Month: August 2022

During the past week we made our way through Quebec along the St. Lawrence River. What a beautiful part of North America—the scenery, the history, the food!

After our time in Montreal, we towed the RV on Friday to a campground near Quebec City on the far northeast end of Ile d’Orleans. The island is known as the Garden of Quebec. It is quilted with vineyards and farms growing strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, and corn. We sampled the local produce, including Tomme cheese and the best sweet corn I’ve ever eaten. Our friends Andre and Letha du Plessis camped on the island years ago with their children and expressed their love of the place.

On Saturday, we drove into Quebec City and found a parking spot near the city center. We loved walking the cobblestone streets of the old upper and lower towns. We drank coffee on the terrace outside the famous Hotel Frontenac overlooking the river below. We took a ferry from the lower town over to the south side of the river and back. (I’d post more photos but we continue have trouble with internet connections.)

From the hotel we walked along the promenade above the cliffs overlooking the river, alongside the walls of the Citadel, and onto the Plains of Abraham. The rolling expanse of green space was not named after the Old Testament patriarch but after Abraham Martin, the original owner of the land. On September 13, 1759, British forces led by Gen. James Wolfe scaled the cliffs in the pre-dawn darkness, surprising the French defenders. After an hour’s fighting, they occupied the city, winning a key battle in the Seven Years War with France. The battle basically won Canada for the British.

On Monday we drove along the north side of the river to Charlevoix, a region of striking scenery where the southern edge of the Canadian Shield rises above a widening river. Highlights were a free round-trip ferry ride across a section of the river to dock on the Isle-aux-Coudres, a bit of pottery shopping, wading into the river at the beach at Saint Irenee, and an afternoon tea on the veranda of the Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu, near Le Malbaie. As we looked out on the river there in perfect summer weather, we could see two passing freighters and the southern bank of the river more than 10 miles across.

After a week in the province of Quebec, we hitched up the trailer on Tuesday morning, crossed the river, and drove on to New Brunswick and a one-night camping spot in Grand Falls and today on to Moncton in a steady rain. Lord willing, we’ll spend the next four weeks in the Maritime Provinces and Newfoundland.

[Dear readers: I may not be able to post regularly on this blog for the rest of this RV trip. Poor or non-existent internet connection has made it a real challenge to upload the text and especially the photos. I will continue to post photos and comments on FaceBook.]

A week ago today we began a seven-week RV trip that will take us through eastern Canada and then back home through the Hudson Valley of New York. Our itinerary includes Quebec, the Maritime Provinces, and Newfoundland, which can only be reached by a seven-hour ferry ride.

We intended to enter Canada on Saturday, but I forgot to pack may passport! Our friend, neighbor and pastor, Dan Clifford, kindly sent it to our campground along the St. Lawrence River near Clayton, NY, via FedEx. It arrived on Monday just before noon.

We entered Canada with our 30-foot travel trailer early that afternoon. The entrance at the Thousand Island station took about an hour. The friendly Canadian border agent asked us if we were going to leave anything in Canada and if we had any firearms (no to both) and where we were going. When we told him our itinerary, he gave us several suggestions of what to see.

With our stay in Ottawa cut down to one night, we only had time to go out to dinner with a long-time friend of Elizabeth from her time in the hotel business in England. Elizabeth had not seen Christine since the mid-1980s, but they had kept in touch and had plenty to talk about, as good friends do.

On Tuesday morning, we hitched up the travel trailer and drove to our current campground on the northwest edge of Montreal. Yesterday we drove the truck into the city and spent the afternoon walking through Old Montreal. We paid $14 (Canadian) each to enter the ornate Notre Dame Basilica and were treated to works played on its giant pipe organ, including Bach’s wonderful Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (see this 30-second FB clip). At a coffee shop Elizabeth wrote a birthday note to her friend in Ottawa and then we caught a one-hour cruise on the St. Lawrence River that took us beneath the huge Jacques Cartier Bridge.

Tomorrow we’re off to spend four nights at an RV park on the Ile d’ Orleans on the St. Lawrence River near Quebec City.

My father, Donald W. Griswold, was born 108 years ago today, on August 6, 1914. We all remember him fondly for his devotion to his wife, family, community, career, and country. Below the photographs is the eulogy I delivered at his funeral in Sauk Centre, Minnesota, in 2005. For more details about his life story, here is an obituary posted at the time by the local funeral home.

Eulogy for Donald W. Griswold (1914-2005), delivered by Daniel Griswold, Sauk Centre, Minnesota, July 25, 2005:

My Dad was a good husband, a good father, and a good man, and he enjoyed a good life. In his final years, he surrendered many of the activities he enjoyed one by one, and he did so with dignity, grace, and good humor. I would often remind my Dad that he had a lot to be thankful for. He would always respond, “I know.”

His greatest blessing in this life was my mother. She looked after him for almost 59 years with love and patience. He had the best in-house hospice care any man ever had. Another great blessing for my dad was the town of Sauk Centre. On behalf of my family, let me thank the people of this church and this town for being such good neighbors to my mom and dad for the past 34 years. My dad could not have picked a better place to settle and run a newspaper. And these past four days, you have shown your love through cards, phone calls, visits, and all that wonderful food that piled up in Mom’s kitchen.

Anyone who knew my Dad well, or maybe for 15 minutes, knew that he admired Abraham Lincoln. One of the characteristics of Lincoln that he told me he admired was that Lincoln was always thinking. Like his idol, my dad’s mind was always working—whether he was crafting an article or an argument, or solving an engineering problem at home or the newspaper. His ceaseless mental exercise kept him sharp to the end. When I was home for a brief visit only ten days ago, he was retrieving articles for me to read from the pouch of his walker. He had just finished reading David McCullough’s new book, 1776, and was reviewing it when he died.

There was much about my dad’s life to admire. Four years ago, on his 87th birthday, I sent him a letter, telling him the lessons I had absorbed from him over the years.

Dear Dad …

I enjoyed our telephone conversation today. You remain in good fighting form. If you thought I sounded good in articulating my arguments on C-SPAN on Saturday, you deserve a good chunk of the credit for teaching me how. I’ve been listening to you do basically the same thing for 40 years or so.

Other things I’ve learned from watching you at home and at work:

• Study history. It is more interesting than most stories people make up, it’s true, and it helps us understand our present condition. We can learn much from the examples of great and good men in history.
• Get your facts straight. People are persuaded by facts. If you get a fact wrong, your opponents will jump on it to undermine your credibility and cause.
• Stick to your principles. Friends and acquaintances come and go, but sound principles endure. They are worth fighting for.
• Deal honestly with people. No short-term gain from dishonesty is worth sullying your reputation.
• Work steadily. Show up for work at the same time each day, the earlier the better. A slothful man is next to worthless.
• Look at the big picture. Ask yourself how your actions contribute to making this a better society. Avoid petty personal squabbles.
• Support your family. Support them financially in comfort but not in luxury. Be faithful to your wife.
• Appreciate things for their usefulness, not the status they confer. This applies to meals, clothes, cars, houses, etc.
• Measure people by their character. Are they honest, do they think clearly, do they care about principles and the big picture? Money, big houses, and flashy cars mean nothing.
• Observe moderation in personal habits. Late nights, excessive drinking, and time-consuming hobbies distract from steady work, principles, and the big picture.
• Don’t demand or expect perfection in others. This applies to co-workers as well as children. I feel sorry for those men I meet or hear about who say, ‘I could never live up to my father’s expectations.’ You always took pleasure in my modest triumphs and always had a kind word, never harsh, when I stumbled.

Well, I’m sure I could think of more lessons I’ve learned from you, Dad, but I think these cover most of the major ones. I’m thankful to the Lord that I have been able to call you Dad for these almost 43 years. You and Mom have been wonderful parents. May you enjoy good health and many more birthdays.

Love, Dan.

Ninety years may seem to be a long time, but it is a brief moment in the eyes of God. The prophet Isaiah tells us in Chapter 40:

And in Chapter 55:

I thank God for such a wonderful dad.

The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger, by Tim Kane (Oxford University Press, 2022, 250 pp, $29.95)

In today’s polarized debate over immigration, Hoover Institution scholar Tim Kane offers fresh and nuanced arguments in his new book, The Immigrant Superpower: How Brains, Brawn, and Bravery Make America Stronger.

As an Air Force veteran, a Ph.D. economist, and card-carrying conservative Republican, Kane represents a point of view on immigration that is underrepresented on cable TV and the Twitterverse. While the book offers an informed analysis on more familiar economic and cultural questions, his central argument that immigration puts “the power in American super power” should appeal to a broad cross-section of Americans, especially in our time of rising conflict with rivals China and Russia.

“The only way to win the great power competition of the 21^st century,” Kane writes, “is by embracing America’s identity as a nation of immigrants.”

Immigration boosts America’s “soft power” in the world by attracting talented scientists and entrepreneurs from other nations, while enhancing our national image as a haven for oppressed people. But immigration also enhances America’s hard power by strengthening the U.S. military compared to our chief rivals.

“We should be wary that the restrictions some politicians today want to place on legal immigration might hurt the long-term strength of the American military,” Kane writes, reminding us that the U.S. military has relied heavily on immigrants to fill its ranks during war time.

Immigration represents a key advantage for the United States militarily against demographically-challenged Russia and China. “Not only have the immigrants increased the population of the United States decisively – putting the power in American super power – but a disproportionately high percentage volunteer to serve in the ranks,” Kane writes. “Furthermore, immigrant soldiers are disproportionately heroic. That’s not just a claim rooted in anecdotes. Across all of America’s conflicts, one out of five recipients of the medal of honor are first-generation immigrants.”

Looking back on our history, immigrants were a huge advantage to the north in the Civil War. Kane notes that at the outbreak of the war there were more immigrants in the 10 square miles of lower Manhattan than over the 770,000 square miles of the confederacy. And in the 20^th century, first- and second-generation immigrants from southern Europe–what one critic characterized as the “dark Mediterranean sub species”–fought bravely alongside their fellow Americans on the beaches of Normandy and the Pacific, and other battlegrounds in both the First and Second World Wars.

In one of the more original sections of the book, Kane offers evidence that presidential greatness tends to be associated with a more favorable policy approach to immigration. Two of the nation’s greatest presidents, Washington and Lincoln, embraced immigration. At a tavern in New York City after the British finally left in 1783, Washington offered the toast, “May America be an asylum to the persecuted of the earth!” And President Lincoln, in a letter to Congress, advocated “a system for the encouragement of immigration,” calling it “this source of national wealth and strength.”

No ethnic group benefited more from Washington’s vision of America as a haven for the oppressed than the Jews of Europe. Jews began to flee the continent in 1881 as anti-Jewish pogroms swept through the Russian Empire after the assassination of Tsar Alexander II. During the decade that followed, Kane notes, one-third of Europe’s Jewish population fled to the United States. That door was tragically shut with “the shameful turning away of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency.”

Like more immigration-skeptic conservatives, Kane argues for limiting immigrant access to welfare, which has the political benefit of making American voters more comfortable with expanding immigration. He affirms the need to offer asylum to those fleeing persecution, but reasonably observes that most nations deny asylum to applicants who are arriving from a safe third country. He believes that border walls can play a constructive role in curbing illegal immigration and other problems at the border.

Kane isn’t worried about whether immigrants are assimilating into American culture. As in past generations, immigrants and their children are learning English and largely embracing traditional American values. Today’s culture wars are more of an internal struggle among the native born. As Kane writes, “The problem today is not that immigrants aren’t assimilating to American values but that young Americans aren’t assimilating to American values.”

Instead of a sweeping overhaul of the immigration system, Kane favors more incremental reforms. He argues for expanding the under-appreciated diversity lottery visa, describing it as a program that radiates soft power in a way that is unmatched by our rivals. He supports economic agreements with other market democracies to allow the freer flow of people along with goods, services, and capital. (I’ve argued myself for such agreements with Canada and the United Kingdom.) He wants Congress to expand work visas, setting higher standards while raising ceilings on the numbers.

When it comes to immigration, Tim Kane is no stereotyped “open borders” liberal. He’s an economically literate, Republican veteran with a wealth of practical policy experience. In The Immigrant Superpower, he asks the perfectly sensible question, “Why would we change the policy and approach that has made America the strongest country of all time?”