flow as it passes, forty-six feet deep, carving its groove to the great ocean and moving majestically onward long before the first human eyes ever saw it. Flowing for 200 miles before it comes to Camden and then onward for a hundred miles to the sea. A massive artery to the ends of the earth. The mother of Camden. Camden by it, and Philadelphia beyond, feeders at the breast. We must always celebrate our Mother. If the Delaware is the great super highway to the world, the linking waterways are what we now know as the Cooper River and the Newton Creek. They were the country "roads" of the first peoples. The Europeans came, at first a trickle and eventually a great flood.

These early Europeans did not discover this land. They discovered that it was discovered long ago by others. These first Europeans were Quakers, Irish Quakers who fled England because of persecution and settled in Ireland. Their coming here and their establishment of West Jersey (New Jersey, south of a line from the Delaware Water Gap to Egg Harbor) was a nonviolent "invasion". They set up the Concessions and Agreements of West Jersey, a bill of rights based on the Magna Carta and that predated the Constitution by 100 years. The original Quakers in Camden were William Cooper and Richard Arnold. 1680. We celebrate the Quakers who brought their peaceful industrious values to the edge of the Delaware, their Magna Carta rights to the new world and their hope in William Penn for a city of brotherly love.

The place that came to be known as Camden was slow to grow. Jacob Cooper started it in 1764. About 60 years later when it was incorporated as a town and named Camden, it had only 1103 people. That was in 1828. (Walt Whitman was approaching his ninth birthday in Long Island, New York). Six years later in January, 1834, one of the first trains in the United States made its way from Perth Amboy over the Cooper River to the edge of the Delaware. On that white head of steam rising in the cool air of a winter's day, the hopes for a great city rose as well. When that train met the ferryboat, Camden was instantly conceived. New York was linked to Philadelphia and Camden was the necessary and most important stop on the way. It would become a place to manufacture everything and move it to centers of population. So in celebrating Camden, we celebrate the marriage of rail and ferry, of land and water, and a birth of enormous consequences. Now the new flow would be people. The tiny population of 1828 doubled every decade and by the end of the century, Camden had 75,000 people. Mostly German, Irish, and English, with some Italian, Polish, and Russian people

Camden was a terminal and destination of the original American railroads. But it was also one stop on the underground railroad that brought the African American people to live in it. Prejudice, however, forced them to live in their own district, Kaighnsville. Tensions rose often in regards to work. But nevertheless Camden is very fortunate to always have its African people. We celebrate their long dark night of suffering, their endurance, their faith, and their music. We also celebrate the emigrants who came from many countries of the world to make a living in Camden.

There is one word that describes the central experience in the development of the United States and that word is "work." The energy that so many hardy adventurous people brought to this land finds no equal in the world. Camden is a splendid sample of that massive enthusiasm. This little town became a hive of constant industrial human activity. Factories rose like mushrooms in the night. Wheels whirred and engines turned in high gear and the sounds of manufacturing, hardly symphonic, were driven by the desire to make things better. Human sweat oiled these engines and human ingenuity and creativity propelled developing enterprises into massive manufacture. Camden made everything from a battleship to a toilet seat. It was a colossal clock that never stopped ticking. Enterprises like Esterbrook, Campbell's, Victor Talking Machine, and New York Shipbuilding were the biggest cogs of their kind in America. No city of its size in the world could match Camden as a place of work. Its promotional literature announced, "The Biggest Little City in the world." Its "big four" were soup, pens, talking machines and mighty ships.

Into the midst of this growing industrial powerhouse and before it reached its peak came the bard of all that was happening from "sea to shining sea." Walt Whitman. He came here to see his dying mother and to convalesce from a stoke at 53. But it was a stroke of good fortune for Camden and for Whitman. "I will never regret," he said, "that I was left over in Camden. It has brought me blessed returns." His Camden stay, 1873 to his death in 1892. Here the last revisions of his masterpiece, Leaves of Grass, were made. He had started in 1855. Here he was laid to rest on March 30, 1892 in a big rough-hewn vault that he designed "for that of me which is to die." America to Whitman was huge and rough-hewn and he set out to put its boisterous energy, its wheels, its wars, its collective lift of human muscle and palm to the music of words. In Camden, Whitman was a fish in water. He saw loading and unloading of railcar and schooner. He heard the hum of the factories and shouts of the workers. He saw the belch of the chimney stacks and the setting of the sun on Philadelphia. He rode in the ferries on the Delaware River and in his horse and buggy rode over the Belgian blocks of Broadway to eat fresh shad on a plank in Gloucester. His Leaves of Grass sang to all that is America and much of all America was in Camden. He loved, as he said, "the working people as good and as bad as they are" and Camden was full of them. He had set out to create for this land its own song, the song of all that is ordinary and to celebrate that it was extraordinary. Not for him and not for his America the lofty metered syllables of English poets and their colonizing sponsors. No, he would celebrate the brawn and sweat of ordinary men and women with no notions of ritualized superiority or class. His last breath was in Camden air and his bones rest in the city's Harleigh Hill.

In his lengthy poem entitled Carol of Occupations, he celebrates the work:

 

Four years before Whitman died, Thomas Edison perfected the wax cylinder of recording. But it was the disc invented by Emil Berliner that was perfected by Eldridge Johnson for his Victor Talking Machine in Camden that set Nipper's nose whirring on records around the world. (Nipper the dog was the logo of Victor Talking Machine.) Great tenors like Enrico Caruso of Italy and John McCormack of Ireland were brought to Camden and they made the recorded discs popular around the globe.

So Camden! Its air once upon a time was the makings of song in the chests of great singers sending their sounds of harmony in records around the world. But death stilled the voices and the Talking machine is sounding no more. But there is music in the silence if we can but catch it.

Other sounds invaded Camden. The jarring noises of bridge traffic. If from the intercourse of transportation systems, Camden's greatness was generated, it is also true that the transportation system of the Ben Franklin Bridge put a massive knife through the heart of Camden and amputated North Camden which was bounded on three sides by the waters of the Delaware and the Cooper. Camden never recovered from this wound because the knife could never be removed. Camden no longer would be the destination but a bump in the road to someplace else. No stopping anymore, the traffic would rip through from the bridge and in time tear through on super highways. Camden is American history - it is today the best visual aid in the United States as to what went right and what went wrong.

Its great shipping enterprise of New York Ship became the greatest in the nation. Thriving especially in the late teens of this century and in the 1940's. Thriving only on war. World War I and World War II. In the 1940's thirty-seven thousand people making up a round the clock workforce, launched ship after ship at a miraculous pace. The world's brains, sweat, and raw materials fused into a force of awesome manufacture. Forty-one nations were represented in this colossal action. One after another huge battle ships slid into the Delaware and brought American might to bear victoriously upon the oceans of the earth. Camden was so important in the Second World War that factories were encouraged to pollute the skies and create a protective blanket against the threat of enemy's planes. Even though war was the tragic promoter of this extraordinary effort in ship building, we celebrate the collective combination of skill, ingenuity and determination on the Camden waterfront. An unsurpassed achievement in maritime labor but as soon as the war was over, Camden's fortune in ship building faded.

The new forces of the 50's would not be focused on the waterways but on the highways. The automobile industry would not only teach America to drive it would drive America to build roads to drive on. The clover exits of the super highways would not be good luck charms for cities like Camden. New cars and new roads gave rise to housing and the green grass of suburbia beckoned to the row home dwellers of Camden. "They are going, going, going, and we cannot bid them stay." It was a twenty year exodus. Then Black Americans began to move from the South in search of a better deal in the cities of the North. They came to Camden and the combination of racism and fear plus the manipulation of some corrupt realtors created the white flight from Camden that devastated it. Latino people came too. At first to be migrant workers in the fields of South Jersey and then to Camden to work in the Campbell factory where the ripe tomatoes came as well. The African Americans and the Latino people were poor.

The super highways also promoted the truck and the industrial parks and they drew industries away from the cities. Camden in time lost almost all of its once magnificent industrial tax base. Its streets of commerce and life became strips of abandoned buildings boarded and blind. The town of live theatres and fourteen movie houses and the first drive-in movies in the world lost them all.

Latino riots in 1971 burned down Broadway and most of the store owners left.

Thirty of its sons were killed in the unpopular Vietnam War of the late 60's and 70's. As Camden declined there was money for bombing buildings in Vietnam but very little to build up buildings in Camden. Its burned and devastated structures and abandoned factories evoked the bombed and burned buildings of Vietnam. Camden became the focus of national attention when its draft boards were entered by an anti-war group in August of 1971 and draft records were destroyed. The anti-war group known as the Camden 28 participated in a three-month trial and were acquitted - the only acquittal of its kind in America. Slides were shown in the courtroom of bombed villages in Vietnam interspersed with burned buildings in Camden. The defendants presented Camden as a casualty of war because it was a casualty of neglect whereas the war effort was generously supported. The city that was known as the great weapons maker of World War II became itself a victim of weapons making. In fact all the wars of the century deeply affected its history.

Its most famous poet of recent years, Nick Virgilio, lost his brother in Vietnam and he grieved for him in haiku poems (Whitman sang with a maximum of words, Virgilio's lean notes rose from a minimum). He hurt for his parents whose health was never the same after news was brought by a Marine of their son's death in Vietnam.

telegram in hand the shadow of the marine darkens our screen door

the autumn wind, has torn the telegram and more from mother's hand

my gold star mother and father hold each other and the folded flag

Nick Virgilio died in 1989. Camden's decline continued. While Whitman wrote in a Camden of robust strength, Virgilio wrote in a Camden poor as a plucked chicken. Its political power had weakened and its economic strength had disappeared.

In recent years it was declared the poorest city in America in terms of the poverty of children. It became a prime example in America of racial environmental injustice. Facilities that would hurt real estate values in the suburbs were placed in Camden. Its crime increased. In the last few years its murder rate went to an average of 40 a year. Blood flowed tragically in the cracks of many sidewalks. Open air drug markets appeared and continue in forty locations around the city and Time Magazine headlined a story on Camden with a terrible question - "How Could Anyone Live Here?"

Twenty-two scrap yards dot this city. Metal morgues for the wheels that once turned to transform matter into useful things. Promiscuous heaps of all that once was working. These rusting piles are not just symptomatic of a broken condition but are huge collections of brokenness and entanglement. The presence of these metal morgues creates a nearby market for local burglars who tear houses apart to extract the pipes and aluminum. So the houses soon become gapping skeletons where light and windows were. Prostitutes sell themselves daily at all hours on every corner from Atlantic to Morgan, a once proud artery of commerce and life.

And yet! And yet! Wild flowers grow in the cracks in the concrete. The bright faces of children smile as God intended they would. But He had an Eden in mind for the first images that would beam on their innocent eyes and into their soft souls. But alas, beauty is seen only in their faces and not in the surroundings they see. The saving power of beauty as Dostoevsky would say: "there are three things that will save the world, truth, goodness and beauty and if the first two fail, beauty will do it."

So who will make a song of the sorrow? Who will set rage into sound to explode itself in the air? Who will write a requiem for the murdered? Who will make a melody of the children's delight? Who will lament for the way we were? Who will beat a drum for the march of the people? Who will create a crescendo to wake up America to the plight of Camden's citizens? Who will drum the truth into the indifference and unconsciousness of those who are to blame? Who will sound the trumpet note to call into action the goodness of the nation? Who will sound the trumpet to call forth hope in a scrap yard, in the recycling of matter, a process ancient as the earth is? Who will sound the trumpet To Call Camden to Life?

For it is true that many Camden people live heroic lives struggling against unsurmountable odds. Camden is in the process of beginning again. Beginning in its mother the great river. Beginning like God began the creation in the water. Look at the opening of Camden to its river! The aquarium, the water, the fish, the life. Look at the garden. The Children's Garden nearby! It was God who first envisioned a garden. Let's begin again with the water and the land.

Let what went wrong … let the wrong note, the jarring note of Camden's past and present condition be the first note of the new symphony.

Let's begin again. Let's Call Camden to LIFE.

Michael Doyle August 1999

Footnote: diapason: full, rich stop on the pipe-organ; here, full harmony.

by Michael Doyle
August 1999

Written to provide the inspiration for a symphony written by Michael Giacchino.